French Revolutions

bed when I found myself gradually
absorbed by the story of Eugène Christophe.
    Leading the 1913 Tour as it crosses
the Pyrenees, Christophe is hurtling down the Tourmalet when his front forks
snap, propelling him into a wall of scree. Tour rules dictate that riders must
effect all repairs themselves (a situation that persisted until 1930), so
Christophe dusts himself down, shoulders his stricken machine and somehow runs
with it for 10 kilometres down what was then Europe’s highest road (sorry:
‘road’). Arriving bloody and exhausted at the village of Sainte-Mairie-de-Campan,
he is followed silently into the local forge by Tour snoops keen to ensure no
illicit aid is offered or received. Waving the blacksmith aside and perhaps
hissing lengthy compound insults through his teeth, Christophe begins to hammer
wearily at strips of glowing metal, and after two hot, hard hours has somehow
fashioned himself a set of forks. As he prepares to set off, now four hours
down and in last place, an official blocks his way. The handiwork may have been
all his own, but in allowing the blacksmith’s boy to pump the bellows
Christophe has accepted indirect third-party help. Illegal assistance — a
further ten-minute penalty.
    I put the book down on the
rain-spotted table, leant back in my slatted folding chair and looked up at the
mountains. Then I went inside, withdrew a number of other titles and thumbed
through their indices looking for Christophe, Eugène. The early years were bad
enough. In 1910 he ploughed through snowdrifts in the Milan-San Remo race, an
effort which earned him a month in hospital and two lost years of racing; in
his comeback Tour, 1912, he actually finished with a lower overall time than
the winner, but because that year the race was decided on an arcane points basis
Eugène was placed second. And then it got worse.
    Determined not to abandon the 1913
race after the rather trying bellows incident, he somehow claws his way back to
finish seventh. The war then intervenes, but in the first race afterwards,
1919, Christophe soon finds himself the inaugural wearer of the new yellow
jersey selected by the Tour organisers to distinguish the race leader. During
the stage between Metz and Dunkirk, at 468k (what? What ?) the
second-longest in Tour history, race leader Christophe feels an ominous shudder
and then a mighty wrench. He can’t quite believe it, but it’s the front forks
again. By the time he sources a new pair from a bike factory he has lost over
an hour and again it is too much to regain. He keeps dying until 1925, when, nineteen
years after his first Tour and now aged 40, he enters his last, abandoning well
before the finish.
    I restocked the library and went into
the bar. I’d hidden ZR behind a table here to minimise the risk of
kit-comparison sessions during which the extent of my ignorance would be
quickly exposed, but now extracted it. Propped against Nick’s turbo trainer,
without the panniers it looked lithe and poised. I thought of a picture of
Eugène Christophe I’d just seen: flat cap, recklessly enormous ringmaster moustache,
spare tyre wrapped round shoulders of fisherman’s jersey, filthy legs planted
on filthy cobbles. And, held by one hand on the saddle, the other on the bars,
his bike. It reminded me a lot of my first bike, the hand-me-down Wayfarer: no
gears, meaty iron tubing, sit-up-and-beg handlebars — and a big chrome bell. A
bell. Ding-ding! Ding-ding! Leader of world’s most gruelling sporting event
coming through! Ding-ding-ding!
    Suddenly I understood something
important. Part of the Tour de France was about trying to get one over on your
opponents: better tactics, better equipment, better drugs — a competitive
advantage by any means necessary. I remembered a helicopter shot I’d seen of
the Tour of Italy, with half a dozen riders sneaking a short-cut across a
petrol-station forecourt while the rest of the peloton log-jammed slowly
through the adjacent roundabout. Stuff like this, and the more epically blatant
chicanery of the early years, had appealed to me, and in my own way I had
already done it all. But beneath this professional cynicism, the Tour was still
fundamentally about the amateur ideals of courage and noble suffering, and this
was a Tour I hadn’t yet entered. In any case, who were my opponents?
Carefully selected old men aside, I was essentially competing against myself:
the shiftless, irresolute schemer facing the rather more reticent