French Revolutions Read online

  I’m sorry to go on about the wind, but it really did make me very happy to coast at such nonchalant speed across the flat fields of green wheat, the rustling sheaves all bending with me towards Richelieu. Men in berets smoking on huge log piles; dogs with their paws up on a tractor dashboard; a literally steaming barrow of ordure: if it hadn’t been for the lorries this could have been the inaugural 1903 Tour.

  Probably because I’d been more concerned with monitoring my physical condition, I hadn’t really noticed the traffic before. It had certainly become obvious that French drivers treat cyclists as fellow road-users, indicating as they overtook and pulling respectfully right over to the other side of the road while doing so. There was never any of the impatient revving of engines, no I’m-bigger-than-you cutting up or jeers of the ‘Get off and milk it, you dozy twat’ variety that make cycling in Britain such a high-octane experience.

  But despite their best intentions, the huge articulated vehicles that are a universal feature of the French landscape couldn’t help but scare your cleats off when they passed. First the huge bow-wave of air they displaced would shove you forcefully towards the gravelly verge; then, a powerful vacuum suck of slipstream pulled you violently back towards the centre of the road. It was horrible. I’d read that, as a boy, Bernard Hinault used to train by racing lorries up hills, and remembering this as a sixteen-wheeler buffeted me into the fag packets and roadkill I realised he must have been even madder than he looked.

  Richelieu was splendid, a proper walled town with moats and gates and a beautifully proportioned square. The whole lot was built by the famously horrid cardinal, bane of Porthos, D’Artagnan and Oliver Reed and one of history’s moustache-twirling baddies. There were plenty of Tabac le Cardinal-style reminders of this, though I’m not entirely sure he would have approved of the huge branch of Intermarché, a supermarket chain that oddly styles itself ‘The Musketeers’ (check out their ‘all-for-one’ offers).

  It was, in fact, a bit of a seventeenth-century day. A majestic classical façade facing the N10 at Les Ormes, fronting nothing, as deceitful as a film set; huge timber-beamed marketplaces reinvented as pétanque courts in almost every village. Pedalling over the first old Tour graffiti – fading emulsioned exhortations to French favourites Jalabert and Virenque, more general war cries of ‘Vive le Tour!’ – I breezed into Descartes, another Renaissance town with pyramid-roofed turrets (it changed its name from La Haye in honour of its most famous son, the man who thought and therefore was). Lunch was taken at an outside brasserie table, ZR locked to one of the many statues of the famous philosopher with his Sweet-style hairdo, both of us watching the farmers’ wives putter home in their odd little two-stroke microcars, baguettes poking up over the passenger seat. Understanding that Loudun had been an aberration, I thought how lucky the French were to be able to take all this history and grandeur for granted. In almost any other country Richelieu and Descartes would have been sightseeing meccas; in a land spoiled for choice they were also-rans. The Rough Guide had nothing to say about either.

  Lunch could be considered the highlight of the day and by far the most important meal, and that afternoon I patented the formula. The breadbasket was emptied before the patron arrived to take my order, invariably the plat du jour (in this instance a plate-overhanging ham omelette) with a side order of French-fried carbohydrates and a salad. Even on a tepid, windy day like this, fluid was ingested with reckless lust: half a litre of Badoit, and another, then a Coke to satisfy what was to become a habitual craving for sugar. More bread. Pudding where applicable (which is to say, when included as part of the menu deal). I’d been yawning almost uncontrollably for most of the previous twenty-four waking hours, which reminded me of the importance of double espresso as part of a balanced cycling diet.

  Odd as it may seem, caffeine is on the International Cycling Union’s list of controlled substances: a limit of six cups a day is apparently the rough guideline. All riders, even Chris Boardman, start a race day with two big coffees; Paul Kimmage, nodding off in the saddle during a debilitating stage of the Tour of Italy, had to shove up a caffeine suppository to keep going (that was bad enough, but you should have seen his face when the Coffeemate and sugar lumps went in). I had a picture of Eddy Merckx in one of my issues of procycling that was to become something of an iconic image for me in times of crisis. Flat out on a dressing-room bench, still wearing half his crap-splattered kit, one sock off, one sock on, mouth gaping limply, dead to the world: it was all you ever needed to know about the absurd physical demands of the sport. Just thinking about it made me want a coffee. And a lift home.

  With a slightly embarrassed cough we move on to the ‘Fluids – Other’ section. I hadn’t thought of alcohol as a performance-enhancing drug – to my knowledge, strip Cluedo has yet to be ratified by the International Olympic Committee – but it was quickly becoming apparent that, in cycling, anything that makes the world seem a better place (or anyway a different place) has got to have something going for it. In the early Tours it was by no means uncommon to watch riders stopping to down a huge bottle of wine, and in my 1973 Tour of Italy video I’d seen domestiques carrying bottles of lager up to the front runners. Bernard Hinault used to get his bidon filled with champagne before the last climb of the day, and when he quit the Renault team it was over an argument with his team boss about how much wine he was allowed at dinner. At the fateful foot of Ventoux, Tom Simpson joined a crowd of other riders on a bar-raid: he necked a cognac, which can’t have done wonders for an amphetamine-jittered constitution; one of the French riders sank two glasses of red wine.

  Anyway, there we are. The prospect of dining in French restaurants without drinking wine was too beastly to contemplate, and now I had an excuse (we’ll just gloss over Tom for the moment). I drank a quarter-litre of wine that day; the next it was up to half, and so it remained every lunchtime thenceforth. Always rosé, though, which I don’t actually like very much but somehow seemed less tawdry. You don’t see tramps on benches with their teeth stained pink by years of rosé abuse.

  ‘Combien de kilomètres?’

  I looked up from the bill – ludicrously small for such a parade of comestibles – to see a well-presented old gent who looked like a character from Jean de Florette dressed up for market day.

  ‘Combien de kilomètres par jour?’ he asked again, tilting his head at ZR. ‘Deux cents? Cent cinquante?’

  A Frenchman who thought I looked capable of doing 200 kilometres a day? I was overwhelmed. ‘Cent trente,’ I replied with a humbled smile, even though this almost randomly selected figure was clearly at the very limit of my capabilities.

  ‘Oh, c’est bien, c’est bien,’ he said sympathetically, and I knew then I would be morally obliged to do it.

  I finally saw some cyclists as I left town, four of them in their fifties, pedalling towards me in big helmets, rear-view mirrors on their handlebars. Those, the panniers and the scoutmaster shorts smacked of a certain Englishness, a suggestion confirmed as the words ‘Bob’s off to do a recce’ were blown towards me as they passed. I was still wearing my own baggy overshorts, but suddenly I knew they wouldn’t be making another appearance. Looking at myself in shop windows I’d seen one of the more outlandish combinations from those children’s books where you make hilarious figures by matching different heads to torsos and legs. I was stuck with the Seventies pot-holer helmet – the incident on Kew Bridge was sure to be repeated soon – but the knobbly-kneed molester legwear was bound for the bin. Old Jean de Florette had taken me seriously; maybe it was time I did so myself.

  The rivers were bulging with the night-before’s rain, filling bridges to the tops of their arches and brimming château moats. I was always awestruck by the procession of imposing castles glowering out over the fields from almost every hillside – the surprise wasn’t that there’d been a revolution, but that they’d waited until 1789 to have it. Nowadays, of course, there’s nothing the French like better than a bit of high-profile direct action, and over th
e years the Tour has seen it all. The second Tour in 1904 was almost the last: as well as the endemic dishonesty of the competitors, crowd trouble got utterly out of hand. Mobs hid in lonely forests, assisting their own local favourites by leaping out to batter rival racers with clubs. Unruly spectators had to be dispersed by firing revolvers in the air, and that was when they were in a good mood. After a rider from Nîmes was disqualified for slipstreaming a car as the race approached his home town, 2,000 of his supporters fought a pitched battle with police and Tour officials. Later stages had to be rerouted after farmers expressed more obscure grievances by the time-honoured French tradition of blocking the road with machinery and produce. ‘The Tour is finished,’ proclaimed its founder, Henri Desgrange, dramatically, ‘driven out of control by blind passion, by violence and filthy suspicion.’ But however noble this speech, Desgrange was ultimately a businessman. He had conceived the Tour purely to sell more copies of his sports daily, L’Auto Vélo, and with circulation up by 300 per cent he quickly changed his mind.

  Crowds are better behaved these days – a slightly mad old man punched Eddy Merckx in the stomach as he rode up the Puy-de-Dôme in 1975, and every year some ass with a compact zoom knocks a rider off his bike in the quest for a close-up – but for everyone else connected with the Tour it’s a case of plus ça change. In 1966 riders protested against the introduction of dope tests by getting off their bikes just after the start of a stage and chanting ‘Merde!’ in unison for five minutes – not the most spellbinding exhibit in France’s extensive museum of mob rhetoric, perhaps, but effective nonetheless: the positive sample that had incited the shit-shouting was mysteriously mislaid. (One wonders how the triumphant protestors felt after Simpson’s death in the following Tour.) In 1998 they were at it again, sitting down in the road to protest about police searching their rooms for drugs. Three teams abandoned the Tour; the remaining riders tore their race numbers off and idled at strolling pace to the stage finish.

  In 1968 it was the journalists’ turn, blocking the road to illustrate their displeasure after the Tour’s boss accused them of trying to discredit the event, and if you think that’s the sort of tactical decision you might expect during an argument over whose Pokémon cards are the shiniest, then what about the photographers, who refused to take any pictures for a day in 1987 because the corporate guests got their own hospitality tent and they didn’t.

  Then, of course, there are the protests from those with no connection to the race at all but who realise the publicity potential of making a big fuss at the world’s largest sporting event. Rare is the stage that escapes: tubby Basque separatists in replica kits pedalling out of the crowd to accompany the leader over a mountain col; student pranksters lining cones in front of the speeding peloton. In 1985, a group of protesting shipyard workers made the mistake of standing across the road when Bernard Hinault was in the lead. Because it was only the Paris—Nice race, he let them off with a few right hooks. If it had been the Tour, somebody would have been eaten.

  The most notable example of what I suppose could be called secondary picketing occurred during the 1982 Tour. After a four-year campaign to get on the route, the village of Fontaine-au-Piré had been rewarded with a stage finish: the smallest French community ever to be given this honour. The streets were re-tarmacked, houses painted, changing rooms built – all paid for by villagers working through the night producing souvenir banners and T-shirts to be sold across northern France. Over 50,000 brochures were handed out, and on the day a huge crowd thronged the tiny square in front of a town hall bedecked with the flags of every competing nation.

  Regrettably, Fontaine-au-Piré had the misfortune to be 40 kilometres down the road from Denain, where a steelworks was threatened with closure. Consequences: riders halted by barricades; stage cancelled for first time in Tour history; mayor jumps into blast furnace.

  My Dr-Livingstone-I-presume appointment with the Tour route came at Saint-Flovier, announcing itself with a virgin stretch of shiny black tarmac and freshly painted kerbs. I had the idea that I’d be able to follow this all the way to Paris like some yellow brick road, but ten yards out of the village it abruptly gave way to a signless crossroads which dispatched three wobbly lines of pot-holed gravel over the rolling hills. As I had by now wandered off the edge of Michelin map 232, with a good fifty blind kilometres before I got back on to 233 (I thought I’d forgotten the relevant 238, but it turned up two weeks later in the middle of a procycling), there was no choice but to turn back and – as a man, I utter these words in a tone normally reserved for descriptions of domestic pest infestation – ask for directions.

  ‘Oh, oh, monsieur, je suis malade!’

  The Babar headscarf was a clue, as was the exuberant application of rouge that was more bleu, but I had failed to detect either indicator of madness in deciding the substantial old dear waving from her balcony might be offering to point a lost soul towards Obterre. It was 3 p.m.; her theatrical wails ricocheted off the shutters down an empty street.

  ‘Oh, monsieur! Ma poubelle!’

  I’d dismounted at her initial exhortation, but now looked up at her gesticulations with a sense of foreboding. ‘Poubelle’, as my schoolboy French remembered it, was dustbin, but used in the context of disease suggested a euphemism whose full horror would only be revealed when she flung her heavily stained floral skirt up over her head.

  Further extravagant sounds and signals presently made it clear she was in fact referring to her wheelie bin, but relief lasted only until I understood she wished me to carry this considerable and unsavoury object up the rickety fire escape that connected her balcony to the street. That her physical condition made her ill-suited to this task was beyond question, but as I tilted the bin backwards and prepared to shoulder it, I was abruptly struck in the temple by the carbon-fibre fist of hard reason. What possible purpose could this whole scheme serve, other than the satisfaction of a senile whim? I released my burden, stepped back into the street and fixed her with a businesslike look.

  ‘Obterre?’

  ‘Mais … ma poubelle! Je suis malade!’

  Following some idiotic horsetrading, during which I had frequent recourse to sotto voce asides of the ‘blubbery old loon’ variety, a bin-relocation/directions exchange was eventually brokered. Fifteen minutes later, leaving a vapour trail of kitchen smells, I hammered into Obterre.

  One of the nice things about the Tour de France is the way it seeks out obscure roads and villages, giving everyone and everywhere the hope that their fifteen seconds of international fame will come. For places like Obterre, a fairly hopeless settlement where the only visible signs of entertainment were bullet holes in the road signs, the Tour offers a rare excuse for a long-overdue civic makeover. Two topless gardeners were stocking an enormous embankment with busy lizzies; when I asked if they were doing it for the Tour (OK, the tower), the one with the hairiest back sent me on my way with sarcastic snorts and a heavy-handed ‘Non. C’est pour ma mère.’ There were new zebra crossings, and the fresh pavement asphalt was an eye-watering red. Only the dogs hadn’t cottoned on. I was beginning to despise rural canines for their persistently unsettling habit of bounding up to the borders of their property as I passed and discharging a furious volley of barks. Three of them ambushed me as I left Obterre, and wearily climbing back into the skin I’d just jumped out of I thought: Come 7 July and you’ll have something to fucking bark about.

  Rain threatened but never came, and with the odometer reading 129.3 kilometres I freewheeled down a considerable hill into le Blanc. Two laps of a great, long square bathed in late-afternoon sun, all shutters and mustard stonework, and I brought up the 130. I had kept my word to Jean de Florette, and discounting a slight hamstring twinge I felt good. The most I had ever cycled in a day and I almost wanted to keep going.

  It’s a general rule that hotels with their reception desk on the first floor are horrible, but I found the exception, run by a motherly type who scored big points by helping me stow ZR under her stair
s, then lost them again by the multi-sensory appraisal of my presentability whose conclusion was that I should give her my details after I’d showered. Le Blanc had been une ville d’étape three years previously, she said, and as the Tour wasn’t stopping here this time no one was getting very excited. For a reasonable-sized place such as le Blanc, a town whose many road connections regularly channelled the race through it, I supposed the Tour was as much a curse as it was a blessing for the smaller villages. There was the wearisome civic obligation to string up the bunting and deadhead the hanging baskets, and all for two minutes of Lycra whoosh.

  A quick pre-shower biological inventory was generally reassuring. The hamstring twinge was much better once I’d Boardmaned my leg up on the cistern, and I was particularly pleased with my Savlon-slathered perineum, which, assuming – oooh! – that was it, emitted only the dull bruised sensation one might expect to feel a week after falling awkwardly at a tap factory. On the other hand, the front seam of those skin-clamping shorts left a terrible scar down each leg, as if I’d recently endured a pioneering double thigh transplant, and there was an itchy fungal patch on my right love handle. No one had warned me that all that cycling would put hairs on your stomach – one could only hope the back wasn’t next – and the idiotic cyclists’ tan, which I’d been secretly cultivating as a sort of initiation ritual, had come up bright pink instead of berry brown. If Barbie had given me a lift in her Jeep I’d have looked like a headless torso.

  Still, strolling about the sun-burnished buildings in slightly dank espadrilles, I grandiosely reflected that these things happened to us giants of the road. As a road warrior, you’ve got to expect a few war wounds. Kids were buzzing round the square on their mopeds, and I smiled leniently at their doomed efforts to imbue these foolish machines with streetwise rawness by sticking their feet up on the frame and gunning the hedge-trimmer throttle. Where were all the cyclists? It was certainly easier to imagine the Tour streaking across the mighty River Creuse to le Blanc’s witch-hat-towered château than fumbling around Loudun’s light-industrial hinterland, but neither scenario seemed particularly convincing.