French Revolutions

there was no
option. Like Paul Kimmage on the col du Télégraphe in the 1987 Tour, I was just
looking for somewhere to abandon. Going so slowly that I had to time my
uncleating manoeuvre carefully to avoid an unsightly fall, I clambered off ZR
by a barrier that closed off the pass’s upper reaches in winter. It would have
helped if the scenery in this section had looked a little more savagely Alpine
and a little less like Box Hill on a pleasant June weekend. Nettles,
buttercups, slugs... and then an off-key bell tinkling somewhere above. Forget
the tree line — I hadn’t even made it past the bloody cow line.
    In the state I was in, pushing was
barely easier. In 1933, Percy Stannard was picked for the British team to ride
in the world championship after winning the national trials — his first ever
race — by shouldering his bike and running up the hills. How dare you,
Stannard. Every five minutes I remounted, but it never lasted long. Once you
get off you can’t really get on again. Cars suddenly started descending towards
me at regular intervals; every time I heard one coming I’d whip the map out of
the bar-bag and pretend I’d stopped to plot my progress. At least there were no
more cyclists.
    I did manage to do the last half
kilometre in the saddle, and even had the gall to set up a self-timer shot at
the top, standing astride ZR by the altitude sign and peering through the low
sun at the bleak but benign eminences around. And of course the descent paid
scant justice to the horrors of the climb, containing long flat sections where
horses with bleached Human League fringes wandered over the road and I had to
pedal fairly hard to keep going. I’d Velcroed myself into the all-weather top
in preparation for a chilly, windswept downhill swoop, but it never happened. I
was the Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a hill.
    Wheeling into the main square at
Laruns I was bonking fairly seriously, an awful mental and physical vacuum that
left me ill-prepared for my reception at the only open hotel. As I swayed
dead-eyed among the outdoor diners finishing their sorbets in the last of the
sun the youthful proprietress fixed me with a challenging look. The rooms were
285 francs, she said, and if I needed a garage for my vélo, eh bien, that would
be an extra 3OF. ‘Pour un vélo?’ She gave me a next-please look. I told her
that in that case I’d take it up to my room. With a sneering shake of the head
she swaggered complacently back indoors.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I yawled, in a weary,
drunken slur that raised faces from many sorbets. ‘Do you think you could come
back and try doing that a bit more rudely?’ It was gone eight by now, and
getting cold down at the foot of the vast encirclement of enormous green peaks
beneath which Laruns cowered. I should have been in an oxygen tent on a drip,
not fighting for my consumer rights in the street. Slowly waving a snot-gloved
hand in her general direction, I remounted and rolled away.
    On the outskirts I’d seen a sign
advertising a hotel memorably called Le Lorry a kilometre beyond Laruns. I
won’t pretend that this was a short kilometre, or that Le Lorry was open, or
that I didn’t return to my tormentress with my tail, and indeed my head,
between my legs. It was like surrendering to an enemy general whose humiliating
terms you had haughtily rejected an hour earlier. She demanded my passport and
kept it; she stood in folded-arms silence as I struggled cravenly with the
up-and-over garage doors; she lined up her staff to watch me drag my panniers
laboriously up the 9-inch-wide staircase. On the other hand, by looking less
like a shovel-faced Def Leppard groupie, I had the last laugh.
    The room was unpleasant — tall,
narrow and gloomy, like a Portakabin turned on end, with an ever-present cough
muffling its way through the distant ceiling to impart the atmosphere of a TB
sanatorium — but, however hungry, I wasn’t about to leave it. Gathering
together the squashed croissants and pliable chocolate squares that had made
their home in my panniers’ basements, I lay on the bed and ate the lot while
watching the final moments of the European Cup Final.
    You’re not real sportsmen, I thought
as Real Madrid jumped about on the victors’ rostrum, you’re just good at
football. You don’t go out and flog yourself half to death every day. Only when
the Valencia squad filed vacantly past to pick up their losers’ medals did I
feel an empathy. These were the