French Revolutions Read online

  Anyway, it was a date. The plan, as it stood, was to complete the Tour route before the race itself set off on 1 July. Departing on 15 May gave me six weeks in which to do so – double the time allotted to the professionals; it also meant I would be 35 for three whole days of the period. On the other hand, all I now had to plot and prepare for my odyssey were a month and a postcard-sized map of the country with a squiggly line linking the start and end points of each stage, torn from the October issue of procycling.

  Each Tour has a new route – travelled clockwise one year, anticlockwise the next. The 2000 Tour was an anticlockwise one. Starting in the centre-west of the country, the line meandered briefly north into Brittany before turning back on itself, sweeping down to the Pyrenees, then across Provence via Simpson’s Ventoux to the Alps. Here it flailed madly about for a disturbing amount of time, working its way circuitously northwards: ‘The entire length of the French Alps from the south, a route last taken in 1949, with the Cols d’Allos, Vars and Izoard, all over 2,000 metres high,’ panted procycling eagerly. Then it was two days in Switzerland and Germany, crossing back over the Rhine in Alsace and working westwards to the traditional Parisian finish.

  The accompanying map had the benefit of being small, but most of the important figures in a box alongside did not.

  5 July, stage five: Vannes–Vitré, 198 km.

  6 July, stage six: Vitré–Tours, 197 km.

  7 July, stage seven: Tours–Limoges, 192 km.

  Six hundred kilometres in three days, as near as ‘dammit’ is to swearing, though not quite as near as ‘fuck that’. Can I have a rest now?

  8 July, stage eight: Limoges–Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 200 km.

  9 July, stage nine: Agen–Dax, 182 km.

  10 July, stage ten: Dax–Lourdes/Hautacam, 205 km.

  11 July, stage eleven: Bagnères-de-Bigorre–Revel, 219 km.

  Apparently I could not. In seven days, the riders would cover a distance that in different and rather foolish circumstances would see them pedalling up to the outskirts of Warsaw. Worse, I knew from my television experiences that a lot of these kilometres would be breezed through by riders idly chatting to team-mates with their arms off the handlebars as they maintained speeds which even the ugliest exertions would leave me some way short of.

  Not that there’d be any of that when the mountains got going. The route might change, but every Tour is won and lost in the second week, when the Pyrenean and Alpine climbs meet an angry sun halfway, the last stragglers wobbling over the line in graphic distress after eight scorched and airless hours in the saddle. Footballers whine if they’re asked to play more than a single ninety-minute game a week. Olympic athletes demand a day of rest after running half a lap of the track. But when the Tour de France hits the mountains, its competitors have to haul themselves to the ragged edge of exhaustion from dawn to dusk, day after day, inching agonisingly up the highest roads in Europe and then careering lethally down them.

  To this end, procycling had also helpfully included a ‘gradient profile’ of stage twelve, Carpentras–Le Mont Ventoux. As learning curves go, they didn’t come much steeper: an alarming succession of peaks and troughs that looked like the printout of a lie-detector test. Two impressive 3,000-foot cols caused jerky fluctuations of the sort you’d expect from Jeffrey Archer comparing O-level results with Pinocchio, then – whoosh! – there was Jonathan Aitken booking Baron von Munchausen into the Ritz as up to Ventoux the line soared crazily off the scale.

  All in all, there were 3,630 kilometres (which may be more familiar to you as 2,256 miles) and sixteen mountains to be conquered in three weeks. It was the equivalent of cycling from London to Bristol every day, only with Swindon wreathed in cold mist atop a towering peak so steep you’d be kneeing yourself in the face if you walked up it.

  Slowly, certainly, the wrongheadedness of my initial pledge was dawning on me. With two weeks to go and my train ticket to Dover already rashly purchased, I knuckled down. I took out temporary membership of a gym, bought Chris Boardman’s Complete Book of Cycling, and tried to fix the Peugeot’s brakes.

  I didn’t take too much notice of the text side of Mr Boardman’s volume after reading of the importance of training on Christmas Day to establish a psychological advantage over one’s rivals, and coming across phrases such as ‘The Tour came close to destroying me because it slowly drained my spirit … The Tour is the limit. It is the Olympics, Wimbledon and the World Cup all rolled into one. It is the highest level of sport … That feeling in the pit of your stomach that the next three weeks are going to hurt.’

  On this basis, it didn’t seem ideal that with less than a fortnight before departure I didn’t actually own a roadworthy bicycle. Jogging for half an hour up and down the towpath every evening was a step in the right direction, but not a very big one. I needed to do some cycling. Or anyway some cycling-type exercises.

  Chris Boardman, a former Olympic gold medallist and the first Englishman since Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour, might reasonably be expected to know something about preparatory exercises. Holding a hand over the accompanying words (the mere mention of ‘the muscle group at the front of your thighs’ made me feel squeamish), I was soon mimicking Mr Boardman’s line-drawn simulacrum on a twice-daily basis. Pressing a heel back to a buttock, pushing a wall, even lowering nose to (or anyway towards) thigh with my leg up on a chair (I’d work up to the illustrated table option just as soon as the sensation that my knees were about to snap forward the wrong way seemed less compelling): these at least had an authentic air, the kind of thing you might see footballers doing on the touchline, albeit with fewer daughters hanging on to their legs and necks. Others, notably the spinal mobility and gluteus maximus stretches, cajoled me into whimsical poses last struck when Miss Pillins asked 2Y to imagine we were spring’s first snowdrops emerging from the frosted soil.

  In recent years, those snowdrops have invariably been accompanied by a savage and ridiculous new gym fad, and they don’t come much more savage or ridiculous than spinning. Melding an exercise bicycle to the traumatic peer-pressure, barked commands and hysterical hi-NRG soundtrack of aerobics, I’d been told that spinning was to a jog around the river what bear-baiting was to yoga. It seemed sufficiently drastic. With a week left I went off and spun.

  The airless spinning room at my local gym consisted of a claustrophobic mass of exercise bicycles arranged in tight, respectful semicircles before the instructor’s machine; settling myself indelicately into the lofty saddle amid two dozen sinewy women in their forties and a fat, red Irishman, it occurred to me that if (or ideally when) we were all vaporised by Martian invaders the first member of the mopping-up squad to poke his little green head round the door would imagine he had discovered some hallowed chamber where obscure rotary homage was paid to King Spin. Only later did I realise that with all that tiresome bellowed encouragement, those clashing elbows, the soul-destroying, out-of-the-saddle, give-no-quarter competitiveness, a spinning class was a static peloton, the closest approximation to a desperate bunch finish I would ever experience.

  I’d sat next to the Irishman in the hope of faring well by comparison, but after ten minutes of hectoring, Flashdance and increased wheel resistance (‘Crank it up a notch, and one and two and UP on the pedals and give me ten and GO!’) the sweat was already cascading in an unbroken stream from lowered chin to pumping knees, flying off the uselessly whirring front wheel and splattering toned, hairless flesh in a generous radius. Part of the deal in gyms, and indeed in professional cycling, is never to exhibit real pain or distress. Consequently, when we got into the uphill double-time sprinting the instructor, perhaps noting my uncanny visual impersonation of a man being exorcised in a sauna, slipped quietly off his bike and sidled over. ‘Take it easy, eh?’ he whispered soothingly as Donna Summer began to feel love. The phlegmy, rutting grunt that was all I could manage by way of response did not help my case.

  After that I started lowering the resistance control a notch whenev
er he said to turn it up, but, even so, winding down at the end of the forty-minute session I felt very, very bad; worse, in fact, than I had ever felt. The techno thump of a shell-shocked heart filled my head; most of my muscle groups had disbanded and a leather-aproned medieval butcher was clumsily yanking my hamstrings. As I shakily dismounted into an unsightly puddle of body fluids, I had a strong sensation that my feet had somehow been stretched and extruded into platform-soled appendages.

  ‘First time?’ said the Irishman, who somehow looked further from death than he had before.

  ‘Last time?’ tinkled a hollow-cheeked, hawser-armed woman, her lilac crop top blemished with the merest sprinkling of perspiration that in any case was probably mine.

  I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) say anything in reply, but explained myself to the instructor after the following day’s session. ‘That’s quite an undertaking,’ he said, implying that I would need quite an undertaker. One of ‘his’ women had recently returned from cycling over the Andes; another was off to the Himalayas. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, noting that this news had failed to comfort or inspire, ‘that was a pretty big hill we just simulated. About 22 kilometres. And you’ll only need to work at maybe 20 per cent of that rate.’

  I nodded wetly. All I could think was that I’d just wasted 22 kilometres going nowhere in a room full of hot Lycra. There would be times, I imagined, when I would dearly want those 22 kilometres back, saving them up as a joker to be played in some epic Alpine crisis. ‘Except,’ he said, squinting thoughtfully, ‘I suppose you’ll need to be at it for about eight hours a day.’

  Somehow blanking out the enormity of this task, I managed one more spinning class and two jogs. Then, gingerly consulting Chris Boardman, I came across the startling revelation that ‘with one week to go, training should be finished … It is highly unlikely that you will generate more form in this time.’ With five days left, interpreting this theory of ‘tapering’ a regime as a competition approached (‘the volume of work is slowly reduced as the objective approaches’), I tapered my training rather more abruptly to a standstill. Everyone knows what the tough are said to do when the going gets tough. But I went shopping.

  The sporting-goods industry prospers from the eternal truth that people who are not very good at something would rather blame a lack of expensive equipment than their own physical failings. Certainly rectifying the former is a lot quicker. Every time I looked at those little line drawings of Mr Boardman down on all fours howling silently at an unseen moon or getting his leg over the dining table, I felt an itching desire to slam his scary book shut and go into town to buy things made out of carbon fibre.

  Not knowing anything about bikes, or at least bikes costing more than fifteen quid, flicking helplessly through the cycling-magazine adverts in Smith’s was a sobering experience. It seemed to be quite easy to spend considerably over £1,500 just on a frame, a wheelless, chainless, pedalless diamond-shaped assemblage of metal tubes. Almost randomly, I came up with a figure of half this amount as my budget for a complete bicycle. Venturing much below this price raised fears of another two-wheels-on-my-Trabant DDR special, meaning that metal fatigue would set in after four days, and that on the way to pick it up my father would appear out of nowhere to place a kind, worldly hand on my shoulder and explain that the male menopause was nothing to be scared of. Beyond £750, I would be too crap to notice the difference, as well as potentially falling foul of the general rule that very expensive pieces of machinery require regular expert maintenance. I didn’t want a Fiesta or a Ferrari. A nice Golf would do me.

  I can’t quite remember why the GT ZR3000 first appealed. It may have been the memory of the slanting GT logo flashed along many of the peloton’s crossbars; it may have been because that crescendo of numerals and digits conjured images of an enormously overpowered motorcycle, thereby suggesting great speed with minimal human effort. When a call to GT’s Martin Warren revealed that the ZR3000 was last year’s model and could therefore be offered at an attractive discount, the deal was done. ‘Do you want to assemble it yourself, or …?’ he asked, ending the whimper-punctuated silence that followed with, ‘Or … yes, I’ll, um, put you down for the “or” option.’

  The bike, of course, was only the start of it. An astonishing 4,000 people make up the Tour’s travelling entourage – journalists, officials, members of the crap-chucking publicity caravan – and 600 of them are there to support the twenty teams who each enter nine riders. Ferried about in over a thousand official vehicles, they carry food, drink, spare parts, spare clothing, vitamins and, er, ‘vitamins’. I would have to get all this stuff, and carry it myself in panniers.

  There are plenty of people whose dark, dull lives are lit up by opportunities to patronise and humiliate those they encounter in their professional capacity. Although most of these people work in the police force or Paris, while acquiring the peripherals for my trip I was intrigued to note the number that had made their horrid little homes behind the counters of bicycle retailers.

  I’d avoided them up to now, but with time running out I had to get help where I could. In tones normally reserved for asking small children to pop down the shops for a tin of elbow grease, I was scathingly informed that the ZR3000, as well as being last year’s model and therefore on a competitive par with a swingbin full of fag-ends and used teabags, was risibly inappropriate for my task. The lugs, whatever and wherever they might be, would snap clean through as soon as I attached panniers, and actually the pannier rack wouldn’t fit anyway, and in any case only a really major prannet would ever use panniers – and listen to this, Dave, there’s a bloke here reckons he’s doing the Tour de France, right, and he doesn’t even know if his bike’s got Presta valves or Schraders.

  It was Martin Warren, perhaps mindful of the extraordinary number of wankers I would be encountering, who had suggested I talk to Richard Hallett, technical editor of Cycling Weekly, a man apparently much sought after for his rare ability to offer advice on clothing and equipment without snorting in helpless derision. I hadn’t really wanted to trouble him, but being told by two awful men in a shop on the Fulham Road that I didn’t walk like a cyclist was the last straw and I gave the man Hallett a call. He listened patiently while I explained my quest, then, rather sharply, asked his only question.

  ‘Are you fat at all?’

  The fact that I am not had, in all honesty, been my sole source of solace while surveying the library of cycling-related literature I was steadily building up. The big sprinters might be bollard-thighed bruisers, but the climbers – those whose bikes skipped lightly up the terrible bare slopes of Ventoux and the Izoard – were often frail-looking and pigeon-chested in a way I could cheerfully relate to. In fact, ludicrous as it may sound, in more expansive moments I had allowed myself to entertain fantasies, based on the recurrent assertion that ‘good climbers are born, not made’, that even without preparation I might belatedly emerge as an Alpine specialist of some note.

  ‘No,’ I replied, making the most of a scarce opportunity to express pride. (Later I wondered how he would have reacted if I’d said, ‘Why, yes, I am! I’m a great big lardy pie-man!’)

  ‘Well, you probably won’t die then. Now let’s talk kit.’

  If I had wanted answers like ‘Well, it depends what you’re looking for’, Richard Hallett would not have been the man to ask. I did not know what I was looking for; I wanted to be told. Richard was more of a ‘Selle Italia Turbomatic 3; Michelin Axial Pro 25Cs; Shimano SH-M036’ kind of guy, and as such deserves my heartfelt gratitude. Saddle, shoes, tyres, type of lock, tools and many of the other issues I had failed to consider were resolved in a brief series of staccato sentences. ‘… Then you’ll need to take four inner tubes, one spare outer casing, hex keys, three pairs of bib shorts, two bottle cages … oh, and plenty of Savlon.’

  ‘For when I fall off?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, but not mainly. Stops boils and infections. Need to apply it every morning to anywhere that’s in contact with the
saddle. Do you know where your perineum is?’

  He paused, perhaps sensing that with this phrase our conversation had moved into unacceptable territory. But perhaps not. ‘Smear it all over your arse and bollocks, basically.’

  I’m sorry, Mr Hallett, but there is nothing basic about smearing anything all over your arse and bollocks. I had a wretched premonition of sitting naked on a hotel bidet, morosely anointing my loins like a husband-to-be on a one-man stag night.

  ‘It’s just a fact. Your bollocks will sweat; infection will set in.’ Richard Hallett was now sounding like a forthright sergeant major giving his platoon a lecture on the perils of consorting with the local girls. Then, drifting briefly out of character, he added in an odd, dreamy voice, ‘So, yeah … really slather it on.’

  A succession of delivery men arrived at my door over the days ahead, bringing Ortlieb panniers, Parrot waterproof clothing, wraparound Oakley shades and other equipment intended to make it look as if I knew what I was doing. To atone for this, I had eschewed a state-of-the-art Tour jersey for a monochrome Peugeot one of archaic design, similar to those worn both by the young Eddy Merckx and Tom Simpson. If it hadn’t been for the aggressively synthetic composition – ‘to wick away the sweat’, said the website I ordered it from – I could have grown to love it, certainly more so than the lewdly comic Lycra shorts, whose gusset featured a thick, ventilated pad like a sanitary towel from the pre-‘wings’ era. It did not take my children long to establish that the rigidity of this structure allowed the shorts to stand up by themselves when placed on a flat, firm surface.

  Finally, with my departure three days away, I opened the door to be greeted by a cardboard box the size of a mattress. ZR3000 had landed. In a state of childish excitement I tore open the packaging: inside was a very blue, very light machine with tyres as thin and hard as Hula-Hoops. Counting the sprockets (as I have since learned to call the cogs at either end of the chain) revealed that, with three sizes on the front and nine at the back, I would have twenty-seven gears at my disposal. These, I discovered after protracted panic and a phone call to Martin Warren that began with aggrieved gabbling and ended in a painfully embarrassed whisper, were selected by pressing the brake levers in and out.