French Revolutions

of his bidon, raised
it at the plaque and chirped, ‘Fausto Coppi.’ He then took a nip of what,
judging by the alarmed exhalation he delivered following its ingestion, was
probably not a soft drink; having been offered and having accepted a
throat-torching memorial tot of my own, I can report that it was in fact the
very hardest drink I have ever successfully swallowed. ‘A la Tour,’ I wheezed,
commemorating once more the Tower. ‘A1 Giro,’ reciprocated The Ugly, taking
another formidable swig.
    As pilgrimages go, theirs was a brief
one. After an awkward wait I slung a leg over ZR, mumbled some
attention-attracting sound and nodded queryingly up the mountain; The Ugly
wrinkled his considerable nose and shimmied a hand in polite rejection. We
shook hands, I dabbed a digit at my tender neck flesh with an awkward ‘Grazie’
and then, leaving them nodding and sighing in the cool shadow of the stele,
gingerly proceeded. Onward and upwards.
    This last stretch of plaited hairpins
and scorched earth was where the Italian fans had gathered for yesterday’s
stage. Pink pages of the Gazzetta dello Sport flapped limply at the edge
of the road, occasionally wedged under empty litre bottles of Moretti beer, the
Tyrolean-hatted fat man on the label beaming at me through his stein-froth.
They’ve never needed a Seventies revival in Italy: along with fare-dodging,
drink-driving and sexual molestation, littering is just another in the nation’s
impressive roll-call of lingering period pastimes.
    And if there’s one thing they love as
much as mess, it’s filth. On-road Tour graffiti rarely ventures beyond the name
of a favoured rider or team; a syringe labelled ‘epo’ below a suspect racer is
about as creative as it gets. But as I toiled up the dead bends, the smooth new
asphalt ahead was decorated with complex artistic tableaux. Many of these were
spoof road markings, perfectly composed ‘give way’ junction dashes neatly
marked ‘pantani — stop’, but most of them were not.
    Simon O’Brien had been at Nick and
Jan’s place in the Pyrenees the night before the Tour passed their front door
in 1997, and offered a stark warning of what can happen when you’re out there
in the dark with a paintbrush, how your intended allez chris can find itself evolving into an everton football club or a fuck the mancs. The Italians, however,
sated these unseemly urges in a more appropriately artistic manner. Their
preferred icon was the erect penis, sometimes as an incidental prop in a scene
depicting unpopular riders eagerly fellating or sodomising one another, but
more commonly as a stand-alone icon, a vast, scarlet-frenumed, wispy-scrotumed
deity solemnly spanning both sides of the carriageway.
    I’d just ridden across a testicle the
size of a mini-roundabout when the road thrashed through one more hairpin, then
straightened, then... what? What ? WHAT ? An obelisk, a souvenir
stall, three dozen wandering motorists and bikers and red-faced cyclists and a
360-degree panorama... the summit, the second-highest point of the Tour. I hadn’t
just conquered the feared and mighty col d’Izoard, I’d pissed it. I couldn’t
understand how it had been so straightforward: was I getting better at cycling,
or better at tolerating pain? The same thing, I suppose.
    As sensations go, it was sensational.
I was still beaming like a loon when I careered an hour ahead of schedule into
Briançon, Europe’s highest town, finally overtaking at a set of lights the
caravan-towing Landcruiser I’d chased all the way down the Izoard. ‘Capitale
mondiale du vélo’, trumpeted a billboard as I bounced and bumped along the
pot-holed road through the old city walls; ‘Let’s talk mountains’, said
another, and I thought, yeah, OK, let’s. It was Saturday lunchtime, and the
sunny streets were lazily busy as I ate burger and chips outside a café in our
appointed meeting place, the modestly fountained place de l’Europe. ‘Ça va
pas,’ scolded the waiter genially as he brought me my Coke. ‘Is hot
température, the cyclistes not drink cold boissons...’ here he clutched his
ample belly ‘... is bad for l’estomac.’ The last person who’d told me off for
drinking iced beverages on a hot day — the grocer who’d sold me two bottles of
Fanta at Comps-sur-Arby — had been lucky to escape without a bike-pump
cappuccino enema, but the world was a very different place today. I nodded,
shrugged, sipped and waited.
    The support vehicle