French Revolutions

faces of men who had just faced the ultimate
sporting challenge of their lives, and had failed.
    Still, I pondered dimly, aware that I
was about to fall asleep with my clothes on again but not caring, at least I
get another go. I had lost the battle but not the war. That’s the good thing
about the Tour. Every day, every stage is a race within the race. There’s always tomorrow.

Eight

     
    When, in 1910, the Tour first got
serious about mountains, it was to the Pyrenees that the organisers came. An
official tried to drive up the Tourmalet — at 2,114 metres the highest point on
the Tour’s Pyrenean itinerary and mercifully avoided in 2000 — but got stuck in
snow near the summit and had to abandon his vehicle. Some hours later he
blundered hypothermically into a police station at the foot of the mountain,
and after a touch-and-go convalescence dispatched the following telegraph to
Tour HQ: ‘ tourmalet passable for
vehicles, no snow .’
    The first
Pyrenean exercise that year, however, was the col d’Aubisque, 1,700 metres up a
twisting track that even the Tour scouts had conceded was no more than a muddy
mule path. Tackling such an obstacle on clodhopping butcher’s bikes with no
gears, carrying spare tyres looped round their shoulders and all necessary food
and tools on their backs, was understandably a challenge. On race day, Tour
officials waited anxiously at the summit; when at last a rider did appear, he
ignored their queries — ‘What’s happened? Where are the others?’ — looking
straight through them with distant, haunted eyes. Half an hour later race
leader Octave Lapize appeared, filthy, famished, fucked as flotsam, pushing his
bike through the mud and mist. He slowly remounted, pedalled up to the official
party, stuck his face straight in theirs and summoned his last reserves to
scream, ‘Assassins!’ It is relevant to point out here that the riders
had set off at 3.30 a.m. — that’s right — and still faced 200 kilometres before
the stage finish.
    On this basis, it wasn’t ideal that
my first task of the day was the Ascension of the Aubisque:16.4 kilometres at
an average gradient of 7.2 per cent, the fourth-longest hors catégorie climb in
the 2000 Tour. I was still in a bad way — when I tried to say ‘Merci’ for my
hot chocolate in the café next door, nothing came out — but at least the
elements were being considerate, sheathing the mountains in thick cloud that
wisped down past Le Lorry as I rounded the first hairpin. The Pyrenees retain a
rough, pioneering ambience that the Alps have long since sold for a blank
traveller’s cheque. The End of the Earth and the Circle of Death are both here,
craggy, treeless highlands roamed by shepherds in snowshoes rather than futures
traders in Gore-Tex.
    Cycling into Descartes on my second
day, there had been a terrible moment when I became convinced that my credit
card was back in Loudun: by the time I realised it wasn’t, I had already
resigned myself to a 90k roundtrip to retrieve it. Since then it had become
something of a mid-morning ritual to wonder whether I’d go back if I’d left my
cards at last night’s hotel, a means of gauging my morale for the rest of the
day. Naturally, the distance I was prepared to retrace had dropped steadily
each stage, and as I hunched and panted through the grimy old spa hotels of
Eaux-Bonnes, 6k and as many fat hairpins up the road from Laruns, I knew I had
recorded the lowest score yet in the Credit Card Challenge. This was good in so
far as I hadn’t left my credit card in Laruns, but bad in so far as I now
realised that I had in fact left my passport there. Feeling internally puréed,
I stopped and sagged bonelessly over the handlebars. Then, starting bolt
upright and with my features savagely distorted into a Hinault of rage, I
barrelled furiously down the hairpins, a terrible oath-fest ricocheting off the
terraced walls. Even now I can hardly bear to picture the proprietress’s face
as she handed the document over, but when I do, yes — there it is again: a
little smile.
    Anyway, I eventually made it as far
as the ski resort of Gourette, 4k from the summit, before getting off to push.
There were signs every kilometre detailing the average gradient for the stretch
ahead: these were supposed to keep cyclists’ spirits up, but when, having
agonised through a couple of 8 per cents and a 9,1 was told to prepare for a
10, I surrendered with a cracked and puny rasp of anguish. It hadn’t