“THE LAST 8KM TOOK NEARLY TWO HOURS …”
Suffering for fun on Mont Ventoux
Forget the 21 hairpins of Alpe d’Huez, the mad mountain of Vaucluse had me by the throat
Some 20 years ago, when my unrequited crush on cycling was getting serious, Ventoux was the first mountain to grip me. Forget the smoothly engineered Alpe d’Huez with its 21 hairpins, Lance Armstrong versus Marco Pantani on the mad mountain of the Vaucluse was a rocket-fuelled sight that had me by the throat. And in the corrugations of the Lammermuir Hills in the Scottish Borders I discovered my own version of Ventoux: Duns Law. About the only thing they held in common was that they were both wooded at the bottom and exposed at the top, but in my callowness, with legs that trembled like fresh grass stalks at all but the mildest of gradients, it was steep and forbidding. Thinking back, I remember it had its own version of the Saint-Estève bend too, that point at the bottom of the genuine article where the climb stops pissing about and the scorpion’s back becomes its venomous tail.
Two decades on, a large part of the latter one spent following professional cycling at relatively close quarters, and I still hadn’t been to the summit of the Tour’s most notorious mountain. I’d never seen the Tom Simpson memorial decorated with votive bidons or experienced the blinding sun reflected off the bare broken rock. The closest I’d got were two dog-day July afternoons spent on the Tour de France, gently and quietly expiring in a stifling press tent at the foot of the climb. I was there by proxy, but not really experiencing the character of the race’s most charismatic mountain, which loomed above and vibrated with half a million, beerfuelled, sun-crazed fans as if cicadas had taken human form. Both times Chris Froome was a central figure. He won there in 2013 with an attack during which his legs revolved like a Magimix. You’ll remember that three years later in a crush of humanity he crashed into the back of a motorbike, broke his bike and then started running. What scenes. God, Ventoux and the Tour is a mad cocktail.
So when a brand-new, one-day professional race that finished on the summit coincided with the Santini Gran Fondo Mont Ventoux (they’re organised by the same crew) a chance arose to strike a couple of entries off my cycling to-do list.
Dead man cycling
Early on a Sunday morning in mid-June, the pretty Provençal town of Vaison-la-Romaine was filled with 2600 jerseys approaching the colour of the green-blue sky. It’s obligatory to wear the jersey, and that’s fine because it’s a lovely one by
Santini, who sponsors the event. The jerseys congregated in a long channel on the Avenue de Charles de Gaulle facing out of town and away from the mountain. The less we could see it the better, perhaps.
The Ventoux massif sits at a roughly north west-south east axis and Vaison is at the north west end. The route of the 135km event I’d put my name forward for described a wobbly fish-hook shape. The non-pointy bit travelled along a corniche road through the Toulourenc Gorges, which forms the border between the Vaucluse and the Drôme départements. That day, in that weather those opening kilometres were glorious. There are a couple of light climbs, including the stacked hairpins of the Col des Aire, before the sportive distances diverged at around 40km.
At the fork, there was a feed stop, the first of a series of ravitos that came with ever-increasing frequency, and it gave me time to reconsider my decision. The right choice would mean another 40-odd kilometres to the top of Ventoux on the sneaky ascent via Sault, which is 21km at ‘only’ 7 per cent. The wrong choice meant a 10km entree over the Col de l’Homme Mort, a name which requires no translation, before hooking back around and tackling Ventoux via Bedoin. I went left, up the Dead Man.
Lapierre Bikes, who sponsors the sportive, graciously lent me a steed – a lovely brand new Xelius 700 SL with a SRAM Force eTap groupset. They’d even tuned it up perfectly before I arrived. What I was interested in was the cassette. My motto was the bigger the better and happily there was a frisbee-sized lowest gear, a 32-tooth sprocket. I found I didn’t need it on the Homme Mort which is 11.6km at 4.9 per cent.
Egg on your face
The best thing about the Homme Mort was the view it afforded of Ventoux. From every angle it really is a staggering bit of geology, an aberration – the malevolent egg of the Vaucluse. Even from the safe distance of the Homme Mort, Ventoux looks threatening. According to a 2016 news article in the French daily Liberation, between three and 10 cyclists die of heart attacks on Ventoux each year, not to mention the hikers and skiers who also meet their maker in the baking heat, freezing cold and howling winds the mountain is famed for.
It is worth acknowledging that not all routes should necessarily lead to Ventoux. On this side of the mountain in the early morning, the deserted undulations were as strenuous as the rider wished to make them. Plus, the villages are so well-geared towards our two-wheeled tribe, with their welcoming cafés, water fountains and shady streets, it may sometimes be tempting not to put a drill to the head and start climbing.
The wrong choice meant 10km over the Col de l’Homme Mort... I went up the Dead Man