NED Boulting has rather a lot invested in the success or failure of this year’s Tour de France. OK, 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 who will set out today from the start line in Dusseldorf, praying that their weary legs will carry them the 2200 miles and 21 days to the Champs Elysees.

No, all Boulting has to do 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 stories, 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.”

But on to 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 peaks and troughs yet one which boasts a uniquely Gallic anarchy which few 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. 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 insists the growth of the sport in the UK in the last few years is robust enough to withstand ongoing controversies. “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.”