How I Won the Yellow Jumper (27 page)

‘Do you feel let down by him. By Vinokourov?' I asked, a notch louder, inwardly tutting.

‘I don't know what you mean,' came the reply.

At this moment, it should have occurred to me that, English not being his mother tongue, Biever might actually not have known what I meant. But through the haze of my wine-soaked reflexes, I took his understandable obtuseness for evasiveness. I pressed home my point.

‘I want to know if you feel let down by Alexandre Vinokourov,' I said, once again, and now almost very loud.

Biever looked pained at me. But he stood his ground and shrugged his shoulders. The next day, Woody said I should have ‘asked him if he felt disappointed'. It was the first and only time he has ever interfered in my job description. But I think he had a point.

‘Did Alexandre Vinokourov let you down?' One final time.

He mumbled some stuff about ‘A' and ‘B' samples, and with that, he was gone. I couldn't help feeling I might have handled the interview with a little more subtlety.

By the time we eventually settled down to eat that evening, it felt like the Tour was unravelling before us. We wondered separately whether we would have jobs to come back to the following July. We speculated on what might happen next, little knowing that the race itself would trump all our guesses.

The next day, we watched on in amazement as Bradley Wiggins's Cofidis teammate Christian Moreni was led away in front of all our cameras and bundled into the back of a gendarme's car after he'd ridden to the top of the Col d'Aubisque.

At the same time, Michael Rasmussen was being booed wearing the yellow jersey and on the podium by the small crowd who had gathered there.

That evening the entire Cofidis team endured the indignity of a police escort back to their hotel rooms. Like Astana, they too withdrew from the race.

And then in the dead of night, Rasmussen as well was stuffed in the back of a car, driven away to a secret location, and disappeared from view. All this happened while we stayed in Pau. All this played out while we enjoyed the hospitality of the Hotel Bristol. Whenever the Tour has taken us to Pau since, we have dropped in there for a coffee and to reminisce.

So in 2010, on finding out that Alberto Contador had tested positive, it came as no surprise to me that the incriminating doping control had been taken in Pau. It seems to be the plughole down which reputations disappear.

As a journalist, these stories are thrilling to report. As a cycling fan, they are toxic. And Vinokourov, through his seeming lack of remorse, remains to this day not without a curious fascination.

Liam retains a mystifying, and enduring affection for the taciturn Kazakh. He went as far as inventing a new piece of vocabulary; ‘Kourov!' A shorthand version of ‘Vino', it simply means wine, and to this day he will shout it out, in a restaurant, as he raises a glass of blood-red claret to the memory of 2007.

Of course, the Astana rider was back in 2010. He won a typical Vinokourov stage, full of defiance and spontaneity. He lapped up the applause. He believed himself absolved.

Liam and I waited in the mixed zone to ambush him.

‘What guarantees can you offer that you are now riding clean?' I asked.

‘This is a new Vino.'

‘Do you regret 2007?'

‘I will not talk about 2007,' he offered, with a pained wince. Then he moved on to the next microphone.

I'll talk about it, though. To anyone who'll listen.

I drove up to within five kilometres of the summit, on the south side of the mountain. There was a café, and a small car park. I left the hire car there, hiding the key behind the offside front wheel. Then I tightened the laces of my running shoes, took a couple of deep breaths of frozen Provençal air and set off up Mont Ventoux.

It was Christmas 2007. We were visiting friends who had a house at the base of the big mountain. I was thrilled to be staying this close to it, having only otherwise glimpsed its humpbacked form from the motorway, speeding past en route from the Alps to the Pyrenees, or vice versa. There is a helpful road sign, in ‘touristique' brown, which points it out, with the words ‘Le Géant de Provence'. Despite having five completed Tours under my belt, not one of them had included an ascent of Ventoux. So I was eager to see it for myself. Even if that meant running up it.

It was a crystal-clear, but bitterly cold, winter's day. The gradient was steep, but just reasonable enough for me to sustain a semi-breathless jog. The road snaked upwards, and I was conscious that behind me an expansive view to the south was opening up. I kept my gaze to the tarmac though, concentrating on my rhythm, as the cold air grew a little thinner.

With about a kilometre to go, the tarmac became shrouded in snow. Old snow, which had fallen some time ago, compacted, thawed a little and then refrozen. I scrunched into it, placing my footfalls as firmly as I could so as to avoid slipping. It was becoming hard. My calves were tightening.

I did stop briefly to see the Tom Simpson memorial and read the various tributes and messages from a wide cross section of the British cycling scene. Wolverhampton. Tiverton. Dulwich. It was curious to see such homely place names in that volcanic setting. A concentrated drop of British sentiment, a dot of Blighty on the lunar landscape of Mont Ventoux. How close he'd been to the summit when his heart gave out. I set off again drawn towards the iconic red-and-white striped tower of the meteorological station, which marks the summit.

Eventually I reached the top. Cresting the ridge quite suddenly, I saw what lay on the other side. Looking north, there was an endless panorama of France. Pretty much all of it.

It was a view of immeasurable depth. I had a sense of the whole of the hexagonal shape of the country spread before me, and a little to the east, the colossal icy forest of alpine peaks. With nothing of any size between where I stood and the great mountain range, they were lined up and on display. It's Ventoux's isolation which defines it.

I became aware that I was not alone. I had been joined on the parapet outside the weather station by a cyclist on a heavy, ancient-looking mountain bike. An old boy in his late sixties, he'd ridden up there just for the view, he told me. I could see why. Together we tried to figure out which alp was Mont Blanc, then he gave me a long drink from his water bottle and set off back down the mountain, explaining that ‘
Pour grimper, il faut boire; pour la descente, il faut manger
.' He grinned, and showed me a slightly bashed-up looking
pain au chocolat
that he presented with a flourish from his kagool. I followed a little while later – and within an hour or so, I was back in the warmth of our friends' house. I jabbered on excitedly about the view from the top. That picture, the Alps.

The Tour de France has always been a month-long commercial for the country; broadcasting images of valleys, fields of sunflowers, medieval villages and aqueducts which are designed to shout out from the TV: ‘
Visitez La France!
It's brilliant! We've got just about everything!'

Recent years have seen astonishing innovation in the quality of the images on TV. The helicopter has been a key factor in the Tour's ability to market itself as landscape eye
candy. Now the advent of high-definition pictures (if there is indeed anyone out there who actually knows how to make their telly receive them) has coincided with a quantum leap in the stability of pictures available from the aerial perch of a helicopter. The cameras are battered by the vibrations that result from being housed underneath a helicopter. But they now sit encased in a shell, which cushions them almost completely. Using baffling hydraulic technology such as ‘five-fold axis high bandwidth full stabilisation', cameras can now be fitted with huge, long, heavy lenses that zoom to the full extent of their capacity, right into the distance of the horizon, and maintain a perfectly stable shot that neither jerks nor judders.

One unforgettable image springs to mind in particular. The Tour was trundling over eastern France heading for Bourg-en-Bresse. Not much was happening in the race, so the French director started looking around for shots. Suddenly he cut to a picture of Mont Blanc.

People stopped what they were doing in the TV compound to watch their monitors, hooked in at once by the clarity of the picture. There was the white enormity of the mountain, framed up perfectly against an azure sky. Slowly, slowly, the cameraman, manipulating the airborne lens by remote control, pulled the shot wider and wider until a huge landscape filled the image, the ant-like figures in the peloton racing far below in the foreground, Mont Blanc now just a tiny white detail on the horizon.

The mountain must have been a hundred miles away, maybe more. But the camera brought it right into our living rooms and gave us a pure hit of that thrilling annual sensation: the mountains are here!

There is a moment like this, which marks every Tour: your first glimpse of the great mountain ranges of France. It might be that you nod off on the autoroute, only to find, as the speed
slows on the approach to the
péage
at the Grenoble exit shaking you awake, that without your realising it the horizon is now entirely entombed in Alps.

Or, it might be that the Tour has been hammering through Normandy or Brittany, an arc heading ever further south through the rolling country of Limousin and the flatlands of Aquitaine, before heading straight towards the pale jagged shock of the Pyrenees – Spain's over-engineered garden fence.

Up high is where the soul of the big race resides. Through a century of print, cartoonists have always anthropomorphised the mountains in French papers, breathing monstrous life into them and letting them roar. In their drawings they bare vicious sharp teeth, pointy, rocky noses, tufts of snowy hair, and often arms and hands, which pick up smaller mountains and hurl them at the defenceless riders. There is always an enraged storm cloud gathering above them, with Zeus-like bolts of lightning cracking over the summit. The riders have no chance.

The two opposing mountain ranges have their individual characteristics. The Alps are markedly better bred than the Pyrenees: neater, sharper, richer, sunnier. Somehow, in their ozone-depleted, Euro-jet-setting heat, they seem brighter. The Pyrenees, on the other hand, have a less-intense dose of the wooden-chaleted alpine kitsch. Their road surfaces are coarser,
their forests gloomier, their villages built from stone, dank with the downpours of Atlantic water dumped angrily over their peaks.