by Ned Boulting
‘They’re in the glove compartment.’
‘We should aim to get to a bank before eleven. You never know when, or how long, they’ll close for lunch. Where are the passports?’
‘In the glove compartment.’
‘Good. Excellent. All set then. There’ll be a péage coming up soon. Have we got some euros?’
And so on. Beam deflectors, Michelen guides, nougat. The cricket on the World Service, crackling into oblivion as the Parisian Périphérique draws near.
Back in the early eighties I had been just such a child, on just such a journey. The first trip abroad I ever made was through Calais, and down through France. I was astounded, the first time we stopped for a toilet break, to be introduced to ‘pétards’, or ‘little farts’, literally translated.
They are, for those who don’t know, miniature sticks of dynamite bundled together in bright red little packs of ten or twenty, which you could buy at tabacs. I swiftly discovered that four of them, stuffed in the passenger-door ashtray of a Datsun and ignited, would blow the door clean off its hinges, and cause apoplexy in the middle-aged parent attempting to steer his right-hand drive car down the wrong side of the road. On that same trip, too, I was introduced to the bidet, and even established what they were used for. Not before I had established beyond any doubt what they weren’t used for, I have to confess.
But it was the sight of kids only a couple of years older than me riding motorbikes without helmets, playing pinball with such precision and flair that they could even lift the table three inches in the air and drop it down again without activating the tilt mechanism, and speaking actual French that impressed me most. This was a grown-up country, with real genuine cool. Authentic, original cool. I was from Bedford, had two spots on my chin, and wore a pacamac. I yearned to be French, with all that might bring with it.
‘Lucky bastards.’
‘Who?’
‘The French. Lucky bastards.’
Someone always says it. It’s a recurring mantra, a leitmotif of my working life on the Tour de France. It’s the signature catchphrase. Somewhere just south of Lyon it will get aired in the airless car for the first time, and from that day on, it is a thought that is verbally expressed daily, sometimes even hourly.
The Hexagon, as cycling’s sentimentalists delight in calling it, has it all. From the green lush north, to the pines and sand of the west, with two vast mountain ranges and the French Rivieira thrown in for good measure. And even if the French have got questionable taste in leisurewear, they’ve got the Tour de France by way of compensation. Even those French people, who don’t care about cycling, still care enough to know that it’s on. And who might win it. They have to. It’s in the small print of their contract, part of their duties as citizens of the republic. Like passing the time of day with neighbours in boulangeries.
One day we were in a pretty town called Saint-Fargeau. It was a typically beguiling little place, complete with a trickling stream, an oversize château, a chocolatier, and an esoteric museum (in this case, for some inexplicable reason, it housed France’s foremost collection of early gramophones). We were filming a day ahead of the Tour’s arrival. At about four o’clock, we headed to a bar to watch the closing kilometres of that day’s action. The next day, the circus would descend, and Mark Cavendish would claim yet another stage win.
The TV was on. In the far corner of the bar, a Canadian family perched around a Formica table heavy with Coca-Colas. They were chatting a little too animatedly about their plans to visit the Museum of the Gramophone. Aside from them, the bar was not exactly buzzing. There was a barmaid polishing glasses in the manner of an extra from ’Allo ’Allo. But she wasn’t the only cliché in the room.
There was the most perfect example of an Old-Boy-At-The-Bar. I sat next to him. He actually wore a beret and a red neckerchief. I was delighted. We both stared at the screen. A hundred kilometres to the west, a helicopter was pulling back to reveal a long peloton, stretched out at the front end into single file. HTC-Columbia was beginning to get the chase organised. My friend was watching, absent-mindedly chewing his lunch. By way of conversation, I asked him if he was enjoying his salami sandwich.
‘C’est bon, votre pain?’ I enquired smilingly.
There was a pause of quite extraordinary length during which he chewed and gave the impression of utter indifference to my question. I held my smile. It began to hurt.
‘Non,’ came the surprisingly honest reply. ‘Trop sec. Il manque du beurre.’
He glanced a little savagely at the barmaid, who shrugged her indifference back at him. He looked profoundly irritated. After all, there’s nothing like a dry, unbuttered salami baguette to take the edge off your enjoyment of the Tour.
Undaunted by his overt unwillingness to engage in light-hearted bar-banter with the sunburnt English fool sitting beside him at the bar, I ploughed on.
‘Vous aimez regarder le Tour?’ I offered, throwing a sideways nod in the direction of the TV screen to eliminate any room for misunderstanding. There was another, even longer pause. I became unsettled. Was this a deliberate snub? Had he failed to understand my French? It turned out that he was formulating his reply. When it came it was succinct and left little margin for ambiguity.
‘Non.’
Munch, munch. Dry crumbs tumbled from his lower lip onto the counter below. It made me thirsty just to watch him.
I allowed what I considered to be a dignified length of time to elapse before I threw in the towel and left some money on the bar for my coffee. At the door, just before I stepped outside into the glaring sun, I glanced back at the hunched shoulders and silhouetted shape of the beret that belonged to my taciturn friend at the bar.
Then the perversity struck me. Despite his protestations on both counts, there he was. Eating his dry sandwich. Watching the Tour. As if he had no choice.
In the end, that’s the point I suppose. There’s no getting away from a race which prides itself on getting round all parts of the country as often as it can. It is, after all, the Tour de France. Not the Tour de Anywhere Else. (Although there is a curiously irritating habit for minor races in far-flung non-francophone countries to name their races using the French conjunctive ‘de’. The now defunct Tour de Georgia is the worst offender. A fine race, I have no doubt, but an ill-judged name.)
So, to be fair to the French, they did the ‘de’ bit a long time before anyone else had even grappled with the concept. And they still lead the way. Strange though this may sound, it sometimes slips your mind when you’re on the race that you’re in France, such is the international bubble that you inhabit. It’s only when you chance to look in detail at the faces in the crowd that you remember what this event means to the host nation. The hours spent waiting at the roadside, enduring baking sun or torrential rain, putting up with the unbearable clamour of the tannoys and the frenetic hell of the Caravane Publicitaire. Grandads, old dears, families with youngsters decked out in as many free sponsored hats as they can get their heads in; some of the lengths gone to just to catch a glimpse of a mediocre French cyclist coasting by at 30mph.
The closest equivalent to this kind of patient enthusiasm for a sport in which the home nation so massively underachieves is the British Wimbledon obsession. There is a common currency in the Henmanite campers outside SW18, and the dedicated Tour fan who will travel hideously overcrowded roads just to get a glimpse of Laurent Brochard. Except that, where the queues outside the All England Lawn Tennis Club might be a mile long, on the Tour de France they stretch over hundreds of miles.
And yet, one of the curiosities I have become familiar with over the years has been this: there appear to be two parallel Tours.
One is the global game, the Armstrong-driven explosion of blue-chip sponsored, mega-corporate transatlantic teams with a diversity of nationalities among the nine men on the team and their followers, as well as the hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. The other Tour is French. Decidedly, resolutely, determinedly French.
&n
bsp; It comes down to national pride, I guess.
On the morning of 6 July 2005, everyone in the media village was glued to TV monitors, tuned to their respective national broadcasters. It was an important day, one that had been widely talked about, particularly in the French press. That day, every major station in Europe would be carrying live pictures from Singapore where the result of the bidding process for the 2012 Olympics was about to be announced.
Certain that London was the outsider, and a little indifferent to it all anyway, I was scooting around the place mopping up little errands here and there, trying to stave off a late-morning hunger. The race was still hours from the finish line. As the announcement drew close, however, curiosity got the better of me. I stopped by a makeshift studio, which had been erected by RTBF, the Belgian TV station. I stood under an awning as a drizzle was beginning to fall, fingering a small Paris 2012 souvenir badge, which I had been handed and had placed in my pocket as a keepsake.
‘The International Olympic Committee . . .’ Pause. ‘Has the honour of announcing . . .’ Longer pause. Across the tented village of the media compound, I could hear the simultaneous translations into Spanish, Italian and German. ‘That the games of the thirtieth Olympiad in 2012. Are awarded . . .’ final pause. ‘. . . to the city of London!’
Londra!
The camera cut to a side shot of the hall, with the most undignified jumping-up-and-down going on from the British delegation. Where I was standing too, there was an audible reaction, reaching us from further afield.
London!
A large crowd had gathered along the finishing straight, even though there would be a long wait before the race was due to finish. They had made their way there hoping to watch the announcement on the big screen, and then share in the inevitable party, which would follow Paris’s triumph.
Londres!
Now their day was ruined. There were wolf-whistles and some shouting.
I lingered a little in front of the Belgian monitors, watching a bizarre three-way hug featuring David Beckham, Seb Coe and Ken Livingstone, each of them wearing the kind of beige suit normally only ever seen for sale on the market down the Walworth Road.
Unexpectedly, I felt a little reflected glory. The Belgian crew started drifting back to work, patting their congratulations on my back as they passed. My inflated sense of self-importance grew a little more. I guess they weren’t really crediting me with making the key late-night interventions that had swung the whole thing London’s way. They were Belgians after all, so I think they were probably just very pleased to see Paris missing out.
I gathered up John and Woody and we spent the next hour or so putting together a short package of vox pops to reflect the reaction among the locals to London’s success. I don’t know what I was expecting really. We were in a town called Montargis, a little to the south of Paris. During the Hundred Years War the Earl of Warwick laid siege to the town for months, until the residents got their act together and sabotaged the dykes and reservoirs in the local area, flooding the enemy lines and killing hundreds of Englishmen. Had the bloodlust been dispelled over the following 500 years? Or would their descendants still be hell-bent on exacting retribution for English perfidy?
I strolled up and down the finish line, microphone in hand, stopping every now and again to offer in broken French, ‘Vous souhaitez sans doute feliciter Londres! ’ I wasn’t totally sure that they would wish to congratulate London, but I felt they should be offered the opportunity.
It seemed, though, that they didn’t feel the same way. Reactions varied from grudging acknowledgement that London might be a reasonable venue, to frank and forthright allegations of deceit and vote-rigging. One man looked directly at the camera, and drew his finger across his neck as if to cut the viewer’s throat. I stopped and spoke to one of the Tour’s legendary figures: the Cochonou salami-man. Small, permanently irate, and moustachioed, this terrifying elderly man spends every July pedalling a tricycle up and down the final kilometre of each stage handing out flimsy chequered sun-hats and miniature sample-sized cellophane-wrapped salamis to the waiting throngs. I have on a number of occasions tried to steal salamis from his basket only to get caught in flagrante and chased off in the style of a sped-up Benny Hill sketch. So I should have known he wouldn’t react with any great friendliness to my approach.
‘Je m’en fous d’Angleterre! Je m’en fous de Londres!’ His words were garnished with fragments of Cochonou salami as they flew in my direction. Garlic, salt, fat and hurt pride.
‘Je m’en fous de Blair!’ he added. And then he spat on the ground, in the manner of a man pretending to be a small, angry Frenchman, made all the more compelling since he actually was one.
There’s a bit of me that understands his anger. His nation invents a great race and wins it a lot. Then they invite the rest of the world to come and join in and they stop winning it altogether. And now he is faced with this idiot from English TV trying to wind him up about the Olympics. As if he wasn’t irate enough already. And would everyone please stop trying to nick his salamis.
But away from the vitriol, there is a touching faith about French support for their cyclists. The fact that they still care about an event their riders seem genetically incapable of even threatening to win does the nation great credit. In the years that I have covered the Tour, French success has been limited to bit parts. Their participants tend to be attendant lords, that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two. Like going for a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics, the French seem to have been busying themselves with competing for the lesser prizes, in the sober knowledge that the big one will elude them for years to come.
Not that that doesn’t have considerable appeal. Recent Tours have featured heartening, brave rides from Sylvain Chavanel, Brice Feillu and Geoffroy Lequatre to name a few. But they have also been characterised by the slow, saddening decline of Christophe Moreau. Moreau is a national treasure, we are led to believe, although I am not so sure. By and large, the French cycling public, despite their yearning for a hero to emerge, aren’t daft, and I can scarcely accept that they have genuinely warm feelings towards ‘the greatest French rider of his generation’. A man who has five top twelve finishes on the tour to his name, Moreau has been masquerading as a contender. Since returning from a suspension for doping he has been holding his own only up to a point with the main men in the mountains. That point invariably would be the first major acceleration. With battle raging up front between the likes of Evans, Sastre and Schleck, French TV would treat the viewer to long, loving, lingering close-ups of Moreau falling off the back and riding all on his own in a world of pain. ‘There’s Christophe Moreau again, struggling already to hold the wheel.’ Every year. Even the French must have become sick of it.
But while Moreau confessed in 1998, his Festina teammate Richard Virenque, stretching credulity among swathes of the media, maintained his innocence. Not everyone believes him. For me, Virenque was another symbol of the impotence of French cycling. Year after year his targeted assault on the polka-dot jersey given to the ‘King of the Mountains’ was as predictable as it was repetitive. But the stick-insect son of Morocco carved out an extraordinary niche for himself. Seemingly ignored by the main riders, by dint of being half an hour adrift in the General Classification, he swept up intermediate climbing points on middling climbs, possibly because no one else could be bothered. ‘Oh go on, then,’ I imagine them thinking to themselves, ‘give it to Virenque.’
He scooped up seven polka-dot jerseys in an era where not many other French riders were showing themselves. He won stages. He should have cemented his place in French hearts.
And, perhaps he did. For a portion of French cycling fans it never mattered that Virenque was morally compromised goods. I would often spot the Virenque fans on the Tour and was fascinated by what could possibly draw them to support him. Amidst the sea of painted names on the tarmac, the LANCE LANCE LANCE and the BASSOs and ULLRICHs, there would always be a fair smatteri
ng of ALLEZ RICHARD, often with a surprisingly neat tricolour painted alongside.
These would have been the proud handiwork of the die-hard caravanners, those French families from Rennes or Le Mans, who would have driven to their allotted switchback days before the arrival of the race, braced the vehicle with stones against gravity and then begun stolidly eating their way through a mountain of merguez, scowling at the new arrivals. Each day would bring more and more caravans from Holland and Germany, cluttering up their view, and bit by bit ALLEZ RICHARD would be swamped on all sides by an invasion of foreign-sounding names. It was a metaphor for the race itself, and it would have been enough to make them retreat ever more deeply into their morning’s edition of L’Equipe, shaking their heads in despair. These were the people who represented Virenque’s natural constituency.
Virenque can be astonishingly forthright. He once recorded a chat show on French TV where he gave quite possibly the most honest answer any sportsman has ever given, an answer that recently has been echoed by Floyd Landis. This was the exchange between Virenque and the presenter Thierry Ardisson:
Q: If you were sure of winning the Tour by being doped, but knew you wouldn’t get caught, would you do it?
A: (without blinking) Win the Tour doped, but without getting caught? Yes.
It’s a wonder that corporate France still holds enough faith in the man to crave association with him. These days he has contracts with a sticky glucose drink (fair enough) and with a pharmacy (yup, I can see that, too). But there’s one French business that will be forever Virenque. The years of his triumphs were the heady days when the polka-dot jersey was sponsored by the supermarket chain Champion.
Since Virenque seemed to own exclusive rights to their prize, and even appeared outside of the Tour in their TV commercials, they were intimately associated with the man, and were clearly pleased with the return on their investment. Their sponsorship of the event seemed to grow with each passing year. Each intermediate King of the Mountains point would be festooned ever more garishly with Champion’s logos, and kilometre after kilometre of barricades leading up to each line would all bear the same supermarket’s name. We fondly imagined that Virenque was by now so indebted to the sponsor that he had to spend every hour God sent working for them. We speculated endlessly about how every morning Virenque would put out hundreds of Champion barricades, before he was allowed back to his hotel for breakfast. ‘Virenque was up early again,’ one of us would invariably comment driving towards a finish line past acres of Champion signage.
