French Revolutions

double, but to you sir with the waxen death
mask a treble gradient chevron.
    I heard my first cowbells as I filled
both bidons with cool water from an almost painfully charming dolphin-head
fountain by the turn-off to Marie-Blanque. There was a shaded bench by the
fountain, and sitting down with the full force of post-wine drought suddenly
upon me I laid the groundwork for the most serious if. If I hadn’t drunk two
litres of chilled water.
    One corner out of Escot and the peaks
suddenly leapt out above me with a genuinely startling visual boo: great slabs
of rock poking out from rainforest greenery, some of them so sheer that I
couldn’t crane my neck far enough to see the tops. A trio of thermal-topped
riders swished towards me round a curve at enormous speed, wheel to wheel,
leaning steeply into the corner. Ignoring the implications of their velocity
and attire I plodded on, click-clicking down into gear twenty-four past the roofless
shepherds’ huts.
    For some time the only sounds were
ZR’s click-clicks and drrr-thwicks, echoing tinnily off the granite
walls. Soon, however, my ugly respirations became rather more dominant. The
gradient didn’t seem ridiculous, with none of the batteries of hairpin bends
I’d been led to expect, but I seemed to be finding it hard to maintain the
revs. Rhythm, I knew, was crucial, and while my heart was playing techno my
legs were struggling to keep time with Mantovani. In contradiction of the modem
maxim, there was pain but no gain. Click-click-click and I was in bottom gear,
twenty-seven, with no more shots in the locker if the incline steepened, which
of course it did just round the corner.
    Tour riders have any number of terms
to describe what was happening to me, and try as I might to resist I found them
all parading funereally through my mind. I was going backwards, I was cooked.
Grovelling, that was another. Dying. I had cracked. The sweat stung my eyes
before being sluiced away down grimace lines that would show up tomorrow like
long, white fencing scars on my otherwise broiled face.
    There were names painted all over the
road now, French, Spanish and even the odd outbreak of Cyrillic, and every one
of them seemed a rebuke. I imagined people racing each other — racing each
other — up this slope, fans shouting their names as they jockeyed and
jostled and jumped on the pedals to speed away.
    When your body is very hot and you
make it very cold, bad things happen: cramps, essentially, affecting all parts
of the musculature. Two litres, I learned later, is what some Tour riders
restrict themselves to for an entire day. ‘Driest is fastest,’ said five-times
Tour winner Jacques Anquetil. Pierre Brambilla, in 1947 the winner of the King
of the Mountains competition for the Tour’s top climber, guzzled cold water
from a fountain during the scorched 1948 race and retired in agonies 10
kilometres further on. The day that Tour ended he buried his bike in the garden
and never raced again.
    My legs felt wizened and pickled, my
arms bruised and tremulous. Filling my lungs was like hyperventilating next to
a faulty incinerator, yet the fire in my chest could not melt the heavy, iced
spasm into which my innards had frozen. I coughed up iron and vinegar and
flobbed it feebly on to my forearm.
    But at the same time, none of this
was the problem. I had seen people feeling worse than this and carrying on,
400-metre athletes throwing up in full flow on the home straight, marathon
runners wobbling drunkenly into the stadium, any number of Tour cyclists on any
number of Tour mountains. Even I had too, I remembered: stumbling agonisingly
towards the line in the second-year 800-metre ‘A’ race of 1974 as Neil Gross
gritted his heavily discoloured teeth in the lane alongside, the tears already
welling up in my eyes as I realised I couldn’t make my legs move any faster and
this Krankie-faced gnome was going to beat me.
    It was Eddy’s will thing. Bernard
Hinault had talked about ‘the doubts which sometimes overwhelm the rider’ and
now I saw exactly what he meant. As soon as you think you can’t, you won’t.
When the first defeatist thoughts sidled tentatively into the corridors of my
mind, the forces of determination immediately collaborated and gave the
invaders a rousing ticker-tape reception. If I could have seen the top of the
col it might have made a difference, but when I looked fuzzily down at the
odometer and saw I’d only done half of the climb’s 10 kilometres