French Revolutions

steadily toiling cyclists,
rocking slowly from side to side as they ground out each revolution. Everyone
was taking it easy today.
    Oh, Tom. Before the 1967 Tour started
he’d marched into a Mercedes dealership in his adopted home town of Ghent and put a deposit on the flashest model, the one spinning slowly on the turntable.
If he had a good Tour he’d pay off the balance: ‘Got to have something to aim
at,’ he told his team-mates. He genuinely believed he could win, and though he
hated heat, and during his previous experience of the mountain had built up a
loathing for Ventoux — ‘it’s another world up there, the white rocks and the
blinding sun’ — he was still hugely confident.
    He started the thirteenth stage
seventh overall, kept at the front of the pack up to the foot of Ventoux and,
in the bottom part of the climb, shaded in pine trees, set off after a pair who
burst away from the leading group. The Alps were over; he’d been saying all
week that if he could stay within three minutes of the leader for the final
time-trial, this could be his year. To catch him, his team car had to pick its
way carefully through a long line of suffering also-rans, and when they got to
Tom, now out of the trees with the summit in sight, he was still up in sixth.
‘But that was when we realised some difficulties were being experienced,’ said his
mechanic.
    There was silent newsreel coverage of
this on the video, and however terrible it was to see a man literally pushing
himself beyond the limits of human endurance I found it grimly, horribly
compelling. Weaving arthritically from one side of the road to the other, he
labours forlornly to chase down two riders who have just passed; as they power
sturdily away his bobbing head drops, he slows and almost wobbles off the
left-hand side, a precipice of white rubble. The mechanic, Harry, shouts and prepares
to leap out of the car but Tom rights himself, only to totter straight into the
bleached scree on the right. Harry jumps out and undoes his toe clips — ‘That’s
enough, Tom’ — but it isn’t, not for Tom, and from somewhere he summons anger —
No, no, no, let’s get on, let’s go, do me straps, Harry — and though Harry
doesn’t say so this is where Tom rasps, ‘Put me back on the bloody bike.’ He
hates the bike, but this is his job, and he’s been world champion, and what
will they think back on the sofa in Nottingham, and this is his final throw of
the dice, one last effort to set up the rest of his life, keep his kids in
matching snowsuits and his wife sitting pretty in that 280SL with electric
windows.
    It’s make or break, and he breaks.
Two hundred metres down the road the race passes under the 1 km-to-go banner,
normally a vision of miraculous redemption for the riders but not this time for
Tom. Two fat Frenchmen in vests have stopped him toppling over on to the hot
tar and are guiding Tom to the side of the road, and though he’s being held by
two pairs of big arms he’s still pedalling automatically. Harry has been
standing up in the sunroof of the team car and now he vaults right through it
and jumps down to the roadside. Tom’s hands are locked to the bars and it takes
some effort to prise them off, unclip his shoes and lie him down on those awful
bare rocks. The last thing we see is his floppy torso, those shaven legs and
Peugeot-emblazoned shorts, being crudely belaboured by the vest men, trying to
shake some life back into him as Harry gives mouth-to-mouth. Then doctors,
oxygen, helicopters and headlines.
    Oh, Tom. I knew it wouldn’t take
much, and it didn’t. Nostalgie FM was murmuring away in the background as I
parked in Sault, a quiet cluster of spires and pantiles stuck up on a hill with
glorious views available for anyone able to tear their gaze downwards from the
hulking bulk of Ventoux. I killed the engine, and as the clear tones of Gilbert
O’Sullivan tinkled melancholically out of the dashboard I felt the back of my
neck fizz and the tips of my nostrils quiver. My soul had left the door open,
and scarcely able to believe his good fortune after three decades of jeering,
two-fingered rebuttal, Mr O’Sullivan strode gloriously in. I got a gloved hand
over my cheeks before they became wet, then having snot-wiped them dry raised a
tear-smeared gaze to the heavens above that bald, brown summit. It was better
to get this out of the way now as I certainly wouldn’t possess the wherewithal
when I got up there. Ground