I love this sort of thing: When reporters interview crabby old reporters,

Crabby old reporters are like crabby old people everywhere. Things were so much better in the old days; we were able to deal with athletes on a human level; things have gone to hell.

This Crabby Old Reporter Story is a little unusual because this isn’t the usual baseball/soccer/football writer.

This is a Crabby Old Cycling Reporter.

The story, written by the Reuters beat writer on the Tour de France, appeared in The National. (As print guys, we’re suckers for this kind of thing.)

If you don’t want to read the whole of it (though you should go, to see what a crabby old reporter looks like), by Julien Pretot of Reuters, here are the key bits.

–Gianni Mura, 68, is an Italian cycling reporter who works on a typewriter. Not just a keyboard, a typewriter. Like everyone did, back when he covered his first Tour de France, in 1967. The opening graf reads as follows: “Ashes fall from his cigarette as his puffy fingers play a distinctive staccato on a 38-year-old Lettera 32 typewriter.”

(Crabby old reporters inevitably smoke. Thank goodness that vile habit has been banned in nearly every press area in the Western world.)

–Mura recalls the good times when reporters traveled with the peleton. “We were named suivers (followers) because we were literally following the race. We would drive right behind the breakaway riders. We were inside the race. Now we’re more preceders of the race.” (In modern times, the press corps is taken from the starting line of the race, before it actually start, to the finish, where they watch the race on TV.)

–He remembers easy access to athletes, a common refrain among old-timer scribes. (Baseball writers in the 1920s could play cards with Babe Ruth on a train.) “We were much closer to the riders,” Mura said. “In the evening we would have dinner with them. We would interview riders in their rooms. I once interviewed Raymond Poulidor while he was was in the bath, in which he would put a bit of vinegar.”

–He recalls when it became harder to find the riders, when EPO made its appearance in the Tour in the 1990s. “Access to the hotels was forbidden to reporters because of what was happening behind closed doors.” Later, it would be steroids.

–Mura travels through France with a food guide, because he is something of a gourmand, and he prefers not to go to restaurants he previously has visited. “Where is the risk? I know it already.”

–He believes the race is more about France than it is cycling. “I am fascinated by the Tour de France mainly because it is in France. Its songs, cuisine recipes, it’s the story of the terroirs (the land). It’s something I don’t find anywhere else. It reverberates with the past. But that’s an old geezer talking.”

–He concedes that he sometimes is approached by reporters — he mentioned Japanese reporters, particularly –who ask him “if I’m not afraid of bothering people with the sound of my typewriting”. And how does he react to that? “I reply that it is their silence that bothers me.”

Spoken like a crabby old reporter, God bless ’em.