Tour de 4: The Bike Ride That Circled the Globe and Proved Absolutely Nothing (Except Our Love of Hype)

Tour de 4: How a Four-Letter Acronym Rode a Bicycle Around the World and Conquered Absolutely Nothing
By Dave’s Locker’s Globetrotting Correspondent, still shaking sand out of his passport

PARIS—The Tour de France is old news. This summer, the world’s attention has pivoted to the “Tour de 4,” a rolling circus of four cyclists, four continents, four flat tires, and four different definitions of “achievement.” Conceived in a Berlin co-working space by two Swedes who had clearly watched too many TED Talks, the Tour de 4 is billed as “a carbon-neutral, ego-positive, blockchain-verified circumnavigation on two wheels.” Translation: four unpaid interns on second-hand bikes trying to outrun their LinkedIn updates.

The route is simple in theory: Stockholm to Singapore via Sierra Leone, São Paulo, and Saskatchewan—because nothing screams “efficiency” like spelling the word “S” four times on a map. Each leg is supposed to highlight a “global challenge”: inequality, climate change, mental health, and “the tyranny of the algorithm.” (Yes, the fourth one is vague enough to qualify as a horoscope.) Along the way, the riders livestream their blisters to 3.7 million followers who apparently find sunburnt Scandinavians more riveting than Netflix.

What makes the Tour de 4 internationally significant is not the mileage but the way it embodies every late-capitalist contradiction we now export like soybeans. The riders are sponsored by a Norwegian fintech startup whose app gamifies micro-donations while its CFO quietly buys beachfront property in Dubai. Their “zero-waste” nutrition bars arrive shrink-wrapped in three layers of corn-based plastic that can only be composted in a lab in Finland. And every night they upload drone footage to servers cooled by Icelandic volcanoes—a geothermal flex that conveniently ignores the 14 cargo flights required to move the drones in the first place.

From Lagos to Lima, local reactions oscillate between bemused hospitality and tactical pricing. In Dakar, kids chase the peloton yelling “Balenciaga!” because any white person on a bicycle must be either fleeing debt or filming a sneaker ad. In Mumbai, traffic cops wave them through red lights the way one indulges street mimes—technically illegal, but the spectacle distracts from the diesel fumes. Meanwhile, carbon-offset consultants in Zurich sell indulgences like medieval friars, promising that each rider’s bowel movement has been rendered climate-positive via mangrove reforestation in Indonesia. Only 12 percent of said mangroves exist outside PowerPoint.

The geopolitical subplot is equally farcical. When the team attempted to pedal across the Russia-Kazakhstan border, they discovered that “blockchain-verified” doesn’t impress a colonel who hasn’t been paid since March. They ended up bribing their way through with a signed Tour de France yarmulke and four jars of lingonberry jam—Nordic diplomacy at its finest. Chinese customs confiscated their air-quality sensors as “espionage devices,” which is ironic because the sensors were manufactured in Shenzhen in the first place. And in Arizona, a TikTok influencer sideswiped them with a Cybertruck while filming a meditation reel titled “Stillness in Motion.” The driver’s apology was autotuned.

Of course, the Tour de 4 has already spawned imitators. The Tour de 3 (fewer continents, more nudity) launches next week from Reykjavik. Venture capitalists are circling a Tour de 5 that will add Antarctica, presumably to lecture penguins on decolonizing ice. Even the original riders admit the project is “a living prototype,” which is startup-speak for “we have no exit strategy.” Their final metric of success? A 0.04 percent uptick in global empathy, measured by an AI trained on emoji usage in 43 languages. Early data suggests people mostly sent the screaming-cat face.

As the peloton limped into Singapore—bodies pocked by mosquito bites, egos slightly less inflated—one rider asked what it all meant. A passing food-truck vendor shrugged and handed him a plastic cup of bubble tea. “You rode around the world, lah. Still gotta pay rent tomorrow.” And there, in a single sentence, was the entire Tour de 4: an epic, self-congratulatory loop that ends exactly where it began, only sweatier. The planet spins on, indifferent, slightly amused, and—like the rest of us—still waiting for the blockchain to confirm.