French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  As a gauche ingenu with a woollen jersey, a Chas Roberts steel frame and a copy of Bernard Hinault’s Memories of the Peloton under my arm, cycling up the Ventoux – because only fearless demigods such as Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx or Bernard Hinault dared venture there – was totally out of the question. Today, like Everest, some of the fear has gone and it is within almost everybody’s reach – even, absurdly, on a Boris bike. You can attribute that to e-bikes and triple chainsets, performance clothing and cheap flights, and the plethora of books documenting cycling’s arcane and wacky history, not to mention its many iconic climbs.

  But, in the September of 1986, shocked by the tragedy of Tom Simpson and fascinated by the notion of the Ventoux as the ultimate mountain climb, my friend Andy and I had driven a three-door, 998cc Mini Metro, with beige velour interior, all the way from Cheshire to the south of France, to visit The Mountain That Killed A Cyclist. It was a thousand-mile journey that, through the studious avoidance of motorway tolls and driven at average speeds, sometimes in excess of 45 miles an hour, induced a thousand-mile stare by the time we finally reached the south of France.

  Eventually, as we pootled along towards the banks of the Rhône, we saw the ‘Giant of Provence’ rise out of the midday heat haze. Our reaction was appropriately one of shock and awe. We stopped and got out to take in the view. My right arm was as burnished as chorizo, my Ray-Bans had moulded to my forehead and we were in chronic need of a launderette.

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘Looks really like snow on the top,’ Andy said.

  ‘It isn’t, though,’ I said, a little smugly.

  ‘Yeah, I do know that,’ he said. ‘Just really looks like it.’

  Until then we had thought that the pinnacle of climbing was the Horseshoe Pass, Holme Moss or Ditchling Beacon. Now the scales fell from our eyes – this was a real mountain.

  We drove through Carpentras and then into Bédoin, pausing for a cold Coke. Then we began the approach to the climb, grinding through the gears until we found that second just about assured a steady progress, rolling up through the vineyards and olive groves and finally onto the ramps heading up through the dark forest.

  ‘Shit,’ Andy said, as the Metro’s luxurious interior filled with horseflies and hornets, ‘it’s ridiculously steep.’

  ‘Bastards,’ I hissed as one bit me on the thigh.

  Ahead of us, we saw a lone rider, hunched over his machine, riding at five, possibly six, miles an hour, his lean, mahogany-brown legs slowly turning his lowest gear. We pulled alongside and gurned admiringly as sweat rolled off him.

  ‘He’s brilliant!’ I exclaimed. ‘Do you think he’s a pro?’

  We eased ahead and pulled over on the verge, jumping out in readiness for our man to pass.

  ‘Allez, allez!’ we shouted as he studiously ignored us and stared, dead-eyed, at the long ramp of tarmac ahead.

  His lack of acknowledgement puzzled me. ‘Is he Italian? Maybe he doesn’t speak French?’

  ‘Forzaaaa!’ I bellowed hopefully at his back as he plodded on. ‘Go on . . .! You can do it!’

  Only higher up the mountain, as we saw many more riders clad in local club colours, climbing and descending, did the banal normality, for locals at least, of riding the Ventoux finally sink in.

  ‘I mean, they can’t all be pros,’ I said hesitantly.

  ‘They’re probably just, you know, really great amateurs – or on a club run,’ Andy suggested.

  ‘Still, they’re all really good, though. I bet some of them could have been pros,’ I concluded as we ground on towards the summit.

  A kilometre or so from the top, we spotted what we’d come for. I pulled over, the little red car a tiny speck on the sea of white rock.

  There’s a slightly morbid tradition of laying cycling paraphernalia at the foot of the memorial to Tom Simpson, marking the site where the British rider finally collapsed to the ground. This was the spot I remembered from the grainy black-and-white pictures in Miroir du Cyclisme. This was where they battled, vainly, to resuscitate him, even as his rivals rode on.

  I took in the mess at the foot of the memorial. Some of it was respectful, but some was literally just rubbish. What did leaving a water bottle or a racing glove signify anyway? And why would you leave an old banana skin there, for God’s sake?

  Here’s to doping in cycling? You died so, er, we could ride (or something similar)? Here’s to amphetamines . . .?

  Or just, I’m so sorry that it all ended this way for you.

  I didn’t understand at that time why the memorial felt so unsatisfying, yet at the same time I knew we had to leave something, that after such a long journey we had to make some gesture of remembrance. In the absence of wild flowers, I rummaged in the boot and then rather pathetically draped an old inner tube over the plinth of the statue.

  When Simpson had collapsed that day, he had been surrounded by a crowd, battling to revive him. Now, late on this autumn afternoon, with the Mistral picking up and whipping across the rocks, it seemed a particularly eerie and desolate place to die.

  We got back in the Metro and crawled, whinnying in first gear, through the eye-popping final bend to the summit, before breathing a cartoon-exhale in front of the Tintin observatory, with all of Europe – so it seemed – laid out at our feet. We hung about, taking pictures, until the gusts of wind were too strong. Then we set off on the descent. But by then Mum’s Ventoux-conquering Mini Metro, like Ferdi Kübler in 1955, had got cocky, believing it was ‘not a Metro like the others’.

  We breezed downhill, picking up speed, and began careering through the bends on the dramatic and beautiful road towards Malaucène. You can’t do donuts in a Metro, but on the crazed descent towards the valley, the warm air rushing up to meet us as we left hot rubber on each and every hairpin, we came pretty damn close. We plummeted towards another hairpin and I pressed on the brake pedal. Nothing. The tyres squealed in complaint. We sped on down a 12 per cent ramp towards yet another sweeping bend. I pumped the brake pedal harder. Still nothing.

  I was sitting in a tin can, far above the world, hurtling at 100 kilometres per hour from the Ventoux’s moonscape towards a precipice into space. Planet Earth was blue and there was nothing I could do.

  ‘We’re going to end up like Tommy!’ wailed Andy.

  ‘They’ll have to put up a memorial!’ I yelled as the rear end fishtailed and I stamped hopelessly on the brake pedal once more.

  ‘Change gear!’ Andy shouted.

  I fumbled frantically and changed down. The engine screamed in distress. We slowed momentarily but then reached another steep ramp and picked up speed once more. Over a thousand miles under our wheels – the plains of Cheshire and Shropshire, Spaghetti Junction, Watford Gap, the Home Counties, Normandy, the arid Ardèche and eventually the grandeur of the Rhône valley – only for it to end like this . . .

  Just in time to save us from plummeting towards the valley, a run-off lane appeared. We ploughed joyfully into the warm, soft sand, the Metro mercifully shuddering to a halt. I flung open the door and collapsed onto the sand. Andy got out and muttered something about needing his own space. He sat on a rock, head in his hands, on the opposite side of the road.

  Somewhere up on Ventoux, close to the summit, lost in the gathering cloud and gusting winds, Ferdi Kübler’s eerie cackle echoed off the bleached rocks:

  ‘Le Ventoux, alors – c’est pas comme les autres . . .!’

  Nine months later we were back, but this time, prepped by repeated weekends in the Cambrian mountains, we’d come to ride. And a week after that, we would watch, because on 19 July 1987 the Tour de France was to climb the Ventoux in an individual time trial.

  Six of us – Andy, Peter, Martin, Mark, Gil and I – had entered La Tom Simpson randonnée, or sportive, run a week before the Tour stage, organised to mark the 20th anniversary of the Briton’s death by something called ‘Ventoux Sports’ and supported by the local Comité des Fêtes in Carpentras. Over 163 kilometres and in 3,500 met
res of climbing, the route took in two ascents of the Giant, climbing first the Gabelle col, above the edge of the Gorges de la Nesque, before dropping down through the familiar lavender fields to Sault.

  Then, from Sault, we would climb to Chalet Reynard and on, past the Simpson memorial, to the summit. After descending to Malaucène, the route looped around, over the Madeleine climb, into Bédoin and back up and over the mountain, before swooping down the descent once more and back into Carpentras.

  The afternoon before the sportive, we paid 80 francs and signed on – using a hastily fabricated club name, VC Pif Paf – blithely assuring the chap in the tourist office that our British racing licences were fully in order and that we had thoroughly prepared for the event. We studied the impressive list of event sponsors as we stepped out of the air-conditioning to be met by the stifling afternoon heat. RoyalDine cafeteria and restaurant, the Grimaud Peugeot dealer on the route de St Didier, Mondial Cups, the trophymakers for all sporting occasions, and the Hotel du Théâtre on the Boulevard Albin Durand, were all supporters of La Tom Simpson. Hanging around outside, in the shade of the plane trees, was an elderly Englishman, who heard our voices and spoke to us briefly.

  ‘You’ll be fine with the right gears,’ he said, letting slip that he knew the Ventoux pretty well.

  ‘You’ve been up it before?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, I was Tom Simpson’s manager in 1967,’ he explained.

  We left our gite on the far side of the Col de Murs at six the next morning, in time to see the dawn illuminate the Ventoux’s unmistakable profile. An hour later, at exactly seven, we rolled away from the Allée des Platanes in Carpentras towards Mazan. People had turned out to watch and we were astounded by the numbers standing at the roadside. Kids in pyjamas, mums in dressing gowns, old blokes clutching an invigorating morning Pastis as we rode past pavement tables. Some of them cheered and clapped.

  The event organisation was impressive: there was a police escort, Mavic mechanical assistance from hovering cars and motorbikes, a local TV crew and Barry Hoban – Simpson’s former team-mate who’d subsequently married his widow, Helen – had fired the start gun. But within minutes the pace was so high that we were fighting to hang on, even to the very back of the 400-rider peloton. As we headed towards the Gabelle climb, silver paper fluttered through the morning air towards us, the detritus of the ‘chaudières’ up at the front – the riders ‘lighting up’ on amphetamines.

  We clung on but eventually had to let them go and, as the sun climbed higher, plodded on, over the Gabelle, down to Sault, through the lavender fields and then onto the slopes of the Ventoux itself. The climb from Sault to Chalet Reynard is 20 kilometres, the final section a sweeping high-altitude corniche offering glimpses of the limestone desert above.

  We stopped at the feed zone in front of Chalet Reynard, where the D974, climbing from Bédoin, meets the D164 from Sault, the lesser-known approach to the junction. I glanced back at the point where the two routes converged and suddenly understood, very clearly, that the climb from Sault is for sensualists, the road up from Bédoin for masochists.

  Only six kilometres then remain to the summit, but they can be six kilometres that question your mental resilience, and, if it gets really bad, flag up the futility of human endeavour. As Lance Armstrong knows well enough, there’s only ever one winner on Windy (and it’s never him).

  By now, far behind the leading riders, our lack of knowledge, experience and power were very evident. We hadn’t eaten enough, we hadn’t drunk enough and we hadn’t prepared well enough.

  We left Chalet Reynard, and soon afterwards, a police out-rider passed us. A few minutes later, the lead group, now on its second ascent, rolled by at speed, a cavalcade of cars and motorbikes in its wake. Within moments they were through the next bend and out of sight. Humbled, we pushed on. The six dots on the desolate landscape, cut adrift on the humpback mountain, pedalled on, but seemingly without any real progress.

  I don’t remember much about the final kilometre, but I do remember that I was sadly lacking in the adrenaline rush that so motivated Betty Kals.

  At some point before the summit, close to the Col des Tempêtes, there was a French chancer with a camera – who no doubt usually touted his talents to bikini-clad girls on the beaches of the Var – sprawled in a deckchair at the roadside. I crawled past him and there was the click of a shutter and then the sound of him jogging breathlessly alongside me as he stuffed a business card into the pocket of my jersey.

  As I rode around the penultimate bend, it happened again. No card this time, but the sound of a shutter and a shouted greeting in French, which I didn’t catch due to the pounding in my chest and the rushing of blood in my ears. Then, almost unexpectedly, I was round the last bend and up there, dancing on the ceiling, at the top of the Giant, gawping up breathlessly at the Tintin rocket, looking down on France, spread out below me.

  We staggered to the feed zone, ate bananas and slugged Isostar, chewed some ‘sugar pills’ and then had a crumpled copy of a local newspaper stuffed down our jerseys. ‘Pour la descente!’ they told us. We rolled away from the summit and quickly picked up speed. These were the 1980s – we all wore racing caps, not helmets. Helmets weren’t cool. They made you look like a dork. Hinault never wore a helmet. Only Americans wore helmets and what did they know about cycling?

  Within a few kilometres, the hot air of the valley had warmed us up. I didn’t need a newspaper under my jersey to keep out the chill any more. At 55 miles an hour I took one hand off the bars and pulled the folded copy of La Provence out of my jersey. The wind immediately tugged it out of my hand and it wrapped itself around the face of the Frenchman descending just behind me. I heard a distant cry of ‘Putaaaaain!’ float away on the wind as I braked into the next sweeping bend. We sped on down the thrilling 21-kilometre descent to Malaucène, racing each other, taking bends on the wrong side, acting like idiots, overtaking cars, taking far too many risks. We were down in 20-odd minutes, mercifully intact.

  Or so we thought.

  Peter, with us when we had left the top, wasn’t with us when we reached the bottom. We waited, first a few minutes, then a quarter of an hour, which became half an hour, but still no sign. We sat on a wall, and watched more chaudières sweep past on their way to the finish. Then we moved to a café and drank coffee. And then an hour had passed and we got really worried.

  Eventually, freewheeling anxiously into view, we saw him. The first few bends of the descent, overhanging the Ventoux’s vertiginous north face, had done for him. ‘Vertigo,’ he said. ‘Just had to stop and then walk. And even walking was bad.’ Shaken, we set off again for Carpentras and the finish.

  As we reached the edge of town, we found ourselves mixed in with faster, stronger riders, coming off the Ventoux for the second time. Wearily they rode to the finish line, while we – now well rested – slipped into the dead air behind them.

  Slumped at the finish in the shade of the plane trees, Peter recounted his tale of woe. Too terrified to ride any further, he’d taken off his racing shoes and walked much of the way down from the summit, even as passers-by, assuming he had punctured or crashed, stopped to offer him a lift. It was hardly Kübler-esque and, unlike Fignon, we hadn’t cried salty tears, but for a first experience of the Giant it had been a harrowing enough day. Yet when the results came out, some time after we’d crossed the line, we were somehow placed in the top 50 riders.

  Our game burst of sprinting to the line, allied to some eccentric timekeeping, had mixed us up among the elite amateurs who had climbed the Ventoux twice, just as quickly as we had once. The good people from Ventoux Sports came over, shook our hands with beaming smiles, offered ‘Felicitations!’ and presented us with bottles of red wine and stylish Eddy Leclerc branded cap-sleeve racing jerseys. None of us said anything.

  The bottles of Côtes du Ventoux – labelled ‘Le Bidon du Cycliste’ – depicted a rider heading up towards the Ventoux’s summit, angelic wings fluttering on his back. ‘L
e vin qui donne les ailes’ it read – the wine that gives you wings. Maybe we should have drunk a bottle each before we started.

  A week later, we were again up before dawn, leaving our scruffy little tumbledown gite with bad plumbing and only one toilet, just off the road near Murs, our white Citroën Safari with GB plates parked outside. We took blankets, flasks, bread, ham, cheese, water, beer and wine. We drove over the Col de la Ligne, up through St Hubert and then to St Jean-de-Sault, dropping down to Sault and pausing briefly to wolf down coffee and croissants in the still, warm morning.

  The road up from Sault to Chalet Reynard was already busy, cars and cyclists making their time-honoured pilgrimage to the route du Tour. Gendarmes waved us past, as walkers strained to lug their cold boxes and hampers. When we could drive no further we pulled over and parked. Then we walked, wrapped in blankets, through the cold mountain air, past the big bend at Chalet Reynard and higher, maybe a kilometre or two, until we could see the road winding up from below and then snaking on across the rocks above.

  We settled down at the roadside. I pulled on an ANC Halfords cap and switched on my Walkman. Kate Bush ‘Running Up That Hill’. Kate Bush, over and over.

  We scoured the Tour classifications in L’Équipe and decided that Stephen Roche would, almost inevitably, win the time trial to the top of the Giant and take the race lead. ‘Jeff’ Bernard was hotly tipped as well, but beyond his Frenchness, we didn’t know much about him.

  Then we sat and waited.

  It was odd to see famous riders – Luis Herrera and Fabio Parra, from Colombia, Marc Madiot of France, American Andy Hampsten, Phil Anderson of Australia and Norwegian Dag Otto Lauritzen – characters only before glimpsed in highlights packages on Channel 4, so close, grimacing and gasping as they raced towards the summit. I remember seeing Roche ride past and Charly Mottet, struggling to hold onto the maillot jaune. But, most of all, I remember Italian sprinter Guido Bontempi’s lumbering style, producing a cadence so leaden that Peter had time to jog alongside the burly Italian and yell: ‘Gertcha Guido, my son!’