I pulled my helmet on and climbed aboard the Kawasaki motorbike. Laurent, my driver, had done 13 Tours on a motorbike, in the race. Nothing, it seemed, fazed him. He’d grown used to having team cars brush his knee as they eased past to deliver a fresh bidon or five to their domestiques. We chatted a little before we set off. He didn’t do this every July for the money, he said, but out of his lifelong love for cycling and particularly for the Tour.
As soon as we rolled out of Montpellier, the wind was tugging at us, buffeting the bike, pulling cypress trees out of shape, blowing flags on campervans taut. Soon, race radio crackled into life. A breakaway of 13 had formed, including André Greipel, the German sprinter whose hopes of leading the race to the revised finish at Chalet Reynard were non-existent.
Laurent let the break ride past. We slipped in alongside, riding just off the back wheel of the last rider, leaning into the curves as the group sped on, hitting a steady 40 kph on the flat but reaching 60 kph when the Mistral changed direction and became a tailwind. We followed for a while then pulled over and waited what seemed an age – almost a quarter of an hour – for the peloton. Eventually, with the familiar dark jerseys of Team Sky massed at the front, and a skeletal figure in yellow tucked in behind them, the peloton breezed past.
Then we were off again, speeding to the rear of the huge group of riders, massed shoulder to shoulder across the road. As the team in pole position in the overall standings, Team Sky’s lead car wore a red number ‘1’, and led the convoy of support cars in their wake.
Riding at the back of the peloton, alongside his Astana team car, was recent Giro d’Italia winner, Vincenzo Nibali. The chance of any Tour glory long gone and his mind now firmly set on the Rio Olympics, Nibali had turned domestique. I watched as the 2014 Tour winner stuffed water bottle after water bottle down the neck of his jersey before elegantly speeding back up to the peloton.
I glanced across at sports director Nicolas Portal in Team Sky’s number ‘1’ car. Cradling the road book’s stage profile on his lap, he sent instructions to his riders, barking orders into his short-wave radio. Moments later, as the peloton approached the Bouches-du-Rhône where the Mistral was blowing hardest, the pace suddenly lifted. We too picked up speed, barrelling through Tarascon and gunning our way towards St Rémy-de-Provence, showering sparks as we grazed the kerb, the trees at the roadside bent over, the gusting winds battering the peloton and moving the Kawasaki around.
Huge gaps appeared between the huddled groups of riders as the wind split the field. I watched them, hunched over their bikes, battling to hold on, until, one by one, they lost contact with the wheel ahead of them. Fabio Aru, slated as one of Froome’s main rivals, now riding on a punctured tyre, braked to a halt and slid off his bike, only to remount, in the blink of an eye, on a team-mate’s machine. Before I could even turn to watch his pursuit of the bunch, Aru, mouth agape, was back alongside us, riding at 60 kilometres an hour and shepherded by three of his team as they chased down the yellow jersey group up ahead.
Finally, the Ventoux’s bleached summit came into view. On the lumpy, bumpy climb past Gordes and climbing up from the lavender-filled valley of the abbey of Sénanque, the breakaway clung on to its lead, Greipel still hanging on through the warm afternoon. We hurtled downhill, past Venasque and on towards Bédoin. Laurent, conscious of the fast-approaching race, accelerated past the now fracturing break, and motored on towards the foot of the climb at St Estève.
As we began the climb through the forest, the crowds were thick, but not intimidating, not even at ‘Froome’s Corner’, the spot where, in 2013, he had suddenly accelerated clear of his rivals before winning the stage. The cynicism that greeted Froome’s turn of speed that day hadn’t dissipated. As Laurent leaned the Kawasaki through the corner, I spotted two fans dressed as speed cameras.
We threaded our way through the crowds and then into the barriered-off section leading to the finish. Laurent dropped me just behind the line and we shook hands. Then we both set off in search of a TV screen to watch the final moments.
The TV coverage of those closing moments has already become classic, unforgettable footage, totally in keeping with the Ventoux’s timeless capacity to generate high drama. The images of Porte slamming into the rear end of a stalled motorbike, of three riders on the floor, of a leering crowd taunting the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, as they watched him running, not cycling, on Mont Ventoux, have a Hogarthian quality. This was bedlam on – and off – a bike.
No wonder, that when he finally rolled across the line, Froome was shaking his head in disbelief. Moments later, Dave Brailsford, his face like thunder, marched past me and headed straight for the referees, the UCI race jury and commissaires. Moments before, he had been sitting, with Alastair Campbell, in the Team Sky tour bus – the ‘Death Star’ – parked a couple of hundred metres away, watching his bike-less team leader jogging up Ventoux.
‘It was like a real “what the fuck?” moment,’ Campbell recalled. ‘There had been the shortening of the route because of the weather, and then that. I thought Chris showed remarkable calm.
‘Dave and the other guys on the bus were pretty calm as well, considering. Dave was straight onto the notion that they would need to have a defence for all the different actions Chris took.’
It took over an hour to make a decision to reinstate Froome as race leader. Boos mixed with cheers as he finally appeared in front of a dwindling crowd for the podium presentation. My immediate reaction was that such a decision would generate even more anti-Team Sky sentiment. Yet even truncated, the Ventoux hadn’t disappointed, although the whole drama was soon to be put into terrifying perspective.
The lingering image of Froome, wearing the yellow jersey and running up Ventoux, slotted seamlessly into the mythology of Kübler and Malléjac, Simpson and Merckx, Bernard and Fignon, Poli and Pantani. Ventoux was always dramatic.
We left Chalet Reynard and got back into the warmth of the car. The wind had eased a little during the afternoon, but now as the sky darkened and the temperature dropped, it was picking up again. Even though the summit hadn’t been fit to race up to, the evacuation route for all race vehicles was over the top. We drove uphill, past discarded crowd barriers, tossed angrily across the vast scree by the Mistral. The wind buffeted the car yet harder. Further up, a line of campervans had paused, wobbling in the wind, hazards on, uncertain whether to continue.
‘This really is a bit mad,’ Pete Goding, sitting in the passenger seat downloading images from his camera, said, with some understatement. I drove on.
We rounded the famed final hairpin and the full force of the raging Mistral slammed into the side of the car. Lying on top of a motorbike, were two motorcyclists in helmets and leathers, clinging onto their machine. A clutch of cyclists crouched, shivering, against the vast bulk of the meteorological station. Hikers, desperate to get out of the wind, fumbled their way downhill on all fours, clambering over rocks and clinging to the black-and-yellow snow poles.
We paused in the lee of the wind at the foot of the Tintin rocket and then eased gingerly over the top. Just below the summit, a four-by-four’s rear end was jacked up, off the ground, back wheels spinning, the caravan hooked to its towbar lying on its side, slowly dragging the car across the tarmac towards the edge of the road. A group clustered around the front end of the car, clinging to the open doors, battling to hold it in place.
Easing through the chaos, we began the descent. Within a kilometre or so, the wind had eased dramatically. By the time we reached Malaucène it was little more than a stiff breeze.
Later, Team Sky’s Rod Ellingworth described the mayhem on the Death Star. The bus had been tilted over on one side at the summit, the alarms ringing frantically and terrified riders throwing themselves onto the floor. Alastair Campbell was another of those who drove over the summit. ‘It was horrific,’ he said. ‘We ended up packing in a load of Spanish hitchhikers who were planning to walk over the top.’
It was very late when
we got to the hotel, hidden away in the Drôme countryside. I checked Twitter before I fell asleep, but the Wi-Fi signal was so slow that my eyes were closing, even as I saw an AFP newsflash about a serious traffic accident in Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais. I woke early the next morning and headed downstairs, sitting under the giant plane tree in the courtyard, hoping to be brought coffee. The Wi-Fi signal was better there, but Twitter still refused to load.
Madame appeared and we exchanged greetings. ‘Bien dormi?’ she asked, out of habit rather than interest.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t, so I said so. It’s the Tour, I explained, it messes with your sleep. She nodded.
‘Moi non plus,’ she said. There was a pause.
‘It’s just so awful.’
I looked up and saw there was a tear rolling down her cheek.
I shifted uneasily in my chair. ‘What . . . what’s happened?’
She wiped her eyes. ‘In Nice, the killings in Nice.’
So she told me, about the madman driving through the crowds watching the Bastille Day fireworks, using his lorry like a battering ram, targeting pushchairs, mowing them down, killing 86 people. I sat, listening, stunned into silence, suddenly very awake.
We packed in a panic, paid our bill and got back into the car, trying to understand. Pete drove, fast, as I scoured for any updates online on terror and the Tour. We got closer to the autoroute and closer to a 4G signal. Twitter loaded and simultaneously the texts and messages came flooding in. The stage was cancelled – the Tour was stopping, or so some of them said. Or it might be stopping. Nobody knew for sure, not yet.
I checked with French colleague Julien Prétot. No news yet, he said. Prudhomme was talking to the Élysée Palace, to the President.
And then there was a voicemail from the newsdesk.
‘How quickly can you get to Nice?’ the message asked.
I called in. They asked again: ‘How far are you from Nice?’
‘Probably three, maybe four hours,’ I said, suddenly dreading the instruction that might come, to turn around, head to the motorway, blast over to Nice; to doorstep broken families, red-eyed policemen, disbelieving relatives.
‘That far? Hmm . . . OK.’ It’s too far, I realised. They’re not going to ask me to go.
‘So what’s happening with the race?’
‘Prudhomme’s making a statement,’ I said. ‘We’re on our way.’
I jogged through the parked cars, past the Tour security crew and into the pretty main square in Bourg-Saint-Andéol. It was the earliest I’d been in a Tour start village for years.
Over at the ASO stand, Prudhomme, Cyrille Tricart and Jean-Louis Pages were deep in conversation. Prudhomme was frowning, focusing on tugging a black armband over the sleeve of his shirt. He caught my eye and nodded, unsmiling, in recognition. He’d dealt with crises before – Puerto, Landis, Armstrong. But that was doping. That was nothing compared to this.
All the staff were following suit, hastily pulling on black armbands. Then Prudhomme strode across the start village to the ‘espace interview’, site of ad-hoc press meetings. We gathered around him, camera crews, boom mikes, iPhones. He composed himself and then started speaking: ‘We have had a crisis meeting with the prefecture of the Ardèche and the gendarmerie. The Tour will continue.’
And then, a crack audible in his voice, he said: ‘We want this day to be a day of dignity as a tribute to the victims.
‘We asked ourselves if the stage should be cancelled, but after talking to the highest authorities in the state, we think that the race must continue.’
Abruptly, he turned away before taking his place alongside local police, dignitaries, race officials, in a minute’s silence. Before I left the village I ran into Jean-Louis Pages, working his last Tour for ASO. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘This must be so hard to deal with.’
‘For me, not really. It’s tougher for the police. We follow their advice. We do as we’re told.’
Jean-Louis introduced the Tour’s gendarmerie liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Luzet. ‘We were in direct contact with the Élysée Palace,’ Luzet said. ‘It was decided to carry on with the Tour because it was important to continue to live normally.’
By now, with the sun climbing into the morning sky, the teams had all arrived, the time trial’s early starters going through the motions, warming up in the shade of the canopies extending from each bus. I paused to say hello to an unsettled Rod Ellingworth, hanging around in front of the Team Sky bus. He had security on his mind. ‘We’re so vulnerable,’ he said of the teams and of the Tour, ‘even if they load the place with gendarmes. I’ve told my missus to skip coming to Paris after this. It’s not worth it . . .’
But other than extreme measures – heavier security, snipers on rooftops, bag searches, tickets, even no public access – how can you protect 200 kilometres of open road?
‘Pas possible,’ Jean-Louis had said, before adding that it went against everything, the years of open access, that the Tour stood for. Instead, he said, you just have to do the best you can.
The snipers and the ‘super-gendarmes’, Luzet had said, were ‘everywhere on the Tour’. ‘They are here in case there is a particularly dangerous situation, such as a terrorist attack,’ he’d told me.
I saw them a couple of days later, at another start village, in Moirans-en-Montagne. ‘See those guys?’ said Julien Prétot, nudging me and pointing to two figures perched on a clifftop, one holding binoculars, the other a rifle, scanning the crowd pressed against the barriers and milling around the riders.
There was a muted howl of protest from rival teams after Chris Froome had been restored as race leader following the debacle on the Ventoux. It wasn’t immediate, because Nice overshadowed every other concern, but within 48 hours the resentment was simmering. One sports director accused the UCI of ‘making the rules up as they go along’, while Patrick Lefevere, general manager of the Etixx Quick-Step team, was even more critical. ‘You think it was the UCI commissaires who decided about Froome being reinstated?’ he said provocatively. ‘The UCI has to be the boss – but it isn’t.’
Lefevere said that there was no point in lodging a protest against the decision to reinstate Froome in the yellow jersey. ‘They don’t even listen,’ he said.
I asked if they listened to Sir Dave Brailsford. ‘Maybe,’ he smiled. ‘I have the impression that everybody is happy Froome is in yellow.’
Nairo Quintana’s sports director, Eusebio Unzué, was also critical of the decision.
‘If we have rules, we have to apply them fairly. It has to be equal, for all riders, for all teams, for all racers. The worst thing about all this isn’t what happened, but the precedent they’ve established. What’s going to happen the next time? Sure, it was exceptional, but there are crashes every day. That is part of cycling. You crash, you get up, you carry on.’
‘It was not a good decision,’ Marc Madiot, director of French team FDJ, told me. ‘Froome is not popular in France and I don’t think this decision did him any favours.
‘Look, I don’t think it was fair what happened to him, but the next day in the time trial he would have taken the race lead anyway. They didn’t need to make a special case.
‘There have been crowd problems on the Tour for a hundred years. If it had been somebody other than Froome, they wouldn’t have done anything.’
Lefevere also suggested that Froome was, in some way, protected. ‘You saw the other day, when the group of four, with Froome and Peter Sagan, went clear [on the stage to Montpellier].
‘Okay, they were strong, but normally the peloton would chase and catch them. But the red car of the Tour organisation and five motorbikes were immediately in front of them. If you ever rode a bike,’ Lefevere said, ‘you’ll know what I mean.’
Surely Froome’s misfortune, many argued, was just that – bad luck? Punctures are bad luck; crashes can sometimes be bad luck. Being misdirected by gendarmes within sight of the finish line is bad luck. Level crossin
gs dropping in front of the pursuing peloton as a break slips clear, that’s more bad luck. It’s all part of racing on the open road. If Froome’s finishing time was to be adjusted because of the logjam on the Ventoux, how about all the others who had suffered bad luck, on a daily basis?
And there were other criticisms filtering through, revolving around the interpretation of UCI rules and regulations. Should Froome, for example, have been disqualified for running? Possibly, said some, if you followed the letter of the law, yes. Others said no, that riders have been seen making their way on foot – walking, jogging, running – in other chaotic circumstances, such as the Koppenberg climb in the Tour of Flanders, or the Arenberg forest in Paris–Roubaix.
Under the usual interpretation of UCI rules, riders always have to be with their bike, functioning or not, and should not use any other form of transport. The rules specify that ‘attempts to finish without having completed the whole course on a bicycle’ shall result in a fine and disqualification. In the 2015 Tour, when Argentinian rider Eduardo Sepúlveda panicked after his team car failed to see him stopped at the roadside, he hitched a 100-metre lift, mid-stage, in a rival team car to catch up and change bikes. He was disqualified from his debut Tour.
‘Be consistent,’ Unzué said. ‘The UCI says we have rules for everyone, so apply those rules consistently. We need to know that the judges have a clear vision of how they will apply the rules.’
But soon Unzué was himself fending off accusations after Quintana was filmed threading his way through the chaos below Chalet Reynard and briefly grabbing onto a Mavic motorbike. ‘Nairo had to grab the Mavic bike so he wouldn’t get smashed against the barrier. He had to do it so he couldn’t fall as a result of the crash. He was up against the barrier; he was trying to defend himself against something even worse.’
So as Froome was running up Ventoux, Quintana was taking a tow from a motorbike . . .
‘He came into that crash with Yates, and the Mavic bike had to stop, and Nairo nearly fell as well. He would have been knocked over . . .’
French Renaissance Page 24