Authors: Jon Day
The Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth’s masterpiece,
A Sunday in Hell
– a meticulously filmed documentary of the 1976 Paris–Roubaix spring classic (and arguably the greatest sports film ever made) – was revolutionary because his cameras went everywhere: filming from within the bunch from the backs of motorbikes; using big sweeping overhead shots from helicopters and cranes of the landscape over which the cyclists rode. After the race Leth followed the riders into the shower room, too, filming Roger de Vlaeminck and Eddie Merckx as they washed the Flanders mud from their bodies while they gave interviews to the press.
Once the Tour was a solo affair, but nowadays the peloton is followed by a vast caravan of vehicles. Team support cars carry bidons of water and spare wheels for their riders, all the while wirelessly monitoring their vital statistics. TV vans and motorbikes zip around getting their shots, and the dreaded ‘broom wagon’ brings up the rear, sweeping up exhausted riders as it goes.
It’s still difficult to know how best to watch the race. Fans who congregate along the route spend most
of their time in dusty little bars, watching events unfold on television before rushing outside for a few minutes as the peloton whirrs by. Other, more devoted disciples seek the stigmata of their heroes, riding the route themselves during L’Ètape du Tour. Still, a visit from the peloton can do wonders for a village’s tourist industry, and the waiting list to host a stage finish is years long.
Before each stage is ridden fans pore over the maps. We assess the climbs, identifying those points at which sprinters might attack, those moments at which the climbers might have their day. We assess road surfaces, more or less authoritatively. Then, when the race begins, we watch online, hogging the bandwidth, following the video streams and live blogs. We download the Tour apps and refresh them endlessly. Little avatars of the riders let us know who’s in the lead. We log onto obscure websites where the power data collected from the riders by the team cars can be read in real time. We note their wattage output and the gear ratios they’re riding. We imagine what it must be like to be them.
Time and distance have passed, registered only in the sweat that’s now leaving its tide-marks on my jersey and its salt-crust on my brow. The hill’s taken it out of me, and keeping enough energy in the tank to accelerate away from junctions is important in a race like this.
As I reach the next checkpoint I grab the next tag – The Highway, Barbican.
When I get to the Barbican I carry my bike up the stairs next to the station before getting lost in the Ballardian labyrinth of its walkways. I bunny-hop down small flights of stairs. People shout at me as I pass. Eventually, by following the flashing red lights of other racers, I find the next checkpoint and descend again to street level.
We’re sent on to Holland Street, over the river in SE1. I’m flagging but the race still feels urgent. I approach via the humpbacked Southwark Bridge, but when I get to the south side I make a mistake and turn east rather than west. I get to Borough before I realise my mistake, get out my map, and head back towards Tate Modern, where a huddle of marshals are waiting for me. I’ve lost all the other riders I was racing with by now, but as I head back over the river I spot the man in the white cap. He’s riding hard and fast, but has cut his leg in a fall, and blood flows from the wound as he rides along. When he sees me he accelerates and leaves me for dust, despite his injury. I’m chastened. I’m empty and have nothing to answer him with. After a minute or two all I can see is his rear light winking in the distance.
I’m on my own now, and just want the race to be over. I tack down Shaftesbury Avenue towards the next checkpoint on Burlington Gardens. I spot another group of riders heading back east, and follow them to
Warner Street EC1, tucked away under a bridge in the valley of the River Fleet. I know my race is over. There’s only one checkpoint left, back where we started in W1. A group of us race back to Golden Square in a daze, riding three abreast down the middle of Theobald’s Road. I don’t talk to anyone. I can’t, I’ve nothing left. But eventually we make it back to the finishing line.
I’ve not done well. Out of thirty-two racers I’ve come somewhere in the middle of the pack, I tell myself, but everyone’s stopped counting by then. None but the top three places count. As I wait, chest heaving, legs twitching, a few other riders come in. One rides round the square before jumping off his bike and letting it roll on down the middle of the road. It nearly hits a pristine Mercedes parked by the kerb.
Prizes are awarded, but no one is paying much attention. Fastest to complete the course is a quiet Polish man with huge plugs in his ears. The prospective soldier riding the white Anchor frame, who left me for dust as we crossed the river, comes second. He’s pleased. Third is a young Brazilian guy called Theo, taking part in his first race in London. He smiles. He is composed. I wheeze on the pavement as more riders come in. Someone passes me a bottle of cider.
Darren mocks my pathetic finish, my lack of racing nous, the weakness of my legs and of my geographic knowledge. John gets on someone’s shoulders to thank us all for racing. We discuss the race. People do laps of the square. Others throw up discreetly into the gutter.
I spit thick flecks of phlegm from between my teeth. My lungs burn.
Later, we all depart for an after party in a squat on Whitfield Street, opposite a police station. A fight breaks out. Mike comes out with a fire extinguisher and douses the fighters, but they carry on regardless. I leave as more fights break out. The next day I wake up covered in bruises.
A few months after the race, I was leaning on a grit-bin outside the Natural History Museum. Winter had set in. The roads crunched with ice where they weren’t slicked with oil. I was waiting to meet Paul Fournel, the author who most directly seemed to address the cyclogeographic ideas I’d been thinking about. I had discovered that he was working as the French Cultural Attaché in London. I wanted to talk to him about the idea of the bicycle race, so central to French cultural identity, so absent from our own. I couriered him a letter: could I meet him? He invited me round on his last day, his last hour, in London, to talk about cycling, literature, and the mythology of the bicycle race.
The lift was out of order at his office on Cromwell Road, so I walked up the stairs. ‘So you’re a cyclist who can climb stairs as well?’ he asked as I got to the top. His office was spartan, apart from a bookshelf, desk and computer. Biographies of cyclists lined the shelves. Fournel was packing up to leave for France. I told him I
wanted to meet a real writer. He asked me about couriering. ‘Do you work for yourself?’ We talked about the logistics of the job, about the employment regulations and labour and about knowing London. He asked me what gear ratio I favoured. Cycling stories are like fishing stories. They are told not to inform the listener but, as in the confessional, to unburden the teller.
I asked Fournel what he thought of London cycling culture. Did he ride here? Had he found a peloton to join? He rode laps round Richmond Park, he said. He’d just got back from a holiday in France. Wistfully he described the hills he’d conquered on that last trip.
We talked about Boris bikes and the Parisian equivalent, the Velibs, the people’s bikes. ‘There are problems,’ he said, ‘it’s amazing how people vandalise or steal these bikes – they throw them into the Seine. They hang them in trees. I’ve even heard of one that appeared in Australia. Imagine the effort involved in that, the cost of shipping it over and so on? It’s very strange. So now I make sure I check the bikes very carefully before I take them out of the cradle. I check the tyres are pumped, that the gears and brakes work and so on.’
I asked him about his own bikes. He’d recently bought a Condor bicycle with a titanium frame, which he loved because he was getting old and it ran a tiny gear, good for attacking the hills: ‘It’s a beautiful bike, and cheap compared to most others. I don’t like carbon
fibre, it is too unforgiving, it feels like you are riding an arrow, you know?’
He asked me if I rode a single speed. He told me that not many people ride fixed-gear in Paris, because of the hills. ‘But they do in San Francisco,’ I said. ‘Yes, but in San Francisco they don’t ride up the hills. I lived there for a while. What they do is grab on to cars or trams and get pulled up the hills, then just coast down. They probably cycle less than couriers in any other country. But it is very dangerous, incredibly dangerous.’
I asked him about his writing, about the connections between cycling, bicycle racing and literature. Why did he think the bike lent itself to this kind of literary treatment?
‘Not just literature but all media,’ he said. ‘The newspaper of course, which in fact sponsored the early Tours de France, and largely invented bicycle racing, and then the radio and now the TV. The bicycle is a literary vehicle, a good place to think. But also, in bicycle racing at any rate, the day-by-day narrative of a race is very good for a reader, is very easy to digest. I think these are themes and ideas that are always attractive.’ We discussed the Dutch author Tim Krabbé’s novel
The Rider,
the finest evocation of a bicycle race ever written. In it Krabbé describes an amateur one-day classic from the perspective of one of the racers. The race is described kilometre by kilometre, every inch ridden corresponding to a narrative twist or turn. It’s
a book about the essential drama of the road, and the stories that unfold around the personalities of a race.
Fournel’s book, like Krabbé’s, is part of a canon of cycling literature that is more thoughtful than autobiographies of cyclists and books about the history of the bicycle race. There is a great literary tradition, especially in France, Holland and Ireland, of combining philosophical speculation with descriptions of cycling, and I wanted to know why he had found the bicycle to be such a potent vehicle for philosophical speculation.
‘I think because it’s so simple, but it remains a mystery,’ he said. ‘You know I ride in a bunch in Paris, a group of friends. And one of them is a physicist at the Sorbonne, one of the twelve top physicists in the world or something. And even he cannot explain it, cannot tell me how a bike and rider stay upright. It has something to do with the wobble of the front wheel, the way it moves from side to side, but really we don’t know. I think this is one reason it is so attractive to writers: it is an enigma that can be pondered forever. But teaching people to ride is also an amazing thing, something they will never forget. I’ve taught many people to ride, or to love to ride: girlfriends, friends, children, and I always love the fact that they will remember that forever, both the event and the action which is taught.’
Fournel needed to finish packing, so I got up to leave. We shook hands. ‘Come visit me in Paris,’ he said. ‘I’d love to,’ I replied. I think I will. ‘We can ride
the Velibs together, I’ll show you the city,’ he said as he led me to the stairs. In my copy of
Need for the Bike
he had written: ‘For Jon, “Le cycliste des rues de Londres”, these memories of the countryside.’
A year or so after my encounter with Fournel, I went to compete in the international Cycle Messenger World Championships, the closest thing on the courier calendar to one of the great Tours. The championships, the CMWCs, are an odd mix of trade-show, music festival and gymkhana, and are unlike any other bicycle race in the world.
The main race is designed to mimic a working day, but unlike an alleycat race it is run on a closed course. Checkpoints represent the offices to which messengers would normally deliver, and empty packages are exchanged for signatures while the clock keeps score. Competitors start the race with a manifest, a list of jobs and delivery addresses, and must work their way around the checkpoints as efficiently and quickly as possible. Fake thieves lie in wait, ready to steal the bikes of racers who neglect to lock them up. At some checkpoints you’d be searched and your stash confiscated. At others you’d be made to wait around until your package was ready. At some you had to jump through bicycle tyres or do a shot of vodka before the marshals would sign your manifest.
The CMWCs are usually quite an unsophisticated
affair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from
Mad Max
. Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns, as long as they’re kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones which they carry strapped across their chests. Some of the events were nearly cancelled when ‘La Ocho’, the figure-of-eight shaped track that was due to host some of the races, was swept away in floods, along with several homes. It was rebuilt overnight. When the finals of the track races eventually took place they were illuminated by car headlights.
The year I went the competition was being held in Poland. ‘Warsaw has had it pretty rough over the last century,’ I read in the welcome pack for the competition. ‘First the Germans had a dream to turn her into a lake, then the Russians rebuilt her using cheap ass Russian concrete slabs, making her grey and dull.’ Most of the city, I learnt, was destroyed during the Second World War, after which much of the old town was laboriously reconstructed brick-by-brick.
The race was to take place on a peninsula jutting out into the River Vistula from the west bank of the city, near to where, at the end of the war, the Polish Home Army had waited for Soviet support that never came. A grand brutalist sculpture of a minesweeper commemorates the failed uprising. At racer registration I was given a number and a map of the peninsula.
The course was roughly the size of a small city block, criss-crossed by tracks and punctuated by twenty-six checkpoints. Streets were named things like ‘Skid Row,’ and ‘Main Stage Alley.’
Modern Warsaw is not particularly bicycle-friendly. Vast, multi-lane roads cleave the city into fragments, while a complicated system of flyovers and bridges take you on mad and terrifying detours. We were warned to beware of the police, who come down hard on drunk cycling. As I cycled back to my hostel on a rented bike I noticed little covens of messengers dotted around the city, cruising the streets in packs or huddling together looking at maps. On a cycle path next to the Royal Lazienki park I got talking to a man from Vienna whose bicycle had been stolen from outside a club the night before, and who was trying to find a replacement. ‘I still need to work when I get back,’he murmured sadly, as he clattered off down the street, walking awkwardly in his stiff-soled cycling shoes.