French Revolutions

was Phil Liggett’s memorably raw
commentary on the epic Alpine performance of Irishman Stephen Roche (‘There’s
someone coming through the mist... it can’t be... it is! It’s Roche! It's
Stephen Roche!’) during his triumphant 1987 Tour that initiated my
fascination. I came to marvel at the heroic scale of the event and its
incredible demands, the murderous climbs and 90-k.p.h. descents that sometimes
defied death but, tragically, sometimes didn’t. I realised that each stage was
a race within a race, and that with the ox-like sprinters and bird-like
climbers there were even different species within each race. I mastered the
terminology — the humble domestiques who fed, watered and protected
their team leaders; th e peloton, the main bunch of riders that careered
along, elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel, at ridiculous speed; the gendarmes assigned to keep tabs on rival breakaways; the humiliations of the broom wagon,
on call to sweep up those who cracked in the Alps. I learned to distinguish the
multi-coloured hooped jersey of the world champion from the appealing
polka-dotted affair worn by the current leader in the Tour’s King of the
Mountains competition. And, after two years, I finally witnessed a rider
hoicking up the leg of his shorts and peeing waywardly into the spectators at
50 k.p.h.
    That those soiled by this incident
reacted with baptismal joy suggested the feats of the enormous crowds were, in
their way, no less remarkable than those of the riders. One third of the entire
population of France watches the Tour from the hard shoulders and hillsides,
occupying a long wait in the mad sun by daubing their favourites’ names on the
tarmac, then maximising their brief contact with the riders by swarming over
the road, emptying warm Evian on the front runners, bellowing encouragement and
occasionally knocking the unwary off their bikes. The rest of Europe provided a
typical assortment of ‘characters’: a trident-waving, cloven-hoofed German
Devil; the fabulously drunken flag-faced Danes. It was the only sporting event
I had come across with its own personality.
    For ten years my keen interest in the
Tour had spawned no greater desire than a vague intention to join one day the
exuberant roadside festivities among the largest sporting crowd in the world.
But after my Icelandic triumphs, achieved without preparation and at the cost
of only peripheral permanent injury, a bolder ambition was born. I might be too
old to join the cast of sport’s greatest drama, but maybe I could still stand
on the same stage. Ride the route of the Tour de France, even on my own, even
at a moderate pace, and I’d have achieved something remarkable, the sort of
achievement that made men. Standing at the window with a recently drained
bottle of millennial Moet dangling waywardly from my hand I added my own
silent, vainglorious vow to the millions swirling blurrily through fizz-fuddled
minds around the globe. As the final lonely firework hissed up into the drizzle
I accepted that with a thriving thicket of unpigmented hairs in the temple
region and three children old enough to swear in two languages, Old Father Time
was catching up with old father Tim. If I didn’t do it this year I wouldn’t,
because maybe next year I couldn’t.
    Unlike most professional sporting
events, the Tour de France is more about taking part than it is about winning.
Only two or three of the 180 starters would begin the race with any real hope
of victory; for most, just completing what people (or anyway journalists) call
La Grande Boucle — the Big Loop — is enough. Make it back to Paris — and in
some years less than half the starters do — and you’re a Giant of the Road. The
last finisher, the lanterne rouge, is given a particularly rousing
hero’s reception and can look forward to a year of lucrative race offers and
sponsorship.
    A race where you get a huge cheer and
large cash sums for coming last sounded like my kind of race. ‘Giant of the
Road’: I could live with that. Maybe I could get some calling cards made up.
OK, we were talking about a lot of cycling — but I mean how bad could a lot of
cycling really be? I was starting to get quite cocky until I read about Tom
Simpson.
    ‘Put me back on the bloody bike.’ As
last words go, these are about as likely to pass my lips as ‘It’s time someone
taught those ostriches a lesson.’ But they did good service for Simpson, rasped
out defiantly after he collapsed while