French Revolutions

challenging for the leader’s yellow
jersey on the dreadful Mont Ventoux climb in the 1967 Tour de France.
    By dying, and by dying from heart
failure brought about by overzealous consumption of the amphetamines that were
later found both in his liver and jersey pocket, Simpson became the first
Englishman to make a newsworthy contribution to the Tour since its debut in
1903. His fate showed both that the Tour’s uniquely monstrous demands were requiring
men to perform beyond their limits, and that despite this they would willingly
gamble their lives in exchange for one of sport’s greatest prizes.
    Tommy’s tragedy was the focus of an
article I once read in a weekend supplement. Its theme was that though the
lesson of his death was clear enough, it had not been learnt. I was
particularly struck by the accompanying textbook-style illustration which
suggested that, in an age where the demands of professional sport spawn
outlandish physiques, there is no more grotesque specimen than the Tour de
France cyclist. His oiled, hairless thighs are basted Christmas hams; those
stringy, wizened arms last night’s leftover chipolatas. Strip him, as the
artist had down one half, and it gets worse — lungs so enlarged that they can
squeeze out below his ribcage like a nascent pot belly, abrupt tan-line
tidemarks delineating sun-broiled flesh from the ghostly, pallid areas forever
sheathed beneath shorts and jersey. Inside his body, years of drug abuse have
thickened his blood to the consistency of toothpaste, extruded laboriously
through the leathery ventricles of a heart distended by relentless
cardiovascular activity.
    It isn’t a good look, overall, but at
least they don’t have to put up with it for long. Given the ludicrous demands
of the event and its associated history of dangerously pioneering chemistry, it
wasn’t surprising to learn that those who have competed in years gone by can
look forward to the briefest retirement in professional sport. A life
expectancy more than a decade and a half below the average means anyone seeking
to organise a cycling Seniors Tour would struggle to recruit a quorum.
    These were all terrible tidings. I
had begun to imagine my own Tour as a long jaunt through vineyards and
sunflowers; maybe I’d get sunburn and a sore arse, but I didn’t fancy going
into an Alpine pharmacy with one hand holding my lungs in and the other
flicking through the phrasebook for ‘my organs are distended’. If these things
happened to healthy young jocks in their sporting prime, what about a man
theoretically old enough to have fathered children who remembered Adam and the
Ants?
    I needed succour, and I found it in
the achievements of Firmin Lambot. By winning the Tour at the age of 36, ‘The
Lucky Belgian’ offered genuine hope that I, an entire year younger, might
feasibly complete the course without doing a Tommy

One

     
    ‘Oh, it’s you again.’
    It’s never wise to phone a
Frenchwoman more than once in any given fortnight, even if — or perhaps
especially if — she happens to work on a help desk. Asking the Tour de France
press office for details of the race route was clearly ranked on the scale of
telephonic enquiries somewhere between ‘Have you ever considered the benefits
of pet insurance?’ and ‘What colour knickers are you wearing?’ No matter that
the route had clearly been decided well before the release of the basic outline
in September, some six months previously.
    ‘We do not announce zis
informations,’ said the voice defiantly, ‘until fifteen May.’ The line went
dead; you could just imagine her flinging the phone down in petulant
exasperation as a sympathetic press-office colleague looked up from her Paris
Match and, slowly unwrapping another bon-bon, said, ‘Don’t tell me —
another journalist.’
    Anyway, it was a date. The plan, as
it stood, was to complete the Tour route before the race itself set off on 1
July. Departing on 15 May gave me six weeks in which to do so — double the time
allotted to the professionals; it also meant I would be 3 5 for three whole
days of the period. On the other hand, all I now had to plot and prepare for my
odyssey were a month and a postcard-sized map of the country with a squiggly
line linking the start and end points of each stage, torn from the October
issue of procycling.
    Each Tour has a new route — travelled
clockwise one year, anticlockwise the next. The 2000 Tour was an anticlockwise
one. Starting in the