The dream is over: Christophe Moreau will not win this year’s Tour de France. The 36-year-old from Belfort has been endorsed by the French president, relentlessly championed by his home media and taken to the bosom of the success-starved population of la France profonde.

Sadly, this afternoon, cycling shorts torn by an early fall, Moreau looked exactly what he really is, a fading time trial specialist in his 12th Tour, supported by a team that, for all it’s individual talents, never appeared able to sustain a three week challenge. Distanced by the Tour favourites on an anodyne flat stage, Moreau’s morale fell apart and his team was unable to support him.

Moreau is the last of a generation of riders that included past heroes Richard Virenque and Laurent Jalabert, both of whom struggled for the best part of a decade against the domination of Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich. Moreau was not good enough to challenge then and, despite his recent wins in the French national championship and the prestigious Dauphine Libere stage race, he is not good enough now.

It says much about the current state of French cycling that Moreau, in the twilight years of his career, was seriously seen as a possible Tour winner by a nation that last cheered a home winner in 1985. There are younger talents — Sylvain Chavanel, Sandy Casar and the exciting young climber from Marseilles, Remy di Gregorio — but they are, as yet, unfulfilled.

That trio have all fallen out of contention this year, di Gregorio crashing out in the first week, while Chavanel and Casar failed to deliver yet again, after another substantial pre-Tour build-up. If it had not been for 37 year old Cedric Vasseur’s canny win in Marseilles on Wednesday this week, the fantasy of a Moreau success would have been the only straw for the home nation to clutch at.

From here on, the Tour belongs to foreign riders once more, just as it has since Bernard Hinault rode into Paris in yellow in July 1985. It has been an awfully long wait for a nation that once considered cycling to be a national passion. Moreau’s inevitable collapse suggests that the waiting game is set to continue.