His name is Michel. I promise. I know there’s been some fuss about fictitious sources in newspapers lately, but the fact is, sheer terror obliterated his last name from my memory.
Michel is a widower with two grown children who works for a banking company and lives in the Loire region. As a hobby he chauffeurs journalists who cover bike races.
Last Sunday he was my driver for the final stage of the Dauphine Libere, an eight-day race in the French Alps. Lance Armstrong and other Tour de France contenders use it to test their fitness in the mountains.
It tested me as well.
People who know me know I like to do risky things in the least risky way. I downhill ski slowly, carving pretty turns. I rollerblade at medium tempo and wear wristguards. I avoid riptides. I generally do not write revealing first-person pieces. Writing this piece, I am told, will be cathartic, a means of getting my resting pulse below a billion.
Before Michel and I set out on our little Sunday spin, Andre Veyret, the gregarious press officer for the race, asked if I scared easily. “No,” I said confidently. After all, I’d driven in three Tours, going ahead of the peleton or around it on alternate roads. Only authorized cars are allowed to stay abreast of the race.
Michel asked if I ever got carsick. “Sometimes,” I said, and walked to a cafe to buy mints. I never opened the cellophane bag. It would have taken two hands, and I had one clenched whitely around the passenger-door handgrip at all times. In my state of mortal fear, I transcended nausea.
Elite cyclists, who barrel down descents at 50 m.p.h. on wheels the width of skate blades with nothing but Spandex, plastic and skill between them and the Great Beyond, are insane. The people who follow them in official cars and motorcycles–race organizers, judges, doctors, photographers, team staff and reporters–are another level of insane.
Behind the peleton, we tailgated a foot apart in both lanes on bobby-pin switchbacks, traversing dimly lit tunnels, blowing past immense dropoffs with itty-bitty concrete guardrails.
The team directors slalom through this traffic at Mach 10 when their riders need water or advice. The moto-photogs cling to the back with their legs and shoot with their upper bodies. The race radio embedded in Michel’s seat rest squawked at regular intervals, imploring drivers to exercise caution. “Right! Caution!” my inner voice shrieked. “Irrelevant! Oxymoronic! Or maybe I’m moronic for being here!”
Occasionally, Michel would glance over and ask if I was OK, prompting me to breathe. When I had enough available saliva, I interrogated Michel.
“Do you have to pass a driving exam?” I said.
“No exam.”
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“But one lousy driver…”
“Could kill 50 people,” he said calmly.
“How do you learn to drive like this?”
“By doing it.”
I saw interesting stuff. I saw a rider puncture a tire and run madly bowlegged back to his team car carrying it the way a kid would tote a Hula-Hoop. I saw riders pick up food in sling bags, toss slimy water bottles to eager fans and string out single file against the countryside like a colorful, thousand-legged Chinese dragon. I saw them relieve themselves. In answer to a frequently asked question, I can confirm that some do it on the move and some prefer to dismount.
I always knew I was missing something by not seeing the race up close. Now I have a whole new respect for the speed and nerve involved in this sport. I can’t believe Armstrong, who won the race, survived his recent crash with nothing but cuts and scrapes, or that his team director, Johan Bruyneel, once missed a turn and catapulted into a ravine without even losing his little cloth cap, or that helmets just became mandatory in Grand Tours.
I frankly can’t believe Michel wasn’t entered in the legendary 24-hour LeMans auto race Sunday instead of inadvertently giving me a refresher course in Happy To Be Alive.
“I wasn’t too mean to you,” he told me matter-of-factly afterward. “If it had been the Tour, it would have been a different story.”
There’s a lot about big-time cycling that doesn’t translate to TV, so it’s too bad that’s the only way most of us see it. Then again, the mortality rate on my couch is quite low, and I can reach for a mint any time.