Dispatch From Stage 14 of the Tour de France: A Fan's POV
The width of the streets was the first thing I noticed.
I mean, you know, they’re streets. But somehow, as the peloton tears a course through France in a multi-colored flash, their support cars expertly zig-zagging through their mass of bodies and bikes, the road feels bigger. At least it does as we watch from home.
But in person, they’re just streets. Regular, two-lane streets.
And then you get into the mountains and they get even more narrow. Those streets just become roads, so slim you feel as if you might be able to jump across them if you really tried.
Though the narrowness of the mountain roads is even more stark, it’s easier to fathom a bike race coming up them because somewhere down the mountain, somewhere not too far from the bottom, the peloton will splinter.
The climbers and the best GC guys will pound up the mountain as fast as we mortals climb little bumps around our town. The sprinters will fall behind, some desperate to stay ahead of the time cut.
And on either side of them is the cavalcade of madness they don’t show on television. First, the hour-long promotional caravan that precedes the lead riders, with beautiful young French people throwing free stuff at the throngs partying on the mountainside; candy, hats, keychains, even samples of laundry detergent. Then, countless vehicles that are some combination of broadcast property, team cars, neutral support, motorcycles, or official race cars.
It's a live theater show speeding across the country at thirty-miles-per-hour, perfectly orchestrated after a century-plus-ten tries.
But it was the size of the streets that I first noticed as I rode from the home my wife and I rented in a little French ski village to the top of the Col de Joux Plane, a monster of an HC climb and the last of Stage 14 of this year’s Tour de France, the first I’d ever seen in person.
***
Other than regular trips to New York City—where we made our home for many years—my wife and I set out to be the kind of people who always travel somewhere new. So, after spending two weeks in the Haute-Savoie region of the French Alps last summer, we were insistent that this year we’d take our kids somewhere none of us had even been before.
That is, of course, until the Tour de France announced the 2023 course with eight stages clustered around the Haute-Savoie.
My fandom of cycling has rubbed off on Emily of late. As we both work from home, we almost always have a race on the television during the day, usually set to mute until the final thirty-or-so kilometers. Thus, centering a vacation around seeing a Tour stage was hardly a tough sell for either of us.
As our kids are five and two-years-old, it wasn’t as though we’d be caravanning around the Alps, following the cavalcade from town to town. Rather, we would pick on stage, the best stage, and plan around that. Emily found us a house in a little town called Verchaix. It’s an old barn-turned-ski house sitting in the valley just before the Col de Joux Plane.
The most likely scenario, we figured, is that she would stay in the valley with our kids and watch the peloton blast by while I climbed the mountain to be part of the madness that we see on television during every mountain climb.
We invited our dear friends who are living in Europe for work and have two kids of their own, just younger than our babies. Roni, one of the pair, is also a nut for cycling and, like me, had never seen a Tour stage in person.
***
My original plan of riding my bike up the Col de Joux Plane (along with as many other cols around Verchaix, Samoëns, Taninges, and the other surrounding villages as possible during our week here) was foiled when a certain airline who shall remain nameless shipped my road bike to Paris rather than Geneva and was in no apparent rush to return it to me.
Considering our options were to hike the 12.9 brutal kilometers to the top of the Joux Plane or rent bikes at the local shop, Roni and I opted for the latter. As all of the shop’s road bikes were rented out for the busy weekend, we were left to choose from mountain bikes. Which meant we were left to choose e-bikes because I have no interest in climbing a hors categorie mountain on a thirty-pound bike with 2.5-inch tires.
We set out several hours before the caravan was set to climb the mountain, taking our time up the Joux Plane and stopping at the several food and drink carts parked up the mountain’s winding road. Bikers of all stripes flooded the narrow road, many on road bikes but some, like us, on e-bikes. There were commuter bikes laden with panniers, mountain bikes (without electric motors), and at least one vintage steel bike with what appeared to be something like a 12-24 range across only three gears.
No matter the bike, everyone on the roadsides cheered us on with shouts of ALLEZ ALLEZ!!!
The closer we got to the top of the mountain, the thicker the crowds grew, the louder the party. Impromptu bars sprouted in the few Alpine cabins dotting the mountainside and the flags of a dozen nations waved above us.
We dodged a few fans spray painting the road with names like WOUT and POGI and passed a massive Swiss flag, an impromptu monument to the late Gino Mäder.
A kilometer-and-a-half from the summit, Roni and I passed a raucous party with a few kegs and a thumping sound system.
“That’s our spot,” we said. But first we had to finish the climb.
After we passed under the polka-dotted KOM banner, we turned our bikes back down the hill and returned to the scouted spot.
Just like the flags we passed on our way up, we were surrounded by partiers from a dozen nations. Danes and Italians, Belgians and Brits, Slovenians singing their national anthem loud and proud, and, of course, plenty of French.
Within an hour or two, the caravan began to crest the hill before us, a ceaseless parade of consumer-brand promotion with beautiful young French people throwing free stuff at the throngs partying on the mountainside; candy, hats, keychains, even samples of laundry detergent. Then, countless vehicles that are some combination of broadcast property, team cars, neutral support, motorcycles, or official race cars.
Then, finally, the racers.
There, after three hours of waiting, Tadej Pogačar appeared. Stuck to his back wheel like a remora was the yellow jersey.
Go ahead. Jonas Vingegaard seemed to be saying. I’ll be right here.
Their speed was stupefying. That they could move their bikes and their bodies up such a grade (it was around 10 percent where we were standing) after well over one hundred kilometers of racing and a few other mountains already in their legs was barely fathomable.
Shortly after came Carlos Rodríguez.
And then, nothing. At least for a while.
Roni and I marveled at the gap the trio of leaders put into the other fastest bike riders on Earth.
The instant Sepp Kuss crested the hill toward us, I immediately forgot how I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those guys running beside the riders, screaming into their faces. I sprinted toward him, making sure to keep enough distance that I not become an international headline, and shouted at my fellow American, one of the Yankees who are doing us all so proud in this year’s Tour.
A few minutes later, I did the same with Neilsen Powless.
“You’re the King of the fucking Mountains,” I screamed, as if I might have any bearing on his performance. I said some other things that aren’t fit for print and some that are. But we’ll leave that on the mountain.
Slowly but surely came the rest of the peloton.
First in grupettos of twos and threes. Then came the sprinters who looked mortal in a way the climbers did not. There were bandaged wounds from the stage’s early crash, blood-red sigils of the grit and toughness of bike racers. Everyone’s kits were a few shades darker than usual, all drenched in the sweat of an eighty-plus-degree day.
Finally, the last group, desperate to stay ahead of the time cut, slowly climbed past us. Among them was Biniam Girmay, the man who has been so close to making history on this Tour.
He will. In this Tour or the next, who knows. But he will.
Then the last few cars passed and the race was over. Or at least it was beyond us, onto the descent where the stage would be decided. Though the mountainwide party continued to rage on.
On the descent back into the little town of Samoëns, in a sea of a thousand bicycles and another thousand pedestrians, all of us dodging dead-stopped traffic, were members of the official race crews tearing down all the official race signage that it might all be set up again on some other mountain tomorrow.
Because in just a few short hours the Col de Joux Plane will be just like any other Alpine mountain, almost as if nothing out of the ordinary happened here at all.
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