French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  ‘Between the hikers, the cyclists, the motorcyclists, the quad bikes and everything else, it’s about ten people who die on the mountain, each year.

  ‘There’s a lot of people who climb it now, maybe more than before. Now there’s people making bets at the restaurant or the bar – “I bet you can’t make it to the top of the Ventoux” – and, of course, if you haven’t trained, you can’t climb the Ventoux just like that.

  ‘It’s not something you can do on a whim – “Oh, I’m going to climb the Ventoux” – just like you’d drink a glass of wine . . .’

  In August 2013, a cyclist and a motorcyclist collided three kilometres from the summit on the climb from Bédoin and were killed. In May 2012, a 43-year-old Belgian cyclist died after climbing the Ventoux, suffering a heart attack at the summit. Pierre Bellier, a 59-year-old from nearby Orange, disappeared on the Ventoux in June 2014. Six days later his body was found, with a fatal head injury, at Alazards, near Beaumont du Ventoux.

  In September 2015, a 64-year-old cyclist collapsed and died as he climbed the north side of the mountain. The same month, a 29-year-old Belgian cyclist from Flanders was killed as he descended the Ventoux towards Malaucène.

  So there is always drama on the Ventoux. In fact, it is almost expected. If it’s not the heat, it’s the wind. If it’s not the wind, it’s the gradient. Sometimes, it’s just the sheer excitement of experiencing this alien world. Once, however, the group I was riding up with saved a life.

  In 2010, I rode up from Malaucène with old friends celebrating a landmark birthday, climbing through autumnal drizzle to emerge, above 1,500 metres, into perfect blue skies and warm sunshine. The climb from Malaucène is underestimated and underappreciated. The final kilometres, from Mont Serein to the summit, really bite. Ahead of my slow progress that morning, sports photographer Bryn Lennon was hanging around at the summit, having already climbed to the top. And as he waited for the stragglers, Bryn found himself drawn into a life-or-death struggle – and, no, it wasn’t mine.

  As I rode wearily through the final hundred metres, I barely clocked a Lycra-clad figure slumped, Simpson-like, against the rocks. ‘That’s not funny,’ I thought, assuming that the huddle around him signified some kind of misplaced re-enactment of the 1967 drama. I wheeled breathlessly to a halt at Bryn’s feet.

  ‘You see that bloke over there pretending he’s Tommy?’ I blurted.

  ‘He’s just had a heart attack actually, Jez,’ he said calmly.

  Later, over dinner, Bryn told me the whole story.

  ‘We were waiting for you guys to come up and then saw this rider had collapsed. I only really spotted him lying there because, when he fell, he landed on my camera bag – if he hadn’t done that I probably wouldn’t even have noticed.

  ‘I realised we were watching him die. We started running around shouting “doctor, doctor”. But he’d got lucky because there was a Swiss doctor there, who’d just hiked up. He rushed over and started working on him, pumping his chest. The first time didn’t seem to get anywhere and then, second time, he slowly came around.

  ‘By the time we left to go down, he was sitting up and the ambulance was there. But that was 45 minutes later.’ The ambulance had driven to the summit from Carpentras.

  After all that, the high-speed descent should have been uneventful. But coming down the Ventoux can be just as heart-stopping as going up. My rear tyre blew as I passed the Simpson monument, at something close to top speed. I got lucky too, managing to hold the bike upright on a straight section of road and avoiding being flattened by the campervan I’d only just overtaken. If I had been cornering, it could have been disastrous.

  I’ve always loved descending, as much because it is payback time for those who, like me, struggle uphill, as for the speed and exhilaration of swooping downhill, slaloming through hairpins. The rush of riding downhill, at 50 or 60 miles an hour, is intense, and the closest I’ve ever come to flying.

  The descents from the summit of the Ventoux, either to Malaucene, Sault or Bédoin, are not for the faint-hearted. The north side soon slings you through a succession of tight hairpins, where it’s necessary to almost come to a halt, before accelerating again. The first couple of kilometres downhill track back and forth across the white rock, an expansive view north towards the Drôme and the distant Alps distracting your eyes away from the road, the bends rushing up to meet you.

  Further down, past the ski station at Mont Serein, the road surface improves and the 12 per cent ramps become runways. This is where, in 1994, Eros Poli’s downhill race speed exceeded 100 kilometres an hour and where Marco Pantani, seeking better aerodynamics, slid his rear end off the saddle and hung it delicately over his rear wheel.

  Descending towards Bédoin is just as quick and just as dangerous, but with more traffic coming towards you. From the summit, the road is laid out in front of you, winding downhill across the bleached scree through fast sweeping bends, with plenty of space and options for taking the racing line. But with no landmarks or trees, beyond intermittent snow poles, it’s easy to forget just how fast you are moving.

  That changes once you pass Chalet Reynard and find yourself picking up speed through the forest, the tree-lined road narrowing, the rock walls coming alarmingly close as traffic comes up the mountain towards you. Once through the steep bend at the Virage du Bois, the speed gets even higher, the long straight ramps throwing you towards the right-left-right sequence of bends leading to St Estève.

  There is, of course, a third way down. The road from Chalet Reynard to Sault is probably the least stressful of the known routes off the mountain, barely losing any altitude as it leaves Chalet Reynard, but then accelerating through the forest and finally looping down onto the upper reaches of the Plateau de Sault at 800 metres.

  The road eases off steadily as it crosses the lavender fields, past the Champelle lavender farm and then crossing the Nesque river, before one final short sharp climb into Sault. Relatively speaking, it’s the ‘easiest’ descent, but it is still fast enough to allow for rapidly overtaking cars and campervans, my own personal benchmark for risk-taking.

  It’s not just cyclists who are at risk as they climb and descend the mountain. There’s a lot of hunting on the Ventoux and in the nearby foothills. In fact, there’s a lot of hunting in France generally, particularly in the Vaucluse département, where Ventoux’s humpback profile dominates the surrounding landscape.

  On 8 December 2012, a hunter was shot in the head by his own teenage son, as they pursued wild boar on the slopes of the Ventoux. The man died 24 hours later. In January that year, during a cold snap of ice and snow, a wolf was found shot dead in the woods at the foot of the Ventoux.

  Coincidentally, Jean-François Bernard, who won the 1987 Tour de France time trial to the summit of Ventoux, the day of my very first experience of roadside Tour-watching, is an enthusiastic hunter. When I tried to arrange to meet him, ‘Jeff’, as he is known, wearily tossed me his business card before shrugging: ‘You can call me, but you’ll be lucky to get hold of me. I’ll probably be hunting.’ And, as it turned out, Jeff always was.

  Ventoux is also the home of documented mountain climbing. It is widely accepted that Petrarch, with brother Gherardo, made the first documented ascent in April 1336. Petrarch’s musings contrast starkly with the pages of first-world whingeing on TripAdvisor. Firmly aligning himself with the cathartic, liberating, cleansing and redemptive school of Ventoux diarists, he wrote a suitably poetic account of his ascent, describing his climb to the summit, ‘as if suddenly wakened from sleep’.

  The mountain is a very steep and almost inaccessible mass of stony soil. But, as the poet has well said, ‘Remorseless toil conquers all.’ It was a long day, the air fine . . .

  We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some 50 years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and cloth
es and body torn by the rocks and briars.

  In his rapture, Petrarch, keen to discover ‘what so great an elevation had to offer’, describes with remarkable clarity the view of the mountains towards Lyon, the Bay of Marseille, and the ‘waters that lash the shores of Aigues Mortes’.

  The brothers came down the mountain in the gathering dusk, which must have been even more dangerous than their ascent. They stopped at an inn and Petrarch wrote his account by candlelight.

  With every downward step, I asked myself this: If we are ready to endure so much sweat and labour in order that we may bring our bodies a little nearer heaven, how can a soul struggling toward God, up the steeps of human pride and human destiny, fear any cross or prison or sting of fortune?

  The first road from Bédoin to the summit was opened in 1882 and by September 1903, excursionnistes as they called them, were racing their automobiles from Bédoin, haring up the climb in less than half an hour. The lack of efficient gear changing held cyclo-tourism back until the early 1900s, when French cycling sage Paul de Vivie – already a veteran of the Galibier and Furka passes – decided to ride from St Étienne to the Ventoux.

  His became one of the epic assaults on the Giant. Despite announcing his summit attempt in his own publication, Le Cycliste, under his nom de plume of ‘Velocio’, only two others joined him on the St Étienne start line at two in the morning. They rode the first 200 kilometres in ten hours and after a pause in Orange, headed on to Carpentras. There, de Vivie was met by two subscribers to Le Cycliste, who had ridden up the Rhône valley from Marseille to join him. At St Colombe, at the foot of the mountain, de Vivie’s party was joined by a Monsieur Albert, Velocio’s old friend.

  Moustachioed, beret-wearing and be-tweeded, the group began the climb. Within minutes, the gradient forced them to walk. Worse was to come when, after 10 kilometres of the ascent, a violent storm broke over their heads. They rook refuge in a farmer’s hut or cabanon, and then, as night fell, descended through torrential rain to Madame Vendran’s hotel in Bédoin.

  Tweeds and beret dried at the fireside, Velocio, undeterred, was back early the next morning, climbing through low cloud. Later, he wrote melancholically of the slog to the summit, of the ‘monotony of the lunar landscape’. Monsieur Albert, riding a heavier machine weighing close to 20 kilograms, was left so far behind that he missed lunch at the Vendran’s hotel, just below the summit. Velocio was back in St Étienne by the next evening, having broken the journey home at Loriol-du-Comtat.

  That was the first recorded bike ride to the summit of the Giant. One of Velocio’s companions, Adolphe Benoît of La Provence Sportive newspaper in Marseille, was seduced by the Ventoux.

  His enthusiasm for the new climb led to the inaugural Marathon du Mont Ventoux in 1908, when Jacques Gabriel rode to the summit from Carpentras in two hours and 29 minutes. Velocio returned in 1903, this time for a round trip of almost 400 kilometres, ticked off between a Wednesday afternoon and a Friday morning, that included a three-hour climb to the Ventoux’s summit. He climbed the Ventoux for the last time in 1929, when he was 76.

  Once the second road, climbing from Malaucène, was opened in 1932, cycle racing on Ventoux became well established, with races such as the Circuit du Ventoux, the Tours du Sud-Est and of the Vaucluse all using the mountain as a venue, as well as higher-profile and ongoing events such as the Dauphiné Libéré and Paris–Nice.

  But Ventoux owes its greatest contemporary notoriety to the death of British cyclist Tom Simpson, a world champion and, long before the production line of British cycling success stories, a sportsman so popular that he became BBC Sports Personality of the Year. On 13 July 1967, Simpson collapsed below the summit in furnace-like conditions during stage 13 of the Tour de France.

  Simpson’s collapse and death, forever depicted as a ‘doping death’ although heat exhaustion, dehydration and illness were also contributing factors, is the mountain’s most famous tragedy. His story was expertly documented by William Fotheringham in his book, Put Me Back on My Bike.

  Since Simpson’s death, however, cycling’s gladiatorial brutality, its doping demons and ongoing ethical struggle, and the demands of the Ventoux have become inextricably linked. Half a century on, that ethical struggle continues. Every victory is scrutinised. Every champion is subject to trial by Twitter. Anti-doping, underfunded and underpowered, remains behind the curve of medicine in sports science and, in cycling’s leading teams, sports doctors retain an unnerving degree of autonomy.

  July 2017 is the 50th anniversary of Simpson’s collapse, yet the Tour’s parent organisation, Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO), now so wary of any adverse publicity, has studiously avoided marking that pivotal moment. So there will be no anniversary visit to the Ventoux. Yet, when I asked him, Tour director Christian Prudhomme said, ‘There’s no fear of the Ventoux at ASO. The feeling for me is that the Ventoux has to be used rarely.’ The Simpson drama, he says, ‘was a long time ago now’.

  ‘After all, the Tour came back to the Ventoux, only three years later, in 1970, when Eddy Merckx won. And you have to put things in perpective. Things have evolved. It is history.’

  But the notoriety of the Bédoin ascent has also been at the expense of the beautiful northern side, made famous in the post-war ‘golden age’ of Tour racing and also by numerous subsequent visits during the week-long Dauphiné Libéré race. This gruelling road, climbing up from Malaucène, is my favourite ascent, and I’d happily debate the notion that it is that much ‘easier’ than the climb from the south. It winds through pine trees and limestone cliffs to a high corniche, with views over the Drôme and the Vaucluse, before long ramps of 10–12 per cent lead to the Mont Serein ski station, at 1,400 metres.

  There, from the wide bend overlooking the nursery slopes at the admirably named Chalet Liotard, which serves good prix fixe lunches, the road narrows and ramps up once more towards the summit. Those final kilometres, emerging from the last stands of trees onto vertiginous hairpin bends, may not be as disorientating, but they are just as demanding as the finale to the south side. Better still, on a clear day, as you round the final few bends and near the summit, the French and Italian Alps emerge above the hills of the Drôme to dominate the distant horizon. Then, as you turn right to reach the summit, the views towards the Mediterranean, concealed throughout, are suddenly panoramic.

  Yet for all the Ventoux’s dramatic televisual appeal, Prudhomme remains a little cool towards it. ‘You have two climbs above all the rest,’ the Tour’s director says, ‘the Galibier and Tourmalet. Then there is Ventoux and Alpe d’Huez.’

  Double Tour champion Bernard Thévenet, a stage winner on the Provençal mountain in July 1972, describes the Ventoux as a ‘mountain of drama’ and Alpe d’Huez as a ‘mountain of happiness’. Prudhomme seemed to agree. ‘The Ventoux is different. Alpe d’Huez thrives on its regularity, the Ventoux thrives because of its rarity. It’s something else.’

  But the Tour director’s rankings of the top climbs doesn’t quite tally with that of Eddy Merckx, who took a lone victory on the Giant in July 1970. ‘There’s Galibier, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, the Gavia,’ Merckx says, ‘but Ventoux is in the top three.

  ‘It’s difficult to say which is the hardest. Sometimes the Ventoux feels harder than the Galibier. It depends how you feel.’

  Prudhomme, meanwhile, waves away any suggestion that it is the Tour’s ever-growing logistical demands – for power lines and parking, hotels and hospitality, combined with the mountain’s exposed summit and potential problems for the Tour caravan and media coverage – that have made ASO steer clear. ‘That’s not it, not at all. You remember what Ferdi Kübler said back in the 1950s? Ventoux is not a climb like any other.’

  Then he leans in, smiling, and prods me in the chest. ‘Ever been up the Ventoux on a bike?’ he asks.

  ‘Me . . .? Y-e-s,’ I say, a little defensively. ‘A few times actually – mostly when I was younger.’

  There’s a pause. ‘How about you, Christian?’ I ask. />
  ‘No, never,’ Prudhomme replies.

  But I’m left struggling with the Tour’s fixation with the climb from Bédoin. Surely the ascent from Malaucène, made famous in the 1950s and 1970s and used so often in classic stages of the Dauphiné, is just as appealing, particularly as a new generation of cycling obsessives have yet to really discover it?

  ‘Non,’ he says bluntly. ‘Bédoin, always. It’s a magnificent climb from Malaucène, but for me it’s always Bédoin. It works on TV, it’s a stadium of cycling, it’s incredibly beautiful. And the Ventoux, part forest, part desert – it’s always compelling.

  ‘The exploits are magnified by the surroundings,’ he says, spreading his arms expansively and launching into a romantic treatise. ‘The setting makes them even more magnificent. The great history of the Tour lives on thanks to the champions, but it also lives on because of the places too.’

  And since 2014, Yorkshire, so it seems, is now as big a feature of the Tour. ‘Yorkshire is now part of the legend. People in France were blown away by the Yorkshire Grand Départ in 2014.’

  Bernard Thévenet, now director of the Critérium du Dauphiné, says that the ‘Ventoux is essential for any mountain stage race’. Yet it has not been included in the week-long June race since 2009, the summer before ASO took over full ownership of the event.

  That’s in stark contrast to the frequency with which the mountain was used under former director, Thierry Cazeneuve, the nephew of race founder and former Resistance fighter, Georges Cazeneuve. Now, however, with ASO’s increasing need to test logistics for stage finishes, the Dauphiné has at times morphed into a dress rehearsal for the Tour, rather than an event in its own right.

  The Ventoux, so it seems, has become less essential, a casualty of that commercial imperative. In the decade prior to ASO buying the race, the Ventoux was included in the Dauphiné’s route no less than seven times.