Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  fn2 The coda to the toe amputation story is that after his own toe was amputated, René Vietto coerced Lazaridès into cutting off his own toe, the better to understand the suffering a rider must endure to win the Tour de France. However, since René never won the Tour this flies in the face of logic (not that logic is always a climber’s close companion) and I never found any evidence. As a further aside, René really didn’t seem to like sleeping or eating. After he retired, he planned to undertake a week-long, 3,500-kilometre solo tour of France powered only by a single musette full of vitamin biscuits, to prove that food wasn’t necessary for nutrition. The attempt never took place.

  fn3 This was quoted by Alasdair Fotheringham in his English-language biography of Bahamontes, which is an excellent account of his life, including the grim details of his childhood. Details in the Further Reading section at the back.

  fn4 Charly Gaul is another singular figure in the history of the climber. Gaul was a former butcher’s boy from Luxembourg who lived up to his nickname, the ‘Angel of the Mountains’, climbing like a dream and looking absolutely angelic on the bike. But his baby face hid a sadistic, killer competitive streak. Well versed in the suffering required to be a great climber (and reputedly a big consumer of amphetamines), Gaul got better as the weather got worse. He won the 1958 Tour with a day-long break into an infernal storm in the Alps, and also won the overall and the mountains prizes in the 1956 and 1959 Giros d’Italia. However, he was as unpopular with other riders – he barely communicated, even with his team, or did routine things such as share his winnings out – as he was idolised by the public.

  ‘Charly Gaul, he was the only one that could keep up. He was the strongest rival I had,’ Bahamontes told me. ‘On cold days he was super dangerous but on hot days I always beat him.’ In 2000, in L’Équipe, the venerable cycling journalist Philippe Brunel wrote: ‘In the furnace of the 1950s, Gaul seemed to ride not against Bahamontes, Anquetil, Adriessens, but against oppressive phantoms, to escape his modest origins, riding the ridges to new horizons, far from the life without surprises which would have been his had he stayed in Luxembourg.’

  After he retired Gaul disappeared from public life and only resurfaced, fat and old and barely recognisable, in the 1980s. He had spent the intervening time living as a hermit in a hut in the Ardennes forests.

  As he explained in an interview upon his re-emergence, which was then summarised in that L’Équipe in 2000: ‘I bought myself a little portable television and I connected it to the battery of my car to watch the Tour de France. When the battery ran down, I called the man at the garage. I had travelled plenty enough. I told myself, “You’re happy here, at peace.” There was nothing but the trees and the water. I passed my days planting vegetables. Deer used to come and eat at the end of my garden.

  ‘How do I explain what I did? Well, it’s difficult to go back into normal society. Today, of course, I laugh about it, but that period was essential: without it, I wouldn’t have been able to tackle the final slope, that of old age.’

  Later still, he befriended the brilliant, troubled climber Marco Pantani, who was seeking help through a psychological crisis after he hit a car during a race and had to learn to walk again.

  fn5 One of those expressions that really has to stay in French. It means learning the trade of a professional bike rider – see the Glossary for more.

  Chapter 5: HOW KoMs CONQUERED THE WORLD

  fn1 There are rather too many segments on the Madone and other famous climbs, actually. The genius of the segment, as well as its Achilles heel, is that it is user defined, and so it is difficult to stop the proliferation.

  fn2 OK, that’s a bad example, as his ride was reported in Cycling Weekly and the mountain is famous enough that we can all know. Plus neither Porte nor Froome use Strava – at least in their own names – but I hope you get the point.

  fn3 I have to thank Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote an insightful interview with Michael Horvath for Outside magazine, for this term and the link to Triplett.

  fn4 42, of course, being the length of a marathon in kilometres, and the implication that the last push to the line takes 50% of your available determination to complete.

  fn5 I have no love for riding Alpe d’Huez. It is almost always busy – with cars and coaches and other cyclists – and not at all interesting or scenic. But then I don’t have the desire or capacity that George and many others do to focus so purely on performance. Or, seemingly, the ability to bury myself in suffering to the exclusion of everything else. For me, the drama of Alpe d’Huez lives only in the race.

  Chapter 6: THE CLIMB IS NOT THE THING

  fn1 In 2013 Michele Acquarone was fired by RCS amid fraud allegations, which he denies completely, pointing to what he says are obvious forgeries of his signature on key documents. (The case is, as they say, ongoing.) Mauro Vegni took over as cycling manager at RCS Sport and I spoke to them separately.

  fn2 The same two factors are true of the Vuelta, which also in recent times has gone for a scattershot and hardcore approach to its mountain challenges – so much so that not one of the top sprinters contested the 2016 Vuelta. The race was simply not designed with them in mind so they avoided it, and the points jersey went to Trek-Segafredo’s Fabio Felline.

  fn3 It was just before Michele’s tenure that the Monte Crostis climb George Mallory II was interested in got removed from the Giro percorso, after the sad death of a rider, Wouter Weylandt, on a mountain descent in a previous stage. I never specifically intended to talk about extreme dangers and risks to life, but the subtext was there with both Michele and Mauro.

  Chapter 7: HOW THE ALPS WERE WON

  fn1 Thus recalling the old joke: where does a one-ton gorilla sleep? Wherever it wants …

  fn2 Not all of Italy’s unification went so smoothly. At the other end of the country, in Sicily, there was fierce fighting between the (Nice-born) Giuseppe Garibaldi and the French House of Bourbon. Nice, Garibaldis, Bourbons – possibly the best stand-off in the history of biscuits.

  fn3 The Passo dello Stelvio has a similarly interesting history. The pass was used as far back as the Bronze Age to get from what is now the Tyrol to Italy. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the northern region of Italy was given to the Hapsburgs, who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in between the Hapsburgs and this new, rebellious territory lay the Alps, so the Austrians planned a road through – first in 1813 and then successfully in 1820. In only five years 2,000 workers under a master engineer called Carlo Donegani built this miracle. The north side, famously, has 48 hairpins, and there are 75 in all. During the First World War it marked the westernmost point of the Guerra Bianca, the ‘white war’ in the mountains between Italy and Austro-Hungary, but it is now completely in Italian territory.

  fn4 This tunnel, which was opened in 1891, was for many years the sole way across and the highest point of the col. Only in the 1970s, when the tunnel was in a state of dangerous disrepair, was the road over the top made passable. Thus bike racers suddenly found the Galibier about a kilometre longer and significantly more difficult.

  fn5 Tarmacadam, using tar to bind the surface, was patented in 1901 in England, and only with the rise of fast-moving motor vehicles which sucked particles up, creating dust clouds and degrading unsealed surfaces, did these kind of roads slowly spread. It’s a fair certainty that no roads in the first Tours were tarmacked.

  fn6 Italy has the Vallo Alpino, the ‘Alpine Wall’, as its defensive mirror to the Maginot, though the Alpine Wall actually protects the border with France, Switzerland, Austria and all the way to the former Yugoslavia.

  fn7 The fighting was mainly concentrated on the Italian border south of Bonette, and there wasn’t much else in the Alps. Later, in occupied France, the Germans made Chamonix a major operational base. The great mountaineer, Lionel Terray, describes in his autobiography how he helped the fighters of the Resistance scale peaks the Germans thought impossible, and fire down on their heads:

  We had long realised the sli
ght military value of all this fighting in the Alps. Life in the front line had ceased to be a patriotic mission so much as a big game of cowboys and Indians, made all the better by the fact that it was played out among our beloved mountains. On the patrols and raids for which we always volunteered we did not really set out to slaughter Germans or anything of that sort. What we enjoyed in this pointless and obsolete form of war was its resemblance to mountaineering. We sought adventures where courage, intelligence and strength might enable us to overcome apparently impossible obstacles; action in a world of grandeur and light which appeared different from that of grubs crawling around in the mud.

  Chapter 8: GETTING HIGH

  fn1 This is obviously a sweeping generalisation. Many of the granite massifs – Mont Blanc, the Argentera, the Mercantour – are ‘autochthonous’, i.e. they are still found where they were created. They are where the unstoppable northward force of the plate tectonics met the immovable object of this very hard rock, and geologists believe that they have risen as high as they have due to their buoyancy – their relative lightness as a liquid magma. Similarly, there is volcanic material to be found in the Alps, but the basic opposition of tectonic to volcanic origin holds. Give the Shoumatoffs a read for more on the geology of the Alps, if you’re interested. Details are in the Further Reading section at the end.

  fn2 All of the Canary Islands, little domes of land stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, are volcanic, and Teide is actually the third-largest volcanic structure on earth. That this is measured from the bottom of the ocean makes it less impressive (it rises 7,500 metres from the ocean floor). What makes it even less impressive is the Olympus Mons volcano on Mars, which is 624 kilometres in diameter and 25 kilometres tall, and is the largest known volcano in the solar system.

  fn3 The Spanish word cañadas, which forms part of the name of this particular side of the volcano, can mean ‘meadow’. It is also used to describe the shepherds’ tracks used by men and livestock in the transhumancias.

  fn4 At real altitude, there is just less air. Less of all of the constituent parts – less nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, etc. Altitude simulators that are not hypobaric – i.e. that do not reduce the total air pressure – simply remove some of the oxygen from the air so that it is present at a lower concentration. Altitude tents, which some cyclists sleep in when they’re at low altitudes, and which are becoming increasingly popular, are an example of this method. According to the experts I spoke to, the physiological effects of this are subtly different to really being at altitude.

  fn5 It’s actually around 1,850 metres, so almost 400 metres lower, but all altitudes are not the same: the Earth is not perfectly round, and is actually slightly egg-shaped. So sea level is a relative concept, and gravity’s pull will affect matter differently in different spots: 1,850 metres on the tip of the egg is very different from 1,850 metres on its flatter aspects.

  fn6 1968 was the first year the GDR (Communist East Germany) was recognised as a state by the International Olympic Committee. It won 25 medals in total and came fifth – at least in part, we know now, thanks to a huge state-sponsored doping programme – probably a case of why bother about the marginal gains if these pills/injections/etc. produce a 10 per cent boost? Later in the GDR’s history, perhaps because doping controls had become more stringent, it too would experiment with altitude. However, it built its facility deep underground in a secret depressurised bunker. Track and field stars, cyclists, kayakers and athletes from all disciplines would descend for weeks or even months at a time, to be given the best of the decadent West’s pop music – principally Supertramp – and forced to exercise in air as thin as at 4,000 metres/13,000 feet. All in all, ‘a form of torture’, as described by a former athlete inhabitant.

  fn7 Recall that Joe was billeted in a hotel at 1,825 metres for the Vuelta’s rest day in Andorra. Some of his rivals were resting at 1,000 metres down in the main town – a fact that he wasn’t all that pleased about.

  Chapter 9: COUNTING SHEEP

  fn1 One of the traditional industries on Mont Ventoux used to be ice-making. Villagers from Bédoin and Malaucène at the foot of the climb used to pile snow in cavities in winter, cover it in branches and sell the resulting ice cubes in summer. The ice was used in applications as diverse as sorbet-making and cooling cadavers. The trade was tightly controlled and the ice was sold as far away as Marseille and Montpellier.

  fn2 From the Latin trans (across) and humus (earth, ground).

  fn3 In addition to the transhumances, there have always been shepherds living year-round in the high mountains, and a very few of them still practise this way of life.

  fn4 Wikipedia would have St Roch as the patron saint of ironmongers, suggesting instead St Geneviève (for shepherdesses) or even St Loup de Troyes. This latter seems laughable – loup is French for ‘wolf’, so I’m giving the Tende shepherds this one.

  fn5 Tende belonged to Italy for almost 90 years until it was taken back by the French in 1947. It sits below the Col de Tende, a historically important pass and is, confusingly for a French town, on the main road from the Italian Riviera to the Po Valley, Cuneo and Turin, in a little outpost of France left isolated by Napoleon III and Vittorio Emanuele II

  fn6 An awkward translation, ‘herder’: the French word berger doesn’t always distinguish between the animals being looked after and can refer to cowherds, goatherds, shepherds etc., so keeping berger is probably simpler.

  fn7 Until 1962 Bousiéyas was lived in all year round. When the snows fell, people would retreat into the specially designed buildings, which housed the farmers’ families, livestock, food stores, firewood and crops all within their walls. The final year-round resident was an old woman, who had the Nice-Matin newspaper delivered every day – which meant a daily snowshoe expedition for the local postie. When she died, the region decreed that the hamlet must be abandoned every year between October and April.

  fn8 It was Jean-Pierre I have to thank for showing me the soldier’s time capsule buried there.