Remember the name: Wim Vansevenant. Who? Bear with me. Wim rolled home in 141st place in the Tour de France 2007, which means that, when we have totalled up all the various retirements through injury and at the insistence of the police working in tandem with the drug authorities, he finished utterly and unmistakably last. The Belgian cyclist was 3hr 52min 54sec off the pace – which technically means he’s still somewhere around Angoulême and perspiring hard.

But it all works out brilliantly, because, after this less than blistering performance, no finger of suspicion points at Wim this morning. No dark cloud of intrigue followed him up the Champs Elysées on Sunday. No ruinous nudging and muttering accompanied him as he demounted for the last time and rubbed his presumably extremely sore backside. He came last and the great thing about that is that, accordingly, Wim is the rider who, demonstrably and beyond question, rode clean.

Unless, of course, he’s taking everything and it’s not working. In which case, there may well be a question mark over his chemist. But we’re going to put our heads on the line here and say we don’t think so.

Instead, we hail Wim as, potentially, the plucky saviour of this crushed and cringing sport. He may well have been bottom of the pile after 20 excruciating stages, but that only puts him at the leading edge of cycling’s necessary reinvention in the public eye. In the inevitably maudlin, closing-day discussions on British Eurosport, Jonathan Vaughters, the former Tour cyclist, talked about Slipstream, his new, overtly drug-free pro team. And he pointed out that the key method for dissuading cyclists from going to the fridge for testosterone is removing the pressure on them, from management and sponsors, to win. Just do the best you can, Slipstream riders are told.

Well, as they say, come back on the show, Jonathan, and let us know how you get on. But he’s right, though. If cycling is going to clean itself up, it’s going to have to rethink its attitude to winning. And if that’s going to work, so have we. The Tour has a nickname for the cyclist at the back. He is “ la lanterne rouge” – the brake light. The onus is on us now to cherish “ la lanterne rouge” as much as we have been drawn to the yellow jersey. Praise be to the brake light. Sing when you’re Wimming.

What a grind this Tour has been for the broadcasters, though. Important French newspapers, with no small instinct for drama, declared the race’s death days ago, which left ITV and Eurosport, in effect, flogging a dead bike – and, in Eurosport’s case, for whole afternoons at a time.

All credit to it, though. Grittily, it hung on in there, unlike German television, which packed up its trucks and pulled out its people, in a state of trenchant moral indignation and unwilling to inflict such wanton decadence on its nation any longer – a rare feat of high-mindedness, when you consider the brightly lit comedy game shows with topless women that constitute 80 per cent of the domestic output on an average German week night.

But surely it was worth sticking around. Right until the end, there were things to learn. For instance, it wasn’t until the final stage that I noticed the phenomenon of riders pulling off the road and emptying their bladders – or, as we say in cycling, “providing a sample” – an aspect of the Tour too little dwelt on, one felt, in the commentary. At least, I think that’s what those cyclists were doing. Whatever it was, they had the decency to choose a strip of the route unlined by spectators, thus avoiding plunging the race into further unwanted controversy.

Doping scandals aside, respect is due, in some measure, to every one of those riders. Hell, these guys went from London to Paris the long way. Say what you like, that’s quite an achievement, with or without a legful of someone else’s blood.

Similarly selfless in their commitment to our short-term entertainment are the pilots who have signed up for Red Bull Air Racing, which came to London at the weekend and was presented on Channel 4 in an unmodulating shout by James Cracknell, the thinking man’s rower. Herein, colourfully painted light aircraft, with canisters of not strictly necessary smoke leaking off their tails, dive around a course described by tall “pylons” (inflatable, thankfully, rather than made of metal and carrying electricity).

Now, if the planes all went at the same time, we might be prepared to join Cracknell in according this diversion the coveted label “sport”. But they don’t (they take turns), so, for now, air racing must be content, like snowboarding, to fall within the category “expensive hobby”.

The prospect of drug abuse by the participants in this particular pastime . . . well, it hardly bears thinking about, except in as much as to say, “Duck”.