French Revolutions Read online

  My previous experience of such establishments should have taught me some sort of lesson, but I can’t be too hard on myself for failing to predict that my tormentors that evening would not be inexpertly preserved fish, but a trio of animatronic harlequins. There were three of them by the door, each the size of a 5-year-old child, and as they ushered me through the lobby area with jerky genuflections and Lurex sieg-heils I chortled merrily at what seemed the kitschest encounter of my life to date.

  This was a response I had cause to regret as soon as I was seated at a table just behind them. It was then that I noticed the noise: ominously familiar, yet strangely changed. Drrrr-thweeek … Drrrr-thweeek … For a time I thought I could at least control the situation by working out which machine was responsible: the gold one, forever beating its brow in reproach for some unknown transgression; the red one, its outstretched left hand juddering uncertainly about as if passing a verdict of mediocrity; the silver one with the Queen Bess ruff, scything out a tune on an absent double-bass … But by the time the goateed waiter glided up it was already too late. My fillings seemed to be melting; there was something wrong with my spine.

  Distantly aware that such a request would usually invite heavy sedation and the removal of belt and shoelaces, I nonetheless heard myself ask for the little golden men to be deactivated. The waiter’s empathetic nodded wince said: If you think you’ve got it bad, try working here. But then he shrugged, looked bleak and in a voice racked with helpless frustration said, ‘Le patron …’

  Le patron what? ‘Le patron spent his childhood trapped in a robot’s body.’ ‘Le patron had a vision in which three metal boys came to Dax bearing the Ruff of Christ.’ ‘Le patron is in love with the one in red, but she’s married to the gold one and won’t leave him, so old silver’s there to keep an eye on the pair of them.’

  There was an argument for returning with my bicycle, wedging le patron’s tie in the chain and pedalling off at speed, and this argument became more compelling when I noticed that all the tables were rhombus-shaped. What was wrong with the man? One could only imagine the Cinzano-raddled reasoning by which such features were thought to lure potential diners.

  ‘Fancy a pizza tonight, Brigitte?’

  ‘Nice idea, Serge. What about Benito’s?’

  ‘Well, I dunno – the food’s good, but look at his furniture and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single oblique angle.’

  ‘Fair point. Dax Romana?’

  ‘I dunno – the pitwheel in their cross-section model of a colliery hasn’t revolved in months. And they keep their anchovies in the fridge.’

  The waiter offered me a more distant table, but I knew that a whispered drrr-thweeek would play even worse tricks on a shot cerebral cortex, and he understood immediately when I said I would have to leave.

  On the way home, chip-stuffed pitta bread in still-trembling hand, I began to fear for myself. For some days now I had become mildly obsessed with Eddy Merckx’s explanation of what made a great champion: that while it was possible to assess a cyclist’s physical capabilities, ‘there are no laws that govern the will’. Suddenly I understood exactly what he meant. Clocking up the ‘k’s and bullying myself into physical condition, I’d slightly missed the point. The Tour was about mental strength, telling your brain to shut up when it started screaming at you to stop, to control physical suffering as if it was just a schmaltzy emotion, like crying in Tarka the Otter. I couldn’t imagine Eddy driven to the dizzy brink of mania by three squeaky dolls. The mountains are coming, I thought. My legs might cope, but will my will? My will won’t.

  There were two rest days in the 2000 Tour, one after the Pyrenees and the other just before the end of the Alps. Playing a rest-day joker before the mountains even started seemed a bit feeble, but then it wasn’t my fault. All I could do was conduct myself in an appropriately professional manner, which, after reading Paul Kimmage’s account of Tour rest days, required me to sleep a lot, wash shorts in the bidet and go for a quick spin on the bike to stop my legs from stiffening up. The first two kept me occupied until 6 p.m., whereupon I pedalled off for a ride-thru McDonald’s, picking up a couple of lagers from a Leader Price store on the way home after seeing two sun-wizened winos exchanging crafty, incredulous smiles as they emerged with armfuls of bargain beer.

  The alarmingly high alcoholic content of these ales helped tide me through an evening of French television, one whose primetime content was dominated by toe-curling studio jamborees reminiscent of Noel’s House Party. Then the phone rang. It was reception saying they had a fax for me from the Société du Tour de France.

  The last day before the mountains is, for the élite riders, the end of the beginning; for the rest, it’s the beginning of the end. When snow crops up on the horizon their sights shift from stage wins to survival, languishing up hairpins behind the guy who’s worked out exactly how much they’ve got in hand before the broom wagon sweeps them up or they’re excluded on time differential (anyone finishing a slow mountain stage in a time 4 per cent greater than the winner’s is kicked out).

  The receptionist had refused to confirm or deny that Tour riders would be staying in the Splendide (‘I regret it is a secret,’ she said; ‘Any particular size?’ was my unanswered counter query), but it seemed more than probable. I imagined them, like me, lying awake in the night and feeling they were about to go into battle after a week of phoney war. ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar glinted tauntingly by the mirror: this was what he had been built for, this was his time. D’you fancy a bit, son, he sneered; d’you fancy a bit of the tall stuff, eh, a bit of the old thin air?

  Of course, in some ways it didn’t make much difference to me: my agenda had been about survival from the start. If I hadn’t made the mistake of looking through those endless faxed tables I probably would have been fine. But deprived of data for so long, I pored over them. Each stage was broken down in kilometre-by-kilometre detail, with every village, sprint and feeding station. Oh, and the climbs. Every eminence above a certain height is graded by an arcane formula, fourth category being the easiest, all the way up to the fearsome firsts, and beyond that the HCs: the hors catégories, off the scale, beyond the pale. These were the legends, from Mont Ventoux to the col d’Izoard, hairpin-stacked horrors where the Tour was won and lost. There were seven in all, and the next day’s stage from Dax to Lourdes-Hautacam had two of them.

  But worse than all this was the speed. There were three times listed alongside each climb and village, giving the riders’ ETA at three different average rates of progress. On some of the flat stages, the most cautious prediction was that they would barrel along at 40 k.p.h. all day, with 44 k.p.h. the most optimistic. Tomorrow’s stage was estimated to be the second slowest, but even then the organisers couldn’t see the riders letting their average speed drop below 31 k.p.h. On a flat road, 31 k.p.h. seems fast. At that speed the wind noise deafens and your hair is blown right back. You’re really travelling. If a red squirrel ran out in front of you it would be a dead squirrel. The concept of maintaining such a speed while ascending some of the highest roads in Europe was an outrage against logic.

  I don’t think I slept at all. At about 5 a.m. I filled the bath and lay for an hour up to my ears in Bond-girl foam. The breakfast-telly weatherman shouted out something about 28 degrees in the Pyrenees, and when I finally wound up the electric shutters everything was already all hot terracotta and azure. Merciless sun and mountains – you wait all week for an unreasonable physical challenge, and then two come along at once.

  I’d ordered breakfast in bed as a treat; ‘Bon appetit,’ said the chambermaid, but looking at all those little pots of jam I felt sick. The off-to-battle panic punched me in the guts again, and I had a strong desire to crock myself by knocking steaming hot chocolate into my lap, like the Somme soldiers shooting themselves in the foot as the order came to go over the top. After forty-four hours of virtual inactivity, my buttocks and legs still pulsed with discomfort. How could I have whined about those lovely flat for
ests?

  Negotiating ZR through a sea of tables laid for some grand buffet reception, a Leslie Phillips chap with a waxed ’tache and cravat sidled over with a camp leer.

  ‘Le Tour de France?’

  I tried to look a bit less like leftover guacamole. After my stuttering explanation, he stood back, saluted theatrically and barked, ‘Aux montagnes, Anglais!’

  Seven

  In a sporting world where the adjective ‘professional’ is often a euphemism for cynicism and naked commercial greed, there is no sport more professional than road-race cycling. Riders have always been willing to throw away certain victory if the price is right, often holding muttered in-the-saddle auctions to sell their services in assisting a breakaway. Most smaller races are shams, their results fixed in advance by an unsightly round of horse trading.

  And the Tour de France itself can claim no noble Corinthian origins, having been founded purely to promote a sports daily; when the yellow jersey was introduced in 1919 it was to emphasise that L’Auto Vélo was printed on paper of that colour. Bike companies had been splashing their names across riders’ chests even before that, and in 1957 the sponsorship expanded to include anything from ice-cream to beer. Soon it went a step further. I still found it hilarious that the names on the riders’ jerseys – at least, the main names – were those not of the team’s sponsors so much as their actual owners. In his prime, Eddy Merckx had flogged himself to the brink of collapse for the sake respectively of Faema, a manufacturer of coffee percolators, and Italy’s leading speciality butcher, Molteni. At the end he was riding for C&A, which no doubt explains his early retirement. I guess I’d give it some oomph for a nice espresso-maker, and the thought of a plate of sliced salami might give you something to aim at when the bonk came knocking, but you just can’t imagine Eddy grinding up the Casse Deserte under a merciless sun, driven onwards by the terrible, soul-swallowing prospect of a world without slacks.

  Fans have always sought to emulate their heroes. You’ve got your replica bike and your replica jersey: all you need now is your replica amoral rapacity. This is where the caravane publicitaire comes in. The faxed itinerary plotted the progress of this brashly commercial vanguard as it sped along the route 30 kilometres ahead of the riders, and standing astride ZR on the Boulevard Saint-Pierre, starting point of stage ten, I pondered the scenes of grasping hysteria that would accompany it.

  Channel 4 always breaks up its on-the-road coverage with behind-the-scenes reports, and a staple of these is the ‘day in the life of a Tour follower’. I must have seen half a dozen of these over the years, but the one that really stuck in my mind focused on a Belgian couple holding a long, hot roadside vigil on some uninspiringly flat stage.

  Mr Belgium, emulating his many surrounding peers, settled down at a folding table to consume pastis with a gusto that belied the hour. If he got to bellow aniseed-spittled encouragement into a hero’s hot face it would have been a good day; if he remembered having done so, even better. But his wife was working to a different agenda. All morning Mrs Belgium had toiled morosely in the motorhome, assembling sandwiches for her unsteady husband and generally defining the adjective long-suffering; then there was a distant volley of silly musical horns and as a sort of Mexican cheer spread slowly up the road she rushed to the tarmac, clapping her hands, slapping her haunches and constructing facial expressions consistent with a triple jumper psyching himself up at the start of his final run-up: the free crap is coming.

  A motorised tub of potted meat; four fibreglass racehorses frozen in mid-gallop on the roof of a Citroën; a mobile oversized gas bottle; a two-stroke globe with leering Michelin men strung round its equator; a coffee cup on wheels. Some of these vehicles and all the others were manned, in addition to the driver, by a couple of weary blondes hurling complimentary merchandise into the crowd, and the ugly feeding frenzy that occupied the next minutes of footage showed Channel 4 viewers the unacceptable face of audience participation.

  Dazed and craven, Mr Belgium beat an early retreat. Blundering haphazardly from the scrum clutching an armful of swag, his sagging features fell further as he laid it out on the camping table: junk-mail brochures for car insurance or cubic zirconium jewellery, vouchers entitling him to bugger-all off his next packet of cack. What had happened to the packets of sweets and key rings, the cycling caps and yellow food-bags, the sachets of coffee and Camembert portions and sausages and windscreen sunshields? He didn’t know, but having watched the truth emerge through Channel 4’s all-seeing eye we did: everything, absolutely everything of any value had been caught, scooped, plucked or snatched by the darting form of Mrs Belgium. One moment she was diving full stretch to grab a packet of first-aid plasters from in front of an old man’s cupped hands; the next she was screaming in the face of the Michelin blonde as if that promotional bottle opener was her birthright. Everything had her name on it. Through a forest of beseeching hands it was hers alone that came away clutching a France Télécom baseball cap; when a neighbouring Dane took a flying videotape in the guts and went down, there she was, snatching it from his side like a battlefield corpse-robber.

  She was the star but there were some glittering cameo performances. A sockless loafer stomped proprietorially on a mini frisbee; a woman with a face like a spat-out toffee held a small child up to the cheesemobile, screaming ‘Pour mes enfants!’ in the manner of a Balkan beggar. Some sort of moped-based Norse god of the sea chugged past dispensing small items of unpromising aspect wrapped in cellophane; a man in aviator Ray-Bans scooped one up and yelled, ‘Saucisson – magnifique!’ Children were dispatched into the road on insane crap-catching missions, plucking caps and biros from the small gaps between vehicles. As the last biro-hurling bath-tub puttered laboriously away through the pines and the crowds, Mrs Belgium puffed out her cheeks, aimed a rearwards nod at her mountain of merchandise and announced to the camera, ‘Une bonne récolte.’ A good harvest. I mean, I appreciate a cascade of free crap as much as – no, much, much more than – the next man, but it takes a special sort of front-line foolhardiness to mix it with the Mrs Belgiums. It ain’t what you get, it’s the way that you get it.

  The Tour riders were to leave Dax at 10.45 a.m., setting off an hour and three quarters after the publicity caravan. I gave myself a 25-minute head start and settled down into a rhythm appropriate for the considerable heat: slow enough to maintain on a slight hill, fast enough to get a breeze down the unzipped front of my humid jersey.

  As the roads got narrower and the villages smaller, so the Tour preparations seemed to gather impetus. At Habas, three separate gangs were doing flower-beds, road markings and telegraph-pole creosoting; every tiny hamlet seemed to imagine they wouldn’t be taken seriously without at least one mini roundabout.

  It got hotter and quieter. There were no châteaux around here, and the farmhouses looked meaty and squat, like old forts; every barn was fronted by a huge chicken-wire cage of corn cobs, propped up on stilts to keep it out of the reach of the few rodents whose corpses were not festering by the roadside. Whole valleys reeked of smoked and smoking Bayonne ham. A rider in the crimson strip of Saeco careered towards me from a rippled horizon and shot past, a medley of loud respiration, sweat beads and nurtured machinery. There were signs for Pamplona, and then, biting into the heavens miles above the churches that wallowed up to their towers in heat haze, there they were. Some soft and round, with jolly Friesian snow patches, others shredding the sky with frightful grey claws: the Pyrenees.

  Sobered, I got drunk. Lunch was taken in a fly-filled bar in the company of a loud road-gang who’d been resurfacing the Tour tarmac, all red wine, red faces, scratch cards and cap sleeves. There was no menu: the barman simply came over and filled the table before me with a huge aluminium tureen full of broth, a plate of black-pudding slices and a big jug of wine. ‘Ah – le dopage!’ guffawed the barman, sticking to the accepted script for all witnesses to my bidon-refilling routine. As I topped up water with Leader Price grape juice, he bent towards me with mock di
sapproval and sighed, ‘Et voilà – l’EPO.’ I laughed as much as I could. I didn’t want EPO. I wanted GTi.

  It was real fuck-this heat by now, a dogs-in-the-fountain afternoon that drawled out for a siesta. Detecting an odd slushy pulping sound as I approached my first official climb, the Côte de Barcus, I looked down and saw my front wheel almost up to its rim in melted tarmac.

  It didn’t help that I had no idea how much had been in that jug, except that it was slightly too much. They say that pride comes before a fall, but in my experience it’s far more likely to be wine. Forgetting to decleat I keeled over into a ditch alongside the temporary traffic lights erected by the road gang, and when I wobbled up to the next roundabout the fingerposts were a sozzled, illegible mass of obscure consonants that raised grander doubts concerning my sobriety. Presently I understood I had entered Basque country, a region whose fragile linguistic tradition is these days bolstered by bilingual road signs emphasising a perverse fondness for ‘k’s, ‘z’s and ‘x’s. I never heard anyone speaking Basque, except on telly, but the heavily accented French was almost unintelligible. For two days I had to deal with people who greeted me with a ‘bon-jewer’ that sounded like a Yorkshireman reading from a phrasebook.

  The Côte de Barcus was a coiling category – three ascent through Teletubbyland: meadows that were too green, sky that was too blue, cows that were too dun. It was bad, but not that bad. I reached the village of Barcus in third-bottom gear, hot but happy. In commentatorspeak, Moore was never in serious trouble on the first climb of the day. The regrettable truth is that such statements are almost inevitably followed by a huge, Pyrenean-sized but.