It’s time to wheel out the peaks, pelotons and punditry
YOU might have won yourself €500,000 this September, and had a nice holiday in France into the bargain if you’d been up for it. Mind you, you’d have had to ride some 3,500km, cycle up several mountains passes and do it all faster than anybody else.
But it’s too late now. The Tour de France today reaches Stage 14 Clermont-Ferrand to Lyon in the Auvergne region. Last time the Tour visited ClermontFerrrand, I really took to this old city, its dark buildings, its gothic cathedral that looms almost threateningly on a hill in the centre of town.
En route I’d stopped at an auberge ici et un hostelrie la, contemplating the countryside and reading a French detective novel (translated into English) called Voyages de Noces by Patrick Modiano. I wanted to get in touch with La France profonde, the character of the French, just as Le Tour does.
Now, a Modiano book is no crowd-pleasing whodunit. It’s the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon crime thriller vulgarity.
Detectives tend to veer off into existential meanderings — as indeed does the narrator of Voyages de Noces.
Inspector Jean B has learned that a woman has committed suicide in a hotel where he is enjoying a drink. Someone has rung neuf neuf neuf, but the barman can’t tell the gendarmes anything.
Jean does what any selfrespecting French detective should, leaves his wife, pretends he’s going to South America, and hides in Paris. Day and night, past and present, have no demarcations in his mind, and his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession. It doesn’t end particularly well. This really isn’t Murder, She Wrote.
But we have to put our books away now, prize ourselves out of the village café and concentrate on the cycling
Stage 15 on Sunday, Lyon to Grand Colombier. This is one of the great climbs in cycling, ascending to 1,501 metres, higher than Carrauntoohil.
The official Tour guide calls it ‘demanding’.
Of course only a fool would make a prediction as to the winner at this point.
So, here goes*: It looks like Primož Roglic (left), the Slovenian man who rides for the magnificently named Team Jumbo–Visma.
Le Tour de France is like chess — where the winner is the person who makes the second from last mistake. Roglic has steered clear of most mishaps, so could well be wearing the Yellow Jersey when the peloton wheels into Paris.
* Other pundits are available