''... The Summer Reaches Its Moment of Sadness ...''

So, the Tour de France has finished for another year - Alberto Contador winning the worlds biggest annual sporting event for a second time. Next up for Contador - and me - is the Vuelta a España at the end of August.

I've watched every minute of every day of this years Tour and, as I've said before, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks largely to the comprehensive - and quality - coverage on British Eurosport I found I was able to quickly understand many of the subtleties of road racing, the commentary team taking time out to explain some of the basics to newbies like myself.

The sporting contest itself is set against the beautiful French (and Swiss, Italian, Andorran and Catalan) landscape where people turned out in their numbers to support the cyclists: the last-but-one stage took the riders up Mont Ventoux where more than half a million people lined the route. Half a million people! Up a mountain! Amazing.

Events during this penultimate stage reminded me what sport is - or should - be about. Sport shouldn't be about cricketers auctioning themselves off to the highest bidder for a months well paid work when perhaps they should be focusing on the forthcoming domestic season; it shouldn't be about journalists (I use the term loosely) and event organisers treating the public as fools by telling them that results in preseason football friendlies matter, and it certainly shouldn't be about footballers trying to play one club off against another to get a raise on their current £135,000 per week wages.

As the riders made their way towards the summit of Mont Ventoux on Saturday the four British riders in the Tour de France paid their own personal tributes to Tom Simpson, whose memorial stands at the spot, 1.5km from the top, where he collapsed and died during the 1967 tour.

Bradley Wiggins - who would go on to record a fourth place finish, equalling the best performance by a Britain at the Tour - raced with a photograph of Simpson taped to the frame of his bike; Mark Cavendish - who has now recorded more stage wins than any Britain - removed his helmet as he rode past the memorial and bowed his head; Charly Wegelius and David Millar left gifts at the memorial: Wegelius a water bottle, Millar a cotton hat on which he had written: 'Tommy Simpson RIP, David Millar.'

That's the essence of what sport should be about. Magnificent.

Onto the final day and I've never seen anything quite like Mark Cavendish's stage winning sprint. For 50km, up and down and around the Champs-Elysées and the Place de le Concorde the Columbia-HTC team drove the pelaton. On the final circuit the Columbia 'train' increased the pace - 60, 65, 70km an hour - and the pelaton did it's best to keep up. Rivals Garmin-Slipstream formed their own train to support their sprint finish but they couldn't compete with Columbia who had the racing line - with the finish in sight Columbia riders George Hincapie and Mark Renshaw peeled off before Cavendish showed his incredible speed to become the first Britain to win in Paris.

Click here to watch the last circuit of the city in full, fast forward to 6:00 minutes to see the duel between Columbia-HTC and Garmin-Slipstream.

French novelist Paul Fournel once wrote that 'with the end of the Tour de France the summer reaches its moment of sadness'. Prior to this year, having never previously followed the Tour, the significance of his words were lost on me.

Yesterday, I understood.