French Revolutions

road when Paul’s mobile rang. I was wondering how many multimillion
deals we’d have to broker in lay-bys along the way when he passed it to me. It
was Birna.
    ‘Anything unusual in your back
pocket?’ she said, and even before I patted my kidneys for new lumps I knew
that there was. The car keys.
    In the high sun, the great blue lake
glittered almost painfully as I barrelled back to Evian while Paul waited at a
waterside café. Half an hour later I met Birna outside the casino and
voicelessly handed over the keys, wearing an expression normally associated
with the latter stages of cholera, then set off to cover those 15 waterside
kilometres for the third time in a little over an hour. But then two cyclists
in pink jerseys whisked past me without a sideways glance, and though this
seemed to be another bad thing, it actually proved to be rather a splendid one.
    Road-race cycling is founded on
physics, and in particular the laws of air resistance which dictate, as I may
well already have mentioned, that on a flat road a rider tucked behind another
can maintain the same speed as the leader while exerting 20 per cent less
energy. The tactical implications of this affect all aspects of the sport.
One-man breakaways are invariably doomed; the peloton, sharing the
wind-breaking effort at the front, can maintain far higher average speeds for
far longer. And by letting their leader tuck in behind them, a team can give
him if not a free ride then a very cheap one, towing him along, keeping him
fresh for the final climb or sprint.
    It was this latter aspect that
interested me most when, after an out-of-the-saddle rotary frenzy, I somehow
managed to get up to the rear wheel of the second pink cyclist. His friend was
pedalling hard; he was doing so steadily; I quickly established, to my
considerable delight, that I could maintain my speed and position with only the
occasional desultory revolution.
    I can only describe this experience
as sensational. Wheel to wheel we swished towards Switzerland, and I realised
that at last my knowledge of the sport could gain me an important advantage
over a horribly well-conditioned new team-mate. It should not be too difficult
to persuade Paul to go at the front, letting me idle in his slipstream like the
leader I so richly deserved to be; he would unwittingly tow me along to the end
of the day, and as the Espace loomed in the hotel car park I’d ease gloriously
by. Twenty per cent less effort — even better results than a skinful of EPO.
The next morning, confused by his own exhaustion and my chirpy freshness, it
would be a simple matter to break Paul’s spirit. A ‘Keep it going, marathon
man’ here, an ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ there and he would soon accept the new
hierarchy: me as boss, him as cowed and humble domestique.
    Oh yes. This was all most
satisfactory. Ruddle would carry my water, read the map, complain in
restaurants, wash my kit. Such was the natural law of the Tour. Ninety per cent
of all professional riders completed their careers in the service of an élite
few, and were humbly happy to do so even for risible rewards. In 1986, Paul
Kimmage was paid £700 a month by his team; two years earlier, the average
professional was on about £400 at a time when trade unions were campaigning for
a national minimum wage of £450.
    Every rider had to serve their time
in the ranks. A young Eddy Merckx was ordered to cede certain victory in the
1967 Paris-Nice to his team leader — the leader was Tom Simpson, and Paris-Nice
his final win. Paul might be the better raw talent (might? Might ? The
only machines I ever damaged through overzealous physical attention were ones
that had erroneously retained my small change), but he had not earned his
stripes. Where was he when Moore toiled through the endless forests of Aquitaine or crested the mighty Galibier?
    And, oh, how wearisome that stripe-earning
process might prove to be. Merckx ruled his domestiques with a rod of iron:
another of his famously ponderous catchphrases was ‘You have to put your own
interests above camaraderie.’ Louison Bobet once dispatched a domestique on an
epic quest for refreshment: he finds a bar, but has no money; the heartless
patron insists on payment; he runs outside and begs the requisite coppers from
locals; runs back in, purchases the water, runs back out and remounts; after
scorched and agonising toil — by now the peloton is over eight minutes up the
road — he pants back to his leader,