by Freya North
Jules tried Jesper Lomers. No reply.
But no reply is good – it means he is training. And no reply is better than Anya answering the phone. Irritating female – she sees Système Vipère as the ‘other woman’. Would Jesper be happy if he was not racing? Would he be a good husband then? She thinks it is she who makes him happy, fulfilled, loved. I know it is Système Vipère. Luckily, I don’t think Jesper gives the theory much thought at all. I’ll try him again. No reply. Good. Later.
The phone rang again. It was a young rider. ‘If you have diarrhoea,’ Jules said patiently, ‘what must you eat? That’s right, hard-boiled eggs, rice and live yoghurt. How much water did you take? That’s not enough. We’ll put you on electrolytes tonight.’ He hung up and laughed.
Directeur sportif? Call me père des coureurs – am I a trainer, a manager or papa?
‘That is why I am strict, a bastard,’ Jules muttered, temporarily changing his pace to a stroll. ‘I can shout at a rider in the morning, yell at him from the car during a race, yet by the evening, when he has finished, he is desperate for my embrace. I have to be a father figure to my racers for it is essential that they trust me and crave my approval through their excellence. Why else would they ride? Fabian only for money? Jesper only for his wife’s love? Get real.’
Jules marched purposefully across the place to the restaurant he had granted the accolade of hosting that year’s pre-Tour team dinner. In the town of Eustace St Pierre, it was an honour that all restaurants strove for each year. The proprietors wanted to pamper Jules with complimentary drinks, some fish soup, tarte tatin. Jules refused. He was there to check on the menu and arrange the seating plan. Busy. Too busy to eat or socialize, no time for pleasantries at all really.
The Tour de France is on Jules’s mind 365 days a year. And because of this, his popularity never suffers. The Tour defines a Frenchman’s calendar – for Jules Le Grand to be so unwaveringly committed to it sets him up as a hero amongst his countrymen. The Tour de France preoccupies Jules throughout the season, even when it is still months away. Paris–Nice, Tirreno–Adriatico, Catalan Week, Criterium International, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the Dauphiné Libéré. Though each race, revered enough in its own right, is given focused dedication, Jules thinks of them all as but preparation for the great one. The Tour de France is always on the tip of his tongue, behind the sparkle in his eye, ever simmering in his mind. The Tour commands his every thought, awake or asleep. Strategy becomes all-consuming.
Directeur sportif? I am a brilliant tactician.
Tonight’s strategy was for no strategy to be discussed and yet the very purpose of the evening was utterly strategic – team bonding and last mouthfuls of haute cuisine before all vestiges of normal life were relinquished to the clutch and drive of the Tour, to pasta at every single meal, to conversation, dream, thought, breath, devoted exclusively to the race.
More than father to the riders, more than director of a small company whose location changes on almost a daily basis, more than diplomat, or supreme strategist – ultimately I am an army general. The Tour de France is not just about teams of riders going to war against each other; frequently the most severe battle for a rider is an individual one with his own self-belief. I must try Jesper again. That is why I must get to Jesper.
‘Hey!’ Fabian drawls when he arrives at the restaurant and sits himself down, ‘it’s our Super Sprinter, the Blond Bomb, the Rotterdam Rocket – you’re looking good!’
The compliment, laced with sarcasm, is directed at Jesper Lomers. The Dutchman regards Fabian with a smile and a shake of his head to conceal any hint of embarrassment. Fabian lifts a lock of Jesper’s hair. It is very blond, like straw, but soft, a little spiky here, charmingly floppy there.
‘That crazy magazine,’ Fabian remarks, referring to a recent adulatory article in Italian Vogue in which he and Jesper were featured, ‘they’ll be mourning when your hair is shorn within an inch of your scalp for the Tour. What was it that they wrote about your legs?’
Jesper waves his hand dismissively and busies himself tearing open a bread roll, buttering it well, yet not eating it.
This is good, Jules thinks, humour, laughter, the team is reacting well.
He answers on Jesper’s behalf. ‘The article said – team, listen up – Jesper Lomers has the most beautiful thighs in the peloton.’
The team fell about laughing.
Jesper shrugs. ‘They’re the tools of my trade, guys, the tools of my trade. I’m a good rider – not a sex symbol.’
‘Where’s the problem in being both,’ Fabian comments, knowing his own blend is consummate.
‘Anya would beg to differ, I’m sure,’ chips in a team member.
‘Anya wants to go back to Holland,’ Jesper says to everyone but looking steadily at Jules.
‘And we want the green jersey,’ Jules responds, holding the eye contact whilst aware and pleased that the restaurant saw fit to serve him first, ‘and we want you, Jesper, to win it for us again this year.’ He regards his rider, one of the most consistent he has ever known. ‘The maillot vert is yours. You can take it again, your riding warrants it.’ Jules knows he can keep Fabian – a little flattery, a lot of money. Jesper he is not so sure about and it unnerves him.
I’ve never known a rider who can win so spectacularly but with such good grace. Nor have I known a rider so keen to kiss his wife whenever she’s at the start or the finish. Increasingly, though, she’s been at neither. It unnerves Jesper, I know. She wants to go home. And that unnerves me. Jesper must stay. She has plans. But so do I.
‘That’s why no wives,’ Jules, musing to himself over the three he’d regrettably suffered, proclaims. Luckily, Jesper is preoccupied dunking his bread into the soup like a tea bag and appears not to have heard, let alone taken offence. A couple of the other riders, however, shoot blade-sharp looks at their directeur. When they are sure he isn’t looking.
‘I ride better if I sleep better and I sleep well when I share with my wife,’ says one under his breath.
‘Vraiment,’ agrees the other. ‘I need a bed-mate on the Tour, not a room-mate. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ his team-mate confirms. ‘So, are we rooming again, this Tour?’
‘I would think so,’ the other shrugs. ‘I’ve requested it.’
‘So have I.’
‘You nervous?’ his team-mate asks, despite knowing it is a question that will never be answered directly.
‘You?’
Clever but fairly standard answer.
‘No Weakness,’ the rider proclaims as if it is some mantra.
‘Précisément!’ The team-mates, soon to be room-mates in lieu of their female bed- and soul-mates, chink glasses and drink the red wine as if it is nectar.
‘Jules, where’s Carlos?’
‘A Spaniard riding for a French team is a coup enough,’ Fabian interjects, touching his nose as if it is out of joint. ‘Can we really expect him to turn up any earlier than the last minute, for something as trivial as a team meal?’
Before Jules can answer on Carlos’s behalf, the waiters arrive with miniature portions of sorbet which everyone samples but, being tomato and basil sorbet (of which, undoubtedly, Django McCabe would have been proud), no one much likes.
Jules raises his glass of Burgundy. ‘Here’s to the jerseys. And they are most definitely plural. The yellow. The green. The polka dot. Fabian. Jesper. Carlos. Here’s to Système Vipère. Salut.’
‘Vive le Tour,’ says Fabian, gulping wine and then tucking into duck.
‘Vive le Tour,’ says Jesper, thinking of Anya, wishing she were here and apprehensive about a certain coldness that will greet him at home that night.
Carlos Jesu Velasquez had no compunction at being absent from the team dinner in France.
‘I am to spend over three weeks in your country so that night I will dine with my wife,’ he had said to Jules previously by telephone.
He must feel special, Jules had reasoned to himself,
so I will make it seem a gesture of my respect that he needn’t be present for the dinner. Realistically, he would not add much in the way of scintillating conversation to the evening. In truth, it is not important to the team or the Tour whether he eats escargots with us or paella with his family.
Carlos Jesu Velasquez is nicknamed the Pocket Rocket, like the energy bars of that name which the riders carry with them, on account of his small stature but enormous potency. Carlos Jesu is also known as the Cicada for he speaks little. He speaks no other language than Spanish but even amongst the Spanish riders he is frugal with communication. He uses his tongue and his lips to address the peloton, hissing or clicking at riders to move away, to work with him, to get out of his line. Carlos is also known as the Little Lion, for when the little climber wins at a mountain finish he lets out a guttural roar utterly inconsistent with his diminutive size and quiet mien. His wife, Marie-Christina, however, calls him Jesu with a throatily pronounced ‘h’. His three children call him Papa.
This evening, he walked his three children across the street to his mother-in-law’s. He then went back to his house, closed the door and made love to Marie-Christina. Then he sang to her. Tomorrow, he will travel to Eustace St Pierre.
‘Away on business,’ he whispers soothingly to his wife, ‘but home again soon.’
If I were to meet the inimitable Fabian Ducasse, what exactly would I say? Cat wondered, on her way in to the Guardian office to discuss their requirements and other practicalities.
He’s famed as a womanizer, so should I concede that he might be more willing to talk, to grant me an audience, if I wore a skirt? I’d have to think of a slant – not just ‘Are you going to win the Tour de France, Monsieur Ducasse?’ Perhaps I could ask him about sport and adulation – would he do it if he didn’t get it? I want to tap in to that arrogance to see if it’s a front or genuine. Not that I care which – it has the desired effect on me for one.
Is there time to learn a little Spanish? Mind you, just a grunt from Carlos Jesu Velasquez would suffice. And how about Jesper? Is there anything that comes close to hearing English spoken with a Dutch accent?
I can’t believe I’m soon to be there. In France. With them. What’ll I say?
RACHEL McEWEN AND TEAM ZUCCA MV
‘Jesus!’ cried Massimo Lipari, grasping his left leg and stroking his hamstring tenderly. ‘Holy Mother Mary – you are in one fuck of a bad mood.’
Rachel McEwen looked down on the rider’s prostrate nakedness, his nether regions covered only by a towel, nappy-style; his lanky, lithe frame the colour of mocha ice-cream, which enabled him to skip up mountains like a gazelle, his huge brown eyes regarding her dolefully, full lips puckered into a somewhat theatrical pout. She looked at her hands, bit her lip and apologized.
‘I’m sorry, Mass,’ she said, using her hands more gently and reminding herself that his thighs were flesh and not meat, ‘I have a lot on my mind.’
Shit, poor Vasily – I must have pummelled him to hell and back half an hour ago. And yet I never heard even a wince – just a ‘thank you, Rachel, thank you’. Vasily Jawlensky, the committed and consummate sportsman for whom, no doubt, ‘pain is gain’, a man frugal with words but abundant in his triumphs. And now Massimo, Italy’s heartthrob, the team’s key personality, one who loves to make drama out of the ordinary, let alone a crisis. Was I rough? Did I hurt you? Sorry.
Rachel shook her hands as if they were wet and, despite fingers glistening with massage oil, scrunched her wavy hair into a haphazard pile on top of her head. She returned her hands to the rider’s inner thigh and then moved her fingers as if she was playing the piano.
‘You know,’ said Massimo, ‘when they said we were to have a female soigneur – well, I almost went on strike, I could have left the team, to and fro.’
Rachel laughed. ‘You mean there and then, Mass. I thought you’d have been delighted, being the Casanova that you are.’
Massimo grimaced as Rachel worked at a particularly tight knot near his knee, as if she was making pastry. ‘Well, girl, if they had said we were going to have a, how do you say, female doll?’
‘Mascot?’ Rachel suggested.
‘Si! Mascot – that would have been different. But I never thought the words female and soigneur could really be – how do you say? Married?’
‘What you mean, you nasty man,’ Rachel retorted with no malice, ‘is that you didn’t think a female soigneur would be any good.’
‘Si,’ said Massimo, his eyes still closed, ‘paint and pasta.’
‘Chalk and cheese,’ Rachel corrected. ‘You thought that she’d be too weak to give a good massage.’
‘Si,’ Massimo smiled, looking at the ceiling of Rachel’s office at the team’s Cambiago headquarters while she continued to untie his muscles and unravel his ligaments.
‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’
‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.
‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’
‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.
‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’
‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.
‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’
‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’
Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are men, women and soigneurs. I mean, I know I’m a woman, but it is a fact of negligible interest to the cycling fraternity.
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says out loud, allowing herself a fleeting glance in the mirror and thinking her hair really does need a cut. ‘This is my job. It’s appallingly paid but I love it.’
Rachel McEwen is twenty-seven years old and looks far too slight to be hoiking the heavy limbs of exhausted men and dispelling the lactic acid in their tense, brutalized muscles. But that is what she does and she does it very well.
‘But what the fuck is a signor?’ her best friends had enquired when she told them she was leaving Edinburgh for Italy to be one two years ago.
‘Soigneur,’ she stressed. ‘It means “one who looks after” – the riders’ needs are my responsibility.’
This was greeted, much to her consternation, by a rapid chorus of wink-wink, nudge-nudging.
‘I’ll be doing their laundry, for Christ’s sake!’ she retorted, twisting her hair around and around in frustration before pinning it to her head precariously. ‘And preparing their race food each day. And going on ahead to the hotels to check out the rooms and the menus. And giving massage and minor medical assistance. And counselling – many riders look on their soigneur as their confidante.’
‘Back track, back track,’ they had implored, ‘to the “massage” bit.’
‘Yes?’ Rachel had replied ingenuously. ‘It’ll be good to put it to some practical use after two years of training.’
‘They’
ll devour you,’ one friend said. ‘You’re such a wee lass and all that friction against the chamois lining of their shorts must make ’em horny bastards.’
‘Numb, more like,’ Rachel had said, ‘and anyway, I can’t be doing with love at my age.’
I haven’t the time, Rachel reasons, remembering that conversation well and realizing with horror that she hasn’t been back to Scotland for almost a year. She prepares the table for Stefano Sassetta’s arrival and skims through the sheaves of lists for the Tour that she started compiling during the Giro.
Shit! Frangipane.
Is that an expletive?
No, I really do mean the cake. It is a fantastic energy burst for the boys and it keeps moist and fresh for ages. I’m in cahoots with a local baker – he has broken an age-old family custom to make the cake square just for Zucca MV, because it’s much more practical to cut and divide.
So, a soigneur is a masseuse and a patisserie expert?
And a rally driver too – watch me bomb along the Stage route to the feed station or the arrivée where often I have to rescue my riders from the media scrum.
It is my job to be the first person my rider sees on finishing a Stage.
‘Shit,’ says Rachel, running fingers still rather oily through her long-suffering locks, ‘I must check on disposable flannels. Stefano is due in ten minutes and I’m a little concerned about that shoulder of his.’
Stefano Sassetta, who should have been on Rachel’s massage table ten minutes ago, was parading around his apartment in his Zucca MV team strip.
‘God, this blue and yellow suits me,’ he commented to his current girlfriend. ‘If I had taken up Team Mapei’s offer, I wouldn’t look half as good. It was reason enough to stay with Zucca MV.’
While Stefano gazed at his opulent if vulgar kitchen extension, a gift from the team’s sponsors and designed by Stefano himself, his girlfriend could barely keep her eyes from the semicircle of stitching around the reinforced groin area. It was like a magnificent sunburst and she was hot for what was behind it.