French Revolutions

is
behind the leading group of seven riders, all rank outsiders hoping for a
single day of glory. From this angle the brutal gradient of this section
becomes clear, and with it the pain: all seven are standing up in the saddle,
shoulders slowly rolling. The camera pulls alongside the last rider in the
group, a Dutchman in the orange strip of Rabobank, and zooms in on his tortured
features: every inhalation, and there are many, seems to crack another rib;
every revolution, and there are not so many, heralds a complicated, discordant
medley of distress. Up past a corrugated-iron chapel, up past more yells and
gestures; he whisks a glove off the bars and in a ragged swipe smears stringy
dreadfulness across his face and hair. This is where the crowds are hemming
tightly in, parting just before the seven to leave a ribbon of pock-marked road
barely wide enough for a bike. There are only two curves left and, as the other
six begin to pull away, the muscles in that big Dutch head bulge and pulse in
desperation: he’s fucked if he’s going to be dropped this close to a summit in
the Tour de France. He sits down, then vaults up in the saddle again, aware
perhaps that this is as close as he’s ever been to fulfilling the fantasies of
his youth, but probably not of the considerable excitement his efforts are
causing in a dark bedroom in west London.
    One more corner to go and now there
are names and slogans rolling slowly beneath his wheels; he’s not reading them
but I certainly am. There’s a pantani and
an ullrich and a no sahaja yoga, whatever the blinking
flip that is, and just before the summit, as Rabobank toils triumphantly up to
rejoin the group, oh me oh my, oh joy of joys, there it is, clear and stark
even as we cut up to the aerial shot from the helicopter, and I’m screaming at
the telly as if my 500-1 shot is a nose behind the Grand National leader coming
into the home straight.
    The only two words I have previously
admitted writing at the top of the col de Vars were ‘The shame’, ballpointed in
tiny, go-away scrawl on a filthy, damp page of my training diary. But actually
there had been a third. At Castellane I had purchased three litres of magnolia
emulsion and a roller, and late that afternoon at the top of the col de Vars,
watched by half a dozen German motorcyclists, I jumped out of the car and
slathered five cream-coloured capitals on to the frost-cracked tarmac. Who does
he think he is? said the Germans’ faces, and even in the unsightly throes of my
current excitement I knew it had been a fair point. Who had I thought I was?
Not Eddy, who had no feelings; not Bernard, who had too many; not Tom, who had
the ability to destroy himself, nor even the many also-rans who didn’t. Firmin
Lambot, older than I when he’d won in 1922, had done so on mud tracks and with
cast-iron technology; yet his average speed over 5,468 kilometres — 24.1 k.p.h.
— was more than I’d managed in any single day excepting that stunted
time-trial. But maybe it had never been about times or speeds. Oscillating
between destinies, I was honouring glory and failure alike: an ordinary man
trying to find his place somewhere between the animals and the gods.
    In typography of a size and stridency
normally associated with phrases such as ‘ambulance
— keep clear’, even in the late-afternoon gloom it had blared out to the
heavens; today, with the mist burnt off by a garish sun, it had star billing,
up in lights around the planet. As a billion viewers watched the world’s
greatest annual sporting event rolling over the top of another Alp, there,
unavoidably, was the bland yet mysterious name