NED Boulting has rather a lot invested in the success or failure of this year’s Tour de France. Okay, so maybe not quite as much as Chris Froome, the Kenyan-born Brit who is chasing a remarkable fourth victory in Paris this month, or other GC contenders like Nairo Quintana, Richie Porte, Alejandro Valverde and Alberto Contador. Come to think of it, he will probably expend less energy too than any of the 198 hardy figures from 22 different teams - be they sprinters, domestiques or merely lanterne rouge contenders - who will set out today from the start line in Dusseldorf, praying that their weary legs will carry them the 2,200 miles and 21 days to the Champs Elysees, ahead of a veritable cavalcade of team cars, battle buses and sponsors. No, all Boulting has to is make sense of the madness to a discerning TV public back home, ask all the right questions at all the right times, then swiftly sub-edit all his experiences down in order to host a coherent one-man show about them all, called Bikeology, at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. “It makes for a bit of a mad summer for me,” acknowledges Boulting, a 47-year-old sports journalist and author who has a starring role on ITV4’s excellent coverage.

As you might imagine, 13 years covering the Tour de France has provided plenty of that, everything from banal behind-the-scenes secrets of the broadcaster’s coverage, to the first time, eight seconds into an interview on his second Tour de France, when Boulting first got ‘the glare’ from Lance Armstrong. “It was the most remarkable and chilling moment of my life,” recalls Boulting. “I challenged him on his behaviour during a rather meaningless stage of the 2004 tour and at first he just laughed it off and played to the gallery. But I wasn’t having that. So I went back in and asked the same question. This time he did answer, although he flatly denied the accusation, then gave me that glare for the first time. It was the first time I became aware of his truer nature, his bullying instincts.”

By contrast, some other matters seem rather more mundane. “What I do in the show is I raise the curtain a little bit,” says Boulting. “It seems that people are endlessly fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes at the Tour de France so I go into things like Gary Imlach’s dietary habits. And the very scientifically assembled cardboard cut out partitions which Chris Boardman builds from scratch using boxes and gaffer tape to separate his working space from everyone else’s in the TV truck. It is an absolute work of art, he does it every single year with absolute precision.”

David Millar, the Scot who has graduated from a flamboyant young rider on the scene to a valued colleague - via a doping ban along the way - isn’t spared either. “There is an interview with David from the 2003 Tour de France, which is one of the funniest interviews I have ever seen,” says Boulting, “because the guy acts like that Harry Enfield character [Kevin and Perry], an overgrown pillock basically. I play that interview in the show and a little piece of David Millar watching it back 14 years later, just to rub his nose in it. ‘What a twat,’ is his assessment now.”

But onto the real matter in hand, which is the 104th running of an event which holds France in its thrall for just shy of a month, a spectacle with predictable peaks and troughs yet one which boasts a uniquely Gallic anarchy which few global sporting events can match. Last year’s highlights, after all, include Britain’s Adam Yates being crushed by a rapidly deflating 1km-to-go arch as he raced into Lac de Payolle and Froome jogging in equally surreal fashion up Mont Ventoux rather than wait for a replacement bike. For the record, seven of the 21 stage winners last year were British, with Froome the overall winner and Adam Yates taking the white jersey for the best young rider.

“We get justifiably, terribly excited about the on- day classics in Belgium, they are fantastic institutions, and hugely excited by the Giro d’Italia, in fact some people say it is the best of the Grand Tours and there is some truth to all of that,” says Boulting. “But when July comes round, and that yellow jersey is up for grabs, the endeavour just kicks up to another level of huge. Every year is different, and every year it defies your expectations, every year they find ridiculous new ways of screwing the race up. Something faintly ridiculous is going to happen. You just have no idea what it is going to be.”

This year’s race is laden with intrigue - with Jakob Fuglsang, a 32-year-old Dane, surprising the likes of Froome and Richie Porte to claim the Criterium du Dauphine title, generally viewed as a decent indicator of pre-Tour form. Is Froome, the winner in 2013, 2015 and 2016, under-cooked in terms of preparation and keeping something in reserve to time his run for a Tour de France and Vuelta d’Espana double or has complacency crept in?

Whatever goes down, Boulting the growth of the sport in the UK in the last few years is robust enough to withstand ongoing controversies over Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky. “I’d like to think Britain’s love of professional cycling has laid down roots now, and is beyond all that,” he says. “And cycling is incredibly resistant to scandal, believe me.”

As someone who used to live there and admires Teutonic riders such as Tony Martin and Marcel Kittel, Boulting approves of the fact that this year’s Grand Depart is in Germany. But with his mum and dad hailing from Livingston - and more than a passing acquaintance with the cycle path into Edinburgh - it is nice to think that perhaps one day the peloton might flow around the futuristic roundabouts of West Lothian.

**Ned Boulting’s Bikeology will be at Assembly Checkpoint at the Edinburgh Fringe, 10th – 12th August and will tour the UK in Autumn 2017. More information: www..bikeology.co.uk