“A mountain is not an obstacle, it is an opportunity”. R.Millar.

The UK has an ambivalent relationship with the bicycle. Our motorsport heritage is what appears to set the tone for road usage and attitudes. Bikes are second class citizens and basically a nuisance. The continental view is different. In France for example, mount a velociped, Route or VTT, and the difference is immediate and tangible. Of course France plays host for three weeks every year to its own backyard bike race called the Tour de France. Broken only by global conflict, the TdF has been bringing its road system to a halt since 1903. It is what sets the tone for how the bike is regarded over there. On a bike you rise to a higher level. Once you realise that cycling in France is an activity worthy of serous intellectual analysis, it all becomes clear. The bike is a test of courage, moral and character, like the relict bull-rings of the south, a forum for epic individual combat. On the bike you are elevated to one of the ‘special ones’ and for this you receive space, time and honour. France has been denied success in its home Tour since 1985. Cycling, however, still has a special place in the hearts of the French. You can see the enthusiasm everywhere from toddlers that can barely walk let alone reach the pedals to veterans with skin and muscle as tanned and leathery as that chap they dragged out of an Essex bog somewhere near Hainault.

Talking of which; L’Alpe d’Huez. From the foot of the climb at Bourg D’Oisians, 21 hairpins, each numbered and named after a former stage winner there. Bernard Hinault (pronounced like the keyboard player from Roxy Music) is virage 11. He won his stage in 1986 only to be second overall that year behind Mr LeMond. The first time an American stole ‘their’ Tour and the first of his three brilliant wins. I did not concentrate too much on the names on the way up. You know they are there though; Hererra, Hampsten, Zoetemelk, Pantani, Armstrong (Curiously Merckx never won here). They look over your shoulder as you concentrate on a rhythm winding up through the trees to la Garde d’Huez past the Church and war memorial. Beyond the small village of Huez the tree’s recede, the road opens up and the ski-station comes into view, new, brash and ugly. You know now that you are well past the half way point. You can afford a little guilty acceleration at this point. Perhaps it is the photographer pointing his lens at you or perhaps it is knowing that you have only started from the bottom of this mountain and not 100km away in another valley on the other side of some other mountain.

‘The’ alpe is a dead-end to nowhere. It is usual to finish here in a mountain-top sprint. A normal etape is nearly over by the time the riders start on virage 21. The record for the climb is 36 minutes 50 seconds. Marco Pantani in 1995. That day the stage covered 163ks, climbing the Madeleine and the Col de Croix de Fer as Hors d'oeuvre before devouring the Alpe as main course. He was reported braking into each hairpin. My time? Irrelevant really. 1hr 15 minutes if you want to know. It’s not the most picturesque of mountain climbs, it is not the hardest or longest, but it is perhaps the one with the most history distilled into that little ribbon of asphalt. It has become an icon of the Tour. It is a must do….

I have a calendar on my wall and I was looking forward to July. July is a picture of Robert Millar leading Greg LeMond, Laurent Fignon and Gert Jan Theunisse on a hot, high, dusty mountain pass in the 1989 Tour. If you don’t know who Robert Millar is, shame on you. The Tour was the one that Fignon lost by 8 seconds to LeMond. The high pass was the Col d’Izoard. I cycled the Izoard with thoughts of Millar. An enigmatic Scot, he won the KoM in 1984. I was living in Glasgow at the time, just round the corner from Billy Bilslands bike shop in Goven. Billy Bilsland, former international cyclist with the Peugeot squad, was a sort of mentor to Millar in his early days. I have a yellow Billy Bilsland musette that I used as a sandwich bag on my trips around Loch Lomond on my Dads steel Mercian (44/41 Campag). The picture shows Millar in the iconic ‘Z’ team jersey at a spot next to the memorial stone to Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet. I stopped on the way down to get a picture here. It is a cauldron, a bare, volcanic shadeless place. I rode at a leisurely pace, I cannot imagine how it must be at racing speed. My Millar pilgrimage started from Guillestre, a lovely market town in the Durance valley. The road leaves the Durance and climbs east through tunnels and into the magnificent Combe du Queryas. Never excessive in gradient, but a constant ‘fasle flat’ of 2-3% warms the legs for 10k or more. Just before you reach the ancient Chateau Queryas the road suddenly veers left requiring an immediate response. A change from 25 to 27 at the back and a launch on the pedals. From here the straight 7k to Brunissard is a 4% soul-destroying grind. Senses tell you the road should be flat but you are smothered by an invisible force. The air converts to water, tyres are Velcro on the tar. Moving very slowly past static telesiege and through buzzing alpine meadows this was the crux and negative thoughts made this a dark section. Reaching the zig-zags above Brunissard a type of relief is achieved, drop it into trente neuf-vingt huit and the hairpins free you to dance on the pedals. It may be steeper but here you can see gravity your enemy and fight against it. You reach that spot, 3k from the summit where the photograph of Millar was taken. It’s called the Casse Desérte. A special geological area of screes and rock pinnacles where the minerals have stained the decaying limestone into kaleidoscopic colours. This place is spectacular. In the photograph I have, Millar is taught, LeMond relaxed, time has rendered it glamorous. Robert Millar escaped from that dour early eighties Glasgow I knew and here he was, wearing the jewelled cape of a ‘Z’ matador in an epic struggle with the greatest cyclists in the world. Fignon was dropped that day by 30 seconds by LeMond on the finish into Briançon and many consider this is where he lost the closest Tour in history, not in Paris. Millar finished in 10th place overall that year. Half a minute meant nothing to me. I measured my ascent in hours. There is a difference, not just in the quarter century between the picture on my wall and the digital image I now have, but in the gulf in ability and courage required to cross these places at racing speed.

The Galibier has two faces. The south face rises gently from the subsidiary summit of the Col de Lautaret at the top of the Romanche Valley, itself at 2058M, in a series of wide green sweeping bends to its summit at 2646M. The north face is another beast. From the mean huddle of chalets at Plan Lachat it does not seem possible that a metalled road can climb out of the cirque of mountains into which it has led. This is the Galibiers mean face, longer and steeper than its twin and the way the Tour normally transfers its victims from the Maurienne to the Romanch valleys. The Col du Galibier is the quintessential Tour climb. It symbolises all that is challenging and character-building of the Tour. It is not an obstacle but an opportunity to explore the heart of the compulsion that is cycling over mountains.

Starting from the top of the Lautaret is a cheat. I pushed hard to expunge this guilt. I reached the summit surprisingly easy, only needing 39/23. Forty minutes for 580M gain, not bad. But I was not happy, this was not the Galibier I was expecting. The Galibier could and should bite. A scorching day in the valley, it was a pleasant spring day up here at the col. Think back to 1998, check the YouTube footage if you want, Pantani on the Galibier, again with a trademark ferocious attack but this time in atrocious weather, so cold the organisers feared the riders would freeze on the descent preventing the use of their brakes. Pantani had enough of a lead at the summit to stop and don his wind jacket. Jan Ulrich, 5 minutes behind at the same point eschewed any clothing, he froze and lost over 8 minutes on the final climb of the day to Les Deux Alpes. 1998 was the year of ‘Il Pirata’. In 1935 a Spanish rider was pitched off one of the hairpins descending toward Briançon and died three days later in hospital in Grenoble, the first of the Tours’ three fatalities. I had not suffered enough yet to get to the core of this mountain.

I descended northward, each hairpin took me down towards Valloire and I realised I was dropping into an unknown, this was a long way and boy was it a long way back. My nerve finally gave out at Plan Lachat, half way down the valley. I stopped and scanned the road I had just travelled. The only evidence from below were the shiny tops of cars and campers, glinting ball bearings crossing each other like some enormous pinball machine being played out on the side of the slope. I had a second guilt-pang. Am I doing this mountain justice? Have I stacked the odds in my favour? The task ahead partially dispelled these thoughts, even here on this meandering section I was in my lowest gear, an abrupt swing to the right and the first of the steep ramps, no more gears, only out of the saddle left. More remarkably steep ramps, each hairpin springing back on itself with vehicles and other riders directly above my head or below my feet as I was snapped back and forth like that shiny pinball side to side across the mountainside. This was what I was here for. I was now suffering, but from this struggle emerged a sense of something that was beautiful and blissful. I was doing this and it was hurting, but it was right and whatever it was, it was beautiful. This sense of calm and blissfulness (Ãnanda?) connected me back to steep Pembrokeshire limestone and gnarled Scottish Gabro where the micro-beauty of feldspar and hornblende grains under your finger tips and the utter concentration required to stay alive, intensify the experience into something spiritual. On this hill, concentrated stress, sensory inputs, pleasurable and nociceptive, distilled together into a moment of beauty. The Galibier is a beautiful mountain. Like time spent in vertical space, the alchemies of physical and mental attrition draw me back wanting more of this spiritual high. This mountain did not have its chance to best me. The true start point should lie in the Maurienne valley where the preliminaries of the Col de Telegraph and the approach through Valloire make it a test to savour. To quote the famous climber Don Whillans, ‘The mountain will always be there son, just make sure you are’.

S.W.N. Thompson. Aug. 2010.