20:20 Vision: Riding the roads of next year's World Champs
With the Yorkshire World Champs imminent, Trevor Ward looks ahead by riding in the Vaud region of Switzerland, which will play host to the event in 2020
Idon’t know if actor Roger Moore ever rode a bike, but I do know he was the best James Bond we ever had.
His eyebrows alone had more acting talent than Connery, Brosnan and Craig put together. So it was a major disappointment to ride through the luxury Swiss resort of Gstaad, where he lived for many years, and find there is no monument to the great man, not even a restaurant called Live and Let Pie or The Man With The Golden Bun.
Fortunately, Switzerland – specifically the canton of Vaud, which will host next year’s Road World Championships – has so much more to offer both Bond fans and road cyclists. Here are 007 reasons why riding in this part of the world is a license to thrill…
MIND BLOWING MOUNTAINS
As every cyclist knows, the only way down is up, and there is no shortage of climbing in this region, although it doesn’t always have to be knee-crunching steep. The two towering landmarks we became familiar with during our stay were the Diablerets massif – a snowblanketed range whose 3210-metre summit is the highest point in this part of Switzerland - and Les Dents du Midi, a range of seven peaks, or ‘teeth’, that dominates the southern skyline. Although we didn’t climb anywhere quite as high, the cols we conquered were never far from the shadow of either of these rather dramatic spectacles.
The climb to the Col du Pillon at 1562 metres – five kilometres from our hotel in the village of Les Diablerets with a gradient hovering around nine per cent – takes you to the foot of the cable car that accesses the evocatively-named Sex Rouge glacier, part of the Diablerets massif. This is a testing climb that can be extended by another 17 kilometres should you find yourself starting from the Rhône valley at Aigle.
Even more challenging – again from Les Diablerets – was the 9km, seven per cent average haul up to the Col de la Croix. It gets steeper in the middle before you emerge via a couple of hairpins into an arena of pastures where the sound of cowbells echoes from the soaring escarpments.
SILKY SMOOTH ROADS
The roads may tilt up or down a lot of the time, but they are consistently well-surfaced and the flow of traffic is never obtrusive. Our guide Alain Rumpf also had an encyclopaedic
knowledge of every back road and scenic short cut throughout the Alpes Vaudoises, so we spent many kilometres on single-lane roads that took us to hidden, Alpine corners far from the hum of motorised traffic. The scenic highlights included a ‘warm-up’ loop – only 25 kilometres but with nearly 800 metres of climbing – on the first day that took us along a succession of narrow lanes and through villages of ornate wooden chalets, all in the shadow of the Diablerets. The only motorised traffic we saw was a tractor and one of Switzerland’s famed mountain trains.
The scenery was even more dramatic on our last day when we rode from the valley floor up to the picture-postcard village of Les Planssur-Bex. After stopping to refill our bottles at one of the many fountains dispensing ice-melt water direct from the nearest Alpine glacier, we took the single-lane road that tilted upwards at over 10 per cent and arrived on a ‘balcony’ offering breath-taking views of just about every Swiss postcard cliché in the book, apart from Toblerone, cuckoo clocks and Roger Federer. The panorama of forested slopes, timber chalets, grazing cattle and ribbons of road spiralling down into deep valleys would have sent Roger Moore’s eyebrows into a twitching frenzy (although what literally took our breath away was a cheeky 27-per-cent ramp Alain had in store for us just a kilometre from our hotel).
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE CLIMBS
Yes, whisper it, but Switzerland does flat too, and it’s far from boring. The Rhône Valley extends south from Lake Geneva. Though flanked by dramatic mountain scenery, vineyards and the occasional château – the handsome castle at Aigle dates back to the 14th century – it is a major transport thoroughfare, traversed by motorways, railways and the river itself. However, an extremely good network of bike paths extending along the Rhône means you never have to spend too long on busy roads. You just have to keep an eye out for locals speeding along on their e-bikes (very popular in this part of the world).
Using these well-surfaced bike paths and smaller roads, you can fit a ‘recovery ride’ inbetween your more mountainous days.
It’s possible to ride to a beautiful park on the shores of Lake Geneva – where the local army regiment was having a drill practise on the day we arrived – or visit the HQ of the UCI – Union Cycliste International – in Aigle without having to spend any time in heavy traffic.
YOU MIGHT MEET A PRO
One other quirk of these bike paths is that they are riddled with Strava segments, and the leaderboards feature some of the most famous names in cycling. Okay, Swiss riders like Steve Morabito and national champion Sébastien Reichenbach live locally, but other pro riders such as Greg van Avermaet and Chris Froome have visited the UCI HQ at some point and haven’t been able to resist the urge to collect a few KoMs on the roads nearby. There will be even more names from the pro peloton when the week-long Road World Championships roll
into town next September, so now’s the time to go hunting that KoM.
IT’ S THE HOME OF CYCLING
That huge, silver flying saucer on the banks of the River Rhone just outside Aigle is the HQ of professional cycling’s governing body, the UCI. As well as coming up with essential rules about the weight of bike frames and the length of riders’ socks, the UCI also hosts athletes whose home federations can’t a ord to o er them elite-level training (as was the case when Chris Froome came here from Kenya in 2007).
I don’t know if it’s the same at FIFA or the International Olympic Committee, but the UCI has a café open to the public and even a gift shop. The risotto I bought was largely inedible – the riders must have their own private canteen elsewhere in the building – and the gift shop o ered an uninspiring and expensive selection of T-shirts, musettes and mugs, but the velodrome is worth a look as you may see some stars of the future in action. Amongst the lesser nations represented on the day we visited were Lesotho, Thailand, Eritrea, Paraguay and Suriname. There’s also a Hall of Fame featuring names as diverse as Federico Bahamontes and Victoria Pendleton.
Our guide Alain Rumpf worked at the UCI for 20 years. “I became employee number nine in 1994”, he told us “and was its first WorldTour manager before being made redundant with a third of the workforce when Brian Cookson became President. “He came in with a clean brush. I was upset, of course, because I didn’t know what I would do, but now I see it was a good thing,” he says. “I now ride my bike more than I ever did when I worked there.”
…AND THE HOME OF CHEESE TOO
Alain also revealed that his family owns a micro-share in one of the many vineyards that adorn the lower slopes of the Rhône valley. Though we never got to sample anything from the Rumpf cellars, the Swiss red wine we did try was surprisingly good, a robust accompaniment to the rich cheese and meat dishes we were served.
The Swiss really do love their cheese. Halfway up the Col des Mosses – a 12km-long gentle and scenic drag to an altitude of 1445 metres that has featured five times in the Tour de France – Alain insisted we stop at the cheesemaking cooperative in L’Etivaz, the heartland of Alpine cheese production.
Here, we had to don white plastic overcoats and hairnets before being escorted into the cold, dank cellars where up to 30,000 ‘wheels’ of cheese – with a combined value of up to 18 million Swiss francs (about £14.6 million) – are stored and matured for up to three years. Four high-tech robots patrol the shelves, salting and turning the cheese at regular intervals.
After emerging blinking and click-clacking into the sunlight, we were served a platter of sample cheeses, arranged in order of age. The general consensus was that the tastiest, smokiest and saltiest were at the older end of the scale.
Every restaurant we visited also featured cheese on its menu, usually served in the form of a fondue or croute, though I preferred the rösti, a potato fritter-like concoction served with a choice of meats. I enjoyed a particularly fine example of this, rösti a la vaudoise – a gutbusting combination of potatoes, cheese, bacon and eggs - at the Rôtisserie des Alpes across the road from our hotel in Villars-sur-Ollon.
With so many huge cows luxuriating in spacious, fertile meadows and grazing on fresh, natural bounty, I couldn’t resist trying
“This is a testing climb that can be extended by another 17 kilometres should you find yourself starting from the Rhone valley at Aigle”
the steak when we visited the Refuge de Solalex, a rustic, wooden cabin at the head of a spectacular valley. My pink-tinged fillet of prime Simmental beef didn’t disappoint and nor did the views from our outdoor table as the pastel hues of the mountains in front of us deepened with the setting sun.
THE TRAINS REIGN SUPREME
In most parts of Europe, the downside of cycling in the high mountains is the act of getting there. Public transport from the airport will be limited leaving cyclists little choice but to hire a car and put yourself at the mercy of a sat nav system that might not even speak your language. With the Vaud region of Switzerland, however, there are no such concerns thanks largely to an extensive network of mountain railways.
We stayed in two villages during our trip to Switzerland, Les Diablerets and Villars-surOllon, both of which are snuggled high in the Alpes Vaudoises, yet both were easily accessible from Geneva airport by train.
“The views from our outdoor table didn’t disappoint as the pastel hues of the mountains in front of us deepened with the setting sun”
You take a direct train from the airport to Aigle, before transferring to a smaller, local train that winds its way up the slopes via a series of scenic zig-zags. There’s plenty of room for bike boxes, too, and the trains operate with truly fearsome Swiss e ciency.
Even if you are travelling with a non-cycling partner, there is absolutely no need to consider hiring a car, as the same trains link other picturesque villages and attractions. The other benefit of the Swiss mountain railway system is that, depending on your route, you are never far from a train station should the going get too tough for you on the bike and you need an easy ride home.
Returning – as we began – with thoughts of Roger Moore, the actor reprised his James Bond role in a TV advert for Swiss National Railways in 1994, with the slogan, ‘The name is card, half-price discount card’, though Moore later complained that he still had to pay full fare when he used the trains.
For the rest of us, a Swiss Travel Pass is available, giving unlimited travel on trains, buses and ferries with the price depending on the number of days covered. Full details can be found at: swisstravelsystem.co.uk.
For more information about cycling in the Alpes Vaudoises, including routes, guides, bike hire and accommodation, visit: alpes.ch/en/home-en. For general tourist information about Switzerland:
MySwitzerland.com. Finally, thanks to our guide Alain Rumpf: aswisswithapulse.com