Stage Four

 I have been keeping my eyes peeled for UK license plates on the camping vans parked along the route since Lance had mentioned on his daily Tour podcast that the parents of the Yates twins were following The Tour.  I glance at them anyway to see the many nationalities represented as well as the range of French départements, as the last two digits on the French license plates are the clue as to where they are from.  Flags and banners and signs supporting riders are a good clue as well.  

The parents of Yates were said to be as reserved as their sons, so it wasn’t likely they’d be brandishing large signs drawing attention to themselves.  But I figured I’d weeded them out when I came around a bend and saw an older couple mounting a sign reading “Yates You Can” across the road from a large camper with UK license plates.  “Are you the parents?” I asked.  

“No, that’s them over there,” the woman responded, nodding towards a gentleman seated at a table in front of a second camper parked just ahead of theirs.

I glided over to him and said, “You must have been going crazy on that final climb on stage one when your sons were ahead of everyone else.”

“We were actually in the camper driving over to Stage Two.  We had stopped and were watching the finish on our phone.  It was exciting.”

I asked if they had followed The Tour before.  It was their third, while the friends accompanying them were on their seventh after having done segments of others before they started doing it from start to finish. They were full-fledged devotee's.  It would have been nice to plop down and watch the peloton pass with them, but that was hours away.  It was only 8:30 and I was intent to get to the stage finish nearly fifty miles away.

When I started the day, signs warned that the route at that point would be closed at ten am.  I had  gotten far enough down the route that the signs now said 10:30, giving me enough breathing room that I dashed into a supermarket for the day’s provisions and a hit of chocolate milk.  I intended to leave the route hopefully by ten at the forty-mile mark and take a shortcut to the finish.  I started seeing gendarmes posted at all the intersecting roads at 8:45, looking fairly relaxed at that point and posed no threat to evicting me.

There hadn’t been much Tour traffic on the road other than a trio of yellow vans of the course marker crew making sure all the markers were still in tact. The most activity was in towns with people mounting last minute decorations, always a fascinating spectacle as they try to get them just right.

This was the first stage entirely in France.  Tributes to The Tour flourished everywhere.

Residents almost feel it is a civic duty to acknowledge The Tour in some manner.

It is truly a non-stop tribute to the bike.

The bike becomes a totem and most revered object.  

I timed my arrival in Nogaro for two pm when the tourist office and the Orange telecom office would reopen after lunch.  On the outskirts of the town a sign acknowledged that 1973 Tour winner Luis Ocana had lived there pointing towards his former vineyard.  I couldn’t ask about it at the tourist office as it was closed for The Tour giving precedence to attending it rather than assisting tourists such as me.  Just bout every shop was closed too. It was over a mile from the town center to the finish line of the stage at a large motor sport racing circuit.  While I sat outside the tourist office using its Wi-Fi a couple of older gentleman asked me what time the peloton was due.  They weren’t residents but rather Jehovah Winesses.  They gave me a card inscribed with JW.org and Les Témoins  de Jéhovah.

A stream of people were headed to the track.  The Giant Screen was very visible and easily accessible.  There was plenty of grass to sit on.  Luckily it was a cool, cloudy day, as there was no shade.  I took out my sleeping pad that converts into a chair and plopped down, happy to have a couple of hours off the bike with non-stop biking action to watch.  It actually extended into three hours with not that much action until the end as the peloton wasn’t pushing the pace, recovering from three hard days in Spain with a monstrous ten thousand, nine thousand and eight thousand feet of climbing with two even more demanding days in the Pyrenees awaiting them starting the next day.  

There wasn’t even a token breakaway until well into the stage for the peloton to chase.  They were riding at times eight abreast across the road.  Near the front for a while was the American Quinn Simmons with the longest hair in the peloton wearing the Stars and Stripes jersey of the American national champion as if to acknowledge the July 4th celebrations going on back home.  The screen cut from time to time to interviews with riders at the day’s start, including one with 94-year old André Darrigade, whose statue graced the route.

This was my first full dose of the caravan, as it had been somewhat reduced in Spain.  There were two sponsors dispensing cans of drink, maybe juice, that one had to be ready for as they were handed to outstretched hands rather than tossed as everything else is.  I will now know to be prepared for that in the future, quick to grab what is extended out.  There were several caps and what appeared to be socks along with key chains and pencils and candy and other snacks.  All I was able to snatch was a spiffy red, white and blue cycling cap of the French FDJ team adorned with bikes and a heavy duty plastic shopping bag with the Tour logo that Janina will be happy to put to use. Surprisingly, Vittel, the bottled water sponsor, was absent, which used to delight the crowds and send them scattering as it sprayed those along the route to cool them down.

This was the first stage finish in a small town after three in urban centers, so it wasn’t so mobbed and the vibe was much more laid back.  There was no hint of whatever ruckus is going on in the large urban centers of the country.  

The gendarmes were as much at ease as the civilians, one even putting his cap on a little girl for a photograph.  When the peloton finally arrived a little before six everyone turned to watch them enter the far end of the track before coming around to us.

Philipson won for the second day in a row after a roaring lead out by Pou Pou’s grandson van der Poel, just nipping the Australia Ewan by a fragment of a wheel.  Behind were a couple of crashes that fortunately didn’t take down more than a couple riders each, two of whom had to abandon, both with broken collarbones, the first since the two on Stage One.  Cavendish was up there in fifth, one better than yesterday, but the strength of the others makes it look bleak for him getting his record-breaking win in this his final Tour.  

Since I wasn’t headed to Pau for the next stage start I had a quiet, leisurely ride heading in the opposite direction freed of The Tour entourage rushing to their hotels.  After half an hour I replenished my water bottles at a cemetery and could begin looking for a place to camp, enjoying that I didn’t need to push on as far as possible.  Once again I ended up in a grassy field on the fringe of a cornfield.  No complaints whatsoever.