French Revolutions

m.)’.
    I couldn’t see much but then it
didn’t seem there was much to see: wet tussocks; mud; the occasional mothballed
ski-lift creaking eerily overhead, lost in the clouds. An anticlimax in a way:
I’d been thinking all day of the weary jubilation as the Tour riders eased over
the Joux-Plane, possibly bloody, certainly bowed, but not beaten. For perhaps
half a dozen of them the race would still be on in earnest; for the other
120-odd survivors, this might as well have been the finish line, the remaining
stages to Paris just a procession, maybe the chance to sneak a cheeky stage win
but no more. If you survive the mountains you survive the Tour, and if you
survive the Tour you are a Giant of the Road.
    Of the seven HC climbs, I’d pushed up
half of the first, bunked off the second and been chauffeured along the last
stretch of the third in a drugged-up coma. But the remaining four had all been
conquered in a fashion that by my standards at least was very possibly heroic.
Giant of the Road might be stretching it a bit, but wheeling along the flat
crest of my final Alp I was King of the Hill. A short and inglorious reign,
however, because then I went round a corner and discovered, as I attempted to
follow it, that the road had fallen down the mountain.
    I suppose I might have died. Had the
visibility been more than two bike lengths I’d certainly have been going a lot
faster, and in this manner would have plunged majestically into the gaping,
mist-shrouded chasm rather than keeling gently over into its muddy but benign
upper reaches: done a Thelma and Louise, in other words, rather than a Laurel
and Hardy.
    Hauling ZR back on to the tarmac and
palming filth off my legs, I understood that this might have been what all the
barriers were about. The Alps, once taller than the Himalayas, were shrinking
every year; in a demonstration of the puniness of man’s efforts to shore up the
mountains, the rain had sluiced away a large piece of Joux-Plane, taking a load
of road as it did so. The chaussée hadn’t been deformed so much as amputated.
For fifty feet, the remaining usable section of tarmac was a ragged ribbon
stitched haphazardly to the mountainside, never wider than a mantelpiece and
sometimes considerably narrower. With one foot on the muddy slope and the other
on what was left of the road, I hoisted ZR in red, numbed hands and carried her
to safety like the hero in an adventure film, albeit one scripted by Fishwife
Productions.
    I was shaken, and soon I was
shivering. During some of the more exciting descents I had become acquainted
with the phenomenon known as ‘brake fade’, the point at which the hardened
rubber pads, overheated by continuous application, would begin to judder and
hiss before abruptly adopting the speed-retarding qualities of buttered fish
scales. Such an unlikely physical transformation always struck me as impressive
as anything in the Old Testament, or the tiger who ran so fast round a bush
that he turned into ghee.
    That a bicycle constructed from
materials which not many years ago would have been described as ‘space-age’
should suffer from this alarmingly fundamental malaise still strikes me as more
than a little crap, but at least I had learned how to remedy it. By alternately
pressing the front and rear levers, the pads were given a chance to cool down:
milking the brakes, I called it.
    When the road plunged eagerly back
through the tree line I began to milk — left, right, left, right — but it was
freezing, and you can’t freeze milk, and as the cold fog rushed over my wet,
red fingertips at 65 k.p.h. I was quickly stripped of all digital mobility. The
brakes could be on, or they could be off, but switching between these two was
no longer an available option. My knuckles had become locked in that mystical
extremity where fire and ice merged, the split second after you brush your toe
painfully against a bath tap and can’t tell whether it was the blue one or the
red. It was all I could do to scream my way through the next few bends until
the gradient temporarily flattened and I was able to judder to an agonising
halt.
    Descending a snowbound peak in the
1989 Giro, Paul Kimmage had to stop by the road and pee on his hands to get
some heat back in them. I would have if I could. For a moment I just stood
there in the fog, fists in opposite armpits, ears in shoulder blades, an
armless, neckless freak howling unlikely scenarios involving most of the
Christian religion’s big