Rice cakes, potholes and terrifying descents – how the Tour looks up close
Unique insight into race only reinforces power and pain of an exercise in self-flagellation
Watch the competitors at the 106th Tour de France up close, and what strikes you is the sheer, desperate agony of it all. It was writ large on Simon Yates as he crossed the line to win Sunday’s stage at Prat d’albis, and on the chasing peloton as each rider scrambled for every last second.
The Tour de France is an exercise in self-flagellation, one that stretches its participants to the limit and then asks them to burst through it. Even those who have conquered it, and loved it, do not miss it. “It’s like when you are in a happy, new relationship, and look back on time with an ex-partner,” says Andy Schleck, the winner in 2010. “Did you love them at the time? Yes. Would you want to go back to them? No way.”
The toll taken by the Tour – physically and mentally – is well chronicled. Yet few beyond competitors and team members past and present can truly appreciate what competing on the Tour involves, while only diehard fans can articulate why the race retains such mystique.
All of which explains why, on Sunday morning, I found myself wandering an already scorching hot team paddock in the southern town of Limoux, a sleepy little place besieged for the day by hundreds of fans who milled around, camera phones at the ready, desperate for a glimpse of the cyclists gathering at the start line for stage 15.
The crowds were already hundreds strong, and bemused locals were at their windows and balconies, peering suspiciously at the throng. Our driver for the day, 1989 British road cycling champion Tim Harris, guided us through the team areas, giving his take on mechanical variations of bikes locked on to team car roofs, and introducing us to the backroom staff who make the race happen.
First we mingled with Team Ineos, meeting Carsten Jeppesen, head of technical operations and commercial, who showed us a phone video of the injured Chris Froome, who was busy racking up 130 watts on his cycling machine with just one leg back at home. “Good old Froomey, he’s on it.”
Next we moved to Mitcheltonscott’s area, where team member Joachim Schoonacker was loading a car with supplies. They pack 150 500ml chilled water bottles for their eight riders, and will meet them at the 100-kilometre mark to hand out food goodie bags to refuel as they ride. Yates’s win later that day suggests Schoonacker’s homemade rice cakes did the trick.
Steven de Neef, the Wantygobert sports director, showed us the radio equipment his car is kitted out with. While riding right behind the cyclists, he warns his riders via an earpiece of upcoming climbs, tricky bends in the road, crosswinds and even the odd pothole over the 185km in the Pyrenees, information which has been relayed via the team cars which travel ahead of the race.
It was these vehicles that we followed on our own winding drive through the mountains, ahead of the peloton. While our driver,
‘There’s a massive backwind, they’ll be flying down here. Go over the edge, nobody sees you’
Harris, was restricted to 50mph, the peloton flew along at such a rate they were often gaining on us during descents and flat runs.
It was a wonder how every bump in the road, each patch of melting tarmac and gravelly turn, could be negotiated safely by the peloton, and how little of the hair-raising vistas, hordes of caravans and throngs of roadside fans the riders could even see.
Driving up the steep inclines, three of which were category one during Sunday’s stage, it became possible to begin to grasp just how drastic an undertaking this is. As a road cycling amateur, I became more incredulous the further we climbed: cycling for the best part of seven miles uphill is daunting enough, but when nearly two of those miles are at an incline of 18 per cent, you wonder how Julian Alaphilippe’s pedals continue to rotate with the ferocity they have these past two weeks.
Then there were the descents. Harris pinged his way down at full speed, negotiating steep hairpin turns with the ease of a man who has been driving on the Tour for 13 years and had already clocked up more than 3,000 miles over the first fortnight – not that it stopped my heart taking permanent residency in my mouth every time he did so.
Even as the conditions switched from scorching sunshine to chilly fog, we continued to drive with pace. The peloton, after all, waits for no one.
“There’s a massive backwind, they’ll be flying down here,” Harris quipped, adding at an especially drastic drop off the side of the road in the poor visibility: “If you go over the edge here, nobody sees you.”
The trip’s organisers hoped that the opportunity to experience the Tour as it is rarely seen – driving the course, rubbing shoulders with champions and attempting to watch from the sky – would demystify it. In the event, it simply reinforced how this is a world which is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.
Towards the end of the stage, we pulled over and clambered out into a parched field, hundreds of metres above sea level. The gaspingly thin air was utterly still. We shuffled to the verge and craned our necks into the road. Then, in the time it takes to draw breath, the peloton flashed past, a whirring riot of colour.
It was a moment that lasted only a few seconds, but, as the hush descended again, the Tour’s enduring power suddenly became a little more understandable.
The 2019 Tour de France is sponsored by Skoda.