French Revolutions

Seine, past houseboats with a view to die for, past joggers,
past hot-dog vendors already warming up their Westlers at 6.15. At the fourth
bridge down I turned left and headed out across the vast, cobbled no-man’s-land
of the Place de la Concorde. A plumb-lined kilometre to my right stood the
scaffolded bulk of the Louvre; to the right, the same vista eased up to the
tiny, sunlit keyhole that was the Arc de Triomphe, over two kilometres up the
Champs-Elysées.
    ‘There are no tired legs on the
Champs-Elysées,’ they say, and though Paul Kimmage rather took the romance out
of this by pointing out the absence of random dope controls on the final stage,
I could see why they said it. Feeling exhilarated and tireless, up the
mile-wide pavement I slalomed breezily between waiters putting out the first
chairs and tables. On the way back down — the Tour riders would turn in front
of the Arc de Triomphe ten times — I picked up speed with alarming ease.
Thirty-five k.p.h. felt like 25; as I swished past the gendarmes questioning a
van driver whose forlorn vehicle sat, front wheels splayed out, across the
central reservation I gave Eddy Merckx an inner wink and hit 50.
    I did a couple more Champs-Elysées
laps, then arced off back to the Seine, bumping over the grilles that blasted
weird wafts of hot Metro air up my legs. Past Notre-Dame, all the way back up
to the Eiffel Tower, and all the way back. For another hour it was wonderful,
but by 7.30 the magic had gone. Commuters were Henri Pauling it into the
underpasses; van drivers parped and revved, and when I took refuge in the cycle
lane they followed me. Hot, hounded and hungry, I glanced down at the computer
and did a quick perimeter tour of the Jardin des Plantes, and another, and
another. It was enough. The 3,000 came up as I turned off the Boulevard Vincent
Auriol, exchanged curt abuse with a jaywalking businessman and eased up to the
car.
    That was it. It was 15 June: I’d done
nearly 1,900 miles in a month to the day. There should have been bunting and
blondes and big bottles of bubbly, but I really didn’t mind that there weren’t.
Eddy and Tom and my support crew had helped me up the Alps, and Paul Ruddle had
helped me down them, but at heart mine had been a solo achievement, a
3,000-kilometre lone breakaway, and I was happy to celebrate its climax in an
appropriate fashion.
    In the final analysis, you see,
because of what I had done I was simply a lot better than almost everyone else.
With others around there would have been churlishness and jealousy; who knows,
maybe even a couple of tiresome fans. Stalkers couldn’t be ruled out. I took
off my hot, wet gloves, opened the hatchback and, with a suitably epic
commentary turning slowly through my mind, Moore’s respectful hands began to
strip down the machine that had been his slave, his master, his confidant and
tormentor throughout a journey where suffering and glory had stood toe to toe
and... and so on.
    With my features settling into a
happy, glazed reverie poorly suited to urban driving I set off into the rush
hour, eventually finding myself amid the canoe-roofed British motorists piling
back to Calais. The French were setting out deck-chairs on the not enormously
appealing beaches south of the ferry terminal, getting ready for summer, a
summer of which the Tour would as ever be the cornerstone.
    I parked in the hire-car compound,
built my bike and packed her bags, then pedalled across the hot tarmac to the
Avis office.
    ‘Voila! You are return!’ It was the
man who had helped me dismantle ZR a month before.
    ‘I am,’ I said, with simple dignity.
    ‘Oh, your velo...’ he said, peering
over his desk at ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar and smutted tyres, ‘…your vélo ’as
been doing many mileages, non?’
    ‘Three thousand kilometres.’
    This information changed the shape of
his face. ‘Sree souzand? Oh, c’est bien fait! Some montagnes?’
    ‘Well, yes. I was following the Tour
de France.’ I remembered telling him this before, and I remembered how he’d
reacted when I’d done so. He seemed to have forgotten.
    ‘So... le Mont Ventoux?’
    ‘Yes.’ Well, near enough.
    ‘L’Aubisque?’
    I issued a sort of puff and rolled my
eyes in an expression of partial conquest, hoping he wouldn’t ask about
Hautacam. He didn’t.
    ‘L’Izoard? Le Galibier?’
    That was better. ‘In the same day.’
    ‘Eh bien,’ he said with a smile, then
pinched the brim of an imaginary trilby and