French Revolutions

by Tim Moore

  If the French want to know why they have not produced a Tour winner in the last fifteen years, I would advise them to visit Freiburg. It occurred to me on the way in that the oncoming cyclists were generally ten years younger than I am rather than thirty years older, and freewheeling up to the town centre I beheld that the main station was ringed with the largest collection of parked bicycles I have ever witnessed outside documentaries about China. Three to a parking meter, five to a tree, endless stacks in endless racks – there were tens of thousands of them, as sure a sign as any of a vibrant and youthful cycling culture.

  The sprawling bikefields were the best thing about Freiburg – honestly, I took photos of them and everything. Elsewhere there was a sort of Hansel and Gretel cathedral, some uncharacteristically grubby nineteenth-century streets and a muted atmosphere that was Sunday afternoon rather than Saturday evening. The centre had presumably been flattened in the war, but it looked as though they’d only just remembered to start rebuilding it. Bronzed-glass office blocks were interspersed with huge empty lots, and above the heavily scaffolded station shot a high-rise hotel so new that the lift-call buttons were still sheathed in plastic. I know this because I checked in – fifty quid a night but I couldn’t be arsed to find an alternative – and because the buttons in question were marked not with the usual up and down arrows, but the words ‘Ab’ and ‘Auf’, which meant as little to me as they did to the many dispirited refugees I accompanied from the basement to the eighth floor and back, and back.

  I showered and changed and wandered off into an evening that stank of brewing thunder. An American-themed restaurant promised ‘Live Euro Fussball und Great Beer’ but delivered neither, though I didn’t really care. I was tired, and tomorrow was a big day: the time trial, against the clock, contre le montre, when for 58.5 flat-out kilometres I’d see what I was made of, how the mountains had built up my physical and mental strength. With my family and Paul around I’d occasionally found myself diverted from the job in hand, but now I was focused. The lullaby that night was not the rush of glacial meltwater but freight trains and ding-dong station announcements and the tortured shouts of madmen. I didn’t mind a bit. No mosquitoes, no rosé wine, none of those holiday-style distractions. And I was in Germany. That alone concentrated the mind wonderfully. You can’t be on holiday in Germany.

  If the Tour hadn’t been decided already, it would be after the time trial. The race of truth, they call it – no tactics, no teammates to fetch and carry and hide behind, just a special lightweight bike and a silly aerodynamic body condom and an hour and a bit of hammering on the pain barrier.

  I slept for thirteen hours and then at breakfast, elbow to shellsuited elbow with a throng of face-stuffing Germans, I shovelled in a mountain of meat and eggs. I was taking this seriously. I’d traced the route on to the map: straight back down the Rhine, across it into France, down into Mulhouse. I retrieved ZR from the luggage store, flexed and twitched and slapped my legs, then went straight up to the check-out desk and smashed a brass reading light. As well as being embarrassing, this rather broke my concentration. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to the receptionist as she swept pieces of low-energy bulb into a pile using a postcard of the cathedral, ‘I really don’t know how that happened.’ With an open face and a slow-motion sweep of the elbow she showed me. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now I see.’

  I’d been hoping the previous day’s wind would have held, blowing me down the floodplain, but along with the sun it was gone. It was one of those flotation-tank days, still and humid, the air so stale it felt second-hand and so thick that it soaked up the noise, filtering the roar of nearby traffic into a muted, earplugged hiss. I rolled slowly along the pavement cycle lane, occasionally glancing around for a strip of bunting or a sheaf of flags that might announce I had reached the Leopoldring, the stage’s start line, until while crossing a junction I looked up and saw that Leopoldring was the name of a road, and that I was already on this road. Buttocks! It was like turning up late for an exam. Adrenalin hosed into my heart and I shot off far too fast, almost immediately having to shriek to a stop at the next traffic lights. Waiting at traffic lights – this wasn’t very professional. I’ll be sticking my bloody arm out to indicate in a minute, I thought, although actually it was less than that.

  Bursting with frustration I slalomed on to the cycle path. There’d hardly been a single cycle path in France, though by according cyclists equal road rights they didn’t really need any. But they were everywhere in Germany and Switzerland and they hated it if you didn’t use them. Usually I did, but they had a habit of whistling away into the woods or skirting even minor intersections with a seven-sides-of-an-octagon detour, and with my average speed down at a risible 22.9 the last thing I needed was extra kilometres. I’d averaged 27.7 for my 16-kilometre prologue, and if I couldn’t do better than that now then all that had happened since would have been in vain.

  Away from the roundabouts and traffic lights and out across the flat fields and stuffy, muggy forests, things began to pick up. I was grinding along in top gear, starting to taste metal but keeping the rhythm, and then with my AVS up to 26 I rounded a corner at substantially greater speed and found the path abruptly taped off and guarded by two girls with clipboards sitting on camp stools. To cut a short story shorter, I stopped. The one who had been bold enough not to hurl herself backwards off her stool looked at the dirty, hot wheel near her head, then up at its pilot. ‘Sorry,’ I panted, noting for the second time in half an hour how rude it was to apologise in a foreign language.

  For a very small moment I attempted to mash my dozen or so words of German into an appropriate query, but had only got as far as ‘Quick, Mr Captain: forward through technology!’ when a lazy peloton appeared ahead. As its lead members reached us and broke off towards a neighbouring industrial estate, the girls ticked boxes and wrote down numbers; I deduced that this was some sort of sponsored cycling event and in a flurry of clumsy recleating set off in pursuit.

  In something of a fury of pent-up pedalling I careered past the backmarkers, and was up to 45 k.p.h. when I hit the front past the final light-industrial unit, holding off a surprised trio of leg-shavers in matching courier-firm jerseys. Ignoring an indistinct cry of alarm from another set of marshals I bumped up the kerb and rejoined the cycle path, leaving everyone to continue their laps in peace. Feeble Sunday-morning amateurs.

  A rollerblader didn’t hear me coming and almost came a cropper, then the route branched off along a tiny road flanked by overgrown pillboxes. It was quiet now and again I put my head down, staring at the sun-bleached hairs on my brown knees. I bared a lot of teeth and gritted them hard, knowing that although I’d never get anywhere near the 50 k.p.h. the pros would average – average – along this route, at least I could put in the same agonising effort. Through quiet villages I glanced at my distorted reflection as it whizzed across the convex mirrors outside every concealed entrance, trying to keep my hands off the brakes even before sharp corners or zebra crossings, promoting the maintenance of momentum above accident prevention in my list of priorities. The AVS was up to 31 k.p.h. when, with 38k covered, I raced across a junction towards the Rhine and the French border. And in fairness, it was 32 when, just under twenty minutes and just over 10 kilometres later, I crossed the same junction for the third time. I was lost. Looking at the straightforward route on the map, it didn’t make any sort of sense, but then by this stage nor did I.

  Suffering more types of distress than I had ever experienced simultaneously I shouldered ZR and slipped and careered madly down a muddy embankment to the service station I’d noticed alongside the motorway beneath me. A man with a huge, hairy face was filling up his old Transit van. ‘Frankreich? France? France?’ I jabbered, feeling my legs beginning to seize up. ‘Da?’ he said, in some sort of thick accent, and hurling ZR against a rack of antifreeze I ran into the shop. ‘Frankreich?’ I yelped at an old couple perusing the biscuits; the husband nodded slowly and raised a thoughtful hand to his white stu
bble, but before it got there I was in the beverage aisle, sweatily buttonholing a man in a boiler suit who could only respond to my question with one of his own, and a teenage girl who didn’t even manage that. Tears were welling up when I turned to see a shirtless youth with a towel over his shoulder, and before I could say anything he’d said, ‘The road to France, yeah?’ in fluent Lancastrian. I nodded and panted through his straightforward instructions – naturally enough, my mistake had been in following a fingerpost labelled ‘Frankreich’ – and with a breathless sound intended to express gratitude ran back outside and remounted. But not for very long. Those nascent twinges of muscle discomfort suggested that my legs might be taking advantage of this respite to formally register their complaint, and the unlubricated paroxysm that accompanied my first revolution caused the unwelling of those stockpiled tears and a clumsy dismount.

  Seeing this, the Transit man jogged over with a look of concern. He placed one hand on my shaking shoulder, the other on ZR’s crossbar, and displaying a characteristic intuition for le mot juste said, ‘Da?’

  What a kind man, I thought, what a good man, and then, because fatigue had changed parts of my brain, I thought how confused and upset he would be if I opened one of those bottles of antifreeze and poured it down his shirt.

  ‘Da,’ I replied, and oddly began to feel better. After all, 48k was only ten shy of the total; despite the intrusions of traffic management I’d covered three times my prologue distance at a significantly higher speed. It was all right. Five minutes later I went back into the shop and spent my last deutschmarks on two cans of Red Bull and some toothpaste I would shortly discover tasted of crushed Rennies. As I gingerly remounted again, the guy with the towel emerged and intriguingly disappeared into a flat-tyred caravan that was clearly a long-term feature of the quiet end of the enormous lorry park. Then, in no particular hurry, I went back to France.

  Sixteen

  Mulhouse was the end of the time-trial stage, but the next one started from Belfort, 45k to the west, or rather 60k by the time I’d become imaginatively lost amid the teenage snoggers in a maze of dead-end allotments. Under melting leaden skies and with a beastly wind pushing the whole countryside in my face, those late-afternoon kilometres tolled by with agonising sloth. Looking at the map now I can still remember every town: Reiningue where there was a cow loose in the maize fields; Bernwiller where I was respectfully applauded by an exiting congregation; Balschwiller where a crow pecked horribly at two roadkilled fox cubs.

  Grovelling along it occurred to me that although these disordered assemblages of roofless barns were unthinkable over the Rhine, every town without exception bore a stridently German name. Crossing the Rhine–Rhône canal, now a good 50 kilometres inside France, I spotted a roadside shrine of some antiquity dedicated to ‘Herr Jesus Christas’. Until 1919, all this land, the area known as Alsace-Lorraine, had been German territory. Seeing a memorial to ‘Nos Enfants, 1914–18’, I realised that the enfants in question would have been wearing spiky-topped helmets and laying down their lives for the Kaiser.

  Reasoning it would at least be flat I followed the bleak canal for a bit, the bullrushes bent double towards me. But then the towpath ended and it was back across the damp, darkening hills, past an ostrich farm, past a dozen spaced-out ravers sitting by their cars in a lay-by, past an old bloke tipping the rain off his patio furniture and waving at me so cheerily that despite myself I got up on the pedals and gave him a bit of a show.

  It was almost night when, with 131 kilometres on the clock, I wound wetly into Belfort past the floodlit bulk of a mighty red fortress that stared down at the town from a steep hill. A jumble of distant, amplified sounds and rain-blurred floodlights suggested that something was going on.

  The upside of my visit coinciding with the Fourteenth World Festival of University Music was the looming opportunity to eat huge kebabs in a bracing sea of lithe young bodies. The downside was that the only hotel with any rooms left was called The Grand Hotel of the Golden Cask. The receptionist, presiding over a colonnaded lobby that led, eventually, to an opera-house double staircase, watched me wheel ZR towards her across the marble with an expression that eloquently betrayed an internal debate pitching human charity against decorum. It was the sort of dilemma you might face, I suppose, upon seeing the caretaker being extravagantly unwell while slumped on the pavement after your office party.

  ‘La Tour de France passe par ici?’

  It was the only time it ever worked. Her long face lit up, and in English so astonishingly good that I instantly forgave her for using it before I did she began to hold forth, or possibly even fifth.

  ‘Yes, absolutely, the Tour is departing from here for its …’ and here she slipped in the savouring smile of someone about to say something clever in a foreign language ‘penultimate stage on July the twenty-second. You are interested in the event?’

  I explained my quest, and when I had finished she tilted her head, smiled a different smile and said, ‘Chapeau!’

  I could have kissed her.

  Anyway, there followed some additional banter on Belfort’s own cycling hero, Christophe Moreau, whose reputation had been tarnished somewhat during the most notorious drug scandal of recent years, the Festina affair, but who had since (another proud grin) ‘cleaned the slate’ and was now riding well. Finally, she said, ‘Oh, but you must be starving hungry,’ then helped me stow ZR in a laundry room and gave me a room key. Stepping beneath a ceiling where cherubs distantly frolicked in cumulo nimbus and into a corridor where a discarded champagne bucket lay outside every other door, I couldn’t quite understand how this place was only eight quid a night more expensive than Freiburg’s spartan station block. There were chocolates on the pillow and everything.

  I put on trousers and espadrilles and went out to perform the aforementioned kebab dance before a North African band with large support among France’s drunken-piggyback community. Then my legs started to concertina and in half an hour I was stumbling up to bed.

  As a public service, I would like to advise visitors to Belfort with an interest in hydraulic equipment, agricultural materials or mattresses to avoid room 124 of the Grand Hôtel du Tonneau d’Or. These headings all appear on page 188 of the local Yellow Pages kept in the room, a page whose distressed remains I currently have before me. Although in later years I may easily wish to stuff a futon with maize husks and mount it on elevating pistons, my interest that morning was focused more on the page overleaf, 187, and the section headed Masseurs.

  It was all part of a grand scheme that I’d hatched with Paul during our last night, one whose detailed refinement had filled an empty head during many subsequent hours in the saddle. This scheme required me to complete the penultimate Belfort-Troyes stage, at 254.5 kilometres the longest in the 2000 Tour, in one day. I’d done the mountains, but had yet to confront the Sisyphean demands of a huge, long day on the flat. Of course, 2,673 kilometres in twenty-seven days wasn’t bad – in fact, every time I did the maths I found it very hard not to raise at least one arm above my head – but the most I’d managed in a single 24-hour period were the 151 wind-assisted kilometres to Agen. Farcical prologue and truncated time-trial aside, I hadn’t ever done what the real riders did in a day, and this was a wrong I felt a need to right.

  Setting off at 3 a.m. would of course be the key tactic, but a physical tune-up, my 2,700-kilometre service, was also imperative. ‘You honestly will need to have a massage,’ Simon O’Brien had said, and though he might easily have done so in anticipation of shameful misunderstandings involving the purveyors of executive relief, I had begun to agree with him. Mr Boardman’s stretches could do only so much for legs with a combined age of 72.

  Covertly examining page 187’s listed practitioners over an expensive croissant was a deeply traumatic experience. I could almost hear Simon sniggering as I ran a finger down the names. What would Francis Yoder get up to when I was face down on the trolley? Did I really want to hear Patrick Baumgartner cracking his oiled kn
uckles? And one only had to say the words ‘Denis Klingelschmitt’ to conjure a hellish inventory of complex and expensive ‘extras’. In the end, slightly depressed at my own predictability, I went back up to room 124 and, feeling my features pucker into a compact gurn of lust, dialled the number shared by Dominique and Delphine Masson.

  However, the call was answered by neither of Belfort’s sassiest twins, but a bored-sounding man. Oh. ‘Good morning. I am on a bicycle and my legs need attention,’ I said. It was a phrase I had honed during a sleepless dawn; not until now did I appreciate that its only appropriate home was in a conversation on an obscure premium-rate service. I had to say it twice more before the man answered, using a great many words whose gist, as I understood it, was that though ‘les Massons’ had recently left his practice, he himself would be happy to attend to me, though not until tomorrow, today being the ‘Pentecôte’.

  I wasn’t too sure about this last part, but it didn’t sound great. The impression was of a hood-wearing cult that forbade the rubbing of foreign flesh on the second Monday in June. Why had the Massons left? Had they known too much? I wasn’t going to wait an extra day so that some daubed, chanting fiend in a ram’s mask could nail me to a candle-bordered altar.

  Only when I’d been wandering about in the windy sun for an hour did I realise that even by French standards there were a lot of closed shops, and that this – combined with the fact that it was a Monday – suggested ‘Pentecôte’ might be Whitsun, and that today might therefore be a bank holiday. This meant another night in an expensive hotel and a further excruciating conversation with the Masson-murderer to arrange a massage appointment for 9 a.m. on Tuesday, but that was OK. The festival was still on and an extra day’s rest would prepare me well.

  Belfort was hungover. I’d heard the music banging on until dawn, and now there was vomit in the streets and a lot of traffic cones sticking out of a river so shallow that the ducks weren’t so much swimming across it as wading. A Grace Brothers-style department store, a horse butcher with the bust of a donkey nailed proudly over the door, a grubby Fascist-looking station ringed with grubbier kebab shops – Belfort was hard to love, but at the same time you couldn’t hate it. The sky was blue and already there were intimations of a holiday atmosphere.