French Revolutions Read online

  It had been a lovely, gentle ride along the Aspe valley to the village of Escot. The looming terror of the mountains had somehow been shielded from me by foothills and foliage, and with 110k up for the day I should by rights have looked for a hotel. But it was only 5.30 p.m., and the idea of tackling all the stage’s big climbs the next day in one fell swoop (with more of the fell and less of the swoop) seemed overambitious. The col de Marie-Blanque was a category one, but on the Michelin map the road over it didn’t flail about like a dying snake. The hors catégorie monsters went up to 1,800 metres; at just over a grand the Marie-Blanque couldn’t be, or anyway shouldn’t be, a ridge too far.

  There were several large ifs to go with the aforementioned but. If I had troubled my imperial brain with the old-money translation, I would have realised I was departing at clocking-off time towards a formidable eminence as tall as Snowdon. If I had read Graeme Fife’s Tour de France I would have found the Marie-Blanque described as ‘a killer in disguise’. If I had spent a little more time looking at the map I would have noted that while the road was reasonably straight, it was also decorated not with a single, nor a double, but to you sir with the waxen death mask a treble gradient chevron.

  I heard my first cowbells as I filled both bidons with cool water from an almost painfully charming dolphin-head fountain by the turn-off to Marie-Blanque. There was a shaded bench by the fountain, and sitting down with the full force of post-wine drought suddenly upon me I laid the groundwork for the most serious if. If I hadn’t drunk two litres of chilled water.

  One corner out of Escot and the peaks suddenly leapt out above me with a genuinely startling visual boo: great slabs of rock poking out from rainforest greenery, some of them so sheer that I couldn’t crane my neck far enough to see the tops. A trio of thermal-topped riders swished towards me round a curve at enormous speed, wheel to wheel, leaning steeply into the corner. Ignoring the implications of their velocity and attire I plodded on, click-clicking down into gear twenty-four past the roofless shepherds’ huts.

  For some time the only sounds were ZR’s click-clicks and drrr-thwicks, echoing tinnily off the granite walls. Soon, however, my ugly respirations became rather more dominant. The gradient didn’t seem ridiculous, with none of the batteries of hairpin bends I’d been led to expect, but I seemed to be finding it hard to maintain the revs. Rhythm, I knew, was crucial, and while my heart was playing techno my legs were struggling to keep time with Mantovani. In contradiction of the modern maxim, there was pain but no gain. Click-click-click and I was in bottom gear, twenty-seven, with no more shots in the locker if the incline steepened, which of course it did just round the corner.

  Tour riders have any number of terms to describe what was happening to me, and try as I might to resist I found them all parading funereally through my mind. I was going backwards, I was cooked. Grovelling, that was another. Dying. I had cracked. The sweat stung my eyes before being sluiced away down grimace lines that would show up tomorrow like long, white fencing scars on my otherwise broiled face.

  There were names painted all over the road now, French, Spanish and even the odd outbreak of Cyrillic, and every one of them seemed a rebuke. I imagined people racing each other – racing each other – up this slope, fans shouting their names as they jockeyed and jostled and jumped on the pedals to speed away.

  When your body is very hot and you make it very cold, bad things happen: cramps, essentially, affecting all parts of the musculature. Two litres, I learned later, is what some Tour riders restrict themselves to for an entire day. ‘Driest is fastest,’ said five-times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil. Pierre Brambilla, in 1947 the winner of the King of the Mountains competition for the Tour’s top climber, guzzled cold water from a fountain during the scorched 1948 race and retired in agonies 10 kilometres further on. The day that Tour ended he buried his bike in the garden and never raced again.

  My legs felt wizened and pickled, my arms bruised and tremulous. Filling my lungs was like hyperventilating next to a faulty incinerator, yet the fire in my chest could not melt the heavy, iced spasm into which my innards had frozen. I coughed up iron and vinegar and flobbed it feebly on to my forearm.

  But at the same time, none of this was the problem. I had seen people feeling worse than this and carrying on, 400-metre athletes throwing up in full flow on the home straight, marathon runners wobbling drunkenly into the stadium, any number of Tour cyclists on any number of Tour mountains. Even I had too, I remembered: stumbling agonisingly towards the line in the second-year 800-metre ‘A’ race of 1974 as Neil Gross gritted his heavily discoloured teeth in the lane alongside, the tears already welling up in my eyes as I realised I couldn’t make my legs move any faster and this Krankie-faced gnome was going to beat me.

  It was Eddy’s will thing. Bernard Hinault had talked about ‘the doubts which sometimes overwhelm the rider’ and now I saw exactly what he meant. As soon as you think you can’t, you won’t. When the first defeatist thoughts sidled tentatively into the corridors of my mind, the forces of determination immediately collaborated and gave the invaders a rousing ticker-tape reception. If I could have seen the top of the col it might have made a difference, but when I looked fuzzily down at the odometer and saw I’d only done half of the climb’s 10 kilometres there was no option. Like Paul Kimmage on the col du Télégraphe in the 1987 Tour, I was just looking for somewhere to abandon. Going so slowly that I had to time my uncleating manoeuvre carefully to avoid an unsightly fall, I clambered off ZR by a barrier that closed off the pass’s upper reaches in winter. It would have helped if the scenery in this section had looked a little more savagely Alpine and a little less like Box Hill on a pleasant June weekend. Nettles, buttercups, slugs … and then an off-key bell tinkling somewhere above. Forget the tree line – I hadn’t even made it past the bloody cow line.

  In the state I was in, pushing was barely easier. In 1933, Percy Stannard was picked for the British team to ride in the world championship after winning the national trials – his first ever race – by shouldering his bike and running up the hills. How dare you, Stannard. Every five minutes I remounted, but it never lasted long. Once you get off you can’t really get on again. Cars suddenly started descending towards me at regular intervals; every time I heard one coming I’d whip the map out of the bar-bag and pretend I’d stopped to plot my progress. At least there were no more cyclists.

  I did manage to do the last half kilometre in the saddle, and even had the gall to set up a self-timer shot at the top, standing astride ZR by the altitude sign and peering through the low sun at the bleak but benign eminences around. And of course the descent paid scant justice to the horrors of the climb, containing long flat sections where horses with bleached Human League fringes wandered over the road and I had to pedal fairly hard to keep going. I’d Velcroed myself into the all-weather top in preparation for a chilly, windswept downhill swoop, but it never happened. I was the Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a hill.

  Wheeling into the main square at Laruns I was bonking fairly seriously, an awful mental and physical vacuum that left me ill-prepared for my reception at the only open hotel. As I swayed dead-eyed among the outdoor diners finishing their sorbets in the last of the sun the youthful proprietress fixed me with a challenging look. The rooms were 285 francs, she said, and if I needed a garage for my vélo, eh bien, that would be an extra 30F. ‘Pour un vélo?’ She gave me a next-please look. I told her that in that case I’d take it up to my room. With a sneering shake of the head she swaggered complacently back indoors.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I yawled, in a weary, drunken slur that raised faces from many sorbets. ‘Do you think you could come back and try doing that a bit more rudely?’ It was gone eight by now, and getting cold down at the foot of the vast encirclement of enormous green peaks beneath which Laruns cowered. I should have been in an oxygen tent on a drip, not fighting for my consumer rights in the street. Slowly waving a snot-gloved hand in her general direction, I remounted and rolled a
way.

  On the outskirts I’d seen a sign advertising a hotel memorably called Le Lorry a kilometre beyond Laruns. I won’t pretend that this was a short kilometre, or that Le Lorry was open, or that I didn’t return to my tormentress with my tail, and indeed my head, between my legs. It was like surrendering to an enemy general whose humiliating terms you had haughtily rejected an hour earlier. She demanded my passport and kept it; she stood in folded-arms silence as I struggled cravenly with the up-and-over garage doors; she lined up her staff to watch me drag my panniers laboriously up the 9-inch-wide staircase. On the other hand, by looking less like a shovel-faced Def Leppard groupie, I had the last laugh.

  The room was unpleasant – tall, narrow and gloomy, like a Portakabin turned on end, with an ever-present cough muffling its way through the distant ceiling to impart the atmosphere of a TB sanatorium – but, however hungry, I wasn’t about to leave it. Gathering together the squashed croissants and pliable chocolate squares that had made their home in my panniers’ basements, I lay on the bed and ate the lot while watching the final moments of the European Cup Final.

  You’re not real sportsmen, I thought as Real Madrid jumped about on the victors’ rostrum, you’re just good at football. You don’t go out and flog yourself half to death every day. Only when the Valencia squad filed vacantly past to pick up their losers’ medals did I feel an empathy. These were the faces of men who had just faced the ultimate sporting challenge of their lives, and had failed.

  Still, I pondered dimly, aware that I was about to fall asleep with my clothes on again but not caring, at least I get another go. I had lost the battle but not the war. That’s the good thing about the Tour. Every day, every stage is a race within the race. There’s always tomorrow.

  Eight

  When, in 1910, the Tour first got serious about mountains, it was to the Pyrenees that the organisers came. An official tried to drive up the Tourmalet – at 2,114 metres the highest point on the Tour’s Pyrenean itinerary and mercifully avoided in 2000 – but got stuck in snow near the summit and had to abandon his vehicle. Some hours later he blundered hypothermically into a police station at the foot of the mountain, and after a touch-and-go convalescence dispatched the following telegraph to Tour HQ: ‘TOURMALET PASSABLE FOR VEHICLES, NO SNOW.’

  The first Pyrenean exercise that year, however, was the col d’Aubisque, 1,700 metres up a twisting track that even the Tour scouts had conceded was no more than a muddy mule path. Tackling such an obstacle on clodhopping butcher’s bikes with no gears, carrying spare tyres looped round their shoulders and all necessary food and tools on their backs, was understandably a challenge. On race day, Tour officials waited anxiously at the summit; when at last a rider did appear, he ignored their queries – ‘What’s happened? Where are the others?’ – looking straight through them with distant, haunted eyes. Half an hour later race leader Octave Lapize appeared, filthy, famished, fucked as flotsam, pushing his bike through the mud and mist. He slowly remounted, pedalled up to the official party, stuck his face straight in theirs and summoned his last reserves to scream, ‘Assassins!’ It is relevant to point out here that the riders had set off at 3.30 a.m. – that’s right – and still faced 200 kilometres before the stage finish.

  On this basis, it wasn’t ideal that my first task of the day was the Ascension of the Aubisque: 16.4 kilometres at an average gradient of 7.2 per cent, the fourth-longest hors catégorie climb in the 2000 Tour. I was still in a bad way – when I tried to say ‘Merci’ for my hot chocolate in the café next door, nothing came out – but at least the elements were being considerate, sheathing the mountains in thick cloud that wisped down past Le Lorry as I rounded the first hairpin. The Pyrenees retain a rough, pioneering ambience that the Alps have long since sold for a blank traveller’s cheque. The End of the Earth and the Circle of Death are both here, craggy, treeless highlands roamed by shepherds in snowshoes rather than futures traders in Gore-Tex.

  Cycling into Descartes on my second day, there had been a terrible moment when I became convinced that my credit card was back in Loudun: by the time I realised it wasn’t, I had already resigned myself to a 90k roundtrip to retrieve it. Since then it had become something of a mid-morning ritual to wonder whether I’d go back if I’d left my cards at last night’s hotel, a means of gauging my morale for the rest of the day. Naturally, the distance I was prepared to retrace had dropped steadily each stage, and as I hunched and panted through the grimy old spa hotels of Eaux-Bonnes, 6k and as many fat hairpins up the road from Laruns, I knew I had recorded the lowest score yet in the Credit Card Challenge. This was good in so far as I hadn’t left my credit card in Laruns, but bad in so far as I now realised that I had in fact left my passport there. Feeling internally puréed, I stopped and sagged bonelessly over the handlebars. Then, starting bolt upright and with my features savagely distorted into a Hinault of rage, I barrelled furiously down the hairpins, a terrible oath-fest ricocheting off the terraced walls. Even now I can hardly bear to picture the proprietress’s face as she handed the document over, but when I do, yes – there it is again: a little smile.

  Anyway, I eventually made it as far as the ski resort of Gourette, 4k from the summit, before getting off to push. There were signs every kilometre detailing the average gradient for the stretch ahead: these were supposed to keep cyclists’ spirits up, but when, having agonised through a couple of 8 per cents and a 9, I was told to prepare for a 10, I surrendered with a cracked and puny rasp of anguish. It hadn’t helped to hear cars that had overtaken me changing messily down into first gear as they disappeared into the mist above and tackled an even more alarming hairpin.

  I’d tried to do it properly: bananas in my back pocket, apple juice frothing unappealingly in my bidons, limbs slathered in Ibuleve pain-relief cream instead of suntan lotion. But it was no good. I was not a climber. One of the final unexplored avenues for sporting glory was closing before me, and what was now left to a man of 36? Golf, perhaps. Darts. Curling?

  I did at least manage to ride the last 2k, in time to see the mountains do a gentle striptease as the mist lifted, exposing my shame to rocks as wet and silver and green as an evil pizza-chef’s anchovy. ‘Félicitations!’ said the cyclo-tourist sign at the top; the cyclo-tourist himself said something else.

  It was nippy up at 1,709 metres. Each of the hairs on my arm dangled a tiny crystal ball from its tip, a shimmering droplet of cloud. My legs were rather less picturesquely slathered and spattered in road mud. After donning rain top and leggings I set off down a tiny, pot-holed road that clung to the rim of a great, sheer rock bowl half-filled with mist. With my hands numbstruck to the bars I swished in and out of Napoleonic tunnels that aimed small, icy drip-falls into my face. Dirty tongues of snow probed out on to the road – yesterday that underwheel slappy-mash sound had been melted tar, today it was slush. I was almost relieved when the road suddenly levelled and rose for the 4k climb to the col du Soulor.

  During my failed assault of the Aubisque I had enjoyed some success with a downwards flick of the ankle that somehow seemed to help propel the opposing leg through the debilitating ten-o’clock-to-midnight arc of the pedal revolution, and employing this weapon, along with the old stalwart hand-on-thigh pushdown, I crested the Soulor at some speed. This carried me at incautious velocity down a circuitous descent, my sagging mouth whipped and pulled about by wind and G-force.

  The descent of the Soulor ended Chris Boardman’s Tour in 1997 (torn back muscle and damaged vertebrae), almost ruined Lance Armstrong’s 2000 preparations (a 75-k.p.h. fall in training) and in 1951 caused perhaps the scariest spill in Tour history. Wim van Est, the first Dutchman ever to lead the race, skidded and went off the edge of a hairpin, landing 20 metres down on the only ledge above a vertical eternity. To retrieve him his team knotted all their spare tubes together and lowered them over the edge to make a rope; van Est was rescued but the tubes stretched so much that the entire team had to abandon the race.

  With blanched old Tourisms
flashing beneath my wheels – RICHARD JE T’AIME; FORZA PANTANI; VIRENQUE = EPO beneath a huge carriageway-spanning syringe – I hurtled into Aucun, where I late-lunched in a ski-hotel restaurant, ZR’s steaming wheel-rims cooling off in the tackle room usually set aside for snowsuits and sledges. The appalling exertions of the climb and the nervous strain of the descent hit me in full as I sat there among the afternoon’s last diners, prim and elderly holidaymakers on mountain-air constitutionals. Blundering dismally into such genteel establishments looking (and often behaving) like the sole survivor of a pot-holing tragedy had long since stopped bothering me. Again I could only watch as flies grubbed about in my mud-speckled armhair, and when my grapefruit appetiser inevitably squirted citric acid straight into both eyes I didn’t even flinch.

  Fumbling parts of some sort of cutlet into my unstable maw I got out the stage itinerary, even though I could now recite it by heart. Ahead from Aucun lay a run up the valley to Argelès-Gazost, followed by … drool wine into Lycra … followed by … grasp knife in right hand like screwdriver and jab listlessly at meat … followed by … oh, to big bad buggery and back, followed by the steepest hors catégorie climb in the race, a 12.9-kilometre, 8.5 per cent assault on the colossus referred to by the organisers as Lourdes–Hautacam.

  There had been bad times before but, anvil-flattened by the doubts which sometimes overwhelm the rider, these were the worst. The people around me were on holiday, and for the first time I accepted that I was not. Hautacam lay at the tip of a tiny, dead-end road drawn by someone, or rather someone else, with a degenerative nervous disease. I’d have to go all the way up and then all the way down. Today. I looked up and caught the wary eye of the quiffed, bow-tied waiter, and thought: please, please take me in. I can wash dishes. I can make beds. I can walk about reception on stilts yodelling limericks. Maybe if I pretended I didn’t have any money to pay the bill … Maybe if someone stole my bike …