TOUR DE FRANCE: PYRENEES
by Graeme Fife
16 July. In company with what seemed to be the entire cycling fraternity of the Pyrenees, I rode up towards La Mongie in blistering heat, well ahead of the race, trying not to remember how hard the climb is, thinking of last year when we had to go all the way to the col, 4km beyond the ugly ski station. At Sainte-Marie de Campan, the foot of the climb, the woman gendarme had told me to dismount and continue on foot. Civic disobedience being a sort of tradition in France, I ignored her and carried on riding.
I’m wearing a yellow top. A man lounging at the side of the road with his family cheers and claps. ‘It’s the maillot jaune.’ I nod, blink the stinging sweat out of my eyes, and say: 'Ah, last year’s.’ The Campan villagers have a custom of putting large straw-stuffed mannequins in doorways, on window cills and balconies – dressed in old costume, rather spooky, an ancient and rather sinister tradition. * [see footnote]
The harder the gradient gets, the more the acid sweat floods my eyes, the more I am overtaken by other cyclists who, like me, glance fearfully at the line of cars cut across the wooded mountain slope way above us, and the more I feel like a straw dummy propping up a crumbling old house. Even so, I don't envy the crowds lining the route. A foolish pride stirs. We're riding the route of the Tour de France, they're just looking at it. I see a picknicker lounging in the shade wearing a T-shirt with the legend “Steep is good” and wonder what his problem is. A beaming woman sits next to a banner with the painted legend “Richard, ton bidon” – will Virenque see and obligingly toss her his bottle ? But bidon is also slang for false, fake, self-styled, phoney, bogus and trcikery swindling, jiggery-pokery. Well, now…
On the lower slopes, the road winds through trees, but around 7km from the Arrivée it breaks clear of the woods and the ridges and craggy humps of the high range loom into view, stark against the clear blue sky. This is the moment when the awe of climbing way beyond the reach of beanstalks swamps you, when you surrender to the sheer enormity of the mountain's power. The daunting prospect, the thrill of natural grandeur and, like a memento mori to you, the puny mortal on a frail bike, the wearing expense of the toil and effort needed to keep the pedals turning. Every revolution of the cranks brings us nearer the top. Got to press on, don't think too hard, stay loose, keep your nerve.
A thought lights up in my soggy brain: a sudden boost to the confidence. I realise that the banners telling us '5km to go…4km to go' relate, of course, to the race not to us penitential sloggers. We certainly won't be allowed beyond the red kite. Hurray. A surprise gift of one whole kilometre less to ride, one whole kilometre less of being ambushed by idiots straying into the road across my wheel.
The local paper La Dépêche has vans plying the Tour roads lobbing out batches of the latest edition to all and sundry. One of the bundles nearly decks me. Higher up the road, in one of the snow tunnels, my back wheel clogs up – a loose page of that wretched despatch caught in the rear mech. I straddle the bike as a friendly cove leans down and unpicks the rags from chain and cogs. Merci, merci, I gasp. De rien, he says affably. Out of the tunnel along the road daubed with the white scrawl of the Tour Riders' Visitor's Book – Vinokourov…Jaja…Bobo…
Basque fans everywhere. The L'Equipe cartoonist has depicted La Mongie as “The Orange Planet”, a strange lunatic world overpopulated with a cloned tribe of corpulent smoke-jawed men in tangerine bolero tops, bikini bottoms and frizzy wigs, some distinguished (if that's the word, it probably isn't) by red tie-on clown's noses. The elders of the clan, possibly. They speak a strange tongue. It's said that when the Devil tried to learn Basque he could master only seven words – perhaps the deadly sins in which he had a vested interest. Luckily the idiot Devil who haunts the Tour is nowhere to be seen…or caught diabolical whiff of. Peugh. No stranger to the fitful shower of celebrity, he is a distant stranger to soap and hygiene. Sulphurous fumes ain't in it.
Dark clouds gather over the peaks as I rejoin my companions, four of the Americans I'm introducing to Tour and mountains. We peel off into a clearing with beer tents and televisions. Wait a minute, man, isn't that Sheryl Crow checking out the blonde (Kronenbourg) and the small screen ? Sure is - Sheryl Crow. She looks kinda nervous, don't she ? But say, we come to the Tour, which is neat anyway, and now we're watching it with Sheryl Crow, too. Man, that's awesome. Cameras out.
The rain comes, the cold cold driving rain. The Basques sing and party on, alfresco. The rest of us huddle under the beer tent canopies and watch coverage of the race through a blur of static interference and spray-shot lenses. At last the storm passes over, the sun breaks through, and we're back at the side of the road packed in with countless others, waiting, waiting. Small knots of people cling for support to trees on the slope of the mountainside opposite.
Gendarmes try to stem the encroaching tide of fans, but the Basques seem to have the situation under control. They carry their own law with them and it is impenetrable to anyone else. They stake claim with the soles of their feet. This is their stretch of tarmac, a bare ten feet wide, and they mount guard across it jealously, joshing the police, grinning wide at the very idea of meekly doing what they're told. The police shrug and, apparently, take mild anarchy in place of a punch up.
Suddenly, the familiar klaxons hee-haw hee-haw in rising pitch up the road, Jean-Marie Leblanc's red car speeds by and motorbikes and press vehicles hot on his wheels, slicing through the crowd like tailor's scissors shearing cloth, and…and…it's Armstrong and Basso, at terrible velocity, faces drawn, bodies hunched and taut. In the vivid snapshot of their flying past us, inches away, I say to myself: 'Armstrong just won the Tour'.
Seconds tick away, too many seconds, before the chasers squeeze through in a burst of speed. The dense crowd opens and closes in peristalsis to allow them narrow passage, like a boa constrictor digesting mice. Pallid masks of pain and shock stand out in this bunch of men who've been strained and dropped: Hamilton, Ullrich, Mayo, the contenders who may even now be giving up contention. But here is the gutsy Voeckler, hanging onto yellow…and the sprint specialists O'Grady and McEwen, who might offer some ripe Aussie response to Monsieur 'Steep is good'. Finally, like the Grim Reaper, the Broom Wagon trundles by, the race is over for the day and La Mongie begins to spill its vast flood of Tour pilgrims back down the mountain.
17 July. I've decided to ride the 13km up from our base - Nick Flanagan's cycling lodge in Massat, to just below the Port de Lers. The view is stupendous: I look across a deep basin to the ramparts of rock towering over the col d'Agnès. Folds of mountain plummet down to the lake below the road along which the riders will first descend and then climb once more. I and a thousand other spectators, more, will see them coming, tiny figures far in the distance, plunging off their fifth col of the day, a brief respite of donwhill before they climb up the next one, past me, and onto the last descent and the valley road leading to the day's grim finale: 16 withering kilometres to the Plateau de Beille. Worse than Mont Ventoux, say the experts.
From where I sit, a grand tableau of what makes this sporting event unique: 5km of serpentine road lined with people come to linger for hours just to snatch a glimpse of a race that, from the very start, lit a fervour across the entire hexagon of France. The 'giants of the route' riding like mythic heroes into even the remotest regions, appearing on mountain tops and vanishing into the long perspective of the endless road. Epic stuff – always was, always will be.
People who've camped up here are well-provided. I passed one family tucking contentedly into barbecued steak, green leaves, chilled rosé. Transient chancers like me liberate a banana from the back pocket and sip the last of the lukewarm water from the bidon. The Vélo car scorches through – a commentator tells us over the loudspeaker that the maillot jaune is in trouble on the vicious steeps of the Agnès. An Irish voice behind me tells a mate he's heard that Mayo climbed off on the fourth climb, got an earful from his manager and climbed back on.
A flurry of excitement ripples along the road: action in the distance – the publicity caravan approaches. The very different Tour de France surges by: motorised Aquarel bottles…a glum-looking bloke driving a giant Crédit Lyonnais winner's lion clamped to a pop-pop tricycle…a large cyclindrical cheese with no visible means of locomotion…in quick sucession a rubber duck, a garden gnome and a horribly sunburnt pink pig each mounted on what may be a stripped-down Robin Reliant. Girls with glassy smiles hurl out the free gifts and an elderly couple next to me pitch in to amass the full collection, everything from sticks of liquorice to Mickey Mouse magazines. At one point, Madame scrambles off down the precipice to retrieve what turns out to be a pair of mulberry coloured flip-flops. Their battle for the bonbons is ferocious, though what they'll do with a pair of ill-fitting Champion polka-dot caps, who knows ?
A lull. Five helicopters herald the arrival of the riders. At the foot of the climb the little troop of boy scouts in cornflower blue shirts take up the cheering again – they cheered me as I went past, they cheered everything that moved – and two riders fly past us, Rasmussen, the bald ex-mountain biker, and Chavanel whose break will take the pressure off his team trying to defend Voeckler's lead. The Postals go through a couple of minutes later, a compact ruthless hunting party, riding down the escape. And here's Voeckler, riding with enormous courage, only a small gap, he's fought his way back. After him come the stragglers, heavy with fatigue. The drama at full pelt along the narrow road on whose verge we stand. It fills out what the television can never show, just as riding the mountains is the only way really to get close to knowing what punishment the Tour metes out on these men, the best in the world.
When the race has passed, I ride down to the junction and turn off on the descent – cars facing both ways parked either side, others trying to squeeze through. There's already a jam – cork in the bottle, the French say. I shoulder the bike, scamper down over mud and boulders across the hairpin, remount on clear road and am away, down the hill at speed. I talked to Phil Liggett the other day on the way to La Mongie. 'You're lucky' he said, knowing he'd be stuck in the media village at the end of the stage, 'you'll be able to get off the mountain – you're on a bike' and it's somehow reassuring that the best way to see the Great Bike Race is on a bicycle.
Back in Massat to watch the last hour on television, Larry and Peter, my American buddies, report from their pitch on the col de la Core. 'We're next to this campervan, okay, folks from Colorado, they've stayed overnight. Suddenly their cell phone rings and they're laughing and shouting into it like crazy. Turns out the girl, who's really an exceptionally hot looking chick, dropped some stuff and when she leaned over and displayed her rear the camera moto swooped and there she is all over the tv coverage Stateside and the folks back home are phoning to tell her. Man, did she blush. It was wild.'
And on this day, 18 July, the flat stage to Carcassonne, I sit to write, glad that I can take a rest from 10 mile's worth of 10% gradients and look forward to some chilled rosé of my own at lunch time followed by the continuing drama of the Tour de France, albeit crammed onto the small screen, from the comfort of a chair. Santé.
* In the upper valley of the Adour, the eldest child of any family, male or female, inherited the entire family wealth - land, animals and house. It was, therefore, considered unacceptable for two heirs to marry and establish too rich a patrimony; better for a younger daughter or son to marry an heir and thus keep the wealth more evenly spread. It was considered particularly reprehensible for an heir to marry someone from outside the village and take the property away, just as village custom looked askance at a widower marrying a young girl or a widow remarrying. If the bachelors of the village disapproved of a betrothal, the affianced man or woman was subjected to the so-called charivari for a month ahead of the wedding: every night, the young men mounted what in Suffolk used to be called the 'Rough Band' a cacophonous serenade outside the house every night, a rowdy jangling of cowbells, kettle and pans beaten with iron bars and the like. In addition, two mounaques, straw-stuffed dummies, one male one female, were suspended from the wall of the house. The word comes from Spanish 'mona', a long-tailed monkey, (the local dialect hereabouts has many affinities with Catalan) and, figuratively, 'an ugly woman, a fright'. The mounaques were reckoned to portray the faults of the betrothed pair. After the wedding, the newly-weds walked under the mounaques into the house and the charivari would end and the rag-doll tabus be removed… if the couple paid over enough money to fund a good blow-out for the disappointed rough bandsmen. The tradition of making the Campan mounaques was revived in the early 1990s as a summertime tourist attraction. They are removed in winter. ('Charivari' is a French word of unknown origin, first recorded in the 14th century but certainly of older date
in usage.)