2023-07-01 00:02:00
After. Brothers, racing bikes, eternal legends and mountains: with the camper on the Tour de France.
The narrow tires don’t draw a straight line. It’s a lurch. Not at the end of the ropes, but still with a little reserve. It’s not a race up the Col de la Madone via Menton. It is the conquest of the meaningless, a path chosen because you want to, not because you have to. It’s not a race against anyone but yourself. Already five, six kilometers. Extremely steep, always in the sun. Another five or six kilometers. Uphill. Below, the sea and city merge with the beach. The plain is now just a hazy refuge that disappears behind us, which we left voluntarily, without any particular reason, as Petrarch once reported in a letter in 1336, namely that he climbed Mont Ventoux without a valid reason was. Simply because the mountain was there. Climbing the giants of Provence, the bare mountain that was often the executioner in the Tour de France, where dreams were shattered and Eddie Merckx needed an oxygen mask to cross the finish line after his 1970 victory. A final destination, often blown about not only by the eponymous winds, but by drama, effort, and sacrifice.
Our destination is not yet over vineyards like Mont Ventoux, but over the sea. The camper is on the beach. The sea will be the shower when we come back. We travel basic, only with the essentials, i.e. bike clothing and tools. And stories. We stop for the night where we can cycle away in the morning, let the coffee on the gas cooker brew between cedars at motorway service stations. The French make it easy for you because they are used to campers and are creating infrastructure for this beyond campsites. We are traveling together for the first time since we were young, my brother and I. We’ve gotten older, but not so old that our legs wouldn’t twist and turn up every mountain. His eternal passion for road cycling and my relatively young passion for road cycling connect us. And the passion for the tour.
Menton was seldom passed by the Tour de France and never over the Col de la Madone, of which we will say above, “Truly a glorious climb.” Professional cyclists who live in the area use the route up from the sea at 922 meters above sea level to determine their shape. The right beginning for the fraternal descendant.
Always followed. There has always been someone there, there is always a story. Anyone following in the footsteps of the Tour de France cannot do so without someone having driven up since the first Tour 120 years ago. Le Tour, as she is reverently known, ticks all the boxes of a classic epic. On the one hand there is the sporting competition, in its duels often like Homer’s “Iliad”, with the legends of big names and their deeds, honestly heroic as well as meanly fraudulent. And there is the colorful world of those who are there on the side of the road. The Tour de France is a cycling race, the largest in the world. It has 21 stages year after year. It holds thousands of stories. For example, that a bike was once named after the Col de la Madone. You can just drive up. Or you do it with these stories.
The pressure that can still be exerted against the pedals decreases the closer you get to the summit. But I don’t stop, kicking and kicking. A sound accompanies me that I know from the afternoons when races are broadcast on GCN, the Global Cycling Network. It’s the background noise of the mountain stages, the cheers of the audience. I see the faces coming up close to the pro cyclists, shouting their encouragement. “Allez, allez, allez,” they shout. They scream for everyone. There are no opponents. There are only those who drive on the same road in the race as we, the followers, before or after. “Allez, allez, allez”, it hammers in my head – a duel between imaginary cheering and the real, hard pulse. And I lift my head, look up the mountain. A few hairpin bends further, where the trees end, a jersey moves along the rocks. White and orange. My brother. Lighter, always fast. I behind. Always backwards in history.
There is no rule for visiting the stages of the Tour de France. However, a code that is not written down anywhere says: You go there by bike. Or by looking for a place to climb up a mountain stage in a camper or mobile home. That’s part of the tradition. We belong to this tradition, traveling in the footsteps of the Tour, along the narrow lines that are drawn on the asphalt. This also includes the six retirees who have been looking for a spot on one of the legendary French Alpine passes for years at each edition. As a backdrop, they are an important part of the spectacle. Days before the sporting event, they are looking for a nice place in impassable terrain for their mobile homes. And then they play cards, gossip over coffee, wait for the climax when the drivers scurry past them in a few seconds. You can see it in the grandiose film “La Grand-Messe”. This movie runs in my head while driving uphill.
A few days later, circling the Sainte-Victoire, we passed the Col d’Èze, the sea is far away for us followers, but there are fields of lavender and gentle, flowing vineyards. Above them, Mont Ventoux hides behind clouds. There is a toilet near the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain and an instant supermarket. There are no fresh croissants there. And those who leave by bus don’t know whether their parking space will still be free when they come back. At least that’s true when the tour is on the road – and with it hundreds of thousands who come to watch. But croissants don’t provide any fuel anyway. They are fat. But like Le Tour or Baguette, the color yellow because of the leader’s shirt and wine with dinner, croissants are part of the country’s DNA. We get our croissants along our stage. We stop, we don’t have to be fast.
The last meters, 21 kilometers after the start already in the shadow of the observatory that stands at the top of the Ventoux, are super steep. There was no longer a straight line for Marco Pantani either. It’s a falter. Now at the very end of the reserves, because after that it’s all downhill. “There is a straight path,” sings PeterLicht from the car radio. There is this straight path. There is no obligation to take it.
Info: www.letour.fr/de, www.france.fr/de
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