Racing Hard Read online

  Yesterday, however, it was the turn of Museeuw to play the role of team man, and he marked what remained of the chasing group, led for much of the time by the American George Hincapie, winner on Wednesday of the Ghent-Wevelgem Classic, and a Belgian veteran, Ludo Dierckxsens.

  Peeters’ valiant effort came to an end in the final section of pavé eight miles from the finish, where Dierckxsens and Hincapie made their final desperate attempts to dislodge Museeuw and his two other team-mates in the Domo squad, the world champion Romans Vainsteins of Latvia and Knaven.

  The pair were helped in their task when Museeuw punctured early in the half-flooded lane. He has spent the last eight months recovering from a motorbike accident which left him in a coma, but it was barely noticeable from the way he fought his way back, his bike bucking under him like a pogo stick on two wheels.

  Hincapie and Dierckxsens were thus left outnumbered. “What could we do?” asked a despairing Hincapie afterwards. “One of them was on to us whenever we moved.” Any of the four Domo men bar the exhausted Peeters could have won but it was Knaven who attacked seven-and-a-half miles from the finish to become the first Dutch victor since 1983, with Museeuw taking second from Vainsteins, who took over the lead in the World Cup. Hell may have been murkier than usual but the result was all too clear-cut.

  In its early days, the Étape du Tour was a radical event. It was not the first sportive by a long chalk, but it was the one that brought the concept of riding these events to a worldwide audience. It was the brainchild of Vélo magazine editor Claude Droussent, whose idea of putting it on during the Tour de France was a stroke of genius. It was also a rare chance, again, to get outside the usual journalistic box on the Tour, and write about riding my bike.

  King of the mountains for a day

  29 June 2002

  As well as being the world’s longest, toughest and most prestigious cycle race, the Tour de France is also a wannabe’s dream. You cannot bowl an over at Lords on the morning of an Ashes Test and fantasise about being Nasser Hussein. But any fan can put on a replica cycling team jersey and shorts, and cycle up one of the Tour’s mountain passes.

  Indeed, that is just what they do, in their hundreds of thousands, every July. They dream the dream in the morning, wobbling up a mountain or two at walking pace, often baring their backs to the noonday sun to horrific effect, and in the afternoon, they cheer by the roadside as the Tourmen struggle up the same strip of hairpinned Tarmac. The hardest of the hard core can go further. They pay their entry fee, train for months, and get the complete Tour experience in the Étape du Tour.

  “Étape” means stage, and that is what you get: a ride along one of the mountain stages several days before the Tour comes the same way, complete with crowds lining the roadsides yelling encouragement, and gendarmes closing the roads to all traffic. Last July, the 7,000 Étape riders set off over the passes of the Aspin and Tourmalet in the Pyrenean “circle of death”, one of the Tour’s great, traditional mountain setpieces, first crossed by the race in 1910 amid fears that the cyclists might be waylaid and eaten by bears. These are roads which are steeped in cycling legend.

  Since I began reporting the Tour de France in 1990, at least once a year some bright spark or other has asked me: “Do you follow the race on your bike?” Cycling the Étape wouldn’t offer me that, but it would be a new way of seeing the mountains I look at every July through the windscreen of a car. It wouldn’t show me what it was like being Lance Armstrong, but it would show me how the race looked from the other side of the handlebars. It was a good reason to get fit, too, because the Étape is not for the fainthearted – in either sense of the word. The best parallel is with the London marathon: a reasonably fit person can complete it, but it takes several months of training to attempt it with a degree of comfort or safety.

  The Tour has been said to resemble a miniature sovereign state as it sweeps across the French countryside with the roads closed for hours beforehand. There was a similarly imperious feel to the start of the Étape as we sprinted out of the little town of Tarbes in the early morning, after being sprung from the “pens” used to prevent an unseemly rush for the front of the grid.

  The leading 3,000 or so cyclists rode shoulder to shoulder across the road, each front wheel inches from the back wheel in front, seamlessly dividing for traffic islands and roundabouts, and coming back together like a river in flood at a steady 25mph. Knowing that there is no traffic coming the other way leads to an uncanny feeling of detachment from the normal world; the pistol-packing gendarmes standing impassively at every junction to every farm track give the feeling of a state procession.

  South of Tarbes in the Pyrenean foothills lies a little known region of fine gastronomy and steep green valleys, the Bigorre. When the clouds parted, I could catch sight of the occasional medieval castle with heraldic flag flapping, vast views across row upon row of foothills that could have been drawn by a child, and, on a 45mph hairpin bend in a wood, one of our number crawling out of a ditch.

  The Étappers were a disparate bunch. Grizzled Frenchmen in the main, who looked as if they had known their prime back in Eddy Merckx’s time, the 1970s. There was a smattering of corporate guests from the Cannondale cycle company wearing zebra-striped jerseys, one of whom I spotted taking a business call from LA halfway up a mountain. And several hundred Britons, easily spotted thanks to cycling club jerseys from Sydenham to Sheffield, their number including the legendary “unluckiest cyclist in the Sydney Olympics”, Rob Hayles, for whom this was merely another day’s training.

  Those who wonder at the millions of spectators drawn to the Tour de France should reflect on this: there were thousands lining the roads of the Étape. Some were encouraging their friends – and writing their names on the road in the style of the Tour stars – but the rest had just come out of their houses and campsites, lending weight to the old argument that your average Frenchman will support anyone sitting on a bike with a look of pain on their face.

  They did karaoke for us, played the obligatory accordion, sang ribald songs about the suffering in front of them (“who’s tired? you, you, you” sang three small boys on one hairpin), wrote graffiti – “no to the Euro”, “smash the G8” – and handed up newspapers, designed to keep the cold off our chests on the downhills, rather than to get the latest on Armstrong’s progress. And, embarrassingly, they greeted my yellow jersey with cheers, both ironic and affectionate in nature.

  After 40 miles with nothing more severe than you would encounter in the Chilterns, the Col d’Aspin was the first “difficulty”, as the French euphemistically call mountains. In a car, it is a charming seven miles of hairpins across the high hayfields but it was an hour of hard work for the single file of Étappers, spread from one shoulder of the mountainside to the other, trying to steer round giant slugs that slimed over the Tarmac with a shared death wish.

  “Suffering” is a facile term to use when writing about the Tour de France, but it is humbling to be reminded of what it actually entails. Instead of the aching legs I had expected, the dull pain spread slowly from my lower back to my shoulders and neck, and down into my backside. I remembered what Robert Millar, the only Briton to lead over these mountains in the Tour, had told me. “The climbers suffer like everyone else, but they go faster.” The aching might be the same for a Tourman, then, but he would be travelling twice as quick. This was stage 14 of the Tour: a Tourman would have had a week or two of it before today, and could expect the same or worse tomorrow and for five more days after that until the finish in Paris.

  The mental arithmetic in mountain climbing is on another level of reality. Each time you pass one of the boards saying how far it is to the top, you look at the speedometer to work out how long it will take. Disconcertingly, as you slow down there seems to be exactly an hour to the summit each time you look: seven miles a hour, six miles an hour, and so on.

  The Tourmalet is even longer, steeper and more mind-bending than the Aspin, rising to 2,100m through a series of concre
te tunnels to an amphitheatre of cliffs where the vultures circle past a ski-station of indescribable ugliness, La Mongie. Miguel Indurain and Eddy Merckx made cycling history by flying clear of the field on this mountain; well before the top, some of the Étappers were walking.

  Going down a mountain, with oblivion waiting a few metres beyond the crash barriers, you are supposed to look for “the flow”, which will enable you to sweep through hairpins with a minimal touch of the brakes and the grace of a downhill skier. I did not flow: I froze, with numbed fingers struggling to hold the brakes, my mind deadened by the physical effort of going up and unable to deal with the sudden transition from 5mph to 45mph.

  Even in summer, the mountains can turn nasty. Climbing to the Étape finish at the Luz Ardiden ski-station, the weather degenerated into a gale, sleet and heavy rain; 1,500 of the 7,000 climbed off en route. Who could blame them: cold rain in the mountains “tetanises” the muscles, turns the descents into skating rinks and makes the eyes burn. But there is no way out in the Tour, if you want to keep honour intact – and that is the difference.

  Since the great drug scandals of 1998, cycling has been riven with suspicion over what the participants may, or may not be, taking to help them along the way. As a reminder of the colossal physical and mental demands that the Tour makes on its participants, the Étape was a welcome antidote to my cynicism. The difference between the Tourmen, artificially assisted or not, and a reasonably fit mortal is brutally simple. I rode the Étape’s 90 miles in seven hours and 18 minutes. Two days later, the slowest man in the real thing, Jacky Durand, was almost 2½ hours faster.

  The devil has been a presence on the Tour since 1993, and has given colour writers plenty of material over the years. This was the sort of piece we all love to write: just run with the idea for the sheer hell of it (sorry).

  Jesus battles devil for a fast buck

  22 July 2000

  Time was, a man would yank on a devil’s outfit and chase alongside the peloton shaking his toasting fork just for the fun of it. Not any more. In a stark reminder of how commercial concerns are taking over sporting ideals, Didi Senff, a 48-year-old German bike inventor and the infamous “Tour devil”, is turning his art into a business. Senff’s “devilish bike show” will open at a beer museum in Schussenrieder, near Stuttgart, on August 5. His eccentric bikes are the centrepiece, including the eight-footer he brings on the Tour de France.

  He has shown up on each Tour since 1993, having first been spotted on a mountain in Andorra when the Italian Claudio Chiappucci, nicknamed “el diablo”, was still a Tour challenger. To Germans the “red devil” also refers to the red banner flown at the one-kilometre-to-go point, so Senff dresses in a red catsuit to ululate his variant of the French yell of encouragement “allez, allez, allez”.

  He drives a battered VW trailer van with limited washing facilities, or so the aroma emanating from the diabolical armpits suggests. Perhaps this is what put off Mrs Devil, who turned up for one Tour in matching red tights but has not been seen again.

  A few hundred metres in front of the trailer’s parking place, he paints 6ft-long toasting forks on the road to prepare the cyclists, who respond by throwing bidons (water bottles) as they pass. Last year an angel joined him on the Tour. Occasionally they stood on opposite sides as the cyclists passed. This year several small devils brandishing inflatable forks have also been prominent and a second angel has put in the odd appearance.

  But surely the most bizarre spectacle was the sight of Jesus stirring on a cross in the Dordogne. For a moment it seemed that 3,000 miles of driving in the wake of the Tourmen had finally taken its toll; but no, it was a cycling fan, complete with fake tan, crown of thorns, beard and loincloth, hoping the TV cameras might notice him. Is nothing sacred any more?

  Senff was probably the first fan to do the roadside dressing up thing on the Tour – it may well be down to him that we now see everything from mad cows to giant syringes and Borat – and his “career” lasted close on 20 years, although his manic energy appeared to dissipate with age. He was definitely running more slowly alongside the riders in his latter years, and his beard was tinged with grey. The last I heard, his sponsorship had fallen foul of the existential crisis that has hit German cycling due to the sport’s doping problems. But he will be back, I’m sure.

  2. TOUR DE FRANCE 1994–2003

  The Guardian began following the Chris Boardman story early in 1994, when the then sports editor Mike Averis decided it might be a good idea to chart the Olympic gold medallist’s progress towards a possible ride in that year’s Tour de France.

  That seemed highly unlikely at the start of the season, given that the Wirral racer was a complete novice in road racing. But Boardman did get that start in the 1994 Tour and he won the prologue time-trial with a ride that stunned the cycling world.

  He was the first Briton to wear the yellow jersey since Tom Simpson in 1962; unlike Simpson, he actually defended the jersey. He also avoided one of the worst finish-line crashes in Tour history. This piece, written for the Guardian on the following Monday, had to include a summary of Saturday’s prologue, as the paper was, at that time, still run independently of its Sunday sister, the Observer and the assumption was that the readerships were not necessarily the same.

  Boardman escapes police pile-up

  4 July 1994

  It is an unwritten rule of the Tour de France peloton that riders with serious pretensions for the yellow jersey do not get involved in the 40mph melee of men and machines which traditionally ends a flat stage. These are too risky for all but the fastest sprinters with the steeliest nerves.

  Careful inspection of the rule book enabled Britain’s Chris Boardman to avoid risking his yellow jersey yesterday when the final metres [in Armentières] became a bloodied tangle of bent metal and writhing bodies in the worst sprint pile-up the Tour has seen since Djamolidine Abdoujaparov performed a series of somersaults down the Champs-Élysées in 1991. Ironically Abdoujaparov, who gained notoriety that year with a series of finish-straight scuffles, was in the clear yesterday and stayed that way to take his sixth career stage win.

  The stack was caused by a gendarme taking advantage of being on the wrong side of the barriers to photograph the sprint that was led out at hellish pace by Wilfried Nelissen, the champion of Belgium, who won a stage last year at Vannes. Unaware of the 189-strong bespoked behemoth bearing down upon him, the gendarme stood a good 18 inches in front of the barriers – his fellows stood well back, aware that to a sprinter 18 inches is sufficient space for a double-decker bus.

  With his head right down, aiming to take the shortest route to the line, Nelissen hit him full tilt and brought down a dozen other riders. Worst off was the 1992 points winner Laurent Jalabert, who was right behind the Belgian and bounced into a giant cardboard Coca-Cola can before falling from several feet on to his face.

  Boardman crossed the line 29th after an untroubled first day in the yellow jersey, which he took in stupefying fashion in Saturday’s 4½-mile prologue time-trial in Lille in which he broke the Tour’s speed record for any time-trial stage with 34.47mph and beat Miguel Indurain by 15 seconds. Once he descended the starting ramp in Lille’s baroque Grand Place, his protestations that he was “not 100 per cent”, that he was “worried about his health”, were put behind him.

  “I realised I was on a great day,” he said afterwards, adding that he had not felt as good since he took the hour record last year. That performance was achieved in the full glare of the Tour de France publicity machine, and first proved he has the unique ability to rise to the occasion – he is the first Briton to take the yellow jersey since Tom Simpson in 1962. “Super”, said the Tour de France director Jean-Marie Leblanc, five times. “Unheard of” was the verdict of the five-times winner Bernard Hinault. “Incredible”, said Laurent Fignon.

  The rest of the caravan could only echo their words. “He demolished them,” said Sean Yates, the only other British rider to have won a time-trial stage in the race.
Indurain can be content with second, given that he gained four seconds on Tony Rominger, billed as his big rival. That sounds very little with about 2,000 miles to go but, given Indurain’s troubled attempts to find his best form, and the fact that Rominger has been assumed to have the edge, it is an important psychological boost for the Spaniard.

  Until its hellish finish yesterday’s 140-mile leg from Euralille, Lille’s new business area and TGV station to Armentieres, an outlying suburb, was routine, with the heat deterring the foolhardy souls who usually try to put daylight between themselves and the bunch at this early stage.

  The only riders who threatened to prevent Boardman becoming the only Briton to defend the yellow jersey – Simpson waved goodbye to it after one day – were Rob Mulders and Jean-Paul van Poppel of Holland and Herman Frison of Belgium, who gained 90 seconds in the final phases before being reeled in, as is routine, by a phalanx of Nelissen’s team-mates in the Novemail team. Little did they know what lay in wait for their leader.

  Boardman held the lead for another two days, but relinquished the yellow jersey the day before the Tour visited Britain for two stages in the south of England.

  Le Tour en Angleterre

  7 July 1994

  A quick spin along the route of the first stage of Le Tour en Angleterre between Dover and Brighton yesterday would have warmed the cockles of [the then EU President] Jacques Delors’s heart. The multinational invasion force landed more or less smoothly, took Dover Castle by storm – after a brief traffic jam to remind the assault force that the castle was built to keep the French out – then was given a rapturous welcome along 125 miles of Kent and Sussex lanes, decked out for the occasion with multilingual greetings and flags of every hue.