It’s rare to experience physical battles in everyday life, and on that level the fight to succeed brings out something primitive, making road racing wonderful to experience and wonderful to watch.
But the best professionals raise road racing to an art; the art of warfare maybe, the art of a hunter perhaps, but still art and glorious to behold and appreciate. Especially since road racing is not played out in stadiums or on pitches, but on incredible natural canvases. Some are stark, set on the cobblestone roads and brutish hills of northern Europe. Others are stunning, like races in the great mountain ranges of Italy, France and Spain. But all are beautiful in their unique way.
There are single-day road races and stage races. Some single-day races have more history or more notable terrain, and they are called the classics. Of the classics five are the biggest and the best, and they are known as the ‘monuments’ of cycling. Stage races are at least two or three days long, most are around one week, but the biggest stage races last for three weeks. They are the Grand Tours: the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta a España, and the biggest and oldest of them all, the Tour de France.
The Tour de France is not just the biggest bike race in the world, it’s the biggest annual sports event in the world, only ever surpassed by football’s World Cup and the Olympic Games. Figures from 2011 show that the Tour de France, or simply the Tour as it’s referred to in cycling, was covered by seventy radio stations, four thousand newspapers and press agencies, and seventy websites, who between them sent 2,300 journalists from thirty-five countries to the race. The Tour de France website, www.letour.fr had 14 million unique visitors that year. Over 100 TV channels broadcast the race to 190 countries in 2011, sixty of them receiving live pictures. And that’s just the media coverage, which has grown since 2011; the Tour de France has a truly worldwide audience today.
The number of roadside spectators is harder to gauge, but the Tour organisers Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) reckon that a staggering 12 to 15 million people watch the race pass by at some point each year. And that’s one of the big attractions of road racing: it goes to the places where people live, it comes down their roads and past their houses. Still, many spectators want to see the race on a famous mountain climb, and they must either walk or bike there on the day of the stage, or they must drive there two or three days beforehand to get any chance of finding a place to park. Many camp on the mountainside, turning their visit into a holiday.
By the time the race gets there the crowds on mountain roads are huge. Police estimated that half a million people stood on Alpe d’Huez to watch a time trial stage in 2004. The atmosphere is always electric and often a little bit mad. Some fans wear bizarre costumes, and so many spill out onto the road that the race leaders often face a wall of hysterical humanity, which parts just ahead of them, leaving only the narrowest gaps to ride through. It’s an incredible sight, and unforgettable to be part of. So let’s look at a typical mountain stage of the Tour de France.
The race fills almost any place where it starts or finishes. Parking anywhere near the start is impossible, so planning ahead is vital if you are to see anything. The focus is the Village de Départ, a temporary structure erected by a travelling team, then taken down as soon as the race leaves town, and transported to wherever it’s needed next.
In Tours gone by everybody had access to all areas, but the race has outgrown the charming informality it once had. Riders, race officials, accredited media and VIPs are the only people allowed in the Village now. Everybody else stands behind barriers, people-watching and star-spotting, and there are plenty of both to see. Old champions and former team-mates meet for a coffee in the Village, where they gossip about the old days; celebrities are shown around by sponsors or race officials, while members of the media pretend to check their smartphones but are continually looking for somebody, anybody, to interview. They don’t find many current riders, just the few who are sent out by their teams to keep the press happy.
The Tour de France has changed a lot. It was always big, always serious for the top riders, but now it’s very big and ultra-serious for every rider. Everybody takes their A-game to the Tour de France – they have to; anything less won’t do. Riders don’t mingle much with the public now; they are cocooned behind black glass in massive team buses. Inside they chat in air-cooled calm, or get lost in i-pods and laptops, but they are all focusing on the day ahead. The last team briefing is done. Everybody knows their job, their part in the team’s stage plan has been explained. This is their quiet time before battle.
Some of the more garrulous riders emerge from the buses first, sign autographs and pose for selfies. Some like the attention, the interaction, but they are rarely the contenders, who stay in their bus shells until the last minute. They want to avoid questions from news-hungry press. How do they feel? What do they think will happen today? Is this a crucial stage? Things the top guys know, or hope they know, but are unwilling to talk about because they don’t want input from anybody else, or in case they are just plain wrong. Contenders emerge in time to wave, nod politely at well-wishers, and head for the signing on. They have a job to do in the race, and it takes all they’ve got to do it. There’s no spare capacity to answer questions, not now, not before the stage. Afterwards they’ll talk at length.
Signing on for a stage is a cycling tradition. In days gone by it served to inform officials which riders were still in a race, but now it’s used as a device for the race speaker to introduce the riders to the spectators, so they know who is who and what they’ve won. One at a time the riders mount the steps to the speaker’s stage, walk stiffly to where they sign, wave to the crowd and by the time they’ve gone the speaker has been through their career in detail, and maybe had a word or two from them. The speaker never asks difficult questions, that’s his side of the bargain. It’s all done quickly and professionally, then the riders head for the start line and the race rolls out.
Tour de France stages have two starts; a nice smiley ceremonial one in the middle of town, then the real one when the race gets out in the countryside. The man in charge, the Tour de France director, the ultimate word on the race, Christian Prudhomme is driven ahead in a distinctive red car. The riders follow it closely, crowding its back bumper. Prudhomme emerges through the sun-roof, a red flag stretched between his hands. The riders watch it, waiting for him to drop it, and when he does all hell breaks loose.
The director’s car accelerates away, and the riders always attack. It’s like the cork coming out of a Champagne bottle, the start of each team’s stage plan, a release of pent-up energy as every rider is anxious to play his part. Tour stages need breakaways, more often referred to as breaks. On stages that suit sprinters their teams work to ensure the whole bunch is together for the finish, but part of doing that involves letting a group go ahead early and stay ahead for a while. The early attackers are trying to form such a breakaway.
In professional road races an early break creates order where otherwise there would be chaos. Breakaways provide a focus for the race; they give it shape so long as there’s nobody in them who threatens somebody else’s plan. Breakaways stop races becoming a free-for-all for the whole distance, with attack after attack until the peloton is cut to ribbons. The trick is not to let a breakaway get so far ahead it can’t be caught later. Just keep it there, keep the gap, then reel it in before the finish. Pro teams have that down to an art.
But this isn’t a sprinter’s stage, this is a mountain stage with other agendas going on. A breakaway still brings order, but the riders trying to get in today’s break come from two distinct groups. One is trying to win the stage, and the other is made up of riders trying to help their team leaders win the race overall. I’ll talk more about both groups in later chapters, but for now let’s look at how a breakaway forms at this level of racing.
For a start the other riders don’t say, ‘Go on, lads, you go ahead and we’ll see you later.’ Quite the opposite, and there’s an incredible scrap before a breakaway forms. Its mix must be right, and the other riders won’t let anything go until it is. For example, if an outside favourite for overall victory or a high overall placing tries to slip into a breakaway unnoticed, it won’t happen. It will be noticed, and the other teams will pounce on it and snuff it out.
Neither will the other favourites’ teams let one