French Revolutions

was still
high and so, as far as I could tell on the rare occasions when I angled my gaze
up from the softening tarmac, were the haze-topped peaks ahead. If those were
the Alps, then these, I supposed, were their foothills. It should not have come
as a surprise to discover that the Alps had very large feet.
    This was a tourist route, all big gay
Germans on big gay motorbikes and roof-racked British estate cars with
painstakingly yellow-painted headlights. At least the Brits noticed me. Every
other nationality has been brought up in a culture where pedalling some poxy
bike up a cliff for no good reason is considered almost humdrum behaviour, but
the looks I got from the occupants of right-hand-drive vehicles were very different:
a sort of intrigued horror that had me running a hand over the top of my helmet
to check for snagged roadkill.
    Up through the wizened weeds I went,
into an empty world of crumbled rock, one with ample disincentives to
settlement even without the enormous military firing range the road now
gingerly traversed. After inching pained but ecstatic over a crest, I
freewheeled round the next corner to be confronted with the full horror of the
term ‘false summit’. This was an awful moment. Come friendly bombs and fall on
me.
    As a weary nod to Chris Boardman’s
training diktats, I’d been scribbling occasional contributions to a
‘performance feedback’ diary. His sample entries were along the lines ‘a hard
day, but never pushed into red’ and ‘sore, no stress’. Deciphering the diseased
scrawl I penned at Comps-sur-Artuby, where my attempts at refuelling were once
again confounded, this time by a restaurant sign stridently recommending
‘Tripes et Daubes’, I can just make out the words ‘v. bilious/feeble’.
    It’s difficult to imagine that the
one-man Fanta festival I held at Comps ameliorated this state of affairs, as
evidenced by the shaming scenes enacted in a lay-by just beyond it. I’d somehow
grovelled through 100 kilometres, but there were still 28 to go before the
arranged rendezvous with my — hollow laugh — support vehicle. If the road had
not immediately lowered itself into a mammoth descent that obviated pedalling
for 16 of these I cannot imagine I would have made it.
    Freewheeling past hill-topping
castles, almost Arabian in their ochred bulk, I eased into the Grand Canyon du
Verdon, an excitable river squeezed between granite flanks. The canyon is by
common consent the most spectacular in Europe, but the incredible truth is that
it wasn’t discovered until 1905. It still amazed me that the caves of Lascaux had remained hidden for so long, but overlooking a 12-mile-long, half-mile-wide
hole in the heart of the world’s most densely populated continent is in a
different league of geographical apathy. And less than fifty years later it was
almost flooded for a hydroelectric scheme, one only abandoned when the money
ran out: you can still see, and I did, the side tunnels they bored out in
preparation. Then I saw a sign welcoming me to Castellane, and just beyond it a
parked maroon Espace, and after 128 very different kilometres from those I’d
breezed through the day before I had somehow made it.
    Castellane was compact and noisy and
overlooked by a tiny chapel stuck terrifyingly atop a towering rock: not so
much standing guard over the town as hoping someone would catch it when it
fell. The other point about Castellane was that it was full, complet, no
vacancy, keine zimmer. ‘Ascension Day,’ said Birna, though at the time neither
of us appreciated the hilarious incline-related irony. I lacked the wherewithal
to participate in the so-you-think-you’ve-had-a-bad-day post mortem, nodding
limply through the support crew’s breathless catalogue of in-car vomit and
vertigo. ‘I wheel-sucked a mechanic,’ was all I could whisper in reply.
    I was all over the shop, but the Tour
pros would just be setting their stalls out. There was a sprint scheduled at
Castellane — a sprint. And then another 200 kilometres of mountains,
with a combined tariff equivalent to cycling up and down the Empire State Building. Eleven times. I hated myself for dwelling on the looming awfulnesses,
but at the same time couldn’t help it. Tour riders at the end of the day don’t
really want to stop talking Tour — can’t, in fact. They live and breathe the
event more literally than competitors in any other sporting contest, and at the
end of a day all they want to talk about is