High-Mountain Heroes

Erik & Rolf in hell

In 2004 I went to the cinema in Edinburgh to watch Hell on Wheels (Hollentour, in its native German). The movie is a documentary by French director Pepe Danquart's and tells the story of the 2003 Tour de France through the eyes of the T-Mobile team and two of their riders, sprinter Erik Zabel and his faithful domestique, Rolf Aldag.

I enjoyed the film, liked seeing cycling and the Tour on the big screen. I enjoyed little insights such as the fraternal relationship between team leader and domestique.

However much I enjoyed it though, I left the cinema feeling none the wiser (perhaps less the wiser). I wanted to know, to really know, what it took to ride the Tour, what was going on behind the curtain, or at the back of the bus. I liked seeing how Zabel's soigneur lathered the cream onto his rider's chamois, but what about the real secrets to the sprinter's success? What were the riders swallowing and injecting when the cameras weren't rolling. And if the riders on the screen weren't swallowing and injecting, then what did they think of their team-mates who were?

Ten years on and Zabel has finally offered a glimpse behind the curtain, given in to the inevitable pressure for truth and admitted to the use of EPO, cortisone and blood doping. Yes he suffered in the heat and on the climbs - him and all the rest - but he also re-transfused his own blood. That's the stuff I wanted to know about back in 2004, the stuff we all suspected but weren't about to be shown, especially not in Technicolour on the silver screen. (Had Pepe Danquart shown us the blood coming out and going back in then it really would have seemed like a glimpse into cycling hell.)

By the time I hit the mountains of Europe to ride The Breakaway I was already pretty disillusioned with pro-cycling. My desire to see behind the curtain had reached insatiable levels; I no longer believed in what I saw on the TV screen, what I read about in the monthly magazines. So it was away from the men who raced the bikes and to the mountains themselves that my admiration and awe were directed  (and, to a lesser degree, to myself, because I was riding climb after climb on nothing but bread and water - or, in my case, SIS Electrolyte energy drink, a whole load of dried apricots and apricot-jam-filled croissants).

I really hope the pro-peloton's current proclamations of a new era really are to be believed (this time, finally) but, to be honest, I don't care. My cycling heroes reach high into the clouds, their reputations incontrovertibly rock-solid. Names like Ventoux, Tourmalet and Izoard will never test positive, never let me down.

Remembering Marco

pic from cycling-passion.com

The late Marco Pantani was a cyclist I greatly admired, a climber whose exploits further fuelled my admiration of the cycling climber and stoked my ambition to go to Europe and try the mountains for myself. He was also the cycling inspiration of Drew, my companion during the travels that make up my book, The Breakaway - Cycling the Mountains of the Tour de France. Without Marco I might never have ridden Alpe d’Huez, the Stelvio, Mont Ventoux, et al.

Pantani was oft compared to an artist; Lance Armstrong called him the Salvador Dali of cycling. He rode with unbridled panache, making crazy decisions to attack based on gut feeling, eschewing modern training and racing aids such as the heart-rate monitor.

However, as the French Senate confirmed on Wednesday Pantani also doped, in this case with EPO, during the 1998 edition of the Tour de France, which he won. Pantani wasn’t alone in his indiscretions: second-placed rider that year, Jan Ulrich, also retroactively tested positive for EPO, as did the American, Bobby Julich, who finished third. It was just those three, and all the rest – the ’98 Tour will forever be synonymous with the Festina affair. Watchmaker Festina was the title sponsor of the team whose soigneur was caught with performance enhancing drugs prior to the race start. The arrest lifted the lid on the sport’s pharmaceutical underbelly and triggered the greatest scandal cycling would see for, well, until the next scandal.

Lightning Quick

The thunder and lightning currently blasting my neighbourhood of Edinburgh into submission is pretty scary, but none will ever be as scary (I hope!) as that which nearly welded me onto the tarmac of the Col d'Aubisque:

Whilst I clung onto Drew’s back wheel and chuckled at what I saw as an irrational fear, the lightning caught up and cracked directly overhead. That explosion of noise was the loudest thing I have ever heard, hopefully the loudest thing I will ever hear. The air turned bright blue as its water content sizzled to the boil. The hairs on our necks stood on end as if we’d stuck our fingers into a electric socket; those power lines I had so recently joked about hissed, buzzed and visibly jerked on their pylon mounts like a sack full of body-popping snakes — the danger I had dismissed suddenly all too real. I shifted up a gear and raced passed Drew, no longer as brave nor as forthcoming with suggestions as to what the lightning might do next. It was all too bloody obvious: we were about to be cooked alive!

To read more click here and pick up a copy of The Breakaway for just £3.99/$4.99.

Best of Times, Worst of Times

One of the great things about having ridden a load of Tour climbs is pretending to know how the peloton feels as the Tour cruises and crawls over the same roads. Stage 19 takes in the Col du Glandon and the Col de la Madeliene, both of which I tackled during The Breakaway. For me the Madeleine was a total and utter nightmare. I suffered like a dog (trapped inside a hot car) the whole way up. The Glandon was that day's second ascent and, surprisingly, I recovered enough to find it, dare I say, enjoyable.

Click to enlarge profile

Who knows how the pros will be feeling as they roll off one Col and on to the next (sore, I'd expect, what with two and a half weeks of racing and yesterday's Alpe D double in their legs). Hopefully more like I felt on the Glandon and not as bad as I felt on the Madeleine.

The worst of times upon the Madeleine:

Cooked atop Madeleine

I was battling with every available ounce of willpower but truly going nowhere; even butterflies were overtaking me. Drew, on the other hand, was feeling (at least relatively) great and refusing to hold anything in reserve for the Glandon. He was also refusing to wait for me, cruised off up the climb and was soon a distant blue dot upon my far horizon — surely a revenge of sorts for my dismissive attitude on La Plagne the previous day. I at once hated and admired my friend, jealousy at his strength countered only by wonder. I felt utterly pathetic as he danced delicately on the pedals, pulling the tarmac down and beneath his tyres. The sun that had become my bête noire was his best friend. Sleeves rolled up and smiling, to him the Madeleine was nothing more than an opportunity to top up the tan whilst taking in a bit of a hill. And with each glimpse of his prowess, the circling vultures of negativity closed in.

A couple of particularly steep corners later and I was audibly cursing Drew, spitting my disdain as if his contrasting condition and velocity were all at my expense. He was purposely taunting me, riding me into the ground as revenge for my actions upon the Stelvio, for having ignored his concerns on the Izoard and La Plagne, for having forced him to come on this trip with its evil Folder of Doom. Was he really so stupid, really so spiteful? I would have spat in disgust had my saliva not already dried up and disappeared.

The best of times upon the Glandon:

The air cooled considerably the higher we climbed, an arrestingly fresh mountain atmosphere that proved a stark contrast to the day's earlier, stifling extremes. Whereas on the Madeleine it had felt like I'd been inhaling hot sand, this new breeze was like an elixir, each intake of breath verging upon a quasi-religious experience. No doubt thanks to that climatic change, the remainder of the energy I had sorely lacked that morning returned, and then some. Drew was either fatigued or had grown accustomed to the idea of my continued existence, no longer expressing the desire to be a bike-length ahead at all times. Just as well too; given half the chance I would have been down in the drops, out the saddle, doing my best Pantani impression. It was inconceivable that the climb on which I had almost thrown my bike into the valley could be part of the same day. My earlier miseries were a lifetime away, part of some distant nightmare or a horror story overheard.

Get yourself a copy of The Breakaway for just £3.99.

Ride the Helter Skelter

For stage 18 the Tour de France will tackle Alpe d'Huez twice. The GC contenders will surely be

Double-ouch stage profile

nervous about this stage. The sprinters and rest of the autobus regulars will be absolutely bloody dreading it. Alpe D once in a Tour stage must hurt enough. Twice will purgatory, for them. For us voyeuristic public it will be an unmissable spectacle.

I've ridden Alpe d'Huez four times (ooh, get me) but never more than once in a day, and never as part of a 172.5km Tour stage. My fourth jaunt to the top was when I rode if as part of The Breakaway (buy a copy here for just £3.99 and read a short extract from my Alpe_D day below). It was easily one of the most enjoyable climbs of the whole trip. Whilst other ascents had actively tried to end my life, Alpe d'Huez seemed to wrap her road around me in a warming embrace, the colourful (if, admittedly, painful) 21 hairpins filling me with excitement and enthusiasm. I'd go back and ride it again in a heartbeat. Even four times up the Alpe isn't enough.

"Alpe d’Huez is around an hour (nearing the three-quarter-hour mark for the best) of all-out effort. In order to maintain morale for the duration you have to concentrate on something other than the pain. Vast swathes of the road were (probably always will be) daubed with a mess of cycling-fans' graffiti. It turns a stretch of grey tarmac into something that more resembles a fun-park helter skelter. Not only are there riders' names and nicknames to discern, there are a host of languages to test and confuse an already addled mind. (Scattered incongruously amongst the sporting scribbles were an array of rather graphic depictions of genitalia, some standing proudly alone, others coupled together, usually captioned by Spanish text that I was happily unable to translate.) On my first ascent I had also attempted to sideline the pain by thinking as much as I could about each of the riders name-checked on the hairpins' signs. That technique had proved inspiring and also a little depressing, especially when huffing and puffing past the name of a pure climber like Luis Herrera (on bend 12; winner in 1984).

There are a few other distractions but none really loud enough to be heard through the pain. La Garde comes after hairpin number 16, where you might struggle to avoid the small water fountain and restaurant, its customers staring idly as you haul yourself passed their tables. You might feel like screaming when the diners neglect to applaud, but don't forget that the locals are probably sick of seeing cyclists, thousands of them, every year, groups of all sizes, individual adventurers, one and all “taming” the Alpe. The road does ease off a touch there (if you can call a 7% gradient easy), as it does a few kilometres (or 10 hairpins) later near the hamlet of Huez. If you are suffering on the climb, those are the points where you might want to resist the temptation of riding faster, when you should relax as much as possible, recover a little before the next gruelling section to come. The last part of the climb is steep (8 to 9% all the way to the summit) and only admonished by the knowledge that the pain will soon end. The road then splits in two and you should take the left fork (the road the Tour uses — remember, doing it like the pros) and come up in the front of the town. On race day this option can often be closed, forcing you to go round the back road, which is tougher and without the knowledge that you are riding on the Tour finale. That finish line is usually placed a short ride into the village, the point at which to check your jersey is zipped up, your shades are down, arms aloft as you coast in to the appreciation of the crowd — you know, the one in your head. Or is that just me?"

To buy a copy of The Breakaway for only £3.99 click here.

The Breakaway Reviewed

I'm not one to blow my own trumpet (tuba, trombone or cornet) so I'll let the rather excellent blog inthegc.com do it for me. Here's an extract from their recent review of The Breakaway:

Rae-Hansen seamlessly manages to combine a real knowledge of the climbs, the facts and figures, their place in history, both in and away from the Tour, whilst tackling some difficult, altogether more serious issues like the passing of his Father and the frailty of emotion that comes with such a huge undertaking. The trivia that Rae-Hansen plucks from an obvious deep understanding of cycling, the legend and terrain of the Tour de France is wonderfully dispersed amongst the wider narrative, providing plenty for the pure cycling enthusiast, whilst the book could just as easily reach out to a non-cycling audience as a story of (mis)adventure, longing, relationships and loss.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

No Holiday on Ventoux

Click to enlarge stage profile

Sunday July 14th July sees stage 15 of the Tour de France, the longest in this year's race. As if the distance of 242.5 kilometres wasn't enough, the organisers have lumped the climb of Mont Ventoux on at the end – just to make sure no one gets the idea that July 14th is some kind of French holiday and an excuse for a day off work.

By the time The Breakaway reached Carpentras for the the Giant of Provence the mood in our travelling camp was like the weather around it: oppressively hot, shocked and scarred by rumbling thunder and bolts of lightening.

The Semi-Circle of Death

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Saturday sees the 100th Tour's first foray into the mountains (about bloody time too, I say). This year La Boucle is running clockwise and so the Pyrenees come first. On Sunday, stage 9 heads from Saint-Girons to Bagnères-de-Bigorre over quite a few Pyrenean passes, including the Col de Peyresourde.

For me the Peyresourde will forever remain a part of Robert Millar Day, an unofficial, never to be repeated event about which you can read more here.

Click to enlarge climb profile

The climb of the Peyresourde from Bagnères de Luchon (the direction I rode it and the direction the Tour will tackle) is a tad over 15 kilometres long, takes in 939 metres of ascent and has an average gradient of 6.1%. Not an absolute monster in isolation (not for the pro peloton, anyhow) but in combination with another three first-category climbs, and a second-cat, in a 168.5 kilometre stage, it will be a sore part of a much harder whole.

Stage 10 of the 1926 Tour was an inhumane 326-kilometre-long brute from Bayonne to Luchon, crossing the Aubisque, the Tourmalet, the Aspin and the Peyresourde, and was nicknamed The Circle of Death. During The Breakaway we rode the Peyresourde and its neighbour, the ascent to Superbagnères, in the same morning and joked that we had ridden the Semi-Circle of Death. I can look back and laugh now but it was no joke at the time — sweltering heat, rough Pyrenean roads and a hefty dose of the holiday splats saw to that:

The temperature had rocketed in the hour since Super-B, further hampering my slog with a heat that

Laurent Brochard

fast approached Rolf Roasting Point. As we passed through a wee village called Garin, the gradient eased to about 4%, sufficient respite to allow my mind a moment or two of contemplation: I was going to empty both bottles of water over my head; I was going to turn around and freewheel back down to Luchon, throw myself into the fountain and cry for my mummy until she arrived to pick me up. My Laurent-Brochard-style bandanna/sweatband had filled to overflowing, was drip-dripping salty sweat into my eyes, into a headset top-cap bolt now rusted and ruined by days of perspiration. I dreamt of a cold sponge on the back of my neck, the way boxing trainers revive weary fighters. In fact, forget sponges, I needed an injection of something performance-enhancing, preferably deep-frozen and highly, improbably illegal. With that thought I rode over a slogan daubed onto the road: dopé salut.

To read more or buy a copy of The Breakaway - Cycling the Mountains of the Tour de France click here.