French Revolutions

mountainous deceit as being merely the carrying
on of a long and proud tradition. Sitting alone at breakfast, pouching bread
and jam and tapping my cleats on the cold, old tiles, I looked out at another
grey day, a sky of clouds barrelling along on a potent westerly. Was I really
going to head into the teeth of this dispiriting unpleasantness, hauling my
panniers of wet espadrilles up to the coast of Brittany on a route I’d be
making up as I went along, away from the sun and the Alps and everything else
the Tour was about? Or was I about to do a Maurice Garin, sticking my bike on a
train to Tours and rejoining the race four days on, where at least I’d be
pedalling down roads I knew were the right ones?
    Every time I pored over the procycling Tour map the same tempting thought had nagged me. Snip that irritating little loop
off; make the route look more like the Grande Boucle it was supposed to be and
less like a dropped shoelace. On the other hand, I’d be pruning 634 kilometres
from the itinerary, and though this still left 3,000 kilometres, 634 was a lot
whichever way you looked at it... A fold here, a tear there, and the procycling map was effectively doctored. Time for recriminations later. I had a train
to catch.
    In a sport riddled with chicanery,
it’s inevitable that the best cyclists are also the best cheats. Maurice Garin
probably wouldn’t have planned Operation Choo-Choo in a tourist-information
office two hours before the stage started, and so probably wouldn’t have found
himself being told: ‘Zere is no train for... passagers. Only is for, uh,
marchandises, oui?’ Sigh. I looked at the map: it was an 80 kilometre ride to
Descartes, where I could rejoin the route of stage seven. Accepting this as a
form of penance (and one whose blow was softened by the realisation that if the
weather persisted I’d be pushed there by a hefty tailwind), I made a slight
fainting sound, then remembered the other reason for my presence in the office.
    ‘The Tour is important for Loudun?’
    The woman at the counter had reacted
to my entrance as if she’d been locked up there since 1974, and was indeed
dressed accordingly. Once the initial wide-eyed alarm had receded, she spoke
with the nervous deliberation of someone hearing their own voice for the first
time. ‘Yes... zis ze, uh... first time Loudun is ville d’étape.’ Was it to
boost tourism? ‘Non. No. Uh... Loudun is une ville bicyclette.’ It is? With a
start I realised I had not encountered a single rival cyclist — not even an old
bloke in a beret with a pig in his panniers — since setting off. ‘Ze maire is,
uh, passionné du vélo.’ Was he around today? Non. Did the town have to pay for
the privilege? Oui. How much? Enormement. Would the teams be staying overnight
here? Non. Poitiers. Only sree hotels ici à Loudun. (Tell me about it, love.)
    Sent on my way with a shy but genuine
‘Bon courage’, I followed her directions to the finish line for stage two and
the start line for stage three, the only parts of the route granted to Loudun’s
tourist officials by the fickle guardians of the Beeg Secret. The Place du
Portail Chaussée, the stage three start line, was studiously unassuming: a
silent, open thoroughfare bordered by a whitewashed billiard hall (une ville
snooker, more like), a petrol station and a driving school in whose window
plastic toy cars shared a dusty cardboard roundabout with many dead insects.
Now I understood why Loudun looked the way it did: the ruler-straight roads
that converged there from far afield suggested it had made its name as a
transport hub back in the Napoleonic days, and all that late-nineteenth-century
architecture showed the railway age had given it another boost. When the
autoroutes came and the railway went, Loudun was suddenly surplus to
requirements.
    Picturing this scene thronged with
cosmopolitan crowds, commentators and sporting superstars required not so much
a mental leap as a triple jump. The night-before’s finish straight, the service
road for a half-built industrial estate round the back of the (hawk, spit)
station, was a barely more credible stage for the world’s biggest annual
sporting event. The Avenue de Ouagadougou (clearly named either after something
Burkino Fasan or the leftover letters at the end of a Scrabble game) had the
sole benefit of linear uniformity, though even this was compromised by a huge
sweeping turn about 500 metres from the end. Even I could see this