was like a fashion show. Deutsche Telekom team, looking pretty impressive in pink, left the stage and Cofidis filed on, the riders’ chests and backs emblazoned with a vibrant golden sun symbol. Système Vipère looked stunning in their predominantly black lycra, a viper picked out in emerald and scarlet curling itself round each rider’s body and left thigh. Despite it being almost eight o’clock, Fabian Ducasse was wearing his Rudy Project sunglasses but Cat was perfectly happy that he should for he looked utterly stunning.
‘What do you miss?’ Cat understood the compère to be asking Fabian. Fabian replied with an expressive Gallic shrug-cum-pout and said wine and women. ‘What does Paris mean to you?’ the compère furthered. Fabian looked at him as if he was dense. ‘Wine and women, of course.’
And the yellow jersey, perhaps, thought Cat, not that Vasily will let it go easily, Oh, why can’t you both have it?
Zucca MV, in their blue and yellow strip, striped into rather dazzling and possibly tactical optically psychedelic swirls, sauntered on to the stage next and stood, legs apart, hands behind their backs. Though there was no music, Massimo Lipari was tapping his toe, nodding his head and grabbing his bottom lip with his teeth as if he were in a night-club and on the verge of dancing his heart out. Cat smiled. Stefano Sassetta smirked arrogantly, his torso erect, his thighs slightly further apart than those of his team-mates and, Cat noticed, tensed to show off their impressive musculature. Her eyes were on an involuntary bagatelle course; if they moved upwards from Stefano’s thighs, they hit his crotch from where they rebounded back to his thighs before being sent north again.
There’s padding and there’s padding – and I estimate that only a fraction of what Stefano has down there is padding. Blimey!
Zucca’s six domestiques, staring earnestly into the middle distance, same height, same build, same haircut, now the same peroxide blond, looked utterly interchangeable and Cat cussed herself for confusing Gianni with Pietro or Paolo and Marco and Mario or Franscesco.
They’re the cogs that keep Zucca’s wheels turning. If these boys weren’t domestiques, they’d most probably be working in their fathers’ restaurants. Not as head chefs or maître d’s, but as waiters, scurrying back and forth, keeping everybody happy. And they would indeed be happy – working for others is what they do. And they do it brilliantly and with pleasure. Their sense of family is strong. A family is a team. A team is a family. Put any obstacle in front of a line of soldier ants and they will not look for a way around it, they will climb up and over it and so it is with the Zucca MV domestiques. Their selflessness is legendary within the peloton. I’d like to write a piece about them.
Cat was making a mental note to phone the publishers of Maillot on Monday morning to propose such an article, when Megapac replaced Zucca MV on stage, the nine riders fresh-faced grinning virgins in comparison to the suave comportment of the Italian team who had a long-standing relationship with the Tour de France. She had to physically stop herself from leaping to her feet and waving at Hunter and Luca whom she now thought of as personal friends.
We meet again. You all look so lovely. Please take care. Have a good race. See you tomorrow. Adieu.
Catriona McCabe. Journaliste.
Cat McCabe is exhausted. She is back at the hotel, in her room, praying that neither Alex nor Josh will call for her. In fact, tonight she wouldn’t even open the door to Stefano Sassetta or Jose Maria Jimenez, no matter how insistently they knocked. The team presentation has been a reality check; she is truly here, on the eve of the Tour de France. She really is a journalist and a journaliste. She’s written her piece which Taverner rather liked, allowing her to keep the extra forty-four words which exceeded his word limit, and it will be published tomorrow morning.
Will He read it, I wonder?
He? Taverner? He has already – he liked it.
No – Him.
Why are you thinking about him, Cat? Aren’t your three weeks in France meant to be putting that all-important distance, in time and space, between you and all that?
I’m just wondering. I still miss Him, all right?
Who, Cat, or what? Do you miss the status of what he was – a long-term boyfriend – or do you miss the person he is? If it’s the former, that’s understandable; if it’s the latter, it’s unacceptable.
I know. It’s just the world seems a very spacious place without Him.
And your world was an unhappy one with him. Let him go. Let go. Here you are – just look where you are. You’re going to be fine.
Am I?
See her sitting up in bed. She is wearing a Tour de France T-shirt and a Team Saeco-Cannondale baseball cap. All the journalists are bribed with branded clothing and yet none are wearing them in public. Cat is disappointed. How can so many seem blasé when she herself is brimming with excitement? Cat has noted how it appears to be cool to wear branded items from previous Tours, but no one wears the current gifts as if somehow that would be too obsequious. Next year, though, no doubt they’ll be an enviable commodity and worn with pride and panache.
Cat, anyway, is wearing hers in bed, scanning L’Equipe and pleased that she can understand most of what she reads. She hauls her laptop from chair to bed and reads through her article. She pulls the neck of the T-shirt up and over her nose, inhaling deeply and knowing that, whenever she smells this T-shirt again, it will say to her ‘Tour de France, eve of the Prologue, Hôtel Splendide, Delaunay Le Beau. Room 50. Jimenez above, Lipari below. Alex Fletcher and Josh Piper in the bar. I was there.’ Cat pulls her cap down over her brow and reads.
COPY FOR P. TAVERNER @ GUARDIAN SPORTS DESK FROM CA TRIONA McCABE IN DELA UNA Y LE BEAU
The Tour de France is the most prestigious bike race in the world. It is also the most extravagantly staged event, not just in cycling but in sport in general.
La Grande Boucle does indeed trace a vast if misshapen 3,800 km loop across France. An entourage of 3,500 people, the Garde Républicaine motorcycle squad, 13,000 gendarmes, 1,500 vehicles and a fleet of helicopters escort the peloton whilst 15 million roadside spectators salute its progress as it snakes its way through France with speed, skill and tenacity in a gloriously garish rainbow splash of lycra.
The Tour de France is the race that every young European boy fantasizes about riding just as soon as the stabilizers are removed from his first bicycle. It is the race that is the inspiration for an amateur to turn professional, that every professional road-race cyclist desires to ride. It is the pursuit of a holy grail: to wear the yellow jersey, to win a Stage, to ride in a breakaway, or just to finish last in Paris albeit having lost three and a half hours to the yellow jersey over the three weeks.
Hell on two wheels, the Tour de France breaks bodies and spirits as much as it does records. It is also a beautiful and frequently moving event to watch, to witness. It is an adventure, a pilgrimage, a piece of history, of theatre, a soap opera unfolding against a stunning backdrop of France. For riders and spectators and organizers alike, it is a journey.
The Tour de France is a national institution raced by a multinational peloton, accompanied by an international entourage and broadcast to the world. It defines the calendar in France in much the same way as Bastille Day or Christmas. Similarly in Spain. And Italy. Belgium. Switzerland. Just not in Britain.
Ask any child anywhere European and hilly for their great idols and they will always name a cyclist. Ask any European sports star to name a hero, they will always hail a cyclist. Ask anyone, in fact, about their country’s key national figures, and they will invariably list a cyclist among them.
Why? Cyclists are heroes because of the bicycle itself; the ultimate working-class vehicle. Many cyclists come from modest beginnings and then