ratcheting fury soon shredded much of the
vegetation from my arboreal umbrella. It was a bad time to be wearing
espadrilles, particularly when I looked down and saw a small canine leg cocked
over my feet.
Three
They say cheats never prosper, but
whoever they are they can’t have done much cycling in France. The first ever bike race was held in Paris in 1869 (won by an Englishman, James
Moore, who I’m delighted to claim as my great-great-grandfather, even though he
wasn’t), and it didn’t take long for sportsmanship to be superseded by
gamesmanship. Bidons, then made of glass, were deliberately tossed over
shoulders to puncture the tyres of following riders; fans were on hand with
handfuls of tacks if that should fail. Riders stole all the ink from
checkpoints so that their pursuers would be penalised for failing to sign on.
The winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour, Maurice Garin, was disqualified after
finishing first in the 1904 race when it emerged that he had employed the
unimaginative but devastatingly effective measure of forgoing his bicycle in
favour of a railway carriage during some of the longer stages. Indeed the next
three finishers were also stripped of their honours, two of them for being
towed uphill by cars trailing corks which they popped between their teeth.
Itching powder in rivals’ shorts, spiked drinks, altered road signs— it was all a bit Wacky Races.
Another popular trick was to saw
through important parts of a rival’s machine while he slept, something I’d been
peripherally mindful of when asking the hotel proprietor to lock my bike in his
garage. The early riders always took their bikes up to their hotel bedrooms, a
measure recommended by Richard Hallett to combat theft rather than sabotage,
but one I’d have felt much too peculiar both requesting (‘Yes, we’ll take the
honeymoon suite’) and experiencing (‘Budge up, ZR, it’s always me who gets to
sleep in the oily patch’).
I suppose it’s becoming obvious that
I am about to justify an act of mountainous deceit as being merely the carrying
on of a long and proud tradition. Sitting alone at breakfast, pouching bread
and jam and tapping my cleats on the cold, old tiles, I looked out at another
grey day, a sky of clouds barrelling along on a potent westerly. Was I really
going to head into the teeth of this dispiriting unpleasantness, hauling my
panniers of wet espadrilles up to the coast of Brittany on a route I’d be
making up as I went along, away from the sun and the Alps and everything else
the Tour was about? Or was I about to do a Maurice Garin, sticking my bike on a
train to Tours and rejoining the race four days on, where at least I’d be
pedalling down roads I knew were the right ones?
Every time I pored over the procycling Tour map the same tempting thought had nagged me. Snip that irritating little loop
off; make the route look more like the Grande Boucle it was supposed to be and
less like a dropped shoelace. On the other hand, I’d be pruning 634 kilometres
from the itinerary, and though this still left 3,000 kilometres, 634 was a lot
whichever way you looked at it... A fold here, a tear there, and the procycling map was effectively doctored. Time for recriminations later. I had a train
to catch.
In a sport riddled with chicanery,
it’s inevitable that the best cyclists are also the best cheats. Maurice Garin
probably wouldn’t have planned Operation Choo-Choo in a tourist-information
office two hours before the stage started, and so probably wouldn’t have found
himself being told: ‘Zere is no train for... passagers. Only is for, uh,
marchandises, oui?’ Sigh. I looked at the map: it was an 80 kilometre ride to
Descartes, where I could rejoin the route of stage seven. Accepting this as a
form of penance (and one whose blow was softened by the realisation that if the
weather persisted I’d be pushed there by a hefty tailwind), I made a slight
fainting sound, then remembered the other reason for my
vegetation from my arboreal umbrella. It was a bad time to be wearing
espadrilles, particularly when I looked down and saw a small canine leg cocked
over my feet.
Three
They say cheats never prosper, but
whoever they are they can’t have done much cycling in France. The first ever bike race was held in Paris in 1869 (won by an Englishman, James
Moore, who I’m delighted to claim as my great-great-grandfather, even though he
wasn’t), and it didn’t take long for sportsmanship to be superseded by
gamesmanship. Bidons, then made of glass, were deliberately tossed over
shoulders to puncture the tyres of following riders; fans were on hand with
handfuls of tacks if that should fail. Riders stole all the ink from
checkpoints so that their pursuers would be penalised for failing to sign on.
The winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour, Maurice Garin, was disqualified after
finishing first in the 1904 race when it emerged that he had employed the
unimaginative but devastatingly effective measure of forgoing his bicycle in
favour of a railway carriage during some of the longer stages. Indeed the next
three finishers were also stripped of their honours, two of them for being
towed uphill by cars trailing corks which they popped between their teeth.
Itching powder in rivals’ shorts, spiked drinks, altered road signs— it was all a bit Wacky Races.
Another popular trick was to saw
through important parts of a rival’s machine while he slept, something I’d been
peripherally mindful of when asking the hotel proprietor to lock my bike in his
garage. The early riders always took their bikes up to their hotel bedrooms, a
measure recommended by Richard Hallett to combat theft rather than sabotage,
but one I’d have felt much too peculiar both requesting (‘Yes, we’ll take the
honeymoon suite’) and experiencing (‘Budge up, ZR, it’s always me who gets to
sleep in the oily patch’).
I suppose it’s becoming obvious that
I am about to justify an act of mountainous deceit as being merely the carrying
on of a long and proud tradition. Sitting alone at breakfast, pouching bread
and jam and tapping my cleats on the cold, old tiles, I looked out at another
grey day, a sky of clouds barrelling along on a potent westerly. Was I really
going to head into the teeth of this dispiriting unpleasantness, hauling my
panniers of wet espadrilles up to the coast of Brittany on a route I’d be
making up as I went along, away from the sun and the Alps and everything else
the Tour was about? Or was I about to do a Maurice Garin, sticking my bike on a
train to Tours and rejoining the race four days on, where at least I’d be
pedalling down roads I knew were the right ones?
Every time I pored over the procycling Tour map the same tempting thought had nagged me. Snip that irritating little loop
off; make the route look more like the Grande Boucle it was supposed to be and
less like a dropped shoelace. On the other hand, I’d be pruning 634 kilometres
from the itinerary, and though this still left 3,000 kilometres, 634 was a lot
whichever way you looked at it... A fold here, a tear there, and the procycling map was effectively doctored. Time for recriminations later. I had a train
to catch.
In a sport riddled with chicanery,
it’s inevitable that the best cyclists are also the best cheats. Maurice Garin
probably wouldn’t have planned Operation Choo-Choo in a tourist-information
office two hours before the stage started, and so probably wouldn’t have found
himself being told: ‘Zere is no train for... passagers. Only is for, uh,
marchandises, oui?’ Sigh. I looked at the map: it was an 80 kilometre ride to
Descartes, where I could rejoin the route of stage seven. Accepting this as a
form of penance (and one whose blow was softened by the realisation that if the
weather persisted I’d be pushed there by a hefty tailwind), I made a slight
fainting sound, then remembered the other reason for my
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