French Revolutions

centre-west of the country, the line meandered briefly
north into Brittany before turning back on itself, sweeping down to the
Pyrenees, then across Provence via Simpson’s Ventoux to the Alps. Here it
flailed madly about for a disturbing amount of time, working its way
circuitously northwards: ‘The entire length of the French Alps from the south,
a route last taken in 1949, with the Cols d’Allos, Vars and Izoard, all over
2,000 metres high,’ panted procycling eagerly. Then it was two days in Switzerland and Germany, crossing back over the Rhine in Alsace and working westwards to the
traditional Parisian finish.
    The accompanying map had the benefit
of being small, but most of the important figures in a box alongside did not.
    5 July, stage five: Vannes-Vitré, 198
km.
    6 July, stage six: Vitre-Tours, 197
km.
    7 July, stage seven: Tours-Limoges,
192 km.
    Six hundred kilometres in three days,
as near as ‘dammit’ is to swearing, though not quite as near as ‘fuck that’.
Can I have a rest now?
    8 July, stage eight:
Limoges-Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 200 km.
    9 July, stage nine: Agen-Dax, 182 km.
    10 July, stage ten:
Dax-Lourdes/Hautacam, 205 km.
    11 July, stage eleven:
Bagneres-de-Bigorre-Revel, 219 km.
    Apparently I could not. In seven
days, the riders would cover a distance that in different and rather foolish
circumstances would see them pedalling up to the outskirts of Warsaw. Worse, I
knew from my television experiences that a lot of these kilometres would be
breezed through by riders idly chatting to team-mates with their arms off the
handlebars as they maintained speeds which even the ugliest exertions would
leave me some way short of.
    Not that there’d be any of that when
the mountains got going. The route might change, but every Tour is won and lost
in the second week, when the Pyrenean and Alpine climbs meet an angry sun
halfway, the last stragglers wobbling over the line in graphic distress after
eight scorched and airless hours in the saddle. Footballers whine if they’re
asked to play more than a single ninety-minute game a week. Olympic athletes
demand a day of rest after running half a lap of the track. But when the Tour
de France hits the mountains, its competitors have to haul themselves to the
ragged edge of exhaustion from dawn to dusk, day after day, inching agonisingly
up the highest roads in Europe and then careering lethally down them.
    To this end, procycling had
also helpfully included a ‘gradient profile´’ of stage twelve, Carpentras-Le
Mont Ventoux. As learning curves go, they didn’t come much steeper: an alarming
succession of peaks and troughs that looked like the printout of a lie-detector
test. Two impressive 3,000-foot cols caused jerky fluctuations of the sort
you’d expect from Jeffrey Archer comparing O-level results with Pinocchio, then
— whoosh! — there was Jonathan Aitken booking Baron von Munchausen into the
Ritz as up to Ventoux the line soared crazily off the scale.
    All in all, there were 3,630
kilometres (which may be more familiar to you as 2,256 miles) and sixteen
mountains to be conquered in three weeks. It was the equivalent of cycling from
London to Bristol every day, only with Swindon wreathed in cold mist atop a
towering peak so steep you’d be kneeing yourself in the face if you walked up
it.
    Slowly, certainly, the
wrongheadedness of my initial pledge was dawning on me. With two weeks to go
and my train ticket to Dover already rashly purchased, I knuckled down. I took
out temporary membership of a gym, bought Chris Boardman’s Complete Book of
Cycling, and tried to fix the Peugeot’s brakes.
    I didn’t take too much notice of the
text side of Mr Boardman’s volume after reading of the importance of training
on Christmas Day to establish a psychological advantage over one’s rivals, and
coming across phrases such as ‘The Tour came close to destroying me because it
slowly drained my spirit... The Tour is the limit. It is the Olympics, Wimbledon and the World Cup all rolled into one. It is the highest level of sport... That
feeling in the pit of your stomach that the next three weeks are going to
hurt.’
    On this basis, it didn’t seem ideal
that with less than a fortnight before departure I didn’t actually own a
roadworthy bicycle. Jogging for half an hour up and down the towpath every
evening was a step in the right direction, but not a very big one. I needed to
do some cycling. Or anyway some cycling-type exercises.
    Chris Boardman, a