French Revolutions

Serge. What about Benito’s?’
    ‘Well, I dunno — the food’s good, but
look at his furniture and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single oblique
angle.’
    ‘Fair point. Dax Romana?’
    ‘I dunno — the pitwheel in their
cross-section model of a colliery hasn’t revolved in months. And they keep
their anchovies in the fridge.’
     
    The waiter offered me a more distant
table, but I knew that a whispered drrr-thweeek would play even worse
tricks on a shot cerebral cortex, and he understood immediately when I said I
would have to leave.
    On the way home, chip-stuffed pitta
bread in still-trembling hand, I began to fear for myself. For some days now I
had become mildly obsessed with Eddy Merckx’s explanation of what made a great
champion: that while it was possible to assess a cyclist’s physical capabilities,
‘there are no laws that govern the will’. Suddenly I understood exactly what he
meant. Clocking up the ‘k’s and bullying myself into physical condition, I’d
slightly missed the point. The Tour was about mental strength, telling your
brain to shut up when it started screaming at you to stop, to control physical
suffering as if it was just a schmaltzy emotion, like crying in Tarka the
Otter. I couldn’t imagine Eddy driven to the dizzy brink of mania by three
squeaky dolls. The mountains are coming, I thought. My legs might cope, but
will my will? My will won’t.
    There were two rest days in the 2000
Tour, one after the Pyrenees and the other just before the end of the Alps. Playing a rest-day joker before the mountains even started seemed a bit feeble, but
then it wasn’t my fault. All I could do was conduct myself in an appropriately
professional manner, which, after reading Paul Kimmage’s account of Tour rest
days, required me to sleep a lot, wash shorts in the bidet and go for a quick
spin on the bike to stop my legs from stiffening up. The first two kept me
occupied until 6 p.m., whereupon I pedalled off for a ride-thru McDonald’s,
picking up a couple of lagers from a Leader Price store on the way home after
seeing two sun-wizened winos exchanging crafty, incredulous smiles as they
emerged with armfuls of bargain beer.
    The alarmingly high alcoholic content
of these ales helped tide me through an evening of French television, one whose
primetime content was dominated by toe-curling studio jamborees reminiscent of Noel’s
House Party. Then the phone rang. It was reception saying they had a fax
for me from the Société du Tour de France.
    The last day before the mountains is,
for the élite riders, the end of the beginning; for the rest, it’s the
beginning of the end. When snow crops up on the horizon their sights shift from
stage wins to survival, languishing up hairpins behind the guy who’s worked out
exactly how much they’ve got in hand before the broom wagon sweeps them up or
they’re excluded on time differential (anyone finishing a slow mountain stage
in a time 4 per cent greater than the winner’s is kicked out).
    The receptionist had refused to
confirm or deny that Tour riders would be staying in the Splendide (‘I regret
it is a secret,’ she said; ‘Any particular size?’ was my unanswered counter
query), but it seemed more than probable. I imagined them, like me, lying awake
in the night and feeling they were about to go into battle after a week of
phoney war. ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar glinted tauntingly by the mirror: this
was what he had been built for, this was his time. D’you fancy a bit, son, he
sneered; d’you fancy a bit of the tall stuff, eh, a bit of the old thin air?
    Of course, in some ways it didn’t
make much difference to me: my agenda had been about survival from the start.
If I hadn’t made the mistake of looking through those endless faxed tables I
probably would have been fine. But deprived of data for so long, I pored over
them. Each stage was broken down in kilometre-by-kilometre detail, with every
village, sprint and feeding station. Oh, and the climbs. Every eminence above a
certain height is graded by an arcane formula, fourth category being the
easiest, all the way up to the fearsome firsts, and beyond that the HCs: the
hors catégories, off the scale, beyond the pale. These were the legends, from
Mont Ventoux to the col d’Izoard, hairpin-stacked horrors where the Tour was
won and lost. There were seven in all, and the next day’s stage from Dax to
Lourdes-Hautacam had two of them.
    But worse than all this was