The 2011 Cirque du France erects its big yellow tent tomorrow, and for some reason I’m having a hard time getting excited about following all its high-powered critters around with a broom and dustpan.

I used to videotape these deals. Not just Le Tour, mind you, but every bike race I could find, over the air, on cable or satellite. These days we have rabbit ears and stream the Innertubes, and I will watch pro bike racing when I’m on the clock and earning, period.

The sport can still be thrilling, even beautiful, in the same way that a chuckling stream is lovely to look at until you notice the rusty, half-submerged shopping cart, the dirty soapsuds, the trash littering the banks. Fishing it on weekends from the Mad Dog pirogue is bad enough. I can’t imagine swimming in it, day in and day out. Not anymore.

I work part-time for VeloNews.com as an editor at large, pushing pixels on Saturdays and Sundays to help keep the site lively and give the full-timers a break. It’s been years since I covered a race in corpus, and I’ve never been on site for anything approaching the grandiosity of Le Tour.

Still, I do have a few acquaintances in the pro peloton, people I like to watch for their work ethic and esprit de corps. We’re talking water-carriers here, not stars. And 20-odd years of helping cover the folks they work for has led me to distrust the theatrical, explosive assault, the stuff of must-see TV.

In all sports, not just cycling, the pros are supposed to make the impossible look effortless. But all too often, when a pro cyclist en route to a big payday casually generates more watts, day in and day out, than the Grand Coulee Dam, we’ve found out afterward that there was more than fresh spring water running through his turbines.

For example, how Riccardo Riccó manages to find a job in cycling doing anything other than patching flats and huffing glue in a Formigine bike shop remains a mystery to me. And Super Spaniard … if the Court of Arbitration for Sport eventually rules against him and the Spanish cycling federation over his clenbuterol positive from last year’s Tour — last year’s Tour! — he’s gonna leave more asterisks in his wake than Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut. Now there was a guy who knew an asshole when he saw one. Too bad he never took up sportswriting. He could draw, too.