French Revolutions

cols, he remarked, were ‘gnat’s piss’. ‘The ideal Tour,’ he went on to
remark, ‘is one in which only one rider finishes.’ I’d read that back home, and
during some of my more epic sufferings had found the words recurring to me in a
taunt that needed to be avenged. I thought of old Octave Lapize, creaking over
the Aubisque and rasping ‘ Assassins !’ at the waiting officials; I
thought of Paul Kimmage, squirming up the Galibier with the broom wagon almost
up his arse in the agonised final minutes of his 1987 Tour; and then, Fm
afraid, I went round the back of Henri’s statue and anointed it more fulsomely
than any gnat. He was one of them; I was beginning to feel like one of us. It
was what the riders would have wanted.
    That last kilometre was perhaps the
steepest of my career as a cyclist, and it is possible that if I hadn’t known
it was only that far I would have given up. But I didn’t. With an exultant
grimace I rolled up to the wind-battered viewpoint, blithely wondering which of
the pointy white bastards over there was Mont Blanc, and which of the
grey-faced fuckers over there was the col de la Madeleine, tomorrow’s
2,000-metre HC treat. I had covered 1,600 kilometres to reach this figurative
and literal high point; two HCs conquered in an afternoon — it could only be,
had better be, downhill from here on. ‘Bravo,’ said a voice, and a little
Frenchman came up to share his reminiscences of a 1969 cycling weekend in the
Benelux countries with a Dutchman who spoke no French, and as I smiled and
nodded I began to understand how Alice Cooper must have felt when, while
interviewing him some years ago, I proceeded to talk at length about the band I’d
been in at school.
    The descent was predictably fast and
predictably bleak: grasping the brakes with numbed, unresponsive fingers
through the slushy hairpins, slaloming madly between two lolloping beaver-like
marmots, off home to their scree-piled treeless slag heap. At one point the
icy, snowploughed detritus was piled into a corridor whose walls dwarfed me; it
was like going down the Cresta run. Upside-down names flashed beneath my
wheels: Virenque, Pantani, Riis; even the odd frost-preserved relic, the ghost
of an Hinault here, a shadowy Roche there.
    As the bends were pulled taut,
unkinked into a straight, flat-out descent, there was no possibility of even
stealing a sideways peek at the Scottish moorlands around me. The rushing wind
swallowed up the sound of the thundering river alongside; I hit a cloud of
flies by the first farm and came out the other side with one up each nostril
and my sunglasses looking like a rally car’s headlamps after a night stage
around the Finnish lakes. As I topped 70 k.p.h. — getting on for 45 m.p.h. —
the frame begin to bow and sing, or so it seemed, and I suddenly recalled that
this morning my bicycle had been in many pieces, and that the person who had
falteringly assembled these pieces was me.
    I hit Valloire, very nearly literally,
bang on 6.30, and found my support vehicle cruising its wide, desolate streets
looking for the town hall. ‘Thanks for telling me about that sodding mountain,’
whispered the pale-faced driver as three junior assistants snuffled and snored
behind her, before taking in my fly-flecked, frost-flayed features with a noise
that combined awe with disgust. I removed my helmet, propped my shades up on my
head and announced, ‘I am an outstanding sportsman.’
    Valloire was doing whatever the
opposite of hibernating is, its five-floor chalets shuttered up waiting for the
snow and the skiers. If we’d been here two days ago everything would have been
closed; as it was, only one hotel was open: a trim, clean and rather spartan
concrete chalet, all whitewash and window boxes, the kind of place you could
imagine Hitler staying in.
    In the bierkeller dining basement we
had fondue, on reflection a poor choice for small children amply supplied with
combustible table linen, and delicious local rosé — with a start I realised I
had forgotten to drink at lunchtime, and desperately hoped this was not the
reason for my enhanced performance. Then, with the children pinned under
Teutonic eiderdowns as heavy as mattresses, we repaired to our balcony and
watched a huge hare hopping about between the Volkswagens and geraniums in the
hotel car park. The white-noise roar of Galibier meltwater seemed an oddly
violent counterpoint to such a sleepy scene.
    ‘Were they that big?’ said a