Eurosport was on in the breakfast room and there was Axel Merckx, Eddy junior, winning a stage of the Tour of Italy. This was the first time I’d seen real cyclists since I’d been doing some real cycling, and I found myself intently scanning the peloton for tips on technique. But there was no secret. They just pedalled really fast, and the man who pedalled the fastest won. Merckx senior, congratulating Axel on the line, was clearly still on race rations, eating for eight hours in the saddle – Fast Eddy had lost an ‘s’. The man they once called Cannibal looked about as man-eating as the owner of a small but prosperous chain of carpet warehouses.
I could talk. I was regularly sticking away enough fuel for 250 kilometres but doing only half that: I might be the fittest I’d ever been in my life, but I was also the fattest. The Pyrenees loomed and no amount of liberal toothpaste use would offer gravitational compensation for the nascent spare inner-tube ruching up above my shorts.
Mont-de-Marsan had been a profoundly horrid place, and I was so eager to leave it that I didn’t notice until it was too late that the N124 marked on my – oh, seventeen-year-old – map had been supplanted by a 110 k.p.h. expressway. Parped reproaches informed me that my presence on this many-laned drag strip was inappropriate; lorries took especial pleasure in buffeting me into the calf-slashing tall grass that lined the hard shoulder. It was a long way to the next turn-off, and by the time I got there an already keen connoisseurship of roadside debris had been broadened still further.
We’re all familiar with the bits of glass, rubber and animals that line major thoroughfares, and I could have contributed a thoughtful foreword to Chrome Alone: The Lost Hubcaps of France, but it was intriguing to note the range of objects that motorists discard voluntarily. Why all these hundred-yard lengths of cassette tape?
‘Gérard, we love Johnny Halliday, right?’
‘Everyone loves Johnny. Go, Johnny!’
‘Yeah. Go! But I was thinking – why is that?’
‘Well, because he’s a global pop-rock legend who just happens to be French, that’s why.’
‘Even though no one else in the world has heard of him.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘And even though he looks like a chain-smoking old tramp in mascara.’
‘Yeah. But you know: go, Johnny!’
‘Right. I mean, I really love Johnny too, but the thing is, all of his music is just so utterly, utterly abysmal, that I was wondering if we could carry on doing the whole love bit while at the same time throwing all his tapes out of the window.’
‘Fair enough. We’ll do it when we stop to crap in the next lay-by.’
I cut down to Dax on stretches of the old N124, through moribund villages that must have cheered the day the expressway took the traffic away but now looked like they were missing the noise and excitement. For much of the way I kept pace with a postwoman in a little yellow van: the dogs always gave her a welcoming pant as she ambled up their front paths, then flung themselves in spittled rage at their chain-link fences when they saw me.
The journey to Dax was a mere 60 kilometres – I should warn you that I’m about to start saying ‘k’ instead of kilometres – and I got there before lunch. Though by most standards unassuming, it was considerably less dead than Mont-de-Marsan, a place I’d erased from my mind so successfully that when the shopkeeper I asked for directions enquired where I’d come from that day I had to get the map out to remind myself.
Dax had a slightly flyblown, Mexican air, with plenty of scabby whitewash and hot dust, but there were a couple of breezy, palm-lined squares, a well-tended maze of pedestrianised shopping streets and the inevitable big river, this time bordered by a bank of enormously flash spa hotels. The most enormous and flashest was a dazzling art-deco palace unashamedly labelled SPLENDIDE, which was good news for me because, as I appear not to have mentioned I had booked myself in here before leaving England. This was the first of my stops under Simon’s reward scheme, and though I’d arrived a couple of days early, due to the now-notorious excision of the Brittany Loop, the room I’d reserved was free.
Can’t say the receptionist seemed overjoyed, however. Wheeling ZR across the Splendide’s lobby, an echoingly regal Grand Central Station job, I’d felt somewhat out of place amongst the old men in dressing gowns perusing brass-and-glass cases full of expensive leather accessories and hampers of foie gras. The garage was ‘not correct’ for bicycles, she said, flashing tell-me-about-it peripheral smiles at passing guests as if to say: Don’t worry, we’ll have this sweaty buffoon out of your way soon.
‘That’s OK. I’ll just take it up to my room,’ I said, raising the stakes with a wide-eyed beam.
‘Non! No – I …’
‘This bicycle,’ I said, patting ZR’s sweaty saddle with exaggerated respect, ‘is worth 24,000 US dollars.’
The receptionist glanced down at the muddy panniers, then looked me straight in the eye and smiled with marked coldness. But she said nothing, perhaps knowing that the spectacle of laboriously levering my bike upright to fit it alongside me in the tiny lift would offer ample recompense.
My room was intensely exciting, a symphony of restored art-deco glass and mahogany, everything authentic except the whopping great telly and the groin-soaking turbo tap in the bathroom basin. And it was also immense, big enough to cycle round, though this didn’t stop it feeling very odd to have the bike in there with me. Propped up against the mirrored wardrobe, it stared accusingly from every angle, even glinting in the dark when I went to the loo in the night. And, because the Tour de France press office fucked up and/or lied – difficult to accept, I know, but bear with me – there would be two nights for it to glint through before I could get my faxed itinerary and be off.
Still, it could have been worse. The room was just £40 a night – an absurd bargain – and a rest day before the (eeeek!) Pyrenees could only be good. After a pleasant interlude making alien faces in the wide-angled make-up mirror, I walked out into a lethargically hot afternoon and somehow ended up talking Tour at the town hall.
Turning up unannounced at a public office in France and requesting an instant meeting must be right up there with alchemy in the long-shot stakes, and I was still in shock when Eric, a nice young man in the service de communication, tapped a Marlboro Light on his desk and asked what he could do for me. Well! After five minutes I had learned that Dax had paid the Société du Tour de France one million francs to be a ville d’étape; that doing so was considered an important investment for the town’s national and international profile in terms of both commerce and tourism; that the civic celebrations would include music, dancing and bicycle-shaped flower-beds.
If my French or Eric’s English had been better I might have learned more, but it was a start. In fact, as I was bundled into the office of his boss Isobel, I was rather wishing it had been an end. Isobel spoke no English, wore Heinrich Himmler glasses and had a Mini-Me secretary sitting beside her. ‘Cinq petites secondes,’ she barked, glancing flamboyantly at her watch, but it seemed like vingt grandes minutes before I managed to think of something to say, and that was asking if she liked bicycles.
Wisely ignoring this imbecility, Isobel slickly engaged human press-release mode. I tried my best to keep up. Dax had last been a ville d’étape in 1959 (possibly), was only a small town of 20,000 (possibly), and the arrival of the Tour would be a night for citizens to resemble each other and shoot cat-skins (possibly not). She also gave me rather a start by insisting that one of the main objectives was to lure old people here for ‘termalisme’. This sounded uncommonly like a frank synonym for euthanasia, and my concerns for all those old dears playing bridge in the Splendide lobby were only laid to rest the next day when I saw the word, complete with silent ‘H’, emblazoned outside a health spa.
Eric rescued me with a slightly apologetic smile and saw me off with a ‘Bon courage’. That was good, but what I really craved was a ‘chapeau’. Chapeau! – hats off! – was the traditional roadside hosanna for those who had achieved the memorable: Merckx on a 130-kilometre solo attack in the mountains during his first Tour, Roche coming up through the mist at la Plagne. Wandering the soporific early-evening streets in search of food I withdrew my odometer, which I’d unclipped from ZR in order to gloat over. In seven days in the saddle I’d gone from wet north to banana-palm south, covering 808.4 kilometres; risible by Tour standards, but more than many pros aim to do in a week’s training. And my top speed, 61 k.p.h., was the fastest I had ever travelled under my own steam, probably even including that youthful encounter with the 577 Crew on Ealing Common. Beginning to feel quite important, I strode into a pizzeria.
My previous experience of such establishments should have taught me some sort of lesson, but I can’t be too hard on myself for failing to predict that my tormentors that evening would not be inexpertly preserved fish, but a trio of animatronic harlequins. There were three of them by the door, each the size of a 5-year-old child, and as they ushered me through the lobby area with jerky genuflections and Lurex sieg-heils I chortled merrily at what seemed the kitschest encounter of my life to date.
This was a response I had cause to regret as soon as I was seated at a table just behind them. It was then that I noticed the noise: ominously familiar, yet strangely changed. Drrrr-thweeek … Drrrr-thweeek … For a time I thought I could at least control the situation by working out which machine was responsible: the gold one, forever beating its brow in reproach for some unknown transgression; the red one, its outstretched left hand juddering uncertainly about as if passing a verdict of mediocrity; the silver one with the Queen Bess ruff, scything out a tune on an absent double-bass … But by the time the goateed waiter glided up it was already too late. My fillings seemed to be melting; there was something wrong with my spine.
Distantly aware that such a request would usually invite heavy sedation and the removal of belt and shoelaces, I nonetheless heard myself ask for the little golden men to be deactivated. The waiter’s empathetic nodded wince said: If you think you’ve got it bad, try working here. But then he shrugged, looked bleak and in a voice racked with helpless frustration said, ‘Le patron …’
Le patron what? ‘Le patron spent his childhood trapped in a robot’s body.’ ‘Le patron had a vision in which three metal boys came to Dax bearing the Ruff of Christ.’ ‘Le patron is in love with the one in red, but she’s married to the gold one and won’t leave him, so old silver’s there to keep an eye on the pair of them.’
There was an argument for returning with my bicycle, wedging le patron’s tie in the chain and pedalling off at speed, and this argument became more compelling when I noticed that all the tables were rhombus-shaped. What was wrong with the man? One could only imagine the Cinzano-raddled reasoning by which such features were thought to lure potential diners.
‘Fancy a pizza tonight, Brigitte?’
‘Nice idea, Serge. What about Benito’s?’
‘Well, I dunno – the food’s good, but look at his furniture and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single oblique angle.’
‘Fair point. Dax Romana?’
‘I dunno – the pitwheel in their cross-section model of a colliery hasn’t revolved in months. And they keep their anchovies in the fridge.’
The waiter offered me a more distant table, but I knew that a whispered drrr-thweeek would play even worse tricks on a shot cerebral cortex, and he understood immediately when I said I would have to leave.
On the way home, chip-stuffed pitta bread in still-trembling hand, I began to fear for myself. For some days now I had become mildly obsessed with Eddy Merckx’s explanation of what made a great champion: that while it was possible to assess a cyclist’s physical capabilities, ‘there are no laws that govern the will’. Suddenly I understood exactly what he meant. Clocking up the ‘k’s and bullying myself into physical condition, I’d slightly missed the point. The Tour was about mental strength, telling your brain to shut up when it started screaming at you to stop, to control physical suffering as if it was just a schmaltzy emotion, like crying in Tarka the Otter. I couldn’t imagine Eddy driven to the dizzy brink of mania by three squeaky dolls. The mountains are coming, I thought. My legs might cope, but will my will? My will won’t.
There were two rest days in the 2000 Tour, one after the Pyrenees and the other just before the end of the Alps. Playing a rest-day joker before the mountains even started seemed a bit feeble, but then it wasn’t my fault. All I could do was conduct myself in an appropriately professional manner, which, after reading Paul Kimmage’s account of Tour rest days, required me to sleep a lot, wash shorts in the bidet and go for a quick spin on the bike to stop my legs from stiffening up. The first two kept me occupied until 6 p.m., whereupon I pedalled off for a ride-thru McDonald’s, picking up a couple of lagers from a Leader Price store on the way home after seeing two sun-wizened winos exchanging crafty, incredulous smiles as they emerged with armfuls of bargain beer.
The alarmingly high alcoholic content of these ales helped tide me through an evening of French television, one whose primetime content was dominated by toe-curling studio jamborees reminiscent of Noel’s House Party. Then the phone rang. It was reception saying they had a fax for me from the Société du Tour de France.
The last day before the mountains is, for the élite riders, the end of the beginning; for the rest, it’s the beginning of the end. When snow crops up on the horizon their sights shift from stage wins to survival, languishing up hairpins behind the guy who’s worked out exactly how much they’ve got in hand before the broom wagon sweeps them up or they’re excluded on time differential (anyone finishing a slow mountain stage in a time 4 per cent greater than the winner’s is kicked out).
The receptionist had refused to confirm or deny that Tour riders would be staying in the Splendide (‘I regret it is a secret,’ she said; ‘Any particular size?’ was my unanswered counter query), but it seemed more than probable. I imagined them, like me, lying awake in the night and feeling they were about to go into battle after a week of phoney war. ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar glinted tauntingly by the mirror: this was what he had been built for, this was his time. D’you fancy a bit, son, he sneered; d’you fancy a bit of the tall stuff, eh, a bit of the old thin air?
Of course, in some ways it didn’t make much difference to me: my agenda had been about survival from the start. If I hadn’t made the mistake of looking through those endless faxed tables I probably would have been fine. But deprived of data for so long, I pored over them. Each stage was broken down in kilometre-by-kilometre detail, with every village, sprint and feeding station. Oh, and the climbs. Every eminence above a certain height is graded by an arcane formula, fourth category being the easiest, all the way up to the fearsome firsts, and beyond that the HCs: the hors catégories, off the scale, beyond the pale. These were the legends, from Mont Ventoux to the col d’Izoard, hairpin-stacked horrors where the Tour was won and lost. There were seven in all, and the next day’s stage from Dax to Lourdes-Hautacam had two of them.
But worse than all this was the speed. There were three times listed alongside each climb and village, giving the riders’ ETA at three different average rates of progress. On some of the flat stages, the most cautious prediction was that they would barrel along at 40 k.p.h. all day, with 44 k.p.h. the most optimistic. Tomorrow’s stage was estimated to be the second slowest, but even then the organisers couldn’t see the riders letting their average speed drop below 31 k.p.h. On a flat road, 31 k.p.h. seems fast. At that speed the wind noise deafens and your hair is blown right back. You’re really travelling. If a red squirrel ran out in front of you it would be a dead squirrel. The concept of maintaining such a speed while ascending some of the highest roads in Europe was an outrage against logic.
I don’t think I slept at all. At about 5 a.m. I filled the bath and lay for an hour up to my ears in Bond-girl foam. The breakfast-telly weatherman shouted out something about 28 degrees in the Pyrenees, and when I finally wound up the electric shutters everything was already all hot terracotta and azure. Merciless sun and mountains – you wait all week for an unreasonable physical challenge, and then two come along at once.
I’d ordered breakfast in bed as a treat; ‘Bon appetit,’ said the chambermaid, but looking at all those little pots of jam I felt sick. The off-to-battle panic punched me in the guts again, and I had a strong desire to crock myself by knocking steaming hot chocolate into my lap, like the Somme soldiers shooting themselves in the foot as the order came to go over the top. After forty-four hours of virtual inactivity, my buttocks and legs still pulsed with discomfort. How could I have whined about those lovely flat forests?
Negotiating ZR through a sea of tables laid for some grand buffet reception, a Leslie Phillips chap with a waxed ’tache and cravat sidled over with a camp leer.
‘Le Tour de France?’
I tried to look a bit less like leftover guacamole. After my stuttering explanation, he stood back, saluted theatrically and barked, ‘Aux montagnes, Anglais!’