Roche on Tyler and ... on Toward Paris

Stephen Roche rode the bus with us to Dax for the start of the next stage. Roche, the winner of the 1987 Tour, has lived in the south of France ever since his greatest cycling victory and he’s considered more French than Irish in these parts. For 10 years, he’s owned a hotel near Nice and part of a company that runs cycling vacations and camps on Mallorca. He more or less “sponsors” the 2003 Tour de France group ride, but it’s Geordie Probert and Claude Escalon who are running the show. Roche has joined the group for two evenings and this morning we chat with him over breakfast and during the two hour ride from Ainhoa to Dax.

Roche isn’t the biggest fan of the two leading American riders, Armstrong and Hamilton. “He only does the one big race, you know” was his answer to the inevitable “what do you think of Lance?” question. This morning, the issue was Hamilton’s surprise win on the Pau to Bayonne stage. Roche felt Hamilton was strong but that his clavicle break was far less of a problem than the press had made of it. Roche described how Bjarne Riis had grabbed Hamilton’s arm and essentially thrown the CSC rider ahead when he passed him a water bottle toward the end of the stage. “Then he won’t even shake the dignitaries’ hands with his right one at the presentation,” Roche said, dismissing the injury. This isn’t quite as strong a complaint about the Marblehead, Mass. rider as was voiced by the Directeur Sportif of the Telekom team who basically said it was a PR stunt. Hamilton and Riis had to get the x-rays printed in the paper to prove the break. Whatever the state of Hamilton’s injury, though, Roche felt he rode very strongly and aggressively and that he did admire the rider.

Roche is part of the generation of professional riders who had to ride as often as possible if they wanted to make a good living and, they felt it was their duty to ride the big tours, the classics and the smaller races. In his big year of 1987 he won the Tour after winning the Giro and then took the world championships toward the end of the season. That’s the sort of thing only Eddy Merckxx, the cyclist of the century, had done. Roche’s career-ending injury came in a six-day indoor track race, something Lance Armstrong would never even think of doing in this day and age.

The riding in our group ranges from leisurely to drop-your-buddy fast. The strongest riders are from France, Switzerland and Belgium and there are two or three Americans who can keep up, like Doug from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho who would match the stronger French riders including Alain from Normandie and Jean-Louis from Switzerland. Among the women, the competitive triathlete, Shelley, was just a tad off the top pace. I’m somewhere in the middle of the group but definitely behind Tony, the 57-year old record importer from London who had a triple by-pass a few years ago. He’s to be seen at the front almost every day pedaling strongly and happily with the faster French guys. The ride leaders, however, aren’t pressed at all by our pace and they can fall back to handle an emergency or some delay and then catch up with out breathing hard. Yesterday, Thursday, we had a quick 55 kilometer run into Futuroscope across this rolling part of France near Poitiers. We averaged a strong 35 kph and the top group managed close to 39. The stronger riders have been itching a bit to get the pace up at times and they get their chance to move along at speed on this ride. Over drinks after the ride we talk about what is fun to do and the French immediately respond that it is conquering the “mythique cols.” The stronger in the group managed to hit 15 different grands cols. My count was five but I’m still pleased as punch about getting up any single one of them.

The bikes the folks bring range from middle of the road Cannondales, to really high end Colnagos, Looks, and there’s a LaPierre team bike mixed in with Litespeeds and some English models. Two of the group picked up new, custom Stephen Roche signature carbon bikes when they got to France. They look a lot like the Fondriest or DeRosa carbons but are made by a “little fabricator” in Italy whose name we can never seem to winkle out of either Claude or Stephen. The Roche group offers rental bikes for use by the clients in their Mallorca camp these are aluminum bikes with Campagnolo centaur components and do quite well. We’ve got four as backups in case there’s an accident or a failure and there are plenty of spare wheels set up for both Shimano and Campagnolo.

On Thursday we watched the stage start in Dax. Our bus squeezed itself into a little side street near the “Village Départ” at 9 am, well before the actual start around noon. There was plenty of opportunity to check out the team vehicles, watch the bikes get prepped and, for me, read a newspaper in a café. I wasn’t out for star-watching but I ran across the Gerolsteiner bus near where I’d staked out my seat for a café crème and saw Udo Bolt’s bike. He writes a column for one of the English bike magazines and is known to be a fairly funny guy. If there was any of the riders I’d say hello to, it might be Udo. As it was, a Gerolsteiner rider came by my spot at the café twice, tooling around, just behind the crowd which was intently awaiting the publicity caravan or a view of their favorite rider. It was Bolts just getting in a little city riding. Except for the very few biggest stars, who are either accompanied by an entourage or driven, these guys manage their own way to the start, pedaling their bikes from where they stayed the night.  Some stop and chat along the way if they feel inclined. I was stuck to my chair and didn’t do anything more than say, “hey, there’s Udo Bolts” and go back to reading the paper. The AG2R team riders carried their back packs to the start where they’d put them in the team cars, goodness, these guys have to haul their own luggage. King Richard Virenque, however processed along the race route from his nearby hotel unencumbered by anything more than his red spotted jersey to be greeted by general applause and little girls calling out that they loved him. There’s a van around the corner that’s selling Virenque tee shirts and a lot of his fans line the starting kilometers with the usual hand-done banners invariably expressing love for the rider from Hyeres. Most of the folks I’ve spoken to who are in the know or claim to know something about cycling consider him a camera-hog but still talented, though tainted by the drugs scandal. The adolescent girls of France have completely exonerated him, though.

The starts have more elaborate ceremonies than the finishes and there’s a big stage set up on one of the town’s squares where the riders are introduced as they sign in. There’s a big deal when the Maillot Jaune is introduced. I can see Lance mount the stairs but I’m not sure if there’s any ceremony attached to his signing in other than Daniel Mangeas listing his numerous race wins in his “Champion du monde, euh; et vainquer de Midi Libre, euh; et vainquer de Tour de France pour le quatreime fois, euh … The “euhs” comprise his signature interrupted style where he seems to breathe deeply and punctuate each phrase with this strange sound. Daniel has long been the official race announcer and is one of those parts of the Tour that, were he not there, would make the whole event very different.

In the mornings at the introductions, the Prix de Combativité is awarded. Today it’s to Tyler Hamilton who also won the prior day’s stage. He gets an introduction toward the end, just before Armstrong. The Prix de C. is sponsored by the Coeur de Lion cheese company and is awarded to the rider who is voted the most aggressive of the day by a panel of six judges—five journalists and Jean-Marie LeBlanc, the Tour General Director. Stephen Roche helps present the award and the rider gets to wear a red number on their jersey during the day’s ride to distinguish them from the other riders.

The starting ceremonies, like most other parts of the Tour besides the racing itself, moves at a pretty slow pace and is accompanied by surging crowds and traffic jams. This start is like the rest and the cyclists are likely happy to get away from the confusion and anxious to get on a road that isn’t clogged with traffic (at least traffic that won’t get out of the way). My vantage point near the line gives me a chance to see the photographers and news people prepare for their 5 hour non-stop ride (when do they pee?). I notice one Reuters photographer has a camera strapped to his lower leg with a shutter release cable led up to his other camera strapped to his chest. They like to get pictures of the riders faces and since the racers are mostly bent over, this is the way to catch the agony in full view.

We’re off soon after the start and our plan is to get in a quick two-plus hour ride along our route to the hotel at Futuroscope near Poitiers. The bus drops us at an exit on the Autoroute and we charge off in two groups. I go with the fast group, at least for a while, and end up in a groupetto of three 500 meters behind the fast guys sharing pulls with Shelley the triathlete and Steve from California. A fast rolling ride at 45 kph at times gets us 70 kilometers at an average of 34 kph. The fast guys do 37-38 kph. The run was fun until Carl in one of the trailing groups decides on a sprint finish to the hotel driveway and pulls out of one of his pedals and takes a hard fall, fracturing his collarbone as well as scraping up one side of his body. The Roche boys get to him quickly and he is off to hospital for X-rays and confirmation that there’s not much they can do other than give him drugs and a shoulder harness and let him go. He was accompanied by one of the three docs in our group, Jeff, a vascular surgeon from Connecticut. Jeff apparently oversaw the French medical residents at the hospital, reports come back that they seemed a bit new to the job. This is July, when there’s a lot of changeover in hospitals in the US and the same seems true here. One other thing that was very much like the USA was the insistence on a some form of proof of insurance when they brought Carl in.

The hotel has a nice dinner and a few of us venture into the bar for a late night chat (and drink or two). The hotel, the Clarion-Futuroscope, is very strange, being deserted but for us. Futuroscope itself doesn’t seem to have quite caught on and we’re not quite sure what it actually is. Apparently there’s a visitors park of sorts with ultra modern buildings scattered in one quadrant of an office and convention center campus, each quadrant called a “teleport.” Our hotel mirrors the theme of modernity but with a strange twist. A railroad line, or what’s left of it, runs through the center of the hotel. The tile floor has glass windows every three meters or so that reveal the tracks which carry on out the front of the building and into the parking lot which, in turn, leads on to open field stretching off to the horizon. The whole affair smacks of a grand government project that’s gone bust. As near as I can tell from the French in the group, this was a public-private venture which, indeed, has sucked millions of dollars from local, regional and national budgets. It has, however, made for a comfortable spot to stay and, given how it’s pretty empty, it probably has made a good start or finish place for the Tour. Not this year though, and we have to travel on.

In the morning, we’re off early to the next stage, leaving from the hotel in the bus for a one hour ride to a lay-by where we pick up the Tour route 60 k from the finish. This is a more leisurely ride and I stay with the second group—quite of few of the folks do, and we happily roll alongside miles and miles of sunflower fields through small villages each with a strong agricultural feel and sometimes, odor. As we join the actual Tour route we are cheered on by more and more people who are setting up their picnics at every conceivable place along the road. The Virenque signs are every 500 meters or so with the odd Ullrich banner or praise of a minor rider spray-painted on a bed sheet hung on the side of a camper.

I meet the devil. His location is marked by tridents painted neatly on the road 100 meters before his camp spot. And you can’t miss his giant bicycle, 25 feet long and 10 feet high that he tows behind his camper van. The devil is actually a German fellow who goes by the name Luk. He follows every stage of every major tour—the Giro, the Vuelta, and, of course, the Tour de France. He finds a spot on the road that is likely to have television coverage and he then runs along with the riders carrying his signature pitchfork or trident. He’s gotten a little coverage this year because he’s modified the trident to look like a 1-0-0 to commemorate the centennial. He’s so well known now that when I asked the guys at my local bike shop if they wanted me to bring anything back from the Tour, the only firm request was of a picture of the devil. The devil, however was dealing with more mundane things at this time and was in his open camper van eating his lunch. Steve and I had dropped off the ride and approached him asking for photos. He obliged, more or less, by interrupting his repast and grinning into the lens holding his lunch fork at a threatening angle. He didn’t have his full devil suit on, but he seems to sleep in his horns. One of the several stories about the devil was verified by this encounter—he doesn’t bathe too often.

Steve and I quickly caught the group (they had stopped for a pee and the obligatory photo-of-me-in-a-sunflower-field). We carried on into the small village of Pamproux four kilometers off the Tour route, to have a late pique-nique at 0.20.100.0. That’s not future time, that’s the name of the place and it’s a cute play on numbers: Oh, Vingt, Cent, Oh, (oh, wine seems/feels like water) I guess. Madame Barrault, the manager and general foctotum was very enthusiastic telling me the meaning of the name but I still didn’t quite get it. This place is a little hotel, snack-bar, but mostly, bar that is the home of the Pamproux football club and a local watering hole for the town’s more bibulous residents. The place was the apex of hospitality when we arrived and they had a nice French country spread for us: salad, tomatoes, paté, a vegetable terrine, cornichons, cakes, bread, fruits—including sliced melons and delicious local green plums and a pleasant chilled rosé from Anjou. Max Gilbert, Marie Claire Barrault’s husband, kept a vigil at the bar and soon had some of our group tasting some local cognacs. Tasting turned to slurping for more than one and before too long, we were doing some Edith Piaf songs and arranging for Max, an ex-footballer and occasional bike rider, to receive a tour jersey. He donned the yellow and blue shirt and posed with John and my bicycle. Max then fetched his classic steel bike from a back room for more photos and the group retired back to the bar for a taste of Max’s stash of commemorative Eiffel Tower cognac kept in a bottle shaped like the tower itself. One Tour for another, in this case la Tour toasts le Tour. A few of the others had ridden off to try to cross the actual finish line before the gendarmes stopped them, this is an ongoing challenge for riders who follow the Tour, they made it to within 100 meters, our personal tour best.

We watched the final hour of the race on the three televisions in the bar of the Oh-Vingt; it was an exciting end to a long breakaway and worth the wait during what is usually a relatively boring flat stage. Then back on the bus for a two-hour ride to Nantes. As we turn into the parking lot of the Mercure, Ile de Nantes, it becomes apparent that we’re staying in the same hotel as the PMU dancing girls and their retinue. The PMU is a sponsor of the Tour and its Green Jersey, which signifies the best sprinter. This competition is won by the rider who scores points by winning or coming in close to the front at a number of sprint points scattered across the flatter stages. Last year was a very close and exciting competition when Robbie McEwen beat Eric Zabel at the finish on the Champs Elysees. McEwan and Zabel are still in the mix for the Green jersey this year with Baden Cooke added for spice. There are PMU platforms and music at each of the sprint points and a traveling stage/cum dance floor moves along in the midst of the publicity caravan and a larger stage is set up in the arrival village. Each features loud, throbbing rock music and a collection of attractive girls who dance vigorously to the music. They use poles to steady themselves and it is vaguely reminiscent of strip club routines which seem to require this vertical accessory. Needless to say, many of the younger males in our group were excited at the prospect of dining with their terpsichorean counterparts and the standard of dress at the dinner table was significantly higher than the usual. Alas, the girls marched past in their matching white jeans and demure tops to an adjoining room and none of the hearty lads had the gumption to say a word until Ben, the Irish veterinarian coaxed one over for some snaps.

We had dined well on a nice plate of smoked salmon with an artichoke farcie then a serve-yourself paella with langoustines, shrimp, sausages and chicken followed by a dessert buffet that everyone seemed to enjoy: ile flottant, tarte tantin, and six or seven other lovely cakes and concoctions that have names I’ll probably never know. The modern and comfortable hotel is recommended if you’re ever in Nantes. We’ll need a good night’s rest, tomorrow is the crucial time trial. Will Jan take the yellow jersey with a repeat of his earlier effort when he beat Lance soundly? Will we have to ride in the predicted rain?

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