French Revolutions

sculpted as granite chicken breasts; prodding and tracing
the outlines of the entirely new front-thigh muscles that spilt over my
kneecaps like double chins; stroking the thick and toughened tendons, still
sore from the (how could it only have been yesterday?) massage.
    It was like a variant of that joke
about the reason men didn’t have breasts: because if they did they’d just stay
in and play with them all night. I kept expecting to be slapped in the face.
Even after I finally stopped fondling myself and dropped off it wasn’t over —
twice that night (and there’d be many more such nights in the weeks ahead) I
awoke with a start: what the bloody hell was this knobbly-kneed woman doing in
my bed?
    When it happened the third time I
couldn’t get back to sleep. My legs were now twitching spasmodically, wondering
why they weren’t pedalling — the legacy of a day spent cycling 279.7 kilometres
followed by one sitting in traffic jams and getting drunk. With daylight
sneaking in through the filthy curtains I creaked stiffly out of bed and stood
before the wardrobe mirror. Even at this time of day, even with a slight
hangover, it was a spectacle so frankly ludicrous that I barked out a single,
mad guffaw.
    Those legs, still blotched from their
therapeutic ordeals, looked like champagne flutes: wrist-thin at the ankles,
they progressively flared out on their way up to a set of mighty hams, thunder
thighs indeed. Halfway up these the smooth, red-brown pint-of-best tan abruptly
gave way to varicose magnolia and Puckish wire wool, as if I was wearing hairy
white shorts. My similarly bleached torso, graced with its new — and hideous —
stomach hairs, was topped by a zip-scarred neck and a gaunt, broiled head with
singed and flaking extremities; from its sides dangled two thin arms whose
tan-line apartheid had been brutally enforced. I might never leave my mark on
the Tour, but that didn’t matter. It had left its mark on me.
    The final chlorinated bidon, the
final night-dried Lycra taken down from the final hotel curtain rail, the final
fistful of vitamins, the final slathering of the arse. Du pain, du vin, du
Savlon — as silly and vile as they might be, I knew I would miss my routines.
At 5.30 a.m. I clacked down four flights of dark stairs, dropped my key on the
empty reception desk, bullied free several recalcitrant bolts and locks and
stepped out into what I could already see, with a sort of mournful glee, was
going to be a gorgeous day.
    Any European city where a man can
walk down a major thoroughfare at dawn wearing a string vest with his head held
high is OK in my book. He walked past with a brisk nod as I leant against the
car finishing my breakfast — three cellophane packets of biscuit crumbs stolen
in rather better condition from the Holiday Inn. ZR stood ready beside me,
assembled with practised hands; I chucked the panniers in the boot, cocked a
leg and rolled off down an empty boulevard.
    I never expected to do the whole
stage — the route before those laps of the Champs-Elysées was monstrously
complex, its details still a mystery after prolonged, albeit fizz-fuddled,
consultation of a detailed map of the capital. Forty-eight kilometres would do
me fine: that would probably be enough to experience the trademark sensations —
heat, fatigue and fear — and, rather more importantly, certainly enough to
bring up the momentous 3,000k. Gathering speed among the occasional taxis and
police vans, I barrelled up the boulevards towards the Eiffel Tower, starting point of the 2000 Tour de France’s twenty-first and final stage. I swished past
a bus with three people on, washed-out ravers silently wondering how it had all
come to this; someone was playing a synthesiser four floors up; from a side
street came a ragged, drunken roar: ‘Jean! Jean!’
    I got to the Eiffel Tower as an enormous sun took shape behind it. The Eiffel Tower is one of the world’s best
things, and rolling to a halt in the centre of its four iron feet I had it all
to myself. I remembered that picture of Hitler standing in front of the Arc de
Triomphe, grinning with disbelief that all this was his, and grinned with
disbelief. I had made it to Paris. With my gleaming exoskeleton legs I looked
the part, and now I felt it. Giant of the Road might be pushing it a bit, but
cycling off across the Pont d’Iena I felt a twinge in my joints that could only
have been growing pains.
    The sky went from cream to blue as I
rolled along the