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Part V. The Road to Alpe dHuez

I devoted a good 45 minutes to breakfast, eating everything that wasn't nailed down. From the start, the tenor of the day was completely different from the previous days' ordeal. My plan was simple: a 120K round trip from Grenoble to Alpe d'Huez and back. Thankfully, the Alpe was the only climb of the day. I didn't have to worry about bus schedules, as Stage 8 of le Tour was scheduled to finish atop Alpe d'Huez at around 5pm, so I'd have plenty of daylight for riding home. Best of all, the Brits I'd met on the Croix de Fer were staying at the Alpe d'Azur B&B. They'd invited me for lunch and to watch the race from their balcony. The promise of air conditioning, a TV with full-on race coverage, and big, cushy couches was too irresistible to skip.

The road from Grenoble to Bourg d'Oisans is 50K of false flat. You gain 500m during the ride, and you do so at the infuriating average grade of about 1%. From the standpoint of navigation, it's a supremely easy trip  follow the signs for Gap and Brianéon, then follow the signs for Vizille. There's only one road exiting Vizille to the east, and that's what takes you to Bourg d'Oisans and the foot of Alpe d'Huez.

I was anticipating road closures on the way out. From what I'd been told, the gendarmes close down the roads at about 9:00am, diverting car and bus traffic through tortuous detours to keep the race route empty of traffic. My understanding, though, was that bikes and motorcycles were free to pass such closures until the race is very, very near. Traffic began being detoured on the outskirts of Vizille, and just as my fantasies about a car-free ride on a 4-lane highway all the way to the Alpe began growing wild, traffic started trickling back on the road. A few K later, that trickle morphed into an epic traffic jam on scale of what I'd seen on the previous night. Even though the combination of my dead legs, fiery crotch, and the false flat made it so that I rarely exceeded 25kph, I ripped past cars like they were standing still because, indeed, they were. One reality is unquestionable: if you plan on seeing the Alpe d'Huez stage of the Tour, do not drive any further east than Vizille. Any further east, the traffic moves with glacial slowness.

Even though the trip to the bottom of the Alpe was only a scant 50K, it took me 2 hours to get there. The hilariously bad traffic made me pity anyone not on a bike  the very fact they were attempting to make such a drive on the morning of the race was a clear failure of one of life's common sense pop quizzes. I stopped for a Coke at a bar at the base of the mountain, then rode under the 15K to go banner, signifying that I'd begun the climb.

The legend of the Alpe is quite correct  it starts out with a steepness I hadn't seen on the other Cols. But given that life is always easier at the beginning of a climb, I withstood the initial punishment with the quiet stoicism of a veteran road racer. In terms of psychological warfare, worse than the steepness is the fact that at the outset the distance between switchbacks is at its greatest. If instead of the distance remaining you focus on the number of the 21 switchbacks you have remaining, getting demoralized early on is guaranteed. After 2 switchbacks you'll look down in the valley and think you're already a mile above Bourg d'Oisans.

In the first few K the steepness didn't relent. I hardly pushed myself since I was completely engaged by the spectacle at large. There was a traffic jam of riders  four and five abreast as far up and down the mountain as I could see. Even though the race wouldn't pass by for another 4 hours, every inch of shoulder was doubled up with spectators. Near the bottom it seemed as though there were more young families and old couples. As I climbed further, the legendary packs of orange-clad Dutch in various stages of drunkenness began to appear, mingling with colonies of college-aged kids in their tent villages and hardcore bike race fanatics in luxury RV's. I found the gathering to be quite moving. For 16 years I've raced bikes, and while I love the sport, I dread the obnoxious preening done by racer-types at training rides and races as they feel the pressure of so many would-be alpha dogs preparing to butt heads. Alpe d'Huez had a completely different vibe  it was a celebration of the sport, of the Tour, and of the very spirit of trying to conquer mountains, both real and metaphorical. I saw no posturing, as though everyone there understood the fallacy of trying to define yourself as a bike racer when the only racers of consequence on planet Earth would be passing through in just a few hours. And unlike the Olympics, there wasn't even a wisp of confrontational nationalism, and unlike American sporting events, say, like a Texas/Oklahoma football game, there was no hostility between opposing fans. Yes, the wasted boys in orange might drop to their knees in worship of Michael Boogerd and his Rabobank teammates, but it's as though this affection was merely an extension of their love of the sport. You might be right next to them pulling for US Postal or Brioches La Boulangére, but this isn't seen as an adversarial act. Rather, you have each other's mutual respect thanks to your equally committed passion for the sport. Call me sappy or limited in life experience if you'd like, but except for a handful of wonderful weddings I've attended, never before have I been to a gathering that was under such an intense spell of communal celebration.

The actual village of Alpe d'Huez is at 14 switchbacks to go. It looked dirty and tired, not quite as prototypically cute as the other French towns I'd seen. Given that it spends the bulk of its year under tons of snow, and that the moneymaking factory is the ski village 800m straight up from there, its condition is perhaps no surprise. At the apex of the switchback #14 was a naked pipe extending from a rock wall from which frigid water poured. Nothing indicated its potability, but dozens of grateful cyclists filled their bottles, happy to face the digestive consequences later on if need be. The heat was brutal, and water was the prized commodity of the day. A few switchbacks later you pass by a beautiful spired chapel with a small graveyard adorned with ornate headstones. To the credit of everyone present, no one camped there despite the insane population density on the mountain. Not much further up  not long before the enormous team buses of AG2R, Saeco, and Kelme passed me  the Dutch occupation force was in full effect. Even though their 80's-era techno/disco remixes were blaring on impressively sizeable speakers, you could have easily elicited a deafening roar as though Jordan had just hit the game-winning jumper if you would only bellow "Rah-Bow-Bank!"

Halfway up the climb the gradient eases. A nasty traffic jam ensued thanks to the armada of team, official, and media vehicles. Combined with the droves of folks riding and walking ever upward and the encamped spectators absentmindedly wandering in the road (doubtlessly drunk, too, on feverish anticipation of the arrival of the race), it meant that no one was getting anywhere fast. The spectacle was such that counting down switchbacks wasn't the dramatic encounter I'd originally expected. There were breathtaking sights to be had  Bourg d'Oisans in miniature in the valley, crowd-lined switchbacks choking the roads in the distance, the first appearance of the ski village at the summit of the road  but nothing I saw or did could rival the ever-increasing thrill I felt in awaiting the race. After all, what can possibly outshine the impending realization of a lifelong dream? It was an amazing place to be.

Switchback #1 comes with roughly 2500m to go. All of the official roadside accoutrements of le Tour were in place, so the attention I paid to the milestone was dwarfed by the excitement I felt at the prospect of giving it a little stick as I passed under the flame rouge. I wanted to split the banner-draped barriers with style as I counted down the final 1000m. The sign for 2K to go hangs on a dark wooden walkway connecting two hotels on opposite sides of the road. Even though both of my bottles were yet again empty, I ignored the sizeable public fountain (the size of a kiddie pool at a nice country club) to my right where hundreds of folks were topping off their reserves. The road kicked upward a bit, but I was sufficiently fired up to upshift to my 23t cog. The instant I put pressure on the gear  the first time in two days I'd consciously gotten aggressive with my pedaling  a petite female gendarme jumped in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, and in words I didn't understand she expressed a very clear message: from this point forward, the road is closed. I let out a laugh as she escorted me to the barriers. Like countless pros over the years, my dreams of glory on Alpe d'Huez were extinguished well before the summit was in sight.

A quick detour brought me to the heart of the ski village. I was at 1850m, and the true peak of the Alpe dramatically lorded over us another 1500m higher. Except for the stilled ski lifts, the village throbbed like a metropolis. The hotel balconies, bars, sidewalks, and roadside barriers were all packed. The functional-in-July outdoor ice rink had its share of acrobatic skaters, the hotel pools served as tiny Côtes d'Azur as scores of bronzed, topless beauties labored to perfect themselves further.

With a surprising lack of effort I found my new British friends. They welcomed me as warmly as they'd invited me yesterday. I immediately knew I was quite fortunate to run into a group of such generous guys. They clearly weren't rookie race fans, as they'd reserved a 10-top table in the front corner of the balcony, perfectly perched at 600m from the finish line with an ideal view of two bends in the road, ranging from 700m to 500m to go. A standard 4-course French lunch was served with meticulous timing to ensure that as we finished our lovely apple tarts, we could walk inside with our coffee to watch the peloton on TV just as they were snaking through St. Michel de Maurienne at the foot of the Col du Telegraphe. The company at the table was superb, and we were all greatly distracted by the endless stream of team vehicles, the media caravan, then the exhibition of the French national paralympic cycling team as they raced up the Alpe. By the time they'd reached us, it was a battle royale between two one-legged riders and a one-armed rider. The one-legged riders rested their amputated limb (interestingly, the left one in both cases) on a cradle expertly welded at the seat tube/top tube juncture. For reasons not entirely clear to me, both of their bikes still had left crankarms. It was an incredible sight because they were hauling ass, and clearly would've dispensed with any of us at the table very early on in the climb. Other riders with a variety of infirmities followed close behind, with a pair of tandems with their blind stokers bringing up the rear. The crowds gave them a hearty roar, and I cheered with equal zeal: I found them to be inspirational, indeed, but I was also intoxicated with all things French at that moment. Their national team jerseys were a powerful symbol of all that I'd fallen so madly in love with over the last few days. No doubt, too, the whole of the mountain was rapt with anticipation of what was to come, and the sheer volume of the cheers proved how difficult it would be to contain ourselves for another 2+ hours.

I suppose I could've spent some time wandering through the nooks of the excruciatingly cute village. Alternatively, I could've simply sat of the balcony and gazed at the perfect view of the highest, densest peaks of the French Alps. Doing either would've been a crowning moment of virtually any other vacation. There was no way in the world, though, I could stand to miss a minute of the race coverage on TV. I chose to nestle myself in a couch in a room full of fans as committed as me. Like me, they enjoyed watching in total silence, except to answer the occasional passerby asking for an update. At the moment I sat down the race was starting to unfold: Merckx's break had been caught, Millar had just gotten dropped, Virenque and his yellow jersey were holding on for dear life. From time to time the old, fat Frenchmen in the room would murmur guttural sounds to each other, but since the TV coverage showed 60 minutes of racing per hour, there were no natural breaks in which conversation might easily start. Especially considering what was to come, I was in Heaven.

The pros shredded the Telegraphe with impunity. The leading group appeared to be in an endless sprint in chasing down a solo Credit Agricole rider up the road. And although he'd appeared to struggle on the way up, Richard Virenque appeared at the front of the group with about 1500m to go til the summit, glued to the wheel of Italian national champion Paolo Bettini who set a furious pace in his big ring. I was aghast comparing their pace to mine. It was as though a switch had been flipped after I'd passed through, causing gravitational pull to be turned off.

In my racing heyday only a couple of years past, my Category 2 license earned me the right to race, upon occasion, alongside the home run kings on the US domestic scene  Chris Horner, Danny Pate, et al. Even in warming up for these races, their advantage of skill and fitness was evident. I'm nevertheless quite expert at wheelsucking and suffering, allowing me to hang with these boys for awhile before inevitably being dropped. My experience from this standpoint confirmed that the racing I was watching unfold on TV was a sport completely apart from anything that I (or Horner or Pate) has ever been involved in. It was a lesson taught with stark clarity by US Postal's George Hincapie  renowned for his flatland power in the Spring Classics, and forever pegged as a "non-climber"  as he set a vicious pace up the Galibier. As the leading group eventually neared the top, Hincapie charged out of the saddle over certain swatches of blacktop graffiti that had a strange familiarity to me  familiar, I quickly understood, because yesterday I'd straddled them with both feet on the ground, waiting for the altitude-induced nausea to come to its vile crescendo. They must have been a blur for Hincapie, his speed was so fierce.

Virenque and Garzelli soon sprinted for the KOM points and led the fresh-faced leading group over the summit. We knew the race was less than an hour from the bottom of the Alpe. Like clockwork, the first cars of the caravan soon appeared, tires squealing like rally cars through the S-bend directly below our balcony. Everyone loves free stuff, so the roadsides quickly grew 3 and 4 deep with people as the heart of the caravan came through, pitching heaps of baubles and trinkets to the crowd. I thought of my daughter at home and pondered how snatching an Aquarel keychain or a Michelin cycling cap for her might help redeem my weeklong absence from her life. But as soon as I began making my way down the staircase to join the fray, the TV room emitted a roar. I jogged back inside to learn that an unidentified member of US Postal had crashed quite hard. Clearly, it was no one terribly important, as Postal was still near the front, setting a torrid pace as they approached the foot of the Alpe.

Once the peloton reached Alpe d'Huez, the room let out a collective gasp: of the 30 people in the room at that moment, at least 20 of us had climbed the mountain once or more in the previous 24 hours. We'd all learned the hard way that even though the Alpe is legendary for its switchbacks, its steepness at the bottom is what makes it so formidable. When we saw US Postal's Manuel Beltran attack the first couple of K at a speed better suited for the final lap of a criterium, we were aghast. Beltran didn't relent in the least until he pulled off to hand over the pacemaking chores to Roberto Heras, who pressed forward at a more humane pace for the dozen or so riders remaining in the now-shattered leading group. Nevertheless, Virenque exploded out the back, and rather than focus on the leaders, French TV spent an eternity panned in on Virenque, now fully in the throes of the agony of defeat.

The steady pace set by Heras was an amazing display of how a top-notch pro can calmly set a pace one tick beneath the red line and seemingly leave it there for an eternity. Not unlike the way Johan Museeuw motors on the cobbles, slowly squeezing the life out of his rivals, Heras sped along at a seemingly perfect pace  perhaps it wasn't fast enough to prevent attacks, but it was certainly fast enough to ensure that none of those attacks would stick. Joseba Beloki tried once and again to make his way off the front, but the steadiness of the leading group was too much for him. It was after one of these attacks that Iban Mayo sprinted full bore up the left side of the road. We watched in utter shock as his sprint never seemed to waver. Even if he'd attacked on a flattish section of the climb, the Alpe always kicks back up soon enough. The speed he maintained was inhuman, and his time gap quickly grew even though Beloki and Hamilton put loads of pressure on the front.

When Mayo passed 5K to go, I made my way back outside and wedged myself into a superb viewing position. Besides the signs and banners and barriers, another big part of the Tour landscape are gigantic loudspeakers set in place for the final few K. They're tied into the radio play-by-play of the race. In a pace I associate with the track announcer at a thoroughbred horse race, the voice on the radio squealed "Mayo! Mayo! Mayo!" every sentence or so. I tried my best to pick up on other key words to discern what was happening with the leading group, but his voice was soon enough obscured by the roar of the dozens of motorcycle-mounted gendarmes and photographers passing through.

Our position on the course was a key one. Immediately below us was the first stretch of flat road above Bourg d'Oisans. I can only imagine that's why Mayo broke into a gigantic smile just as he passed us, sitting up to zip up his jersey just as he took the right turn at 500m to go. Not soon thereafter Alexander Vinokourov motored past us in his drops with determined grimace on his face, almost immediately followed by the Armstrong group. The next 45 minutes was a spectacle as groups of all sizes and states of being passed by. White-jersey clad Denis Menchov spun past us looking startlingly fresh and handsome, as though he was more concerned with winning a style contest than the race itself. Sylvan Chavanel came by shortly after Menchov, and the enormous roar of "Syl-vain! Syl-vain!" erupted louder than the cheers for Mayo, proving indeed that he's the great French hope for the future. The only cheer nearly as loud was that for Richard Virenque. As he slogged by he was on the wheel of his faithful domestique, the recent victor in the Tour of Belgium, Michael Rogers of Australia. Virenque had a terrible time of it on the climb, and the ten minutes he lost cost him his yellow jersey by a long shot. And as rough as Virenque looked, it was nothing compared to the shattered riders I saw come by 20, 30, then 40 minutes down. I saw one Rabobank rider holding the hand of his directeur sportif as he drove over the crest of the climb, so wasted that he couldn't even pedal as he took the tow. The two autobus groups came through, and then the two starkest sights of the day came into view: Robbie McEwen passed by, pedaling just hard enough to stay upright. His face was ghostly white, his eyes were recessed impossibly far into their sockets, his skin pulled so tightly on his face that I though his bones were readying to rip through. Then poor Jimmy Casper came though. Never a gifted climber by any means, his saga of riding even though he broke his neck in a Stage 1 crash had reached legendary proportions. He came by us at an unsually high speed, as the time cut hovered above him like the grim reaper.

An experience like mine inevitably leaves you with a kaleidoscope of random memories: the brilliance of the blue paint on the 10 DeRosa Dual bikes on the roof of the Alessio team car; the sight of the traffic jam filling the mountain, the village, and the highway once the race ended  literally 30 miles of cars unable to move at even a walking pace; the fright and exhilaration of pacelining downhill back to Grenoble, riding against oncoming traffic with riders from four different countries.

Perhaps it was fitting that as I neared Grenoble, I saw signs for Chambery. It gave me chills to see the name of the town made famous by Greg Lemond in 1989 when he slew all in the rain to win the World Championship Road Race. Lemond was my original hero, and even though America is abuzz with Armstrong fever, I shudder to think what my life would've turned out like if I hadn't set my teenage self straight by trying to emulate Lemond's successes. My weekend in the Alps had been amazing, it confirmed my longstanding sense that I'll never shed my obsession with the bicycle and my love affair with pro bike racing. The sight of the sign for Chambery set a warmth in my heart further alight. For the rest of my days, come every July, it'll take nothing less than war, disaster, or act of God to distract my desire to see the Tour again. See you there.