French Revolutions

little,
muffled voice as we came back in. ‘The mountains you went up on your bicycle —
were they as big as those?’ I followed Kristjan’s gaze up to the opposite
peaks, silhouetted in the moonlight.
    ‘Much, much bigger,’ I said, because
they had been.
    ‘So are you all better now?’
    I realised then that what I had done
that day was the sort of thing that hitherto only other children’s daddies had
done, and by doing it I had joined some sort of élite club. ‘I’m not just
better,’ I said in an assumed voice, ‘I’m the best.’
    It could have been worse. I almost
said ‘son’.

Thirteen

     
     
    Paul Kimmage abandoned on the col du
Télégraphe, early in the same misty stage that ended with the agonised heroics
at la Plagne of his countryman Stephen Roche. In the morning, breezing gaily up
the Télégraphe’s modest slopes — not even a category four in this direction — I
realised just how comprehensively bollocksed he must have been by that day’s
fearsome pace up the Galibier. Far more exhausting for me was the
joint-juddering descent, 34 kilometres continuously downhill, from the dizzy
top flap of the Alpen packet all the way down to the last squashed raisin at
the bottom. I was going less than two-thirds as fast as the pros, but let me
tell you now that if I drove a car like I rode that bike — at the ragged edge
of the performance parameters of both man and machine — the passengers would be
screaming to be let out after two minutes. I shot a tiny glance at the
waterfall-veined, pine-wooded loveliness around me and as a result only accidentally
missed a pot-hole the size of a punchbowl that would happily have
killed me.
    Soon after, something small and
flappy got entwined in my leg hair — I really would have to address this issue
soon — and I didn’t dare slap at it until the road straightened into the Arc
valley at Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne. When I dismounted for a pain au chocolat
and a coffee, the underside of ZR’s frame was littered with spoke-spattered
fragments of thorax. Still juddering and shaken, I recalled that Bernard Hinault’s
obsession with aerodynamic posture had once led him to experiment descending
with one hand on the bars and the other stretched out behind him, and picturing
this immediately understood how important it was that I should never again read
or say anything about this dangerous maniac.
    There was a Sunday-morning club event
of some sort being organised in the usual all-day siesta that entombs most
Alpine towns in the summer, and as I was overtaken by cars with half a dozen
bikes on their roofs I couldn’t help wondering if one of the team bosses might
lean over to the driver to yell, ‘Hey — there’s that guy who passed me going up
the Lautaret: have his legs shaved and stick him in the first team.’
    As soon as I thought that thought I
knew I’d regret it, and it didn’t take long. The col de la Madeleine didn’t
mess about: no Izoard or Galibier-style slow build-up, just a full-frontal
assault from the valley floor. I’d noticed that some mountains seemed at one
with their surroundings, overgrown green hills incorporated almost seamlessly
into the pastures, but the peaks crowding the Madeleine were of the other sort:
bare and alien rocks, huge flint hand axes flung petulantly into the earth at
random angles.
    It was another scorcher, and I was
soon melting. The road was a slight shambles — white and thin as cotton thread
on the map, frost-cracked and sunburnt in the flesh — but it rose to its
challenge with admirable pluck, heading straight at the 2,000-metre summit with
the minimum of dilatory hairpins: an 8 per cent gradient for 19.3 kilometres,
steeper than Ventoux and almost as long. I’d averaged 34 k.p.h. from Valloire,
but doublefigure progress soon became a distant memory. Unsteady hands were
fumbling regularly for the bidons; the first one had been sucked dry before the
climb started, and the second only lasted me to the moribund village of
Saint-Fran^ois-Longchamp, last outpost before the top and the place where I’d
rather ambitiously hoped to cadge a refill. But though necessity might be the
mother of invention, it is also the grandfather of petty theft, and if people
really must leave dozens of crates of Coca-Cola (ahhh!), Badoit (ooooh!) and
Heineken (falalalala-la-la-la-la!) in the open back of an unattended pick-up
truck in an area where the transient presence of thirsty British men might
easily be predicted,