Paul Hartigan's L'Etape du Tour 2003
Having watched the TdF on the telly for as long as I can remember, I learned in January that it was possible to actually ride a stage of the thing, without being a svelte super-athlete under the age of 32, I put my name down in an instant. Fast forward through to July, the intervening period filled with more road cycling than I’d done in the previous 3 years, and there I was, at 6.00 a.m. on Wednesday 16th July, cycling - as slowly as I could manage without actually falling off – to the Place Verdun in Pau for the start of this year’s Etape du Tour. Chatting nervously with an old school friend who had been very game and taken a late entry available due to a cancellation, we joined our pen and mingled with a multinational range of exotic bikes and riders. The nervousness I think stemmed from the fact that we had driven some of the course the day before, and had seen the physical reality that a phrase such as “8.8 km with an average gradient of 9.2 %” doesn’t really convey, no matter how hard it may try.
With my limited experience of riding in a bunch, settling down to a good pace with 7,499 other riders for company was actually quite a thrill. The first 40 miles of the route were pretty straight forward, punctuated as they were by shouts of “Attention! Attention!” and “Bidon!” as the helpful French competitors pointed out the various hazards on the way.
The Col du Soudet then arrived, and it is, in fact, bigger than anything I’ve ever ridden up before. However, I stayed calm, and following Tony Geraghty’s advice of ‘talking to my hills’ I picked a lowish gear and made it to the top fairly comfortably. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want this on my office commute route, but it was very do-able. The descent did twist and turn like a twisty-turny thing, but I managed to get into some kind of rhythm around the hairpins, until a front tyre blow out at 35 mph, highly fortunately on a straight bit. A chap running down the descent (do they have fell runners in the Pyrenees?) asked if I needed any help, but as my French didn’t stretch to ‘any idea how to convert my pump head from Schrader to Presta?’ I declined the offer, finally got the new pump working (yes, I know, never try anything new on a big event), and was back on the road.
On to the next hill, this one being the rather more serious Col de Bargagoogoo. Again, I could hear Tony’s voice ‘talk to your hills’. I tried, but this was a Basque Separatist sort of a hill, a terrorist of a climb with whom you couldn’t negotiate, and with very steep bits. So I resorted to more of a brute force and ignorance approach, and very soon was in my lowest gear of 30x25, trying not to let my gaze settle too long on the road snaking upwards to the horizon. Bolstered by the fact that I was overtaking those that had decided to walk, and by the shouts of “Allez, allez!” and “Courage!” from the spectators, I made it to the top, grabbed a few bananas, and, after a second Col, started on the big descent. Not being the world’s greatest descender, I nevertheless achieved my personal land speed record of 45 mph, but was still being over taken on both sides by those with more skill/less nerves.
The final 50 miles into Bayonne were great – more crowds, villages, bunches to tag on to, and offers of everything from water to alcohol (“Vino d’Oporto monsieur?”) from the bystanders. Managed a sprint finish at the end, met up with some of the other guys on the Graham Baxter trip, cycled back to the hotel in Biarritz, and attempted to recreate the scene from ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ with Pelforth Brun an estimable stand-in for the “beer so ruddy cold there's a sort of dew on the outside of the glass", and my friend Tony not standing in at all for Sylvia Sims.