Tour de France 2016 preview: How to fully appreciate the world’s greatest race

God cycling is so dumb. The Tour de France is pretentious and full of pomp like every crown jewel in individual sports seems to be, like Wimbledon and tennis or the Masters and golf, except that behind its pretensions is a supremely janky sport.

Its athletes are birdlike wafer people built only for their profession, all quads and hollow bones. They’ll careen through hairpin turns and narrow mountain gaps at well over the speed limit and presumably won’t die. It’s not the speed that’s most likely to kill them, anyway. Fans line the road within arms reach, people who, even when they don’t have malicious intentions, still have a propensity to get in the way. The biggest scourge of all are the nihilistic motorbikes that speed and weave in and out of the peloton to document these creatures and all too often cause awful trouble.

Cycling is a sport of egos and paranoia and conniving. Its retired legends often become bitter, prematurely old men who see conspiracies everywhere and complain about cheating as if that exonerates their own cheating-ass era. The current scandal is mechanical doping, which is literally hiding a motor on a bike that riders can activate by flipping a surreptitious switch like they’re competing in Wacky Races.

Somehow this inscrutable, slapdash sport was given the most spectacular theaters in the world. Its three grand tours take place in the prettiest places of Italy, France and Spain, with cameo appearances from neighboring nations. Two years ago I went to the Tour de France and stood on top of the Col d’Aspin, which riders will summit on Stage 7 this year. It was the most breathtaking view I have ever taken in.

That vista is also a reminder that someone has to climb over the damn thing. The ride up is 7.5 miles long up to a height of nearly 5,000 feet, and that isn’t nearly the hardest mountain in this year’s race. There are 56 categorized climbs in the 2016 Tour de France, any of which have the potential to decide the race in infinite ways.

There’s no way to fix any of this. Cycling’s traditions are form and function of the sport itself. It can’t get safer without eliminating the challenge. It incubates the insecurity that makes champions, then immolates them. The 2016 Tour features what feels like its deepest cast in a long time. Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana are the two riders assumed to ultimately duel for the top podium place in Paris — just as the Warriors and Cavaliers were presumed to meet in the NBA Finals, and did — but there is a very good proletariat of old and young foaming faces all gnashing even just to aggravate the two favorites.

Below is what I think you need to know to begin to digest when the most maddening event of a maddening sport begins Saturday, July 2, at Mont-Saint-Michel. I’ll be wrong, but start here. This is for you, person who stopped paying attention when you found how horrible Lance Armstrong is. He is long gone; it’s okay to dip your toe back in. You’ll have a lot of dumb, really dumb, fun, I promise.

Chris Froome — Winner of two of the last three Tours and leader of Team Sky, cycling’s boring, inevitable empire of automatons. There’s no good reason that Froome shouldn’t be your favorite to win. He’s demonstrably at the height of his powers and easily has the best support staff, led by Geraint Thomas. He rides like a mathematical model. Last year, he peaked in the early mountain stages before fading late as he used up the last of his carefully rationed energy. He very nearly gave the Tour away to Quintana, but there’s debate whether that should be seen as a sign of actual weakness or just a matter of him factoring out the remainder.

Nairo Quintana — Quintana is still young — at 26, this is the first year he can’t compete in the young rider classification — and already has two podium finishes at the Tour de France, both second place to Froome. He is arguably the best pure climber in the Tour, putting a scare into Froome late last year with an impressive five-kilometer solo effort to the top of Alpe d’Huez that helped him erase more than a minute from his deficit. This year he has been conspicuously quiet, choosing to skip many traditional Tour warm-up races to train at home in Colombia at 10,000 feet in elevation with the Tour foremost in mind. If you want to think of him as Luke Skywalker biding his time on Dagobah, basically, go ahead because I already am.

Alberto Contador — At 33, Contador is an elder statesman in cycling. He is also a two-time Tour champion — three if you want to throw in his 2010 title that was stricken after he failed a urine test. If you can get past the doping allegations, Contador is still one of the most popular riders on the Tour and somehow overlooked as a contender. True, he finished fifth last year, but he was also coming off the 21-stage Giro d’Italia in May, which he won, and arguably wasn’t his best self come Tour time. Contador skipped the Giro this year. He should be in fine shape.

Romain Bardet and Thibaut Pinot — The two young French hopes, 25 and 26, respectively, both immensely talented climbers, both riding into the Tour de France expecting to give the host nation a podium finish, at the very least. Bardet has kept an aggressive racing regimen this year, which mirrors the man himself. He was named the most aggressive rider of the 2015 Tour and made one of the lasting marks on the event by soloing his way to a Stage 18 win. Pinot is arguably even better at this point — at least, there’s some hope he can salvage France’s poor time trialing reputation. He’s also terribly moody. If he doesn’t crack, he’ll be an obnoxious presence to the three men above.

Fabio Aru and Vincenzo Nibali — Nibali likely gassed himself by making a late comeback at the Giro to win the general classification, which means he should take a backseat during this year’s Tour and help out his Astana teammate, Aru. No one is actually sure whether the 2014 Tour winner can actually get over himself enough to willingly serve anyone, however. If he finds himself in striking distance of a podium place, he may very well try to swing the team dynamic back to the status quo, relegating Aru to a domestique role even though it seems time that the loyal Astana rider and 2015 Vuelta a Espana winner be given a chance to win the Tour. If it’s delicious drama you crave, Nibali has you covered.

This comes with a caveat, because last year’s race had two decisive stages vastly different from one another:

This makes watching the Tour de France occasionally infuriating. The stages that are supposed to be all-decisive and epic — the climbs up Mont Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez, Col de Tourmalet — are often stalemates. Stages that are supposed to be inconsequential — say, a stage meant to move riders south along some scenic coastline — can change the face of the Tour. You’d have to watch every single minute of the Tour to ensure that you don’t miss anything. While this is recommended, you have time constraints.

These are the stages that are the safest bets to be really fun. Which is to say, not a safe bet at all, and this is mostly just fan fiction.

(For a more complete look at every stage, check out Podium Cafe’s viewing guide. It’s really good. Also check out their mountains preview. It’s also really good. Actually just keep Podium Cafe open in a tab for the next three weeks; they’re smart and fun and all-around great. Stage and mountain profiles courtesy the Tour’s official site.)

This is the first potentially significant stage of the Tour, but more importantly it’ll be a fun finish with a pretty sizable wall to climb after a bumpy first 180 kilometers through Normandy.

Part of the climb hits 14 percent gradient. That’s steep! And the profile of the entire stage should ensure that there will be a lot of contenders for the stage win comprising a lot of different types of riders.

The Tour de France will be firmly in the Pyrenees and taking on the Col du Tourmalet, one of several iconic climbs that the Tour likes to visit often. I’d venture to call it the first BIG stage of the 2016 Tour, where a decisive ride could put someone in firm control of the yellow jersey. It’ll be a relentless day, just look:

For the last 120 kilometers, this stage doesn’t let up. The only thing that may hold back the racing is the fact that Stage 9 is also brutal, and then it’s a rest day. Even still, Stage 8 should be the first big indication of who does and doesn’t have the legs to compete over the final two thirds of the Tour.

Good god, please don’t miss this stage. Mont Ventoux is the most brutal climb of the Tour. From base to summit riders will be 1,758 meters, or 5,768 feet, higher than when they started, and they’ll get there over gradients of more than 10 percent in several places on a bald-faced, purgatorial landscape under constant assault by the wind.

It’s on July 14, no less, Bastille Day. This stage was designed for Bardet or Pinot, a long flat with one comparatively easy climb so that escapes will be difficult until Ventoux and only the bonnest homme will win.

The Tour de France always includes one or two time trials. They tend to be underappreciated despite their significance on the general classification. There will likely be a lot of more attention on this year’s late time trial than usual, however, because it’s straight up a dang hill.

The climb gives the super climb-y types a chance to actually gain some time — or at least, not lose time — on a stage on which they would normally take a loss. And because this time trial is so late in the Tour, it could have a major impact on the yellow jersey.

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Either of these stages could claim to be the queen stage — that is, the hardest, most decisive and most compelling stage of the Tour. The fact that Tour de France organizers put them back-to-back AND made them the last two stages of real racing before the coronation parade around the Champs-Elysées seems almost unconscionably cruel.

The good news for the riders is that the stages are relatively short, which makes for punchier racing and better viewing, too. The only thing that could take the sting out of these stages is if the yellow jersey holder has opened up an insurmountable lead. Given the depth of this year’s field, that seems unlikely. And Froome faltered late last year, remember.

If the race is still remotely close, we could see some of the best racing in years.

France is pretty, so be on the lookout for that, too.