French Revolutions Read online

  And if there’s one thing they love as much as mess, it’s filth. On-road Tour graffiti rarely ventures beyond the name of a favoured rider or team; a syringe labelled ‘EPO’ below a suspect racer is about as creative as it gets. But as I toiled up the dead bends, the smooth new asphalt ahead was decorated with complex artistic tableaux. Many of these were spoof road markings, perfectly composed ‘give way’ junction dashes neatly marked ‘PANTANI – STOP’, but most of them were not.

  Simon O’Brien had been at Nick and Jan’s place in the Pyrenees the night before the Tour passed their front door in 1997, and offered a stark warning of what can happen when you’re out there in the dark with a paintbrush, how your intended ALLEZ CHRIS can find itself evolving into an EVERTON FOOTBALL CLUB or a FUCK THE MANCS. The Italians, however, sated these unseemly urges in a more appropriately artistic manner. Their preferred icon was the erect penis, sometimes as an incidental prop in a scene depicting unpopular riders eagerly fellating or sodomising one another, but more commonly as a stand-alone icon, a vast, scarlet-frenumed, wispy-scrotumed deity solemnly spanning both sides of the carriageway.

  I’d just ridden across a testicle the size of a mini-roundabout when the road thrashed through one more hairpin, then straightened, then … what? What? WHAT? An obelisk, a souvenir stall, three dozen wandering motorists and bikers and red-faced cyclists and a 360-degree panorama … the summit, the second-highest point of the Tour. I hadn’t just conquered the feared and mighty col d’Izoard, I’d pissed it. I couldn’t understand how it had been so straightforward: was I getting better at cycling, or better at tolerating pain? The same thing, I suppose.

  As sensations go, it was sensational. I was still beaming like a loon when I careered an hour ahead of schedule into Briançon, Europe’s highest town, finally overtaking at a set of lights the caravan-towing Landcruiser I’d chased all the way down the Izoard. ‘Capitale mondiale du vélo’, trumpeted a billboard as I bounced and bumped along the pot-holed road through the old city walls; ‘Let’s talk mountains’, said another, and I thought, yeah, OK, let’s. It was Saturday lunchtime, and the sunny streets were lazily busy as I ate burger and chips outside a café in our appointed meeting place, the modestly fountained place de l’Europe. ‘Ça va pas,’ scolded the waiter genially as he brought me my Coke. ‘Is hot température, the cyclistes not drink cold boissons …’ here he clutched his ample belly ‘… is bad for l’estomac.’ The last person who’d told me off for drinking iced beverages on a hot day – the grocer who’d sold me two bottles of Fanta at Comps-sur-Arby – had been lucky to escape without a bike-pump cappuccino enema, but the world was a very different place today. I nodded, shrugged, sipped and waited.

  The support vehicle showed up twenty minutes early and its driver was astonished to find me there. ‘Those mountains were enormous,’ she said. ‘It was bad enough driving under them. Have you found us a hotel yet?’

  In the light of my previous exploits it had been assumed that one HC a day was the well-balanced way. But the rules had changed. The Tour riders, I recalled, would ride 249 kilometres from Draguignan – remember back that far? – to Briançon in a single day: even driving half of it I’d taken double that, and on this basis the least I could do was push on a bit further. ‘I’ll meet you in front of the town hall in Valloire at 6.30,’ I said, having checked out the itinerary for stage fifteen, the penultimate day in the Alps. ‘It’s 50k up the road.’

  ‘Well … all right. What’s that on your neck?’

  As she settled the children down to lunch – a verb that merits inverted commas if ever there was one – I rolled off into the crowds of shoppers, wondering if I should have told her that the only route to Valloire would involve me cycling, and her driving, over the second-highest road in Europe.

  The haul up to the foot of the col du Galibier posed a severe threat to my enthusiasm. The col du Lautaret was a spirit-sapping, soul-slapping incline, 25 upward kilometres that were perpetually painful without quite being unbearable: in the words of Paul Kimmage, ‘It’s a long bastard.’ There was a headwind and heavy traffic – the N91’s passage between the 10,000-foot peaks on either side has been an important trans-Alpine route since Roman times – and though I did reel in and pass two fairly serious cyclists, an attempt to take on a third almost finished me off. A bloke with a close-cropped beard and a Giro-souvenir feeding bag slung over his shoulder, he had stared straight into my face after catching me, gauging my physical status as pros are taught to do, before jumping on his pedals with a vicious smirk. I rose to the bait – childish, perhaps, but then this was what real cyclists had to do – standing up in the saddle and pistoning my legs until every part of them seemed to glow with pain. I closed the gap to four coach lengths – easy enough to estimate in these road conditions – but couldn’t get it down further, and entering the first tunnel I thought, well, I bet he hasn’t done the bloody Izoard today, then issued the world’s favourite impolite noise and backed off.

  Motorcyclists were buying ‘I climbed the Lautaret’ T-shirts at the col-topping café; stifling an arrogant snort I wolfed down two bars of chocolate and an Orangina before heading off down a listless little road that prodded shyly towards a recklessly steepled ridge of snow-veined granite. ‘One place you won’t be cycling to …’ was how the guidebooks chose to describe the 2,645-metre Galibier. Today was 3 June and I was surprised to learn from the waitress that the road over the top was usually snowed up for at least another two weeks. On any previous day the discovery that it had opened early would have been the excuse for anguished howls: betrayed by global warming.

  The Galibier had undone hundreds of professional reputations, and it is still difficult to understand how I conquered it with such glorious nonchalance. The wind hit me on that first grassy, treeless flank, and when I entered the six o’clock shadows and lost the sun my breath started steaming furiously. But I never really slowed, never dropped out of twenty-six, even as the snow started to pile up at the roadside, gritted and muddy like ice-cream dropped on the beach. A kilometre from the top, negotiating a slushy brown stream that dribbled fitfully over the road, I came to the squat concrete cylinder of the monument to Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France. I stopped, and with unaccustomed self-assertion flagged down a middle-aged couple in a Toyota. ‘Un photo,’ I ordered, pointing at ZR and Henri, and the balding husband nodded in cowed compliance. As he reversed to the edge of the road to make way for a minibus there was a horrid crack that echoed off the snowy rock behind; he had struck a boulder. ‘C’est rien,’ I said briskly, glancing at the negligible remains of his offside rear-light cluster. ‘OK – mon photo.’ He snapped me and drove quickly off without even inspecting the damage himself.

  They’d stuck Henri here because it was his favourite mountain. Beside the Galibier, ‘Giant of the Alps’, the other cols, he remarked, were ‘gnat’s piss’. ‘The ideal Tour,’ he went on to remark, ‘is one in which only one rider finishes.’ I’d read that back home, and during some of my more epic sufferings had found the words recurring to me in a taunt that needed to be avenged. I thought of old Octave Lapize, creaking over the Aubisque and rasping ‘Assassins!’ at the waiting officials; I thought of Paul Kimmage, squirming up the Galibier with the broom wagon almost up his arse in the agonised final minutes of his 1987 Tour; and then, I’m afraid, I went round the back of Henri’s statue and anointed it more fulsomely than any gnat. He was one of them; I was beginning to feel like one of us. It was what the riders would have wanted.

  That last kilometre was perhaps the steepest of my career as a cyclist, and it is possible that if I hadn’t known it was only that far I would have given up. But I didn’t. With an exultant grimace I rolled up to the wind-battered viewpoint, blithely wondering which of the pointy white bastards over there was Mont Blanc, and which of the grey-faced fuckers over there was the col de la Madeleine, tomorrow’s 2,000-metre HC treat. I had covered 1,600 kilometres to reach this figurative and literal high point; two HCs conquer
ed in an afternoon – it could only be, had better be, downhill from here on. ‘Bravo,’ said a voice, and a little Frenchman came up to share his reminiscences of a 1969 cycling weekend in the Benelux countries with a Dutchman who spoke no French, and as I smiled and nodded I began to understand how Alice Cooper must have felt when, while interviewing him some years ago, I proceeded to talk at length about the band I’d been in at school.

  The descent was predictably fast and predictably bleak: grasping the brakes with numbed, unresponsive fingers through the slushy hairpins, slaloming madly between two lolloping beaver-like marmots, off home to their scree-piled treeless slag heap. At one point the icy, snowploughed detritus was piled into a corridor whose walls dwarfed me; it was like going down the Cresta run. Upside-down names flashed beneath my wheels: Virenque, Pantani, Riis; even the odd frost-preserved relic, the ghost of an Hinault here, a shadowy Roche there.

  As the bends were pulled taut, unkinked into a straight, flat-out descent, there was no possibility of even stealing a sideways peek at the Scottish moorlands around me. The rushing wind swallowed up the sound of the thundering river alongside; I hit a cloud of flies by the first farm and came out the other side with one up each nostril and my sunglasses looking like a rally car’s headlamps after a night stage around the Finnish lakes. As I topped 70 k.p.h. – getting on for 45 m.p.h. – the frame begin to bow and sing, or so it seemed, and I suddenly recalled that this morning my bicycle had been in many pieces, and that the person who had falteringly assembled these pieces was me.

  I hit Valloire, very nearly literally, bang on 6.30, and found my support vehicle cruising its wide, desolate streets looking for the town hall. ‘Thanks for telling me about that sodding mountain,’ whispered the pale-faced driver as three junior assistants snuffled and snored behind her, before taking in my fly-flecked, frost-flayed features with a noise that combined awe with disgust. I removed my helmet, propped my shades up on my head and announced, ‘I am an outstanding sportsman.’

  Valloire was doing whatever the opposite of hibernating is, its five-floor chalets shuttered up waiting for the snow and the skiers. If we’d been here two days ago everything would have been closed; as it was, only one hotel was open: a trim, clean and rather spartan concrete chalet, all whitewash and window boxes, the kind of place you could imagine Hitler staying in.

  In the bierkeller dining basement we had fondue, on reflection a poor choice for small children amply supplied with combustible table linen, and delicious local rosé – with a start I realised I had forgotten to drink at lunchtime, and desperately hoped this was not the reason for my enhanced performance. Then, with the children pinned under Teutonic eiderdowns as heavy as mattresses, we repaired to our balcony and watched a huge hare hopping about between the Volkswagens and geraniums in the hotel car park. The white-noise roar of Galibier meltwater seemed an oddly violent counterpoint to such a sleepy scene.

  ‘Were they that big?’ said a little, muffled voice as we came back in. ‘The mountains you went up on your bicycle – were they as big as those?’ I followed Kristjan’s gaze up to the opposite peaks, silhouetted in the moonlight.

  ‘Much, much bigger,’ I said, because they had been.

  ‘So are you all better now?’

  I realised then that what I had done that day was the sort of thing that hitherto only other children’s daddies had done, and by doing it I had joined some sort of élite club. ‘I’m not just better,’ I said in an assumed voice, ‘I’m the best.’

  It could have been worse. I almost said ‘son’.

  Thirteen

  Paul Kimmage abandoned on the col du Télégraphe, early in the same misty stage that ended with the agonised heroics at la Plagne of his countryman Stephen Roche. In the morning, breezing gaily up the Télégraphe’s modest slopes – not even a category four in this direction – I realised just how comprehensively bollocksed he must have been by that day’s fearsome pace up the Galibier. Far more exhausting for me was the joint-juddering descent, 34 kilometres continuously downhill, from the dizzy top flap of the Alpen packet all the way down to the last squashed raisin at the bottom. I was going less than two-thirds as fast as the pros, but let me tell you now that if I drove a car like I rode that bike – at the ragged edge of the performance parameters of both man and machine – the passengers would be screaming to be let out after two minutes. I shot a tiny glance at the waterfall-veined, pine-wooded loveliness around me and as a result only accidentally missed a pot-hole the size of a punchbowl that would happily have killed me.

  Soon after, something small and flappy got entwined in my leg hair – I really would have to address this issue soon – and I didn’t dare slap at it until the road straightened into the Arc valley at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne. When I dismounted for a pain au chocolat and a coffee, the underside of ZR’s frame was littered with spoke-spattered fragments of thorax. Still juddering and shaken, I recalled that Bernard Hinault’s obsession with aerodynamic posture had once led him to experiment descending with one hand on the bars and the other stretched out behind him, and picturing this immediately understood how important it was that I should never again read or say anything about this dangerous maniac.

  There was a Sunday-morning club event of some sort being organised in the usual all-day siesta that entombs most Alpine towns in the summer, and as I was overtaken by cars with half a dozen bikes on their roofs I couldn’t help wondering if one of the team bosses might lean over to the driver to yell, ‘Hey – there’s that guy who passed me going up the Lautaret: have his legs shaved and stick him in the first team.’

  As soon as I thought that thought I knew I’d regret it, and it didn’t take long. The col de la Madeleine didn’t mess about: no Izoard or Galibier-style slow build-up, just a full-frontal assault from the valley floor. I’d noticed that some mountains seemed at one with their surroundings, overgrown green hills incorporated almost seamlessly into the pastures, but the peaks crowding the Madeleine were of the other sort: bare and alien rocks, huge flint hand axes flung petulantly into the earth at random angles.

  It was another scorcher, and I was soon melting. The road was a slight shambles – white and thin as cotton thread on the map, frost-cracked and sunburnt in the flesh – but it rose to its challenge with admirable pluck, heading straight at the 2,000-metre summit with the minimum of dilatory hairpins: an 8 per cent gradient for 19.3 kilometres, steeper than Ventoux and almost as long. I’d averaged 34 k.p.h. from Valloire, but double-figure progress soon became a distant memory. Unsteady hands were fumbling regularly for the bidons; the first one had been sucked dry before the climb started, and the second only lasted me to the moribund village of Saint-François-Longchamp, last outpost before the top and the place where I’d rather ambitiously hoped to cadge a refill. But though necessity might be the mother of invention, it is also the grandfather of petty theft, and if people really must leave dozens of crates of Coca-Cola (ahhh!), Badoit (ooooh!) and Heineken (falalalala-la-la-la-la!) in the open back of an unattended pick-up truck in an area where the transient presence of thirsty British men might easily be predicted, then that’s their lookout. As retribution goes, a slight dose of hiccups was a bit of a let-off.

  Up the bikeless, lifeless last stretch, past shuttered-up shepherd shacks and broad green pistes, I struggled to keep the bad thoughts at bay. I’d been in twenty-seven almost all the way and sweat was being forced out of places with no previous history of perspiration, glistening on both forearms and bubbling out of my knees. The summit had none of the drama of the previous HCs – no monuments, no mist, just a boarded-up snack bar and a gravelly car park where half a dozen children were redistributing the last patches of granular slush to their parents’ windscreens. But the view was nothing if not epic: what I proudly recognised as yesterday’s peaks savaging the horizon to the south, and what I sincerely hoped weren’t tomorrow’s doing the same to the northeast.

  The bonk was knocking at my door but as I laboriously focused on the plummeting sta
ge profile I knew it didn’t matter: the day’s pedalling was all but done. The tin-roofed Savoyard villages I plunged through were a frail last bastion of Alpine life without tourism, those vast-planked hovels perching lowing livestock and wheelless Citroëns over the most fearful gorge yet. Sighing into the valley floor I purchased many inappropriate foodstuffs at a petrol station and ate them all on the forecourt; within the hour I was rolling into Brides-les-Bains, our nominated afternoon meeting point.

  Brides-les-Bains was another spa resort that had grown out of nothing when the railway arrived, then been slowly starved of tourists as cheap flights made foreign travel an affordable and more glamorous option. But, as proven by its perennial presence on the Tour route, it wasn’t going down without a fight, and judging by the number of doddering jaywalkers dicing with vehicular euthanasia its efforts to reinvent itself as an OAPs’ health-spa playground were clearly paying off. Regrettably, one aspect of this diligent pursuit of the grey franc was the systematic alienation of the pre-pubescent pound.

  As Birna had discovered on the train to Avignon, genteel French society demands that children be seen but not heard. Because Lilja’s default vocal response to any thwarted whim is of a pitch and volume that recalls a hospital surgery of the pre-anaesthetic age, we correctly anticipated ours might fall foul of this maxim. Even locking them in the car didn’t work: hotel receptionists, detecting a muffled commotion, would contrive ever more ludicrous deterrents. Positioning themselves so as to conceal a well-stocked rack of keys, they would brazenly claim to be full; or not to have any cots or highchairs; or to own a ‘beeg dergue’ who might ‘play too strong’.

  In the end I parked the car half a mile from any hotel and stayed there with the children while Birna found us a room in a place with swan-neck taps and a slimmers’ menu. The Ruth Ellis receptionist didn’t look too pleased when the rest of us piled into her lobby, but of course she had nothing to worry about. It’s not as if we peed in both saunas, or dive-bombed every last pensioner out of the swimming pool.