Stage Twenty

 

The road was packed on both sides at the site Yvon had selected for us to watch Stage Twenty just past Munster, a twenty minute drive, then a twenty minute bike ride from his home outside of Issenheim north of Mulhouse.  The caravan was due to arrive in fifteen minutes.  We had to walk down the road a bit to find a gap to slip into.  

Several minutes after we sat down a husky guy came from across the road and plopped down beside us on a blanket where his wife had been perched under an umbrella to shield herself from the sun.  The guy gruffly accused us of encroaching upon his space and wasn’t very diplomatic about it.   Yvon pointed out there was plenty of room to accommodate us and besides this was all public space.  The guy said they’d claimed this spot three hours ago and it wasn’t fair for us to just slip in.  

This was all in English as he’d overheard Yvon and I speaking.  Yvon asked him to speak in French.  He said he didn’t speak it.  He was neither English nor American nor a nationality we could determine.  The guy had no idea he was trying to run off the friendliest guy around and how fortunate he was to be joined by Yvon.  

Before matters could escalate the preliminary gendarmes on motorcycles and other vehicles preceding the caravan absorbed all of our attention.  Fortunately the guy wasn’t such a beast as to hurl himself into us fighting for the offerings from the caravan.  He soon realized that Yvon and I weren’t a threat to aggressively battle for what was being dispensed, no doubt his greatest concern.  Our pacifity and his success rate in grabbing stuff mollified his distemper and put him in a good enough mood to almost be friendly sharing in this Christmas in July experience.

After the twenty minutes of caravan hoopla it was an hour wait for the racers to come by, almost Yvon’s favorite time, as he could circulate about and have a friendly word with everyone around us glorying in his life-long tradition of coming out for The Tour.

When the riders arrived at four they came in several bunches—a lead group of about twenty with the polka jersey, then the Yellow Jersey group a minute later, followed by four or five more groups over the next ten minutes with a few solo riders caught in  between.  We knew they’d all past when the broom wagon came along right after the last bunch and was followed by twenty-two team cars all stacked with bikes. Before we were on our way Yvon had one final chat with the gendarme at the side road we had biked in on. 

Two Category One climbs awaited the racers after they passed us.  With the Yellow Jersey group so near the lead group it was clear it would be contesting the stage win.  I continued my thorough classic French immersion into The Tour by learning the results of the stage on the radio as we drove to my drop-off point.  There was no radio coverage of the race so we had to wait for the news at the top of the hour to hear the results. The Tour was the lead story and we learned Pogaçar had refound himself and won the stage with Vingegaard finishing third with the same time.  The Yates brothers finished strong with Adam preserving his podium spot and brother Simon moving up to fourth.

I had initially planned to start riding back to Paris from the spot we had just watched the racers pass.  Yvon said that would thrust me into the heart of the Vosges mountains and some very demanding climbs.   He offered to drive me thirty miles north to the fringe of the mountains for a much easier passage.  He’s always looking out for my best interests and I know enough to accept whatever advice he has to offer.  Our drive north took us past Colmer and the roundabout with a huge replica of the Statue of Liberty, as the designer of it was from there.  I’d seen it before as it was just past the finishing line of a stage of The Tour one year.

It was wondering catching up with Yvon’s exploits in his three favorite pursuits—cycling, pétanque and table tennis.  He goes to Spain every few months to coach and give table tennis lessons in the region where his grandmother lived.  Table tennis has a strong following in France and Europe.  Yvon was excited to report France has produced a nineteen year old phenom who is a threat to break the Chinese stranglehold on the sport at the Olympics.  It will be one of the great stories of next year’s games in Paris if he wins the gold medal for the host country. 

After a quick farewell to Yvon and The Tour it was good to be back biking and in a sense heading home with Paris my next destination three hundred miles away.  I did have a minor pass to get over through the Vosges and by a ski town, but it was a very gentle gradient.  The extent of ski chalets forced me to ride until dark before I came upon a clearing to pitch my tent in a pasture near some very curious cattle,  but fortunately not so curious as to push through their electrified fence.