French Revolutions

showed up twenty
minutes early and its driver was astonished to find me there. ‘Those mountains
were enormous ,’ she said. ‘It was bad enough driving under them. Have
you found us a hotel yet?’
    In the light of my previous exploits
it had been assumed that one HC a day was the well-balanced way. But the rules
had changed. The Tour riders, I recalled, would ride 249 kilometres from
Draguignan — remember back that far? — to Briançon in a single day: even
driving half of it I’d taken double that, and on this basis the least I could
do was push on a bit further. ‘I’ll meet you in front of the town hall in
Valloire at 6.30,’ I said, having checked out the itinerary for stage fifteen, the
penultimate day in the Alps. ‘It’s 50k up the road.’
    ‘Well... all right. What’s that on
your neck?’
    As she settled the children down to
lunch — a verb that merits inverted commas if ever there was one — I rolled off
into the crowds of shoppers, wondering if I should have told her that the only
route to Valloire would involve me cycling, and her driving, over the
second-highest road in Europe.
    The haul up to the foot of the col du
Galibier posed a severe threat to my enthusiasm. The col du Lautaret was a
spirit-sapping, soul-slapping incline, 25 upward kilometres that were
perpetually painful without quite being unbearable: in the words of Paul
Kimmage, ‘It’s a long bastard.’ There was a headwind and heavy traffic — the
N91’s passage between the 10,000-foot peaks on either side has been an
important trans-Alpine route since Roman times — and though I did reel in and
pass two fairly serious cyclists, an attempt to take on a third almost finished
me off. A bloke with a close-cropped beard and a Giro-souvenir feeding bag
slung over his shoulder, he had stared straight into my face after catching me,
gauging my physical status as pros are taught to do, before jumping on his
pedals with a vicious smirk. I rose to the bait — childish, perhaps, but then
this was what real cyclists had to do — standing up in the saddle and pistoning
my legs until every part of them seemed to glow with pain. I closed the gap to
four coach lengths — easy enough to estimate in these road conditions — but
couldn’t get it down further, and entering the first tunnel I thought, well, I
bet he hasn’t done the bloody Izoard today, then issued the world’s favourite
impolite noise and backed off.
    Motorcyclists were buying ‘I climbed
the Lautaret’ T-shirts at the col-topping café; stifling an arrogant snort I
wolfed down two bars of chocolate and an Orangina before heading off down a
listless little road that prodded shyly towards a recklessly steepled ridge of
snow-veined granite. ‘One place you won’t be cycling to...’ was how the
guidebooks chose to describe the 2,645-metre Galibier. Today was 3 June and I
was surprised to learn from the waitress that the road over the top was usually
snowed up for at least another two weeks. On any previous day the discovery
that it had opened early would have been the excuse for anguished howls:
betrayed by global warming.
    The Galibier had undone hundreds of
professional reputations, and it is still difficult to understand how I
conquered it with such glorious nonchalance. The wind hit me on that first
grassy, treeless flank, and when I entered the six o’clock shadows and lost the
sun my breath started steaming furiously. But I never really slowed, never
dropped out of twenty-six, even as the snow started to pile up at the roadside,
gritted and muddy like ice-cream dropped on the beach. A kilometre from the
top, negotiating a slushy brown stream that dribbled fitfully over the road, I
came to the squat concrete cylinder of the monument to Henri Desgrange, founder
of the Tour de France. I stopped, and with unaccustomed self-assertion flagged
down a middle-aged couple in a Toyota. ‘Un photo,’ I ordered, pointing at ZR
and Henri, and the balding husband nodded in cowed compliance. As he reversed
to the edge of the road to make way for a minibus there was a horrid crack that
echoed off the snowy rock behind; he had struck a boulder. ‘C’est rien,’ I said
briskly, glancing at the negligible remains of his offside rear-light cluster.
‘OK — mon photo.’ He snapped me and drove quickly off without even inspecting
the damage himself.
    They’d stuck Henri here because it
was his favourite mountain. Beside the Galibier, ‘Giant of the Alps’, the other