The rain had flattened the long grass like a stampeding herd of bulls, but the sun was out now and, pouring me the first of half a dozen glasses of orange juice, Nick suggested the three of us go for a mountain ride. Because this could not be allowed to happen, I went back to bed until I heard Rhys and Nick leave, then shambled wanly downstairs to look at the map. Nick’s proposed circular route up to the col de Saraillé and back to Biert down the gorge involved a climb to 942 metres up a tiny road whose impressive collection of double-gradient chevrons guaranteed a rousing ‘sod-that’ verdict. Instead I sat on the patio, reading selections from the Flanagan cycling library and enjoying the experience of wearing only slightly foolish clothing during the hours of daylight. The sun made my mottled, waxy nose throb; under the table, the one-eyed dog leaked sympathetic milk over my espadrilles. I was ready to go back to bed when I found myself gradually absorbed by the story of Eugène Christophe.
Leading the 1913 Tour as it crosses the Pyrenees, Christophe is hurtling down the Tourmalet when his front forks snap, propelling him into a wall of scree. Tour rules dictate that riders must effect all repairs themselves (a situation that persisted until 1930), so Christophe dusts himself down, shoulders his stricken machine and somehow runs with it for 10 kilometres down what was then Europe’s highest road (sorry: ‘road’). Arriving bloody and exhausted at the village of Sainte-Mairie-de-Campan, he is followed silently into the local forge by Tour snoops keen to ensure no illicit aid is offered or received. Waving the blacksmith aside and perhaps hissing lengthy compound insults through his teeth, Christophe begins to hammer wearily at strips of glowing metal, and after two hot, hard hours has somehow fashioned himself a set of forks. As he prepares to set off, now four hours down and in last place, an official blocks his way. The handiwork may have been all his own, but in allowing the blacksmith’s boy to pump the bellows Christophe has accepted indirect third-party help. Illegal assistance – a further ten-minute penalty.
I put the book down on the rain-spotted table, leant back in my slatted folding chair and looked up at the mountains. Then I went inside, withdrew a number of other titles and thumbed through their indices looking for Christophe, Eugène. The early years were bad enough. In 1910 he ploughed through snowdrifts in the Milan-San Remo race, an effort which earned him a month in hospital and two lost years of racing; in his comeback Tour, 1912, he actually finished with a lower overall time than the winner, but because that year the race was decided on an arcane points basis Eugène was placed second. And then it got worse.
Determined not to abandon the 1913 race after the rather trying bellows incident, he somehow claws his way back to finish seventh. The war then intervenes, but in the first race afterwards, 1919, Christophe soon finds himself the inaugural wearer of the new yellow jersey selected by the Tour organisers to distinguish the race leader. During the stage between Metz and Dunkirk, at 468k (what? What?) the second-longest in Tour history, race leader Christophe feels an ominous shudder and then a mighty wrench. He can’t quite believe it, but it’s the front forks again. By the time he sources a new pair from a bike factory he has lost over an hour and again it is too much to regain. He keeps trying until 1925, when, nineteen years after his first Tour and now aged 40, he enters his last, abandoning well before the finish.
I restocked the library and went into the bar. I’d hidden ZR behind a table here to minimise the risk of kit-comparison sessions during which the extent of my ignorance would be quickly exposed, but now extracted it. Propped against Nick’s turbo trainer, without the panniers it looked lithe and poised. I thought of a picture of Eugène Christophe I’d just seen: flat cap, recklessly enormous ringmaster moustache, spare tyre wrapped round shoulders of fisherman’s jersey, filthy legs planted on filthy cobbles. And, held by one hand on the saddle, the other on the bars, his bike. It reminded me a lot of my first bike, the hand-me-down Wayfarer: no gears, meaty iron tubing, sit-up-and-beg handlebars – and a big chrome bell. A bell. Ding-ding! Ding-ding! Leader of world’s most gruelling sporting event coming through! Ding-ding-ding!
Suddenly I understood something important. Part of the Tour de France was about trying to get one over on your opponents: better tactics, better equipment, better drugs – a competitive advantage by any means necessary. I remembered a helicopter shot I’d seen of the Tour of Italy, with half a dozen riders sneaking a short-cut across a petrol-station forecourt while the rest of the peloton log-jammed slowly through the adjacent roundabout. Stuff like this, and the more epically blatant chicanery of the early years, had appealed to me, and in my own way I had already done it all. But beneath this professional cynicism, the Tour was still fundamentally about the amateur ideals of courage and noble suffering, and this was a Tour I hadn’t yet entered. In any case, who were my opponents? Carefully selected old men aside, I was essentially competing against myself: the shiftless, irresolute schemer facing the rather more reticent lion-hearted incorruptible, the one who got on his bike instead of getting off it. Humbly thanking Eugène, I went upstairs, changed into my jersey and shorts, came back down, cleated myself into ZR and headed for the hills.
The D17 out of Massat was thin, steep and so quiet that dogs slept on it. With the sun working on the wet greenery you could smell photosynthesis going into overdrive: Jan had given up her vegetable plot after weeding it became a painting-the-Forth-Bridge job, and Nick said hillsides like this one were regularly buzzed by police helicopters looking for pot plantations. It was almost tropical up there. I nodded at a couple of ageing hippies on their corrugated veranda; three blokes pretending to fix a barn roof jeered, ‘Eh – le Tour est arrivé!’ as I rounded the hairpin alongside. The road dipped slightly, then pitched radically upwards, but even as it did so I became aware of an important fact: I was not slowing down. The D17 climbed through a dark arc of woodland and I climbed with it, looking down at my back wheel to note that I was only in gear twenty-four, three shy of the bottom of the barrel. The trees petered out and suddenly there it was, a yawning 360-degree panorama of perpendicular pastures and snow-veined granite that swept all the way across to Spain.
My heart felt like bursting, but not for the reason I had become accustomed to on reaching such altitudes. Reaching the brow of the col de Saraillé was a religious experience: I am healed; I can see; in conquering the savage beauty around me I have, in fact, become its creator. The climb had not been a calvary but a road to Damascus, one that had converted me to a self-believer. For the first time in over twenty years I raised both my hands from a set of handlebars and punched the blue sky.
On the loop back to Biert up the gorge I stopped at Castet-d’Aleu for a celebratory coffee at an excellent bar/shop, where an unbelievably old man presided over dark cabinets of pre-war preserves. Was it the lack of panniers, I wondered as I sat outside watching the traffic, or the additional rest, or the brevity of the day’s 33-kilometre itinerary? Probably all three, but none of them played any part in the conclusion I arrived at during the course of a bitter, beetle-black coffee and what would have been a complimentary chocolate if the old man’s old wife hadn’t nicked it while I was in the loo. I had gone off that day to search for the hero inside myself, and somewhere up on the col de Saraillé I had found him. To return to Pyrenean Pursuits and be obliged to dismiss my climb in casual terms was a very hard thing to do.
On this basis, it was a shame that in the pitiable depths of my long, dark night of the soul I’d already committed myself to more cheating. Biert was a good 60k off the route of a stage which dead-ended at the unpromising town of Revel, from where the riders would take a plane transfer across Languedoc to Avignon (alight here for Mont Ventoux). Birna had not been required to use all of her powers of persuasion to convince me on the phone to bunk off the bit to Revel, and had even, as a call from her that morning revealed, booked me a hire car to drive myself from Toulouse airport to Avignon.
I would get to Toulouse by train, or rather I wouldn’t, for as Nick established during an epic sequence of chair-bitingly contradictory telephonic encounters with assorted transport officials, of the three trains a day which would accept bicycles, an impressive seven were affected by wildcat strike action. Of the remaining five, six were redirected to Barcelona, though the front two carriages of the other four would proceed to Carcassonne, arriving eleven minutes before they had left. ‘I’ll drive you,’ said Nick; I instantly protested at this further act of generosity, but not for very long.
We left the next morning, my body still processing a snails ’n’ quails gourmet extravaganza that had made an additional mockery of Pyrenean Pursuits’ 250F-a-night half-board tariff. Rhys, now infected by the Zen-like inertia that apparently governs many an Ariègeois lifestyle, was planning to stay a few more days, cooling his heels and more particularly their adjacent ankles. A serendipitous phone call from Nick’s next guest, an American called Mike, asking to be picked up at Toulouse airport, made me feel slightly better about his 200-kilometre roundtrip, and proved an additional boon when it became clear that the only hire-car available at the airport was the one Mike had just returned.
It was odd to be driving again, odd to ease down on the sort of pedal that effortlessly whooshed you up to idiotic velocity. Cleated to the bike I’d forgotten what it meant to be footloose and fancy-free, and it was good to remember. Hammering eastwards on the hot motorway I passed the pop-up medieval horizon of Carcassonne, deafeningly serenaded with the bygone sounds of Nostalgie FM, the station selected by Mike and, after a fruitless attempt at mastering the tuning procedure, tolerated in default by me. I’d read somewhere that French radio stations are obliged to broadcast 40 per cent of their music in the native language as part of the nation’s campaign to prove that it is better than England, and the distressing Halliday-heavy consequences of this made themselves apparent as I flew up the fast lane. Still, the Nostalgie playlist devisers had found the odd grey-area loophole. ‘Michelle, ma belle’ and ‘Chanson d’amour, ra-da-da-da-da’ had both blared out of the speakers twice before I began the first of several late-afternoon laps of Avignon’s city walls.
Avignon was my second pre-booked flash-hotel stopover, though given the modest scale of my achievements since Dax I barely felt I’d earned it. I eventually found the Mercure Palais des Papes near the famous half bridge, embedded in the man-made cliffs that shore up the Pope’s palace. My plan had been to bugger about up and down the ochre boulevards and high-sided alleys, then early to bed for a prolonged toss/turn session mulling over the looming horrors of Ventoux, but this scheme was adapted somewhat by the revelation at reception that my single room had been upgraded to the rather larger one necessary to accommodate Birna and our three children. The party had arrived on the TGV an hour before and, as I presently discovered, were currently in situ.
I will leave you to imagine the emotional, high-pitched yelps of ‘Daddy gone but Daddy here now!’ as well as my children’s own reactions. Birna explained that my unsettling telephonic performance had triggered much domestic concern, and I belatedly understood that all the car-hire booking and detailed enquiries into my itinerary were related to the planning of this half-term surprise. ‘In fact, I’m completely OK now,’ I said with an effort. ‘I went up a big mountain yesterday without any problems at all.’ Birna has an impressive armoury of level looks, and she treated me now to her most horizontal. ‘Isn’t that what you said to those men in the Pyrenees?’
My morale roller-coaster had been round a few loops and corkscrews since that terrible phone call, but I realised just how bad I must have sounded for Birna even to have considered marshalling three children aged 1 to 6 single-handed from London on the train. I-Spy had regressed into We-Punch well before the Channel, and after the sweets ran out at Lille Birna had been drawn inexorably into yet another prolonged search for our children’s on/off switches, or at least volume controls. A snooty businesswoman had repeatedly demanded that ‘the calme of the wagon to be respected’, and though she abruptly relocated to the next carriage after a co-ordinated ‘bouncing’ incident outside Dijon, those final hours of onboard high jinks had been inevitably trying.
The presence of my family was joyous but utterly dislocating. Things I had become accustomed to – strewing all my road-ravaged clothing carelessly about the room, spending less than £400,000 an hour, performing Mr Boardman’s Patent Stretches without rowdy hecklers, waking up in full daylight – were to become distant memories. Of course all of this was comfortably outweighed by the benefits of an Alpine support vehicle, loaded with panniers and cheerleaders, urging me up the mountains. Then watching in grim-faced, nauseated disillusion as I wheezed and swore and flobbed and fell and failed.
You really don’t want to cycle up Mont Ventoux when it’s hot. 28 May 2000 might not have been as fearsome as 13 July 1967, but even at 10 a.m. the dark green litter bins out in front of the Palais des Papes were sufficiently sun-grilled to make a small child squeal almost as loudly as the slightly smaller child he was trying to upend into one. I looked up at the cloudless sky and tried to regulate my breathing. Tom Simpson’s fate wasn’t one I aspired to, and no matter how large a shadow he would cast over the day ahead it wouldn’t be large enough to keep me cool. My stomach fizzed with trepidation, but click-cleating back to the car park I at least detected that for the first morning in two weeks my legs didn’t feel as if they’d been energetically headbutted all night by someone wearing a welder’s helmet.
With my departure delayed by the amount of time it takes to manoeuvre three children past a merry-go-round, a Pokémon stall and a dead pigeon, the sun was already high when I returned to the hotel room to fill my bidons with the usual fly-friendly blend of grape juice and tap water. The plan had been for me to drive to Carpentras with ZR in the boot of the Twingo, then set off for the 149-kilometre stage to the Ventoux summit, where Birna and the kids would meet me in the distressingly dear Renault Espace we had hired. The issue here was that on past form I would require at least eight hours (including the non-negotiable long lunch) to do those 149 kilometres, and that was without taking the gradient factor into account.
As it was now midday, this schedule appeared an irksome one. Additionally keen to minimise the scope for hot death, I abruptly decided to sit out the worst of the sun by bunking off the preparatory meanderings. Driving beyond Carpentras to the village of Sault, I’d skip 89 kilometres and gird myself for a late-afternoon assault on the final 60k. This, after all, included most of the awful bits.
It was a sombre send-off. My 6-year-old son Kristjan had only recently been disabused of a misconception that I was competing among cycling’s élite in the actual race; horribly crestfallen, he looked at me with the betrayed air of a child coming to terms with the fact – first suspected, perhaps, during those self-mutilating Swingball sessions – that his father might not be the world’s most complete athlete. Untroubled by such concerns, his 2-year-old sister Valdis filled the lobby with gay chortles as I strode out of the lift in full Lycra. I can normally count on 4-year-old Lilja for an appropriate sense of theatre, and this was briefly supplied when she tugged at my shorts, looked up with wide eyes and pleaded, ‘Don’t go up the mountain, Daddy!’ I hardly had the chance to ruffle her hair with a brave smile before she added, ‘It’s really boring.’
A long, broad hump of a hill, Le Mont Ventoux didn’t in fact look that bad as I drove into the unremarkable town of Carpentras, half an hour southwest and 6,265 feet below its round, chalky summit. In a certain light, the topping of bare, bleached rocks is said to give the impression of a permanent layer of snow, but on a wincingly bright afternoon in late May, rising gently out of the cherry trees and lavender fields, Ventoux seemed benign, a big sandcastle recently washed over by the first wave of an encroaching tide.
Still, you couldn’t miss it. Six thousand two hundred and sixty-five feet: hoist the Eiffel Tower on top of Canary Wharf, then stick the whole thing on Ben Nevis – let’s face it, we’ve all wanted to – and you’d still be looking up at the summit. Ventoux isn’t an Alp, nor whatever the single of Pyrenees is – it’s just there on its own, looming up on almost every Provençal horizon, making its own weather, that squat, muscle-bound bulk spread across a fold and a half of my Michelin map like a whole mountain range in itself. The eye is drawn to it, and often the feet follow. Mountaineering was invented here: by conquering its summit in 1336, the poet and scholar Petrarch became the first man to climb a peak as an end in itself. Almost six hundred years later, future Prime Minister Edouard Daladier had a road built to the top, again for no practical purpose other than curiosity and a determination to tame nature.
On this basis, it is no surprise that the Tour de France should regularly make its way to that slightly lunar summit. Unspectacular as it might look from a distance, Ventoux is the most feared mountain in the Tour’s considerable arsenal. ‘It is not like other mountains’ has been a common refrain among riders since the race first went up it in 1951.
And here I was, a pallid, flimsy tourist in nylon and Lycra sportswear, unsuccessfully trying to remember at what precise time this whole stupid scheme had seemed like a good idea. Striving to psych myself up, something I’ve never ever been able to do, I acknowledged that for the first time I was up against a legend of the Tour. By conquering Ventoux I could feel a direct affinity with some of the greatest names in sporting history. This would be like taking a penalty at Wembley or portentously bouncing a yellow Slazenger on the Centre Court baseline, only with better weather and a nice view. And if I took it easy, it couldn’t be that hard, could it? Sans panniers, I’d breezed up the col de Saraillé. This was just a steeper, longer hill, I reasoned, and if I could cope with feeling slightly less breezy it could be mastered.
Regrettably, stage twelve, Carpentras-Ventoux, was by any standards beyond reason. A perfect exercise in agonising futility, it ended with a summit finish: up to the top, from A to B, then all the way back down to A in the team coach. The stage profile map was a horrible document. My 60 kilometres included the second-category col de Notre-Dame des Abeilles, a fourth-category hill and the merciless ascent of Ventoux, at 21k comfortably the most drawn-out hors catégorie climb in the Tour’s itinerary.
Ventoux’s notoriety was of course sealed in the 1967 Tour. You can blame the heat, you can blame the drugs, but the bottom line is that Le Mont Ventoux remains the only peak in the Tour’s 97-year history to have caused a man’s death through physical overexertion.
I’d bought a video of Tom Simpson’s life, and watched it before I left. It was the ordinariness of his story that made its final chapter so desperately poignant. An inevitably humble upbringing in Durham and Nottingham as the youngest of six kids, the one who always had to win at Ludo; the borrowed bike that won him the first race with his local club at the age of 16, nicknamed Four-Stone Coppi in reference to his hollow-cheeked, beak-nosed similarity to the great Fausto, cycling’s first superstar. The additionally inevitable ‘happy-go-lucky’ descriptions from those who always enjoyed a chat and a laff with Tom.
The cycling scrapbooks under the bed, the determination that had him writing to pros all over Europe for advice; winning a bronze at the 1956 Olympics then going off to Brittany with £100 in his pocket to turn pro; adapting to the people, language and food so successfully that when he met his future wife Helen a year later she thought he was French. Winning four of his first nine races and writing home to say he was earning big money. Almost grabbing the lead in his first Tour in 1960, aged 22. The first big victories – Bordeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo – wearing the chequered-band Peugeot jersey like the one that now clung to my thumping chest. The big car, the holidays in Corsica. The home movies: skiing with his two young daughters, sleeping in a deckchair, training on a bike on rollers. Mastering the hierarchy and tactics of road racing, and its accompanying PR duties: as the rest of the 1960 British Tour team fidget gormlessly in front of the Continental cameras, there’s Tom grinning hugely with his sponsor’s cap right in the lens. Contriving the media-friendly invention of Major Tom, a brollied and bowlered city gent whose sociological origins shared nothing with his own. Sofa-splitting living-room mayhem in Nottingham when Tom wins the 1965 World Championship in Spain; as the first Briton ever to do so, he’s voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The autographed publicity shots in his world champion’s jersey, a clean-cut young man with a cheeky, crooked grin. Major Tom playing the accordion with his gaping mouth frozen in lusty mid-chorus. The broken leg that cost him the next season, and coming into 1967 knowing that at age 30 this was probably his final chance to do well in the Tour and so underwrite a comfortable retirement.
Oh, Tom. I stocked up with raisins and dried apricots in Carpentras, and followed the Tour itinerary to Sault. The organisers were obviously being kind, contriving a route that bent away from Ventoux, tactfully shielding it from the riders’ line of vision until the last possible moment. The sky was the colour of ZR, a deep, almost metallic blue, its intensity emphasised by occasional smoke-signal puffs of white cloud. Kids were ambling home for lunch along the flat, scrub-lined roads into empty towns shuttered up for the long afternoon.
It was an airless day, but in the harsh Provençal sun everything seemed unnaturally sharp: cherries gleaming like varnished holly berries, neon poppies lining dayglo lavender meadows. Up the col de Murs I overtook a stretched-out crocodile of steadily toiling cyclists, rocking slowly from side to side as they ground out each revolution. Everyone was taking it easy today.
Oh, Tom. Before the 1967 Tour started he’d marched into a Mercedes dealership in his adopted home town of Ghent and put a deposit on the flashest model, the one spinning slowly on the turntable. If he had a good Tour he’d pay off the balance: ‘Got to have something to aim at,’ he told his team-mates. He genuinely believed he could win, and though he hated heat, and during his previous experience of the mountain had built up a loathing for Ventoux – ‘it’s another world up there, the white rocks and the blinding sun’ – he was still hugely confident.
He started the thirteenth stage seventh overall, kept at the front of the pack up to the foot of Ventoux and, in the bottom part of the climb, shaded in pine trees, set off after a pair who burst away from the leading group. The Alps were over; he’d been saying all week that if he could stay within three minutes of the leader for the final time-trial, this could be his year. To catch him, his team car had to pick its way carefully through a long line of suffering also-rans, and when they got to Tom, now out of the trees with the summit in sight, he was still up in sixth. ‘But that was when we realised some difficulties were being experienced,’ said his mechanic.
There was silent newsreel coverage of this on the video, and however terrible it was to see a man literally pushing himself beyond the limits of human endurance I found it grimly, horribly compelling. Weaving arthritically from one side of the road to the other, he labours forlornly to chase down two riders who have just passed; as they power sturdily away his bobbing head drops, he slows and almost wobbles off the left-hand side, a precipice of white rubble. The mechanic, Harry, shouts and prepares to leap out of the car but Tom rights himself, only to totter straight into the bleached scree on the right. Harry jumps out and undoes his toe clips – ‘That’s enough, Tom’ – but it isn’t, not for Tom, and from somewhere he summons anger – No, no, no, let’s get on, let’s go, do me straps, Harry – and though Harry doesn’t say so this is where Tom rasps, ‘Put me back on the bloody bike.’ He hates the bike, but this is his job, and he’s been world champion, and what will they think back on the sofa in Nottingham, and this is his final throw of the dice, one last effort to set up the rest of his life, keep his kids in matching snowsuits and his wife sitting pretty in that 280SL with electric windows.
It’s make or break, and he breaks. Two hundred metres down the road the race passes under the 1 km-to-go banner, normally a vision of miraculous redemption for the riders but not this time for Tom. Two fat Frenchmen in vests have stopped him toppling over on to the hot tar and are guiding Tom to the side of the road, and though he’s being held by two pairs of big arms he’s still pedalling automatically. Harry has been standing up in the sunroof of the team car and now he vaults right through it and jumps down to the roadside. Tom’s hands are locked to the bars and it takes some effort to prise them off, unclip his shoes and lie him down on those awful bare rocks. The last thing we see is his floppy torso, those shaven legs and Peugeot-emblazoned shorts, being crudely belaboured by the vest men, trying to shake some life back into him as Harry gives mouth-to-mouth. Then doctors, oxygen, helicopters and headlines.
Oh, Tom. I knew it wouldn’t take much, and it didn’t. Nostalgie FM was murmuring away in the background as I parked in Sault, a quiet cluster of spires and pantiles stuck up on a hill with glorious views available for anyone able to tear their gaze downwards from the hulking bulk of Ventoux. I killed the engine, and as the clear tones of Gilbert O’Sullivan tinkled melancholically out of the dashboard I felt the back of my neck fizz and the tips of my nostrils quiver. My soul had left the door open, and scarcely able to believe his good fortune after three decades of jeering, two-fingered rebuttal, Mr O’Sullivan strode gloriously in. I got a gloved hand over my cheeks before they became wet, then having snot-wiped them dry raised a tear-smeared gaze to the heavens above that bald, brown summit. It was better to get this out of the way now as I certainly wouldn’t possess the wherewithal when I got up there. Ground control to Major Tom.