presence in the office.
‘The Tour is important for Loudun?’
The woman at the counter had reacted
to my entrance as if she’d been locked up there since 1974, and was indeed
dressed accordingly. Once the initial wide-eyed alarm had receded, she spoke
with the nervous deliberation of someone hearing their own voice for the first
time. ‘Yes... zis ze, uh... first time Loudun is ville d’étape.’ Was it to
boost tourism? ‘Non. No. Uh... Loudun is une ville bicyclette.’ It is? With a
start I realised I had not encountered a single rival cyclist — not even an old
bloke in a beret with a pig in his panniers — since setting off. ‘Ze maire is,
uh, passionné du vélo.’ Was he around today? Non. Did the town have to pay for
the privilege? Oui. How much? Enormement. Would the teams be staying overnight
here? Non. Poitiers. Only sree hotels ici à Loudun. (Tell me about it, love.)
Sent on my way with a shy but genuine
‘Bon courage’, I followed her directions to the finish line for stage two and
the start line for stage three, the only parts of the route granted to Loudun’s
tourist officials by the fickle guardians of the Beeg Secret. The Place du
Portail Chaussée, the stage three start line, was studiously unassuming: a
silent, open thoroughfare bordered by a whitewashed billiard hall (une ville
snooker, more like), a petrol station and a driving school in whose window
plastic toy cars shared a dusty cardboard roundabout with many dead insects.
Now I understood why Loudun looked the way it did: the ruler-straight roads
that converged there from far afield suggested it had made its name as a
transport hub back in the Napoleonic days, and all that late-nineteenth-century
architecture showed the railway age had given it another boost. When the
autoroutes came and the railway went, Loudun was suddenly surplus to
requirements.
Picturing this scene thronged with
cosmopolitan crowds, commentators and sporting superstars required not so much
a mental leap as a triple jump. The night-before’s finish straight, the service
road for a half-built industrial estate round the back of the (hawk, spit)
station, was a barely more credible stage for the world’s biggest annual
sporting event. The Avenue de Ouagadougou (clearly named either after something
Burkino Fasan or the leftover letters at the end of a Scrabble game) had the
sole benefit of linear uniformity, though even this was compromised by a huge
sweeping turn about 500 metres from the end. Even I could see this causing
problems for the sprinters, whose boisterous competitiveness makes a flat
stage’s final kilometre powerfully reminiscent of the film Rollerball.
But on the way out of town, hitting
the dead-straight road to Richelieu with the wind behind me, I realised Loudun
fitted perfectly into the whole ethos of the Tour de France. It was an ideal
counterpoint to Futuroscope’s mirrored-glass ultramodernism, the other side of
the franc. The idea that an ugly duckling could be a swan for a day was touchingly
romantic, and it was a credit to the people of Loudun and their passionné mayor
that they had invested so much to make this dream come true. I just hoped that
when it did they’d all have woken up.
I’m sorry to go on about the wind,
but it really did make me very happy to coast at such nonchalant speed across
the flat fields of green wheat, the rustling sheaves all bending with me
towards Richelieu. Men in berets smoking on huge log piles; dogs with their
paws up on a tractor dashboard; a literally steaming barrow of ordure: if it
hadn’t been for the lorries this could have been the inaugural 1903 Tour.
Probably because I’d been more
concerned with monitoring my physical condition, I hadn’t really noticed the
traffic before. It had certainly become obvious that French drivers treat
cyclists as fellow road-users, indicating as they overtook and pulling
respectfully right over to the other side of the road while doing so. There was
never any
‘The Tour is important for Loudun?’
The woman at the counter had reacted
to my entrance as if she’d been locked up there since 1974, and was indeed
dressed accordingly. Once the initial wide-eyed alarm had receded, she spoke
with the nervous deliberation of someone hearing their own voice for the first
time. ‘Yes... zis ze, uh... first time Loudun is ville d’étape.’ Was it to
boost tourism? ‘Non. No. Uh... Loudun is une ville bicyclette.’ It is? With a
start I realised I had not encountered a single rival cyclist — not even an old
bloke in a beret with a pig in his panniers — since setting off. ‘Ze maire is,
uh, passionné du vélo.’ Was he around today? Non. Did the town have to pay for
the privilege? Oui. How much? Enormement. Would the teams be staying overnight
here? Non. Poitiers. Only sree hotels ici à Loudun. (Tell me about it, love.)
Sent on my way with a shy but genuine
‘Bon courage’, I followed her directions to the finish line for stage two and
the start line for stage three, the only parts of the route granted to Loudun’s
tourist officials by the fickle guardians of the Beeg Secret. The Place du
Portail Chaussée, the stage three start line, was studiously unassuming: a
silent, open thoroughfare bordered by a whitewashed billiard hall (une ville
snooker, more like), a petrol station and a driving school in whose window
plastic toy cars shared a dusty cardboard roundabout with many dead insects.
Now I understood why Loudun looked the way it did: the ruler-straight roads
that converged there from far afield suggested it had made its name as a
transport hub back in the Napoleonic days, and all that late-nineteenth-century
architecture showed the railway age had given it another boost. When the
autoroutes came and the railway went, Loudun was suddenly surplus to
requirements.
Picturing this scene thronged with
cosmopolitan crowds, commentators and sporting superstars required not so much
a mental leap as a triple jump. The night-before’s finish straight, the service
road for a half-built industrial estate round the back of the (hawk, spit)
station, was a barely more credible stage for the world’s biggest annual
sporting event. The Avenue de Ouagadougou (clearly named either after something
Burkino Fasan or the leftover letters at the end of a Scrabble game) had the
sole benefit of linear uniformity, though even this was compromised by a huge
sweeping turn about 500 metres from the end. Even I could see this causing
problems for the sprinters, whose boisterous competitiveness makes a flat
stage’s final kilometre powerfully reminiscent of the film Rollerball.
But on the way out of town, hitting
the dead-straight road to Richelieu with the wind behind me, I realised Loudun
fitted perfectly into the whole ethos of the Tour de France. It was an ideal
counterpoint to Futuroscope’s mirrored-glass ultramodernism, the other side of
the franc. The idea that an ugly duckling could be a swan for a day was touchingly
romantic, and it was a credit to the people of Loudun and their passionné mayor
that they had invested so much to make this dream come true. I just hoped that
when it did they’d all have woken up.
I’m sorry to go on about the wind,
but it really did make me very happy to coast at such nonchalant speed across
the flat fields of green wheat, the rustling sheaves all bending with me
towards Richelieu. Men in berets smoking on huge log piles; dogs with their
paws up on a tractor dashboard; a literally steaming barrow of ordure: if it
hadn’t been for the lorries this could have been the inaugural 1903 Tour.
Probably because I’d been more
concerned with monitoring my physical condition, I hadn’t really noticed the
traffic before. It had certainly become obvious that French drivers treat
cyclists as fellow road-users, indicating as they overtook and pulling
respectfully right over to the other side of the road while doing so. There was
never any
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