French Revolutions

look down from aeroplane windows at the complex urban landscapes
below it is in slack-jawed admiration for the people who create and maintain
them, with a parallel gut-punching terror at the thought of the cack-handed,
jerry-built anarchy that would reign if I myself had been involved at anything
approaching an executive level. It had been an overwhelming enough task just to
gather together the equipment for my tour (I’d give that a capital T at the
same time as I felt I’d earned the right to wear the shorts and jersey); here I
was, loaded up like a camel, and the news about the French trains was the straw
that broke my back.
    My sons’ classmates were being taken
to school, and as I cycled laboriously by, trying to haul all those panniers up
to some sort of cruising speed, a couple of mothers recognised me and waved in
a manic, give-’em-hell sort of way. I wasn’t about to lift any part of my hand
from the unsteady bars to return the greeting, and in any case lacked the
spiritual wherewithal.
    Fussing fretfulness about the
transport situation, compounded by Birna’s failed last-minute attempts to drum
up a volunteer force to accompany me, had left me vulnerable to more elemental
fears: I was beginning to feel like a blithe young conscript being sent off for
a brutal, filthy death at the front; a butterfly to be broken upon two wheels.
Even people who knew nothing about cycling, nothing about sport, seemed to be
aware that the Tour de France was a grim and vicious ordeal. The reality had
been postponed and ignored for as long as possible, but now there it was,
staring in spiteful digits from the little multi-function odometer at the front
of the crossbar. 0.97... 0.98... are my shoulder blades supposed to be feeling
like this already?... 0.99... Jesus, that van just missed my elbow with its
wing mirror... 1.0. Pain and danger in one kilometre. Three thousand six
hundred and twenty-nine to go.
    Battered and clattered about in the
otherwise empty guard’s van — a proper old one lined with planks and many
generations of fag-jaundiced gloss paint — ZR3000 and I made our irregular
progress to Dover. Someone had left behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph ;
I got to the sports section as we rattled across the green belt and there,
staring out across some bleak-looking mudflats with his elbows resting on the
lofted saddle of a muddy-wheeled mountain bike, was a man I recognised as Mr
Christopher Boardman. Even in Britain the Tour hype had started already. Mr
Boardman, not a man given to hyperbole, described the forthcoming challenge as
‘physically very unpleasant’; to drum up something more appropriately dramatic,
the writer had introduced the interview with a quote from Greg LeMond, an
American who in 1990 won the last of his three Tours. ‘At the end of the first
stage your lungs are on fire, your legs feel as though they have been plunged
into molten tar, your arms burn, your chest, your shoulders, your back, are
aflame. Even your eyelashes ache. And ahead of you...’ We whooshed into a
tunnel and I stood there in the deafening dark, doing a couple of halfhearted
back stretches and picturing Greg wincing over his Fig Newtons as the Savlon
kicked in. We whooshed out again and the italics juddered before my eyes. ‘And
ahead of you lie another three weeks of Tour de France.’
    He couldn’t even bring himself to
give it a ‘the’. Without a definite article he’d made it sound like a ghastly
punishment: ‘I sentence you to three weeks of Tour de France.’ Imagining it as
a penal institution, I could understand why Chris Boardman had never fulfilled
his potential in the Tour. All the pictures I’d seen of the Tour’s greats
showed the kind of expressions you could imagine gracing the Daddy of C-Wing. Jacques
Anquetil, winner five times in the Sixties, had narrow, weaselly features and a
sarcastic sneer; baby-faced legend Eddy Merckx surveyed the world with a
terrible, blank-eyed froideur that helped earn him the nickname Cannibal;
Miguel Indurain, who dominated in the early Nineties, was a huge, silent
Terminator. Scariest of all was Bernard Hinault, winner five times in the
Seventies and Eighties. His nickname was Badger, which sounds a bit Wind in
the Willows unless you happen to have seen one in action against two Jack
Russells in a video seized by the RSPCA. Hinault’s default demeanour on a
bicycle suggested he’d just been told that some bloke up the road was prancing
around in a wedding