The Call of the Road: The History of Cycle Road Racing. Chris Sidwells

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СКАЧАТЬ be caught later. Just keep it there, keep the gap, then reel it in before the finish. Pro teams have that down to an art.

      But this isn’t a sprinter’s stage, this is a mountain stage with other agendas going on. A breakaway still brings order, but the riders trying to get in today’s break come from two distinct groups. One is trying to win the stage, and the other is made up of riders trying to help their team leaders win the race overall. I’ll talk more about both groups in later chapters, but for now let’s look at how a breakaway forms at this level of racing.

      For a start the other riders don’t say, ‘Go on, lads, you go ahead and we’ll see you later.’ Quite the opposite, and there’s an incredible scrap before a breakaway forms. Its mix must be right, and the other riders won’t let anything go until it is. For example, if an outside favourite for overall victory or a high overall placing tries to slip into a breakaway unnoticed, it won’t happen. It will be noticed, and the other teams will pounce on it and snuff it out.

      Neither will the other favourites’ teams let one of their rivals get too many team-mates in a breakaway. If they did that, they could find themselves outnumbered later in a stage. So there will be attack and counter-attack, embryo breakaways forming and being brought back, until the right combination is allowed to go. Then things calm down, and the break is on.

      But if all that sounds too choreographed, many things can spoil the script. Crosswinds, early steep climbs and other factors can and do upset the course of all the above. Early difficulties in a race provide opportunities for the strongest riders or teams to attack early and turn everything on its head. It happens a lot, especially in single-day races, but that’s another thing I’ll cover later in the book.

      The British rider Steve Cummings is a current top dog at spotting the right combination of riders for a breakaway to succeed, and when a stage suits him he’ll be in it. ‘I focus totally on the first ninety minutes of a stage I know I can do well in,’ he says. ‘I don’t even think about the rest of it, I just psyche myself up for the first ninety minutes, because that’s when you have to give everything you’ve got to ensure you get in. Once I’ve done that, and I’m in, then I think about the rest of the stage.’

      Cummings’s preference is for rolling terrain, or medium mountains in cycling parlance, a route with several quite long climbs, but not the big mountains of the Alps and Pyrenees. The stage I’ll try to describe here isn’t like that. It’s a typical, if imagined, stage in the Alps. One that finishes on top of one of the famous climbs: Alpe d’Huez, say, or the Col du Galibier.

      Okay, on with the stage. Let’s say an early break has formed, so now the race leader’s team by tradition assumes control at the front of the peloton, trying to go fast enough to discourage further attacks but not so fast that the breakaway is caught early. If it is caught, the attacks will start all over again.

      With the race leader’s team in control, the race is in perfect balance, and will stay that way for a while. Time to consider the physical presence of the Tour de France, because it’s immense. For a start there’s the Caravane Publicitaire, the procession of vehicles that precedes the riders, and it’s spectacular and weird in equal measure.

      If you watch the Tour de France by the roadside – and everybody should do it once because it’s an incredible experience, very different from seeing the race on TV – the first race vehicles start zooming past you at least two hours before any cyclist is seen. They might be media or logistics vehicles on the way to the stage finish, vehicles involved with safety or official duties; cars, lorries, motorbikes and buses all zoom by. Then, after a short pause, the Caravane arrives.

      Have you seen a giant fibre-glass insect lying on a flat-bed truck, or a man driving a huge gas canister or a giant wheel of cheese? Or have you been pelted with cheap plastic knick-knacks flung from a float by moonlighting students? Well you will; you’ll see them all, along with more elaborate creations, in the Caravane Publicitaire. All are products of the imaginations of publicists or design agencies, who embrace the maxim ‘weird is wonderful’, and weirder is always better for the Tour de France.

      The Caravane takes forty-five minutes to pass. Some vehicles stop to better distribute their branded plastic tat, while those in others just chuck it in the direction of spectators as they drive by. Woe betide you if you try to race a French granny for a free Esso keyring. She will trample you down and her grand-kids will dance on your spine.

      Once the Caravane has gone there’s another lull, an even shorter one punctuated by waves of motorbikes and cars, all part of the Tour, all speeding to where they are needed next. To marshal the race, maybe, or man one of the feed stations. They pass like squally showers, with an increasing number of French police connected to the race mixed in. Team vehicles too. Each passing batch is greeted with enthusiasm. Is this the race? Are the riders coming now? No. You can’t mistake it when they do.

      First there’s a Mexican wave of noise. It’s been noisy so far but the noise has been random, without any order to it. This noise has order, and depth, and it grows louder and louder. On flat stages the noise travels from village to village towards you, drowning the throbbing of the helicopters above the race at first, but then they get too near to be drowned out. There are always at least two helicopters above the riders, swapping with others, leapfrogging to provide total stage cover for TV directors to switch to. Nothing is better than a view from above to show what’s happening in a road race.

      You feel as well as hear the race long before you see it, but that feeling is magnified in the mountains. Go high and you might be standing directly above the race as it approaches. It ascends to you, passing thousands of spectators lining the route below you. The sound of their cheers and cries is trapped by the surrounding rocks and bounces off them, reverberating upwards. Alpe d’Huez, for example, is a natural theatre. The climb is named after a ski village at its summit, and it starts directly below the finish in Bourg d’Oisans. The road between the two places goes up in tier after tier, twenty-two hairpin bends and twelve straights, one piled on top of the other.

      Standing, waiting for the race near the summit of Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux, as I have done, the sound rises up to meet you, to engulf you. The helicopters fly slowly upwards, their blades beating the air, sending pulses of sound pushed by thousands of shouting, screaming voices, rolling upwards like thunder, charging the air so it prickles with anticipation.

      The riders get nearer and nearer, clawing their way upwards like a giant bellowing beast. Nearer and nearer, our anticipation growing. Cars, motorbikes, police whistles, revving engines, shouting and screaming. A solid wave of sound crashing up a rocky wall, rolling onwards and upwards. The anticipation grows stronger and louder, until …

      They’re here, the first riders, though you can’t see them yet because people further down the road have rushed out to see them before you do. The early breakaway has been caught, and now the best in the race are fighting it out for the stage. They include most of the overall contenders.

      Anticipation turns into hysteria now, and formerly responsible people with good jobs and old enough to know better go glassy-eyed. They jump up and down, shouting themselves stupid. Kids grab their parents’ hands for reassurance. What’s happening? Now you can taste the Tour, it’s an actual physical thing, like a summer storm and the relief of rain.

      People crowd the riders, some run alongside, roaring incoherently at them. They ignore everything that isn’t a clear threat, but fans who get too close risk a slap from their hero, and possible rough treatment from the rest of the crowd.

      The stage leaders’ faces are masks of concentration. Only total commitment and solid self-belief keeps them where they are. Let go now, and it’s over. There’s a belief in pro road racing that everybody at the pointy end of a mountain stage in a Grand СКАЧАТЬ