Stage Eleven

 

The Moulins mediatheque, just a mile from the Stage Eleven finish, was in full Tour tribute mode.  All the librarians were wearing yellow t-shirts, a pyramid of books on cycling greeted all who entered and a room to the side had been transformed into a mini-museum with a wall of classic Tour photos and a row of vintage bikes from a local collector and a large television screen showing Tour highlights.  

Among the photos were the four French post-WWII Tour winners, all of whose graves I have visited, wearing their saggy Yellow Jerseys and expressions that implied they were just barely tolerating being photographed.  And among the bikes was a Peugeot PX10 that the next French Tour winner after these four, Bernard Thevenet rode to victory in 1975 and 1977 Tours and the very bike I rode coast-to-coast in 1977 and to Alaska four years later, back before there were touring specific bikes, and before high tech came to racing bikes and one could buy the exact bike the pros were riding for less than a king’s ransom—just $250, though I had to swap out the tubular wheels.

I couldn’t have found a better place to await the arrival of Florence and Rachid, who were driving down from Tours, two hundred miles to the northwest, to join me for our annual Tour rendezvous.  It’s usually been in Tours, as the Tour frequently passes through or nearby, but this year Florence and Rachid were kind enough to come all that way to me.

My visits to France have come to be remembered as much for our brief times together as for my three weeks of following The Tour.  They have greatly enriched my time in France and opened my eyes to many of its charms that I may never have discerned.  And I have Osama bin Laden to thank for this, for if not for 9/11 they’d still be living in Chicago and I never would have been able to broaden my French experience through them.  Because of Rachid’s Algerian heritage he was ordered out of the country, despite working as an architect for years, along with thousands of others from Arabic countries, as shameful as the WWII Japanese internment camps.  They are greatly missed by their many friends in Chicago’s cycling and art communities and they miss Chicago very much too.

The television in the mini-museum switched to the peloton’s departure from Clermont-Ferrand.  They were an hour into the race when Florence and Rachid arrived, delighted they’d been able to find a place to park just a block away.  The town was mobbed with fans, but they hadn’t crammed the town with cars.  We strolled over to the race course just a couple blocks away to await the arrival of the caravan.  The temperature had dropped over twenty degrees from the day before and was further cooled by a cloud cover, so we had no need to seek shade or stock up on water.  We found a grassy patch to sit on and chatted as if we had seen each other last week as we caught up on this and that.  

I feared the stage could be delayed, as there had been climate change graffiti on the road for the final twenty miles of the stage, the first time environmentalists had struck this year’s Tour, as if a warning that those who disrupted several stages last year had targeted this stage.  I was woken at one the night before by the bright lights of a vehicle parking near where I was camped and loud laughter.  

I feared it was some late arrivals who might intrude upon me, but after a few minutes they were on their way looking for perhaps a better place to spend the night. In the morning when I began riding I discerned they were the crew that had been painting the road with “ecocide” and “climat” and “terre” and “eau” and things that didn’t register with me such as “49.3,” which Rachid later explained referred to the presidential article that Macron invoked to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.

The authorities often paint over graffiti that doesn’t reflect well on The Tour, such as syringes back in the EPO era.  As I approached Moulins I came upon a crew that had begun applying black paint to the last four letters of “ecocide,” letting the “eco” remain.  Fortunately the environmentalists were content with just graffiti this day, or at least that we were aware of, as the peloton arrived right on schedule.

The three of us spread out when the caravan arrived to increase our chances of gathering what was tossed.  We didn’t do too badly coming up with some hats and candy and packets of detergent and a bicycle key chain and a key chain with a couple of mini-screw drivers in a tiny cylinder.   The bicycle key chain came as a surprise, as it was in a small packet which I had previously ignored not knowing what was in it.  The bicycle is actually sturdy enough to serve as a bottle opener.  If it hadn’t been demonstrated on the packet, we never would have known.  

At last, a cool item to really try for that will make nice gifts for friends back home.  I’ll  be on hyper-alert when that sponsor comes by, as those are often tossed by the handful and are scattered all over making it easy to grab one or more. Florence said even if she decides not to use it as a key chain, she’ll be happy to dangle the mini-bike somewhere, a great use for it.

After the caravan had done its duty we mendered towards the finish line until we came upon a screen mounted on one of the VIP viewing stands to watch the peloton finish off the stage.  The break had been gobbled up and it came down to the sprinters with Philipson showing even greater dominance than his previous three wins.  The sprinters were somewhat spread out making pure speed more than positioning the crucial factor.  This might have been the stage Cavendish could have won if he hadn’t crashed out several days ago.

I had arrived at the mediatheque at ten and it was now 5:30, the most prolonged daytime  break my legs have had since my flight over twenty-two days ago.  They greatly appreciated it,  but were happy to get in four hours at the end of the day, a necessity as the next day’s stage started fifty-nine miles away in Roanne, one of the longer transfers of this year’s Tour.  

I was fortunate to have an alternate route to the highway that most of the Tour entourage would be taking, though a few of the team cars and others chose my route on secondary roads.  Around nine as I was still riding a car pulled over in front of me and a woman hopped out and held out a polka dot hat for me.  She said it came from The Tour, not surmising that I was following it.  Before she slipped back into her car she pulled out a polka dot Jersey she had also gotten and proudly held it up for me to see.  It was a fine ending to another exceptional day at Le Tour.