Remembering Marco

On February 15th 2004 my friend Drew and I rolled out on a solemn bike ride. We were sporting black armbands, strips of cotton cut from an old t-shirt — a shabby yet honest tribute. Our conversation came in fits and starts, interspersed by long moments of silent gloom. We were in shock, saddened and more than a little angry: the man of our shared sporting inspiration had died the previous day of a cocaine overdose.

The aforementioned Drew, my Breakaway travelling partner, had been inspired to get into cycling by Eurosport's coverage of the 1998 Tour. He had never seen an athlete, in any sport, quite like Marco. It was the guts, the determination, the panache and the daring (attacking on the rain-soaked Galibier ascent, solo and so far from the finish). For Drew it was love at first sight. By the end of that summer he was riding around Edinburgh on a Mercatone Uno replica Bianchi, sporting the matching kit, bandanna and all.

Not Been There, Not Done That

In the weeks and months after returning home from my Breakaway travels I exuded an air of ascender's arrogance. In a couple of weeks I’d climbed almost three times the height of Everest. I’d taken on and (just about) survived many of cycling’s biggest names: Ventoux, Galibier, Izoard, Stelvio ... .

None of the climbs that Scotland had to offer could perturb me. “Think this is bad?” I’d shout at my legs, “this is nothing compared to the [insert famous-name climb] and you survived that!”

I’d been there, done that — or so I thought.

With every grand tour comes a clutch of climbs, some big names, some I’d never heard of, whose tarmac my tyres have yet to touch. The routes of 2014’s big three prove no exception.

Never Meet Your Heroes - Redux

Back in June last year I wrote this short blog about 'meeting' the polka dot jersey won and worn by one of my cycling heroes, Robert Millar, at the 1984 Tour de France. 

I'd encountered it after stumbling into Billy Bilsland Cycles on the way home from an afternoon watching the British Road Race Championships at Glasgow Green.

Well it seems as if another trip west (surely a pilgrimage?) is on the cards. Billy Bilsland Cycles have this week unveiled an addition to their Millar tribute. Alongside the signed and framed spotty jersey you can now see the actual Peugeot bike upon which Millar rode to that famous victory.

Apparently the bike hadn't been seen in public for 30 years, having been in the ownership of a private collector. Well now (but unlike it's ilusive original owner) the bike is very much back in the public eye — and in one of Scotland's best bike shops too. Definitely worth a trip to Glasgow, if only to marvel at the size of the inner chainring — what, no compact?!

There's more info and a full gallery at Billy Bilsland's Facebook page.

(Still reckon retro Peugeots look better in fluro pink, like my old steed.)

Retro Ride

My mind wanders during car journeys. On a recent drive to visit family in the north of Scotland I

Old faithful

imagined what would it be like to hop back aboard the steel-framed Peugeot that was my teenage years’ pride and joy? Would the current, approaching-forty me cope without his lightweight, carbon-fibre steed; would my ageing legs cope without a compact?

There was only one way to find out, so I clambered into the dustiest corner of my mother’s garage and returned dragging a relic. It needed new tyres, a pair of pedals would be useful, but otherwise it looked perfectly serviceable.

I don’t always appreciate just how advanced my current ride is in comparison to that early-Nineties, utterly basic bike. It’s also true to say that the teenage me failed to appreciate how lucky he was to reside in such great cycling country. I grew up in Fochabers, a village near the Moray coast and on the edge of Highland Speyside. My extended backyard was packed with quiet roads, cracking climbs and the kind of scenery tourists travel thousands of miles to gaze at.

So it was at Fochabers that this nostalgic experiment would begin and end. I’d opted for one of the aces from my riding repertoire — a 60-mile loop around Malt Whisky country with almost 4000 feet of ascent.

Not Just For Christmas

PERFECT FOR ANYONE — EVEN WEIRDOES

The Breakaway would make the perfect gift for any cyclist  — especially those who can read —  and non-cyclists (weirdoes that they are) would love it too.

Well I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Yes, I would, but it happens to be true. There is a lot of cycling in The Breakaway, and a lot of cycling up mountains (roughly equivalent to three ascents of Everest). There’s also a lot of humour — laughter inspired by heatstroke, oxygen debt and the likes of The Goonies, bicycle-eating Italian goats, Marmot smuggling, Goose from Top Gun, Minxy the mutant Playmate, and more.

Life’s not all giggles and energy jells though, and neither is The Breakaway. There are some serious issues in there too, such as my struggle to overcome grief whilst attempting to overcome hors category mountain passes, and dealing with a friendship that was balanced on a rocky precipice like the bus at the end of The Italian Job.

HOW TO SEND AN E-BOOK AS A GIFT

“Okay, I’m sold”, I hear you cry, “but how to gift the cyclist/reader in my life an e-book?”

Simple. If you're in the UK the easiest way is to send a gift card by email. Make it out for the amount of the book you wish to gift (mine, at £3.99, of course), add the lucky recipient's email address and then type a suitable message in the box before you click buy – something like: “The Breakaway – Cycling The Mountains of the Tour France sounds like it's right up your allez.”

And don't forget to include a link to the book of your choice – there's one for The Breakaway here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Breakaway-Cycling-Mountains-France-ebook/dp/B00BO9LLG8

If you're in America and using Amazon.com then it’s even easier — just find the book you want to gift and click the Give as a Gift button (you Yanks don't know how easy you've got it!).

WHAT ABOUT ME?!

What if you don’t know a cyclist/person who can read? Then gift a copy to yourself, of course (and make finding some cyclist/more intelligent friends your top new year’s resolution).

You don’t even need  to own a Kindle. Download the Kindle reader app and you can Breakaway on a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and maybe even a teapot (or perhaps not).

You’ve had a tough year, you’ve been a very good boy/girl/hermaphrodite — you deserve a copy of The Breakaway.

But remember, this book is not just for Christmas. If you’re a slow reader it might well last through to the end of the Ardennes Classics.

Dinner On The Pass

Cycling and food are two of passions of mine. Sometimes I wonder if the main reason for the former is to create a calorie deficit that excuses my intake of the latter.

View from the hot seat

I recently had the privilege of enjoying Dinner on the Pass in The Sheraton hotel's One Square kitchen. The cycling equivalent of this foodie experience would be to ride in a pro-team car that's driving  alongside the peloton: sitting at the pass, watching the kitchen work at full steam; the brigade of chefs in perfect synchronisation, gathered around their leader, selflessly doing his bidding, preparing the ground for a team's grand victory (and at the feed zone the musettes held more promise than energy gels and rice cakes).

The road book

In this peloton, Sheraton Executive Chef, Malcolm Webster, is patron, running his kitchen in a manner that's surprisingly calm yet clearly effective: beware fans of the swearing and sweating kitchen cliché, you might be disappointed.

In fact, my previous experience of a hotel kitchen was a stint, many moons ago, as a kitchen porter in Edinburgh’s George Hotel – an experience of grovelling, sweating, anger-filled heat that put me off catering-as-profession for good. The experience was something on the same grovelling, gruesome level as Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Suffice to say the plungeur's life was not for me.

Prolougue

Chef Webster's kitchen is the antithesis of that, a place that employs the cooking equivalent of Team Sky's
marginal gains philosophy. There's no naked gas flame here, only inductive stoves and hobs (not to mention the Green Egg barbecue, the steamers and sous vide machines). Huge ceiling fans and ducts suck out the heat and pump in cool, calming air. Orders come through on a printer and each section gets a copy so the atmosphere is quiet, minus the barked call-and-answer routine we've all seen done to death on Masterchef — why do things they way they have always been done when there's a better, modern method? Whisper it: yes chef.

A fast stage

The queen stage

So as I sat at the shining marble-slab of a pass, feeling like a cross between Greg Wallace and Mr Creosote, Chef Webster dished up a six-course menu that was perfectly balanced, like the route of week-long stage race.


We began with a prologue of beetroot and Connage crowdie, and then sprinted towards the coast and an oceanic Partan bree. A well-judged intermediate stage of barbecued mackerel led back inland to the Queen stage of turbot with oxtail (a dish I will dream about for years to come). The leader’s jersey was challenged by a serving St Bride’s Farm duck, before the short but satisfying penultimate étape of Smoked Cuddy’s Cave cheese and quince.

The dénouement was a final flourish dessert called Pudding on the Pass, like laps of the Champs Elysees, had Salvador Dali been the original Paris city-planner (imagine using a spoon to pick your way through the remains of a sweet shop that's been dropped from a great height, and you’re only halfway to getting it).

Yellow-jersey challenger

Chef Dali adds a flourish

Chef Webster not only dished up amazing food, he didn't seem to mind my constant interruptions and enquiries. He was asked about everything from poaching eggs (they gently steam theirs in the shell before cracking them into water to maintain that perfect shape) to his opinions on Professional Masterchef, and answered with a the kind of passion and knowledge that was evident in his kitchen's end product.

By the time we stumbled out into the night, I was grinning inanely and doing my best to keep thoughts from the coming day's calorie-crunching bike ride.

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.