How I Won the Yellow Jumper (29 page)

Eventually, after climbing to within about 3km of the finish line, we rounded a sharp left-handed bend, and I signalled, with the assuredness of a water-diviner, that this was indeed the spot. It was a grassy slope on the inside of the switchback, with a scattering of tents. It was a little exposed, but boasted an extraordinary view of the mountains opposite. They were swathed in a menacing-looking purple cloud against which the
dipping sun was fighting a losing battle.

Liam and Woody started filming my preparations, overseen by Chris. I suddenly felt like one of his six children, watching Dad take control of the family holiday. Chris scouted a location for my pitch, flattened the grass, considered the lie of the land and prodded the turf for tent-peg-purchase with scientific intensity. Satisfied with his findings, he pointed to the spot.

He unpopped the tent. It kind of flopped onto the mountainside, looking much like one of those tiny ‘fortune-telling' fish you place in the palm of your hand. It curled up at the edges as if it had died from exposure.

Chris cackled with delight. This now genuinely seemed to amuse the former Olympic Champion. ‘You going to sleep in there?'

‘Yes,' I replied.

‘That's funny,' the former world record holder concluded.

But the jealous fuss he made over my box of provisions was completely unnecessary. It was as if Philippe and Odette, in providing me with a few bits and pieces for dinner, had actively denied him something, which was rightly his. He was outraged that I had been given a bottle of Côtes de Bourg. He
felt a personal sense of indignation, that I had been given a thick slice of Camembert.

The time came at last for them to leave me on my own. They retreated, filming me as they went; a forlorn figure on a darkening mountainside, clutching a camcorder, with which I filmed them as they went. In the final edited piece, this is the moment when the professionally shot footage hands over to the much shakier and more amateur video-diary footage, which I shot myself.

They drove off back down the mountain, beeping their horn with unconcealed glee. I gazed across at my surroundings. There was a brief break in the traffic, a temporary respite from the noise of the road. Time enough to register the tiny sound of a thousand different souls putting kids to bed and uncorking bottles in a dozen different languages. Their voices melted into the void against the chill of the evening sky that was beginning to bear down on the landscape.

I unpacked my stuff and laid it out as best I could. I fiddled with the camera, and began to grapple with the peculiar demands of the video-diary format. Filming myself going about my ordinary business struck me as a peculiar vanity. Especially when conducted within the privacy of my own one-man tent. I was embarrassed for myself. But as soon as I stepped outside, clutching the damn thing at arm's length, pointing it back at me, my sense of foolishness grew until it bordered on shame. Nevertherless, it had to be done. To go through this experience and not return with anything like a cogent piece of telly would be adding pointlessness to futility.

Armed with my bottle of wine and my video camera, I yomped down the ten yards of sloping mountainside to meet the neighbours. Within seconds, and without even taking off my shoes, I was standing in their ‘front room', balancing a plate of spaghetti, a cup of pastis and a camcorder. They were a warm, kind family from somewhere in France that I had
never heard of. Not that I let on. I am sure that I nodded with enthusiastic familiarity as they told me about their journey from Saint-Jean-de-Wherever to find their plot of land next to mine on the side of Hautacam.

They asked me where I was from. Londres. ‘
Ah oui, oui
.' They had a cousin who'd been to a language school in Eastbourne. Most French people do.

Then they asked me what I thought I was doing. This was trickier. ‘
Je travaille pour une chaine de télé anglaise
.'

Really? They looked me up and down, a little sceptically. ‘BBC?'

‘
Oui
,' I lied.

‘
Ah, très bon ça
. BBC verrry goood. Ha ha ha.' No one abroad has ever said to me ‘Ah, ITV! Ant and Dec! Very good.'

So it was that, with their daughter-in-law now acting as the official BBC camera operator, I passed a very fine hour in their company as the pastis flowed and the night got gradually colder and colder. We talked about the nationalities, the numbers of different countries represented in the tented settlement. We aired prejudices, shared stereotypes. We talked about the racing, the riders, the route. They metaphorically raised their
chapeaux
to Armstrong; not something I was used to seeing the French do. But this was the 2008 Tour, led for a long time by Cadel Evans. It had been uninspiring so far, and even the French were now yearning for a dash of the swashbuckling Texan. If you're going to win the race, then ride like a winner, we generally agreed.

I left them to it, and with darkness now settled on the Hautacam, carried on my rounds of the neighbours, the pastis now emboldening me, and easing my embarrassment with the camera.

I passed by a few grizzly old veterans gathered around a recalcitrant TV set which they were trying to tune in to the Tour highlights show. These two old boys had seen every Tour
together for the last twelve years. I suspect that this is what swathes of French middle-aged manhood do to get away from home life. Every nation seems to create a mass participation event for men of a certain age, which involves canvas and flasks. For the British it's fishing. In France it's Le Tour. They planned to drive over to the Alps and climb Alpe D'Huez in a week's time. In 2003, they'd been there the day Armstrong assumed control of the race. We remembered the day. We shared the Côtes de Bourg. And then I stumbled on.

I was down on the road now, strolling past campfires and gas stoves, singing kettles and singing people. But the rural idyll was shortlived. For, as the clock ticked towards midnight, the Tour Proper had started to hit the mountainside. The convoy of articulated trucks containing thousands of tons of metal barriers as well as all the broadcast equipment, the catering, the podium, the commentary tribune, the VIP stand, etc., etc., etc., had begun to grind its way up to the finish line. They flashed their lights and sat on their horns, blasting their way to the top. They roared past tents, missing guy-ropes by inches. On narrow stretches of the road, I had to squash myself flat against the cliff-side while the trucks hammered past me, or hop up precariously onto the parapet on the outside of the road to let them pass, dicing with the bottomless drop on the other side. There seemed no end to the convoy. I was amazed to witness its passage from this perspective. Violent, noisy, triumphant. A terrifying game of chicken had begun. The fittest, boldest and drunkest took turns dashing across the road just in front of the lorries, risking everything for the sake of a pastis-soaked thrill.

Andy, our driver that year, edged our truck past, picking me out in a blast of recognition. I saluted him.

By now I had reached another long switchback. Here, where the road widened slightly to allow for a passing bay, was a temporary nightclub. Lights, dance floor, DJ, bar, everything.
There was even a bar-room fight, although it was a pretty half-arsed affair which ended in two Basque students missing each other repeatedly with wide, rangy left hooks before swapping hats and collapsing on the floor convulsed with laughter. All this took place, while their friends were baring their backsides at the passing convoy.

I stopped for a beer, chatted to a couple of Dutch kids who had got the Rabobank team from 2007 to sign their team-issue shirts. They showed me Michael Rasmussen's signature and made the universal sign of the syringe before crying with drunken laughter, draining their beers and turning to order more. I wished them well, and turned for ‘home', the lure of my canvas tomb now proving irresistible. As I left the nightclub behind me, I wondered at the logistics of it all. There was a ten-mile stretch of the same scene endlessly self-replicating. Diesel generators discharging into the mountain air, powering the noise, light and beer, and oiling the wheels of mayhem.

Trudging back up the grassy slope towards my tent, I stopped off one last time, drawn to a scene of painterly beauty. A group of a dozen young Basque students had a campfire roaring, kept burning by a constant supply of aromatic bush wood from their well-organised colleagues on a foraging rota. I asked them if I could join them, and then concentrated on filming them as they began to sing. I had no idea what songs they were, but they sounded perfect; the alien, ancient language bellowed with throaty sincerity across the bowl of warm light, which flickered across their faces.

They could have been singing anything. It was wonderful to hear.

I suppose they must have asked themselves who I was and what on earth I thought I was doing filming them. But if they did, they hid their suspicions well. I listened for a while longer, politely declined their offer of a swig from their shared bottle of Metaxa, and then headed home to the wilting dew-speckled
accommodation Chris had sorted for me. I opened my front door with that trademark zipping sound, which more than any other noise evokes the chilly privations of the campsite, and clambered in. Climbing into my sleeping bag and chewing on a salami, I lay awake for a while enjoying the mixture of sounds outside.

The holy trinity of a summer's night on Tour in the high Pyrenees: Basque singing, diesel engines and French laughter. I fell sound asleep, and dreamt with frightful intensity that I was in a tent on my own on a mountain.

I awoke an hour or two later to find that I had dissolved into a crumpled heap at the bottom end of the tent. It is one of the great hardships of mountainside camping, a phenomenon that deprives all but the comatose of a decent night's sleep, and I was just about to make its acquaintance.

Because mountains rise steadily, there is an entire absence of anywhere flat. This may sound fairly obvious, but until you've felt the resultant effect, you're in no position to judge its seriousness. Forced to sleep with my head higher than my feet, which faced down the mountain, I had been unaware of what might happen to me. But it is a clear physiological impossibility to gain restful sleep with your calf and thigh muscles gently bracing you against gravity. Eventually they will simply give in, and you'll wake to find yourself curled up in a ball at the foot of your tent. Using a baguette as an improvised ice-pick, I scaled back up the mountain, to the rolled-up ball of jumpers and socks that was making do as a pillow. I lay my head down and closed my eyes again, feeling the gentle insistence of the inevitable crumpling process beginning to take hold even as I drifted off. Outside, it was cold and quiet, the revellers now dotted all across the hillside in their own cocoons, waging their own private wars against the laws of physics.

After what seemed like six hours and thirteen minutes, I gave up pretending to myself that I was sleeping. It was 6.13.
I deemed that a respectable-enough time to unzip my tent and get going. Coyly, and with the camera self-consciously nosing through the opening first to get the shot for real, I blinked into the morning air.

Overnight everything had changed. Still, clear air stood high in the valley, and reached from the grass to the stratosphere. Far away, the sun had just burst over the crested ridge of mountaintops that stood guard to the east, making the colours of the various tents on our side glow. It was going to be a beautiful day.

For now, I had the mountain to myself. The various victims of pastis, beer and Metaxa were still sleeping it off, somehow. I filmed a little, turned the camera on myself to complain about the terrible night's sleep, and then set off for a high point on a rock 100 yards further uphill. Here, with the help of a bottle of water to prop the camera against, and a quite inspired eye for cinematography, I framed up a breathtakingly beautiful shot of the Pyrenees. It would have been breathtaking had it not been spoilt a little by the sight of me in silhouette, gargling Evian mixed with Colgate and spitting repeatedly into the fine mountain grasses on an otherwise perfect day for the Tour de France.