In his own words
We stop at a bend for photographs. Opposite is a granite overhang with hundreds of metres of nothingness between it and the road upon which we’d started our ride
…RIDING AND WRITING I’m still riding and writing like hell. I was able to do a 246km ride in the Cevennes [in 2014] that incorporated parts of the [Tour du Mont Aigoual] route. I never saw myself as a journalist. I never had a job with a paper. I’m a writer – a fiction writer mostly – who did occasionally write for newspapers and magazines.
…FACT AND FICTION How can you say so firmly that the Tour du Mont Aigoual was a fictitious race? Anything a writer writes about reality instantly makes it fiction. Words lie, no matter how you try. I did ride a race that day, on those roads – but protesting the fictitiousness of that Tour does not mean I have to say how hard I tried. Whether that race is fiction or not, or to what degree, is beside the point.
…PAIN AND SUFFERING If you’re going to be a cyclist, you have to suffer. Why do cyclists celebrate it? Because it’s good bragging stuff. That is what Knetemann saw clearly – it’s up to us writers! Or to eloquent riders like himself. Suffering comes in thousands of forms, and it’s always different. Compare the suffering of winning solo to that of the weakest guy in a team time-trial. To speak about suffering is like speaking about wine – it’s almost disrespectful to any particular sort of suffering or wine. The Dutch have the perfect word for it, afzien, which has a different, more specific flavour. I think it originated in Flemish cycling jargon.
opposite direction: ‘At the window a lady in a cheap hat looks down at me in amazement. “The Tour of Causse Méjean was wunderschön, and then we saw a bicyclist by the name of Krabbé go hurtling into the abyss.”’
Feed zone
At the bottom of the descent and after passing through Meyrueis, the 53 riders in the Tour de Mont Aigoual started climbing again, but for Gerry and me it’s time for lunch on the outdoor terrace of a riverside restaurant. We are surrounded by tourists without bikes, of whom Krabbé observed: ‘The emptiness of those lives shocks me.’
Krabbé discovered the route of Tour de Mont Aigoual in 1973 when he moved to the nearby town of Anduze for a period of ‘cyclo-literary hermitry’. Anduze is also featured in the 1988 film version of another of Krabbé’s novels, The Vanishing. On the face of it, this tale of a man’s search for his girlfriend who disappears during a holiday has nothing in common with The Rider, except for the theme of suffering, which is notched up to unimaginably horrifying extremes. Another tenuous link is that the plot of the film – which Krabbé scripted and should not be confused with the saccharine 1993 Hollywood remake – unfolds against the backdrop of radio commentary from the 1984 Tour.
In view of what happens in The Vanishing, I’m slightly worried the Tour de Mont Aigoual might have a nasty twist in the tale. Gerry hasn’t read the book nor seen the film, so I’m left to recall the story’s dark conclusion on my own as we start the uphill slog to the second plateau of the day, the aptly named Causse Noir.
After 6km the road emerges from a forest into a landscape of rolling hills that ripple towards the horizon. ‘Uphill or down, you can’t sort it out, it drives you crazy,’ observes Krabbé.
It is here that he sees the ‘pretty girl’ who dares to shout encouragement to the riders. Krabbé takes an instant dislike to her, speculating that she knows the names of all the famous pro riders but ‘has no idea what a 43/19 is’.
This strikes Gerry and me as unduly harsh. It can’t have been much fun for a 16-year-old girl to have been waiting up here on this rain-spattered plateau in the pre-facebook age for a bunch of amateurs to go racing past.
After 10km on the Causse Noir, the road commences a steep, technical and frankly terrifying plunge towards
After 10km on the Causse Noir, the road commences a steep, technical and frankly terrifying plunge towards the village of Treves
the village of Treves. It demands fingers-on-levers concentration, although I dare to make brief glances to the deep, thickly forested chasm to our right.
During his descent, Krabbé pulls his feet out of his toe straps in case he should need them as extra brakes, suggesting that all Dutch riders ‘bear the mark’ of Wim van Est, who survived a spectacular crash into a Pyrenean ravine during the 1951 Tour.
At the bottom we turn left in the village of Treves and follow the road into the wooded depths of our third gorge of the day, the Trevezel. Soon we are engulfed by rock and trees as the road starts climbing. It’s a gentle gradient, but one that will rarely relent for the next 26km until we reach the summit of Mont Aigoual at 1,500m.
With not much of a view until we arrive at the chalets of Camprieu after 15km – where Krabbé wins 50 francs in the intermediate sprint – there’s plenty of time to consider his formula for ascending: ‘Climbing is a rhythm, a trance; you have to rock your organs’ protests back to sleep.’
Krabbé reaches the summit in the leading group of three. From here it’s 22km of mainly downhill to the finish, but for Krabbé the suffering is far from over. The wind is so cold he admits to ‘crying out loud’, which prompts the most oft-quoted passage from The Rider:
‘After the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature’s payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering.’
But on the way down, there’s a reminder that not all suffering can be explained away in poetic niceties. We arrive at the crossroads at the Col de Perjuret where, during the 1960 Tour, Roger Riviere, the 24-year-old world Hour record holder, crashed while descending and broke his back, never to ride again. Gerry and I freewheel the few kilometres down to the spot where the crash happened. A handsome monument has been erected as a tribute to Riviere, who died from cancer aged 40.
We ride back to the crossroads and continue down the other side to Meyrueis, where the sun is starting to sink behind the jumble of towers, belfries and spires.
Spoiler alert
The Tour de Mont Aigoual ends in a tightly contested sprint finish involving 34-year-old Krabbé and a 19-yearold called Reilhan. Gerry and I have calculated the finish line to be near the town’s war memorial, and Juan the photographer is keen for us to give the sprint full gas.
Juan isn’t happy with any of our repeated takes. He wants to capture the essence of The Rider, a book all about pain and suffering. But on every frame he shoots the expression on my face is one of unmitigated joy.
The Tour de Mont Aigoual – ridden at a non-competitive pace – has been an absolute pleasure. Trevor Ward is a freelance writer who regularly suffers for his art. The Rider is published by Bloomsbury