French Revolutions Page 4

  He couldn’t even bring himself to give it a ‘the’. Without a definite article he’d made it sound like a ghastly punishment: ‘I sentence you to three weeks of Tour de France.’ Imagining it as a penal institution, I could understand why Chris Boardman had never fulfilled his potential in the Tour. All the pictures I’d seen of the Tour’s greats showed the kind of expressions you could imagine gracing the Daddy of C-Wing. Jacques Anquetil, winner five times in the Sixties, had narrow, weaselly features and a sarcastic sneer; baby-faced legend Eddy Merckx surveyed the world with a terrible, blank-eyed froideur that helped earn him the nickname Cannibal; Miguel Indurain, who dominated in the early Nineties, was a huge, silent Terminator. Scariest of all was Bernard Hinault, winner five times in the Seventies and Eighties. His nickname was Badger, which sounds a bit Wind in the Willows unless you happen to have seen one in action against two Jack Russells in a video seized by the RSPCA. Hinault’s default demeanour on a bicycle suggested he’d just been told that some bloke up the road was prancing around in a wedding dress singing, ‘Bernard, Bernard, je m’appelle Bernard’. It was an unbridled, primal rage that one could quite easily imagine being sated only by a fight to the death with a load of dogs.

  Chris Boardman, however, was just a friendly bloke with a big nose, peering mildly into the Southport mist with an expression that said, ‘On a clear day I can see me mam’s house from here.’ He was an exceptional cyclist, but he was no Cannibal. If you had to give him a nickname it would be The Grocer.

  Half-heard snatches of notably less flattering epithets jeered down from French-exchange shoplifters on the sundeck as I freewheeled down the gangplank at Calais. But with ZR3000 weaving perilously through the articulated mayhem and on to French soil, I didn’t really care. It had been a splendid crossing: I’d been the only cyclist on the ferry, and had ridden in through the cavernous bow doors exhilarated by the peculiarity of doing so, lashing my bike to a rusty railing beside those huge trailers of whatever it was of ours that the French could possibly admit to wanting. No less significantly, my mood had been lightened by the successful realisation of The Daytrip Gambit: twelve-hour returns are invariably much cheaper than singles, and I’d managed to blag the bike and me on to the boat for a fiver. Things had improved further with the mid-Channel epiphany that my logistical woes could of course be neatly resolved by hiring a car in Calais, dismantling the bike (stick that one on the back burner just for the moment), shoving it in the boot and dropping the car off in Poitiers.

  ‘You are not maybe a mechanical man,’ said the Avis official at the ferry terminal, watching as I made a mockery of the expressions ‘quick-release hub’, ‘folding rear seat’ and ‘big boys don’t cry’. ‘Affirmative, master,’ I said, in an idiotically camp C3PO trill that failed to deter him from easing the now alarmingly cockeyed ZR3000 out of my battered hands. ‘A beautiful vélo’, he continued, working with neat efficiency as he filled my Volkswagen Polo with bicycle parts. ‘You do a tour?’

  I knew it was going to sound ridiculous, but I said it anyway. ‘No. I do the Tour.’

  Having mentally purged this exchange of its denouement, wherein Monsieur Avis turned slowly to showcase a cheesy ‘that’s the spirit, Tiger’ wink of the sort normally reserved for young nephews who have expressed an intention to pilot the Space Shuttle, I set off for Poitiers in a portentous state of mind. With ZR3000’s front wheel grazing my neck, I barrelled down a succession of autoroutes, many of them heading the right way, feeling like the Danish cyclist at the end of the 1973 Tour of Italy video I’d watched the night before, cheerily shoving his bike into the boot of a Peugeot 504 and speeding off into the Rome rush-hour with a farewell scratch of those big sidies. Off to the next race; wherever I lay my bike, that’s my home; have bike, will ride; this bike’s for hire – it’s a tough job being a pro, but someone’s got to do it. And here I was, flashing past old farmers dangling their leathery left arms out of Citroën van windows, my cleats clicking the clutch, doing it.

  Sustaining this spirit for the six and a half hours it took me to get to Futuroscope was a challenge, but shuffling into the painstakingly anonymous reception of the Ibis hotel I was still clinging on to a thread. It was 10.15 p.m., and I caught the restaurant by the skin of my teeth; feasting alone among the impatient staff, I singlemindedly stocked up on carbohydrates before stumbling up to bed for a mercifully dreamless sleep.

  Six hours later I was awake and peering blearily out of the window at the dawn-fringed outlines of some of the huge, mirrored tower blocks housing the enormous virtual-reality rides that are Futuroscope’s raison d’être. Being flung down ski slopes, hurtling through the Milky Way (‘a vertigo-inducing 3-D nightmare’ said the Rough Guide to France [620 grams], which was more than enough to put me off): there are cheaper ways of losing a pair of sunglasses and making yourself feel sick. Indeed, I was about to do one of them.

  With its hordes of picnicking families and unashamed commercialism, the Tour de France is somehow a very Fifties event. It’s appropriate, then, that the Tour regularly visits Futuroscope, whose breathless glorification of technological progress is the epitome of post-war, Dan Dare enthusiasm. There’s something almost Communist about the desperation to showcase all this space-age know-how. The Concorde shambles didn’t put them off: France still wants to have the fastest trains in the world, and the most nuclear power stations, and an active space programme. The hi-tech jet fighter that screamed terrifyingly over my helmet later that day provided the first of many saddle-soiling experiences with low-level training runs. While Britain’s motor industry (silence at the back there, please) looks to past glories with retro-style Rovers and Jags, France is forever pushing out weirdly futuristic concept cars. The funny-faced Renault Twingo was considered so outré that they didn’t even bother making a right-hand-drive model for our benefit.

  After breakfast (another lock-up-your-croissants face-stuffer), I spread my Michelin maps on the table. The first stage prologue around Futuroscope was only 16 kilometres; even I could presumably manage this fairly smartly, then shove the bike in the boot, drop off the car in Poitiers and cycle back to rejoin the route for the next day’s stage, Futuroscope to Loudun. Two stages in a day – stick that up your yellow jersey, boys.

  There was a genial, flabby Dale Winton at reception; together we spent a short time plotting the progress of a column of ants across his desk before I asked him where, precisely, the Tour de France began.

  It was 16 May, the day after the press office were to announce the route details. If nothing else, I thought, they’d have been looking forward to telling me exactly where to get off. Presently, however, it emerged that Dale had no idea what I was talking about, partly because despite mentally rehearsing the question several dozen times it had dribbled fitfully from my lips in an intriguing blend of languages – it would be two weeks before I stopped saying the Icelandic ‘nei’ instead of ‘non’ – and partly because of his preoccupation with the ants, and in particular the fact that the lead group had penetrated his switchboard. At length he presented me with a 1:5 billion scale map of western France and said, ‘You try ze Futuroscope, ah, service de presse?’

  Ten minutes later I was knocking gently on a little door by the park’s entrance, surrounded by jabbering coachloads of schoolchildren waiting in the windy sunshine for the main gates to open for the day. I waited for a moment, then tried the handle. The door blew inwards and I crossed the threshold; before me stood a crisply presented young woman with an enamelled name badge detailing the flags of those countries whose nationals she was authorised to belittle.

  The up-and-down look she poured slowly over me could have withered a vase of carnations at twelve paces, but in fairness it was difficult to take her to task. Back at the hotel I’d tried out my full Tour outfit for the first time: jersey, shorts, mirrored wraparounds, white Nike ankle socks, gloves, cleats. In the mirror it was surprisingly convincing, a symphony of lissom logos. It did not take me long, however, to establish that it
was in fact too convincing. If you’re going to walk the walk, you’ve got to talk the talk, but having already demonstrated incompetence at both disciplines I felt a fraud. If I was to avoid being shown up as the worst kind of inept poseur, the look would have to be diluted.

  The Peugeot shirt made the cut, but was now teamed with a rather noticeable pair of baggy tartan shorts that sheathed those panty-linered Lycras. I kept the gloves, though the shades had gone, replaced as a facial accessory by a daftly bulbous white helmet eerily reminiscent of the look pioneered by Woody Allen when playing the role of a spermatozoa. Big, fat, morning-campers panniers completed the picture. In the hotel mirror I’d looked the part; outside the Futuroscope press office I looked the prat.

  Spying a Union Jack on her badge I piped up, ‘I’m following the Tour de France, and it would be very useful if … if …’ Something was wrong; I looked down and saw what it was. Her hand was on my chest – she was pushing me out of her office. Not quite knowing what else to do I carried on talking as she eased me outside and slammed the door behind us: ‘… If you … could …’

  ‘Zis is a press office. It is perhaps more … correct to talk with you out of side.’

  ‘No, no, I think it might be more correct to talk … in there, because I am a journalist, or anyway a writer, although I do look a bit of a bottom right now, but that’s because I, um …’

  ‘You ’ave a card? A press card?’

  ‘Yes! No.’

  It was looking bad, but I had an idea. I unhooked a pannier and began rummaging about, withdrawing a toothbrush, three socks and an E1–11 EC healthcare certificate that instantly blew away as the wind abruptly picked up. Aware that henceforth I would be treating my own compound fractures with a puncture-repair kit, I finally pulled out a copy of procycling.

  ‘Here! This is the UK’s premier publication for bikists,’ I said in what had at least begun as an authoritative drawl. ‘We run all sorts of features on pedals, handlebars, Savlon …’

  She took the magazine and, having perfunctorily flicked through it, began examining the staff list on the masthead with the suspicious intensity of an Israeli border guard.

  ‘Last month we blew the lid off Fig Newtons.’

  ‘And your poste …?’ she enquired briefly.

  Well, that was easy. ‘Technical Editor.’

  ‘So you are … Steeeeve Robinson?’

  ‘That’s my name – don’t wear it out.’

  ‘Well, Monsieur Robinson, you ’ave a question?’

  I looked at my hands and realised I’d put the gloves on the wrong ones. ‘Yes. It’s quite easy, actually: I’d just like to know the route of the first stage of the Tour de France.’

  Her face lit up. ‘No, no, no! I’m sorry, but it is not possible to say zis!’

  ‘But the exact details were announced yesterday.’

  She laughed horribly. ‘No, no! It’s a beeeeeeeg secret!’

  ‘The Tour de France press office told me that—’

  This was a serious tactical error, opening up whole new avenues down which bucks could be leisurely passed. ‘Eh bien, well, you must talk wiss zem about it. Beeeeg secret ’ere!’

  ‘It’s not a very good secret, though, is it? The stage is only 16 kilometres long.’

  We were now deep into shrug territory.

  ‘But I’m almost certainly more important than you,’ I said as the door eased shut in my face.

  Cycling the long way round the enormous car parks into an already dispiriting headwind I took stock. My diminutive procycling Tour map implied that the prologue looped northwards from Futuroscope; only one road appeared to head off in this direction and after circling the roundabout in front of the Ibis about seven times I found it.

  In less than five minutes I was in peasants-and-poppies rurality, an astonishing contrast with Futuroscope, but no doubt part of the reason the still heavily agricultural French are so obsessed with flaunting their technology. As a TGV powered steadily across a distant field as if being reeled in – the antithesis of that Thomas the Tank Engine affair aboard which I’d rattled through Kent – I remembered reading somewhere that as recently as 1965 only 15 per cent of French homes had telephones.

  In less than ten minutes, of course, I was lost. I’d expected the route to be in some way obvious, lined with floral displays and bunting, but, standing at a windswept hilltop crossroads surrounded by a billion acres of oil-seed rape and lowing cattle, I realised it was not. Feeling lonely and ridiculous, I allowed myself to be blown back to Futuroscope, where I again circled the roundabout while wondering how to salvage something from this towering anticlimax.

  Forty minutes later, I braked to a slightly messy halt in a corner of one of Futuroscope’s desolate overspill car parks. In several dozen clockwise circuits, before an understandably curious audience of two gardeners and a coach driver, I had completed my prologue; managing to focus on my odometer between ragged exhalations I established that the 16 kilometres had been undertaken at an average speed of 27.7 k.p.h., with a maximum speed of 36.5. I knew the pros would average twice that, but it didn’t matter. My Tour had begun.

  I was hot then and a lot hotter when I dropped the car off in Poitiers and cycled back to find the route of stage two. The wind had blown itself out, and as I assembled first ZR3000 and then a complex baguette sandwich in the fascinatingly hideous carrental lot, the sun sat on me with its full weight. I’d never been to Poitiers, and thought the old town seemed worth a look, but with Brie being fondued in my lap and the bike’s blue crossbar almost too hot to touch I just wanted to hit the road and get some wind in my hair.

  Richard or Matthew or Simon or someone had told me the heat wouldn’t be a problem until I stopped or went uphill, and they were right. The road northeast out of town offered views of some arrestingly attractive châteaux, but when, at Dissay, I stopped to look at one I found myself sagging into involuntary siesta almost immediately. Besides, I wanted to get some kilometres under my belt. After all, by now the real riders would be … yes, actually, where would they be? I kept forgetting I was making the route up as I went along. The best I could divine from the procycling map was a sweeping spiral, up to the east of Futuroscope, then north to Loudun, but trying to extrapolate anything cartographically meaningful from this was like giving someone directions from my house to Sainsbury’s using a child’s globe.

  Still, I was heading in the right general direction and it was a splendid day if you kept on the move. Birds and crickets shrieked manically from roadside copses that exuded a strong smell of hot tea; old women in straw hats and housecoats prodded hoes at gaudily immaculate beds of irises. During a white-knuckle descent through Saint-Cyr I broke the 50 k.p.h. speed limit – a defining moment in my fledgeling career as a cyclist – and swallowed my first fly. I don’t know why I swallowed a fly. Perhaps I’d die.

  And curiously enough, in accordance with the generally accepted rule that steep downward hills are followed by steep uphill ones, after five minutes I almost had.

  Simon had urged me to take advantage of the clear-plastic map-envelope thing on top of my handlebar bag, which permitted time-saving on-the-move navigation (albeit at the expense of taking another large step towards visual association with the worst sort of beardy hiking-socked cyclo-dullard). He had also recommended taking a set of hugely detailed ramblers’ maps, but because this scheme involved the traumatic logistical undertaking of saving weight by mailing relevant batches of maps to poste-restante boxes in pre-booked hotels and sending the old ones home, I hadn’t bothered. A more generously scaled map might have been more forthright in identifying the ascent of Beaumont as a labour straight out of Classical mythology; an illegibly minuscule couple of chevrons was all Monsieur Michelin had to say for himself, other than ‘Please don’t hurt me – I’m really stupid-looking and fat.’

  As those with more experience than I had predicted, the heat soon become a very real issue as the road narrowed and rose; dropping my hazy gaze to the pitted asphalt
immediately before me I was soon blinking body brine out of my eyes. I had not yet begun to master ZR3000’s embarrassment of gears, forever clunking down at the front dérailleur when I meant to go up one at the back, but it had seemed inconceivable that I’d have any occasion to engage bottom gear, number twenty-seven, until I crossed the Pyrenean tree line. But though Beaumont was no doubt a mere pimple in professional cycling terms, here I was, grinding jerkily down into gear twenty-seven with the gradient still rising and the summit nowhere in sight.

  ‘Spin the pedals,’ I’d been told by Martin Warren. ‘Get in an easy gear and keep the revs high.’ Mr Boardman had been more specific. ‘Maintain an average pedal cadence of around 80 revs per minute,’ he’d said. The small parts of my brain not blaring manically like klaxons calculated this was more than one turn a second; surveying the humid, tortuous progress of my damp and reddening legs it seemed obvious that I was nearer 80 revs per hour.