How I Won the Yellow Jumper

by Ned Boulting

  It was a view of immeasurable depth. I had a sense of the whole of the hexagonal shape of the country spread before me, and a little to the east, the colossal icy forest of alpine peaks. With nothing of any size between where I stood and the great mountain range, they were lined up and on display. It’s Ventoux’s isolation which defines it.

  I became aware that I was not alone. I had been joined on the parapet outside the weather station by a cyclist on a heavy, ancient-looking mountain bike. An old boy in his late sixties, he’d ridden up there just for the view, he told me. I could see why. Together we tried to figure out which alp was Mont Blanc, then he gave me a long drink from his water bottle and set off back down the mountain, explaining that ‘Pour grimper, il faut boire; pour la descente, il faut manger.’ He grinned, and showed me a slightly bashed-up looking pain au chocolat that he presented with a flourish from his kagool. I followed a little while later – and within an hour or so, I was back in the warmth of our friends’ house. I jabbered on excitedly about the view from the top. That picture, the Alps.

  The Tour de France has always been a month-long commercial for the country; broadcasting images of valleys, fields of sunflowers, medieval villages and aqueducts which are designed to shout out from the TV: ‘Visitez La France! It’s brilliant! We’ve got just about everything!’

  Recent years have seen astonishing innovation in the quality of the images on TV. The helicopter has been a key factor in the Tour’s ability to market itself as landscape eye candy. Now the advent of high-definition pictures (if there is indeed anyone out there who actually knows how to make their telly receive them) has coincided with a quantum leap in the stability of pictures available from the aerial perch of a helicopter. The cameras are battered by the vibrations that result from being housed underneath a helicopter. But they now sit encased in a shell, which cushions them almost completely. Using baffling hydraulic technology such as ‘five-fold axis high bandwidth full stabilisation’, cameras can now be fitted with huge, long, heavy lenses that zoom to the full extent of their capacity, right into the distance of the horizon, and maintain a perfectly stable shot that neither jerks nor judders.

  One unforgettable image springs to mind in particular. The Tour was trundling over eastern France heading for Bourg-en-Bresse. Not much was happening in the race, so the French director started looking around for shots. Suddenly he cut to a picture of Mont Blanc.

  People stopped what they were doing in the TV compound to watch their monitors, hooked in at once by the clarity of the picture. There was the white enormity of the mountain, framed up perfectly against an azure sky. Slowly, slowly, the cameraman, manipulating the airborne lens by remote control, pulled the shot wider and wider until a huge landscape filled the image, the ant-like figures in the peloton racing far below in the foreground, Mont Blanc now just a tiny white detail on the horizon.

  The mountain must have been a hundred miles away, maybe more. But the camera brought it right into our living rooms and gave us a pure hit of that thrilling annual sensation: the mountains are here!

  There is a moment like this, which marks every Tour: your first glimpse of the great mountain ranges of France. It might be that you nod off on the autoroute, only to find, as the speed slows on the approach to the péage at the Grenoble exit shaking you awake, that without your realising it the horizon is now entirely entombed in Alps.

  Or, it might be that the Tour has been hammering through Normandy or Brittany, an arc heading ever further south through the rolling country of Limousin and the flatlands of Aquitaine, before heading straight towards the pale jagged shock of the Pyrenees – Spain’s over-engineered garden fence.

  Up high is where the soul of the big race resides. Through a century of print, cartoonists have always anthropomorphised the mountains in French papers, breathing monstrous life into them and letting them roar. In their drawings they bare vicious sharp teeth, pointy, rocky noses, tufts of snowy hair, and often arms and hands, which pick up smaller mountains and hurl them at the defenceless riders. There is always an enraged storm cloud gathering above them, with Zeus-like bolts of lightning cracking over the summit. The riders have no chance.

  The two opposing mountain ranges have their individual characteristics. The Alps are markedly better bred than the Pyrenees: neater, sharper, richer, sunnier. Somehow, in their ozone-depleted, Euro-jet-setting heat, they seem brighter. The Pyrenees, on the other hand, have a less-intense dose of the wooden-chaleted alpine kitsch. Their road surfaces are coarser, their forests gloomier, their villages built from stone, dank with the downpours of Atlantic water dumped angrily over their peaks.

  They’re just a bit wilder, really. And it doesn’t stop with the landscape either. The people on them play their part too. It is no coincidence that it was the Alps which Hannibal crossed with his elephant troops. If he’d tried it over the Pyrenees, his herd would probably have been sliced up, marinated, grilled on a disposable barbecue and slapped between a burger bun. These mountains, and the people who populate them for the Tour, take no prisoners.

  One morning, up in the Pyrenees and wrapped chin-high in a pacamac, I trudged off through the chill to find our catering tent. I was after a coffee and a madeleine. It should have been a Marcel Proust experience. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator has the blocked sink of his memories unplugged by the taste of these buttery little cakes in one of the defining passages of twentieth-century literature. But my mind remained stoically blank. It was that sort of a foggy morning, and I was exhausted by two weeks of following the race.

  I allowed the mixture of sweet cake to mingle with the astonishingly bitter coffee. They blended on the tongue. I sat in our tented dining room on the mountainside that we had arrived at overnight, and watched Philippe and Odette prepare lunch. It was good to see them, slicing carrots behind pots belching gouts of aromatic steam. A smell of wine and sage filled the air.

  As so often, the weather in the Pyrenees was hard to predict. You might have expected the sun to have got to work on the mountain mist by now, but judging by the gentle patter of drizzle on the canopy, it was actually getting darker. As if to blend in with his surroundings, Philippe was in a foul mood.

  He was banging around the coffee machine (which has a habit of running out of both water and coffee at just the minute he has a million other things to attend to), taking out his frustrations on the flimsy bit of kit.

  It was surprising to find him angry. Philippe is a big man, but he is remarkably even-tempered on the whole, with a laconic smile and an ability to brush off most of the indignities which touring throws at him. He is not prone to shows of genuine anger. At first, therefore, I thought he was joking. It was only when he showed me his van, parked up alongside his catering truck, that I understood. The windscreen had been shattered, and the van lay wounded on the roadside allowing the wetness of the mountain air to permeate the front cab.

  ‘They’re fucking crazy, Ned. You know. Fucking why did they fucking do this?’ Let’s not forget after all that Philippe lives in south London.

  Thousands of Basques, gathered on the mountainside, had rioted the night before. Philippe and Odette had been ambushed.

  He removed his glasses and, pinching the bridge of his nose, scrunched his eyes shut. It was the gesture of a weary man with 2,000 kilometres already behind him, lunch to cook for 120 people, and, now, a windscreen to fix. How he managed to get a nice man from the French equivalent of Autowindscreens to drive up a mountain on the day of the Tour and replace his windscreen, I have no idea. But then again, I am never quite able to understand how it is he manages to serve magret de canard in a car park round the back of a provincial rugby ground.

  The Basque violence had come as no great surprise to anyone, but its expression that night had taken on a new wildness. Philippe and Odette’s was not the only tale of vandalism to emerge. All around the Zone Technique, drivers were waking up in their cabs, reaching for a coffee, or a towel, and bantering with each other as they showe
red and tried to make light of it all. They began to swap war stories.

  Philippe told all. It had been seriously late as he and Odette, propping their tired eyes open, and peering into the gloom as the mountainside unfolded in front of them, finally neared the summit. They were nosing their refrigerated Petit Forestier truck through crowds of Basque cycling fans, conscious all the while that they were steering a valuable, but vulnerable, cargo of cucumbers, cheeses, wines and gateaux round switchback after switchback. But they were old hands at this kind of driving. Estimates of crowd numbers are notoriously implausible, but that night, it felt as if a million people might genuinely be crawling over the side of the mountain. Makeshift bars lit with clattering generators had sprung up in the hollows by the side of sheer cliff walls. Music and laughter simmered in the warm night air at the foot of the climb. But by the time they had taken the truck up closer to the top of the mountain, there was a chill breeze, and they wound up the windows. The further they climbed, the more the mood changed, as if the altitude itself were the intoxicant. Suddenly there was almost no one left who was sober.

  Basques with a sense of grievance had congregated on the upper slopes, close to the ski resort itself. They were drawn higher by the promise of witnessing the sharp end of the race the following day, and the promise of an actual bar selling actual beer for them to whet their appetites. Young, mostly, and dressed in the orange of Euskaltel-Euskadi, the Basque national cycling team, with bandanas and flags and scarves, they swarmed around the roadside, singing their allegiances and spitting their distaste for the French and the Spanish. They had come to make a point and here, in the dark night on top of the mountain range that is at the heart of their sense of identity as a people, they had found their voices, roared on by the twin spirits of protest and vodka.

  There was barely a single gendarme there that night, although many had predicted what might happen. The convoy of Tour vehicles in which Philippe and Odette had taken their place suddenly became the target. The attackers jumped out in front of the lorries, forcing them to slam on the brakes (probably putting paid to few jars of cornichons at the same time), and pelted the drivers’ cabs with beer cans, traffic cones and whatever else came to hand.

  All night the action continued. Philippe and Odette managed to park up in the caterers’ car park where they tried as best they could to get their heads down while the angry orange picket line continued to create mayhem out on the road. The trucks still came lumbering towards the finish line, their huge gearboxes growling at the stumbling hordes of Basque revellers.

  One driver told me the following day how he had watched as the cab of the truck in front of him was stormed. A couple of Basques had taken it upon themselves to open the door and try to get at the driver. The lorry veered a little as the man behind the wheel booted his invaders as hard as he could. He repelled the attack, and, leaning over, somehow managed to slam the heavy door shut in their faces. Sometime after that, all the trucks had reached their destination, many carrying the marks of the ascent. And towards dawn, the mountainside gradually grew quiet, as one by one the army of Basque foot soldiers turned in for the night, or, more accurately, fell into a stupefied sleep. The battle had been a score draw, but the point had been made.

  Later the next day, the seething beery mass would form the enduring image of the stage’s racing, as the riders pushed through the delirious crowds, parting the sea of huge, orange and green Basque flags flapping in their faces. The night’s chaos barely got a mention in the commentary, as the Tour revelled in its revellers.

  Basque patriots have a confused attitude to the race. On the one hand they rail against it as a symbol of Francophone cultural imperialism, and an invasion of their mountains. On the other hand, they know their place in its pageantry and they rise to the occasion. They celebrate the passage of the great race with heart and hangover, roaring their support in their rare language, which is itself being pushed into the sea by the allied forces of Spanish and French homogeneity. Their tongue after all, pre-dates pretty much everything. It is descended from Bronze Age languages, and has developed over time entirely separately from the Indo-Germanic roots which dominate Western Europe.

  But Basque remains impenetrable. Even Matt, for whom almost no language barrier is impossible to hurdle, throws up his hands in despair when faced with a wall of drunken Basque bonhomie. On my first experience of the Pyrenees, we were dispatched down the climb up the Luz-Ardiden (just hours before Lance Armstrong was to hit the deck and then execute the defining ride of his career). Our task was to ‘vox-pop’ the Basques. To extract some content from them which spoke of their aspirations and their passion for the Pyrenees and for the representatives of the team bearing their colours.

  Not prone to shirking a challenge, Matt, nonetheless, wore an expression of horror and helplessness.

  ‘But I don’t speak Basque. And they don’t speak anything but Basque. I won’t understand them,’ and then he added, ‘at all.’

  The problem for him that day was that none of us believed him, least of all Steve, whose idea it had been. We were certain that it must be a bit like Spanish. Steve gave a look that ended the conversation. Matt knew resistance was futile. He assumed the grave, saddened air of a man who knows his fate has been sealed.

  Only when we got some way down the mountain did I realise the extent of the problem. The Basque fans were riotously pissed, for starters. The camera acted straight away like a lamp to moths, except these moths had ketchup dribbling down their chins and kept dropping their shorts to impress on us just how proud Basque men behave when provoked by the presence of a digital recording device.

  And when they weren’t singing Lord knows what obscenities, they were laughing at us. Not with us, you understand. At us. Matt valiantly held out a microphone and somehow a question emerged. I forget what language he opted for. I suspect it was Tahitian. The answers came flying back, a crackling firework of sound, featuring more Xs and Ks than Eddy Merckx himself.

  ‘Axxarrankatha. Barraxxakakaxxaria. Kox. Arax. Xarraka. Ha ha ha ha ha.’ And off they would stumble, back to paint more giant orange genitalia on the tarmac, or just to smear more ketchup on themselves.

  A few years later, on the 2008 Tour, I was to learn at closer hand what goes on in the collective (un)consciousness of a mountainside gearing up to welcome the Tour. Back in a production meeting in the spring I had wondered out loud if there was any chance that I could shoot a feature about the experience of spending a night camping out on the side of a mountain. The idea presented a logistical nightmare, as most things on the Tour do, given the difficulty of getting around narrow roads stuffed up with official and unofficial traffic.

  Nonetheless, we put a date in the diary, and, more significantly, a tent was bought. The production invested £29.99 at Millets in this idea, at which point it became clear there was to be no going back. It had to happen.

  The date chosen was the Sunday 13 July, the eve of Bastille day. The mountain was the Hautacam. The next day the Tour would finish there, having climbed into the Pyrenees from Pau. The idea was simple enough. I would be armed with a small camcorder and would film myself, in the well-worn style of a video diary, as I passed the night among the revellers and the international flotsam and jetsam that had scattered itself all the way up the fifteen-kilometre climb. I packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush. I had a sleeping bag, a pop-out one-man tent, and a box of bread, salami, cheese, fruit and wine, which Philippe and Odette had kindly packed for me. I was ready.

  The Tour had finished in Bagnères-de-Bigorre that day, and so the first thing we had to do was pick our way through the solid traffic running down the valley road, and then turn off to climb the Hautacam so that I could be dropped off. It would have been a laborious trip at the best of times, but this was the Tour de France, when hundreds of thousands of other people had exactly the same idea.

  On the roads, the eventide scramble had begun. Everyone was looking for an ill-suited and uncomfortable bed for the
night. Campervans jostled for space on the verges of the road. Tents were popping up next to truck-stops. Chain gangs of American and British cyclo-tourists were grouped around unfolded maps, studying them with wearied tension as the prospect of a hot shower and a hotel meal grew ever more enticing, and ever more remote.

  Woody, Liam and Chris Boardman, who were all travelling in my car, also had comfortable hotel rooms booked in Pau, and were yearning for them. The banter had begun.

  ‘No dinner for us then. Oh no. We’ll just stick around here in a traffic jam,’ Liam began. ‘But it’ll be worth it, just so that Mr Boulting can craft his brilliant piece of tour cinematography. Just so long as he can fulfil his artistic ambitions, we’ll gladly forgo our right to a hot meal.’

  I grinned, a little sheepishly. Dinner is an essential pressure valve on the Tour, and theirs was being scraped off the plates and chucked away. I think I’d have felt the same.

  ‘How much further?’ ventured Chris, in his matter-of-fact deadpan.

  We were already inching our way up the Hautacam. It was about eight o’clock in the evening, and there wasn’t much roadside left to colonise. The crowds were vast. I looked out of the window with more interest and attention to detail than usual. Normally these sights simply form part of a moving backdrop to the jerky progression of the Tour. Certainly, it was a grand event, this pilgrimage of devotees, this migrating human herd. But the sea of faces would have lacked definition, and in its vast generality would never have seemed as important as my own individual concerns and frustrations. In the bubble of the Tour the crowd simply constituted the context in which the drama of one’s own life was played out. But now I was about to immerse myself into their world, and I would have to pay them closer attention. I felt like Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate, when he jumps into the pool in the diving suit. There. But not really there.