The road to Ventoux.

Ricketts here…internet contact was made difficult by a move to the country side and the need to acquire a modem connector. In true French style the wall plug for the modem is big (one by two and-a-half inches) with three rather large tangs that go into a socket. Some phones use two of the connectors on one side and one on another and others use three and two, but to be internet capable, you need all three on both sides. Although France has “Mr. Hardware” stores (Monsieur Bricolage) they don’t have Radio Shacks in most places. It took two trips to Carpentras and a lucky stumble into an Internet Café with a display case holding one of the magic modem connectors to find it—I still haven't found the proper term to ask for such a thing.  I tried a sad faced plea to buy their display model and it worked.  The guy apologized for charging 5 euros. The web time was promptly taken over by my wife who was searching French web sites for a place to ride horses and I was stuck off line.

The place we were staying was chosen because it was near Mount Ventoux and I figured I could get to the Tour route pretty easily. When I finalized the rental, the owner mentioned casually that “A big bicycle race was going to go by on the road in front of the house.” Sure enough, the “Mas au Portail Bleu” (Old Farm House with a Blue Gate and Pigsty-en-suite) was 30 meters from the D-55 between Aubignan and Caromb, part of the Ventoux stage route and the start of the up turn to Bedoin and the real climbing on Mount Ventoux. From that point on the debate in the house among the six of us raged over whether to ride up Ventoux to see the climbing or to just enjoy the Tour as it raced by while we sat in lawn chairs on the road a short stroll to a cold refrigerator full of beer and chilled rose. The debate was settled by another trip up the Giant of Provence with my pedalling friend Scott on the Friday before the Sunday Ventoux stage.

The Tour is a rolling party that has at its core a group of caravanners who drive campers from tour stage to tour stage. They seem to have a system where one group goes ahead and finds prime spots on the climbs where they park and then they pile in together in an old Lada or Fiat to go back to another group that has picked the best places to park for the flat stages. This rolling succession of campers travels by night and keeps the roads leading to the big cols filled well before the stage is to pass by. On Ventoux, two days before the riders were to appear, the mountain was filling rapidly as we climbed on the hot and sunny day up the 21 kilometers of nearly 8% grade. We had to watch for sudden stops by the camper vans as one or the other would spot a seam in the line of parked vehicles. Like rats, they can squeeze through a space that is seeming narrower than their bodies; using a gesticulating crowd of compatriots to guide the driver as he jockeyed the vehicle into a seemingly un-occupiable space, they created a virtual wall along the route up the mountain. The campers were often wedged up to level using an array of found rocks and branches, lending the line up along the race route a look of precariousness and impending collapse. Not a few people were injured as they took the wrong turn out their camper door and plunged a few extra feet onto a rock or two.

The campers were usually clustered by nationality and the most apparent nationalities were those that didn’t yet have a nation: Flanders, Britanny, Pays Basque. Danes and Germans were in evidence, even the Swiss managed a bit of a raucous presence (all that chocolate was laced with brandy) along with a few Brits and one strange Scottish contingent—happy to let people see what was under their kilts. The Australians seemed to either camp in tents or stay all night in bars and cafes—they were saving themselves. The sedate groups were the French and Italians, the latter seemingly missing in action without their best riders in the race. The French were busily putting together their Ja-Ja banners or signs thanking Virenque for his bravery. Meanwhile, they were all drinking lots of wine in the sun dappled woods on the way up to the Ventoux summit. The ride up this time was often entertaining as the more bored of the campers glanced our way and practiced a “sotto voce” version of their TdF encouragement or scorn for the riders to come. “Courage” they said as we slowly pedalled by, followed by a disquisition in French or Italian or German or Danish about how stupid it was to climb the mountain in the middle of the day.

The ride up was made even more awkward as we were in the midst of the “Retro-Alps” ancient car rally. Scott, being a classic car fan, was practically sent over the edge of the cliff when a series of three Hispano-Suizas rolled down toward him. The 70 cars in the promenade. were all vintage 1900-1940, and slowly rolled past going downhill to Bedoin in a stately, occasionally backfiring parade. There were giant-hooded Peugeots, Bentlys, Mercedes and cars that I’d seen in movies and have no idea what they are called. There were bullet-shaped racers made of plywood and a big, yellow-tan-cream Buick convertible that would put a modern urban-assault SUV to shame. An entertaining backdrop to the pain that was gradually overcoming our legs as we crept up the hill.

This day the mountain was more alive with riders than my mist-shrouded ascent but since we had cannily chosen the forbidden middle of the day on this sunny July Friday, we saw perhaps only 50 to 60 of the day’s several hundreds of climbers. The ride was grinding me down and Scott pulled away at the 10 km point and I didn’t see him again until he hailed me from the water pump at Chalet Reynard. Very cold, mineral tinged water poured forth from the pump and gave us a boost for the first of the 6 kilometers to go. The pump was busy when we got there, it was the last water until the top and the many camper people who were parked two kilometers or so up the road in a open, unshaded spot depended on it for their supplies.

Scott rode away from me quickly as we pushed on through the final 6 kilometers. For some reason a guy on a Pinarello stuck to Scott’s wheel while he was going up and stayed there until the last kilometer. It’s got to be tough needing to draft at 7 mph, but then, people were clinging to any advantage as they slithered the final kilometers. Again, we passed a lot of people “pied a terre” as they say. Scott was smiling and snapping my picture as I turned onto the final level of the summit, laughing about my “sprint finish” when I had to stand on the pedals (30-25) to make it to the final line. The summit was very crowded and perhaps the toughest part of the ride as I had to dodge three cars backing blindly out of parking spots into the paths of myself and other exhausted riders struggling to the white line painted across the road. The crowds and the congestion on the way up made us realize that seeing the race on Ventoux took more planning and youthful abandon than we had and we agreed that the lawn chair approach was the better idea as we trailed a tall French guy on a full-suspension Trek down the mountain. The descent was pleasant for the most but harrowing at times as we spent a good amount of energy dodging the men, women, children and other things (dogs, wine bottles, a beach ball, stray petanque overshots) that crossed the road unexpectedly in front of us. Another day, another trip up Ventoux. Actually, a really stupid thing to do since I was going to try the “Etape du Tour” stage the following Monday and didn’t need to have the stress of the climb.

It’s lonely at the top (on a day when it’s foggy)

L’Etape du Tour is one of the many “cyclosportives” that the French hold around the country from March through October. These are what you might call races in disguise. They are timed and are quite competitive for some riders but open to all. They cover distances that vary from 50 to 120 miles and they often take in famous climbs that are included on the Tour de France. Alpe d’Huez, for example, is the site of one of these. The difference with L’Etape is that it is coordinated with the Tour de France and follows one of the Tour stages on a rest day during the Tour itself. This was the tenth edition of L’Etape and would follow the Aime-Cluses stage that was going to happen on the following Thursday. The ride was scheduled for Monday.

I had registered the prior February, having been told that it was a hard thing to get into and you needed to be quick about getting an entry in (no internet entries s’il vous plait). I sent in my money, 49 euros, a doctor’s note (“He is alive and capable of riding a bicycle—although the two are not necessarily connected.”) and my application on the first day they were accepting applications and received word via the internet that I had been accepted and given number 3548. Actually, you had to query their web site for days on end to see if you made it. I found out in the middle of March. Sure enough, the 7,500 spaces were filled quickly and there was a small market in “dossards” (jersey numbers) that was running on the internet this spring.

Having done some relatively big club rides and a “Ride Across A Southern State With Lots of Pick-up Trucks”—the famous RASSWLOPups—I was expecting the usual jumble of harried volunteers scurrying around a few card tables trying to find your little gift bag and a pin-on number in the midst of a newly formed wetland of an unpaved parking lot. What I got when we drove into the alpine valley town of Aime was a “Village” of hundreds of professional bike ride organizers and volunteers who had created a cycling fair and giant pasta party alongside a rapidly flowing river in a peaceful valley. First off, there was no line to get your number, there were 15 access points where the riders picked up their materials by number. You got a bag with full instructions, maps, a pocket route card, a bottle (Orbea-Velo Magazine) a Tour de France ditty bag, information on your transponder, entry forms for the “Giant Tombola” and a T-shirt along with your stick-on number which looked like a TdF number. You also got a frame number that, if you wanted your picture taken along the route, you attached to the front of your bars. You were invited to test your transponder at a nearby tent where you walked in an put your info package on a mat and your name, number, birth date, address, category and whatever else they knew about you flashed on a computer screen. The transponder was to be worn on your ankle and would register you when you crossed the start, at intermediate locations and when you crossed the finish. At the end, they were able to post your time, your scratch time and position and your course time and category position all within minutes of your finish.

The village also sported vendor tents for all the leading bike companies in France and Italy plus Litespeed-Merlin, Shimano, Giant and more. The Giant display included a jumbo screen television display that was playing the day’s Tour stage. Other tents offered heart monitors, sport drinks, jerseys, and a huge assortment of knick-knacks and indispensables for the rider. Perhaps because it was in France, one of the largest display areas and most active tents was the one that was giving away saddle cream.

They were running a Tombola (Door Prize), showing off celebrities (Jeannie Longo was one—she was riding the event), and serving a pasta dinner for 5,000 in a big tent by the village. Uniformed people scattered about the village were handling any other of the riders’ needs with one of the most efficient information services groups I had ever seen—all of this in five languages. The three and a half hour ride from deepest Provence to the Alps convinced us that we needed to get a local hotel room for the night before the ride, two days hence, and that was accomplished with no problem in a matter of minutes by a very helpful woman at the Infos-Reseignments-Acceuil stand. I was registered, had a place to stay, and was not a little daunted that I had somehow stepped into real bicycle country.

This was a big show and I was going to be part of it. I was a bit scared, these looked like very serious riders, but there was a bigger race going on in the south of France.

Back at the Provencal Ranch.

The build up to the Tour passing through the Aubignan area started in the week before the race date. There were specials in the local paper about the history of the climbs up Ventoux, advice on how to do it, and detailed pictures of the route and its mounting inclines were spread across the front page. There were also pictures of the policemen who were going to assure the security of the route and deal with the 40,000 anticipated extra vehicles that were going to jam the roads around the mountain. There were helpful hints on where not to park and how to walk up Mount Ventoux the short way if you wanted to see the stage on the top (the short way was a four hour hike). The Mountain was to be closed to cars from Friday night up to a certain point and closed completely until well after the race from Saturday. Still, the caravans kept streaming in and the small local towns leading up to Ventoux began to fill up. Aubignan was in holiday mode and had synchronized their local votive festival with the arrival of the tour, so they had carnival rides in the center of town. Caromb was popping, relatively speaking, as the local road work crew removed the concrete antiparking barriers from the route with cranes and the local merchants were dealing with rather large purchases of bulk wine. Bedoin was practically a zoo with cyclists trying to rush in a ride up Ventoux before the stage and the campers trying to get provisions for their vigil and the overflow late arrivals squeezing into anything that looked like a parking spot—that covered a fairly large part of the dictionary—like sidewalk, doorway, front room of house, you name it.

Vaison-la-Romain, 20 kilometers to the north of where we were staying was also in preparation mode as the start town for the Tuesday stage. That town, usually already crowded with tourists in July, was bracing for the bike crowd and essentially declared most of the town a no-parking zone. That confused some of the theater goers in town for their annual drama festival. There were still 10 or 15 people, perhaps from Albania or Sri Lanka, who were unaware that there was a bicycle race going on. They were habitually in front of us on the road, stopped, asking a befuddled farmer where they could park, or in line at the store staring uncomprehendingly at a fistful of euro coins, or wedged in the middle of the road trying to turn their rented Citroen around while we were trying to pedal past to the local café for our apertif.

The next day, Sunday, was the big day and it was hot and from early reports and gauging the temperature we knew the tour was going to be late coming through so we planned to set up a little after the advertised time of 1 pm for the publicity caravan to pass by. In Aubignan the “allee” of plane tress leading out of town was the place to be and people staked out places at the little s-curve the riders had to negotiate getting through town. The roadway was painted with the ubiquitous paeans to Ja-Ja and Virenque but also with the syringe and “Dopage – Le Patron” that was showing up on the roads of the tour all over France. This was in reference to Armstrong and was the product of the nasty little rumor drivers who kept hinting that something other than hard, systematic training was behind his success. The national sports paper didn’t mention this much and France 2 and 3, the television stations covering the Tour, never seemed to talk about it. But there was some mention in Figaro and the local papers carried an article or two that quoted one of the Festina bad-guys as having “their doubts” about Armstrong. Still, the discussion of doping was much less visible and at issue in France that it seemed to be in the U.S. press coverage. Lance’s comments about being irritated by some of the catcalling on Ventoux about doping was hardly mentioned in the French coverage.

The weirdest headline about Armstrong appeared in La Provence before the Ventoux stage: “Armstrong, Jesus-Christ de Cancereaux Americains.” The story went on to describe the growing “culte” that he was engendering and how people were coming to him as people journeyed to Lourdes for magical healing. The local papers seemed to like this sort of stuff about Armstrong. The same La Provence was fond of quoting people who had been banned from cycling.

We managed to drag out chairs and umbrellas and a ladder for a bird’s eye view around noon and made a party of watching the passing parade of the publicity caravan along with a group of Belgians we found in the nearby town at lunch. The publicity caravan vehicles were moving pretty fast when they went by us, having to accelerate to get away from the little kink in the road back in Aubignan and re-form before snaking through Caromb. It was easy to see how someone could get run over by the racing trucks as the road side was filled with less than sober people and the rhythm of the caravan was jerky and unpredictable. Then came the winding little Haribo cars and the cars covered with giant cheeses and the PMU car with even more giant horses, and the Credit Lyonnais go karts with giant racing bikes and the cars with Miss Middle-of-France or whoever. They threw the key chains and little bits of swag and the special issue of Mickey Mouse Comics done specially for the tour and, get this, little sausages, that everyone scrambled for. The big prize seemed to be the Champion (Supermarket-sponsor of the Red Polka Dot Jersey) Red Cap. There were no BIG GREEN HANDS at this point. Everybody seemed to get something, lots of little Coeur de Lion Heart and Banesto key chains to go around. Then a pause and the helicopters were sighted The hovering one was over the lead group of 10 or so riders somewhere to the west. Then a car with a loudspeaker announced they were outside of Sarrians and headed this way and that Richard Virenque was in the lead group and implied that all of France was jubilant at this. Then a pause, then the build up of motorcycles and red cars and yellow cars and then, they were there, the lead group surrounded by motorcycles and the race director’s red car and some other red cars and the team cars following closely.

After the racing trucks and the speeding publicity caravan, the pace of the cyclists was positively controlled. They were late and the heat was obviously a factor and then they were gone. We knew there was 10 minutes separating them from the peloton and the Postals and Lance and everyone around us stayed in position for a glimpse of the yellow jersey. The next helicopter hovering above the riders could be seen over Aubignan and the peloton with the same seemingly controlled pace hove into view around the corner, the same array of cars and motorcycles and shouts of “there’s Lance!” and “where’s Lance?” were heard in the mostly English-speaking group that had settled in around us. Hincapie was at the back getting water and Lance was tucked in the heart of the peloton, there seemed to be little organization at this point and the only cohesion appeared to be with Telekom or ONCE, their pink jerseys seemed to blend into some order as they went by.

Then it was over. For some folks, a day’s worth of waiting for the combined 30 seconds of viewing as the riders headed off for Ventoux in the afternoon torpor. It was going to be hot on the mountain.

We hustled the lawn furniture back to the house to watch the stage on television and just in time to see one of the leaders head for the vineyards for a close appreciation of the Mourvedre grapes. The camera switched away just in time as it was apparent that Mr. Morin was needing a little privacy to clear his system of a bad meal. Imagine, having to take a emergency crap with a helicopter hovering above and at least three cameras covering every—yes—movement.

The announcer on France 2 was going gibberingly fast as Virenque started to get away. The Ja-Ja cartoons gave way to pictures of little Richard staring up a giant’s leg from his perch on an ankle. By the time that it was apparent that Virenque was going to win the climb, the announcer’s pitch was seriously soprano, the first time I’d heard him begin to lose his voice after commenting in the fastest French possible for 8 hours day for the previous 15 days. They did cut to LA as he decided a little late to see what Beloki was made of and regained 7 or 8 minutes on Virenque before it was over. France was joyous. Slick Richard was in with a big win and “Le Boss” showed enough acceleration to keep the superlatives (le plus de impressionable) rolling. The “Velo Club” show was All Richard, All the Time with the occasional turn to Jalabert for his comments. Lance gave another interview in French (c’est dur, tres dur) and the cycling giants of the Giant of Provence looked down on the quickly dismantling stage finish town that had been built atop the 6,000 foot lonely peak. The big radio tower was decorated with huge photographs of the winners of prior TdF stages on Ventoux:, Charly Gaul, 1958; Raymond Poiulidor, 1965; Eddy Merckx 1970; , Berbard Thevenet, 1972; Jean-Francoise Bernard, 1987; and Marco Pantani, 2000. Now they can add Richard Virenque. It was special. I wonder if Lance noticed he wasn’t up there.

Diana and I left for Aime just after the finish and the next day’s test up to the Cormet de Roseland (what’s a cormet?), the cols des Saises, Aravis and Columbier, a semi-real stage of the Tour de France for me.

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