I can’t pretend it was unpleasant to reacquaint myself with activities not focused either on doing an enormous amount of physical exercise or recovering from it, but it certainly was odd. No longer did each day begin with a wake-up gut-punch of nauseous fear at the wretchednesses ahead; no longer did it end with a dead-eyed vigil at the dinner table, wordlessly watching bits of wasp and Alp and sun-flayed nose drop into a half-eaten plate of pasta. Nevertheless, it was at meal times that I had most trouble. Breakfast had to be relearned as a time to sip tea and read the paper, rather than an industrial process centred on funnelling a kilogram of Bran Flakes down my gullet straight from the packet; at lunch and supper I searched in vain for the tureens of Coca-Cola and the side orders of chips. I no longer got drunk before reaching the fat bit of the wine bottle, and no longer avoided a hangover if I proceeded down to the dimpled bottom. The weather forecast had lost its status as the day’s most significant media event, and the nutritional information on food packets played a diminished role in my nocturnal ponderings.
For the first few nights my legs itched and twitched from lack of exercise; once I’d had to get up and run on the spot in the bathroom for ten minutes, and once I very nearly went for a bike ride. After two weeks my legs were stubbling up and those muscles beginning to waste, fruit rotting on the bough. ZR was outside the back door with the kids’ bikes, a spider’s web under the crossbar, its chain rusting in the late-June rain.
July was twelve hours old when the Tour started, and fourteen hours after that, with Michelin maps all over the bed and a sympathetic knot of anguish in my innards, I was embarking on the first of twenty-one nightly vigils, tuning into Channel 4’s extended 2 a.m. highlights. The Futuroscope prologue was won by an incredulous 22-year-old Scotsman, David Millar, riding in his first Tour, but if I’d hoped to feel a chest-swelling affinity I would be quickly disappointed. On the flat stages at least, the cameras, their focus narrowed on the leading riders’ faces, would show little that I recognised. Behind all those hoardings and gantries, the view beyond was obscured by massed ranks of picnickers waving merchandise thrown out by the advance caravan of publicity vehicles: yellow feeding bags, polka-dot caps, green cardboard hands as big as bin lids.
The corn was stiff and yellow and as the race turned south the maize was up to the riders’ shoulders; inevitably, the sunflowers were out. The stage into Limoges was won by a Frenchman, the host nation’s first win for two years, but he had an Italian name and a face like a proboscis monkey so they couldn’t get too excited about it. An ageing Dutchman won the next after an epic breakaway and when Channel 4’s Paul Sherwen interviewed him beside the podium he cried. They were averaging almost 50 k.p.h., and it kept raining. Paul’s senior partner Phil Liggett said he’d covered thirty Tours and this was some of the worst weather he’d come across.
The race reached Dax, which in common with all the other villes d’étapes looked a lot better with the flags out, but when it set off towards the Pyrenees I wasn’t thinking about bicycle-shaped flower-beds and the other fruits of their million-franc civic knees-up. Sitting there in the middle of the night, flanked by sleeping wife and rib-kicking infant daughter, this was what I’d been waiting for. Up until now it had all been tactical and fairly pedestrian; as the highlights zipped straight to the foot of the col de Marie-Blanque, I knew I was about to witness the extremes of human emotion. I wanted to see men soar where I had grovelled, knuckle down where I’d knuckled under; to see how it should be done. But I also wanted to see how it shouldn’t, to see terrible pain and defeat, to enjoy the company of my fellow failures.
‘A tough little climb, the Marie-Blanque,’ said Phil, and it was tougher that day more than most. There was cloud and driving rain; a few soggy cardboard hands waving limply by the road but plenty more wind-filled golf umbrellas. It had been a gut-cramping bellyful of chilled fountain for me; for them it was a bidon of hot tea.
The Tour had suddenly gone into slow motion. For a week the peloton had flashed past spectators in a smudge of hissing metal and artificial colour; now fat, wet, flag-wrapped Belgians were able to waddle alongside the toiling riders, bellowing abuse or encouragement. Four men abandoned the race before the summit, and a fifth fell on the descent and was taken away in an ambulance, Lycra slashed, skin gashed. News that a rider had thrown in the towel was announced via a little on-screen graphic of a man energetically hurling his bike to the floor and storming off in disgust. None of those I saw being helped into their team cars, eyes glassing up like dying fish, looked as though they’d be up to that. Drugged-up men at the threshold of human suffering, mouthing agonised obscenities and peeing into their tight, greased gussets: an enticing image in certain circles, perhaps, but surely not the appropriate inspiration for a national romance.
I watched the ascent of the Aubisque like a man reliving a nightmare. The towns were transformed by the crowds and banners, but with slug-tennis rain keeping all but the very drunkest spectators at home I had a clear view of every fateful hairpin, tunnel and false summit. ‘In these conditions, with the wind chill, your limbs get tetanised on the way down,’ said Paul, and I instinctively flexed my knuckles and pressed them into my hot armpits.
‘Blown to pieces’ was a favourite refrain in a day of violent clichés; all around people were either putting hammers down or hitting walls. Lance Armstrong started the climb to Hautacam with fifteen riders between him and the leading Spaniard; he stood up in the saddle and, without a single facial indicator of expended effort, cruised haughtily past wobbling wrecks of men, leaving his rivals to fight distantly among themselves. Armstrong had the yellow jersey and a four-minute lead and as a contest the Tour was over.
David Millar winced over the line a creditable thirty-second, and with haunted eyes spoke of encountering ‘The Fear’ during his journey through ‘a world of pain’. Then, without warning, there was the round, expressionless, shop-wigged face of Eddy Merckx. ‘Deez climbs are not so hard,’ he told Paul Sherwen in a slightly robotic monotone, turning away for the next interview even as Paul said, ‘And that’s from a man who knows a bit about the Tour de France with five victories in the event.’
Dammit all to hell, Merckx. Why did he have to say that? When the end credits began to roll it was like reading every clause and subsection of my Pyrenean surrender. Phil and Paul had explained perhaps a dozen times that the Tour was won and lost in the mountains. It was where Armstrong had won, and it was where I had lost.
The weather got worse when they reached Ventoux. There was snow on the summit and a terrible gale that had the trees waving desperately for help as Channel 4’s Gary Imlach bellowed his report to camera. It was awful, the kind of occasion that blurs the boundaries between holidaymaker and refugee, and yet if Gary was to be believed an astonishing 300,000 people were camped out on Ventoux. Men in bobble hats and puffa jackets were out there, battling with flyaway flags and furniture; the drinks vendors had swathed tea towels over their beer taps and were instead doing a brisk trade in vin chaud. I liked professional cycling, I mused, but some people really, really liked it. Behind Gary a ramshackle peloton of plucky amateurs pedalled agonisingly through the narrow column left between placards and Peugeots and pastis-pouring pedestrians; one of the sturdy crowd-control barriers was blown over with a clatter and just in front of it a cyclist in a yellow jersey caught a gust in the chest and came to a halt, twisting a foot out of his pedal bindings just in time. It occurred to me that in all my weeks on the road this was the first yellow jersey I’d seen; that such was the hallowed, iconic status of this item only a heretic would dare to wear it; and that when he did, a divine blast of cold wind would come down from on high and smite him off his bike.
Then the coverage fast-forwarded, the cheers grew to a rowdy climax – how awful to have that noise following you around all day – and there was Lance Armstrong, wraparounds propped casually on his head, untroubled but for a sheen of sweat. As the camera panned back down the field we got to the sufferers, a fitful dribble of pained men. This was better; these were my people. The King of Belfort himself, Christophe Moreau, went by alone with his tongue hanging down to the bottom of his goatee. (In fact, Moreau was to have a glorious Tour, astounding himself and his many close personal friends in Belfort by finishing fourth overall as the leading Frenchman.) Then the rump of the peloton, men who’d given up and just wanted to get to the top in one piece, and there was David Millar, with blood running down his legs and a horrible vampire slash on his throat. He’d crashed earlier on, and while doing so had trapped the flesh of his neck in someone’s chain, which still makes me feel ill even thinking about it. ‘It only hurts when I breathe,’ was his wry assessment of the after-effects. He finished, but many didn’t. ‘There are another ten riders in there today,’ said Phil as the broom wagon rolled up past Tom Simpson’s memorial. It was thirty-three years to the day.
The following stage, across Provence from Avignon to Draguignan, was undertaken at astounding speed. How could these people be the same ones who less than twenty-four hours earlier had been trapping their necks in people’s chains and toiling up a mountain mired in most of the human body’s least appealing secretions? But the stage after that was the killer, the one that most riders said they feared above all others.
Between Draguignan and Briançon lay 250 kilometres and three mountains over 2,000 metres; if there was a calvary, this was it. The smelly-bearded German Devil recognised this, waddling about the mountainsides in a soiled red leotard, and so too did his Italian nemesis: the Angel, all in white, fiddling with his feathery wings as he stood in wait on the roof of a camper van near the summit of the day’s final peak, the col d’Izoard.
The preparatory climb out of Draguignan, up that awful parched road through those mountain-top firing ranges, was a route I knew like the back of my hand but not quite like the top of my knee. That’s where I had the race with that mechanic, that’s where those stupid Austrian bikers almost ran me down, that’s where I bought all that Fanta and that’s where I … offloaded it – a whole lifetime of suffering and sickness, at least deserving of a respectful hearse-speed drive-by, condensed into four dismissive minutes.
But it was the penultimate climb of the day that had me staring at the telly in dry-lipped anticipation. By the time they lowered their jersey zips at the foot of the col de Vars the riders had covered 167 kilometres in just under six hours of cycling; as the stage leaders passed the point where I’d been shamed by that rusted butcher’s bike, the helicopter camera panned out to reveal a vast acreage of sheep-shit tussocks and gravel. In the shadows a grey, dry-ice mist was wisping about, giving the treeless geological rubble a sort of troll-valley Icelandic aspect.
At ground level it’s all Thermos fumes and Italian chatter and that faint ski-crowd whooping – hup-hup-hup-hup – urging some emptied soul upwards. Then the road bends up and the camera is behind the leading group of seven riders, all rank outsiders hoping for a single day of glory. From this angle the brutal gradient of this section becomes clear, and with it the pain: all seven are standing up in the saddle, shoulders slowly rolling. The camera pulls alongside the last rider in the group, a Dutchman in the orange strip of Rabobank, and zooms in on his tortured features: every inhalation, and there are many, seems to crack another rib; every revolution, and there are not so many, heralds a complicated, discordant medley of distress. Up past a corrugated-iron chapel, up past more yells and gestures; he whisks a glove off the bars and in a ragged swipe smears stringy dreadfulness across his face and hair. This is where the crowds are hemming tightly in, parting just before the seven to leave a ribbon of pock-marked road barely wide enough for a bike. There are only two curves left and, as the other six begin to pull away, the muscles in that big Dutch head bulge and pulse in desperation: he’s fucked if he’s going to be dropped this close to a summit in the Tour de France. He sits down, then vaults up in the saddle again, aware perhaps that this is as close as he’s ever been to fulfilling the fantasies of his youth, but probably not of the considerable excitement his efforts are causing in a dark bedroom in west London.
One more corner to go and now there are names and slogans rolling slowly beneath his wheels; he’s not reading them but I certainly am. There’s a PANTANI and an ULLRICH and a NO SAHAJA YOGA, whatever the blinking flip that is, and just before the summit, as Rabobank toils triumphantly up to rejoin the group, oh me oh my, oh joy of joys, there it is, clear and stark even as we cut up to the aerial shot from the helicopter, and I’m screaming at the telly as if my 500–1 shot is a nose behind the Grand National leader coming into the home straight.
The only two words I have previously admitted writing at the top of the col de Vars were ‘The shame’, ballpointed in tiny, go-away scrawl on a filthy, damp page of my training diary. But actually there had been a third. At Castellane I had purchased three litres of magnolia emulsion and a roller, and late that afternoon at the top of the col de Vars, watched by half a dozen German motorcyclists, I jumped out of the car and slathered five cream-coloured capitals on to the frost-cracked tarmac. Who does he think he is? said the Germans’ faces, and even in the unsightly throes of my current excitement I knew it had been a fair point. Who had I thought I was? Not Eddy, who had no feelings; not Bernard, who had too many; not Tom, who had the ability to destroy himself, nor even the many also-rans who didn’t. Firmin Lambot, older than I when he’d won in 1922, had done so on mud tracks and with cast-iron technology; yet his average speed over 5,468 kilometres – 24.1 k.p.h. – was more than I’d managed in any single day excepting that stunted time-trial. But maybe it had never been about times or speeds. Oscillating between destinies, I was honouring glory and failure alike: an ordinary man trying to find his place somewhere between the animals and the gods.
In typography of a size and stridency normally associated with phrases such as ‘AMBULANCE – KEEP CLEAR’, even in the late-afternoon gloom it had blared out to the heavens; today, with the mist burnt off by a garish sun, it had star billing, up in lights around the planet. As a billion viewers watched the world’s greatest annual sporting event rolling over the top of another Alp, there, unavoidably, was the bland yet mysterious name
