French Revolutions

of the Tour. By
conquering Ventoux I could feel a direct affinity with some of the greatest
names in sporting history. This would be like taking a penalty at Wembley or
portentously bouncing a yellow Slazenger on the Centre Court baseline, only
with better weather and a nice view. And if I took it easy, it couldn’t be that
hard, could it? Sans panniers, I’d breezed up the col de Saraille. This
was just a steeper, longer hill, I reasoned, and if I could cope with feeling
slightly less breezy it could be mastered.
    Regrettably, stage twelve,
Carpentras-Ventoux, was by any standards beyond reason. A perfect exercise in
agonising futility, it ended with a summit finish: up to the top, from A to B,
then all the way back down to A in the team coach. The stage profile map was a
horrible document. My 60 kilometres included the second-category col de
Notre-Dame des Abeilles, a fourth-category hill and the merciless ascent of Ventoux,
at 21k comfortably the most drawn-out hors catégorie climb in the Tour’s
itinerary.
    Ventoux’s notoriety was of course
sealed in the 1967 Tour. You can blame the heat, you can blame the drugs, but
the bottom line is that Le Mont Ventoux remains the only peak in the Tour’s
97-year history to have caused a man’s death through physical overexertion.
    I’d bought a video of Tom Simpson’s
life, and watched it before I left. It was the ordinariness of his story that
made its final chapter so desperately poignant. An inevitably humble upbringing
in Durham and Nottingham as the youngest of six kids, the one who always had to
win at Ludo; the borrowed bike that won him the first race with his local club
at the age of 16, nicknamed Four-Stone Coppi in reference to his
hollow-cheeked, beaknosed similarity to the great Fausto, cycling’s first
superstar. The additionally inevitable ‘happy-go-lucky’ descriptions from those
who always enjoyed a chat and a laff with Tom.
    The cycling scrapbooks under the bed,
the determination that had him writing to pros all over Europe for advice;
winning a bronze at the 1956 Olympics then going off to Brittany with £100 in
his pocket to turn pro; adapting to the people, language and food so
successfully that when he met his future wife Helen a year later she thought he
was French. Winning four of his first nine races and writing home to say he was
earning big money. Almost grabbing the lead in his first Tour in 1960, aged 22.
The first big victories — Bordeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo — wearing the
chequered-band Peugeot jersey like the one that now clung to my thumping chest.
The big car, the holidays in Corsica. The home movies: skiing with his two
young daughters, sleeping in a deckchair, training on a bike on rollers.
Mastering the hierarchy and tactics of road racing, and its accompanying PR
duties: as the rest of the 1960 British Tour team fidget gormlessly in front of
the Continental cameras, there’s Tom grinning hugely with his sponsor’s cap
right in the lens. Contriving the media-friendly invention of Major Tom, a
brollied and bowlered city gent whose sociological origins shared nothing with
his own. Sofa-splitting living-room mayhem in Nottingham when Tom wins the 1965
World Championship in Spain; as the first Briton ever to do so, he’s voted BBC
Sports Personality of the Year. The autographed publicity shots in his world
champion’s jersey, a clean-cut young man with a cheeky, crooked grin. Major Tom
playing the accordion with his gaping mouth frozen in lusty mid-chorus. The
broken leg that cost him the next season, and coming into 1967 knowing that at
age 30 this was probably his final chance to do well in the Tour and so
underwrite a comfortable retirement.
    Oh, Tom. I stocked up with raisins
and dried apricots in Carpentras, and followed the Tour itinerary to Sault. The
organisers were obviously being kind, contriving a route that bent away from
Ventoux, tactfully shielding it from the riders’ line of vision until the last
possible moment. The sky was the colour of ZR, a deep, almost metallic blue,
its intensity emphasised by occasional smoke-signal puffs of white cloud. Kids
were ambling home for lunch along the flat, scrub-lined roads into empty towns
shuttered up for the long afternoon.
    It was an airless day, but in the
harsh Provençal sun everything seemed unnaturally sharp: cherries gleaming like
varnished holly berries, neon poppies lining dayglo lavender meadows. Up the
col de Murs I overtook a stretched-out crocodile of