Cyclogeography (7 page)

We begin to ride and immediately the bunch is split. One group heads north, the wrong way around the one-way system of the square and against the flow of traffic on Beak Street. The other heads south. I realise that I’ve picked the less direct route, and hope the leaders will be slowed by having to go against the traffic on the way through Soho, and that we’ll be able to catch them. My group continue south down Lower John Street, then turn left onto Beak.

Up Wardour Street, past the throbbing traffic which waits idling at the lights, past the men in suits and girls in dresses drinking in the street in the balmy evening air, past the taxis queuing to sweep round onto Oxford Street and on to collect their fares, past other cyclists, blissfully unaware of the race taking place in their midst.

There are five or six of us in this group – Sam, Mike, Clarence, and a couple of other riders whose names I don’t know, faces in the crowd who I half-recognise from the road.

At the top of Oxford Street I tuck in behind Sam and push till my lungs burn and my legs are beginning to throb, spinning down the gutter and shouldering my way through the gaps between cars and drinkers. Unlike a real road race, alleycats are scrappy, individual affairs. There’s no real peloton, no real attempt to shield each other from the wind or help each other out on the climbs. The bunch is instantly fragmented, driven apart by the accidents of traffic and the interruptions of the lights. But still we try to work as a team, calling to each other as we navigate the temporary course, urging each other on. We grin as we go. We whoop and cheer. It is deeply antisocial, this run through the crowded streets of the West End, but for the moment we don’t care. We are conscious only of the wind cracking around our ears, the pain in our legs, the rhythms of pedal stroke and the twitches from the handlebars as our wheels skip across the potholes in the tarmac beneath us.

‘The dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements,’ wrote Roland Barthes in his essay on the dynamics of bicycle racing, ‘The Tour de France as Epic’, ‘to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse’:

A bicycle race is a communal endeavour, and it is almost impossible to win one on your own. This means that the moves you can make within a race are often purely symbolic. You can only attack with the tacit support of the group; only win if you’re allowed to by the rest of the bunch. Marked men can’t often break free on their own. A move made without support is a futile form of expression, a mute articulation of some kind rather than a genuine attempt to win.

It is a sport that has always rewarded, indeed depended on, symbolism. The peloton has its heroes and villains. Moves are made and clawed back.
Domestiques
, riders whose only role is to support the leaders of their team, sacrifice themselves heroically for their stars or treacherously go for glory on their own. Riders break and keep the lead only to be drawn inevitably back in to the bunch. The mock-heroic tone of much cycling writing reflects the sport’s origins as a fundamentally literary event. From its inception, the Tour in particular was conceived of as an epic, and written about in an appropriately high style.

The bicycle race was often interpreted as a stage
for political symbolism also. The Tour was created in the wake of the Dreyfus affair by a young journalist named Géo Lefèvre, whose editor Henri Desgrange had asked him to come up with a way of boosting his paper’s ailing sales. Before the advent of radio and television the results of the race were consumed like war: in print over breakfast, as lists of losses and gains. The yellow jersey worn by the leader of the Tour is the same colour as the pages of
L’Auto
, the newspaper which first organised the race.

Quickly appropriating Lefèvre’s idea for a race that would take its riders around the whole of France, Desgrange’s aim was to create ‘the most courageous champions since antiquity’, and the heroic era of cycling involved some of the most gruelling routes the organisers could dream up.

No one really knew what was going on out on the road during those early races. Cheating was rife. Riders took trains and had friends pick them up in cars along the route. One rider was once was caught being towed along the road by a car on a length of wire, the other end attached to a cork clamped between his teeth. During the first incarnation of the race Lefèvre was described by his son standing at night ‘on the edge of the road, a storm lantern in his hand, searching in the shadows for riders who surged out of the dark from time to time, yelled their name and disappeared into the distance.’

Early cycling journalists were notorious for inventing facts, changing the positions of riders and
fabricating knowledge of entire stages. On an early Tour the journalist Orio Vergani invented accounts of entire stages of races he hadn’t seen. Later he reported that he had written about the race ‘in the only way I could, that is, with my imagination’. In the early years the stories told about the Tour was much more important than the reality. Perhaps they still are.

When we hit Oxford Street the pack swerves hard right, round the front of a bus. Its passengers stare through the glass at us as we pass. We’re gone before they grimace. We slalom through the oncoming traffic, against its flow. At the edge of Soho the pack fragments further. Half of us go up Tottenham Court Road. Two riders I don’t know – one on a geared road bike, the other riding a bright blue single-speed – head down New Oxford Street for Bloomsbury. I follow them. It’s a mistake. I don’t quite know where we’re going, but take my turn at the front of the bunch in any case.

At the end of Gray’s Inn Road we run the lights, turn hard right and pedal against the oncoming traffic round the corner, crossing the lanes to face up the hill to attack Pentonville Road. At the checkpoint we catch up with another group of riders who’ve taken the shorter, faster route. We jostle for position, reaching out to grab the slips of paper held out by the marshals. I’m given a scrap of paper with the next checkpoint written on it: Duncan Terrace N1.

It’s a straight run up the Pentonville Road from here, the only col on the circuit, part of the great escarpment that marks the northern edge of the Thames Basin. Standing off the saddle I run the red and push on my pedals, leaning forward into the gradient as I do so. The frame of my bicycle flexes as I lean left and right with each pedal stroke. It gives off quiet clicks and groans.

I’ve caught my legs unawares and they’re perfectly willing for these few short minutes to really work for me. My skin too isn’t up to speed quite yet – I’m dry as a bone, but I’ve invested in the future of my sweat. It’ll come out no matter what I do, so I’ll make the most of this dry patch and just push on up the hill. The Angel is nearly in view as I begin to feel a slight lactic burn in the legs, but it’s nothing to worry about at this stage. Up and down they go, dancing on the pedals. My lungs crack. I grin like a fool.

Near the top of the hill my legs begin to burn. Cramp hits. Cars blur by. Other riders pass me. I reach out and grab hold of a bus lurching up the hill and catch a few stragglers at its brim. At the junction with Upper Street we open up again, stitching a way through the two lines of traffic under a hail of horn-honks and shouted swears.

I’ve started feeling good on the bike now, my legs feel strong and the run up the hill has opened my lungs. The saliva in my mouth has thickened to a paste which I spit out in solid chunks like broken teeth.

A white van forms a perfect shield for my break-away. Comforting clichés of graffiti are written in the dust covering its back window. Old time-trial racers used to set their records behind motorbikes or trains, using these vehicles, as I do now, as buffers to create pockets of turbulence in which they’d sit in comfort and pump enormous gear ratios to impossibly high speeds.

The white van just catches the next set of lights and I dash with it across the junction as it shields me from the traffic emerging from the right. Behind us I make out the tell-tale engine noise of a cab, a Fairfield, an old LTI model, which burbles like a piece of agricultural machinery as it swings round the bend and comes up behind. As an urban cyclist you quickly learn to attend to the soundscape of the city, anticipating vehicles coming up behind or emerging from side streets. The daily bombardment of sonic activity has honed my hearing, and I can recognise most generic types of vehicle through their aural signatures: the chugging tickover of a double-decker bus or the throaty hum of an aggressively driven white van.

The cab squeezes me into the curb, but as the traffic slows I leave it behind, tracing a route through the now stationary traffic and getting to the front of the line just as the lights change again. Another small hill. Lights in sequence. Open tarmac.

If bicycle track-races are lyric poems, and the one-day classics achingly significant short stories, then the grand Tours are triple-decker Victorian novels: sprawling, unpredictable, and filled with slightly artificial plot twists. Unlike football or tennis, sports that take place on standardised fields of play, cycling takes place in the real world. Its verisimilitude is its virtue: it celebrates the actual.

Unlike Football’s World Cup, the grand Tours take place every year, and visit roughly the same territory each time – the riders make
la grande boucle
around France or do their circuits of Italy and Spain. In his wonderful cultural history of the Tour de France, Christopher Thompson argues that the geographic repetitiveness of the race was borne of necessity and opportunity. In Britain, earlier to industrialise than France, football became the national game because the large crowds available in industrialised cities meant that mass-spectatorship was easy to organise. France, a bigger country with a sparser population, needed a sport that came to them.

The great road races become exercises in applied topography, incubating notions of nationhood by measuring out countries by the turn of wheel and crank. Early coverage of the Tour gave many French people their first look at a map of France, popularising the idea of the country as ‘L’Hexagone’. ‘It has been said the Frenchman is not much of a geographer,’ wrote Roland Barthes in
What is Sport?
:

Over the years the great climbs – Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez – have become as famous as the riders who annually attack them. In cycling journalism they’re written about as characters with personalities and histories of their own. They are duplicitous. They possess motives. As Barthes continued, through the Tour – or at least through writing about the Tour:

Later, as broadcasting technology improved, TV crews followed the race in cars and motorbikes: the bad feed registered something of the terrain, a series of interference bars and static fuzzing whenever the
peloton hit a particularly treacherous stretch of road. Watching footage from the early Tours you’re struck by the utter ungainliness of the riders once they’ve dismounted, to drink a quick cup of water at a dusty roadside bar, or to eat a quick meal after the day’s racing.

Ottavio Bottecchia, first Italian winner of the Tour de France in 1924, does battle with the mountain.

Unlike standardised sports, the records for which can be measured incrementally, year on year, there is no necessity for ever-increasing improvement among road cyclists. The terrain is the challenge. Thus it doesn’t much matter that the current peloton is significantly slower than it was in the ’90s. Far from it.
It’s often held up as evidence that doping has, if not been stamped out, then been considerably reduced. When Fausto Coppi won the Tour in 1952 he rode up mountains as though they were hills. Great riders have the ability to turn the landscape to their whims, to dance up impossible inclines as though they are mere blips, and thus appear to physically alter the landscape itself.