French Revolutions

on her
experiences of the ‘derme’, which I hoped at the time was a skin complaint but
have just realised referred to the Dome. In all this time my only contribution
was ‘Stansted Airport?’, and when that emerged unsteadily through my vibrating
teeth, she looked at me as if I’d just pointed out she was wearing too much
make-up and snapped, ‘Non, Luton.’
    A miner’s face greeted me in the
mirror above the basin — white helmet-strap lines down otherwise black cheeks,
eyes like Polos on a chocolate muffin. This, I noted with tired pride, was the
most road-warrior-like I had looked yet, the closest approximation to another
iconic picture in my procycling Merckx special, of Eddy during the 1972
Paris-Roubaix. Held on an invariably cold, wet day in April on a route
specially selected to include as many cobbled streets as possible,
Paris-Roubaix is known as the Hell of the North — the definitive race for
super-hard men. And there was Eddy, leaning into an arc of wet cobbles at a
speed sufficient to blur the Ford Capri parked in the background, gaze fixed
calmly to the road in front, fingertips artistically poised on the bars, and
the filth: running from the corners of his eyes and soggy-Allbran sideburns in
sweaty black rivulets, goateed around his mouth and chin, caked so completely
over both legs that where his shorts have ridden temporarily up his left thigh
is a cheeky little band of pink that separates black mud from black cotton like
a garter belt (well, you know — after ten days alone on the road I was getting
my kicks where I could).
    Why couldn’t I align myself with a
plucky but doomed underdog, a Chris Boardman or a Paul Kimmage? Or Raymond
Poulidor, perennial Tour runner-up in the Sixties and Seventies, still coming
second at the age of 40? (And if that wasn’t dispiriting enough, the French
public nicknamed him Poupou.) It has always been my misfortune to lionise
winners. When everyone was moaning about the loathsome behaviour of ‘Superbrat’
McEnroe, I was fondly indulgent — here was a man who just really wanted to win.
Bernard Hinault might have been barking mad, but having started on his
autobiography I was beginning to feel a strange awe for that monstrous ego.
‘It’s said that a great victory doesn’t really sink in until afterwards,’ he
writes on winning the world championship in 1980. ‘Not in my case! I knew
straight away what I’d done. I had conquered everybody .’
    Today’s Tours are often won by small
margins, with the overall winner maybe only taking one stage victory during the
race, sometimes none. Not in Eddy’s case! In 1970 he won eight stages, and
hogged the King of the Mountains prize for himself. His contemporaries were
outraged — the tradition then and now was to share these things out, let others
have a slice. The Cannibal’s response was a phrase he learned to say in five
languages (I heard the Italian version on my 1973 Tour of Italy video): ‘I am
completely indifferent.’ Not a great one as catch-phrases go, but imbued with a
cold arrogance that I could only admire. And he was Belgian, for heaven’s sake.
How could a Belgian be so brutally determined, so merciless, so... successful.
    Velcro had played an important role
in my life for the last two months: with those little prickly pads affixing
gloves, shoes, rain jacket and any number of baggage items, any careless
exuberance while dressing led to the sort of Gordian limb entanglements you
might expect during the latter stages of a one-man game of Twister. Undressing
wasn’t much better. Pulling off the Velcro strips on my gloves unleashed
drying-dog mud sprays all over the scalloped nylon bedspread, and after I
discovered that the insect repellent had leaked into my plastic bag of washing
powder I decided that the best thing all round was simply to go fully dressed
into the shower (a plastic booth in the corner of the room) and soap down my
clothes. This worked a treat, at least until I started stripping them off for a
kickabout rinse in the shower tray, grape-crusher style.
    The temperature control was one of
those safecracker jobs: tiny clockwise adjustment —
JesusChrist-ow-bloodybollocks-owowow-I’m-on-fire; minute anticlockwise
compensation — Hooooooly-Mother-of-Merckx-who-turned-on-the-hail. I had just
pulled off shorts and one sock when some body part made inadvertent but sturdy
clockwise contact, and the extravagant flailing that ensued cruelly exposed the
cubicle’s inherent