In a sporting world where the adjective ‘professional’ is often a euphemism for cynicism and naked commercial greed, there is no sport more professional than road-race cycling. Riders have always been willing to throw away certain victory if the price is right, often holding muttered in-the-saddle auctions to sell their services in assisting a breakaway. Most smaller races are shams, their results fixed in advance by an unsightly round of horse trading.
And the Tour de France itself can claim no noble Corinthian origins, having been founded purely to promote a sports daily; when the yellow jersey was introduced in 1919 it was to emphasise that L’Auto Vélo was printed on paper of that colour. Bike companies had been splashing their names across riders’ chests even before that, and in 1957 the sponsorship expanded to include anything from ice-cream to beer. Soon it went a step further. I still found it hilarious that the names on the riders’ jerseys – at least, the main names – were those not of the team’s sponsors so much as their actual owners. In his prime, Eddy Merckx had flogged himself to the brink of collapse for the sake respectively of Faema, a manufacturer of coffee percolators, and Italy’s leading speciality butcher, Molteni. At the end he was riding for C&A, which no doubt explains his early retirement. I guess I’d give it some oomph for a nice espresso-maker, and the thought of a plate of sliced salami might give you something to aim at when the bonk came knocking, but you just can’t imagine Eddy grinding up the Casse Deserte under a merciless sun, driven onwards by the terrible, soul-swallowing prospect of a world without slacks.
Fans have always sought to emulate their heroes. You’ve got your replica bike and your replica jersey: all you need now is your replica amoral rapacity. This is where the caravane publicitaire comes in. The faxed itinerary plotted the progress of this brashly commercial vanguard as it sped along the route 30 kilometres ahead of the riders, and standing astride ZR on the Boulevard Saint-Pierre, starting point of stage ten, I pondered the scenes of grasping hysteria that would accompany it.
Channel 4 always breaks up its on-the-road coverage with behind-the-scenes reports, and a staple of these is the ‘day in the life of a Tour follower’. I must have seen half a dozen of these over the years, but the one that really stuck in my mind focused on a Belgian couple holding a long, hot roadside vigil on some uninspiringly flat stage.
Mr Belgium, emulating his many surrounding peers, settled down at a folding table to consume pastis with a gusto that belied the hour. If he got to bellow aniseed-spittled encouragement into a hero’s hot face it would have been a good day; if he remembered having done so, even better. But his wife was working to a different agenda. All morning Mrs Belgium had toiled morosely in the motorhome, assembling sandwiches for her unsteady husband and generally defining the adjective long-suffering; then there was a distant volley of silly musical horns and as a sort of Mexican cheer spread slowly up the road she rushed to the tarmac, clapping her hands, slapping her haunches and constructing facial expressions consistent with a triple jumper psyching himself up at the start of his final run-up: the free crap is coming.
A motorised tub of potted meat; four fibreglass racehorses frozen in mid-gallop on the roof of a Citroën; a mobile oversized gas bottle; a two-stroke globe with leering Michelin men strung round its equator; a coffee cup on wheels. Some of these vehicles and all the others were manned, in addition to the driver, by a couple of weary blondes hurling complimentary merchandise into the crowd, and the ugly feeding frenzy that occupied the next minutes of footage showed Channel 4 viewers the unacceptable face of audience participation.
Dazed and craven, Mr Belgium beat an early retreat. Blundering haphazardly from the scrum clutching an armful of swag, his sagging features fell further as he laid it out on the camping table: junk-mail brochures for car insurance or cubic zirconium jewellery, vouchers entitling him to bugger-all off his next packet of cack. What had happened to the packets of sweets and key rings, the cycling caps and yellow food-bags, the sachets of coffee and Camembert portions and sausages and windscreen sunshields? He didn’t know, but having watched the truth emerge through Channel 4’s all-seeing eye we did: everything, absolutely everything of any value had been caught, scooped, plucked or snatched by the darting form of Mrs Belgium. One moment she was diving full stretch to grab a packet of first-aid plasters from in front of an old man’s cupped hands; the next she was screaming in the face of the Michelin blonde as if that promotional bottle opener was her birthright. Everything had her name on it. Through a forest of beseeching hands it was hers alone that came away clutching a France Télécom baseball cap; when a neighbouring Dane took a flying videotape in the guts and went down, there she was, snatching it from his side like a battlefield corpse-robber.
She was the star but there were some glittering cameo performances. A sockless loafer stomped proprietorially on a mini frisbee; a woman with a face like a spat-out toffee held a small child up to the cheesemobile, screaming ‘Pour mes enfants!’ in the manner of a Balkan beggar. Some sort of moped-based Norse god of the sea chugged past dispensing small items of unpromising aspect wrapped in cellophane; a man in aviator Ray-Bans scooped one up and yelled, ‘Saucisson – magnifique!’ Children were dispatched into the road on insane crap-catching missions, plucking caps and biros from the small gaps between vehicles. As the last biro-hurling bath-tub puttered laboriously away through the pines and the crowds, Mrs Belgium puffed out her cheeks, aimed a rearwards nod at her mountain of merchandise and announced to the camera, ‘Une bonne récolte.’ A good harvest. I mean, I appreciate a cascade of free crap as much as – no, much, much more than – the next man, but it takes a special sort of front-line foolhardiness to mix it with the Mrs Belgiums. It ain’t what you get, it’s the way that you get it.
The Tour riders were to leave Dax at 10.45 a.m., setting off an hour and three quarters after the publicity caravan. I gave myself a 25-minute head start and settled down into a rhythm appropriate for the considerable heat: slow enough to maintain on a slight hill, fast enough to get a breeze down the unzipped front of my humid jersey.
As the roads got narrower and the villages smaller, so the Tour preparations seemed to gather impetus. At Habas, three separate gangs were doing flower-beds, road markings and telegraph-pole creosoting; every tiny hamlet seemed to imagine they wouldn’t be taken seriously without at least one mini roundabout.
It got hotter and quieter. There were no châteaux around here, and the farmhouses looked meaty and squat, like old forts; every barn was fronted by a huge chicken-wire cage of corn cobs, propped up on stilts to keep it out of the reach of the few rodents whose corpses were not festering by the roadside. Whole valleys reeked of smoked and smoking Bayonne ham. A rider in the crimson strip of Saeco careered towards me from a rippled horizon and shot past, a medley of loud respiration, sweat beads and nurtured machinery. There were signs for Pamplona, and then, biting into the heavens miles above the churches that wallowed up to their towers in heat haze, there they were. Some soft and round, with jolly Friesian snow patches, others shredding the sky with frightful grey claws: the Pyrenees.
Sobered, I got drunk. Lunch was taken in a fly-filled bar in the company of a loud road-gang who’d been resurfacing the Tour tarmac, all red wine, red faces, scratch cards and cap sleeves. There was no menu: the barman simply came over and filled the table before me with a huge aluminium tureen full of broth, a plate of black-pudding slices and a big jug of wine. ‘Ah – le dopage!’ guffawed the barman, sticking to the accepted script for all witnesses to my bidon-refilling routine. As I topped up water with Leader Price grape juice, he bent towards me with mock disapproval and sighed, ‘Et voilà – l’EPO.’ I laughed as much as I could. I didn’t want EPO. I wanted GTi.
It was real fuck-this heat by now, a dogs-in-the-fountain afternoon that drawled out for a siesta. Detecting an odd slushy pulping sound as I approached my first official climb, the Côte de Barcus, I looked down and saw my front wheel almost up to its rim in melted tarmac.
It didn’t help that I had no idea how much had been in that jug, except that it was slightly too much. They say that pride comes before a fall, but in my experience it’s far more likely to be wine. Forgetting to decleat I keeled over into a ditch alongside the temporary traffic lights erected by the road gang, and when I wobbled up to the next roundabout the fingerposts were a sozzled, illegible mass of obscure consonants that raised grander doubts concerning my sobriety. Presently I understood I had entered Basque country, a region whose fragile linguistic tradition is these days bolstered by bilingual road signs emphasising a perverse fondness for ‘k’s, ‘z’s and ‘x’s. I never heard anyone speaking Basque, except on telly, but the heavily accented French was almost unintelligible. For two days I had to deal with people who greeted me with a ‘bon-jewer’ that sounded like a Yorkshireman reading from a phrasebook.
The Côte de Barcus was a coiling category – three ascent through Teletubbyland: meadows that were too green, sky that was too blue, cows that were too dun. It was bad, but not that bad. I reached the village of Barcus in third-bottom gear, hot but happy. In commentatorspeak, Moore was never in serious trouble on the first climb of the day. The regrettable truth is that such statements are almost inevitably followed by a huge, Pyrenean-sized but.
It had been a lovely, gentle ride along the Aspe valley to the village of Escot. The looming terror of the mountains had somehow been shielded from me by foothills and foliage, and with 110k up for the day I should by rights have looked for a hotel. But it was only 5.30 p.m., and the idea of tackling all the stage’s big climbs the next day in one fell swoop (with more of the fell and less of the swoop) seemed overambitious. The col de Marie-Blanque was a category one, but on the Michelin map the road over it didn’t flail about like a dying snake. The hors catégorie monsters went up to 1,800 metres; at just over a grand the Marie-Blanque couldn’t be, or anyway shouldn’t be, a ridge too far.
There were several large ifs to go with the aforementioned but. If I had troubled my imperial brain with the old-money translation, I would have realised I was departing at clocking-off time towards a formidable eminence as tall as Snowdon. If I had read Graeme Fife’s Tour de France I would have found the Marie-Blanque described as ‘a killer in disguise’. If I had spent a little more time looking at the map I would have noted that while the road was reasonably straight, it was also decorated not with a single, nor a double, but to you sir with the waxen death mask a treble gradient chevron.
I heard my first cowbells as I filled both bidons with cool water from an almost painfully charming dolphin-head fountain by the turn-off to Marie-Blanque. There was a shaded bench by the fountain, and sitting down with the full force of post-wine drought suddenly upon me I laid the groundwork for the most serious if. If I hadn’t drunk two litres of chilled water.
One corner out of Escot and the peaks suddenly leapt out above me with a genuinely startling visual boo: great slabs of rock poking out from rainforest greenery, some of them so sheer that I couldn’t crane my neck far enough to see the tops. A trio of thermal-topped riders swished towards me round a curve at enormous speed, wheel to wheel, leaning steeply into the corner. Ignoring the implications of their velocity and attire I plodded on, click-clicking down into gear twenty-four past the roofless shepherds’ huts.
For some time the only sounds were ZR’s click-clicks and drrr-thwicks, echoing tinnily off the granite walls. Soon, however, my ugly respirations became rather more dominant. The gradient didn’t seem ridiculous, with none of the batteries of hairpin bends I’d been led to expect, but I seemed to be finding it hard to maintain the revs. Rhythm, I knew, was crucial, and while my heart was playing techno my legs were struggling to keep time with Mantovani. In contradiction of the modern maxim, there was pain but no gain. Click-click-click and I was in bottom gear, twenty-seven, with no more shots in the locker if the incline steepened, which of course it did just round the corner.
Tour riders have any number of terms to describe what was happening to me, and try as I might to resist I found them all parading funereally through my mind. I was going backwards, I was cooked. Grovelling, that was another. Dying. I had cracked. The sweat stung my eyes before being sluiced away down grimace lines that would show up tomorrow like long, white fencing scars on my otherwise broiled face.
There were names painted all over the road now, French, Spanish and even the odd outbreak of Cyrillic, and every one of them seemed a rebuke. I imagined people racing each other – racing each other – up this slope, fans shouting their names as they jockeyed and jostled and jumped on the pedals to speed away.
When your body is very hot and you make it very cold, bad things happen: cramps, essentially, affecting all parts of the musculature. Two litres, I learned later, is what some Tour riders restrict themselves to for an entire day. ‘Driest is fastest,’ said five-times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil. Pierre Brambilla, in 1947 the winner of the King of the Mountains competition for the Tour’s top climber, guzzled cold water from a fountain during the scorched 1948 race and retired in agonies 10 kilometres further on. The day that Tour ended he buried his bike in the garden and never raced again.
My legs felt wizened and pickled, my arms bruised and tremulous. Filling my lungs was like hyperventilating next to a faulty incinerator, yet the fire in my chest could not melt the heavy, iced spasm into which my innards had frozen. I coughed up iron and vinegar and flobbed it feebly on to my forearm.
But at the same time, none of this was the problem. I had seen people feeling worse than this and carrying on, 400-metre athletes throwing up in full flow on the home straight, marathon runners wobbling drunkenly into the stadium, any number of Tour cyclists on any number of Tour mountains. Even I had too, I remembered: stumbling agonisingly towards the line in the second-year 800-metre ‘A’ race of 1974 as Neil Gross gritted his heavily discoloured teeth in the lane alongside, the tears already welling up in my eyes as I realised I couldn’t make my legs move any faster and this Krankie-faced gnome was going to beat me.
It was Eddy’s will thing. Bernard Hinault had talked about ‘the doubts which sometimes overwhelm the rider’ and now I saw exactly what he meant. As soon as you think you can’t, you won’t. When the first defeatist thoughts sidled tentatively into the corridors of my mind, the forces of determination immediately collaborated and gave the invaders a rousing ticker-tape reception. If I could have seen the top of the col it might have made a difference, but when I looked fuzzily down at the odometer and saw I’d only done half of the climb’s 10 kilometres there was no option. Like Paul Kimmage on the col du Télégraphe in the 1987 Tour, I was just looking for somewhere to abandon. Going so slowly that I had to time my uncleating manoeuvre carefully to avoid an unsightly fall, I clambered off ZR by a barrier that closed off the pass’s upper reaches in winter. It would have helped if the scenery in this section had looked a little more savagely Alpine and a little less like Box Hill on a pleasant June weekend. Nettles, buttercups, slugs … and then an off-key bell tinkling somewhere above. Forget the tree line – I hadn’t even made it past the bloody cow line.
In the state I was in, pushing was barely easier. In 1933, Percy Stannard was picked for the British team to ride in the world championship after winning the national trials – his first ever race – by shouldering his bike and running up the hills. How dare you, Stannard. Every five minutes I remounted, but it never lasted long. Once you get off you can’t really get on again. Cars suddenly started descending towards me at regular intervals; every time I heard one coming I’d whip the map out of the bar-bag and pretend I’d stopped to plot my progress. At least there were no more cyclists.
I did manage to do the last half kilometre in the saddle, and even had the gall to set up a self-timer shot at the top, standing astride ZR by the altitude sign and peering through the low sun at the bleak but benign eminences around. And of course the descent paid scant justice to the horrors of the climb, containing long flat sections where horses with bleached Human League fringes wandered over the road and I had to pedal fairly hard to keep going. I’d Velcroed myself into the all-weather top in preparation for a chilly, windswept downhill swoop, but it never happened. I was the Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a hill.
Wheeling into the main square at Laruns I was bonking fairly seriously, an awful mental and physical vacuum that left me ill-prepared for my reception at the only open hotel. As I swayed dead-eyed among the outdoor diners finishing their sorbets in the last of the sun the youthful proprietress fixed me with a challenging look. The rooms were 285 francs, she said, and if I needed a garage for my vélo, eh bien, that would be an extra 30F. ‘Pour un vélo?’ She gave me a next-please look. I told her that in that case I’d take it up to my room. With a sneering shake of the head she swaggered complacently back indoors.
‘Excuse me,’ I yawled, in a weary, drunken slur that raised faces from many sorbets. ‘Do you think you could come back and try doing that a bit more rudely?’ It was gone eight by now, and getting cold down at the foot of the vast encirclement of enormous green peaks beneath which Laruns cowered. I should have been in an oxygen tent on a drip, not fighting for my consumer rights in the street. Slowly waving a snot-gloved hand in her general direction, I remounted and rolled away.
On the outskirts I’d seen a sign advertising a hotel memorably called Le Lorry a kilometre beyond Laruns. I won’t pretend that this was a short kilometre, or that Le Lorry was open, or that I didn’t return to my tormentress with my tail, and indeed my head, between my legs. It was like surrendering to an enemy general whose humiliating terms you had haughtily rejected an hour earlier. She demanded my passport and kept it; she stood in folded-arms silence as I struggled cravenly with the up-and-over garage doors; she lined up her staff to watch me drag my panniers laboriously up the 9-inch-wide staircase. On the other hand, by looking less like a shovel-faced Def Leppard groupie, I had the last laugh.
The room was unpleasant – tall, narrow and gloomy, like a Portakabin turned on end, with an ever-present cough muffling its way through the distant ceiling to impart the atmosphere of a TB sanatorium – but, however hungry, I wasn’t about to leave it. Gathering together the squashed croissants and pliable chocolate squares that had made their home in my panniers’ basements, I lay on the bed and ate the lot while watching the final moments of the European Cup Final.
You’re not real sportsmen, I thought as Real Madrid jumped about on the victors’ rostrum, you’re just good at football. You don’t go out and flog yourself half to death every day. Only when the Valencia squad filed vacantly past to pick up their losers’ medals did I feel an empathy. These were the faces of men who had just faced the ultimate sporting challenge of their lives, and had failed.
Still, I pondered dimly, aware that I was about to fall asleep with my clothes on again but not caring, at least I get another go. I had lost the battle but not the war. That’s the good thing about the Tour. Every day, every stage is a race within the race. There’s always tomorrow.