PART OF THE TOUR PELOTON
Kate Wagner spent stage 19 on a race moto, experiencing the Tour up close
My helmet is far too big and I have to knot my hair in a bun to get it to be snug around my face. The driver speaks no English, but he’s good to me anyway.
I zip up the jacket, pocket my phone, which is all I’ve brought with me. I’ve never done this before.
Being on the back of a motorbike seems illegal but isn’t. Zip zip zip over the rolling hills and the only thing keeping you from certain death is some handles near your butt and the force of the air coming at you, giving you some stability, some false sense of security that’s easily reset every time you come to a speed bump. We stop at kilometre zero, pull off, and watch them gun it the second the commissaire waves their flag. It’s a technical course which is hot and fast. Once the peloton passes, we climb back on the motorbike and follow them, and suddenly it occurs to me that I am in the race, I am part of the race. What the riders see and what I see is no different, a realisation that seems more powerful than it is.
I understand completely how things were done before television, when correspondents narrated the whole thing, dictating into some obsolete technology, when the Tour had an air of panache and thrill. When there’s a crash, I’m the first to know, and as they scramble, I watch their struggle as some kind of voyeur. When I pass by them, they are so close, I could touch them. I can feel the way they move through the air, I can hear their conversations in piecemeal, in different languages, conversations between team-mates and rivals, nationals and foreigners, leaders and domestiques.
Most of my time on the moto is spent in the break, because I had a hunch that they’d win. It’s nice up there, to see them working together. You know that only a short time later, they’ll fracture, but for now there’s a tense peace.
As we pass the break for the last time, I scream at them, Allez allez! with hair in my mouth, and for 100 kilometres I’m immersed in a countryside not so different from the one where I grew up, full of rural folks and the smell of burnt pine needles. I know the riders are behind me; I’m all on my own, yet still being cheered on by strangers, probably as their first sign that the race, the throng, is coming. When we cross the finish line, there’s a sense of victory. My hands are sunburned when I raise them.