French Revolutions

didn’t last much
longer. When the last sickly little Christmas trees gave up the ghost just
round the corner, all that lay above me was a bald and soulless slagheap of
concrete-coloured rubble, the road zigzagging crudely up to a drab,
antenna-topped weather station as if drawn by a giant’s clumsy finger. Four
miles to climb 1,700 feet.
    Ahead the tarmac was liberally
decorated with heroes past and present, as if even the spectators knew that
from here on in the riders would need all the help they could get. Soundbites
from pre-Tour press conferences gone by tolled out in my still slightly
fermented brain: ‘There’s nothing there... you can’t breathe... it’s like the
moon.’ I had been playing about with ZR’s twenty-seven gears, but twenty-six of
them were now irrelevant.
    I’m still not sure why it hadn’t
occurred to me before, but it was only when I winced agonisingly round that
first corner and suddenly found myself being punched backwards by a hurricane
screaming rudely in my face that I deduced the name ‘Ventoux’ might in some way
be connected to wind. The Windy Mountain. Though this in fact turned out to be
completely wrong — the name actually derives from vinturi, Ligurian for
mountain — I did learn later that Ventoux is the world’s windiest place, the
mistral having howled over its summit at a record 320 k.p.h. just a few months
before Tom’s last stand. Forehead pressed to the handlebars, I somehow forced
my unsteady legs to the next corner, where a huge gust suddenly shoved me in
the back so violently that I all but freewheeled up to the one after.
    The wind and gradient were one thing,
which is to say two things, but in the light of Tom’s Saharan demise I hadn’t
been prepared at all for this abrupt and appalling cold. Those great heaps of
rock blocked off the setting sun, a sun whose rays I had been so desperate to
shelter from before but now missed terribly, and with the chilled gale suddenly
freeze-drying my sweaty limbs I was soon shivering uncontrollably. I hadn’t
seen a soul since le Chalet-Reynard, and when a sturdy-looking bloke wheeled
waywardly down towards me, eyes slitted, teeth gritted, hands off the bars and
wedged for warmth into their opposing armpits, I understood why. This last
stretch was inconceivably merciless, so much so that only the most brutally
determined managed it.
    Wincing along between the
barber-striped snow-depth poles, I forced myself on, each turn of the pedals
like a one-armed pushup. The Womble breathing was back, ragged and panicked,
supercharged painfully down my throat by the deafening wind. Then, with all
remaining physical and mental resolve galeforced out of me and final surrender
imminent, I stole an upwards squint to my right and there it was, a modest
gold-lettered slab of pale granite just above the road. The Simpson memorial.
Tommy’s stele.
    With a final, draining wrench I
yanked my right foot out of its pedal cleat, eased it to the tarmac and for
maybe thirty seconds leant there, head on the bar-bag. Then I uncleated the
left, dropped ZR where Tom’s bike had been lain, and juddered coldly up to the
stone. At its foot was a messy memorial mound of sun-bleached, weather-worn
cycling detritus: old tyres; caps; a saddle; bidons weighted down with chalky
lunar rubble; a PVC rain top, one sleeve knotted around a white stone, the
other whiplashing furiously in the wind. On the slab itself was a bas-relief of
a hunched cyclist, speeding gleefully down a mountain rather than languishing
palely up, and the words:
     
    A LA MÉMOIRE DE TOM SIMPSON
    MÉDAILLÉ OLYMPIQUE, CHAMPION DU
MONDE, AMBASSADELTR SPORTIF BRITTANIQUE,
    DÉCÉDÉ LE
13 JUILLET TOUR DE FRANCE 1967
    SES AMIS ET CYCLISTES
DE GRANDE BRETAGNE
     
    Nothing but hard, loud wind and
silent, bare rock above and below and all around: a wretched, lonely place to
die, a godless, extraterrestrial wasteland. Tom’s story was one of umpteen
hindsight sadnesses, and one of them occurred to me now. ‘It’s a good rider who
can ride himself into the ground.’ That was Tom himself. And then I thought
about Harry the mechanic’s last words on the video: ‘He destroyed himself — he
had the ability to do that.’
    I stumbled back down to ZR,
cackhandedly slapped some heat back into my legs and remounted. But there was
nothing left, not a single unburned calorie, not one watt of willpower.
Nothing. My legs buckled at joints I never knew existed and I folded myself
creakily off my