RIDE DOWN MEMORY LANE
NED BUMPS INTO REMINDERS OF TOURS PAST DURING THIS YEAR’S RACE
The story of how I came to be standing in a field, close to midnight, with an oyster in one hand, a microphone in the other, singing an Elvis ballad to former French pro Richard Virenque is just one of a whole host of memories, some slightly fuzzier than others, which I will take away from my fifteenth Tour de France.
Even if the exact sequence of events which led me to croon for the former King of the Mountains while digesting shellfish is too complex and intricate to merit inclusion here (it went, in summary: lunch, wine, bike ride, flat tyre, pétanque, Virenque), there were many more that, alongside the race, will endure in my recollection of 2017’s race.
Some of them only tangentially cross paths with the Tour, literally. One morning, not far from the foot of the climb to La Planche des Belles Filles in the Vosges Mountains, David Millar and I stumbled out of the hotel, and almost straight into an architectural wonder – Le Corbusier’s iconic Notre Dame en Haut. Ignorant of the fact that we had been staying so close to it, we discovered that our guest house had been used by the architect while building was being completed.
We were the first, and only, visitors at nine o’clock that morning. Walking into its austere silence on our own was an extraordinary, and unexpected, privilege, and when the chapel was revealed in all its glory from a helicopter shot later that afternoon we felt a personal and direct connection to what we saw, as the race flew past its white walls and soaring roof.
Then there were the faint traces of repetition; the echoes of previous Tours, reverberating faintly as the routes crisscross on previous incarnations. A hotel on the outskirts of Liege was only half familiar to me as I checked in late one evening. It was only over breakfast, walking in to the dining room that smelt of croissants, bad coffee and déjà vu, that I realised I had spent three nights there before the 2004 Tour got underway, sharing the hotel with Lance Armstrong and his US Postal team. On one occasion, I ended up getting in the smallest lift in Belgium with the (at the time) five-time winner of the Tour de France and Sheryl Crow, his girlfriend of that summer. Lost for anything to say, I think I teetered very close to getting her name wrong, and in my panic came within a hair’s breadth of calling her Shirley. When we got to Paris that year, one of our team did actually call her Shirley, to her face.
That hotel near the finish of stage two also reminded me of a key moment in my understanding of the sport, and in David Millar’s personal story. I recalled having to leave it, two days before the 2004 Prologue, drive to Paris, and doorstep Millar as he appeared before a magistrate to answer charges of doping offences. We drove all the way back, reaching our Liege hotel close to midnight.
Thirteen years later, I sat in the same place, this time with Millar
We constantly tripped over former incarnations of ourselves
present, the other side of his self-inflicted journey, and now a trusted colleague and friend. It was astonishing to be reminded of the passage of time that separated those two races, and how much had changed.
As the race continued we constantly tripped over former incarnations of ourselves and the race. There was the almost annual return to Pau, and to Luchon; reminders of drug raids, drama and duck breasts in cherry sauce.
We stopped in on Romans-sur-Isère, a humble place with a beautiful name, where I ended up sitting at the same table on the same terrace eating the same thing as I had on our previous visit, some ill-defined number of years ago. This time, nothing had changed.
That is the Tour de France; a meandering journey through the past, with sudden, acutely vivid flashes of the present breaking into the flow. When the race exploded, when the yellow jersey crashed, cracked, attacked, when the violence of the sprint unfolded or the race blew apart in crosswinds, then we were reminded of the foreground, wonderful and unpredictable as it was.
All the while France ticked by in the background. Although I have forgotten most of the details already, it was, as it always is, an unforgettable experience.