French Revolutions

he
would cast over the day ahead it wouldn’t be large enough to keep me cool. My
stomach fizzed with trepidation, but click-cleating back to the car park I at
least detected that for the first morning in two weeks my legs didn’t feel as
if they’d been energetically headbutted all night by someone wearing a welder’s
helmet.
    With my departure delayed by the
amount of time it takes to manoeuvre three children past a merry-go-round, a
Pokémon stall and a dead pigeon, the sun was already high when I returned to
the hotel room to fill my bidons with the usual fly-friendly blend of grape
juice and tap water. The plan had been for me to drive to Carpentras with ZR in
the boot of the Twingo, then set off for the 149-kilometre stage to the Ventoux
summit, where Birna and the kids would meet me in the distressingly dear
Renault Espace we had hired. The issue here was that on past form I would
require at least eight hours (including the non-negotiable long lunch) to do
those 149 kilometres, and that was without taking the gradient factor into
account.
    As it was now midday, this schedule
appeared an irksome one. Additionally keen to minimise the scope for hot death,
I abruptly decided to sit out the worst of the sun by bunking off the
preparatory meanderings. Driving beyond Carpentras to the village of Sault, I’d skip 89 kilometres and gird myself for a late-afternoon assault on the final 60k.
This, after all, included most of the awful bits.
    It was a sombre send-off. My
6-year-old son Kristjan had only recently been disabused of a misconception
that I was competing among cycling’s élite in the actual race; horribly
crestfallen, he looked at me with the betrayed air of a child coming to terms
with the fact — first suspected, perhaps, during those self-mutilating Swingball
sessions — that his father might not be the world’s most complete athlete.
Untroubled by such concerns, his 2-year-old sister Valdis filled the lobby with
gay chordes as I strode out of the lift in full Lycra. I can normally count on
4-year-old Lilja for an appropriate sense of theatre, and this was briefly
supplied when she tugged at my shorts, looked up with wide eyes and pleaded,
‘Don’t go up the mountain, Daddy!’ I hardly had the chance to ruffle her hair
with a brave smile before she added, ‘It’s really boring.’’
    A long, broad hump of a hill, Le Mont
Ventoux didn’t in fact look that bad as I drove into the unremarkable town of
Carpentras, half an hour southwest and 6,265 feet below its round, chalky
summit. In a certain light, the topping of bare, bleached rocks is said to give
the impression of a permanent layer of snow, but on a wincingly bright
afternoon in late May, rising gently out of the cherry trees and lavender
fields, Ventoux seemed benign, a big sandcastle recently washed over by the first
wave of an encroaching tide.
    Still, you couldn’t miss it. Six
thousand two hundred and sixty-five feet: hoist the Eiffel Tower on top of
Canary Wharf, then stick the whole thing on Ben Nevis — let’s face it, we’ve
all wanted to — and you’d still be looking up at the summit. Ventoux isn’t an
Alp, nor whatever the single of Pyrenees is — it’s just there on its own,
looming up on almost every Provençal horizon, making its own weather, that
squat, muscle-bound bulk spread across a fold and a half of my Michelin map
like a whole mountain range in itself. The eye is drawn to it, and often the
feet follow. Mountaineering was invented here: by conquering its summit in
1336, the poet and scholar Petrarch became the first man to climb a peak as an
end in itself. Almost six hundred years later, future Prime Minister Edouard
Daladier had a road built to the top, again for no practical purpose other than
curiosity and a determination to tame nature.
    On this basis, it is no surprise that
the Tour de France should regularly make its way to that slightly lunar summit.
Unspectacular as it might look from a distance, Ventoux is the most feared
mountain in the Tour’s considerable arsenal. ‘It is not like other mountains’
has been a common refrain among riders since the race first went up it in 1951.
    And here I was, a pallid, flimsy
tourist in nylon and Lycra sportswear, unsuccessfully trying to remember at
what precise time this whole stupid scheme had seemed like a good idea.
Striving to psych myself up, something I’ve never ever been able to do, I
acknowledged that for the first time I was up against a legend