‘Oh, it’s you again.’
It’s never wise to phone a Frenchwoman more than once in any given fortnight, even if – or perhaps especially if – she happens to work on a help desk. Asking the Tour de France press office for details of the race route was clearly ranked on the scale of telephonic enquiries somewhere between ‘Have you ever considered the benefits of pet insurance?’ and ‘What colour knickers are you wearing?’ No matter that the route had clearly been decided well before the release of the basic outline in September, some six months previously.
‘We do not announce zis informations,’ said the voice defiantly, ‘until fifteen May.’ The line went dead; you could just imagine her flinging the phone down in petulant exasperation as a sympathetic press-office colleague looked up from her Paris Match and, slowly unwrapping another bon-bon, said, ‘Don’t tell me – another journalist.’
Anyway, it was a date. The plan, as it stood, was to complete the Tour route before the race itself set off on 1 July. Departing on 15 May gave me six weeks in which to do so – double the time allotted to the professionals; it also meant I would be 35 for three whole days of the period. On the other hand, all I now had to plot and prepare for my odyssey were a month and a postcard-sized map of the country with a squiggly line linking the start and end points of each stage, torn from the October issue of procycling.
Each Tour has a new route – travelled clockwise one year, anticlockwise the next. The 2000 Tour was an anticlockwise one. Starting in the centre-west of the country, the line meandered briefly north into Brittany before turning back on itself, sweeping down to the Pyrenees, then across Provence via Simpson’s Ventoux to the Alps. Here it flailed madly about for a disturbing amount of time, working its way circuitously northwards: ‘The entire length of the French Alps from the south, a route last taken in 1949, with the Cols d’Allos, Vars and Izoard, all over 2,000 metres high,’ panted procycling eagerly. Then it was two days in Switzerland and Germany, crossing back over the Rhine in Alsace and working westwards to the traditional Parisian finish.
The accompanying map had the benefit of being small, but most of the important figures in a box alongside did not.
5 July, stage five: Vannes–Vitré, 198 km.
6 July, stage six: Vitré–Tours, 197 km.
7 July, stage seven: Tours–Limoges, 192 km.
Six hundred kilometres in three days, as near as ‘dammit’ is to swearing, though not quite as near as ‘fuck that’. Can I have a rest now?
8 July, stage eight: Limoges–Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 200 km.
9 July, stage nine: Agen–Dax, 182 km.
10 July, stage ten: Dax–Lourdes/Hautacam, 205 km.
11 July, stage eleven: Bagnères-de-Bigorre–Revel, 219 km.
Apparently I could not. In seven days, the riders would cover a distance that in different and rather foolish circumstances would see them pedalling up to the outskirts of Warsaw. Worse, I knew from my television experiences that a lot of these kilometres would be breezed through by riders idly chatting to team-mates with their arms off the handlebars as they maintained speeds which even the ugliest exertions would leave me some way short of.
Not that there’d be any of that when the mountains got going. The route might change, but every Tour is won and lost in the second week, when the Pyrenean and Alpine climbs meet an angry sun halfway, the last stragglers wobbling over the line in graphic distress after eight scorched and airless hours in the saddle. Footballers whine if they’re asked to play more than a single ninety-minute game a week. Olympic athletes demand a day of rest after running half a lap of the track. But when the Tour de France hits the mountains, its competitors have to haul themselves to the ragged edge of exhaustion from dawn to dusk, day after day, inching agonisingly up the highest roads in Europe and then careering lethally down them.
To this end, procycling had also helpfully included a ‘gradient profile’ of stage twelve, Carpentras–Le Mont Ventoux. As learning curves go, they didn’t come much steeper: an alarming succession of peaks and troughs that looked like the printout of a lie-detector test. Two impressive 3,000-foot cols caused jerky fluctuations of the sort you’d expect from Jeffrey Archer comparing O-level results with Pinocchio, then – whoosh! – there was Jonathan Aitken booking Baron von Munchausen into the Ritz as up to Ventoux the line soared crazily off the scale.
All in all, there were 3,630 kilometres (which may be more familiar to you as 2,256 miles) and sixteen mountains to be conquered in three weeks. It was the equivalent of cycling from London to Bristol every day, only with Swindon wreathed in cold mist atop a towering peak so steep you’d be kneeing yourself in the face if you walked up it.
Slowly, certainly, the wrongheadedness of my initial pledge was dawning on me. With two weeks to go and my train ticket to Dover already rashly purchased, I knuckled down. I took out temporary membership of a gym, bought Chris Boardman’s Complete Book of Cycling, and tried to fix the Peugeot’s brakes.
I didn’t take too much notice of the text side of Mr Boardman’s volume after reading of the importance of training on Christmas Day to establish a psychological advantage over one’s rivals, and coming across phrases such as ‘The Tour came close to destroying me because it slowly drained my spirit … The Tour is the limit. It is the Olympics, Wimbledon and the World Cup all rolled into one. It is the highest level of sport … That feeling in the pit of your stomach that the next three weeks are going to hurt.’
On this basis, it didn’t seem ideal that with less than a fortnight before departure I didn’t actually own a roadworthy bicycle. Jogging for half an hour up and down the towpath every evening was a step in the right direction, but not a very big one. I needed to do some cycling. Or anyway some cycling-type exercises.
Chris Boardman, a former Olympic gold medallist and the first Englishman since Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour, might reasonably be expected to know something about preparatory exercises. Holding a hand over the accompanying words (the mere mention of ‘the muscle group at the front of your thighs’ made me feel squeamish), I was soon mimicking Mr Boardman’s line-drawn simulacrum on a twice-daily basis. Pressing a heel back to a buttock, pushing a wall, even lowering nose to (or anyway towards) thigh with my leg up on a chair (I’d work up to the illustrated table option just as soon as the sensation that my knees were about to snap forward the wrong way seemed less compelling): these at least had an authentic air, the kind of thing you might see footballers doing on the touchline, albeit with fewer daughters hanging on to their legs and necks. Others, notably the spinal mobility and gluteus maximus stretches, cajoled me into whimsical poses last struck when Miss Pillins asked 2Y to imagine we were spring’s first snowdrops emerging from the frosted soil.
In recent years, those snowdrops have invariably been accompanied by a savage and ridiculous new gym fad, and they don’t come much more savage or ridiculous than spinning. Melding an exercise bicycle to the traumatic peer-pressure, barked commands and hysterical hi-NRG soundtrack of aerobics, I’d been told that spinning was to a jog around the river what bear-baiting was to yoga. It seemed sufficiently drastic. With a week left I went off and spun.
The airless spinning room at my local gym consisted of a claustrophobic mass of exercise bicycles arranged in tight, respectful semicircles before the instructor’s machine; settling myself indelicately into the lofty saddle amid two dozen sinewy women in their forties and a fat, red Irishman, it occurred to me that if (or ideally when) we were all vaporised by Martian invaders the first member of the mopping-up squad to poke his little green head round the door would imagine he had discovered some hallowed chamber where obscure rotary homage was paid to King Spin. Only later did I realise that with all that tiresome bellowed encouragement, those clashing elbows, the soul-destroying, out-of-the-saddle, give-no-quarter competitiveness, a spinning class was a static peloton, the closest approximation to a desperate bunch finish I would ever experience.
I’d sat next to the Irishman in the hope of faring well by comparison, but after ten minutes of hectoring, Flashdance and increased wheel resistance (‘Crank it up a notch, and one and two and UP on the pedals and give me ten and GO!’) the sweat was already cascading in an unbroken stream from lowered chin to pumping knees, flying off the uselessly whirring front wheel and splattering toned, hairless flesh in a generous radius. Part of the deal in gyms, and indeed in professional cycling, is never to exhibit real pain or distress. Consequently, when we got into the uphill double-time sprinting the instructor, perhaps noting my uncanny visual impersonation of a man being exorcised in a sauna, slipped quietly off his bike and sidled over. ‘Take it easy, eh?’ he whispered soothingly as Donna Summer began to feel love. The phlegmy, rutting grunt that was all I could manage by way of response did not help my case.
After that I started lowering the resistance control a notch whenever he said to turn it up, but, even so, winding down at the end of the forty-minute session I felt very, very bad; worse, in fact, than I had ever felt. The techno thump of a shell-shocked heart filled my head; most of my muscle groups had disbanded and a leather-aproned medieval butcher was clumsily yanking my hamstrings. As I shakily dismounted into an unsightly puddle of body fluids, I had a strong sensation that my feet had somehow been stretched and extruded into platform-soled appendages.
‘First time?’ said the Irishman, who somehow looked further from death than he had before.
‘Last time?’ tinkled a hollow-cheeked, hawser-armed woman, her lilac crop top blemished with the merest sprinkling of perspiration that in any case was probably mine.
I didn’t (or rather couldn’t) say anything in reply, but explained myself to the instructor after the following day’s session. ‘That’s quite an undertaking,’ he said, implying that I would need quite an undertaker. One of ‘his’ women had recently returned from cycling over the Andes; another was off to the Himalayas. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, noting that this news had failed to comfort or inspire, ‘that was a pretty big hill we just simulated. About 22 kilometres. And you’ll only need to work at maybe 20 per cent of that rate.’
I nodded wetly. All I could think was that I’d just wasted 22 kilometres going nowhere in a room full of hot Lycra. There would be times, I imagined, when I would dearly want those 22 kilometres back, saving them up as a joker to be played in some epic Alpine crisis. ‘Except,’ he said, squinting thoughtfully, ‘I suppose you’ll need to be at it for about eight hours a day.’
Somehow blanking out the enormity of this task, I managed one more spinning class and two jogs. Then, gingerly consulting Chris Boardman, I came across the startling revelation that ‘with one week to go, training should be finished … It is highly unlikely that you will generate more form in this time.’ With five days left, interpreting this theory of ‘tapering’ a regime as a competition approached (‘the volume of work is slowly reduced as the objective approaches’), I tapered my training rather more abruptly to a standstill. Everyone knows what the tough are said to do when the going gets tough. But I went shopping.
The sporting-goods industry prospers from the eternal truth that people who are not very good at something would rather blame a lack of expensive equipment than their own physical failings. Certainly rectifying the former is a lot quicker. Every time I looked at those little line drawings of Mr Boardman down on all fours howling silently at an unseen moon or getting his leg over the dining table, I felt an itching desire to slam his scary book shut and go into town to buy things made out of carbon fibre.
Not knowing anything about bikes, or at least bikes costing more than fifteen quid, flicking helplessly through the cycling-magazine adverts in Smith’s was a sobering experience. It seemed to be quite easy to spend considerably over £1,500 just on a frame, a wheelless, chainless, pedalless diamond-shaped assemblage of metal tubes. Almost randomly, I came up with a figure of half this amount as my budget for a complete bicycle. Venturing much below this price raised fears of another two-wheels-on-my-Trabant DDR special, meaning that metal fatigue would set in after four days, and that on the way to pick it up my father would appear out of nowhere to place a kind, worldly hand on my shoulder and explain that the male menopause was nothing to be scared of. Beyond £750, I would be too crap to notice the difference, as well as potentially falling foul of the general rule that very expensive pieces of machinery require regular expert maintenance. I didn’t want a Fiesta or a Ferrari. A nice Golf would do me.
I can’t quite remember why the GT ZR3000 first appealed. It may have been the memory of the slanting GT logo flashed along many of the peloton’s crossbars; it may have been because that crescendo of numerals and digits conjured images of an enormously overpowered motorcycle, thereby suggesting great speed with minimal human effort. When a call to GT’s Martin Warren revealed that the ZR3000 was last year’s model and could therefore be offered at an attractive discount, the deal was done. ‘Do you want to assemble it yourself, or …?’ he asked, ending the whimper-punctuated silence that followed with, ‘Or … yes, I’ll, um, put you down for the “or” option.’
The bike, of course, was only the start of it. An astonishing 4,000 people make up the Tour’s travelling entourage – journalists, officials, members of the crap-chucking publicity caravan – and 600 of them are there to support the twenty teams who each enter nine riders. Ferried about in over a thousand official vehicles, they carry food, drink, spare parts, spare clothing, vitamins and, er, ‘vitamins’. I would have to get all this stuff, and carry it myself in panniers.
There are plenty of people whose dark, dull lives are lit up by opportunities to patronise and humiliate those they encounter in their professional capacity. Although most of these people work in the police force or Paris, while acquiring the peripherals for my trip I was intrigued to note the number that had made their horrid little homes behind the counters of bicycle retailers.
I’d avoided them up to now, but with time running out I had to get help where I could. In tones normally reserved for asking small children to pop down the shops for a tin of elbow grease, I was scathingly informed that the ZR3000, as well as being last year’s model and therefore on a competitive par with a swingbin full of fag-ends and used teabags, was risibly inappropriate for my task. The lugs, whatever and wherever they might be, would snap clean through as soon as I attached panniers, and actually the pannier rack wouldn’t fit anyway, and in any case only a really major prannet would ever use panniers – and listen to this, Dave, there’s a bloke here reckons he’s doing the Tour de France, right, and he doesn’t even know if his bike’s got Presta valves or Schraders.
It was Martin Warren, perhaps mindful of the extraordinary number of wankers I would be encountering, who had suggested I talk to Richard Hallett, technical editor of Cycling Weekly, a man apparently much sought after for his rare ability to offer advice on clothing and equipment without snorting in helpless derision. I hadn’t really wanted to trouble him, but being told by two awful men in a shop on the Fulham Road that I didn’t walk like a cyclist was the last straw and I gave the man Hallett a call. He listened patiently while I explained my quest, then, rather sharply, asked his only question.
‘Are you fat at all?’
The fact that I am not had, in all honesty, been my sole source of solace while surveying the library of cycling-related literature I was steadily building up. The big sprinters might be bollard-thighed bruisers, but the climbers – those whose bikes skipped lightly up the terrible bare slopes of Ventoux and the Izoard – were often frail-looking and pigeon-chested in a way I could cheerfully relate to. In fact, ludicrous as it may sound, in more expansive moments I had allowed myself to entertain fantasies, based on the recurrent assertion that ‘good climbers are born, not made’, that even without preparation I might belatedly emerge as an Alpine specialist of some note.
‘No,’ I replied, making the most of a scarce opportunity to express pride. (Later I wondered how he would have reacted if I’d said, ‘Why, yes, I am! I’m a great big lardy pie-man!’)
‘Well, you probably won’t die then. Now let’s talk kit.’
If I had wanted answers like ‘Well, it depends what you’re looking for’, Richard Hallett would not have been the man to ask. I did not know what I was looking for; I wanted to be told. Richard was more of a ‘Selle Italia Turbomatic 3; Michelin Axial Pro 25Cs; Shimano SH-M036’ kind of guy, and as such deserves my heartfelt gratitude. Saddle, shoes, tyres, type of lock, tools and many of the other issues I had failed to consider were resolved in a brief series of staccato sentences. ‘… Then you’ll need to take four inner tubes, one spare outer casing, hex keys, three pairs of bib shorts, two bottle cages … oh, and plenty of Savlon.’
‘For when I fall off?’
‘No. Well, yes, but not mainly. Stops boils and infections. Need to apply it every morning to anywhere that’s in contact with the saddle. Do you know where your perineum is?’
He paused, perhaps sensing that with this phrase our conversation had moved into unacceptable territory. But perhaps not. ‘Smear it all over your arse and bollocks, basically.’
I’m sorry, Mr Hallett, but there is nothing basic about smearing anything all over your arse and bollocks. I had a wretched premonition of sitting naked on a hotel bidet, morosely anointing my loins like a husband-to-be on a one-man stag night.
‘It’s just a fact. Your bollocks will sweat; infection will set in.’ Richard Hallett was now sounding like a forthright sergeant major giving his platoon a lecture on the perils of consorting with the local girls. Then, drifting briefly out of character, he added in an odd, dreamy voice, ‘So, yeah … really slather it on.’
A succession of delivery men arrived at my door over the days ahead, bringing Ortlieb panniers, Parrot waterproof clothing, wraparound Oakley shades and other equipment intended to make it look as if I knew what I was doing. To atone for this, I had eschewed a state-of-the-art Tour jersey for a monochrome Peugeot one of archaic design, similar to those worn both by the young Eddy Merckx and Tom Simpson. If it hadn’t been for the aggressively synthetic composition – ‘to wick away the sweat’, said the website I ordered it from – I could have grown to love it, certainly more so than the lewdly comic Lycra shorts, whose gusset featured a thick, ventilated pad like a sanitary towel from the pre-‘wings’ era. It did not take my children long to establish that the rigidity of this structure allowed the shorts to stand up by themselves when placed on a flat, firm surface.
Finally, with my departure three days away, I opened the door to be greeted by a cardboard box the size of a mattress. ZR3000 had landed. In a state of childish excitement I tore open the packaging: inside was a very blue, very light machine with tyres as thin and hard as Hula-Hoops. Counting the sprockets (as I have since learned to call the cogs at either end of the chain) revealed that, with three sizes on the front and nine at the back, I would have twenty-seven gears at my disposal. These, I discovered after protracted panic and a phone call to Martin Warren that began with aggrieved gabbling and ended in a painfully embarrassed whisper, were selected by pressing the brake levers in and out.
With barely less difficulty I fitted Richard Hallett’s recommended sit-upon – a no-mercy buttock-cleaver that recalled the old Yellow Pages ad where a young lad pedals off into a Yorkshire dawn on his birthday present while dad, peering out of the net curtains, mutters indulgently to himself, ‘I were right about that saddle.’ There had been much debate about the saddle. Some had advised me to go for a podgy, gel-filled number; Hallett, his complicated psyche awash with infected testicles and Stakhanovite toil, insisted that such a saddle would do me no favours in the long run. ‘You’ll be comfortable for three days, but then the sores will start,’ he’d said, illustrating this theme with the parable of Holland’s Joop Zoetemelk, who had silenced a press conference during the 1976 Tour by rolling up his shorts to reveal an intimate boil the size of an egg.
I’d been warned to expect trouble with the pedals, or more particularly the ski-type binding mechanism that is nowadays employed to attach them to the shoes. I’d never even ridden with toe clips, which had lashed every Tour rider’s feet to his pedals from 1903 until the mid-Eighties. As someone who never feels truly at ease on a bicycle unless I can put both feet flat on the floor when waiting at traffic lights, the idea of being strapped tightly to the pedals was unsettling to say the least. But at least you could see toe clips, big stainless-steel bands round the top of the shoe. And when you had seen them, all you had to do to free the foot was to pull it back. The essential trouble with the newer system was that the cleat (a word whose leg-iron, penal twang would come to haunt me) which slotted into the pedal was on the sole of the shoe, utterly out of sight. And so utterly out of mind.
Having wobbled gingerly along the pavement to Kew Bridge on my debut ride (in cleated shoes but not the jersey and shorts, which I didn’t yet feel qualified to wear), I was deeply disturbed by the head-down, humpbacked riding position, which as well as being instantly uncomfortable was also dangerous: to look where you were going rather than where you’d just been required an unnatural – and additionally uncomfortable – craning of the neck. None of this was assisted by the drop handlebars: so narrow and rigid that every slight hump or lump made my whole frame vibrate like a tuning fork; so featherweight and fickle that riding off a kerb was like barrelling out of some rodeo pen on an unbroken steer. Experimenting with the surfeit of gears I clanked and clunked down into gear twenty-seven: my feet spun manically, a dozen resistance-free rotations for a couple of car lengths’ progress. Monstrous as this seemed, a small part of my brain acknowledged that there would be times when I’d be pressing down with the full weight of my breaking body to get gear twenty-seven creaking agonisingly round, times when twenty-seven wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough.
Seconds later, however, none of this seemed to matter. Clicking back into gear fifteen or so I was astonished by ZR3000’s effortless straight-line performance: on other bicycles I have owned, the drawn-out, rising span of Kew Bridge has always been an out-of-the-saddle lung-burster. I swept majestically past two schoolgirls on mountain bikes and immediately began to feel rather successful.
What is it pride comes before? Ah, yes. Cresting the bridge at a canter, and speeding down the other side, I was suddenly confronted with a long queue of stationary traffic; caught off-guard by the abrupt efficiency of the brakes, I inevitably forgot to perform the viciously pigeon-toed ankle twist required to liberate shoe from pedal. The good news was that I had come to a halt at a bus stop and by embracing the eponymous concrete post was able to avoid keeling gently over into four lanes of rush-hour traffic. The bad news was that there were a good two dozen people in the queue, and that the vaudevillian première of Mister Drunkpedal offered unexpected but welcome entertainment to every one of them, except perhaps the schoolboy who had been leaning against the bus stop.
As inauspicious starts go, this was right up there with Captain Scott peering out of his tent across the tundra and saying, ‘Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but this isn’t anything like how I imagined South Poland.’ There were less than a hundred hours to go and the more people I talked to, the more disheartened I became. Martin Warren went very quiet when I phoned him to ask how often you were supposed to oil the brake pads, and my friend Matthew was clearly appalled by the grandiose scale of my ignorance and incompetence during a hands-on tutorial on removing the rear wheel. A call to another friend, Simon O’Brien, who will thank me for mentioning his Liverpool bike-shop/café, The Hub, but probably won’t for referring to his distant notoriety in the role of Brookside’s Damon Grant, was regularly interrupted by prolonged gales of incredulous laughter.
During the small gaps in between these, Simon did at least impart what seemed like useful advice. Don’t try to average more than about 80 kilometres (50 miles) a day; pre-book yourself into a nice hotel every ten days or so to give you a target to aim at and a reward for meeting it; shovel in carbohydrates. ‘You cannot eat too much,’ he stressed, which are just the words you want to hear when you’re about to set off for a month in France, assuming you don’t hang around for Simon’s next sentence. ‘Especially prunes and bananas.’
However saddening is the thought of filling a dry mouth with warm brown fruit, this prospect was at least preferable to the nutritional options suggested when I searched the Internet discussion forums. ‘For a 200k ride, I usually pack four Power Bars and twelve Fig Newtons,’ wrote one Canadian endurance enthusiast. I tried to imagine what a Power Bar might look like, and tried not to imagine what a Fig Newton might taste like. Fig Newton. It sounded like a result in that old game of deriving a porn-star alter ego from adding the name of your first pet to the street you lived in as a child.
The stuff was starting to accumulate. My Ortlieb panniers were soon complemented by a neat little bag that clipped to the handlebars and would eventually become my best friend, and having fitted all these, a process which probably needn’t have involved quite so many hours, or indeed hissing at pieces of dismantled bicycle like a cornered stoat, I filled them.
Looking now at the list I compiled then, I can see the word ‘shaver’ crossed out, rewritten and crossed out again. I’d been agonising for weeks in advance about methods of saving weight, ever since reading Mr Boardman’s assertion that even a couple of kilos could make the difference between whistling up the Giant of Provence and floundering grimly in the Valley of Death. My faithful Braun electric (175 grams) had assumed a crucial symbolic significance: by substituting it for a featherlight but wretched Bic disposable razor (7 grams), I would prove I was taking this thing seriously. I even pondered not shaving, before reaching the conclusion that after a month of harsh sun and prunes I’d be looking enough like Robinson Crusoe as it was.
Only when I made a heap of the essentials did I accept the hopelessness of it all. Maps, spares, tools, lock, all-weather clothing and, however often I tried to hide it beneath the multivitamins and toothbrush, a huge, leering tube of Savlon: with all that shoved into the panniers, ZR3000, once such a flighty will-o’-the-wisp that you could pick it up with two fingers, now required two people to perform the same task.
Oh, what was the point. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought – or, more accurately, in for a pound, in for ten stone. I’d restricted my après-cycling evening wardrobe to one T-shirt, a pair of pants, thin cotton trousers and the selfsame footwear I would have been cleated into all day, but now threw in three additional shirts and the same of pants, baggy beach shorts, a load of socks and a pair of espadrilles. A couple of hefty guidebooks were promoted from the standby list, along with half a dozen back copies of procycling Matthew had lent me. The Braun joined them, though as a token gesture I didn’t take the plastic head cover or the funny little cleaning brush. I also cut my nails down to the quick, took off my signet ring and had a very severe haircut. Then I sat down and watched a video.
Tour de France 1903–1985 did exactly what it said on the box, until the end. After a studiously forthright appraisal of the Tour’s great riders, the badly dubbed, nasally British voiceover clicked clumsily off to be replaced by a rousing, if slightly approximate burst of Onedin Line-style orchestration. Then, over a visual backdrop of grainy Sixties Tour footage, a man who sounded a lot like Charles Aznavour trying to do Orson Welles began to speak in a voice charged with portent.
‘Like one of Napoleon’s soldiers, a racer in the Tour de France need only say, “I was there,” to provoke the respect and admiration given to one who is ranked among exceptional human beings, part of an élite who seeks to excel through effort and suffering, and like Guillaumet, mechanic to the aviator Mermoz, he can say, “I have done what no animal can do.” ’
There was a short pause here, presumably while the narrator imagined two sheep standing flummoxed before an aeronautical tool kit. Then the epic soundtrack blared waywardly again and the commentary recommenced.
‘In an apparent paradox, the racer achieves transcendence of himself, and his sense of the absolute, by reaching deep into himself and dreaming himself, as animals do when the survival instinct orders them to walk, to run, to fight. The racer in the Tour has his place somewhere between the animals and the gods, sometimes one, sometimes the other, often both, always oscillating between these two opposite poles of his destiny.’
Well, that was something to look forward to. Perhaps I’d got it all wrong. Instead of building up muscle bulk, or anyway making feebly half-hearted efforts at doing so, I should instead have been fine-tuning my sense of the absolute. A good, hard session on the transcendental treadmill and I’d be destiny-oscillating with the best of them.
Regrettably, my one extended training run – to Harrow and back, perhaps a 20-mile round trip – suggested that my place would be rather closer to the animals than the gods, and indeed within that former category rather closer to the invertebrates than the mammals. Bucking along the North Circular Road’s bike-path pavement past Gunnersbury Park, I had to brake sharply, and therefore painfully, to avoid contact with a large cyclist emerging at speed through the park gates alongside. Mercifully uncleated, I had come to a lopsided halt with our wheels barely an inch apart. Feeling as if I had mistaken Deep Heat for Savlon, I looked up to see that the large cyclist was the type of middle-aged, Harrington-jacketed skinhead that everyone apart from newspaper cartoonists assumed had long since moonstomped off our high streets.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, but the eager sneer snagging his thin, cold-sored lips suggested there would be strings attached to this apology. It was no particular surprise, having cycled wordlessly on my way, to hear the loud shout of ‘PRICK!’ ringing out from behind.
Later, I marvelled at the wretched chemistry apparently created by combining me and a bicycle with Gunnersbury Park. Almost thirty years on, here I was again, being curtly abused by an ugly, bored male. Now that I consider the two events, it is in fact easily possible that both involved not just the same stage but the same actors.
The brain makes rapid calculations in moments like this, and as I trumped his insult in terms of both volume and profanity I was barely aware of having established that my enemy’s bulk and inferior machinery made a successful pursuit unlikely. Certainly this calculation took no account of my own fitness, nor the fact that my sudden stop had left me in an appropriately high gear. If there is one thing more debilitating than running away, it is doing so while pretending not to. Striving to find a balance between life-saving flight and face-saving nonchalance, I ground in private agony up the North Circular Road, not daring to look round until I topped Hanger Hill two miles up the road.
This effort, coupled perhaps with an unwisely piquant supper that had paid extravagant homage to a lifelong fondness for Tabasco, malt vinegar and grapefruit juice, so disturbed my body’s pH balance that freewheeling down towards the Hanger Lane Gyratory System I began to feel very unwell. It started as a stitch, I suppose, but the little man with the needle soon got carried away. Wincing, I dismounted alongside a huddle of pavement smokers outside a large office building, with the sensation of being internally tattooed. During my many subsequent distress stops, I established that temporary relief could be procured by bending double and stoutly pushing the left side of my stomach in with both hands. This was not a pose one would choose to sustain by the side of a public highway, and I would guess that my resultant impersonation of a man attempting to remove his own spleen attracted some interest among the rush-hour commuters of northwest London.
I arrived at the Harrovian residence of my friend Paul Rose looking like Stephen Roche at la Plagne and sounding like Stephen Hawking at la Scala. Helping me over his threshold, he set about my rehabilitation. This process incorporated three beers, six Rennies and several dozen viewings of a crafts-channel cable TV video clip wherein an erstwhile innocuous sculptor expresses abrupt and radical disgust for his half-finished feline creation by decapitating it with a single, lusty uppercut. It had taken me two hours to get there; the return leg required a quarter of this time.
Even so, it had not been an encouraging maiden voyage. In fact, if I had been planning to cycle to, say, Oxford or Brighton, I’d probably have called it off. In a strange way, only the sheer scale of my itinerary stopped me from losing heart: that daftly inflated figure of 3,630 kilometres was difficult to take seriously.
The night before leaving, very slightly drunk, I’d wandered down my road to the river. It was balmy; a group of girls sat around a cheerily crackling bonfire on the foreshore; before I’d even left, the elements and environment were in cahoots to engender homesickness. Almost inevitably there was a little crowd of French students on and around a towpath bench, and almost inevitably they were talking with some excitement about the Tour de France. Though I only got the odd noun – ‘Armstrong’, ‘Virenque’, ‘EPO’ (the notorious haemoglobin-boosting drug) – the relish was unavoidable. The race was still over a month off and already the expatriate youth of Gaul were on amber alert.
ZR3000 was propped by the front door, and on the way back in I squeezed round it, wondering how I felt about my bicycle now and how those feelings would have changed after 2,256 miles. Bowed down with baggage, the machine’s lean, hungry look was gone: it was like putting a roof-rack on a Lotus. My children had fulsomely decorated the saddle’s diminutive surface area with Cinderella stickers (you shall go to the balls, Cinders); there were already long scratches and an ugly dent where my trailing cleat had failed to clear the crossbar when I repeatedly dismounted in clumsy agony en route to Harrow.
Was I really going to cock my leg over that crossbar and not uncock it for a month and a bit? As a perennially shiftless slacker I had been urged more than once to get on my bike. To think that it should come to this.