It was interesting to note how unremarkable I felt waiting on the platform for the 11.39 to Paris. Cyclists from Lance Armstrong to Terry Davenport invariably discovered at least one inner truth about themselves in the eye of some desperate ordeal. ‘I met a guy up on that mountain who I grew to kind of like, and do you know who that guy was? That’s right: it was me.’ That sort of thing. But looking back over the already slightly unreal events of the past twenty-four hours, the only epiphany I could claim to have experienced was this: some mornings, even five croissants are not enough.
Though actually there was something else. Wheeling ZR back out through the Holiday Inn’s automatic doors and into the misty sun I’d seen a roomful of sales-conference delegates staring bleakly into their Styrofoam cups as a bald man drew pie charts on an overhead projector; one of them turned to me as I cleated up and as our eyes met we both understood an important truth: however wretched my day might be, even if it meant going back to Belfort and back his was going to be far worse.
Troyes had not surprised me by looking rather better by day: haphazard, half-timbered streets opening into well-scrubbed, geometric boulevards, a Gothic cathedral, market squares – a proper French town; the kind of place you wouldn’t mind being twinned with, especially because every time the maire came over you’d be able to go on about the post-Agincourt Treaty of Troyes that recognised our own Henry V as heir to the French throne.
There were two tourist offices, and lured by window displays of bikes and jerseys and ville d’étape posters I visited them both. I didn’t expect much, and I didn’t get it – not even a souvenir bidon. But at least this time the ignorance was cheerful, and the lady at the second place did endeavour to help by telling me I’d got my helmet the wrong way round, even though I hadn’t.
It was here I learned that it might indeed be possible to take my bike on the train, and so at least vaguely emulate the Tour riders, who would transfer by Orient Express to Paris for the final stage, a circuitous roam about the capital followed by the traditional mad scramble of laps up and down the Champs-Elysées. After painstaking ticket-office conversations and timetable consultations, I established with as much certainty as any tourist can hope for that the 11.39 to Paris Est was a service on which accompanied bicycles could be carried free of charge.
The 11.39 was one of those Sixties efforts with a windscreen that sloped the wrong way, the only sort I’d imagined being allowed to take a bike on, but it creaked up to the almost deserted platform on the dot and with difficulty I bundled ZR aboard.
‘Eh! Non! Eh! Monsieur! C’est interdit!’
There were rapid footsteps and further cries and suddenly two inspectors were outside on the platform, gesticulating at the driver and yanking my door handle. Someone had already blown a whistle and there we were, having a tug of war through an open door with ZR as the rope. I’d been wondering when the monstrosities of yesterday would catch up with me, and now I knew. There was little physical resistance and less mental: a four-armed yank and ZR was on the platform; a slight shove from an onboard official behind and I joined her.
‘Oh, c’est joli, le maillot,’ said one of the inspectors, dusting off my jersey as the train awoke with a long, rusted yawn and moved slowly away. ‘Un rétro?’
His kind, trustworthy voice was so unexpected and disarming that I somehow found myself quietly discussing Merckx, Simpson, Bernard Thévenet and other Peugeot riders of yore when by rights I should have been well entrenched in a physical confrontation whose final scene would see me bellowing the terms of the Treaty of Troyes as the gendarmerie dragged me down the platform by my ankles. As the pair gently escorted me out of the station I did halfheartedly draw their attention to my pocket timetable, and in particular the little bicycle symbol next to the 11.39, but they both just smiled and nodded like uncles being shown their small nephew’s inept artwork. It didn’t really matter. There was an Avis office almost next door and in half an hour I was shooting past fields of lilac opium poppies, a handlebar in my ear, hairless thighs sticking to the hot upholstery of an Opel Corsa.
In one way it was a shame not to be cycling into Paris, not to see the Eiffel Tower taking shape on a hazy horizon and gradually reeling it in with each portentous turn of the pedals, but in most ways it was not. Everyone was getting sweaty and bad-tempered as I approached the outskirts – it was no place to be on a bike. The signs warned pedestrians to cross in two stages, but the way things were going it was more likely to be two pieces. After turning off the périphérique ring road it got worse, and the apparently straightforward task of finding a hotel and parking the car required me to commit several dozen motoring offences, from illicit U-turns to driving the wrong way down a one-way street. On the pavement.
The hotel, near the Place d’Italie in the city’s unfashionable south, was unsatisfactory to the point of outrage. It looked no worse than grubby from the outside, set in a street behind an enormous hospital and flanked by the sort of dirty-windowed, faceless government offices you could only imagine being responsible for the most obscure bureaucratic pedantries: issuing crab licences, approving artichoke export quotas, plotting the wholesale assassination of environmental activists.
A big-faced man with a moist neck made me pay up front before entering my name with difficulty in his soiled register of the damned; as I trod carefully towards the lift he issued a two-tone grunt of dissent and without looking up thumbed at a dark stairwell. My fourth-floor window overlooked a forgotten courtyard full of dead pigeons and an avant-garde installation entitled One Hundred Years of the Fag End. Inside, the view wasn’t much better. The wardrobe was the size of a child’s coffin and contained a vegetable. Rolling back the tramp’s blanket on a bed of institutional design, I beheld a pillowcase that might have been used to filter coffee. But of course it hadn’t: after all, what’s the bathroom towel for? Still, clicking off the Bakelite switch with wet hands I wished I’d used it. The shock was so violent it flung me halfway to the bed – not bad seeing as the bathroom was a shared one right down the end of the corridor.
But do you know what? I simply didn’t care. I didn’t care because it reminded me of the tawdrily romantic hotels I’d patronised during my first teenage visit to Paris. I didn’t care because it was cheap. But mainly I didn’t care because I was setting out into a flawless summer evening with a bottle of pink champagne inside me, and because having put it there in a very small number of minutes I was already strangely untroubled by the negative aspects of my environment, and because the reason I had put it there was because I had done it. I had gone all the way round an enormous country, all the way across Europe’s hugest range of mountains: 2,952 kilometres, with almost 10 per cent of them in a single historic day. I had done all these things, and here was the bit I still couldn’t get over as I jostled out into the zigzagging scooters and the apple-polishing Turkish grocers and the mincing old women walking their Pekineses: I had done them on a stupid bloody bicycle.
Feeling smug and splendid and world-famous, I promenaded luxuriously up to the Place d’Italie. It was remarkable that somewhere so humdrum by Parisian standards – this was just one of the minor étoiles, those vast roundabouts where boulevards converge – could seem the epitome of Continental sophistication in British terms. The nearest equivalent in London would be some brutalist concrete nightmare, a gyratory wasteland such as the Elephant & Castle. But here there was space and light and the huge glass wall of a daring new cinema complex and cobbles and ashlar and bars with outside tables: a proper urban focus for a proper urban community.
Sweden were playing Turkey and the local supporters of the latter team were out in force, filling the bars to the rafters and standing on chairs outside to get a view of the telly. It was all terribly exciting. I had a peek through one door and in seven loud seconds established that far post was ‘deuxième poteau’ and that Ross from Friends was playing on the left side of the Turkish midfield. And it was good to hear that even in such an environment, ‘ooh la la’ remains the exhilarated Parisian’s default expression.
I found an outside table at a bar that wasn’t showing the game, next to two old men almost inevitably playing chess. Lovers were sitting on the statues around us, stroking each other’s warm faces in the 9 p.m. sun, and as my tall glass of cold beer arrived I surveyed the scene with the avuncular fondness of the reasonably plastered. But then, succumbing to this same group’s vulnerability to wild swings of emotion, I suddenly felt a profound sadness. A snapshot photographed by my eyes the previous day was belatedly developed in my brain, and as it took shape I found myself looking at three teenage girls silently sharing a Coke outside a bar flanked by abandoned homes in a decaying rural town strung carelessly along both sides of a thundering main road.
How could you expect any young person to put up with a life like that when they could be having a life like this? The girls were mentally thumbing a lift from anything that passed – they even plotted my weary passage through their lives with glum envy – and one day soon someone would stop and pick them up and they’d be off. It was tragic to think that when the Tour first visited Londun or Obterre, or Carpentras or Chaumont or a thousand semi-derelict towns in between, each had been as vibrant as this in its own modest way, each had its own thronging Place d’Italie. But industrialisation and social mobility and any number of other demographic phenomena had lured people away to the cities, and even those rural towns that weren’t just slinking off to die alone were doomed. They’d pay their million francs and string up their bunting and resurface their mini-roundabouts, but when the Tour came to town, that one day of sex and speed would only serve to highlight the snail-paced, strait-laced parochialism of the other 364.
I made my way back to the hotel, as wistful as it’s possible to be with a leaking kebab in your mouth. The traffic was still insane at 10.30 and I knew that my final trans-Parisian stage would be feasible only at dawn, and that consequently I should go to bed straight away.
Bed was one thing; sleep was another. The sackcloth sheets were too short for the mattress and against my shaven shins the horsehair blanket felt like the rough grope of a lust-fogged drunk. That was how it started. The night before I had fallen immediately into a fatigued coma; only now, as the bedding rasped against my silken skin, did I notice how peculiar it felt to have hairless legs. Suddenly I couldn’t keep my hands off them. Wobbling the firm, smooth bulk of those enormously bulked-up calves, as meaty and sculpted as granite chicken breasts; prodding and tracing the outlines of the entirely new front-thigh muscles that spilt over my kneecaps like double chins; stroking the thick and toughened tendons, still sore from the (how could it only have been yesterday?) massage.
It was like a variant of that joke about the reason men didn’t have breasts: because if they did they’d just stay in and play with them all night. I kept expecting to be slapped in the face. Even after I finally stopped fondling myself and dropped off it wasn’t over – twice that night (and there’d be many more such nights in the weeks ahead) I awoke with a start: what the bloody hell was this knobbly-kneed woman doing in my bed?
When it happened the third time I couldn’t get back to sleep. My legs were now twitching spasmodically, wondering why they weren’t pedalling – the legacy of a day spent cycling 279.7 kilometres followed by one sitting in traffic jams and getting drunk. With daylight sneaking in through the filthy curtains I creaked stiffly out of bed and stood before the wardrobe mirror. Even at this time of day, even with a slight hangover, it was a spectacle so frankly ludicrous that I barked out a single, mad guffaw.
Those legs, still blotched from their therapeutic ordeals, looked like champagne flutes: wrist-thin at the ankles, they progressively flared out on their way up to a set of mighty hams, thunder thighs indeed. Halfway up these the smooth, red-brown pint-of-best tan abruptly gave way to varicose magnolia and Puckish wire wool, as if I was wearing hairy white shorts. My similarly bleached torso, graced with its new – and hideous – stomach hairs, was topped by a zip-scarred neck and a gaunt, broiled head with singed and flaking extremities; from its sides dangled two thin arms whose tan-line apartheid had been brutally enforced. I might never leave my mark on the Tour, but that didn’t matter. It had left its mark on me.
The final chlorinated bidon, the final night-dried Lycra taken down from the final hotel curtain rail, the final fistful of vitamins, the final slathering of the arse. Du pain, du vin, du Savlon – as silly and vile as they might be, I knew I would miss my routines. At 5.30 a.m. I clacked down four flights of dark stairs, dropped my key on the empty reception desk, bullied free several recalcitrant bolts and locks and stepped out into what I could already see, with a sort of mournful glee, was going to be a gorgeous day.
Any European city where a man can walk down a major thoroughfare at dawn wearing a string vest with his head held high is OK in my book. He walked past with a brisk nod as I leant against the car finishing my breakfast – three cellophane packets of biscuit crumbs stolen in rather better condition from the Holiday Inn. ZR stood ready beside me, assembled with practised hands; I chucked the panniers in the boot, cocked a leg and rolled off down an empty boulevard.
I never expected to do the whole stage – the route before those laps of the Champs-Elysées was monstrously complex, its details still a mystery after prolonged, albeit fizz-fuddled, consultation of a detailed map of the capital. Forty-eight kilometres would do me fine: that would probably be enough to experience the trademark sensations – heat, fatigue and fear – and, rather more importantly, certainly enough to bring up the momentous 3,000k. Gathering speed among the occasional taxis and police vans, I barrelled up the boulevards towards the Eiffel Tower, starting point of the 2000 Tour de France’s twenty-first and final stage. I swished past a bus with three people on, washed-out ravers silently wondering how it had all come to this; someone was playing a synthesiser four floors up; from a side street came a ragged, drunken roar: ‘Jean! Jean!’
I got to the Eiffel Tower as an enormous sun took shape behind it. The Eiffel Tower is one of the world’s best things, and rolling to a halt in the centre of its four iron feet I had it all to myself. I remembered that picture of Hitler standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, grinning with disbelief that all this was his, and grinned with disbelief. I had made it to Paris. With my gleaming exoskeleton legs I looked the part, and now I felt it. Giant of the Road might be pushing it a bit, but cycling off across the Pont d’Iena I felt a twinge in my joints that could only have been growing pains.
The sky went from cream to blue as I rolled along the Seine, past houseboats with a view to die for, past joggers, past hot-dog vendors already warming up their Westlers at 6.15. At the fourth bridge down I turned left and headed out across the vast, cobbled no-man’s-land of the Place de la Concorde. A plumb-lined kilometre to my right stood the scaffolded bulk of the Louvre; to the right, the same vista eased up to the tiny, sunlit keyhole that was the Arc de Triomphe, over two kilometres up the Champs-Elysées.
‘There are no tired legs on the Champs-Elysées,’ they say, and though Paul Kimmage rather took the romance out of this by pointing out the absence of random dope controls on the final stage, I could see why they said it. Feeling exhilarated and tireless, up the mile-wide pavement I slalomed breezily between waiters putting out the first chairs and tables. On the way back down – the Tour riders would turn in front of the Arc de Triomphe ten times – I picked up speed with alarming ease. Thirty-five k.p.h. felt like 25; as I swished past the gendarmes questioning a van driver whose forlorn vehicle sat, front wheels splayed out, across the central reservation I gave Eddy Merckx an inner wink and hit 50.
I did a couple more Champs-Elysées laps, then arced off back to the Seine, bumping over the grilles that blasted weird wafts of hot Metro air up my legs. Past Notre-Dame, all the way back up to the Eiffel Tower, and all the way back. For another hour it was wonderful, but by 7.30 the magic had gone. Commuters were Henri Pauling it into the underpasses; van drivers parped and revved, and when I took refuge in the cycle lane they followed me. Hot, hounded and hungry, I glanced down at the computer and did a quick perimeter tour of the Jardin des Plantes, and another, and another. It was enough. The 3,000 came up as I turned off the Boulevard Vincent Auriol, exchanged curt abuse with a jaywalking businessman and eased up to the car.
That was it. It was 15 June: I’d done nearly 1,900 miles in a month to the day. There should have been bunting and blondes and big bottles of bubbly, but I really didn’t mind that there weren’t. Eddy and Tom and my support crew had helped me up the Alps, and Paul Ruddle had helped me down them, but at heart mine had been a solo achievement, a 3,000-kilometre lone breakaway, and I was happy to celebrate its climax in an appropriate fashion.
In the final analysis, you see, because of what I had done I was simply a lot better than almost everyone else. With others around there would have been churlishness and jealousy; who knows, maybe even a couple of tiresome fans. Stalkers couldn’t be ruled out. I took off my hot, wet gloves, opened the hatchback and, with a suitably epic commentary turning slowly through my mind, Moore’s respectful hands began to strip down the machine that had been his slave, his master, his confidant and tormentor throughout a journey where suffering and glory had stood toe to toe and … and so on.
With my features settling into a happy, glazed reverie poorly suited to urban driving I set off into the rush hour, eventually finding myself amid the canoe-roofed British motorists piling back to Calais. The French were setting out deck-chairs on the not enormously appealing beaches south of the ferry terminal, getting ready for summer, a summer of which the Tour would as ever be the cornerstone.
I parked in the hire-car compound, built my bike and packed her bags, then pedalled across the hot tarmac to the Avis office.
‘Voilà! You are return!’ It was the man who had helped me dismantle ZR a month before.
‘I am,’ I said, with simple dignity.
‘Oh, your vélo …’ he said, peering over his desk at ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar and smutted tyres, ‘… your vélo ’as been doing many mileages, non?’
‘Three thousand kilometres.’
This information changed the shape of his face. ‘Sree souzand? Oh, c’est bien fait! Some montagnes?’
‘Well, yes. I was following the Tour de France.’ I remembered telling him this before, and I remembered how he’d reacted when I’d done so. He seemed to have forgotten.
‘So … le Mont Ventoux?’
‘Yes.’ Well, near enough.
‘L’Aubisque?’
I issued a sort of puff and rolled my eyes in an expression of partial conquest, hoping he wouldn’t ask about Hautacam. He didn’t.
‘L’Izoard? Le Galibier?’
That was better. ‘In the same day.’
‘Eh bien,’ he said with a smile, then pinched the brim of an imaginary trilby and raised it. ‘Chapeau!’
Two hats in three days – it was a good feeling. And ten minutes later I almost made it a – woo-hoo – hat trick, defying the gloomy predictions of the girl at the ticket desk by covering the vast acreage of tarmac between her office and the ferry in less than the ninety seconds she had given me to get there before the ramp was raised. After an all-hands-on-sundeck crossing I whisked through the customs at Dover, waved past by officers who clearly couldn’t imagine an earnest sportsman like that shoving a condom full of Kruggerands up his jacksy. More fool them!
On the way out, the route from station to ferry had seemed a white-knuckled, knee-buckled roller-coaster of mountains; on the way home, I honestly didn’t even notice the change in gradient. The same Victorian guard’s van and the same rattling progress, the scenery dribbling by when the noise and commotion implied an indistinguishable blur of greens and browns. We went through Staplehurst, and as I said this name to myself I somehow knew that my former sloth was already beckoning, that my endeavour had not been a turning point in my life, just a memorable detour, and that a lot of this might be because cycling around Avignon had something about it that cycling around Staplehurst did not.
And two hours later I was cycling up my road, oblivious to the highway hazards that had so unsettled me as I’d set off for London Bridge. Birna opened the door and smiled, then looked down at the flesh between shorts and socks and stopped.
‘Oh, you haven’t,’ she said.