French Revolutions Read online

  The presence of my family was joyous but utterly dislocating. Things I had become accustomed to – strewing all my road-ravaged clothing carelessly about the room, spending less than £400,000 an hour, performing Mr Boardman’s Patent Stretches without rowdy hecklers, waking up in full daylight – were to become distant memories. Of course all of this was comfortably outweighed by the benefits of an Alpine support vehicle, loaded with panniers and cheerleaders, urging me up the mountains. Then watching in grim-faced, nauseated disillusion as I wheezed and swore and flobbed and fell and failed.

  You really don’t want to cycle up Mont Ventoux when it’s hot. 28 May 2000 might not have been as fearsome as 13 July 1967, but even at 10 a.m. the dark green litter bins out in front of the Palais des Papes were sufficiently sun-grilled to make a small child squeal almost as loudly as the slightly smaller child he was trying to upend into one. I looked up at the cloudless sky and tried to regulate my breathing. Tom Simpson’s fate wasn’t one I aspired to, and no matter how large a shadow he would cast over the day ahead it wouldn’t be large enough to keep me cool. My stomach fizzed with trepidation, but click-cleating back to the car park I at least detected that for the first morning in two weeks my legs didn’t feel as if they’d been energetically headbutted all night by someone wearing a welder’s helmet.

  With my departure delayed by the amount of time it takes to manoeuvre three children past a merry-go-round, a Pokémon stall and a dead pigeon, the sun was already high when I returned to the hotel room to fill my bidons with the usual fly-friendly blend of grape juice and tap water. The plan had been for me to drive to Carpentras with ZR in the boot of the Twingo, then set off for the 149-kilometre stage to the Ventoux summit, where Birna and the kids would meet me in the distressingly dear Renault Espace we had hired. The issue here was that on past form I would require at least eight hours (including the non-negotiable long lunch) to do those 149 kilometres, and that was without taking the gradient factor into account.

  As it was now midday, this schedule appeared an irksome one. Additionally keen to minimise the scope for hot death, I abruptly decided to sit out the worst of the sun by bunking off the preparatory meanderings. Driving beyond Carpentras to the village of Sault, I’d skip 89 kilometres and gird myself for a late-afternoon assault on the final 60k. This, after all, included most of the awful bits.

  It was a sombre send-off. My 6-year-old son Kristjan had only recently been disabused of a misconception that I was competing among cycling’s élite in the actual race; horribly crestfallen, he looked at me with the betrayed air of a child coming to terms with the fact – first suspected, perhaps, during those self-mutilating Swingball sessions – that his father might not be the world’s most complete athlete. Untroubled by such concerns, his 2-year-old sister Valdis filled the lobby with gay chortles as I strode out of the lift in full Lycra. I can normally count on 4-year-old Lilja for an appropriate sense of theatre, and this was briefly supplied when she tugged at my shorts, looked up with wide eyes and pleaded, ‘Don’t go up the mountain, Daddy!’ I hardly had the chance to ruffle her hair with a brave smile before she added, ‘It’s really boring.’

  A long, broad hump of a hill, Le Mont Ventoux didn’t in fact look that bad as I drove into the unremarkable town of Carpentras, half an hour southwest and 6,265 feet below its round, chalky summit. In a certain light, the topping of bare, bleached rocks is said to give the impression of a permanent layer of snow, but on a wincingly bright afternoon in late May, rising gently out of the cherry trees and lavender fields, Ventoux seemed benign, a big sandcastle recently washed over by the first wave of an encroaching tide.

  Still, you couldn’t miss it. Six thousand two hundred and sixty-five feet: hoist the Eiffel Tower on top of Canary Wharf, then stick the whole thing on Ben Nevis – let’s face it, we’ve all wanted to – and you’d still be looking up at the summit. Ventoux isn’t an Alp, nor whatever the single of Pyrenees is – it’s just there on its own, looming up on almost every Provençal horizon, making its own weather, that squat, muscle-bound bulk spread across a fold and a half of my Michelin map like a whole mountain range in itself. The eye is drawn to it, and often the feet follow. Mountaineering was invented here: by conquering its summit in 1336, the poet and scholar Petrarch became the first man to climb a peak as an end in itself. Almost six hundred years later, future Prime Minister Edouard Daladier had a road built to the top, again for no practical purpose other than curiosity and a determination to tame nature.

  On this basis, it is no surprise that the Tour de France should regularly make its way to that slightly lunar summit. Unspectacular as it might look from a distance, Ventoux is the most feared mountain in the Tour’s considerable arsenal. ‘It is not like other mountains’ has been a common refrain among riders since the race first went up it in 1951.

  And here I was, a pallid, flimsy tourist in nylon and Lycra sportswear, unsuccessfully trying to remember at what precise time this whole stupid scheme had seemed like a good idea. Striving to psych myself up, something I’ve never ever been able to do, I acknowledged that for the first time I was up against a legend of the Tour. By conquering Ventoux I could feel a direct affinity with some of the greatest names in sporting history. This would be like taking a penalty at Wembley or portentously bouncing a yellow Slazenger on the Centre Court baseline, only with better weather and a nice view. And if I took it easy, it couldn’t be that hard, could it? Sans panniers, I’d breezed up the col de Saraillé. This was just a steeper, longer hill, I reasoned, and if I could cope with feeling slightly less breezy it could be mastered.

  Regrettably, stage twelve, Carpentras-Ventoux, was by any standards beyond reason. A perfect exercise in agonising futility, it ended with a summit finish: up to the top, from A to B, then all the way back down to A in the team coach. The stage profile map was a horrible document. My 60 kilometres included the second-category col de Notre-Dame des Abeilles, a fourth-category hill and the merciless ascent of Ventoux, at 21k comfortably the most drawn-out hors catégorie climb in the Tour’s itinerary.

  Ventoux’s notoriety was of course sealed in the 1967 Tour. You can blame the heat, you can blame the drugs, but the bottom line is that Le Mont Ventoux remains the only peak in the Tour’s 97-year history to have caused a man’s death through physical overexertion.

  I’d bought a video of Tom Simpson’s life, and watched it before I left. It was the ordinariness of his story that made its final chapter so desperately poignant. An inevitably humble upbringing in Durham and Nottingham as the youngest of six kids, the one who always had to win at Ludo; the borrowed bike that won him the first race with his local club at the age of 16, nicknamed Four-Stone Coppi in reference to his hollow-cheeked, beak-nosed similarity to the great Fausto, cycling’s first superstar. The additionally inevitable ‘happy-go-lucky’ descriptions from those who always enjoyed a chat and a laff with Tom.

  The cycling scrapbooks under the bed, the determination that had him writing to pros all over Europe for advice; winning a bronze at the 1956 Olympics then going off to Brittany with £100 in his pocket to turn pro; adapting to the people, language and food so successfully that when he met his future wife Helen a year later she thought he was French. Winning four of his first nine races and writing home to say he was earning big money. Almost grabbing the lead in his first Tour in 1960, aged 22. The first big victories – Bordeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo – wearing the chequered-band Peugeot jersey like the one that now clung to my thumping chest. The big car, the holidays in Corsica. The home movies: skiing with his two young daughters, sleeping in a deckchair, training on a bike on rollers. Mastering the hierarchy and tactics of road racing, and its accompanying PR duties: as the rest of the 1960 British Tour team fidget gormlessly in front of the Continental cameras, there’s Tom grinning hugely with his sponsor’s cap right in the lens. Contriving the media-friendly invention of Major Tom, a brollied and bowlered city gent whose sociological origins shared nothing with his own. Sofa-splitting living-r
oom mayhem in Nottingham when Tom wins the 1965 World Championship in Spain; as the first Briton ever to do so, he’s voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The autographed publicity shots in his world champion’s jersey, a clean-cut young man with a cheeky, crooked grin. Major Tom playing the accordion with his gaping mouth frozen in lusty mid-chorus. The broken leg that cost him the next season, and coming into 1967 knowing that at age 30 this was probably his final chance to do well in the Tour and so underwrite a comfortable retirement.

  Oh, Tom. I stocked up with raisins and dried apricots in Carpentras, and followed the Tour itinerary to Sault. The organisers were obviously being kind, contriving a route that bent away from Ventoux, tactfully shielding it from the riders’ line of vision until the last possible moment. The sky was the colour of ZR, a deep, almost metallic blue, its intensity emphasised by occasional smoke-signal puffs of white cloud. Kids were ambling home for lunch along the flat, scrub-lined roads into empty towns shuttered up for the long afternoon.

  It was an airless day, but in the harsh Provençal sun everything seemed unnaturally sharp: cherries gleaming like varnished holly berries, neon poppies lining dayglo lavender meadows. Up the col de Murs I overtook a stretched-out crocodile of steadily toiling cyclists, rocking slowly from side to side as they ground out each revolution. Everyone was taking it easy today.

  Oh, Tom. Before the 1967 Tour started he’d marched into a Mercedes dealership in his adopted home town of Ghent and put a deposit on the flashest model, the one spinning slowly on the turntable. If he had a good Tour he’d pay off the balance: ‘Got to have something to aim at,’ he told his team-mates. He genuinely believed he could win, and though he hated heat, and during his previous experience of the mountain had built up a loathing for Ventoux – ‘it’s another world up there, the white rocks and the blinding sun’ – he was still hugely confident.

  He started the thirteenth stage seventh overall, kept at the front of the pack up to the foot of Ventoux and, in the bottom part of the climb, shaded in pine trees, set off after a pair who burst away from the leading group. The Alps were over; he’d been saying all week that if he could stay within three minutes of the leader for the final time-trial, this could be his year. To catch him, his team car had to pick its way carefully through a long line of suffering also-rans, and when they got to Tom, now out of the trees with the summit in sight, he was still up in sixth. ‘But that was when we realised some difficulties were being experienced,’ said his mechanic.

  There was silent newsreel coverage of this on the video, and however terrible it was to see a man literally pushing himself beyond the limits of human endurance I found it grimly, horribly compelling. Weaving arthritically from one side of the road to the other, he labours forlornly to chase down two riders who have just passed; as they power sturdily away his bobbing head drops, he slows and almost wobbles off the left-hand side, a precipice of white rubble. The mechanic, Harry, shouts and prepares to leap out of the car but Tom rights himself, only to totter straight into the bleached scree on the right. Harry jumps out and undoes his toe clips – ‘That’s enough, Tom’ – but it isn’t, not for Tom, and from somewhere he summons anger – No, no, no, let’s get on, let’s go, do me straps, Harry – and though Harry doesn’t say so this is where Tom rasps, ‘Put me back on the bloody bike.’ He hates the bike, but this is his job, and he’s been world champion, and what will they think back on the sofa in Nottingham, and this is his final throw of the dice, one last effort to set up the rest of his life, keep his kids in matching snowsuits and his wife sitting pretty in that 280SL with electric windows.

  It’s make or break, and he breaks. Two hundred metres down the road the race passes under the 1 km-to-go banner, normally a vision of miraculous redemption for the riders but not this time for Tom. Two fat Frenchmen in vests have stopped him toppling over on to the hot tar and are guiding Tom to the side of the road, and though he’s being held by two pairs of big arms he’s still pedalling automatically. Harry has been standing up in the sunroof of the team car and now he vaults right through it and jumps down to the roadside. Tom’s hands are locked to the bars and it takes some effort to prise them off, unclip his shoes and lie him down on those awful bare rocks. The last thing we see is his floppy torso, those shaven legs and Peugeot-emblazoned shorts, being crudely belaboured by the vest men, trying to shake some life back into him as Harry gives mouth-to-mouth. Then doctors, oxygen, helicopters and headlines.

  Oh, Tom. I knew it wouldn’t take much, and it didn’t. Nostalgie FM was murmuring away in the background as I parked in Sault, a quiet cluster of spires and pantiles stuck up on a hill with glorious views available for anyone able to tear their gaze downwards from the hulking bulk of Ventoux. I killed the engine, and as the clear tones of Gilbert O’Sullivan tinkled melancholically out of the dashboard I felt the back of my neck fizz and the tips of my nostrils quiver. My soul had left the door open, and scarcely able to believe his good fortune after three decades of jeering, two-fingered rebuttal, Mr O’Sullivan strode gloriously in. I got a gloved hand over my cheeks before they became wet, then having snot-wiped them dry raised a tear-smeared gaze to the heavens above that bald, brown summit. It was better to get this out of the way now as I certainly wouldn’t possess the wherewithal when I got up there. Ground control to Major Tom.

  Ten

  The trouble with cycling up mountains is that – panniers or, as today, no panniers – after about four minutes, as soon as that first metallic-tasting, lactic gasp rasps inward at the back of your throat, any thoughts of appreciating your surroundings, contemplating the Continental way of life or otherwise entertaining an appropriate holiday mentality have been booted out of your brain by an all-encompassing him-or-you struggle to the death with the force of gravity.

  If I’d known this, of course, I might have made more of an effort to admire the view as I’d sat under a café awning in Sault, unenthusiastically ingesting two-thirds of a croque-monsieur, my usual half-litre of the old pink stuff and a Coke. A good few dozen cyclo-tourists take on Ventoux every day during the summer, and as I bounced and booted and bullied ZR’s front wheel into its carbon-fibre lugholes a trio of large, ruddy Americans freewheeled slowly by in auspicious silence, their mashed-rainbow cycling jerseys clashing with everything and themselves. If they can make it, I thought … But then I realised they probably wouldn’t.

  The category two col du Notre-Dame des Abeilles was supposed to be only the warm-up act, but as I wound gingerly up its lazy, shadeless curves it soon became clear that it had fulfilled this role rather too well. Cresting it with sweat stinging my eyes and dripping hissily on to the scalded crossbar, I was beginning to feel a karmic payback for the terrible things I had done as a boy involving sunny afternoons, a magnifying glass and woodlice.

  The summit took me by surprise; one second I was creaking along at a rate that permitted detailed perusal of the health warnings on discarded Gitanes packets, the next I was screaming down at terminal velocity, airborne fauna spattering my larynx; hot, thin tyres neatly bisecting an unwary lizard. A sudden blast of mistral snapped back the poplars, yanked the helmet chinstrap against my windpipe and buffeted me towards a family of hard-shoulder picnickers; the bellowed warnings were ripped from my mouth and dispatched so abruptly that I never heard them. A transient whiff of roadkill, a flash of vineyard, a fleeting, wobbly glance at the speedo – Jesus: 65 k.p.h. – and then I was easing into the Provençal plain, able at last to raise a glove to my nose and restore some element of facial respectability.

  Maintaining the momentum, for an hour I was eating up the kilometres rather than choking on them. There was a fourth-category hill somewhere along the way but it came and went unnoticed, and I cruised with growing confidence into Bédoin, the town at the base of Ventoux, untroubled either by the parched associations of its name or the mobile donation unit in the main square emblazoned with a banner heralding the following morning’s ‘Day of Blood’. It was here that Tom had necked that fateful c
ognac, and I was just wondering under which of the bar awnings he’d pegged it when I became aware of an abrupt and painfully bone-shaking decline in ride quality.

  There are few sights more instantly dispiriting than a wrinkled, folded, cellulite-dimpled, pancake-flat bicycle tyre, particularly when accompanied with a cortex-freezing epiphany that somewhere within the panniers one has so joyously hurled into a car boot lies the pump. I couldn’t believe it. Over a thousand kilometres covered and I hadn’t even had to put any air in the tyres up until then. And what made the scenario even more cat-swallowingly infuriating was that I’d remembered to stick all other repair accessories in my bar-bag – tyre levers, patches, glue, spare tube, even a shag-arsing square of emery board, for cock’s sake.

  It was while wondering whether to tackle this situation by biting random parts of the bicycle or gluing repair patches over my eyes and mouth that I looked to my right and saw a thin man in army shorts standing before a barn full of mountain bikes. In less than a minute he had cheerily repaired my tyre free of charge and sent me enigmatically on my way with a banana.

  It seemed too good to be true, and after fifteen minutes of dusty maize fields and increasing gradient I found myself wondering whether it was. Things were starting to acquire a queasily ethereal air, a heat-haze sense of unreality. By now familiar with the early-warning signals of an impending bonk, as soon as I found myself struggling to remember which side of the road I was supposed to be on I transferred a couple of handfuls of hot dried apricots from jersey pocket to drooling chops, then exhausted my daily innuendo allowance by choking on the tyre man’s banana. It didn’t help. My slowly pistoning knees, focus of most of my head-hung visual attention, began to look blurred and distant; my skull pulsed and swelled to helmet-cracking proportions. I was already in twenty-seven but still pawed feebly at the gears, like an addicted laboratory rat clicking a deactivated cocaine button in its cage. And try as I might I could not banish a conviction that my increasingly ragged inhalations and exhalations had adopted the precise rhythm – and after a while the tune of the theme to The Wombles.