French Revolutions

helped to
hear cars that had overtaken me changing messily down into first gear as they
disappeared into the mist above and tackled an even more alarming hairpin.
    I’d tried to do it properly: bananas
in my back pocket, apple juice frothing unappealingly in my bidons, limbs
slathered in Ibuleve pain-relief cream instead of suntan lotion. But it was no
good. I was not a climber. One of the final unexplored avenues for sporting
glory was closing before me, and what was now left to a man of 36? Golf,
perhaps. Darts. Curling?
    I did at least manage to ride the
last 2 k, in time to see the mountains do a gentle striptease as the mist lifted,
exposing my shame to rocks as wet and silver and green as an evil pizza-chef’s
anchovy. ‘Félicitations!’ said the cyclo-tourist sign at the top; the
cyclo-tourist himself said something else.
    It was nippy up at 1,709 metres. Each
of the hairs on my arm dangled a tiny crystal ball from its tip, a shimmering
droplet of cloud. My legs were rather less picturesquely slathered and
spattered in road mud. After donning rain top and leggings I set off down a
tiny, pot-holed road that clung to the rim of a great, sheer rock bowl
half-filled with mist. With my hands numbstruck to the bars I swished in and
out of Napoleonic tunnels that aimed small, icy drip-falls into my face. Dirty
tongues of snow probed out on to the road — yesterday that underwheel slappy-mash
sound had been melted tar, today it was slush. I was almost relieved when the
road suddenly levelled and rose for the 4k climb to the col du Soulor.
    During my failed assault of the
Aubisque I had enjoyed some success with a downwards flick of the ankle that
somehow seemed to help propel the opposing leg through the debilitating
ten-o’clock-to-midnight arc of the pedal revolution, and employing this weapon,
along with the old stalwart hand-on-thigh pushdown, I crested the Soulor at
some speed. This carried me at incautious velocity down a circuitous descent,
my sagging mouth whipped and pulled about by wind and G-force.
    The descent of the Soulor ended Chris
Boardman’s Tour in 1997 (torn back muscle and damaged vertebrae), almost ruined
Lance Armstrong’s 2000 preparations (a 75-k.p.h. fall in training) and in 1951
caused perhaps the scariest spill in Tour history. Wim van Est, the first
Dutchman ever to lead the race, skidded and went off the edge of a hairpin,
landing 20 metres down on the only ledge above a vertical eternity. To retrieve
him his team knotted all their spare tubes together and lowered them over the
edge to make a rope; van Est was rescued but the tubes stretched so much that
the entire team had to abandon the race.
    With blanched old Tourisms flashing
beneath my wheels — richard je t’aime;
forza pantani; virenque = epo beneath
a huge carriageway-spanning syringe — I hurtled into Aucun, where I
late-lunched in a ski-hotel restaurant, ZR’s steaming wheel-rims cooling off in
the tackle room usually set aside for snowsuits and sledges. The appalling
exertions of the climb and the nervous strain of the descent hit me in full as
I sat there among the afternoon’s last diners, prim and elderly holidaymakers
on mountain-air constitutionals. Blundering dismally into such genteel
establishments looking (and often behaving) like the sole survivor of a
pot-holing tragedy had long since stopped bothering me. Again I could only
watch as flies grubbed about in my mud-speckled armhair, and when my grapefruit
appetiser inevitably squirted citric acid straight into both eyes I didn’t even
flinch.
    Fumbling parts of some sort of cutlet
into my unstable maw I got out the stage itinerary, even though I could now
recite it by heart. Ahead from Aucun lay a run up the valley to Argelès-Gazost,
followed by... drool wine into Lycra... followed by... grasp knife in right
hand like screwdriver and jab listlessly at meat... followed by... oh, to big
bad buggery and back, followed by the steepest hors catégorie climb in the race,
a 12.9-kilometre, 8.5 per cent assault on the colossus referred to by the
organisers as Lourdes-Hautacam.
    There had been bad times before but,
anvil-flattened by the doubts which sometimes overwhelm the rider, these were
the worst. The people around me were on holiday, and for the first time I
accepted that I was not. Hautacam lay at the tip of a tiny, dead-end road drawn
by someone, or rather someone else, with a degenerative nervous disease. I’d
have to go all the way up and then all