French Revolutions Read online

  ‘This is exactly the kind of place where people go completely mad,’ said Birna later, breathless after a hurried nocturnal outing to retrieve her eye-varnish or hair-liner or something from the car. Though I’d probably have opted for ‘senile’, there was something undeniably disturbing about Brides-les-Bains and not just because we had immediately dubbed it ‘Brides in the Bath’. As well as the stroppily daunting scenery, we blamed the noise, that endless thrash of melted Alp roaring a final farewell to its birthplace as it headed off to the Mediterranean. No wonder there weren’t any other children in town – with a watery lullaby like that they’d be in nappies until puberty. Just as well that most of the current residents were back in them.

  Three weeks were up; the real racers would be rolling up the Champs-Elysées today. Because I was still a very long way from Paris, over breakfast I made the very easy decision not to proceed from Brides-les-Bains to Courchevel, the category-one eminence 20k up (and up and up) the road where stage fifteen ended and stage sixteen began. No, I would go straight back down the Isère valley, then straight up the next category one, swiftly followed by a not inconsiderable category two. ‘I’m not doing those squiggly bits,’ said Birna, following my finger up the map: the day before she had happily undertaken a 120k detour to avoid driving over the Madeleine. It was arranged that our two rather different itineraries should converge after 100k at the ritzy-sounding ski resort of la Clusaz.

  You might arrive in Albertville not knowing that the town hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics, but there is not the tiniest chance of leaving with this ignorance intact. Its slightly Communist ambience of broad avenues and low-rise tower blocks is only enhanced by the number of enormous commemorative murals – peeling skiers slaloming down the side of a warehouse, a faded luge speeding along concrete embankments. Distant association with winter sports was no barrier: there was an Olympique tennis club and cycling centre, and even a hairdresser’s. I bought three pains au chocolat and a litre of Yoplait in a boulangerie with five linked pastry rings in the window, and click-clicking down, down, deeper and down, began the slow haul up to the col des Saisies.

  You could tell they didn’t get many cyclists round here. Car passengers were now looking curiously round at me as they passed, only partly because of the black-and-white-minstrel Yoplait mouth ring I discovered during my next confrontation with a mirror. And I’d become so accustomed to restaurant staff blithely pulling out a chair to accommodate my Savlon-steaming behind that it was a shock to be accorded the lunchtime reception my appearance deserved. Asking the waitress where the loo was, I saw the backs of a dozen grey heads quiver in sour disgust: ‘Typical! Flies in his hair, yoghurt round his mouth … and he’s got a bladder.’ It wouldn’t have been so bad – not quite – if the loo in question had not been one of those porcelain footprint jobs, the kind of sanitary fitting that makes it easier to understand why so many Frenchmen prefer the lay-by option. And when bladder-boy made the mistake of asking where the mustard was … well, you should have heard the roof-raising merriment as the waitress approached with a finger outstretched and slowly lowered this squat digit to the cruet set. Because … yes! The mustard was already on the table! Do you see?

  Still, it was nice to bring some laughter into their lives. Though not as nice as it was to take seventy-one complimentary mints out of them.

  The col des Saisies sported the most grandiose hairpins yet, huge lazy sweeps up a smooth bank of green dotted with immaculate chalets. Six-foot thistles and wild strawberries lined the road, but bad stuff was happening above: peaks disappearing into beige clouds; thunder rumbling off the opposite mountain sides. In the valley those big stacks of neatly hewn firewood by every garage were employed as faux-rural decorative features, but when the rain finally got me I’d reached the peasant zone where such things were very much for real.

  When the storm caught up I sheltered in the porch of an ancient-planked barn, watching the cows graze on a 60-degree slope to my left, and looking down at the rainbow bridging the valley to my right. The road I’d turned off at the bottom was the back way to Mont Blanc, and in the humid mist the silhouetted mountains were lined up on all sides like ranks of stage scenery. The cars below were tiny mobile specks, and for the first time I was able to think: yes, I have just ascended an enormous vertical distance under my own steam without even trying. Viewed in this heroic light, it didn’t seem appropriate to be cowering under a hovel, so out I went to be pebble-dashed and shot at by the elements, wondering if my tyres would save me from electrocution.

  The road was steaming and so, quite literally, were my limbs, and through squinted eyes I entered a steep land where cows drank from old baths and proper milk churns were lined up by wood-shingled farmhouses. It felt like a different world, and the inhabitants clearly felt it deserved partial recognition as such. Tattered Savoy flags – they really should make them look less like the Swiss one – hung wetly by every barn, and SAVOIE LIBRE was daubed on bus shelters. And frankly, they can have it. If it was like this in June, I thought, what happens up here in bloody winter?

  It stopped raining at la Saisie, and as the road broadened and levelled I rolled into a moribund concrete ski town – summer, Monday, 3 p.m.: dead to the power of three. Mankind’s contribution to the beauty of this place was not altogether admirable, but nature was doing its best to atone: through the mist, peaks emerged distantly on all sides with ethereal sunlit haloes, lined up like an Alpine greatest-hits postcard.

  It said something for my condition that I was beginning to dread the descents more than the climbs. Actually, reading that I recognise it as a terrible, terrible lie, but you get the point. Fear was beginning to challenge fatigue, and locking my wheels around the loose-chippinged curves into Fluvet I impregnated the thin air with deafening indelicacies in a language known to no man. Having squealed to a breathless halt down its (very) high street, I went into the only open shop in town and, finding all the confectionery was behind the counter, found myself obliged to ask for ‘A Snickers … ? Un Snickeur? Un Sniquet? Une Sniqueur?’

  I made short work of this hard-won quarry, along with a half-litre of milk, as I wheeled ZR back past the dirty buildings. Remounting alongside the last, I spotted a young boy flamboyantly arching his back atop a low wall to its rear as he widdled gleefully into an unseen void. As he met my gaze with airy nonchalance I found myself contemplating perhaps the ugliest of the Tour’s many ugly secrets.

  I hope I am not alone in harbouring a mild obsession with the excretory habits of professional sportsmen. When a tennis or snooker player strides briskly out of the arena mid-match, as the commentator mumbles something about calls of nature I find myself curiously comforted: they might in most other ways be a different species, but here is evidence that at heart these champions are as human as you or I. Because Tour cyclists are not, however, they have to do things differently.

  Until 1957 the unwritten rule in the Tour was that when a rider stopped to pee in the bushes, the rest freewheeled along, not taking ungentlemanly advantage by speeding away up the road. In that year, however, infuriated by the arrogance of Luxembourg’s Charly Gaul, a small group did exactly that when the tiny Luxemburger pulled into the verge. ‘No one takes the piss when I take a piss,’ he may easily have said, because the next day he initiated the practice of widdling on the wing, pointing Percy at the pavement, baptising the bitumen. This could have earned him the nickname The Raining Champion or some unsavoury derivation of yellow jersey, but in France they preferred to call him ‘Pee-Pee’ (a shame his career didn’t overlap with Raymond ‘Poupou’ Poulidor – what a hit they’d have been on the cabaret circuit).

  Anyway, since Charly broke the taboo, mobile micturation has become the norm. The practice is even acknowledged in Tour regulations: you can whip it out wherever you want on the country roads, but there’s a fine for anyone offloading processed Evian in a built-up area. I’d seen it more than once on the television coverage: a rider drops off the back of the pack, ideally on a
straightish, emptyish stretch of road, then hoicks up the leg of his shorts and does what he can to direct things away from the bicycle. Obviously what you really want to avoid are the rapidly revolving spokes, and their impressive potential for fluid dispersion.

  Sometimes, however, a rider may lack the opportunity or wherewithal for such an operation. In 1978 Michel Pollentier assured himself of an unwelcome place in Tour history with an astonishing two-act display of urinary recklessness. Leading the race up the formidable climb of Alpe d’Huez, in extremis he voids himself directly into his gusset; having won the stage he is required to give a sample but has nothing left to offer. These unappealing details are already tarnishing a heroic achievement, but as he slips off the victory rostrum to hesitant applause after an unusually restrained embrace from the podium blondes there is worse to come. Pollentier has also taken an illegal stimulant, and with the dope-testers making their way up to his hotel he elects to tackle this situation using apparatus that will be familiar to anyone who has either watched the film Withnail & I or is a repellent weirdo.

  When the doctors call it is all set up, but with Michel waiting his turn, another testee is spotted behaving unusually as the flask is passed to him. All the riders present are summarily ordered to lower their shorts: a tube is discovered, one end taped to an intimate place, the other connected to a rubber bulb in his armpit containing somebody else’s urine, and Michel’s humiliation is complete. He is immediately thrown out of the race, and as a taunting postscript the genuine sample he subsequently provides passes the test.

  I’d been wondering about Pee-Pee and Pollentier for some days, and wondered about them again as the D909 rose gently between the wet, black, coal-face cliffs of the Gorge de l’Arondine. There was no one about; the road was straight; the milk was going the way of all ingested fluid and I thought: this’ll do.

  During my idle speculations on the subject I’d always imagined the short-rucking would be the hard bit, but the wrongheadedness of this assumption became quickly apparent. Pulling the shorts up to get at the old budgie perch was one thing; getting them to stay there was another. Wobbling lewdly about the rain-slick tarmac I realised the problem was my continuing inability to remove both hands from the bars simultaneously. A fearsome elastic tension is Lycra’s defining quality, and by assigning four fingers of my right hand to keeping this at bay I was left with only a thumb – rightly belittled as the least articulate of the major digits – for the delicate and demanding directional operation. The ensuing scene is not one I am ever likely to recall with enthusiasm. It started raining heavily as I wound disconsolately past the copper-belfried church at la Giettaz, and if I say that I greeted this downpour with muted joy you will have some idea of the extent to which I had failed to master Charly Gaul’s initiative.

  It was a shame, really, because la Giettaz seemed the most perfect example yet of an Alpine village: shockingly precipitous outlook; proper wooden chalets; even a sanatorium where uniformed nurses wheeled blanket-kneed pensioners up the mountains. A couple even had a light-hearted race with me – well, light-hearted for them anyway. There wasn’t room for more than one incontinent sporting legend on these hills.

  With my morale still damp and soiled, I got in a spot of bother up the col d’Aravis. Paul Kimmage often comments how form varies from mountain to mountain, how you can grovel up one then fly up the next, and now I understood what he meant. The streams that had been wallowing gently over boulders as smooth as elephants’ backs were now darting violently between sharp rocks and vaulting over waterfalls, and as the hill steepened I began to struggle, head bobbing, fingers fumbling at the gear levers. ‘Allez! Allez!’ shouted two girls as they laboured past in a 2CV; two whimpering ‘k’s later I was applauded sporadically over the muddy, misty col by a family drinking something nice and warm outside the now-traditional summit café. Distracted with exhaustion, I almost overcooked it on the descent, flirting with a barbed-wire fence at incautious velocity, once more filling the wet, green valley with bungee-jumper shrieks as the back wheel slipped in the verge-side mud.

  Still, the main point was that I got to la Clusaz twenty minutes ahead of schedule, which allowed me plenty of time to decide that this was the sort of ritzy glühwein resort where Fergie would come skiing, and to down two Ricards and a lager in the square by the church. In consequence I was half asleep at the table when the family arrived, and soon fully so as Birna drove west between mountains with the silhouettes of crowned monarchs. I awoke as we arrived at what I instantly understood would be the most expensive hotel I have ever paid for out of my own pocket, with a lobby full of silver-haired Blake Carringtons in ironed leisurewear and immaculate, deck-chair-strewn gardens running down to its own private stretch of Lake Annecy’s crenellated, aristocratic shoreline.

  ‘It isn’t that bad,’ said Birna, seeing my features sag into a very close approximation of the funereal depression portrayed during the aftermath of that ill-fated excretory experiment. And at fifty quid for the lot of us, it wasn’t. Remembering how ludicrously cheap French hotels tended to be, it occurred to me that the Beau-Site in Talloires showcased the best attributes of the surrounding nations: Swiss service, Italian view, French prices.

  Ahead was the last day of mountains, and if I did survive, I realised now it would only be by the skin of my teeth. I hadn’t seen another bike for almost two days, or a single name daubed on the tarmac, and at breakfast I found out why. ‘Is not so many vélo ’ere,’ said the black-tied young waiter at breakfast. ‘Too many montagnes. I préfère ze, uh, sliding sports: snowboard, wakeboarding.’ Still savouring this last word – there is something wonderful about hearing a recalcitrant French mouth bully itself round a many-syllabled English word – I took another messy mouthful of croissant and asked if anyone would be watching the Tour when it passed down the road. ‘Yes, of course, I watch it always – but I do not ’ave ze …’ and here he thumped a fist dramatically to his chest … ‘ze art for vélo. It’s very … difficult, very ’ard sport.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, toying vaingloriously with my jersey zip and gazing through the French windows as a thick mist squatted down on to the mountains. ‘Yes, it is. And you prefer the wakeb … what was it again?’

  Tiny drops of cloud were already clinging to exposed flesh when the family waved me off at la Clusaz. It wasn’t going to be easy. Between here and our scheduled meeting at Evian lay 130k of badness, up and down a 5,000-foot mountain before the Alps went out with a wet and lonely bang up the hors catégorie col de Joux-Plane. This name had always sounded like something out of a nursery rhyme, conjuring gay images of bunting and maypoles, but the chanting children were all bundled over an echoing precipice when I unfolded the Michelin. The frail white line that traced its circuitous path on the map had a messy, doodled look, one that suggested Friday-afternoon cartography, a sort of that’ll-do approach to a road no one would seriously consider following. Three small hands waved sadly through the drizzled windows, and I realised for the first time what a rubbish holiday this was for my children: thrown around the back seat all day in a Dramamined stupor, then being kissed awake in the late afternoon by a filthy, tearful cripple.

  La Clusaz, le Grand-Bornand: what made one village masculine and another feminine? Maybe it was the legacy of my own gender-related tower/tour travails, but I was starting to become genuinely angered by this linguistic imbecility. At la Clusaz the night before I’d asked for ‘un bière’, only for the fat-faced patron to chide, ‘une bière’. With my tongue loosened by pastis and fatigue I’d leant back in my slatted chair and muttered, ‘Tell you what, René, bring one of each: maybe they’ll get it together and make me lots of little baby bières.’

  My experiment in town-sexing was made more difficult by the thickening fog. The last haul up to the category-one col de la Colombière was so lonely that slugs were making it all the way across the road; the bleak, cloud-hazed patches of browned snow and muddy moorland were the sorry remnants of a majestic panorama that I only go
t to see on the postcards in the col-topping café. Here I drank a double espresso and dripped sweat and mist on to the table, then briefly caught my craw in the zip again before heading off for the descent, followed into the fog by the amazed gaze of the patron’s young daughter holding a vigil at the window.

  Clenched with cold I almost died on the way down, my approximate, frost-fisted control of the handlebars edging me on to the wrong side of the road just as an oncoming car ghosted out of the fog. Only when the pine-shingled hovels gave way to all-weather tennis courts was I sure I’d made it; when I glanced back up, the mist-swirled peaks looked ablaze, and if they had been I’d have gone back up there to thaw. Pedalling desperately to try and generate some body heat I sped through Cluses, a jarring outbreak of dark satanic mills, then hurled myself at the third-category hill outside. It started to rain and my speedometer stopped working; a learner-driver side-swiped me and the two slices of fruitcake I’d nicked at breakfast had somehow vanished from my jersey pocket. A closed bridge, a dispiriting detour, cuckoo-clock balconies and then, running on empty and with the first bonk-of-England madnesses marching over the horizon, I was in Samoëns, looking for lunch, the road to the Joux-Plane and any mislaid parts of my brain.

  There wasn’t a lot to do in Samoëns, not at 3.30 on a wet Wednesday in June, and while sitting in a pine-panelled bar dispatching a parade of fried and fatty foods I watched a lot of people not doing it. Sturdy housewives waddled aimlessly past. A pouchy-eyed man with a low brow and a bobble hat came in and gruffly ordered a Lucifer Flambée, which I saw described in my bill of fare as ‘bière et alcool’. More sturdy housewives. A driver delivering dustbins to a hardware shop sat in one of the wheelbarrows on display outside and his mate gave him a quick and noisy ride round the square. After another dozen housewives, a man cycled past one-handed, guiding a second bike with his right hand, which still impresses me now, though probably not as much as it did then if a hazy memory of open applause has any basis in reality. As bobble hat was ordering his second Lucifer, two pairs of purple cycling shorts swooshed in through the door, and when after a few more fistfuls of chips I realised that the heads above these shorts were issuing English voices I looked behind me to see a young couple, as fresh-faced as Blue Peter presenters, helmets on the table, writing postcards and drinking hot chocolate. Without thinking I rose and approached.