The Alpe d'Huez isn't the highest, or the hardest climb visited by the Tour de
France. It certainly isn't the prettiest: in July, the chalet-shaped concrete
boxes look like some bizarre mountaintop industrial complex.
But in this
Alpine resort the most dramatic scenes of the Tour are played out. Like Wembley,
there is nothing special about the place itself - except that this is where the
spectacle is staged. This is where the magic takes place.
Every year,
when the famous race enters the Alps, to swing round the endless hairpins,
ladder up the bare mountainsides and drop down from the famous cols, I remember
the day I went to Huez to watch the drama unfold for myself.
It doesn't
cost a penny to be part of the Tour de France. You don't need a season ticket, a
debenture seat, a corporate box or a plastic pass on a branded lanyard. You just
stand anywhere on 2000 miles of road and watch the riders come past.
And
in the summer of 1992, armed only with an Inter Rail pass and a tent which
turned out not to be waterproof, I decided to do just that: to stand beside as
many roads as possible and follow the race all the way to Paris.
The
logistics were taxing. That year the Tour was nicknamed the 'Tour d'Europe'
because it spent so much of its three-week duration outside the French border;
in Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Italy. My rail pass was in and out of
my sweaty pocket so often that by the time it reached the Champs Elysées it
looked like a used teabag. Many train conductors flatly refused to take it out
of my hand. They just looked at it, looked at me, and moved wordlessly down the
carriage.
The day before Huez it had taken a 5am start and Operation
Overlord-style planning to make a series of connections from the lake town of
Annecy to a backwater of the Italian rail network near Sestriere. The train
pulled in with enough time for me to sprint to the main road, breathlessly watch
the peloton flash by, and sprint back to the platform for the last train
out.
I had the idea that I needed to be in Grenoble before breakfast
time. The roads close several hours before the race passes, and you need to get
to a good spot to watch the action. So by 7am I was boarding a coach outside the
railway station, bound for the summit. But as it turned out, I wasn't early at
all.
21 hairpins the road climbs to the resort, and at each turn, on each
verge and layby, there was already a crowd. Camper vans with yellow Dutch number
plates perched in every possible spot, and several impossible ones; men and
women with tight shorts and pink legs sat in folding chairs sucking at breakfast bottles of Amstel
and Heineken. The Dutch love the Tour de France. And they love Alpe
d'Huez.
But it wasn't just the Dutch. There were Spaniards, Belgians,
Italians, Irish, Americans and even a few English. I was wearing my favourite
claret-and-blue football shirt, partly to show the flag on foreign soil, but
partly because I had run out of clean clothes. More than once on the Alpe I was
greeted by a shout of 'Villa!'
It's said that 500,000 were on Alpe d'Huez
that day, ten times the biggest crowd I had ever seen at Villa Park, and I can
believe it. Long before my coach reached the summit we had slowed to a crawl
behind a swollen stream of humanity. In buses, on bikes, on foot - all there for
the same show. So I persuaded the driver to let me hop off, and sat by the road and
waited.
The great thing about mountain stages of the Tour is that you get
more chance to see the race, and at close quarters. Firstly, you can see it
approach from a long way off, down in the valley; it doesn't just hurtle round a
corner without warning, and flash by before you've had a chance to cheer or wave
a flag.
It also travels far more slowly than on the flat, with the field
strung out by the narrow roads and the effort of climbing. In single file and in
small groups the riders pass: the best climbers at the front, light, wiry men,
built like mosquitoes and up on their pedals, dancing up the gradient at
improbable speeds. The main bunch, or peloton, follows as best it can, trying
not to fall too far behind, sweating and straining in the saddle. And then,
bringing up the rear, the stragglers, the exhausted, the injured, those doing
their best just to turn the pedals and survive.
But even strung out as
they were, the riders came past that day in a blur of motion. The leading group
had already been pedalling for almost five and a half hours before they hit the
foot of the slope, and yet in burning sun, they didn't pause, or slow down: the gears turned and
they climbed the nine-mile, 8% gradient like a cable car.
At the very
front was the Motorola rider, the American Andy Hampsten. He'd surged clear of a
small breakaway group and was already on course for a first place finish which
would remain a highlight of his career.
On both sides of the road where I
stood, the crowd was two or three deep. You could hear Hampsten coming long
before you saw him; the noise of the crowd rolled up in waves from every bend
and turn on the course. And as he approached, the spectators would draw aside at
the very last moment, allowing him a passage maybe two or three feet wide,
screaming and bellowing, just long enough for him to pass through. And that was
the reception that greeted every rider in the race. Every single one, from first
to last, as he went by.
Group by group they came through, slower and
slower, more and more painfully, and at last I was able to distinguish one
cyclist from another, and began to notice their faces. Their faces were
extraordinary.
Each one was running with sweat, but in 30* heat their
skins weren't flushed or burned like the Dutch campers by the motorhomes; their
faces were grey, drawn, haggard, like the faces of the dead. Their jaws hung
open, their eyes stared emptily ahead. These were men enduring pain and
suffering at the very edge of what was possible for human beings to survive. And
in that relentless heat, on that merciless slope, in that boiling, surging
noise, that screaming, yelling mob, mile after mile - at the top of that
mountain, those riders must have been in the depths of hell.
One by one
they passed, and the noise never calmed. The clock ticked and their progress
slowed, their machines rocking and rolling as the back markers tried to maintain
momentum. By now I was transfixed by their expressions, and was surprised when
one of them spoke as he came by.
He looked me in the eye, and uttered a
single, urgent word. 'Push!'
I had no idea what he meant, until he mimed,
with his right hand, the motion of shoving. He wanted me to *push* him up the
hill. It's not allowed of course. Occasionally in the television coverage you
see spectators touching the riders - slapping them on the back or on the
shoulders in encouragement, and you wince at the thought of such impudence - but
here was a cyclist pleading - begging - for a push. So I did. I pushed him up
the hill for twenty or thirty yards. Other spectators were doing the same. By
now the TV cameras, mounted on helicopters and motorbikes, were far, far away
filming Andy Hampsten crossing the finish line, and what we were doing was away
from the gaze of the public.
So we did it. I guess it was a sense of
guilt that motivated me. I'd come to this place to be entertained, and
discovered that the entertainment was a brutal, impossible torture for those
providing it. So I kept pushing the straggling riders along until I was
exhausted myself.
One of them, eventually, I recognised. A British
cyclist called Sean Yates, who'd achieved fame by winning a time trial stage in
the Tour some years before and was now a team-mate of Hampsten in the Motorola
outfit. He was near the rear of the field and fighting to keep going. So I ran
beside his bike, pushing and pushing, and as I ran I told him the only thing I
could think of to take his mind off the pain. 'Andy's won the stage,' I shouted.
'He's won it, he's won on Alpe d'Huez!'
I have no idea if he understood,
or cared, or even heard my voice. His chin was almost on his breastbone as his
heavy legs turned the pedals.
And then the riders were gone, and the race
was over, and the hysteria was broken like a magic spell and the spectators
looked at each other, embarrassed. Already on the road back to Grenoble was the
longest immobile queue of traffic I have ever seen. Ahead of me I foresaw a
night on station platforms and stuffy trains, sleepless and sunburned to
Marseille or Carcassonne or wherever the next staging post might be.
I
was exhausted and dehydrated, burned and broke, stuck on a bare mountainside and
with nowhere to spend the night. I had helped the riders of the Tour de France
cheat the slope of the Alpe d'Huez. But I would do it again, in a
heartbeat.
Damon Green
Follow Damon on Twitter @damongreenITV
Memory added on July 15, 2014
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