French Renaissance Read online

  For my parents

  Contents

  Introduction

  I: 13 July 1967 . . .

  PART 1

  Winter

  Kilometre Zero

  Carpe Diem

  II: I first started riding . . .

  Foaming at the Mouth

  III: You never forget your first Tour de France . . .

  PART 2

  Summer

  IV: I was bowled over . . .

  Eddy

  V: Eddy’s a great rider . . .

  VI: I love Corsica . . .

  Golden Years

  The Accidental Grand Tourist

  The Americans

  PART 3

  VII: Marseille

  Gone in 60 Seconds

  The Light That Never Goes Out

  VIII: White sky above me . . .

  Autumn

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Glossary of Names

  Index

  Introduction

  Visible from the Alps, from the Pyrenees and from 35,000 feet, Mont Ventoux is a mountain so singular, so identifiable, that pilots flying south towards Italy and the Côte d’Azur use its bleached summit as a reference point. The vast, unmistakable bulk of the ‘Giant of Provence’ dominates the rolling landscape of the Drôme and Vaucluse regions of the south of France. The gruelling ascent has become one of the most feared and revered climbs in cycling.

  This is a history of the significance of the Ventoux, to the development of professional cycling and, more intimately, to those whose lives, like my own, have been enriched, defined or shaped by their experience of it. It is based largely on collective memory, on conversations and recollections, encounters and interviews. It is a personal interpretation of events and histories, some public, some private.

  Some of those histories are well documented, some passed on by word of mouth, some by rare photography and some, too, preserved digitally. In this book, parts of that narrative are accelerated, other parts slowed or paused and revisited in greater detail. As such, it is subjective – a snapshot, a single frame, taken from one perspective.

  That is particularly relevant with the dramas that have been provoked by its brutality and by its part in the death of British cyclist Tom Simpson in July 1967. The debate over how Simpson should be remembered – as flawed but courageous hero or as another example of professional sport’s ongoing ethical malaise – will continue long after this book has been digested. His story is not the raison d’être of this book, but the Simpson tragedy – in an era of naivety and lawlessness – ensures that, of all the mountains in cycling, it is the Ventoux that casts the longest shadow.

  Of all the renowned climbs in cycling, it is the Ventoux that is both inspirational and intimidating; it is the Ventoux that has the richest history; it is the Ventoux that most embodies both the grandeur and the darkness of professional racing.

  That is why my fascination with the Giant is so enduring.

  I

  13 July 1967

  White light. The bleached sky pulled taut by the heat. The bleached sky, taut like a drum.

  There’s no blue any more, not up here. Not like the blue down by the sea, on the beach, all kids screaming, ice creams and cold beers. Up here, it’s just white. Like I’m on the Moon or something.

  There’s salt crusted around my lips, baked onto my face, salt in my eyes. No sweat any more, just salt. Maybe it’s too hot to sweat. That’s funny, eh? Too hot to sweat, you reckon, eh, Tom?

  It’s too bloody hot to do anything, let alone ride up the sodding Ventoux. I should be on the beach in Corsica with Helen and the kids. Anywhere but here. I hate this bloody place. So bleak. Just salt and dust, like in a desert.

  I’ve been here before, but it’s never been this bad, never been this dry. So much noise buzzing all around me, a right din. Bloody shouting, bloody helicopters, bloody motorbikes, bloody buzzing insects.

  ‘Come on, Tom!’

  ‘Allez Tommy . . .’

  Leave me be. I’m fine. Just keeping it going, pushing on, turning it over.

  How much longer?

  Maybe five minutes, or so, maybe a bit less if I can keep this going. Keep this up, then chuck it down the other side sharpish.

  One last push, tick the bastard off, then get down the other side, get back on the front. I’m rapid going down – I’m quick enough, I’ll catch back on.

  Why am I not sweating? I should be sweating cobs – five miles to the gallon, pouring into my bloody shoes, soaking my socks, like that time I had to wring them out in the sink.

  Blow me, though, my guts. I’ve had it with feeling this rough, day after day. I thought they’d be sorted out by now. But it’s always the same on the Tour. My guts, my breathing, the salt in my eyes, the salt in my mouth, and then there’s my head, banging like a drum.

  Nothing left in the bottles either. No more of anything. All gone, ages ago. Now I need water. No bars up here, though, Tom, no bars on the bloody moon.

  Keep it going, keep pushing. How far have I got left now? Up here, you can’t really tell. Probably a bit over two, then down the other side, bastard ticked off, into Carpentras, job done.

  Just keep it going. Get it over with. Forget that bloody drum.

  I know they’re all watching me, waiting for me to crack. They’ve been waiting for that to happen for days. In the cars, on the motorbikes, Plaud in the French bloody team car. Now even Aimar’s staring at me! Is he mad?

  ‘Take it easy, Tom! Are you all right, Tom? Have some water, Tom!’ – blah blah blah, like I’m struggling. Like I’m bloody done for.

  I can hear it all, all the bloody buzzing around me. And I can still just make them out up ahead, the hunched, rocking shoulders, just up this godforsaken hill.

  Don’t you worry – I’m keeping tabs, keeping it ticking over. But I can’t breathe, can’t see anything – just the white rock, the white light. And the white sky above me, as white as the skin of a bloody drum.

  The drum banging inside my head.

  PART 1

  ‘The mountains provided a mythic kingdom, an alternative world in which you could reinvent yourself as whoever you wanted. Nonetheless, it didn’t matter how you imagined yourself or the mountains: the landscape could still kill you.’

  – ROBERT MACFARLANE, Mountains of the Mind

  Winter

  During the night, the freezing rain that pelted down on the cat-black autoroutes and deserted retail parks of the Rhône valley fell delicately and silently above 1,000 metres, as gigantic snowflakes blessing holy ground. The next morning, as a low sun struggled to break through, the Giant’s summit was icy white, dusted with snow, from the tree line to the barren frozen summit.

  Far below Mont Ventoux, I sat drinking bitter coffee in a village café, clad in layers of thermals, my toes already frozen, wondering if I really wanted to reconnect with the suffering that had typified all the previous mornings and afternoons I’d spent toiling on those slopes. And I wondered too, as ever, if I was really ready, once again, to ride the road that killed Tom Simpson. I knew, deep down, that over the years I never really had been.

  At least, for once, there was no wind.

  Wind and the Ventoux are old mates, old muckers, old bedfellows. That unrelenting whipping wind, that loathsome Mistral, it drives you mad they say – whips away your placemat, knocks over blackboard menus, blows campervans off mountains, blows cyclists off the Giant. If the heat doesn’t get you, the Mistral – the wind that picks up, builds to a frenzy and then dies at a moment’s notice – will.

  I drank the last of the coffee, pulled my thermal mufflers tighter still around my extremities and set off, from Bédoin on the
road that put paid to Tom, that put Eddy Merckx in an ambulance, that forced a crazed Ferdi Kübler to quit, that made Chris Froome run. This then, is the climb of L’Équipe’s ‘killer mountain’.

  It’s not so bad at first – really, it’s not. You start to wonder what all the fuss is about. The views of the Vaucluse in winter are beautiful as you climb up from Bédoin past the hamlets of Les Baux and St Colombe. On this winter morning, it was all woodsmoke, low sun, silhouetted vines, churned earth and morning-blue hills rolling south towards the distant Luberon.

  The first real pain – shocking to the mind as well as the body – comes at St Estève, on a steep left-hand corner as famous for slaloming Porsches, Abarths and BMWs as for the sudden crippling degeneration in morale of a million Lycra-clad wannabes. It’s a brutal bend, one that the French poetically describe as ‘un petit enfer’ – a little hell. It is a bend so savage that it immediately fuels self-doubt. This is the bend of which Eros Poli, stage winner over the Ventoux in 1994’s Tour de France, said: ‘I thought I was dying.’

  I hate this bend.

  I hate it because it immediately highlights limitations. It takes your vanity, your silly dreams, and hurls them heartlessly to the tarmac. And as you turn through it onto the steep ramp, you can look up, almost vertically, craning your neck to take in the distant, pitiless summit. Perhaps a sadistic road engineer thought to himself: ‘One day Eros Poli, the biggest, tallest, heaviest man in cycling, will ride here thinking of glory and wealth and his heart will drop out of his chest and onto the very road itself when he sees what I have created!’

  Famous climbers – Fausto Coppi and Charly Gaul – have been pictured here, as have many two-wheeled donkeys, of which I am the latter. If a photographer had been here this clear and icy morning his lens would have captured me, swathed in thermals and wearing a Munch-like expression, open-mouthed and wide-eyed in appalled horror.

  I steadied my nerves and winched myself uphill. Thankfully, I was alone, or at least had thought I was, until two women in Dutch colours skipped past me, out of the saddle as the road reared up, riding like twins, elegantly matching each other’s swaying pedal strokes. They moved ahead and out of sight, dancing on the pedals, light as feathers.

  After St Estève, there is no pleasure to be had: the ride becomes purely about pain management. I plodded on, deep into the thick forest, bright winter sunshine overhead, snow melt trickling down the gutter as the interminable ribbon of steep tarmac stretched ahead.

  I hauled myself up and through the 12 per cent hairpin of the Virage du Bois. Unlike so many other famous climbs, the Ventoux’s south side has few bends. Hairpins help a cyclist in distress: the gradient eases momentarily and the novelty of pedalling through 180 degrees fuels the sense of momentum. Unlike the multiple hairpins on the climbs of Alpe d’Huez, or the Stelvio, the Virage du Bois doesn’t really do that. In fact, it offers false hope, because within seconds you are staring at another runway of vertical road and battling the gradient again.

  I rode on, watching trees sprout leaves faster than I could turn the pedals. My breath formed clouds in the icy air. I knew I had a few more minutes of pain to manage. I knew that the road would be closed by snow beyond Chalet Reynard, where I would stop at the old café to refuel and warm up with coffee and homemade myrtille tart.

  Melting snow plopped off overhanging branches onto the road ahead. My mind wandered as I turned the pedals against the gradient. Just keep pushing, I told myself.

  I thought of the one time I’d come up here with my parents, on their last foreign holiday, the autumn before my mother was lost to dementia and before caring for her around the clock put paid to my dad. Dad never understood my fascination with cycling. He was an architect, who emerged from London’s post-war East End with a roll of drawings and a burning need to right social wrongs. The exotica of the Tour de France was as familiar to him as the carnival in Rio.

  Once on holiday, after a long lunch in Malaucène, we’d driven round to Bédoin and headed up the mountain.

  ‘Did you really cycle all the way up here?’ he’d asked quietly as we passed a weaving rider close to the summit.

  ‘Yes, Dad – a few times,’ I said.

  He took in the barren scene.

  ‘Goodness me,’ he said. We never talked about the Ventoux again.

  I slowed to a halt in front of Chalet Reynard, altitude 1,426 metres, the café-refuge first opened in 1927, and straightened my back. I settled in front of the fire, toes tingling and peeled off layers of sweat-soaked Lycra, hanging them over a wooden chair to dry. The myrtille tart, freshly baked and warm, crumbled as I bit into it.

  Kilometre Zero

  ‘Don’t leave Provence without enjoying the tour of Mont-Ventoux – altitude 1,912 metres – the Giant of Provence,’ proclaims the old poster, now to be found on the wall of every holiday home, gite, hotel, chambre d’hôtes, restaurant and bar within a 50-kilometre radius of ‘Windy’.

  I still sometimes refer to the Ventoux as ‘Windy’. It’s an old habit.

  Yes, there’s a rather tedious argument over the origin of the name Ventoux that says, ‘Ah, just because vent means wind it does not follow that Ventoux derives from that word’ – and more of that fascinating debate later tonight on Radio 4 – yet the pass just below the top of the Ventoux, although rather confusingly not actually the summit itself, is also called the Col des Tempêtes.

  That would suggest that windiness, and stormy weather generally, are connected to the mountain’s name. For me, windy mountain, famed for blowing over campervans and cyclists, works perfectly. In late autumn and early spring, when the summit is hidden by clouds, and the Mistral rattles shutters and doors, ‘Vent-oooooh!’ has real resonance.

  The gushing prose on the art-deco poster, originally produced by Les Frères Rulliere in Avignon, continues further extolling the delights of a day out on the Ventoux.

  ‘The most beautiful panorama in Europe,’ it states. ‘Visibility as far as 275 kilometres, from the French and Italian Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.

  ‘And that’s without mentioning the famous culinary specialities of the Hotel du Mont Ventoux – proprietor Raoul Vendran, reasonable prices, no more or less expensive than in the valley – with modern comfort and a Provençal atmosphere.’

  The building is still there, just 250 metres from the summit. Now it’s the Café Vendran, closed in the winter, when snowfall usually blocks the road up from Chalet Reynard, but open in high season for hikers and bikers needing breakfast, lunch, cognac or coffee.

  The café – and the summit itself – has mixed reviews on TripAdvisor that are at odds with the romantic prose churned out in praise of Ventoux by French sportswriters (and these days, some British ones).

  ‘The summit of Mont Ventoux is a fairly grim place,’ reads one, ‘where hordes of weary cyclists and disappointed tourists stumble around the rocky wastes wondering why they came.’

  Another review, written in French, really puts the boot in:

  ‘. . . there are no public toilets at this world famous summit, frequented each day by hundreds of sportspeople. The men can go and relieve themselves in the wilderness, but what about the women?’

  True, French men often relieve themselves alfresco, although there are no bushes to hide behind and, anyway, it would be foolhardy to do so in a gusting Mistral.

  ‘There are a few stalls selling sweets and sugary treats, but nothing healthy for an athlete. One restaurant, the Vendran, has toilets that are dirty – I’ve known cleaner toilets in Turkey! – and without toilet paper . . .’

  This, then, is a book about the mountain of my dreams. It’s horrendously steep and appallingly windy, desolate and forbidding, sells overpriced tat, is streaked with windblown piss and, even worse, there’s no toilet paper.

  It’s probably haunted too, not just by Tom Simpson, Ferdi Kübler, Fausto Coppi, Laurent Fignon and the other legends of the Tour de France who have done battle here and lost, but also by the numerous touring cycli
sts, walkers, hippies and day-trippers who failed to properly respect it. And forgot to go to the loo first . . .

  Mont Ventoux is the final Alp, the last peak before the pines give way to the arid thickets of maquis and, eventually, the salted humidity of the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Mediterranean. Ventoux is the last giant ripple in a rumpled geological quilt.

  It exists in other-worldly isolation, an aberration of nature, a child’s fantasy mountain of strange flora and fauna, dark forests and wild animals, eerie deserts and astral winds, topped off with a cartoonish meteorological observatory that looks like Tintin’s rocket to the moon.

  It has a schizophrenic, wilful climate that can be bestial, hateful and brutal. It is a climb so severe that it has brought Tour de France champions to tears and delirium, as both Fignon and Kübler testified. Most notoriously, it can kill and does so on an alarmingly regular basis.

  There are many clichés used to describe an ascent of the Ventoux. I like to think of it as cathartic, liberating, cleansing, redemptive. For others, however, it is, by turns, forbidding, monstrous, diabolical and murderous. Google ‘Mont Ventoux’ and within a few seconds the search spits out descriptions of it as the ‘death climb’. Nepal has Everest and the ‘death zone’: Provence has Ventoux and the ‘death climb’.

  Jean Bobet, the brother of triple Tour de France champion Louison Bobet, and also an accomplished writer, described the experience of approaching the Ventoux in the heat of July 1955 as ‘a lingering death’.

  ‘Nothing is more impressive than a silent peloton. Nobody says a word, nobody laughs. Lifting your head slightly, you can make out the shape, in the distance, of the Ventoux. You can smell the fear of the men going to a lingering death,’ he wrote.

  In fact, so treacherous is the mountain that fatalities are almost commonplace – it is a playground but it can be a dangerous one. ‘Every year there’s a few people who die on the Ventoux,’ says Éric Caritoux, one of France’s best-known cyclists during the 1980s, who grew up and still lives in Flassan, at the very foot of the mountain.