French Revolutions

an
astonishing 300,000 people were camped out on Ventoux. Men in bobble hats and
puffa jackets were out there, battling with flyaway flags and furniture; the
drinks vendors had swathed tea towels over their beer taps and were instead
doing a brisk trade in vin chaud. I liked professional cycling, I mused, but
some people really, really liked it. Behind Gary a ramshackle peloton of
plucky amateurs pedalled agonisingly through the narrow column left between
placards and Peugeots and pastis-pouring pedestrians; one of the sturdy
crowd-control barriers was blown over with a clatter and just in front of it a
cyclist in a yellow jersey caught a gust in the chest and came to a halt,
twisting a foot out of his pedal bindings just in time. It occurred to me that
in all my weeks on the road this was the first yellow jersey I’d seen; that
such was the hallowed, iconic status of this item only a heretic would dare to
wear it; and that when he did, a divine blast of cold wind would come down from
on high and smite him off his bike.
    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 earier 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 Briangon 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