Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  The twenty-eighth of May. I am on my mountain staring down into the void towards the Caserne de Restefond and beyond, where, somewhere as yet unseen, the Giro dramas are being teed up, played out or resolved. I have no phone reception and am consequently completely in the dark about what is happening. For all I know the race has been abandoned due to Nibali being abducted by aliens live on TV. A fat and opinionated Dutchman standing next to me is no help. I sip some brandy from the hip flask I carried up in my jersey pocket. This is not even the decisive climb of the day. A cold wind is blowing and dark clouds sit in ranks across the infinite sky. I am very happy and terribly, terribly nervous. This is the only place I could be.

  We had set off in the morning and slowly climbed the 12 kilometres to the top. It is still and quiet, the deer are still in the valleys. Barely a motorhome anywhere. Further up we meet the first of a steady stream of race vehicles coming the other way. Technical vehicles, team cars, sponsors’ vans and then press cars, some of whose occupants I recognise, from the atomised global community of writers and photographers spinning centripetally in the maelstrom of the pro cycling circus. They stop to say hi, and suddenly the incongruity of seeing them, friendly faces in beautiful places, of the race and the world coming to the mountain, of the enormity of what is about to happen, makes a lump rise in my throat. I’m nervous for Joe; nervous, weirdly, for myself, pinning everything on a stupid race on a road on a big hill in the south of France. There is nothing to do but keep going.

  At the top there is a lone figure standing on the ridge above the col. An Italian flag flies from the bunker, which seems like a provocation. Among the handful of people waiting at the narrow defile of the col are Aurelien and the park police. They are standing behind a metal barrier where six weeks earlier was the blue portacabin. We say hi, put on our down jackets and beanies, and then freewheel down to take up our position. Staring down into the void towards the Caserne de Restefond. Are they coming yet? Is that them? When in doubt, brandy. I sip from my hip flask and squint at the snow and wait.

  Is that them? The first tiny dot appearing on the road far below. It’s not a group, it’s a single rider. Is that him? It inches past the barracks and, preceded by motorbikes and followed by a car, slowly takes the right-hand bend. A minute, two minutes pass. The wind blows but otherwise it is still here on high. They reappear. A Team Sky car. So not Joe. It’s Nieve. He must be pushing on to secure the King of the Mountains points. As if by magic, my phone vibrates into life. There is a break behind, it’s been away since the gun, and Joe has been in it. BMC’s Darwin Atapuma just rode away from it and Joe has ridden back to him, Giovanni Visconti too. The break from the break. They are a few minutes behind Nieve, I can see them now, zigging and zagging left and right on the distant switchbacks, then Nieve suddenly appears close to, on the road nearby. He is not inching as it had seemed but riding strongly, pedalling smoothly, very composed. Then he is gone. Joe’s group behind him seems to reach us faster and too soon Joe is swooshing past. There are six of them. I scream and scream my support. I have sun cream in my eyes, they start to water, that is the only explanation. He gives us a small wave, and I remember something he said, no doubt when we were eating fish and salad in the sun: ‘It’s interesting when your friends come to mountain stages because it’s slowed down enough sometimes in your periphery you see them. You never forget when it happens. You’ll be on a finishing climb and you hear your name and you glance over for just a second, and then it’s back to what you’re doing. My friends back home, they were at Cali last year and when we finished on the Baldy stage there’s a picture of me and one of them running next to me in a banana suit. It’s just priceless.’

  I curse that I forgot the banana costume.

  Shouting, hoarse, three seconds, an eternity. And then they’re gone. Joe looked comfortable. He definitely saw us. And I saw he was comfortable and within himself. (I later find out that with this ride he takes the Strava KoM for the climb.) I saw six riders and controlled effort and racecraft and calculation and I knew that the stage winner would come from this group. I had not expected a glorious solo break over two mountains – I don’t know what I’d dared to expect from those contesting the stage – but seeing the break pass like this made the battle real. Obviously Joe will be waiting for the next climb past Isola to attack, but the break had had to go early or else they would have been caught in the fireworks that will happen on the GC. He is waiting for a real chance at the stage, racing cleverly. I wonder if he’s thinking of his parents up the road, waiting in their turn, and the hope and expectation and delight that racing past them near the front, maybe in front, will bring.

  The road is quiet once again. Nine minutes later the peloton comes past, grim-faced and lined out, passing within millimetres of the edge of the tarmac on the racing line, followed by the support cars. Maybe 10 minutes later the grupetto and the cars and race vehicles behind. Finally, after a straggler or two, the broom wagon and the breakdown truck and the official van that marks the end of the race cordon. I get on my bike and race to and hug the back bumper. I need to get back down. I pass over the col and glimpse the race disappearing into the distance, fight through the exhaust fumes, past the fire trucks and the ambulances and I descend as fast as I can, shadowing the racers arcing gracefully through the distant hairpins, many kilometres away and hundreds of vertical metres below.

  I try to imagine what’s going on, what they’ll be thinking in the break. The group of them will have no trouble catching up with Nieve and then the stage will be anyone’s for the taking. Joe had told me about the final short climb to the sanctuary of Sant’Anna, where the finish line lay, which is past the border after an eight-kilometre descent, but it was the Col de la Lombarde, the 22-kilometre climb to the frontier sign, that had him excited. ‘I’m pumped,’ he had told me. ‘I’ve been up Lombarde a hundred times. When you’re training at Isola you have to go up and down every day. Knowing it starts hard, that it’s really steep the first few kilometres and then it evens out a bit, I think that’s really valuable. Particularly with positioning and stuff, knowing where you can move up, that kind of thing. It should be epic,’ he added. Followed by a pause and then: ‘EPIC.’

  At Bousiéyas I chuck my bike against the wall, grab my iPad and sit down on the floor of the dormitory in my cycling kit. My girlfriend has been sending me text updates; now she has found me a live stream to watch. We are watching the break. Sean Kelly is commentating and explaining that he expects attacks. Nieve loses the wheel. Now they are seven. Twenty-one kilometres before the top. The sun is shining as they follow Visconti up. The pace slows, they are looking around at each other. It is steep. And this is where Joe attacks. Joe is leading the race. He is on his own. They are slow to react, but Atapuma chases through the tight hairpins and is the first and only one to make it over to him. The texts from my girlfriend get more frequent and excited. She doesn’t follow cycling much but has briefly met Joe, and this – a recognisable face leading the race – is the catalyst for her excitement. As for me, I am glued to the glitchy pixelated figures on my tiny screen.

  He keeps going. There is a big no man’s land now between Joe and Atapuma and the shattered remains of the break, Visconti floundering in between. Back in the valley in the main group Nibali is looking cool, but Chaves is not yet showing signs of the great fatigue the commentators say he is carrying from his efforts the previous day. Chaves looks OK, but nothing is happening, yet. Soon somebody will try something.

  Now it’s Visconti, Atapuma and Joe. Visconti is choosing to do very little work, but that’s to be expected since he is probably riding with half his mind on Valverde, his teammate, who started the day sitting in fourth place in the GC, just off the overall podium, and who is no doubt lurking on Chaves’s wheel, his hyena breath loud in Chaves’s ear. The peloton is at the bottom of the climb now and Nibali’s teammates take to the front. There is a sense of foreboding, of barely concealed conspiracy, a mob assassination about to take place. Ten
and a half minutes ahead are Joe, Atapuma and Visconti working well, climbing through the forests. Joe is still looking good; Atapuma, tenacious and also comfortable. Visconti is sandbagging, or maybe he is faking weakness and riding a clever race. Is Joe the strongest or is he doing too much work? Is he the strongest and also doing too much work? I cannot know. It is getting unbearable. I am glued to the screen. So is my girlfriend, who is starving but cannot tear herself away to make lunch. ‘Fucking shitballs,’ she texts.

  Behind Joe’s trio are Tanel Kangert, Rein Taaramäe and Alexander Foliforov, and Nieve, who has made it back. Nieve looks knackered but the two Estonians and the Russian, though on different teams, have formed a post-Soviet alliance and they are motoring on. Joe’s group pass under the Italian bunkers that guard the old border, so they still have at least 10 kilometres to go to the top. They are caught by Taaramäe and Kangert. Nieve and Foliforov are gone. Now they are five. Joe is at the back. This is either bad or good. Or neither. It is very possible I am second-guessing too much. (Am I second guessing whether I am second guessing?) They are through the avalanche tunnels now, which I know are just below the ski resort. The road is long and straight.

  The camera cuts back to the maglia rosa group, where Michele Scarponi, Nibali’s right-hand man, has attacked. Immediately Nibali bridges, as does Chaves, but Chaves has no teammates, only Rigoberto Urán, a compatriot who has said he’ll do a pull for his diminutive friend. Chaves’s mirrored glasses hide his eyes, but his face is set in a rictus. Nibali bites into an energy gel. The atmosphere is ominous. There are only a dozen of them left and Nibali’s Astana are firmly in charge. Valverde hunches his shoulders, gets on the radio to his team. Everyone is making plans. The knives will soon be out. There are no spectators around, nobody to jostle them like Bartali and Robic, there will be no mistakes. It will be clinical. This will be assassination caught on CCTV.

  Joe’s group is now at the ski station, so there’s about five kilometres left on this climb. They take a left-hand hairpin and Joe leaps. The Estonians are dropped, but Taaramäe comes back. Kangert, a teammate of Nibali, has let go. He has been told not to burn all his matches. He is soft-pedalling next to a team car. The camera cuts away, cuts back, and Taaramäe has pulled away. He has drifted ahead and has a significant gap. Joe and Atapuma are following, but maybe they don’t realise the threat because they seem to be attacking each other rather than chasing together. Come on, Joe. The trees are thinning out, the road is very beautiful and deserted. Taaramäe is away, and though there are no time splits yet being shown to measure the effectiveness of his attack, I’m sure he has won the race.

  Joe has 12 kilometres to go – two kilometres up, eight down and then two more up – when Nibali attacks the pink jersey group. Chaves is with him. Valverde makes it. Kruijswijk, with his grazes and his broken ribs, does not. So that’s that. Nibali must distance Chaves by 44 seconds to steal the GC lead. Out comes the knife. He attacks again. Chaves cannot follow the shark. Chaves is distanced. Nibali is in high-cadence, rock-solid locomotion, his trademark. Legs like pistons. Valverde attacks too. It would be massively advantageous to Chaves if Valverde would work to his pace, but Valverde knows he only has to gain 43 seconds on the stricken Kruijswijk to win a podium place and he is riding hard. They are working together in a fashion, but instead of nursing Chaves through Valverde is almost goading him to give what he has, and then to dig deeper. He might be helping him, but an equally persuasive reading of it is that he is sitting behind, making him work, then sprinting, getting a gap, working him over. Fucking shitballs indeed. Nibali looks to have exhausted his initial momentum, but here is Tanel Kangert waiting for him, and Nibali can sit on his wheel and recover while Kangert does a suicide pull – a superhuman effort that will, should Nibali win the maglia rosa, as now looks highly likely, no doubt be extremely well rewarded. Astana are so far playing their hand to perfection. We cut to Taaramäe who is going over the top of the climb alone, just a descent and one final uphill from glory. ‘This is a beautiful race,’ says the commentator, as the helicopter camera sweeps over snow-capped peaks.

  Where is Joe? Unfortunately for me, Joe’s battle is comparatively minor in all of this – and especially for the Italian broadcasters controlling our international TV feed. The camera has not been with him for minutes. We know that he is behind Taaramäe, somewhere, with Atapuma and Visconti there or thereabouts. We also know that not so long ago Nibali was still eight or nine minutes behind Joe, six at the very least, and so should not threaten the stage’s podium positions. More than that, who knows? The broadcast is glued to Nibali and Chaves. ‘Pedalling squares’ is a cliché of exhaustion but I cannot remember anyone who looked closer to pedalling squares than Chaves right now.

  Urán arrives in the picture for the final two kilometres of this climb. Finally Chaves has a friend. Valverde is still pushing on. Visconti, we see briefly, is still with Joe. Surely he will drop back for Valverde. Surely. Kruijswijk is slowly slipping off the podium, at least if Valverde has his way, but it is unclear which of Chaves and Kruijswijk is feeling worse. Kangert peels off, he is blown, but Nibali now has 30 seconds of the 44 he needs to win. He is looking strong again and he is also a very fast descender. Les jeux sont faits, I think. It is agonising. Chaves can no longer hold Urán’s wheel and Urán floats away without seeming to mean to. Valverde knows a sinking ship when he sees one and departs, and Chaves is alone, wearing that pink jersey for a few minutes more. He is losing the Giro d’Italia just as Kruijswijk did the previous day. The hill goes on.

  For a second or two we see Joe, and he is with Visconti. No Atapuma. Does that mean Atapuma has cracked, or has he left the other two behind? From the way he looked earlier, I think Atapuma may have jumped. Fifteen minutes ago Joe was leading the race and now, if Atapuma is ahead and Visconti is still in contention, there’s a real chance he won’t be on the podium, it seems, which would be totally wrong, just wrong. There is no more brandy.

  By the time Chaves reaches Italy – the border is at the top of the col – he has lost the pink jersey. Nibali is flying down the valley on the narrow, narrow road, 55 seconds ahead and counting.

  Taaramäe is now on the final climb. Atapuma, it seems, is chasing behind him in second. There are no time gaps being shown, but I don’t think he will steal it. Where Joe is I have no idea. More importantly, where is Visconti? Has he dropped back? Is he ahead of Joe? That would be devastating. Their last known positions were third and fourth. I can’t bear it. All we are being shown is the turquoise streak of Nibali descending through larch forests, twisting the knife.

  My girlfriend’s web stream in London is ahead of mine and I cannot hear from her what she is seeing and then watch it a minute later, so with 1.6 kilometres to go I ask her not to tell me anything more. I will suffer this alone.

  The camera is now with Taaramäe, who is within the barriers close to the finish. Now the final 200 metres. He will win the stage. He wins the stage. Atapuma is approaching the line … and there is Joe! He is in the barriers too. He must be third. Must be. The camera cuts to Visconti, who, as I had hoped, is back with Valverde.

  Atapuma has taken second. And there is Joe, still climbing, another 15 or so seconds back.

  He has his podium place. ‘Joe Dombrowski, a name to watch in Grand Tour racing,’ says the commentator.

  Epilogue

  TIME PASSES

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but I want to tell you about a memorial to a fallen cyclist. It’s on Mont Ventoux, to the right of the road about a kilometre from the top. Just above the one to Tom Simpson, the British cyclist who collapsed here chasing his dream of winning the 1967 Tour de France, which was disappearing up the road ahead of him.

  Oh, you thought I meant that memorial. Sorry.

  Those slopes are pitiless, and Simpson’s tragic tale is well known: the pressure he was under to perform well in the Tour; the combination of heatstroke and exhaustion and drugs that killed him somewhere near where the stone now stan
ds; his last words, ‘Put me back on the bike.’ But only a short scramble across the bare white limestone is this other stone on a plinth, one that few people visit or even are aware of. I’ve sat at its base and watched 50 cyclists pass without breaking their contemplation of their stem.