Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  The story of Steinès’s reconnaissance has been told and retold many times. Like most of the good stories about the Tour de France, its truth or otherwise is slightly beside the point, and it all happened more than a hundred years ago so it’s not surprising there are many conflicting accounts of what went on. There has been a lot of exaggeration, guesswork and Chinese whispers – mainly about when it all actually happened (estimates in most histories range from late 1909 to May 1910) and what befell Steinès on the mountain that night. But, as it happens, we have two accounts of it directly from Steinès himself. One was published in L’Auto on 1 July, just before the race itself. The other was in a L’Équipe special edition almost 50 years later, in 1959, when Steinès was an old man of 86. In the accompanying photograph he has a long white beard, his trademark John Lennon spectacles and appears to be wearing a dressing gown and pyjamas. He is clutching something that looks suspiciously like a road map of c.1910 vintage, and resembles most closely Santa Claus on one of his evenings off. Both accounts, despite the years between them, concur on all the major details.

  Steinès must have known as well as anyone how unpredictable the weather can be in the mountains, even relatively late in the year, but he was unprepared for the serious late-season snowfall in the Pyrenees in June 1910, which coated the tops of the highest peaks with deep fresh drifts. It didn’t impede Steinès initially. He negotiated the Perpignan–Luchon stage and much of the second (including the Col d’Aspin where Ravaud and Abran had failed) successfully on his bicycle. After the Aspin, he stopped at Sainte Marie de Campan at the foot of the Tourmalet for some food, and received bad news: the Tourmalet was probably impassable. Definitely, probably, or maybe it wasn’t. Nobody knew for certain, and nobody nursing their drink in the warmth of the local auberge seemed much inclined to find out. But Steinès could feel, you imagine, the malevolent heat of Desgrange’s wrath on his back. He decided he must press on. A local man volunteered to drive him up (in a Dietrich, if we’re still keeping an eye on the cars), and in the lengthening shadows of the evening they set off.

  The going was good until, two kilometres from the top, they were halted by banks of snow covering the road. It was 7 p.m. and a heavy fog was competing with the approaching night to see which would fall first. The Dietrich was forced to turn around and Steinès, though hemmed in by snow, was at a metaphorical crossroads. To turn back would be to admit that he had let his mouth write a cheque his bike couldn’t cash, and above all to fail his patron. ‘It’s great to play the big man, to show a courageous face, when you’re chatting by the fire,’ he wrote, somewhat self-congratulatingly in L’Auto. ‘It’s another thing to see that man in the face of adversity.’

  What sort of man was he?

  He resolved to make it, come what may, and found a shepherd who agreed to take him to the col. Together they began the climb. Steinès’s inexperience made him a slow and perilous walker, and he fell into a crevasse more than once. An hour later they reached the trig point marking the top (given in those days as 2,133 metres, not the 2,115 metres the road is now) and the shepherd, refusing all pleas, imprecations and finally threats, refused to neglect his flock any longer and lead Steinès down the other side. Snow lay even more thickly on the downhill towards Barèges, and Steinès, alone and unsure of the way down, crawled on all fours for four kilometres over the snow, through the dark, slid, rolled and hit his head. Enveloped in clouds, unable to orient himself or even know how much time was passing, since his watch had stopped at ten past nine, he simply headed in what appeared to be the least dangerous way down. Eventually he reached a stream, which he followed to a waterfall, which soaked him, before carrying on downhill. Then he found some bicycle tracks to follow and, finally, a road; and when he found that, he fell to the floor with exhaustion and started crying. He’d crossed the Tourmalet by night and made it safely to Barèges. But only just. It was 3 a.m. and there were search parties out combing the mountainside for him.

  ‘I escaped all by myself,’ he wrote as an old man, ‘but not without injury and not without terrible dangers. I lived through hours of mortal anguish, without help, in the sinister nocturnal silence of the high mountains.’

  Nevertheless, Steinès communicated back to Paris that the Tourmalet was perfectly passable.fn2 And it was by this confidence trick that he turned the Tourmalet from a ‘wrong turn’ (which is what the name means in the local dialect) to a ‘must have’ – from un mauvais détour to l’incontournable, as the French know it today.

  If only this had been the end of his problems.

  There was still the matter of the Col d’Aubisque, which, though lower, was reckoned by many to be harder than the Tourmalet, and was definitely in a worse state of repair. The next day, Steinès battled over it through a storm, both riding and pushing his bike when the track got too bad. Arriving safely on the other side, he stopped for the night and learnt that only a few days previously a car had been attempting the crossing when it skidded on the loose stones of the track surface and rolled 400 metres into a gully. The car (a Mercedes) was completely destroyed, and all four passengers had died.

  The following day he paid a visit to the Génie des ponts et chaussées in Pau, to talk to the chief engineer in charge of the local roads and bridges. At first, the man was horrified that anyone might consider sending a bicycle race up what was clearly an unsuitable track. The Mercedes catastrophe had shocked the valley and he would happily do something to make it safer, the chief engineer said, but he didn’t have any money.

  ‘You have to make the road good. The riders will cross it in a month – mark my words, they will cross it,’ Steinès replied. ‘If it’s a question of money we will provide it. But they will pass!’

  The mention of financial help got things moving. Steinès put in a long-distance call to Paris and finally got Desgrange on the other end of the line, to whom he explained they needed around 5,000 francs to make the road passable.

  ‘Offer them 500,’ Desgrange said, and the line cut out.

  That evening, Steinès dined with the chief engineer and the subordinate whose job it was not to maintain the Aubisque road. By the end, they’d agreed that Steinès would return to Paris and try to increase this sum. After calling in all the favours he could, Steinès scraped together 1,500 francs. The chief engineer found the same amount, and with these 3,000 francs the work started to make the road over the Aubisque from Arrens to Gourette passable for a bike race.

  I read Steinès’s account of all this some months after my meeting with Jean-Marie-André Fabron who, though his official job title is chef de la subdivision Tinée, stands in a direct line of descent from that chief engineer in Pau; his conversations – or lack of them – with the Giro organisers about snow on the Bonette seem familiar. Plus ça change, I think. It seems correct to say that race organisers are always on the edge of a folie de grandeur – that their o’erleaping ambitions to bring us the highest peaks, the greatest excitements and spectacle always risk falling flat. The history of bike racing in the mountains has probably always been one of big gestures and big risks, for the organisers as well as the riders.

  For all the uncertainties and difficulties in its preparation, once the riders are over the start line the 1910 stage is a huge success. The winner, Octave Lapize, duels with his teammate Gustave Garrigou up and down the monstrous cols. However, while Lapize is humbled and has to climb off his bike and walk some of the way up the Tourmalet, Garrigou, first man over, wrestles his machine up the whole way and doesn’t put foot to ground. Desgrange’s money man and deputy, Victor Breyer, is there on the top of the Tourmalet to see the first men over and receive Lapize’s famous hurled abuse: ‘You’re all assassins!’

  Either there was a lot of murdering going on or it’s such a good line the reporters take it and run with it, as it’s riffed on in the paper three times over the coming days. In the second instance, the organisers’ car draws alongside a labouring Lapize on the Aubisque, and the rider is asked what’s up. ‘I’
ll tell you what’s up, you’re criminals, you hear?’ he replies. ‘Tell Desgrange that from me. You don’t ask a man to make an effort like this, I’ve had enough.’ In the third instance, Steinès conducts some interviews after the stage: ‘Desgrange is an assassin,’ is Lapize’s verdict.

  Emboldened by this reaction, perhaps – and by Faber’s amazing third place overall – Desgrange thinks bigger and higher. The next year will include the Ballon d’Alsace, and in the Alps the Col du Télégraphe and the mighty Galibier. The mountains have given him suffering, spectacle and drama, and already forged some of the myths that will sustain the Tour for the next hundred years and more. Steinès makes even more grandiose claims, however, when he tells his version of the Tourmalet story in 1959. This modest sum of 3,000 francs and the publicity generated by the Tour, he says, led to the routes thermales being classified in the national road network for the first time: ‘I say that without the Tour de France, the world’s tourists might not even today know the splendid, admirable, unique Route des Pyrénées, this trophy of France in its incomparable natural setting.’

  In other words, when Desgrange gave the mountains to cycling, he gave them to everyone else as well.

  As for us, we got to the top, eventually. Just not in the 2CV. It motored happily up to Saint Dalmas, where we found the photographer and assorted bike riders already tucking into a lunch of cured meats and cheeses made of the milk from the flocks of sheep that grazed on the banks of the tiny river below. We joined them and mixed in a little red wine to give us courage for the ascent ahead. But even the wine could not convince me that the 2CV would successfully take us much further. Even though our late-model van was, comparatively speaking, supercharged – 602cc rather than the 398cc the smiling little rust buckets were born with in 1948, and therefore something like trois rather than the deux chevaux of its name – it didn’t inspire confidence. To cap it all, it had been decided we would be taking the hidden back road to the top, past Saint Dalmas to the Col de la Moutière and then around. This had the benefit of being stunningly beautiful and deserted, and the disadvantage of being much steeper, with three kilometres of unpaved track at the end. I was uneasy and, surrounded by models, the old advice from Walden flashed through my mind: ‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ And I remembered from Steinès the folly of unadvised motor trips in the mountains. In 1913 he had the privilege of reading his own obituaries after the car he was travelling in during a Tour de France recce (a Hispano-Souza, if you want to know) rolled over while trying to avoid an accident. It left him with multiple fractures, wounds bad enough that he was not expected to live. Upon awaking in the hospital, he read the words written over him on his deathbed and – ever the diligent journalist – offered to write his own instead, so that there were no mistakes.

  Despite my pessimism, the Fourgonnette took the first steep slopes with aplomb. However, about halfway up it started to labour. Something began to smell and the clutch ceased to engage or disengage the gearbox, and I enviously thought back to the unasked-for luxury of both reading and writing one’s own obituary. The burning smell got worse. Eventually the forward motion ceased – no explosion, no flames, broken bones or disfigurements, barely even a cough from the engine – and we had to park it on the verge and let it ‘rest’. Then we carried on up to the top, the Col de la Moutière, a desolate place where I had my first real look at a wartime Alpine bunker. The compact, forbidding concrete outpost stared out over the desolate landscape, still standing guard in a way that captured my imagination.

  The Fourgonnette revived on the way down, and we got it back to town without accident or injury. But I took the experience as proof, if any was needed (it wasn’t), that a 2CV did not dictate the Tour’s climbing categories. Neither did our valiant 2CV, to my knowledge, appear in a single publicity picture taken from that shoot. Was it all in vain? Your guess is as good as mine. Much later, in a fit of vintage postcard buying – the results of which you will find scattered through this book – I came across something. A picture from the early days of the Col de la Bonette with, you’ve guessed it, a 2CV parked at the top. So it was not the road’s fault. Perhaps it was simply a bad 2CV. Perhaps our failure was due to bike riders jumping in and out and a photographer hanging out of the back doors. Perhaps it was because we were going at barely a walking pace and stopping frequently to let the riders catch up. I recalled that the hors catégorie – the slightly nonsensically named ‘beyond categorisation’ categorisation was born in 1979, around the same time as our Fourgonnette. Let’s call it an hors catégorie photo shoot.

  Chapter 3

  CONTROL, AND LOSING IT

  Or, pain and its consolations, racing with or without a brain, and Freud and flying stones to finish off

  It’s summer somewhere in some nameless mountains in France, and I’m riding with my rather fitter and speedier friend James. But that’s OK, because he’s stopped for a pee behind a road sign and I’m forging ahead up the slope at my own pace, knowing that he will catch me soon enough and force me to speed up to, and then past, the point of hot discomfort once again. In the meantime, though, there’s some pensioner on a mountain bike a couple of hairpins up the road. A damselfly snared in the surface tension, a trout circling below. I glimpse him periodically through the cherry and the apricot trees, and a little further up, strobing in between the neat rows of the vineyards, frozen zoetropically each time as if in a motion study of a cyclist. He’s pedalling very smoothly, but I figure I’ll reach him easily, breeze past him with a cheery ‘Bonjour’, maybe slow down to exchange a few words – if he can squeeze any out without keeling over – and then I’ll pedal off again, all souplesse and mountain-goat ease. Five minutes later, I’m breathing loudly and mashing at the pedals, while the old timer is still just spinning along. He’s barely any closer and I can feel my features are set into a familiar red scowl of effort. James rejoins, smells the sweaty tang of competition in the air, and also takes up the chase. An eternity passes and I’m on the edge of breathless collapse but we’re within hailing distance of the guy, whose scrawny legs seem barely to be pushing the cranks around. I struggle to compose myself and to project the nonchalance I had once imagined I’d have in this situation. We draw alongside, force out a ‘Salut’, and the plastic bulge on the down tube of his bicycle frame makes everything clear: he has a battery, and, therefore, a motor. Mechanical doping. He was a lure, and we swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.

  The point to be drawn from this is not that we should hate electric bikes. (I did at that moment, but, all in all, I was rather pleased he was even able to ride in the mountains, which I don’t think would have been open to him otherwise.) Nor am I highlighting how much I cared that we’d bust our guts in a rigged and unfair contest. The point is more that anyone can ride up a mountain. OK, not everyone; but most people aged between seven and 77 with a good basic level of fitness can, even without motor assistance. If you don’t think so, give it a go. You won’t look elegant like Fausto Coppi or soar like Marco Pantani – it will more than likely be a bloody ugly, dishevelling and discomfiting slog – but as long as you’re prepared to dig in and turn the pedals for far more time than is reasonable or dignified, you will probably get to the top.

  However. Very few people ever actually race up a mountain. On group rides we may attack relentlessly and tear strips out of our mates, or when riding solo set our sights on beating some nameless other up ahead, but even if we participate in an Italian Gran Fondo event or an Étape du Tour (the annual amateur sportive run on closed roads over one of the Tour de France’s stages, which are hotly contested by an elite few), for most of us these are just a long, lumpy day out on the bike. Yet racing in the mountains has, in the century since Desgrange’s experiments in the Pyrenees, become central to our appreciation of our sport. Whether it’s the Pyrenees, the Alps or the Dolomites, the mountains are where, as a rule, the Grand Tours are decided. And for armchair fans, a race inching up and snaking down passes is one of the m
ost beautiful spectacles pro cycling offers. We can share in the satisfaction of beating gravity and arriving at the top, but very, very few of us get to ride at top speed up a mountain, taking on an opponent, taking on a race, sprinting uphill for fame, glory and a place in the history books.

  What does racing in the mountains actually feel like and how do you do it well?

  When I first met Joe it was at a mutual friend’s birthday barbecue, one attended by several pro cyclists who lived in and around Nice. He was a lanky 22-year-old American neo pro who had moved to France only a few months before, at the start of a two-year deal with Team Sky. Joe – Dombrowski – had excelled in his previous two years with the Livestrong development team, winning the Girobio, the ‘Baby Giro’, which vied until 2012 (Joe’s year happened to be its last running) with the Tour de l’Avenir to be the most prestigious amateur stage race on the calendar. Previous editions had been won by riders such as Francesco Moser, Gilberto Simoni and Marco Pantani, and Joe joined these celebrated names thanks to a solo win on the Passo di Gavia. The Girobio used to be something of a crystal ball into which pro teams and agents would gaze, divining future promise in the swirling shapes of the peloton within, but the race was not closely followed by many fans, even the diehard ones. What really got Joe recognised was his performance in that year’s Tour of California. Stage 7 had a summit finish, a 5.5-kilometre climb with an average gradient of almost 9 per cent that took the riders high into the San Gabriel mountains to the ski lifts on Mount Baldy. At Baldy’s foot, the 21-year-old had found himself in a whittled-down peloton of elite climbers, and when Robert Gesink jumped on a stage-winning solo break Joe did his damnedest to go with him. Although he eventually came in fourth, just off the podium, his finishing position ahead of respected climbers such as Tejay van Garderen, Tom Danielson and Chris Horner caused a stir. He arrived in the top echelon of the pro ranks at Sky, the team of the moment (alongside his friend Ian Boswell, who had also transferred from Livestrong), marked out as a climber of great potential.