“Man, I have seen this movie,” drawls a familiar voice. “The ending is s-----. [Dave] Brailsford needs to put the shovel down and stop digging."

This has been an interesting Tour de France in lots of ways. The battle for the yellow jersey has been one of the closest in years. We have had crashes and controversy. French panache. Plenty of talking points. But there has been one unexpected addition to this year’s Tour, which has added to my experience anyway.

I’m not sure whether I should be admitting to it but I’ve been enjoying Lance Armstrong’s Stages podcast on the long transfers each day.

Apparently I’m not alone. To judge from the emails Armstrong reads out from listeners around the globe it seems people are as fascinated as ever by Big Tex (assuming, of course, he is not making the emails up). Stages attracts around 300,000 downloads per day across all platforms and that number is growing.

The podcast itself has obvious limitations. Recorded a few minutes after the end of each stage from an Airstream caravan in Aspen, Colorado, it offers little in the way of ‘live colour’; the sights, the sounds, the smells of a hard-working peloton on the road, to paraphrase the immortal Marty DiBergi from This Is Spinal Tap. For that, though, we have the Telegraph-backed The Cycling Podcast, and excellent it is too.