French Revolutions Page 28
Then the coverage fast-forwarded, the cheers grew to a rowdy climax – how awful to have that noise following you around all day – and there was Lance Armstrong, wraparounds propped casually on his head, untroubled but for a sheen of sweat. As the camera panned back down the field we got to the sufferers, a fitful dribble of pained men. This was better; these were my people. The King of Belfort himself, Christophe Moreau, went by alone with his tongue hanging down to the bottom of his goatee. (In fact, Moreau was to have a glorious Tour, astounding himself and his many close personal friends in Belfort by finishing fourth overall as the leading Frenchman.) Then the rump of the peloton, men who’d given up and just wanted to get to the top in one piece, and there was David Millar, with blood running down his legs and a horrible vampire slash on his throat. He’d crashed earlier on, and while doing so had trapped the flesh of his neck in someone’s chain, which still makes me feel ill even thinking about it. ‘It only hurts when I breathe,’ was his wry assessment of the after-effects. He finished, but many didn’t. ‘There are another ten riders in there today,’ said Phil as the broom wagon rolled up past Tom Simpson’s memorial. It was thirty-three years to the day.
The following stage, across Provence from Avignon to Draguignan, was undertaken at astounding speed. How could these people be the same ones who less than twenty-four hours earlier had been trapping their necks in people’s chains and toiling up a mountain mired in most of the human body’s least appealing secretions? But the stage after that was the killer, the one that most riders said they feared above all others.
Between Draguignan and Briançon lay 250 kilometres and three mountains over 2,000 metres; if there was a calvary, this was it. The smelly-bearded German Devil recognised this, waddling about the mountainsides in a soiled red leotard, and so too did his Italian nemesis: the Angel, all in white, fiddling with his feathery wings as he stood in wait on the roof of a camper van near the summit of the day’s final peak, the col d’Izoard.
The preparatory climb out of Draguignan, up that awful parched road through those mountain-top firing ranges, was a route I knew like the back of my hand but not quite like the top of my knee. That’s where I had the race with that mechanic, that’s where those stupid Austrian bikers almost ran me down, that’s where I bought all that Fanta and that’s where I … offloaded it – a whole lifetime of suffering and sickness, at least deserving of a respectful hearse-speed drive-by, condensed into four dismissive minutes.
But it was the penultimate climb of the day that had me staring at the telly in dry-lipped anticipation. By the time they lowered their jersey zips at the foot of the col de Vars the riders had covered 167 kilometres in just under six hours of cycling; as the stage leaders passed the point where I’d been shamed by that rusted butcher’s bike, the helicopter camera panned out to reveal a vast acreage of sheep-shit tussocks and gravel. In the shadows a grey, dry-ice mist was wisping about, giving the treeless geological rubble a sort of troll-valley Icelandic aspect.
At ground level it’s all Thermos fumes and Italian chatter and that faint ski-crowd whooping – hup-hup-hup-hup – urging some emptied soul upwards. Then the road bends up and the camera is behind the leading group of seven riders, all rank outsiders hoping for a single day of glory. From this angle the brutal gradient of this section becomes clear, and with it the pain: all seven are standing up in the saddle, shoulders slowly rolling. The camera pulls alongside the last rider in the group, a Dutchman in the orange strip of Rabobank, and zooms in on his tortured features: every inhalation, and there are many, seems to crack another rib; every revolution, and there are not so many, heralds a complicated, discordant medley of distress. Up past a corrugated-iron chapel, up past more yells and gestures; he whisks a glove off the bars and in a ragged swipe smears stringy dreadfulness across his face and hair. This is where the crowds are hemming tightly in, parting just before the seven to leave a ribbon of pock-marked road barely wide enough for a bike. There are only two curves left and, as the other six begin to pull away, the muscles in that big Dutch head bulge and pulse in desperation: he’s fucked if he’s going to be dropped this close to a summit in the Tour de France. He sits down, then vaults up in the saddle again, aware perhaps that this is as close as he’s ever been to fulfilling the fantasies of his youth, but probably not of the considerable excitement his efforts are causing in a dark bedroom in west London.
One more corner to go and now there are names and slogans rolling slowly beneath his wheels; he’s not reading them but I certainly am. There’s a PANTANI and an ULLRICH and a NO SAHAJA YOGA, whatever the blinking flip that is, and just before the summit, as Rabobank toils triumphantly up to rejoin the group, oh me oh my, oh joy of joys, there it is, clear and stark even as we cut up to the aerial shot from the helicopter, and I’m screaming at the telly as if my 500–1 shot is a nose behind the Grand National leader coming into the home straight.
The only two words I have previously admitted writing at the top of the col de Vars were ‘The shame’, ballpointed in tiny, go-away scrawl on a filthy, damp page of my training diary. But actually there had been a third. At Castellane I had purchased three litres of magnolia emulsion and a roller, and late that afternoon at the top of the col de Vars, watched by half a dozen German motorcyclists, I jumped out of the car and slathered five cream-coloured capitals on to the frost-cracked tarmac. Who does he think he is? said the Germans’ faces, and even in the unsightly throes of my current excitement I knew it had been a fair point. Who had I thought I was? Not Eddy, who had no feelings; not Bernard, who had too many; not Tom, who had the ability to destroy himself, nor even the many also-rans who didn’t. Firmin Lambot, older than I when he’d won in 1922, had done so on mud tracks and with cast-iron technology; yet his average speed over 5,468 kilometres – 24.1 k.p.h. – was more than I’d managed in any single day excepting that stunted time-trial. But maybe it had never been about times or speeds. Oscillating between destinies, I was honouring glory and failure alike: an ordinary man trying to find his place somewhere between the animals and the gods.
In typography of a size and stridency normally associated with phrases such as ‘AMBULANCE – KEEP CLEAR’, even in the late-afternoon gloom it had blared out to the heavens; today, with the mist burnt off by a garish sun, it had star billing, up in lights around the planet. As a billion viewers watched the world’s greatest annual sporting event rolling over the top of another Alp, there, unavoidably, was the bland yet mysterious name
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rachel Cugnoni, Paul Ruddle, Martin Warren, Simon O’Brien, Matthew Lantos, Richard Hallett, procycling, Pyrenean Pursuits, Thordis Olafsdottir and my family. Not forgetting the Tour de France press office, without whom none of this would have been difficult.
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