Higher Calling
Page 9
Freud famously speculated on why people often performed actions that did not simply increase their pleasure or diminish their unpleasure – beyond the pleasure principle, he called it.
One motivation, he theorised, was that the repetition compulsion we feel is an impulse to re-enact unpleasant or painful experiences to master or prove ourselves superior to them (hill reps, anyone?). He also theorised there were ‘death drives’, a deep desire of conscious matter to return to a former, preconscious state of being. They are ‘a manifestation of the inertia of organic life’, he wrote, ‘the drive to return to the inanimate’. Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs. And, in Freud’s opinion, we gain some deeper satisfaction from our unpleasant tasks because we have ‘safeguarded our own particular path to death’ – followed our will, in other words, past the point of perversity and even into nothingness. I can see that in riding up a mountain: in that pain-filled path into the sky there is a reaching for an inner stillness, an inertia through repetitive, mind-numbing upwards movement. And what have the immortal climbers (Vietto, Coppi, Gaul, Merckx, Pantani) done, but aggressively followed their own way – chased it with particular alacrity and to the detriment of all else – to its logical end?
I’ve been back to the Galibier several times, struggled up it again, more or less slowly, ridden away from thought, felt better than that first time. And I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe Freud only got it half right. All living matter wishes to return to the inanimate, yes, but all stones dream of flying.
Chapter 4
THE KINGS OF THE MOUNTAINS
Or, did one man’s untimely demise doom all climbers to unhappiness? Ice cream and wine, and lightness and sacrifice in literal and metaphorical ways, and riding on the moon
Is there anywhere in the world where Sunday afternoon doesn’t feel like Sunday afternoon? Or any job that doesn’t leave you with the eternally nagging feeling, on those Sunday afternoons, that you should really be sitting down and doing your homework and getting ready for school the next day? Bike racing, possibly. I am with Joe on such a Sunday, at the French National Sport Museum, which is housed in the OGC Nice football stadium, and I am trying to shake off that desultory feeling. He, on the other hand, has done his scheduled training for the day and, having achieved something – having already done his metaphorical homework – is seemingly feeling far more satisfied with life. In the pantheon of entertaining visitor attractions, this sport museum is not up there with Disney World, but it contains some diverting things, not least of which is a collection of historic bicycles. Aside from a beautifully carved wooden hobby horse and a penny farthing from the distant reaches of history, there’s one of Richard Virenque’s old rides, a T-Mobile time trial bike and a slender steel-framed machine in a familiar dark orange colour – a bike that belonged to a late-period Eddy Merckx. We scrutinise the decaying tubular tyres, thin alloy rims and elegant Campagnolo gears as if looking for the secret to greatness. ‘Do you think it was really his?’ Joe asks. Then an idea: he takes a picture with his phone that he sends to Axel Merckx, Eddy’s son. This kind of historical verification is, of course, not available to mere mortals. However, when you have spent two years riding for a team run by Axel and count him among your good friends and confidants, I guess it’s normal. The moment sticks with me, and I begin to ponder the ties that bind cyclists to the history of the sport. To state the obvious, professional riders’ relationship to cycling history is far more direct than mine or yours. Pros are likely to have met some of the legendary riders who have come before them, to start with. They may well have received advice from or even been coached by them, and if they reach the highest levels they will be aiming for results that are comparable to those of the stars who’ve turned pedals before them. Win a Classic, or a Grand Tour stage on a famous climb like Alpe d’Huez or the Gavia, and they can look the greats in the eye. For most fans the relationship to cycling history is more distant and mediated: perhaps a glimpse of a former champion from the crowd; reading about glorious exploits past in an autobiography; watching a TV programme or looking through the vast archive of books, old photos and magazines that create the legends of the sport, and sustain a history that is rich with myths and meaning.
More often than not, these myths are born and live in the mountains. To give an example: Mont Ventoux is a remarkable enough place in itself, but nobody rides up it without a certain sense of its history in cycling. Maybe that’s Pantani and Armstrong’s thrilling (and, unfortunately, drug-fuelled) duel in 2002, or the heavyweight Eros Poli’s unlikely break for victory in 1994. It might be Eddy Merckx receiving oxygen at the top in 1970 or Charly Gaul, ‘The Angel of the Mountains’, who won the first summit finish on Ventoux in a remarkable time of one hour, two minutes in 1958. For many, the mountain’s menacing reputation is indissolubly linked to Tom Simpson, the British cyclist who collapsed and died on its upper slopes in fierce heat in 1967, but for some – mainly very old Frenchmen – it conjures up the image of Jean Malléjac, who almost suffered the same amphetamine-fuelled fate 12 years earlier, in 1955. Many pros are no different. In that Tour in which he placed tenth on Ventoux, Bradley Wiggins seemed absolutely aware of what his climbing prowess meant, and where it fitted into the history of the sport.
Here’s another: the Tourmalet is Octave Lapize shouting ‘Assassins’ at the Tour organisers; it’s Eugène Christophe breaking his forks on the way down and stopping to mend them at a blacksmith’s forge; it’s Eddy Merckx on his solo break in 1969; it’s Robert Millar or Richard Virenque, or Andy Schleck duelling with Contador in the mists. To each their own hero, depending on predilections and, well, age; but we nearly all build something of our relationship with the mountains out of these myths. At the heart of it all is the singular figure of the ‘climber’, a new kind of rider invented by Desgrange when the Tour introduced cycling to the mountains. The climber was a complicated man, who from that moment on complicated the idea of cycling. Something intruded that was not, as far as I can tell, there before, something of a different order – because what climbers do, at their best, transcends ideas of athleticism, physical endurance and winning or losing. I’ll try to explain: we admire and respect fast riders, dominant riders, and those who win Grand Tour stages on the flat. We marvel at the sprinters’ courage, their skill and vision, tally up their wins and are impressed, but somehow, I believe, they don’t occupy the same place in our hearts. A sprint is quicksilver rough and tumble, often too quick to be seen properly, and a second-placed sprinter is a sorry figure. Whereas a climber on a lone breakaway into thin high air (or two riders battling in the mountains) produces a spectacle that seems beautiful regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, or really achieves anything other than climbing the hill gracefully at all. There is something alluring and self-justifying there, something that heightens the emotions and quickens the pulse. Just as the mountains introduced something intrinsically beautiful, climbers introduced a new layer of mystique. More than other riders, the stereotypical climber is someone uncompromising and somehow unknowable: solitary, difficult and often troubled. But are these things inextricably linked? Is this the only way for climbers to be, and how does this lineage bear on the climbers of today?
René Pottier was a Frenchman with drooping moustaches and a demeanour, if we are to believe the photos of him that survive, that naturally found rest somewhere between lugubrious and haunted. He also did a nice line in racing headwear – again, if the photos are believed, alternating between a trademark linen cap (which resembled nothing so much as a shepherdess’s bonnet) and a stripy woolly bobble hat. Born in 1879 near Paris, Pottier was small, light, intensely focused and solitary. His talent shone from an early age, and before turning professional in 1904 he had already broken several track cycling records. The 1905 Tour de France was his first. It was also, as we discovered in Chapter 2, the first Tour to feature a ‘real’ mountain climb, the Ballon d’Alsace. The Ballon came in the middle of the 299-kilometre Stage 2, a stage which started o
ff slowly. Riders were saving their energy for the 12-kilometre climb, with its 8–10 per cent slopes. When it arrived, a lead group quickly broke free containing all the era’s big names: Hippolyte Aucouturier, Émile Georget, Louis Trousselier (the Tour’s eventual winner) and Henri Cornet (the previous year’s champion). One by one, Pottier dropped them all, climbing at an average of 20 km/h on his single-speed bike. Only Pottier managed the climb without putting foot to floor and taking a break, though Cornet hung on the longest. At the top Pottier changed back to his all-purpose machine (riders were allowed to swap between bikes with a different gear ratio on them, suited either to climbing or riding on the flats) and set off again for the finish line at Besançon, but he was caught on the descent by Aucouturier and came second. Wrote Desgrange: ‘The climb of the Ballon d’Alsace … was one of the most emotional spectacles I have ever seen, and it confirmed above all else, that man’s courage is limitless and that a well-trained athlete can claim the unlikeliest victories.’
Pottier abandoned during the following stage because of tendonitis, but in 1906 he repeated the feat on the Ballon. This time he won the stage, one of five he took that year on his way to winning the Tour overall. So dominant was he that, during one, he was so far ahead that he stopped at a roadside bar and drank a whole bottle of wine. An hour later, as the peloton came past, he remounted, gave chase, and caught and beat them. If he sounds carefree, he was not: ‘He won without showing any joy or effusiveness. Silent, stubborn, severe,’ wrote one newspaper. ‘In every situation Pottier kept a cold, neutral expression, from which one could only divine one thing: willpower.’ But his talents when the going got tough were undeniable, and he was loved for it: ‘If Pottier had a chance to shake off an adversary on a climb, it was over, one would not see him again,’ ran the same article. ‘The harder the race, the more it seemed it was to his taste.’ On the Ballon d’Alsace, it is said, he was cheered on his way by a thousand staff from Peugeot, the bicycle company that sponsored his team and had a factory nearby. In 1905 he had been the ‘meilleur grimpeur’ – the best climber. It was after this repeat that Henri Desgrange coined the name ‘Roi de la montagne’ – ‘King of the Mountain’.
Less than six months later, he was dead. On 25 January 1907, Arthur Barthélemy, the racing equipment director at Peugeot, went to the building where many of the racing cyclists in the town of Levallois kept their bikes. The door was locked and the wine merchant adjacent said that Pottier had not returned the key to its habitual place. Barthélemy went to Pottier’s house, but he was not there. His wife had supposed that he was with Barthélemy. Worried, they ran back to the store, broke the door down and found Pottier. He had entered, locked the door behind him, taken his bike down from its hook and then hanged himself from a rope affixed to that same hook. He was 27.
Despite desperate interrogations by his wife, his brother, all the press, there was no apparent motive for Pottier’s act. Some suspected a mental breakdown, but he had seemed cheerful at lunch and had talked about participating in the forthcoming Paris–Roubaix. It was whispered later that his wife had been having an affair, but nothing was ever proven and she was beside herself at the news. ‘This is maybe the first time in this brave man’s whole life that we must set down what moralists call a failure of courage,’ wrote Desgrange in his tribute to this ‘introspective, quiet, fierce, uncomplaining’ man.
In these qualities, as in his enlarged capacity for suffering while riding uphill, Pottier set the mould for climbers to come. The best climber prize continued to be named every Tour, though until 1930 the honour was just a mention in the paper. Then, a chocolate manufacturer called Menier put up some 5,000 francs for the Prix Chocolat Menier, Prix de la Montagne (the next year it would rise to 35,000 francs). However this was still not a classification as we know it today – it was a nomination, not a proper competition like the points classification or the GC. According to some sources the Menier money was actually shared between the top five or six climbers, who were picked out subjectively by the organisers, and not just given to the first-named rider.
In 1933 the official mountains classification, the Grand Prix de la Montagne (GPM), was born.fn1 The next year the competition would really take off, with the advent of Le Roi René – King René.
With a nod to Donald Rumsfeld, there are at least three categories of truth that pertain to the Tour de France:
True truths (things that are – Eddy Merckx won five Tours)
Untrue untruths (things that are false – Floyd Landis’s 2006 performance was fuelled by beer and bourbon alone)
True untruths (myths that are probably untrue but carry the weight of truth – Jacques Anquetil used to put his bidon in his jersey pocket while climbing, to save carrying the weight on his bike)
For me, for a long time, the greatest true untruth of them all was a story about René Vietto and his toe. Vietto was France’s first grimpeur superstar. A child of the sun, he was born to a dirt-poor family in the hills above Cannes on the Côte d’Azur, and worked from the age of seven with his mother collecting jasmine flowers for the local perfume industry. Through a friend he got a job as a bellboy at a hotel, then as an usher at the local casino. He saved his tips, bought a bike and began to ride, further and further until he was doing out-and-backs to Marseille 175 kilometres away; faster and faster until he was winning races (the local ‘Boucle de Sospel’ over several mountain passes was his first pro-level victory); and higher and higher, up over the Col d’Allos and the Col de Vars to the top of the Col d’Izoard – and then back down to the shining sea again, over 500 kilometres in a single go.
In 1934, at only 20 years old, he won the Tour de France’s King of the Mountains classification in its second year. He had seemed also to have the yellow jersey within his reach until, descending in the Pyrenees, his team leader Antonin Magne broke a wheel, and René, the dutiful junior teammate, gave him his own so that Magne could continue on. A photograph of Vietto sitting on a wall sobbing, waiting for another wheel (and with every passing second watching any private ambitions of wearing the yellow jersey slip away), sold hundreds of thousands of copies of the next day’s paper. The following day, Magne punctured on another descent, and Vietto rode back up the hill and surrendered his wheel again. These potent images of sacrifice (and not the aforementioned toe story) endeared him to the French and Le Roi René entered into the realm of myth.
Vietto rode the Tour again in 1935 after winning Paris–Nice that year. But in the years after that, his sporting career was hampered by knee injuries that required multiple operations, and fast cars and the good life took precedence over racing. In 1939 he was back, and placed second in the Tour, only for war to interrupt. He would never win the Tour de France but would, by the time he retired in 1953, be the rider who had spent the most days in yellow without winning in Paris (only overtaken in 2012 by Fabian Cancellara), and that mountains prize in his debut Tour might be considered the pinnacle of his achievements.
In spite (because?) of this failure to scale the highest peaks of his sport, he was, and remains, an icon in France. The most elegant climber of them all, still fondly remembered by those too young to have seen him race for his rolling, high-tempo cadence en danseuse, and his style: attack, always attack. Always ride your opponents off your wheel and solo into the distance. If we are to judge Vietto by results alone he was a beautiful firework that exploded brilliantly but was eclipsed by bigger bangs. It might be said that he was loved unreasonably – as much (more, even?) for his failures than his successes, which is something that happens to climbers. Some believe he didn’t quite live up to the myths that were built around him, but maybe that’s precisely why they grew. He was taciturn, irascible and intense, but this hid certain acts of kindness and courtesy towards others. ‘His attitudes and whims … hid shyness and tenderness. He intended to keep a part of himself a mystery,’ wrote Tour historian Jacques Augendre. Maybe it’s easier to project our own hopes, fears and desires onto a blank surface, and maybe René
knew that. He seemed naturally to lend himself to legend.
In the Esterel, the wild red hills to the west of Cannes, there was a goat who, when Vietto was out training as a young man, would greet him from the side of the road. For years it would bleat him a welcome as the Cannois passed through just after midnight on his regular 350-kilometre there-and-back to Marseille. When Vietto retired, the goat died.
In 1934, René won a Tour stage in his home town, Cannes, over much the same route as his Boucle de Sospel win, having led from the Col de Braus onwards. At the finish line there were riots. His supporters – the whole crowd – lifted him off his bike, pummelled him, manhandled him in joy. Some race official tried to intervene but one burly fan took exception to this nobody’s interference, hit him and knocked him out, and René was safely carried to his hotel. The KO’d man was Jacques Goddet, the Tour director.
In 1981, just before that year’s Tour started in Nice, the 68-year-old René was knocked over by a car. During the subsequent physiotherapy he was put on a mechanical contraption to strengthen his legs. He immediately started pedalling furiously. ‘Calm down, M. Vietto!’ said the nurse. ‘What do you think you are, a Tour rider …?’
In the 1947 Tour a plane crashed into the mountainside as he climbed past; earlier in that race, incandescent at being reeled in after a 120-kilometre lone breakaway, he had kicked a kerb in Brussels. One of his toes went badly septic, threatening to curtail his Tour (and now we reach the toe). Since the Tour stopped for a rest day in Nice, close to his home, he arranged for his doctor to come and cut it off. Then he got on his bike and resumed with the other riders the next day. In other words, instead of abandoning the race he abandoned the toe. He’d lugged it through the Alps but jettisoned the excess ballast ahead of the Pyrenees.