Those lucky enough to be riding, or working on, the Tour de France quickly find themselves inside a three-week, in fact, almost month-long, bubble – a bubble that non-bike-related life fails to pervade.
But a silent bubble? Pas du tout. With manifold sounds, from the mechanical to the man-made, it’s noisy in there, as Matthew Beaudin recounts – very noisy indeed.
NO NOISE.
The chorus is building five thousand miles away. But not here in a dark bedroom in Colorado. An iPhone alarm chime slices through the dark.
Miserable.
It’s 4.30 a.m. and the sound signals the start of a deluge of noises of the next month that pound through my head, all our heads, through the Alpine valleys and between the millions of fans.
But the rasp of the shower is next, the boiling of a kettle, the lid rattling off its top. The sounds of an everyday life still and the muffled noises of morning. This moment is brief.
The phone rings, the sleepy voice of a man from Algeria on the other end.
‘Sir, your cab is here. I am outside.’
‘Be right out,’ I say. ‘Be right out.’
Wheels rolling on concrete. This is a noise that will repeat itself again and again. Between here and hotel rooms for the next month. Over gravel and asphalt. Bags slamming into stairs. Bags slamming down stairs.
The radio next. Hiss and crackle of early morning’s dead air. No one owns this space; there’s not much happening at 5 a.m. on whatever day it is. Day one is all I know, of thirty on the road for the big show. It’s too soon to be excited, or think, or worry. Thin concern is lost in my headphones, a careful mixture of favourite bands to cradle my brain before it’s broken in parts by the drone of a transatlantic flight and twenty hours of travel. Easy now.
The airbrakes of the bus to Denver International Airport break the din of the slow roll through the outskirts of the city, where the factory lights are now odd stars burning out in a post-dawn sky. It goes quiet again. Not for long. Never for long. It is the month of noise. Loud and quiet in alternating frequencies and radio bands and never in the right volume. This is the month of the Tour de France.
The short plane ride to the East Coast I never notice; it’s buried in emails and half-hearted story ideas that sound like filler, like boring somethings collecting dust in the corner of a dormant reporter’s brain. I’ve been meaning to do a story about the notion of what it means to be a road captain. No, that’s boring. Well, what of the fall of Mark Cavendish? Seems imminent. No, not that either. Self-doubt has no sound other than your own voice.
This is the final boarding call, Newark to London.
Sounds like a jail term, more than anything. Newark to London. Now the white-grey noise of the plane, the piping of the air into the chamber, the hmmmmmm of resting and eager engines, the light rattle of the plastic windows. All the sound of something waiting to happen with great force that is taken completely for granted.
What is the sound of something waiting to happen?
Soon the air is a blanket in which we are deeply folded. Quiet on a plane is different than any other quiet. The rattle of a beverage cart approaches, the glass teetering of mini-bottles lined up like soldiers waiting to fall. My neighbour’s head falls on my shoulder.
‘Gin and tonic. Two gins, one bottle of tonic.’ Twist, crack, fizz, the loud smashing and echo of ice into teeth. Bad habit, chewing on ice. ‘Maybe another.’
For once there is a man holding a card with my name on it. Mr Matthew Beaudin. Wheels on concrete again, the shut of a door. Then the real noise starts. Sleeping until now, the wave finally forms. We’ve been talking about the Tour for ten months. It’s been out there on the horizon, the race of all races, the one by which riders and teams and even journalists are measured.
And the noise is already so loud. Orica-GreenEdge rider Daryl Impey has returned positive samples for a masking agent. ‘This can’t be the Grand Départ Orica-GreenEdge was hoping for,’ and ‘Daryl Impey tested positive in both A and B samples for probenecid, a diuretic and possible masking agent,’ come out of my fingers in the cab from the airport.
Add that to the chorus that was already humming along after a biological passport issue side-lined Tinkoff-Saxo’s Roman Kreuziger, and the sound of cynicism was already at its normal rumble. Never overwhelming but always somewhere behind our heads.
‘He was adamant that he never used doping methods or substances,’ a team press release said. ‘Through our own medical staff and independent verification the team was satisfied that Roman’s blood profile had valid medical and scientific explanations other than the use of doping methods or substances. This was subsequently confirmed by the expert opinions Roman shared with the team.’
Sounds like… everything we’ve heard and typed before. Fair or not. It just all runs together at this point and the rainbow of reasons turns to only a brownish tint of noise and what comes out of the public megaphone is the static sound of suspicion.
By the time I arrive in Yorkshire, the Tour de France is in full symphony. The team buses idling and all parked in a row, the staccato insults of car horns angry with the worker bees in the road. The murmur of the fans at the barriers and the screams of the Norwegians. How fifteen of them are louder than a thousand fans from other countries, I’ll never know. I ask questions quietly; it’s far too soon to be loud and fast. The Tour is long, we always say. Be quiet now, maybe louder later.
The unmistakable noise of the race-wave breaking.
Riders clicking into their pedals. The subdued buzz-saw of hubs spinning into the air. The peloton and its collection of language courses towards the start line. English, French, Italian and Spanish, German. The clicks and taps and myriad versions of the same word – venga venga, allez allez, go go – make up a river of sound that is a constant every July across France. It’s always moving and whirring, a fleeting blur of colour set against the greens and yellows of a country at a standstill while a bike race flashes through it. The sight of the peloton lasts longer than its sound; it’s seen and then heard only for a few moments and then gone again, fast as a piece of wind too thin to feel longer than a second.
The first week is always crazy. Crashes and groans and the soft whacks of carbon and bone on pavement. Visually it’s all something to see, the deep crowds and the big sprint finishes.
Usually, it sounds like swearing at the finish.
Sometimes it sounds like the nervous voice of a rookie set against the constant chatter of the veterans who start stages only after finishing an espresso in the start village with the pretty girls in the yellow dresses handing out newspapers to the journalists, none of whom the pretty girls seem interested in, ever.
The newbies play it cool. As cool as they can, anyways. Three years back I was a new reporter in France, terrified by the sound of my own voice at the team cars, or in the press conference.
‘It’s kind of a mess, this whole Tour de France thing. It’s kind of a circus. People keep telling me it’s just another bike race, but it doesn’t feel like just another bike race. It feels like the big show,’ American Alex Howes says while sitting on the back of a Garmin-Sharp car, a wisp of hair peaking from under a cycling cap tilted just so. His glasses give his young face a distinct complexity and his voice sounds so much older than he is. I’m from Colorado, too, and I didn’t know one of us could have such a drawl.
‘I feel like they’ve kind of thrown me into the deep end here,’ he says. ‘Everybody just assumes I know what I’m doing and to be honest I’m not so sure any more.’
Most of us aren’t sure any more. Some sound sure. Some sound excited. Even the old guys.
‘I really only feel my age when I first wake up in the morning. Then I feel like I can feel every kilometre and every race of the past twenty-five years. But once I’m up and moving, it all melts away. And once the race starts, I feel like I’m still twenty-five and excited to be there. Being in the race never gets old and is always a great feeling,’ Chris Horner tells me in Leeds, ten minutes before the start. ‘I am absolutely excited for the Tour. It is the biggest, most epic race in the world and that is something every bike racer dreams about being a part of. No matter how many times I’ve started the Tour now, it is always exciting and I can’t wait for the start.’
No one can. The Tour chatter is endless in our heads and in the team cars and behind the buses. Conjecture abounds, always. Soon, we’ll have a real race. A real reason to write the things and think the things we think.
And then it happens for the first time.
‘It’ is Daniel Mangeas. Simply, the voice of the mornings and afternoons at the Tour de France. This is what he sounds like: LOUD SENTENCES IN FRENCH. ENDLESS LOUD WORDS ABOUT BIKE RACERS IN BOOMING FRENCH THAT BREAK LIKE WAVES UPON MY EARS AND FACE.
He is the announcer of the race at the starts and finishes; he is blasting his famous noise into the air now and this is the one noise that will hardly stop for the next month. When he is not talking he is still talking. Over the recordings in my audio files, in the dreams I have the five seconds before I wake up. The part where reality and subconscious merge. He lives even there. It all sounds like Mangeas, whose voice sounds like it comes directly from the sky and runs on a generator. He does not use notes to talk about every rider as they approach sign-in. He does not speak on rest days, unplugging the voice that haunts us all.
LOUD STUFF IN FRENCH IS STILL HAPPENING. AND WILL CONTINUE TO HAPPEN.
What day is it now?
Sometimes you have to get in the car and roll up the windows and stop all this noise and take a drive. You drive every day from the start to the finish, of course, and then some more. Some days it’s more welcome than others; it’s the only time you have real control over what comes into your ears. Which today sounds like Bruce Springsteen. It’s the fifth of July, and I have a patriotism hangover. Third year in a row now I’ve missed the booms and cracks of the Fourth in the USA.
Born in the USA blares over the BMW stereo.
I love Bruce. Particularly in France.
The race is loud in those days. The smashing of the barriers drowns out even the voice itself. And then the building noise breaks – the sound of anguish and let-down. Mark Cavendish takes a hard fall after taking a big chance and he is down and soon out and the crowd has been deflated like an immense and sad balloon.
When the race is over, another race always begins. The race for quotes and for riders and directeurs and, in a pinch, even a team doctor. So often a job of scarcity, we run now, jog, walk fast, towards the teams. Cameramen are always shouting and running badly and in strange manners. Those of us armed with only iPhones slip into cracks. We talk to each other in the moments between things happening.
You chasing Cav? No, Gerro didn’t say shit. Says he has to watch the replay. He was walking to the bus.
The scrums on days like these are amoeba-like messes of humans and fans and a smashing of bodies and languages. They sound like fatigued irritation, smell like body odour and feel like a bulky and fattened rugby scrum.
‘I wanted to win today, I felt really strong and was in a great position to contest the sprint thanks to the unbelievable efforts of my team,’ he said later. ‘Sorry to all the fans that came out to support – it was truly incredible.’
If a heart breaking had a noise today, it might sound like Mark Cavendish’s hollow words do.
Cycling is always showing its true religion of cruel punishment and disdain for proper narrative. Marcel Kittel – the stage winner – does a press conference in dazzling English in England and he says the right things, which must fall upon Cavendish’s hot ears.
Once this race launches it is a snowball rolling downhill. Bigger, faster, each day. All of us hold on tight and look for our places in the ever-moving sporting instrument this movable feast really is.
For the next few days the Tour sounds the same. The routine of click-click-snap-hey-I-have-a-question is already metronomic three days in. The advertising caravan is a constant assault on ears and eyes, with cars shaped like lions and ice-cream cones armed with megaphones. I never knew anyone could be so excited about a French bank, ever.
Generally, it takes something special to knock us from our routines. But sometimes it finds us all, the riders and the writers at the same time. That day came on stage 5 from Ypres, Belgium, to the edge of the Arenberg Forest.
It’s hard to know it, whatever it is. It only sounded like rain that day, a porous and tapping melancholy on the car windshield. I imagined I could hear the sounds of the Menin Gate, where the Last Post sounds. At 8 p.m. every night since 1928, buglers from a local brigade close the road through the memorial to the 90,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers with no known graves, and they sound off into the evening, calling to those who never came home. During the German occupation during the Second World War, the ceremony was conducted at the Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey.
Stage 5 this year was known for its cobblestones and driving rain. And for Froome’s abandonment and the triumph of Nibali, which was loud in its own right. The peloton tore itself inside out in the driving rain of the north, rolling over battlefields from the Great War and past plain white crosses with no names. It’s been a hundred years since the start of a war that killed 16 million people.
In the squares of towns, there are stone lists of those who died in the fighting. Some are lengthy, others much shorter. The land cannot tell its stories, and so the Tour plays its part; bit by bit and year by year it reminds the sport and its viewers of wars and things past. In this way, the arena of cycling is a highlighter to the open book of the land’s histories, wherever the races wander.
‘A lot of the work that goes into the race is really, strictly, technically based,’ Garmin-Sharp director Charly Wegelius told me. ‘But also, that’s the beauty of cycling – that it interacts with the world around it. We don’t just go to stadiums and play our game. I think it’s nice when the organisers can build the race around the culture and the history of the countries that we race in. I think it’s pretty hard to drive by a war memorial and see those kinds of places without it affecting you. They’re really striking places.’
The racing was striking that day, too. After Nibali’s masterwork of a GC raid, the Tour de France sounded like something it hasn’t in some time, since Pantani. It sounded Italian.
This was Nibali’s opus now, and it sounded like hands slapping the barriers as he approached the summit finishes at La Planche des Belles Filles and Chamrousse and Hautacam. There was still the chatter of contempt and disbelief – no one can blame those wondering loudly about performance these days – though even that was subdued. Once Contador had abandoned, everything felt somewhat calm for a Tour de France. Never quiet during the day, but quieter at night. The media hallucinations seemed to slow down at least.
LOUD FRENCH WORDS. LOUD LOUD LOUD VINCENZO NIBALIIIIIIIIIIAHHHHH. I can’t hear what Michael Rogers said in that recording. All I can hear is the voice.
MOVE, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS. That is the sound of Fabian Cancellara screaming at us one day in the chute of the finish.
YOU CAN’T DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DO THAT! That is the sound of Andrew Talansky screaming into the air and at, apparently, Simon Gerrans – what is it with Simon Gerrans, by the way? – after Talansky went down heavy as a car crash in stage 7. He was at the wrong end of the sprint and got tangled up with the Australian while trying to get out of the way. We never really hear the crashes. We just hear the clatter afterward.
‘He looked over his right shoulder while I was coming in from the left, and unfortunately just fell on my back wheel. I’m sorry he crashed, but I think, as everyone saw, there was no malice in it,’ Gerrans said. ‘I don’t think I did anything wrong.’
Somewhere during the race, the Italian guy shows up. And he THWAK THWAKS at his typewriter. The rest of us are whispering words with our fingers into our screens. Nudging them along gently. But not the Italian with the typewriter. No. He’s shouting them right on an actual page of paper. I wonder where you even buy real typewriter paper any more.
It seems absurd he’s still able to do this, this arcane methodology of creating words and story, and yet we are glad he is here with his TingTingTinging. Come to think of it, it may be the one sound in the press room we all may agree on. Well, that and the sound of lunch. Which sometimes sounds like wine into the bottom of a cup and the noshing of free food.
We are in the mountains these days, and glad for it. The hotels are always hushed. Our glasses clink together and the French is so thick I cannot begin to understand it. Rivers run behind the buildings and the roads are quiet. I snap into my own pedals and go, trying to make the cluttered audio on loop through my brain stop if only for an hour. In the Vosges, a couple of kids scream ALLEZ ALLEZ at me. In the Pyrenees up the Col d’Aubisque the only noise is the sound of cowbells that clang through the mist. Those bells were the sound of the Tour ending. In an hour, Nibali levelled Chris Horner out of a late and sublime attack – Nibali’s got a pretty good memory from the last Vuelta, it turns out – and it all sounded like a coronation. Trumpets should have been playing. They may have been playing in my head.
The rest was mere formality. There was loud, loud club music that more unhinges a body than makes it dance – BOOM CLAP BOOM SMASHHHHH – and the sound of money being spent at eleven euros a beer at the blowout party in Paris.
Marcel Kittel bounded through the club in sunglasses at night, and why wouldn’t he? It sounded like victory and the end. Sounded like a hangover.
‘Montmartre,’ I tell the cab driver at 3 a.m. The Arc is lit up yellow. That is the last thing I notice.
The din of the transatlantic. Wheels on concrete. The turn of a key.
The confluence of sounds flows off me down the shower drain. No noise.
Finally. No noise.
Matthew Beaudin lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he works for Velo magazine and velonews.com. He is a Libra, likes bread and oil, drinks three cups of coffee before leaving the house and has been known to run shirtless through the woods with face paint on. He has since recovered from the deafening Tour and will return next year, with $500 noise-cancelling headphones.