Rupert Guinness has covered the Tour de France for 20 years. As the 2009 event gathers speed, the sports writer reflects, rather breathlessly, on Australians who have made their mark on the world’s toughest cycling race.
Staring up at the steep pitch of road a few metres in front of me, it is clear there is no return on my plan to run up the famed Tour de France icon, l’Alpe d’Huez, on the southern face of the Grande Rousses range in the French Alps. The long, straight and wide bitumen road rises at a 10.5 per cent gradient. It is more like a wall than a road.
I know the gradient will vary for bad and worse from between five and 11.5 per cent on a climb made up of 21 hairpins (each bearing the name of a stage winner there) that will rise by 1054 m over 13.8km by the time I reach its summit at 1860m. I had studied the mountain profile so many times, but the sight of this first 800m stretch is all I need for an inkling of what those Tour cyclists must really feel after another hard day’s slog in the saddle as they “enjoy” those last few metres of relatively flat road before starting the climb and the pinch of muscle and lactic acid and the heavy rasp of burning lungs takes over within a dozen pedal strokes.
The purpose of running up l’Alpe d’Huez was a chance to reflect on the Tour and what it has meant to me since I first embarked on the ascent of l’Alpe during Stage 20 of the 1987 race in the relative comfort of the Winning magazine media car, when Spaniard Federico Echave won the stage. It was an ideal opportunity to reminisce about the spectacular landmark that overnight converts into a natural grandstand for the exciting sporting theatre of the Tour. It was also a chance to experience a little of the suffering that must be felt by Tour riders who have raced up the mountain 26 times since it first appeared on Stage 10 of the 1952 Tour.
As I warmed up, the difference in the atmosphere from my Tour debut could not have been starker. Absent was the excitement, the frenzied crowds lining the road, who part miraculously seconds before the Tour vehicles – and then the riders – plough their way to the summit finish.
One of the ironies of the Tour is that despite its status as a pilgrimage site for so many cycling fans, as a stand-alone climb l’Alpe is not the hardest mountain for a Tour rider. Its reputation has more to do with its coming at the end of a stage and the accumulated fatigue felt by riders who have raced over two or three mountain passes beforehand. I didn’t need those two or three mountains.
Whether it is apprehension or plain old lack of condition, the road feels dead on the one-kilometre approach to the foot of the mountain from the town of Bourg d’Oisans. I try to imagine the tightening knot in the stomach and shortness of breath riders feel as l’Alpe comes into sight and they realise the race is about to explode once more in a day that most likely has already seen the peloton splintered by many attacks.
As steep as the rise to the first switchback is, an early distraction from the pain emerges after 30m. There are two giant yellow signs painted on the road. One reads “Our Cadel” (for Cadel Evans, runner-up in the 2007 and 2008 Tours). The other reads “C’mon Aussies”. I have never seen either sign before, and considering the speed at which the race hits this first but still backbreaking stretch and the thickness of crowds that line the road, chances are that the riders haven’t, either. But the existence of those signs reflects the long journey Australian cycling has taken since 1914 when Victorians Don Kirkham and Iddo “Snowy” Munro became the first Australians to ride the Tour. Munro and Kirkham were mere curiosities to the Europeans. They also lived in relative anonymity back home unlike today’s Australian Tour riders, who are not only becoming household names in Europe, but are also the raison d’être for thousands of Australians to travel to France every year to follow the Tour.
Through increasing pants of exhaustion, I think of those Australians who followed Kirkham and Munro: Sir Hubert Opperman, who rode the Tour in 1928 and 1931, and his teammates Ernie Bainbridge and Percy Osborne in 1928, then Richard Lamb, “Ossie” Nicholson and Frankie Thomas in 1931. I think of John Beasley in 1952 and 1955, Russell Mockridge in 1955, Bill Lawrie in 1967, and Don Allan in 1974. Then of the man who ignited my love of the Tour, Phil Anderson, a five-times top-10 finisher who in 1981 was the first Australian to claim the yellow jersey, and who won a stage in 1982 and 1991.
Anderson retired in 1994, but this period also saw Allan Peiper, Michael Wilson, Omar Palov, Shane Sutton, Neil Stephens and Stephen Hodge emerge, followed by Scott Sunderland and Patrick Jonker. The next generation included Stuart O’Grady, who in 1998 was the second Australian to wear the yellow jersey, and Robbie McEwen, who won his first Tour stage in 1999 in Paris and then in 2002 became the first Australian winner of the sprinters’ green points jersey. I think about Henk Vogels, Jay Sweet, Baden Cooke, Brad McGee and Matt Wilson, and more recent names: Allan Davis, Simon Gerrans, Brett Lancaster, Heinrich Haussler and, of course, two who emerged as potential Tour winners, Cadel Evans and Michael Rogers.
As I run up l’Alpe... it becomes harder. The pain. Already excruciating. No wonder even the hardiest of l’Alpe d’Huez stars struggle when they are pressed on this first stretch, as Lance Armstrong was in 2003 when his Spanish teammate Manuel Beltran bolted away at such pace when he hit the first stretch that even the Tour champion had to call out to him to ease up.
Passing the first kilometre mark on this second stretch, reality sets in. This is difficult, possibly too difficult. My lungs and throat are parch-dry. The heaving is already straining on my shoulders. It continues to hairpin 20 when I stop and think of Cadel Evans and his response when asked why he doesn’t attack more on the mountains: “If you can’t, you can’t. You keep your pace. I only have one pace. My own.”
Allan Peiper once told me he would look only two metres in front when climbing and never, ever look up to the top of a mountain. Doing so, he warned, will only cruel the spirit. I dare to do otherwise. I wish I hadn’t.
Peiper is right. My spirit, this early in the climb, isn’t ready for the daunting view above me. The weight of my head is already a burden. It drops. I pant. I continue… flat-footed, stopping intermittently for the next five stretches until I reach hairpin 14, where I see through blurred vision the grey marble monument erected by the Sporting Clube de Portugal in memory of the great Portuguese cyclist Joaquim Agostinho, killed in 1984 in a race crash in Portugal. One of the most popular riders of the Tour, he was placed third in 1978 and 1979 and won stages in 1969, 1973, 1977 and 1979. I think about Fabio Casartelli, the Italian 1992 Olympic Road champion killed on the 1995 Tour. Unlike Agostinho, he had not won a stage. He had never even finished the Tour – although he was just days away from that breakthrough result when he crashed on the Col de Portet d’Aspet in the Pyrenees on July 18.
The memory of Casartelli’s death still hurts, as do recollections of the next day’s stage when the peloton rode like a funeral cortège across the Pyrenees to the finishing town where his American Motorola team rode ahead over the last 200m and Casartelli’s Italian roommate, Andrea Peron, nudged his wheel first across the finishing line in his honour. I think of the ultimate price paid by riders in pursuit of a sport they love.
Doomsayers are wrong when they say the Tour is a platform for drug abuse. Doping has been a problem – it still is. L’Alpe is even a testimony to that shady history. In 1978 the Belgian Michel Pollentier placed first on the mountain, but was later stripped of the stage win and kicked out of the race when caught at the dope control kitted up with a rubber bottle containing clean urine. Skulduggery and cheating have been a part of the Tour since its inception in 1903 as a publicity stunt for the French newspaper L’ Auto. In 1904 the first four riders, among others, were disqualified, one for tackling parts of the distance by train!
Passing hairpins 13, 12 and 11, plaques with the names of the 1983, 1984 and 1986 stage winners catch my eye – Peter Winnen from the Netherlands, Colombian Luis Herrera and Bernard Hinault from France. On hairpin 10 is the 1987 winner’s name – Federico Echave, the Spaniard who beat France’s Laurent Fignon for the stage win.
In a silence interrupted by the odd bird tweeting and my heavy breathing, I turn to look at the fantastic view of the Oisans Valley glowing in the autumn sun and usually blocked for several days before the race arrives by a wall of fans, campervans and tent villages. How taken aback I was by the frenzied spectacle and the cacophony of noise from the crowd, officials and police, the blare of car sirens and motorcycle horns as we followed Echave’s winning break on my first “ascent” in 1987.
Three more switchbacks. Already I have been running for more than 60 minutes when I reach one of the most famous switchbacks – hairpin 7. Whenever the Tour visits l’Alpe d’Huez, this becomes the “Dutch corner”, awash in the bright orange of Dutch fans. At 1553m, my breath and heart-rate increase with the altitude. At the start of the rise to hairpin 4, the sight of a painted yellow Boxing Kangaroo provides a little lift.
The end seems to be nearing, but the pain in my legs, hips and shoulders, and my increasing shortness of breath hint otherwise, especially when forced to walk 100m to hairpin 3 and then to hairpin 2, named after Marco Pantani, Il Pirata, who won at l’Alpe d’Huez in 1995 and again in 1997. A tragedy in the waiting, Pantani was the most beautiful climber. Despite winning the 1998 Tour and Giro d’Italia he wrestled with his fame and doping allegations, only to become a recluse and die in February 2004 from cerebral edema and heart failure caused by cocaine use.
The sight of l’Alpe d’Huez, the village, is deceiving. The run to the finish is still some way off. How this must cruel the spirit of Tour riders. Entering the village, I soon get lost. The green plaques directing the media to which I am accustomed are nowhere to be seen. There is no corridor of crowds. No fanfare. Just a biting summit wind, barren roads and the turning of the heads of a few workers using the off-season to tinker with broken-down ski facilities. All I hear are my footsteps.
Nearing the final corner, images of past [stage] winners come to mind. Echave (1987), Dutchmen Steven Rooks (1988) and Gert-Jan Theunisse (1989), Italian Gianni Bugno (1990, 1991), American Andy Hampsten (1992), Italians Roberto Conti (1994), Pantani (1995, 1997) and Giuseppe Guerini (1999), Lance Armstrong (2001, 2004), the Spaniard Iban Mayo (2003), Luxembourg’s Frank Schleck (2006). The 2008 winner, Carlos Sastre of Spain, who ended Evans’ dream of winning the Tour, had yet to have his name put up on one of the famous switchbacks. I think of riders who lost their crack at bagging one of the most prestigious stage wins, or who won private battles to finish within the time limit, avoid elimination and race another day.
The finish finally arrives. I stop, bend over, then stand to take several deep breaths before looking down at the view of solitude and calm from l’Alpe to the valley below… then turn and run back down. I wanted reflection and got it… now I just want a beer!
Edited extract from What A Ride: From Phil Anderson To Cadel Evans, An Aussie Pursuit Of The Tour De France by Rupert Guinness (Allen & Unwin, $35).
Source: Qantas The Australian Way July 2009