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  “The Tour is still very important in rural France, it’s important for people around the world to see Lorraine, and it’s an event that brings Lorraine to life. We have been talking about it for ages.”

  The Tour is unique among major sports events for the way in which it goes out to its public. To paraphrase one writer: apart from war, it is the only form of international conflict that takes place on the doorstep. The welcome varies from region to region: bike-mad Brittany always produces more of a show than yesterday’s run east through Alsace-Lorraine, an area which is as German in its identity as it is French. And the towns and villages through which the Tour passes – some 600 of them this year, the organisers say – all find their own ways of welcoming the race.

  In one village, Vezelize, the only sign of Tour mania was a sports bike placed incongruously in the window of the undertakers and banners proclaiming “Lorraine” hung around the war memorial. In Vaucouleurs, from where Joan of Arc set out to wage war on the English, there was nothing apart from a small area marked off with tape where the local pensionnaires could sit undisturbed. Schirmeck had set up a vast marquee for the locals to compete in their own race using bikes on rollers; in Lutzelhouse the schoolchildren had constructed a vast cyclist from coloured paper, while one enterprising farmer at the entrance to another village had built a huge man on a bike using six-foot-high straw bales.

  The only animation in Mattexey was a set of loudspeakers on a lawn, and the buvette, which the villagers expected to attract about 200 people – three times the usual population. By 11 o’clock a pile of glowing cinders had been tipped from the bucket of one of Mayor Fleurance’s tractors into the two oil drums which made up the barbecue, next to the henhouse in front of Mayor Fleurance’s straw barn. Sandwiches with merguez sausages or beefburgers at 15 francs (£1.44) a shout, beer at 10 francs, said the cardboard sign.

  Apart from the Tour, Philippe Leclerc, a farm worker, said, there were few occasions now when villagers could meet, thanks to recent economic pressures and rural depopulation. “Most places this size don’t have fetes any more because guys get drunk and beat each other up. They don’t have dances either now. Villages can’t support a bar. People have no way of socialising. There are few things that unite a village any more apart from things like this.” The only other event in the village was their repas collectif, two weeks ago.

  The locals began gathering at 9am, when the roads were closed “under articles L2213-1 to L2213-6 of the general law of territorial collectivities”, but there was little for them to see. “Ah, Coca-Cola,” they murmured as an occasional vehicle sped past. There was at least one man on a bike to watch, but he was towing a wheelie bin for the buvette and it was not until past one o’clock that the action began, with the arrival of the caravane publicitaire, the parade of sponsors’ floats created in 1930 to keep the crowds entertained as they waited for les coureurs. The 250-vehicle strong caravane is itself preceded by a jazz band on a large blue van shaped like a kidney bean, a recent innovation which, one suspects, owes something to the fact that the Tour organiser Jean-Marie Leblanc is known for his love of trad jazz.

  [Jean-Marie Leblanc, who had run the Tour since 1989, retired in 2005; the jazz band followed him…]

  The lure of its free samples is what draws many of the crowds and is unique to the Tour: no other sports event is synonymous with the daily spectacle of middle-aged ladies battling like rugby forwards for possession of a small plastic key ring with the logo of a telephone bank. For parents of small children, it is a nerve-racking experience.

  Bigger and brasher is better is the rule of the caravane publicitaire, although at least the freebies are no longer dominated by plastic bags and paper flyers, as was the case 10 years ago. This is not entirely positive, as this brings the risk of being decapitated by a flying washing bag (courtesy of Crédit Lyonnais) or packet of sweets (thank you, Haribo). Tasteless jingles have largely gone, quite possibly because health and safety people took a dim view of their cumulative effect, eight hours per day over three weeks, on the eardrums and the sanity of the caravane’s drivers.

  Through went the firemen spraying water from giant mineral water bottles (Aquarel, l’eau minerale du Tour de France), giant orange squares on quad bikes (Orange, obviously), the PMU betting company’s pom-pom girls, carefully dressed against the chilly Lorraine winds but strutting their stuff none the less – and most popular of all, Michelin’s Bibendum, alongside a precarious motorbike with its driver sitting inside a 10-foot rear wheel.

  By about 2.30pm, after more than five hours of waiting, the main act arrived. Heading downhill at almost 40mph, with the wind slightly behind, riding on a wave of cries of “les voilà” the 185 riders in the peloton passed in a whirl of shiny spokes and brightly coloured jerseys lasting less than a minute. Mattexey’s big day had come to its climax, and, as ever, it was all too brief.

  This next piece marked a watershed. For cycling, obviously, because Kelly was the last of the champions who won all kinds of race all through the season. With him went an era when the sport was smaller and its champions more accessible. Also, in a small way, it closed a chapter for me: Kelly had been part of the sport since I began following it as a teenager. Later, as a journalist, I had found him a pleasure to work with as he had become more expansive since his younger days. And as cycling experiences go, this was an unforgettable one.

  Sean Kelly retires

  17 December 1994

  The president of the Irish Cycling Federation called it “the end of an era” but the Sean Kelly years could not have finished more appropriately. His final sprint as a professional, in the Christmas Hamper race [in Carrick-on-Suir] yesterday, took him across the River Suir and up Main Street to lead across the finish line outside Cooney’s Bar for the 194th victory of his 18-year career.

  The result was hardly surprising. It would have been a tactless outsider who dared to place his wheel in front of the local hero with several thousand of his own people watching. But aspiring amateurs throughout Ireland had been training for weeks for their ride alongside Kelly, and two of them finished close behind.

  Carrick’s population of 5,000 swelled overnight as every cyclist in Ireland, or so it seemed, came to pay homage to the man who won 12 one-day classics and was ranked No 1 in the world for five years. Initially the organisers expected a maximum of 500 entries but almost 1,200 appeared from as far afield as Galway, Ulster and the west of England.

  The idea of combining the annual Hamper race with a mass-participation ride came to Kelly when he guested at the Rominger Classic in the summer and saw 2,000 turn out to ride alongside the current world No 1 and hour record holder. The vast turn-out in Carrick was a tribute to the household status Kelly has acquired in Ireland.

  Kelly rang old adversaries and turned the top end of the start sheet into cycling’s equivalent of a fantasy football team. Eddy Merckx, the greatest rider the sport has seen, flew in on a private plane between organising a horse race on Saturday and commentating on a football match. Bernard Hinault, five times winner of the Tour de France, directed affairs from a lead car, as he did on the Tour until this year. Laurent Fignon, Stephen Roche and Roger de Vlaeminck, four times a winner of the Paris-Roubaix, all finished a few seconds behind Kelly in a select lead group.

  [De Vlaeminck, I seem to recall, spent much of the first two hours ostentatiously rubbing marks on the back bumper of the lead car, with his front tyre, just to pass the time.]

  Packing the lanes from hedge to hedge, the vast column of cyclists took six minutes to pass as they rode in tight formation at a steady 15mph for two hours around Carrick. Then they were unleashed for a final 40mph sprint into Carrick down the Clonmel Road on which Kelly achieved one of his finest feats: winning the time-trial in the inaugural Nissan Tour of Ireland in 1985 at almost 35mph.

  Perhaps the best expression of how Kelly was seen by his fellow cyclists came from the double Tour de France winner Fignon, never one to mince his words: “Kelly was a pain in the
arse. I began racing when he was at his best and it really annoyed me that there were so many races which I wanted to win and couldn’t win because of Kelly.” The Irishman was, he added, “un adversaire royal”.

  The tone for the whole weekend was set on Saturday evening when the Irish president, Mary Robinson, entered the Sheba Ballroom at the back of the Carraig Hotel, where Kelly was to present her with a racing jersey signed by the weekend’s celebrities. As Kelly, a few yards in front, milked the applause, all the Irish head of state could do was to look on in awe-struck admiration like the rest of the fans. The president of Ireland had been upstaged by the king of the classics.

  The Linda McCartney team was a brief presence in the European peloton with two distinctive calling cards: its link to Sir Paul’s late wife, and its vegetarianism. Plenty of colour there.

  Meaty task for British veggies

  14 May 2000

  “Niente carne, siamo inglesi”, “No meat, we’re English.” The headline in Gazzetta dello Sport was inevitable when the paper profiled the Linda McCartney foods team, which yesterday became the first English squad to start the Giro, the Italian version of the Tour de France, since it was launched in 1909. And it was the only team of the 20 profiled in La Gazzetta with a breakdown of what the riders eat in a day.

  As a publicity vehicle for the ready-made veggie meals launched by Sir Paul’s late wife, the team is vegetarian, a major talking point in a carnivorous country. It’s a quintessentially English mixture, eccentricity plus the Beatles connection, which was irresistible to an anglophile nation where every small town has its “Oxford school” selling English courses.

  In Italy, cycling is a national obsession second only to calcio. On Friday the team met the Pope, as did the rest of the 180 Giro starters. Yesterday they raced a 6km time-trial in Rome. Today things get serious with 125 km south towards Naples and by the finish on June 4 in Milan, more than 2,300 miles will have been covered, including mountains as big as those scaled in the Tour de France.

  This is tough fare even for the giants of cycling, squads such as the mighty Mapei team, with a £5.5m budget put up by a building products company, and 35 riders to select from. McCartney receive well under £1m from parent company Heinz and – since Spencer Smith went back to triathlon and an Italian signing, Emanuele Lupi, simply failed to turn up for his first race two weeks ago – the squad numbers just nine, which is the number needed for the Giro team. Had one of the team fallen by the wayside this week, they would have turned up a man short.

  Manager Sean Yates is an iconic figure in British cycling, one of the hard men, who has himself ridden the Giro and has won stages in the Tour de France and Tour of Spain. “We have to get to Milan with as many [riders] as possible, but it’s going to be bloody hard for most of the team. Three of the guys have done the race before but for the others, it’s going into the unknown.”

  What is British about McCartney is its name, its staff, its manager and, of course, its character, the plucky underdogs up against the mighty foreigners. After last year’s British team failed to live up to Yates’s expectations, they were sacked and replaced with a multinational mix: two Britons, an Irishman, two Australians, one Swiss, a Norwegian, a Dane and an Italian.

  The better-known Briton, Atlanta bronze-medallist Max Sciandri, has dual nationality and had an Italian racing licence until 1995. He and the Swiss Pascal Richard, who is reigning Olympic champion, are long in the tooth but provide the bulk of the firepower and experience: the pair have won six Giro stages over the years.

  The other Briton, the former national champion Matthew Stephens, was stacking shelves in Marks & Spencer in Crewe a year ago; Yates feels that his team’s inexperience, rather than its diet, will put them at a disadvantage. “There’s no proof that being vegetarian is a handicap or a bonus. I was a vegetarian until I was 20, then I went to France and everyone ate steak so I did. I cut back over the years and had my best Tour de France in 1988, when I ate no meat.”

  Being vegetarians creates other problems. The team can’t haul lorry loads of veggie bangers around Europe – they are frozen and might go off – although there is a vast pile of tofu burgers and lasagne at the headquarters in Toulouse. Instead, they rely upon the cooperation of the hotels where race organisers book them rooms, and – like most of the teams, veggie or not – take protein powder daily.

  “We just tell them we’re veggie and see what they come up with,” says Yates. “But 99.9 per cent of chefs don’t have a clue how to make decent vegetarian food. France is the worst, it’s supposed to be the culinary capital of the world, but in the chains the food can be dire.”

  The worst so far, he reckons, “was an egg bake in Northern France. We had it one evening, and the next day they brought it out again. They’d left it all and they’d just filled in the hole we had eaten from the day before.” This was countered at a race in Bergamo, where the local vegan society cooked for the team for a week.

  For Yates, getting something other than vegetable lasagne over the next few weeks will be a minor concern compared to the worry that his herbivores may get chewed up and spat out. “We’ve had a lot of write-ups because of the name, but you can’t go for ever on novelty value. We have to justify our selection ahead of a couple of good Italian teams. We’ve taken places from them because of the McCartney name and because we have Pascal and Max.”

  There is talk of building up the team for a tilt at the Tour de France in a couple of years, but for now the aims are those of any small team in a cycle race this vast: “If we get to Milan and the organiser doesn’t regret selecting us we’ll have done a reasonable job.”

  McCartney got several riders to the finish, and more importantly won a stage along the way through David Mackenzie. Unfortunately, that was as good as it got for the team: wages began to go unpaid later in the year, and it was disbanded at the start of the 2001 season leaving its entire line-up – including a young Bradley Wiggins – high and dry. Sean Yates would go on to be a directeur sportif at Wiggins’s Team Sky before retiring in 2012.

  The Tour de France and Olympic cycling take centre stage in this collection, but Paris-Roubaix deserves its place as well. This was one of the muddier editions in recent years, and by sheer good luck there was sufficient space in the paper that Monday for an extended piece.

  Riders slip up as mud swamps hell of the north

  16 April 2001

  A week after the Aintree epic, cycling witnessed its own version of the Grand National yesterday. The bulk of the 200-rider field in the 99th Paris-Roubaix, the third round of this year’s World Cup, were eliminated in a series of mass pile-ups after 70 of the 150 miles, and the result was a mud-splattered war of attrition. It was won by a little-known Dutchman, Servais Knaven, but in reality the race was a triumph for an entire team, the Belgian squad Domo, who dominated the final 50 miles and took the first three places.

  To the French, this race will always be L’Enfer du Nord – the Hell of the North – having earned the nickname when it resumed just after the first world war, and the journey from the French capital to the Belgian border took the cyclists through a devastated landscape of shell craters, trenches and broken trees. Yesterday, all the 55 men who struggled to the finish on the velodrome at Roubaix looked as if they had been to the nether reaches of the earth and back, unrecognisable as each one was under a thick coating of mud from the fields of French Flanders.

  These days, the landscape may be more orderly, but Paris-Roubaix remains a cycling version of hell, thanks to the inclusion in the course of about 30 miles of cobbled lanes, some dating back to Napoleonic times, and others boasting evocative names: Chemin des Abattoirs and Chemin des Prières. The late organiser Jacques Goddet called this race “cycling’s last folly”; the 1980 winner Bernard Hinault was more blunt: “A piggery”.

  Criss-crossing the fields of sugar beet, the cobbled sections double up as drains in wet weather and at the end of the wettest winter since records began they have doubled up so efficientl
y that they became flooded and some sections had to be pumped out during the week merely so the race could pass. On Saturday night it rained again, there were torrential April showers yesterday and the pavés [cobbles] turned into a cyclist’s nightmare.

  In places it seemed impossible for anyone to keep their bike upright, so thick and slippery was the mud. Vast puddles hid deep potholes, where cobbles were missing, adding the risk of punctures to the ever-present danger of crashes. Any problem, if not terminal, meant at best a strength-sapping chase – assuming a support vehicle had fought its way through the mire to assist – and yesterday there were few who did not either crash or puncture.

  A chill wind whipping through the poplars merely added to the agony and among those reduced to a hopeless chase after the early crash were former winners such as Andrei Tchmil of Belgium and the Italians Andrea Tafi and Franco Ballerini, who had postponed retirement solely in order to compete in Hell one more time, plus the Briton Max Sciandri, who was to finish 12th.

  “Hell” is geared towards cycling’s older men, with knowledge of the cobbled sections vital, as is a cool head when trouble strikes. It was one of the peloton’s senior members, the 36-year-old Belgian Wilfried Peeters, who took a grip on the event at its heart, the dank Wallers-Arenberg forest.

  The road through the wood is a dead-straight lane just outside Valenciennes with undulations caused by subsidence in the nearby coal mines, where Zola based his novel Germinal, and yesterday it was lined with Belgian fans brandishing the Lion of Flanders as they squelched in the verges.

  Here, with over 50 miles and 12 cobbled sections remaining, the leaders had been cut down to a mere 16 when the Frenchman Philippe Gaumont, second in line behind Peeters, fell heavily and broke his right leg. The confusion, as Gaumont’s companions tried to avoid him, favoured the Belgian, whose usual role is as chief assistant to cycling’s leading one-day specialist, last year’s winner in “Hell”, Johan Museeuw.