Rather more than two hundred years ago, the English discovered Nature, and at just the same time they invented tourism. In the eighteenth century young noblemen made the Grand Tour through France, Germany and Italy, and the word was then extended: ‘tourist’ appears for the first time in 1780, as such enthusiasts found contemplation of the new-found beauties of lakes and fells in the north-west of England. Maps of the Lake District in the 1790s were engraved ‘for the Tourists’, and by 1811 a reference to ‘Cockney Tourism’ suggests that the word had already acquired its sometimes opprobrious modern overtones.
Keener tourists looking for grander views had already moved further afield than Cumberland, and the Alps had begun its new career as Europe’s greatest scenic attraction. No one then could have foreseen the day when ‘alpinism’ or mountain-climbing would take so many muscular Christians, or indeed muscular agnostics in Leslie Stephen’s case, from Oxford and Cambridge to explore those peaks. Later in the late nineteenth century tobogganing would be invented (by English sportsmen, of course) at St Moritz, before the previously utilitarian gadgets called skis would be adapted for downhill sport (English again to the fore), and from modest beginnings become a multi-billion-Euro business bringing tens of millions to the Alps each winter.
Nor did anyone guess the thrill and the thrall of the world’s greatest bike race crossing a series of now-hallowed passes in the great mountains every summer: not in 1816 when Byron first visited the Alps, to find ‘the music of the Cows’ Bells . . . in the pastures (which reach to a height far above any mountains in Britain) and the shepherds’ shouting to us from crag to crag & playing on their reeds where the steeps appeared almost inaccessible, with the surrounding scenery . . . pure and unmixed – solitary – savage and patriarchal – the effect I cannot describe,’ which was the way that scenery would take many people from then until now, making them feel superior in the process. His banal words about ‘any mountains in Britain’ didn’t stop Byron sneering at a commonplace Englishwoman who was gawping over the ‘rural’ scenery as if it were no more than Hampstead or Highgate.
In his own tour surveying the components of the national genius, Michelet traversed the Dauphiné towards Savoy, the modern departments of Isère, Savoie and Haute-Savoie. Some of what he said could sound a little fusty or sententious:
The virile genius of the women of the Dauphiny has often exercised irresistible power over men; as for instance, the famous Madame Tencin, d’Alembert’s mother, and that washerwoman of Grenoble [Claudine Mignot], who married husband after husband until she at last married the king of Poland. There is a frank and lively simplicity, a mountaineer grace, about the people of Dauphiny, which charms one at first sight. As you ascend towards the Alps, you meet with the honesty of the Savoyard, the same kindness, but with less gentleness. Men, here, must love one another perforce, – for nature seemingly loves them but little.
And yet this particular generalization may not seem so silly to those who know and love that corner of the hexagone. There really is a friendliness about the Savoyards, which one encounters over and again, winter and summer; and Michelet might have had a point about human nature reacting to the threat of the harsh environment, as seafarers and miners are warmer and more companionable than city folk. The Alps may be a playground today, but that could only happen once wild nature had been tamed: the contemplation of natural beauty only became possible when it no longer represented a mortal threat. For most of history these mountains had not been sublime but terrifying, offering only the most scanty, hard-fought-for living to those who lived among them, and always echoing with sudden death.
For most of history this province was also independent of France. Dauphiné or Dauphiny was one of the successor-states of the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire (or a successor-state of the successor-states). In the twelfth century its rulers adopted the title of Dauphin of Viennois; and then when the childless Humbert II sold his principality to the King of France in 1349, he made a condition that the king’s eldest son and heir should thenceforth be known as the Dauphin, just as the eldest son of the King of England had recently become known as Prince of Wales. To the north-east Savoy remained sovereign for much longer. The ruling house founded by another Humbert, ‘aux blanches Mains’, the white-handed, in the eleventh century, gradually extended its territories to cover much of what is now north-eastern Italy, the Valais and Vaud in Switzerland, Bugey and Bresse. In the thirteenth century the dynasty established an English connection when Henry III of England married Eleanor of Savoy and made his father-in-law, Count Pierre II, Earl of Richmond, whose brother became Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Pierre who built the Savoy Palace on the north bank of the Thames west of Blackfriars, where its name remains. If ‘Burgundy’ in English means a wine and a colour, ‘Savoy’ in London means the Savoy Chapel of slightly dodgy reputation (‘What a squalid wedding!’ Celia tells Charles of her own in Brideshead Revisited: ‘the Savoy Chapel was the place where divorced couples got married in those days’), the Savoy Hotel with its much-networked Grill, and the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, first performed at the Savoy Theatre.
Like Burgundy, Savoy enjoyed a period of greatness in the late Middle Ages, under a series of rulers called Amadeus, one of whom, Amadeus VIII, was made Duke of Savoy and Piedmont by the Emperor in the early fifteenth century. Like Burgundy, Savoy came into conflict with France. Like Burgundy, Savoy might, if the tides of history had flowed differently, have remained an independent state. It still was one in the eighteenth century, when the great general Victor Amadeus II fought against the French in the war of the Austrian Succession, and then, in one of those shufflings of chips on the board in which the ancien régime delighted, his house picked up Sicily, swapped it for Sardinia, regained their lands after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, but became almost without noticing it Italian princes. Victor Emanuel I of Sardinia was the future king of Italy anointed by the Risorgimento (hence the pre-unification slogan ‘Viva Verdi’, addressing the great national composer of the Risorgimento, could also subversively intend ‘Viva Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia’). On his way to the top in 1860 he struck a secret deal with Napoleon III in the treaty of Plombières, finally severing his family’s ancient connection with Savoy when he ceded it to France. And there Savoy has remained, although that didn’t stop Mussolini including ‘Savoia’, along with Nizza and Corsica, in his irredentist demands on France, not without historical reason.
The capital of the Dauphiny is Grenoble, once a pleasant small town, now a flourishing city whose population has quadrupled since 1945, with a famous university and high-tech industries including a very prominent ‘Synchrotron’ particle accelerator. Alas for Grenoble, its most famous son hated the place, its society, and his own complacent lawyer father, who was – said Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal – ‘the least elegant, the most cunning, the shrewdest, in a word the most Dauphinois of men’. In what was one of the first manifestations of that not uniquely but peculiarly French phenomenon, bourgeois self-hatred, he said that, ‘Everything that is mean and vulgar in the bourgeois way reminds me of Grenoble, everything that reminds me of Grenoble fills me with horror, no horror is too noble a word, with nausea . . .’
Few who have followed the Tour on any of the many occasions it has visited Grenoble are likely to share Stendhal’s neurotic rage. They are more likely to look in at the fine museums, including the old church of St-Laurent, and then maybe lunch at the Chaumière at Voiron not far to the north-west, or due south at the Chalet in Gresses-en-Vercors. Not that all memories of the Vercors, that massif often crossed by the riders, are pleasant. Grenoble was occupied by the Italians after the fall of France but became a great centre of the Resistance, as was the Vercors. In the summer of 1944 one of the largest risings of the Resistance seized much of the up-country on the plateau, strengthened by paratroops dropped in, but ferociously crushed: at Vassieux-en-Vercors is a memorial to the many résistants who were captured, often wounded, and massacred there by the Germans before liberation came just too late to save them.
A few other literary echoes are heard in Savoy. There are two pretty lakes, the Lac d’Annecy, with the town of Annecy at its head, visited a couple of times by the Tour, and the Lac de Bourget with the spa town of Aix-les-Bains, regularly a ville-étape, on its west bank, and Chambéry to the south, in a house outside which the regrettable Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his Confessions. Lamartine was sent to Aix for his health and fell in love with a married woman who died soon after, a doomed romance that inspired his poem ‘Le Lac’.
Higher up in Savoy there are fewer writers’ memories, which isn’t surprising given how inaccessible and poor it was until recently. Equally the Savoy has a somewhat limited cuisine of its own, apart from the indigenous raclette and the not-so-indigenous fondue, both direly indigestible and neither anything like as good as the simple cold meats and mountain cheeses found in any village shop. The village of Cordon, lying below the ski resorts of Megève and Cluses and the Col des Aravis – all on the seventeenth stage in 2002 – does have not only a couple of grand hotels but, what is rarer in these parts, a comfortable simple hotel, the Cordonant, with very good and modestly priced food. But for cuisine savante, you need to return towards Grenoble. A few minutes to its south-east is the superb Grand Hotel at Uriage-les-Bains, as good a place as could be to fortify oneself before setting off on a long circuit over those famous Tour passes, the Col du Glandon, Col de la Croix de Fer, then south to the Col du Galibier, Col du Lauteret, Col d’Izoard, Col de Vars, with the Col d’Allos further south, each of them with its own distinctive characteristic and allure.
Merely driving over these – in winter if they aren’t closed by snow as they often are, or in summer, before or after the Tour is run – is taxing enough to make anyone hungry and thirsty, and Embrun beckons. ‘The Nice of the Alps’ is a slightly hyperbolic tag, and an unnecessary one, since it is a really delightful town on its own terms, sitting on the high reaches of the Durance, with a fine twelfth-century cathedral and the neighbouring Tour Brune. In mid-winter the place Mairie is turned into a skating rink, and there are street fairs selling Christmas presents. Pictures of the Tour hang in cafés round the square, on one side of which is the Hotel Mairie with its admirable restaurant. I was there when the ninth stage of the centennial Tour de France passed through Embrun from Bourg d’Oissan to Gap on the quatorze juillet 2003, before watching the riders once again cross those great passes.
They may have their own fascination and majesty, but the peloton never faces any of them without some sense of dread. Seeing the field climb several thousand metres in an icy wind after covering 150 kilometres in baking heat, you might wonder in seriousness whether the human frame was possibly intended for this ordeal, and what it does to the riders. When the Tour de France began life more than a hundred years ago, the men who rode in it weren’t such unusual physical specimens, but average artisans of their day, though plainly a good deal fitter and stronger than most. Nor has cycling ever been a sport for freaks, or oddities, in the way that some have. No one can play in the scrum for an international rugby team today who weighs much under 16 stone or 100 kilos, or play as a linebacker for an NFL team who weighs much less than 280 pounds, or play basketball in an NBA team who is much shorter than 7 foot. Soccer is happily still a game which men of normal build can play at the highest level. With a Giggs or a Zidane, lack of stature is more than made up for by agility and skill, not to say sheer courage, though even on the football field goalies seem to be growing bigger all the time.
Although the tiny cyclists seen on earlier Tours mightn’t flourish now, some are still quite short, and many are slight. The physique of a shot-putter or sumo wrestler would obviously not be ideal on a bike, or even that of some track sprinters, and the frame for a cyclist tends to be wiry and compact. Standing amid the riders before the start, or watching them working on rollers, you see nothing very startling in appearance, apart from the rather kinky shaved arms and legs (so that grazes and gashes with dirt and gravel can be quickly cleaned and dressed without hair getting in the way), and the fearsome muscles, too often rippled by varicose veins.
What now distinguishes the bodies of great cycling champions is invisible to the eye: they are likely not to be conspicuous from the outside, but to have almost freakish internal organs. Lance Armstrong’s heart is a third larger than those of most men of his height and weight. And Miguel Induráin’s lungs are wholly abnormal, so huge that at full stretch they displace much of his stomach. In his prime he could inhale eight litres (almost two gallons) of air in a breath, against a normal man’s four. And with that, his resting pulse of twenty-eight beats a minute was half the rate of a fit amateur racing cyclist, let alone a man watching the Tour in a bar.
But if the physique, strength and stamina of Tour riders are extraordinary, what racing takes out of them is alarming. It is impossible (though it would be interesting) to ascertain the dates of birth and death of every one of the men, now approaching 5000 in number, who have ridden in the Tour. It is possible (though it might be statistically misleading) to give an average life expectancy for Tour winners. What’s for sure is that many have died before their time, and the more so as the twentieth century went by, when life expectancy was of course steadily increasing in France and throughout the West. Winners in the first quarter-century include one man who died by his own hand, three killed in action, and one who was murdered. Others lived to ripe old ages, beginning with Maurice Garin, winner of the 1903 Tour, who died at eighty-five. His immediate successors Henri Cornet and Louis Trousselier died at fifty-six and fifty-seven; after those deaths from non-natural causes of Pottier, Petit-Breton, Faber and Lapize, the last winners before the Great War, Gustave Garrigou, Odile Defraye and Philippe Thys, all lived to more than seventy-five, well over the average for their generation, as did the post-war winners Firmin Lambot and Léon Scieur.
Then comes a sudden premonition with Henri Pélissier, who died at only forty-six. Sylvère Maes died at fifty-seven, Lucien Buysse and Nicolas Frantz lived to their eighties, André Leducq, Antonin Magne and Georges Speicher to their seventies, and Romain Maes to sixty-nine. Of other prewar winners, Roger Lapébie and Gino Bartali both died at eighty-five, and of post-war winners as I write, Ferdi Kubler is ninety-three, Roger Walkowiak and Federico Bahamontes are both in their eighties.
Against them is a more striking necrology. Among riders who won the Tour after the Second World War, Jean Robic died at fifty-nine, Fausto Coppi at forty, Hugo Koblet at thirty-nine, Louison Bobet at fifty-eight, Jacques Anquetil at fifty-three, Gastone Nencini at forty-nine, Luis Ocaña at forty-eight and, only in February 2004, Marco Pantani, aged thirty-four. That is, six out of the ten riders who won the Tour between 1947 and 1960 died before they were sixty. As with the pre-1914 period, these included violent deaths: ‘The pedlar of charm’ Koblet died in a car crash in 1964, as did Robic in 1980, and Ocaña had been the second Tour winner to commit suicide. Nevertheless, the other five died of what are called natural causes, and at an average age just under fifty-two.
In several cases the primary cause was cancer, and the Tour was to have another still more famous ‘cancer victim’, but one who survived and ‘conquered’; we look at Armstrong’s story in the next chapter. There doesn’t appear to be any direct connection between riding and cancer, although doctors observe that cycling does have other specific dangers: a man riding a bicycle (as opposed to a horse or even motorbike) is much of the time holding the weight of his torso on the very base of the penis where blood and nerves enter, and this is likely to explain why, among the other sacrifices they make for their sport, cyclists have an unusually high rate of both sterility and impotence (in their correct respective senses of inability to procreate and inability to copulate). And one must wonder whether there is a connection between the racing cyclists’ rate of mortality and their way of life.
When the great cols are climbed in sunshine but between snowbanks, as sometimes happens, it might be designed by a perverse medical scientist to cause bronchitis and pneumonia, but in any case riding a bike up the Galibier is not a normal activity. The development of those organs isn’t normal either: heart and lungs are remarkably elastic, and although Induráin and Armstrong are plainly physical prodigies, their careers have made their bodies more prodigious still. With men not quite so tough in the first place, the strain put on the heart by cycling may tax it beyond the limit.
And that’s without artificial stimulants. ‘I get no kick from cocaine,/Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all . . .’: even in the first half of the century, many riders could not have convincingly sung ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, as they consumed heroic quantities of both, even before the vogue for amphetamines. All of those are mood-altering as much as performance-enhancing drugs. They make you feel good, they keep you going, they tell you you’re riding better, but they don’t do the body much good. All of those deceased champions rode before the new generation of drugs that swept through sport in the last decades of the twentieth century, different in kind rather than degree from cocaine, or la bomba. Growth hormones and EPO (erythropoietin) don’t quell tiredness or lift the spirits, they actually alter the metabolism. Cancer doctors deal with a very wide range of drugs for different purposes; in England they not long ago used quite legally to prescribe moderate doses of cocaine and heroin as effective painkillers for those in extreme suffering, and EPO, like many drugs forbidden to, but used by, athletes is no more than an artificially or synthetically manufactured version of a hormone produced naturally by the human body: one of the original complications of Armstrong’s story, and the accusations against him, was that he had indeed been prescribed EPO as part of his cancer treatment. Hormones produce dramatic and unnatural growth, as could be seen with plenty of East European shot-putters and weightlifters, not to mention the alarming effects that they can have on someone’s gender balance. EPO raises the red-corpuscle count in the bloodstream, which sends more oxygen to the muscles and makes them tougher and more endurant. Julian Barnes may be exaggerating slightly when he says that, of two riders of equal ability, ‘the one taking EPO will always beat the one who remains clean; it is as simple as that’, but not exaggerating much, and it was no wonder that this miracle drug became so popular.
With the same will to win outweighing sense and safety, few riders bothered to learn that this wonder drug could be literally lethal, thickening the blood and leading to clotting. A number of otherwise inexplicable heart attacks in the middle of the night must be put down to this cause. Or maybe riders did know, just as they knew Simpson’s principle: ‘If it takes ten to kill you, I’ll have nine,’ and were even prepared to dice with ten. Whatever the exact medical explanations, the great race consumed all too many victims.