French Revolutions

admirable, but nature was doing its
best to atone: through the mist, peaks emerged distantly on all sides with
ethereal sunlit haloes, lined up like an Alpine greatest-hits postcard.
    It said something for my condition
that I was beginning to dread the descents more than the climbs. Actually, reading
that I recognise it as a terrible, terrible lie, but you get the point. Fear
was beginning to challenge fatigue, and locking my wheels around the
loose-chippinged curves into Fluvet I impregnated the thin air with deafening
indelicacies in a language known to no man. Having squealed to a breathless
halt down its (very) high street, I went into the only open shop in town and,
finding all the confectionery was behind the counter, found myself obliged to
ask for ‘A Snickers...? Un Snickeur? Un Sniquet? Une Sniqueur?’
    I made short work of this hard-won
quarry, along with a halflitre of milk, as I wheeled ZR back past the dirty
buildings. Remounting alongside the last, I spotted a young boy flamboyantly
arching his back atop a low wall to its rear as he widdled gleefully into an
unseen void. As he met my gaze with airy nonchalance I found myself
contemplating perhaps the ugliest of the Tour’s many ugly secrets.
    I hope I am not alone in harbouring a
mild obsession with the excretory habits of professional sportsmen. When a
tennis or snooker player strides briskly out of the arena mid-match, as the
commentator mumbles something about calls of nature I find myself curiously
comforted: they might in most other ways be a different species, but here is
evidence that at heart these champions are as human as you or I. Because Tour
cyclists are not, however, they have to do things differently.
    Until 1957 the unwritten rule in the
Tour was that when a rider stopped to pee in the bushes, the rest freewheeled
along, not taking ungentlemanly advantage by speeding away up the road. In that
year, however, infuriated by the arrogance of Luxembourg’s Charly Gaul, a small
group did exactly that when the tiny Luxemburger pulled into the verge. ‘No one
takes the piss when I take a piss,’ he may easily have said, because the next
day he initiated the practice of widdling on the wing, pointing Percy at the
pavement, baptising the bitumen. This could have earned him the nickname The
Raining Champion or some unsavoury derivation of yellow jersey, but in France they preferred to call him ‘Pee-Pee’ (a shame his career didn’t overlap with Raymond
‘Poupou’ Poulidor — what a hit they’d have been on the cabaret circuit).
    Anyway, since Charly broke the taboo,
mobile micturation has become the norm. The practice is even acknowledged in
Tour regulations: you can whip it out wherever you want on the country roads,
but there’s a fine for anyone offloading processed Evian in a built-up area.
I’d seen it more than once on the television coverage: a rider drops off the
back of the pack, ideally on a straightish, emptyish stretch of road, then
hoicks up the leg of his shorts and does what he can to direct things away from
the bicycle. Obviously what you really want to avoid are the rapidly revolving
spokes, and their impressive potential for fluid dispersion.
    Sometimes, however, a rider may lack
the opportunity or wherewithal for such an operation. In 1978 Michel Pollentier
assured himself of an unwelcome place in Tour history with an astonishing two-act
display of urinary recklessness. Leading the race up the formidable climb of
Alpe d’Huez, in extremis he voids himself directly into his gusset;
having won the stage he is required to give a sample but has nothing left to
offer. These unappealing details are already tarnishing a heroic achievement,
but as he slips off the victory rostrum to hesitant applause after an unusually
restrained embrace from the podium blondes there is worse to come. Pollentier
has also taken an illegal stimulant, and with the dope-testers making their way
up to his hotel he elects to tackle this situation using apparatus that will be
familiar to anyone who has either watched the film Withnail & I or is a repellent weirdo.
    When the doctors call it is all set
up, but with Michel waiting his turn, another testee is spotted behaving
unusually as the flask is passed to him. All the riders present are summarily
ordered to lower their shorts: a tube is discovered, one end taped to an
intimate place, the other connected to a rubber bulb in his armpit containing
somebody else’s urine, and Michel’s