Tour de France - It's Show time!

If ever there was a day that will tell the world who can win the Tour de France, it is today. Throwing open the windows of my hotel room this morning I couldn’t see the activity and bustle at the finish line but I could almost smell it. Nowhere else on the route of the Tour has the same atmosphere as Alpe-d’Huez.

The Tour first came to the mountain in 1952 when an enterprising hotel owner George Rajon decided that is fledgling ski holiday business needed a massive injection of publicity. It proved to be a smart move as the most elegant cyclist of the day, Fausto Coppi wheeled onto the top of the hill as victor. It kick-started tourism to the Alpe but even so it took Rajon a quarter of century to get the Tour to come back by which time the sprawling, partying ski station was in full swing. Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk ground out a victory and in doing so started a cult that not even Rajon could have predicted.

Between 1976 and 1989 no fewer than 8 victories were taken by Dutchmen. Delighted and rather surprised by their success, the man and women of the flat lands have made the mountain their own. This is officially ‘The Dutch Mountain’. Heaven knows how much beer is transported up the 21 bends of the Alpe for them to consume, and believe me they do. Or rather up 16 of the bends because, when you round the corner with still 5 hairpins to go you are assaulted with a wall of bright orange made up of hundreds of reeling, chanting, waving ‘cheeseheads’ giving it everything for sport, for passion and of course for a damned good time.

It was the Dutch, and this monument of the Tour de France that finally made me realise I had been fooling myself for years that I was still a bike rider. When the race last finished on the Alpe in 2006 I took the opportunity to ride the mountain for myself. For years I had been talking myself into the belief that I was that svelte, fit athlete I had once been. Alpe d’Huez almost killed me. Never had I welcome thee granny ring so much. The Dutch alone made me feel special. As I rounded the bend in a world of pain the huge crowd cheered me and every other rider toiling up the gradient as if we were the very first man ever to do so. A sea of hands pushed me, a throng of men passed me water and urged me on and my heart soared.

Despite making it to the top I was too ashamed to tell anyone my time in doing so. That evening, in the bar, someone whipped out the digital camera and passed around a photograph of my toils on some dimly remembered hairpin of pain. There was a round of applause from all present except from my French colleague Patrick Chasse who, peering squint eyed at the photo mused: “Ooo iz zis fat man on a bicycle?”

This is the first time I’ve been back since to the greatest of all climbs in the Tour and it has me captivated again. Tomorrow I will ride it again, this time it will be for love.

But today we will see others endure the pain, today we will feel our hearts beat faster, today, it’s show time.