Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  His one Tour overall win came in 1959, and it was inspired by the great Fausto Coppi, whose team he had signed for that year. Coppi, as they say, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: ‘Coppi said to me, “Why do you always ride for the mountains? You should do the GC!” I said, “GC? I’m not made for the flats, but I climb well in the mountains and that’s what I’ll do.” Always I targeted the GPM. All the cols in Spain, Italy, France, I won. Every day I rode for the GPM, it was mine.’ The conversation with Coppi happened in the winter off season: ‘We were eating before going hunting and he said to me, “If you want to come to my team, you must go for the GC.” I said, “With Coppi, yes!” If somebody says to you, “Come play football for Real Madrid,” you sign immediately. Coppi was my Madrid.’

  Bahamontes explains, in his characteristic mix of French and Spanish that pays little respect to the half of it I can understand without translation, that he arrived at the 1959 Tour in good shape: ‘First stage, I went on the attack on the flat. I rode à bloc and I seem to remember I arrived two or three minutes ahead of the peloton. That was the moment I thought, I’ll do the general and not the mountain.’ He pauses for a second then adds, ‘Then in the mountains I always went to the front, and I won the mountains and the Tour as well.’ And he smiles.

  Some say he got away with it because the other riders thought it was business as usual and he would do his usual trick of flopping on the GC. But I get the feeling that when he put his mind to something he was unstoppable.

  I ask Bahamontes if a climber has to love solitude, as the stereotype suggests. The question is a royal road leading to several of his favourite subjects: suffering, sacrifice and how much better (that is to say, tougher) it was in the good old days. ‘[Climbers] have to have the capacity to suffer, so when they come to difficult moments they can deal with it,’ he says, and as his thoughts turn to modern riders he segues into they-are-not-worthy-of-the-name territory: ‘In the Vuelta España, for example, there are only four or five [modern] riders that compete for the classification. The others just sweat and get fat. They eat like kings and get massages and showers after every stage. They’re like girls. They don’t know how to suffer, the bike is hard.’

  That’s them put in their place, then.

  His eyes are sparkling, he is enjoying himself. There is an element of him playing up to the audience. But there is no doubt he is obsessively serious about the basics of his craft. First, there is that pure, iron will, which is probably innate. Or, as he says: ‘You don’t learn to be a climber, you’re born one.’ Next, there is work, sacrifice, suffering. And them alone. That’s it. They become a mantra. For example, Bahamontes on racing with power meters and heart-rate monitors: ‘It’s ridiculous. I tell them the only thing they need is sacrifice and training,’ he says. ‘Fewer numbers, more reality.’ Then the qualities needed to be a great climber: ‘Great sacrifice. The key is in the sacrifice that you have to have if you want to be an athlete.’ He continues: ‘You have to faire le métierfn5 strictly. If not, it won’t happen. You can’t climb cols without sacrifices.’ He says he was always telling his teammates not to go out in the evenings, not to drink that Coca-Cola, not to have sex (‘You have to save yourself. If you have relations before a race, you’ll only be a gregario’ [the Italian for domestique]), to go out training for another hour instead. Again: ‘You have to sacrifice yourself. I used to have a director that used to make me go to sleep whenever he did, to make sure I didn’t go out partying at night.’

  It sounds pretty grim and pretty self-abnegating, but then, if you look at where he came from, and the national hero he became, the 50-plus years of comfort and relative wealth he’s had since, I guess it makes sense. Bahamontes also said one particular thing that has stayed with me. Before my visit to Toledo I’d stayed with friends in Girona, and there had asked Nathan Haas, (the Australian pro rider for Dimension Data, who, it turned out, was a huge fan of the Eagle of Toledo) what he would ask Bahamontes, given the chance. At that point on a climb when the effort becomes unbearable, Nathan wondered, how did he carry on, and go even deeper? What was his key in that moment of suffering? ‘I thought about everything I had done to arrive at this point,’ Bahamontes replied, via me. The dedication, the sacrifice, the efforts he’d made and the life he’d escaped. ‘There isn’t the suffering now like there was before. The bad moments make you stronger. To get to the top, you must climb the stairs.’ As was the way in this Spanish-French-English conversation, we circled around and came at the question again. ‘We were poor, we had nothing,’ he said later: ‘There is no way back, the only way is forward. If you don’t fight, you don’t win.’

  We kept on bumping into the differences between the modern and the old that day, and I felt for a while that I should put up a defence of the new, or give the modern pros some kind of right of reply. After all, Bahamontes had said to me that today’s cycling was ‘artificial’ and ‘cold’ and that the riders lacked passion or temperament. The legends of old bestride the narrow world like Colossuses and we petty men walk under their huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. But then I thought about how much Bahamontes and many of the previous generations are respected – by people like Nathan as well as by normal fans – and I thought it was probably unnecessary. There was self-aware humour in his words, and I think he acknowledged his status both as a legend with total freedom to speak his mind, and as a living link to a bygone age who could easily shock and thrill us modern softies. Beneath the jovial provocations, what he was saying – technology doesn’t necessarily improve racing, money sometimes spoils things, hard work pays off – is totally uncontroversial. And I don’t think he actually wanted people to go back to a time of 12-kilo bikes, misery and desperation in which you were only a few bad results away from eating cats. There is no way back, the only way is forward.

  Bahamontes’s hard line on training and dedication also reminded me of a conversation I’d had with Joe Dombrowski, when I asked him what he noticed when he saw someone climbing well: ‘I guess you see guys who come into phases within a season when they’re climbing really well, and mostly because they’re super skinny, but they haven’t gone so skinny that they’re just useless either,’ he said. ‘They’re toeing that line, which is a pretty fine one. Especially at the high, high end of the sport, because it’s a power-to-weight game, and getting that weight as low as possible without having your power tank is a dangerous game.’

  To me that sounds a lot like recognising the work and the sacrifice of the best riders – valuing exactly what Bahamontes did too.

  I have brought along two illustrated magazines from the 1962 and 1964 Tours and finally the translator and I coax Bahamontes into remembering the Bonette. As he flicks through them it all comes flooding back. First: ‘I should have won this stage in the Pyrenees!’ Then, ‘These are great photos!’ And then: ‘This is the Col de la Bonette. Wow, it was tough!’ He looks at another photo of the climb winding its way up towards the sky. ‘This I remember, because just a bit further ahead there was my name written in big letters in the snow. I don’t know how they did it, but my name was written in black in the snow. It made me feel really emotional.’

  But most of all, as he looks through my old magazines he says, several times, ‘Another world.’ He shakes his head, ‘It was another world.’

  ‘Are you going to say in your book that bicyclists are all bloody mad?’ my girlfriend asked as I told her I was heading back to France. This time it was for a special challenge. Nice–Bonette–Nice. From the Bay of Angels to the top of the highest paved road in Europe, and back again. Two hundred and thirty-five kilometres. Yeah, right, I thought, mad, and I mentally called upon a speech by JFK in mock justification of this epically needless expense of energy: “But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are
hard. Because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”

  I’d been thinking about it for a while. Ever since, in fact, my first ride up the Bonette one October. Like Everesting, this ride, climbing from the Mediterranean to the top of the highest road and freewheeling back down, promised to fulfil my desire for something geometric and conceptual. Something as pure and as flawless in theory as a mathematical formula, but beautifully futile, and in practice as hard and hot and dirty as hell. I had been working too hard and too much, struggling ignobly in the city, and despite a huge lack of recent bike time or fitness I was overjoyed at the prospect of a good honest fight in the mountains.

  We left our apartment at dawn and cycled slowly through dark streets towards the expanse of lighter and lightening sky between the tall buildings that showed us where the sea was. There, my two companions for the day took their bikes to the water’s edge to dip the back wheel in, while I selected a pebble from the millions around the high water mark to accompany me on the journey, and put it in my jersey pocket.

  We rode with the sea to our left until we reached Nice airport, then looped under the promenade road to turn right into the Var valley, the wide, rocky expanse so poorly filled by the Var river in normal weather but terrifyingly quick to rise when spring thunderstorms added to snowmelt in the mountains. North we pedalled through the detritus of civilisation – shoe warehouses and discount stores and DIY yards and motels and tyre shops – that has collected in this wide valley crowded all around by hills, where once there were fields and greenhouses growing fruit and vegetables. At the top, at the confluence of the Esteron, Vésubie, Tinée and Var rivers, the land split into four and tunnelled into the foothills along four smaller gorges. We followed the Tinée, on a road overlooked by a 19th-century fort cut into the rocks, a reminder that Italy was close over the ridge of peaks to our right and that these neighbours had not always been friendly. Though the sun had risen on the coast it was still almost night in this narrow cleft, but it soon opened out and we rode past riverside meadows and through small villages, still morning fresh and cool. The road rose at a gradient of two or three per cent, one of those false flats that are deceptively hard to ride up fast and which would be equally deceptively hard to ride down fast. Meadows of cow parsley, cherry trees and plums. The occasional cow or horse, and in one field an old and very patched-up helicopter, its rotors spinning lazily, next to a plastic water tank and other sundry supplies it would soon transport, in a net hanging from a rope underneath, to shepherds in the summer pastures up above.

  Roughly speaking, the gradient of ecological change is a thousand times quicker vertically up or down than horizontally north or south, so by journeying up to 2,800 metres we would be taking ourselves to the equivalent of somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. It was also true that we were turning back the clock as we went. Not that they didn’t have iPhones and broadband and the other accoutrements of modern life up here, but the décor and the signage were slipping in time. The hotels in villages, dormitories for the local ski stations, had last been renovated in the 1960s or ’70s, and were full of fading plastic furniture and Formica or, even better, elegant wood, tiles and zinc in a state of genteel dilapidation. At the bar, a farmer or hunter or two with a little coffee, and the local taxi man walking the precarious high wire between his two main occupations, drinking and driving.

  Gradually civilisation fell away.

  At Saint Étienne we were three hours and 45 minutes into our day. We ate pastries and drank two coffees in the warm sun, refilled our bidons at the tap and then remounted our bikes. This was where the real climb started, and even with 90 kilometres of slight uphill behind us we still had 1,600 metres to climb – a vertical mile – ahead.

  ‘I like climbing. But 24 kilometres uphill and 2,860 metres [sic] of altitude is daunting even when you are motivated and have a plan (first to the top),’ wrote Robert Millar in Michael Blann’s book, Mountains: Epic Cycling Climbs, about his ascent of the (other side of the) Bonette in the 1993 Tour de France. His rival in the race to the top that day was Pedro Delgado, and he was determined to break the Spaniard. He continued: ‘I’ll ride 10 kilometres hard and see what happens. On a normal col that would put me close to the top, but here it won’t even be halfway. Strangely it seems a reasonable thing to do.’

  We would not be riding hard. Our whole strategy for surviving the day relied on taking it moderately. After all, at the top, we would still only be halfway to our journey’s end. We had been riding through soft sedimentary limestone and bright red mudstone, but at Saint Étienne a wall of granite reared up, the first outlier of the Argentera massif that separates Italy from France and which includes Monte Argentera, the tallest peak in the region. Past the village we plunged into forests of scrub oak, spruce and beech, and chestnuts that once were cultivated and had now again run wild, on overgrown terraces shored up by drystone walls stacked steep on the river banks. We cycled past Le Pra, officially abandoned for fear of landslides, but where a few people remain in summer, and crossed the bridge over the Salso Moreno river, which was so named – ‘brown sauce’ – by Spanish soldiers in the 18th century because it runs dark after heavy rain.

  The landscape told a story of occupation, use and desertion. It had meaning, and this road was our narrative through it. Some people ride bikes on these roads to escape. Some because it’s a socially acceptable way of being on your own. That’s a good reason. Racing is a good one too. To think or to staunch thought; to help you sleep at night or get up in the morning. All good. So is going fast. I ride, I realised once, partly to make stories in the world. To make sure that there is a beginning, a middle and an end. A narrative of effort across the landscape in a world where our attention is otherwise pulled constantly in many directions. Fitness alone is the worst reason to ride a road bike. Robert Johnson, the bluesman, spent his life playing the blues to seduce women and to escape the hounds of hell. Not to perfect his command of the pentatonic scale. When Johnson performed at a jook joint he would single out one woman in the audience and fix her with his gaze, sing only to her, without regard for the rest of the audience – try to sleep with her, and never mind her boyfriend or whoever else she was with. I think that’s what bike racers call focus. A jealous boyfriend was what killed him.

  Not that one can totally scorn fitness. It is a means to an end. I was finding the Bonette was increasingly difficult. What had looked to me geometric was actually hot, sweaty chaos. Wherever there is interaction between place and time and an expenditure of energy there is rhythm, yet my rhythm was increasingly ragged. Sometimes before the beat, sometimes after. A jazz drummer would be ashamed. As Duke Ellington said, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.’

  My companions were slowly pulling away. In this situation, there is no way to bluff yourself faster. Even going slower is a kind of bluffing. When you’re not fit the only speed you can ride up a mountain is the speed you can go. I was alone. I settled in and was at peace. The year that Robert Millar and Pedro Delgado were sprinting for the top the great French rider Laurent Fignon was also climbing alone. He describes it in his autobiography, We Were Young and Carefree:

  The next morning, on the road to Isola 2000 we climbed up the Col d’Izoard and then the Col de la Bonette, the highest pass in the Tour. I can remember it very clearly. I rode up the whole climb in last place. Because I wanted to. I put my hands on the top of the bars and savoured it all to the full. I was breathing deeply as I lived through my last seconds in bike racing, which I had thought would never end for me. This col was all mine and I didn’t want anyone to intrude. Climbing up over 2,700m above sea level like this gave me a host of good reasons to appreciate everything I had lived through on the bike. I had plenty of time to let my mind wander. It was a poetic distillation of the last twelve years. A little fragment of my being, breathed in and liv
ed to the full, at my own speed.’

  Once he’d descended, he climbed off the bike and retired.