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The Barnes & Noble Review
Professional athletes are few; countless are those who'd love to be one. In French Revolutions, hack cyclist Tim Moore rides the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong be damned. The salty, spirited Brit's hilarious travelogue charts 3,000 kilometers of biking through the desolate French countryside and up and down the forbidding slopes that make and break cycling champions.

After huffing and puffing his way up the first mountain, Moore rides himself into shape and eventually covers the course at about half the speed of the pros. This is by no means a minor accomplishment. Moore doesn't actually race the Tour de France -- he cycles the course in the weeks prior to the event -- but he does stress his 35-year-old body day in and day out, under a baking sun and in freezing rain, to the point of absolute exhaustion, and he conveys the sense of bonking with glorious aplomb. Looming in Moore's psyche is Tom Simpson, the British cycling champion who put forth such effort that he collapsed and died during the 1967 Tour.

To achieve authenticity, Moore goes so far as to grab an ephedrine rush from hay fever medication and relieve himself while riding, like racers do. It's a strange way to chase a dream, but given that he lacks the talent to race the Tour de France by conventional means, Moore gets props for making it his own. (Brenn Jones)

From the Publisher

The ultimate amateur attempts to cycle the Tour de France route.

“Put me back on my bike.” As last words go, these are unlikely to pass Tim Moore’s lips. The author attempts to cycle all 3,630 km of the 2000 Tour de France route just before the professionals do. His is an epic depiction of an inadequate man’s attempt to achieve the unachievable, a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort.

St. Martin's Press

[Moore's] adventures are — in the best sense — off the beaten track. Thank goodness for that.

Kirkus Reviews

An amusing British writer creates a lively swirl of action and observation as he bicycles the route of the 2000 Tour de France. Six weeks before the official Tour started, 35-year-old Moore (Frost on My Moustache, 2000, etc.) began the 2,256-mile circuit of France that finishes on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Since 1904, when winner Maurice Garin was disqualified for riding a train, the Tour has a rich history of cheating, a tradition that Moore quickly embraces. He lops off the first 400 miles of the race, then in the Pyrenees circumvents the steep climb called Lourdes-Hautacam and walks up the Col de Marie-Blanc. Satisfaction does come with increased endurance and successful ascents of the Cols de Galibier and Izoard in the Alps. Moore observes a changing France as he rides; small towns are dying, and local cycle clubs ride with a casualness that underlies a national softening. His wife and three noisy kids show up for the Alpine section, offering a contrast to the orderly French families. Moore's expertise on Tour history carries the narrative; from Paul Kimmage's race laundry tips to Bernard Hinault's champagne-filled water bottles, interesting detail abounds. The author gladly plays the old game of Anglo-French sniping, firing entertaining blasts at the Tour's unhelpful PR department, hostile hotel clerks, and condescending chefs. At the end, Moore clicks through 3,000 kilometers (1,863 miles) in Paris, compares his joyful, disbelieving smile to Hitler's at the Arc de Triomphe in 1940, and provides an earthy coda asserting that on some days, five breakfast croissants are not enough. Throughout, he employs colloquial British English-"bollocks," "poxy," and "ponce" lead the list ofwords, phrases, and inside national jokes that remind us we are not in Kansas anymore. Outstanding: a must for cycling enthusiasts and recommended to lovers and haters of France, general sports fans, or anyone who has ever cheated at anything.

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Parasailing, pot-holing, the luge: even those sporting activities that appear to require no skill invariably demand an abundance of human qualities that I might only hope to acquire if the Wizard of Oz was in a particularly generous mood. But we can all ride a bike. We have all known what it is to grind agonisingly up a steep hill and freewheel madly down the other side. In its unique dual capacity as mode of transport and childhood accessory, the bicycle has played a formative role in all our lives.

But thinking back, I find that my cycling memories are imbued less with a nostalgic sepia glow than a stark fluorescent glare of fear and failure. Reading the back cover of Rough Ride, the autobiography of former Irish professional cyclist Paul Kimmage, I feel profoundly chastened. Describing a portentous first ride at the age of 6, Kimmage fondly recalls his father immediately removing the stabilisers before plonking his son on the saddle and pushing him off across the car park in front of their Dublin flat. "I wobbled, but basically had no trouble and was delighted with myself." Replace "trouble" with "balance", and "delighted with myself" with "repeatedly injured," and you have the encapsulation of my own debut.

I lived in the tricycle age for far too long, squeaking about Walpole Park on a maroon three-wheeler, its capacious tin boot flamboyantly emblazoned with a royal coat of arms my father had mysteriously acquired from somewhere. It may be that in this fashion I appeared a ghastly little ponce. After all, I hadn't learned to ride without that shaming third wheel until I was almost 8, being pushed again and again across our back garden on a hand-me-down girl's bike by an increasingly frustrated mother. I was not a natural. I lacked the reckless bravado that propelled other boys to pedal across Ealing Common with their arms ostentatiously aloft, or, worse, nonchalantly folded.

My first real bike was an ancient machine whose name had a stolid, Empire twang, something like Wayfarer or Valiant, and whose cast-iron forthrightness of design you could never quite shake off by removing the mudguards and fitting a pair of cowhorn handlebars. I should by rights have aspired to a Raleigh Chopper, but then Tomas Kozlowski got one, and seeing those already burgeoning Slavic buttocks unappealingly cleaved by that slender bench saddle I understood with a youthful prescience of which I am still quietly proud that Raleigh Choppers were laughably awful. So it was with Valiant between my pistoning young knees that I breathlessly eluded park-keepers seeking to enforce the new "Sling Your Hook, Eddy Merckx" no-cycling rule; his were the wheels that shot across mad Mrs. Lewis's feet and prompted her to send my parents an admonitory letter that famously included the word "delinquent". My Valiant was there outside Gunnersbury Park when a trainee psychopath treated me to my first encounter with a number of other new but much shorter words; there too when, perhaps four seconds later, I accepted that fondly remembered inaugural smack in the mouth.

A succession of inherited shopping models followed, and I had to wait until my sixteenth birthday for my first new bicycle, a ten-speed racer of East German origin. On the way to pick it up, my poor father felt obliged to usher his youngest son into manhood with a dilatory lecture on birth prevention, one whose more poignant euphemisms would recur to me whenever I rode it thereafter. Mercifully almost every component shattered, buckled or split within weeks - I had never previously thought of corrosion as a process you could actually sit down and watch happen. On the other hand, its demise did mean that the balance of those important mid-teenage years was spent wobbling about on my father's foldable Bickerton.

My girlfriend at that time, in fact my wife at this time, had a recurring dream in which I would pedal away from her house naked on the Bickerton. If I tell you that the Bickerton resembled two dwarf unicycles clumsily welded together you will understand that this was not an erotic dream. The Bickerton was a ludicrous machine with the handling characteristics of a human pyramid. Its unique selling point was portability, an asset summarised by a long-running television commercial in which a haughty executive defied a platform full of generously trousered commuters to snigger as he laboriously hauled a huge sack of metallic angles through the ticket barrier, chased and chivvied by taunting voiceover whispers of "Bickerton! Bickerton!"

Nevertheless, as it became difficult to affect the piping tenor necessary to procure a child ticket from ever more sceptical bus conductors, so the Bickerton's social utility increased. I began riding it to pubs and parties, generally returning well-lit and yet, in a hilarious twist of irony, without lights. I crashed into road works and garden fences, and finally broke the Bickerton's back in the grand manner, careering into a parked car with such force that I snapped his number plate in half and ended up on the roof.

It was long years before I cycled again, so long that I almost forgot how to ride. Attending an auction of unclaimed stolen property I felt sorry for a conspicuously pre-teenage girl's bicycle and acquired it for three quid; after a stimulating exchange of views with my wife Birna concerning the practical worth of this item I committed myself to riding it to and from my place of work, the offices of Teletext Ltd.

Six months on, a commuter's familiarity with my route was beginning to breed contempt, and one bright summer's morning I spectacularly overcooked it coming into the Old Ship chicane. Arriving at work with the coagulation process still very much an ongoing one, I was summoned to an impromptu meeting with senior management. Bleeding without permission was added to a catalogue of similar outrages against corporate discipline and four minutes later I was being escorted from the premises. This was a shame, for as well as stymieing a well-developed plan to substitute the main Teletext menu with an animated graphic of an ejaculating penis on 24.7 million television screens across the land, it meant I also faced the demanding challenge of storming furiously past the assembled terminators of my contract on a little pink bicycle.

When the girl's bike was stolen from outside my house, probably by Birna, it had already decayed into a state that would have made for a drawn-out round of Animal, Vegetable or Mineral; its eventual replacement, a brakeless old Peugeot touring bike bought from a man who I'm fairly certain hadn't paid for it, was used only as occasional urban transport for the slightly drunk. I'd hit 30 and had never successfully repaired a puncture, overtaken anything faster than a milk float or ridden hands-off without eating kerb. The faint, arthritic squiggle that was my career path as a cyclist had slipped unnoticed off the bottom axis.

That is until I arrived in the north Icelandic town of Blonduos at 9:32 p.m. on 28 June 1997. It's difficult to imagine cycling across Europe's second-largest desert by mistake, but this seemed the only fair description of the events of that day and its three predecessors. In the company of Birna's brother Dilli I emerged from two-wheeled retirement in glorious fashion, traversing the land of my in-laws on a day-trip that somehow ran out of control into a critic-confounding odyssey. During those long, lonely hours watching Dilli on my forward horizon as he squinted around to locate me on his hindward one, I had found myself mumbling an epic commentary, a tale of water-carriers and wheel-suckers, of bonks and breakaways, a vocabulary learned from ten years of seasonal obsession with the world's largest annual sporting event.

In fact, I'd first become aware of the Tour de France during the home leg of my elder brother's 1976 French exchange. Our house guest Denis spent almost every waking hour of those three weeks with his conspicuous facial features pressed up against a transistor radio on which he had managed to locate faint medium-wave coverage of the event. It was a display of stamina and dedication to parallel that of the riders themselves - clearly, here was an event which gripped a nation like no other, and didn't relax its grasp for twenty-one whole days.

Sadly, Denis was an awful boy who cheated at Monopoly and avenged yet another Belgian victory in that year's race by running amok in our flower-beds with the big lawnmower, so I did not at the time ascribe positive attributes to the focus of his obsession. My own interest lay dormant until the late Eighties, when Channel 4 began covering the event at a time when my lifestyle made getting up to switch channels after Countdown an onerous task beyond contemplation. By default I became one of the billion people who watch the Tour de France on telly.

It was Phil Liggett's memorably raw commentary on the epic Alpine performance of Irishman Stephen Roche (`There's someone coming through the mist . . . it can't be . . . it is! It's Roche! It's Stephen Roche!') during his triumphant 1987 Tour that initiated my fascination. I came to marvel at the heroic scale of the event and its incredible demands, the murderous climbs and 90-k.p.h. descents that sometimes defied death but, tragically, sometimes didn't. I realised that each stage was a race within a race, and that with the ox-like sprinters and bird-like climbers there were even different species within each race. I mastered the terminology - the humble domestiques who fed, watered and protected their team leaders; the peloton, the main bunch of riders that careered along, elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel, at ridiculous speed; the gendarmes assigned to keep tabs on rival breakaways; the humiliations of the broom wagon, on call to sweep up those who cracked in the Alps. I learned to distinguish the multicoloured hooped jersey of the world champion from the appealing polka-dotted affair worn by the current leader in the Tour's King of the Mountains competition. And, after two years, I finally witnessed a rider hoicking up the leg of his shorts and peeing waywardly into the spectators at 50 k.p.h.

That those soiled by this incident reacted with baptismal joy suggested the feats of the enormous crowds were, in their way, no less remarkable than those of the riders. One third of the entire population of France watches the Tour from the hard shoulders and hillsides, occupying a long wait in the mad sun by daubing their favourites' names on the tarmac, then maximising their brief contact with the riders by swarming over the road, emptying warm Evian on the front runners, bellowing encouragement and occasionally knocking the unwary off their bikes. The rest of Europe provided a typical assortment of `characters': a trident-waving, cloven-hoofed German Devil; the fabulously drunken flag-faced Danes. It was the only sporting event I had come across with its own personality.

For ten years my keen interest in the Tour had spawned no greater desire than a vague intention to join one day the exuberant roadside festivities among the largest sporting crowd in the world. But after my Icelandic triumphs, achieved without preparation and at the cost of only peripheral permanent injury, a bolder ambition was born. I might be too old to join the cast of sport's greatest drama, but maybe I could still stand on the same stage. Ride the route of the Tour de France, even on my own, even at a moderate pace, and I'd have achieved something remarkable, the sort of achievement that made men. Standing at the window with a recently drained bottle of millennial Moet dangling waywardly from my hand I added my own silent, vainglorious vow to the millions swirling blurrily through fizzfuddled minds around the globe. As the final lonely firework hissed up into the drizzle I accepted that with a thriving thicket of unpigmented hairs in the temple region and three children old enough to swear in two languages, Old Father Time was catching up with old father Tim. If I didn't do it this year I wouldn't, because maybe next year I couldn't.

Unlike most professional sporting events, the Tour de France is more about taking part than it is about winning. Only two or three of the 180 starters would begin the race with any real hope of victory; for most, just completing what people (or anyway journalists) call La Grande Boucle the Big Loop - is enough. Make it back to Paris - and in some years less than half the starters do - and you're a Giant of the Road. The last finisher, the lanterne rouge, is given a particularly rousing hero's reception and can look forward to a year of lucrative race offers and sponsorship.

A race where you get a huge cheer and large cash sums for coming last sounded like my kind of race. `Giant of the Road': I could live with that. Maybe I could get some calling cards made up. OK, we were talking about a lot of cycling - but I mean how bad could a lot of cycling really be? I was starting to get quite cocky until I read about Tom Simpson.

`Put me back on the bloody bike.' As last words go, these are about as likely to pass my lips as `It's time someone taught those ostriches a lesson.' But they did good service for Simpson, rasped out defiantly after he collapsed while challenging for the leader's yellow jersey on the dreadful Mont Ventoux climb in the 1967 Tour de France.

By dying, and by dying from heart failure brought about by overzealous consumption of the amphetamines that were later found both in his liver and jersey pocket, Simpson became the first Englishman to make a newsworthy contribution to the Tour since its debut in 1903. His fate showed both that the Tour's uniquely monstrous demands were requiring men to perform beyond their limits, and that despite this they would willingly gamble their lives in exchange for one of sport's greatest prizes.

Tommy's tragedy was the focus of an article I once read in a weekend supplement. Its theme was that though the lesson of his death was clear enough, it had not been learnt. I was particularly struck by the accompanying textbook-style illustration which suggested that, in an age where the demands of professional sport spawn outlandish physiques, there is no more grotesque specimen than the Tour de France cyclist. His oiled, hairless thighs are basted Christmas hams; those stringy, wizened arms last night's leftover chipolatas. Strip him, as the artist had down one half, and it gets worse - lungs so enlarged that they can squeeze out below his ribcage like a nascent pot belly, abrupt tan-line tidemarks delineating sun-broiled flesh from the ghostly, pallid areas forever sheathed beneath shorts and jersey. Inside his body, years of drug abuse have thickened his blood to the consistency of toothpaste, extruded laboriously through the leathery ventricles of a heart distended by relentless cardiovascular activity.

It isn't a good look, overall, but at least they don't have to put up with it for long. Given the ludicrous demands of the event and its associated history of dangerously pioneering chemistry, it wasn't surprising to learn that those who have competed in years gone by can look forward to the briefest retirement in professional sport. A life expectancy more than a decade and a half below the average means anyone seeking to organise a cycling Seniors Tour would struggle to recruit a quorum.

These were all terrible tidings. I had begun to imagine my own Tour as a long jaunt through vineyards and sunflowers; maybe I'd get sunburn and a sore arse, but I didn't fancy going into an Alpine pharmacy with one hand holding my lungs in and the other flicking through the phrasebook for `my organs are distended'. If these things happened to healthy young jocks in their sporting prime, what about a man theoretically old enough to have fathered children who remembered Adam and the Ants?

I needed succour, and I found it in the achievements of Firmin Lambot. By winning the Tour at the age of 36, `The Lucky Belgian' offered genuine hope that I, an entire year younger, might feasibly complete the course without doing a Tommy.

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FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
Cycling the Tour de France

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By Tim Moore

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2001 Tim Moore.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0312290454

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Chapter One

‘Oh, it's you again.’

    It's never wise to phone a Frenchwoman more than once in any given fortnight, even if — or perhaps especially if — she happens to work on a help desk. Asking the Tour de France press office for details of the race route was clearly ranked on the scale of telephonic enquiries somewhere between ‘Have you ever considered the benefits of pet insurance?’ and ‘What colour knickers are you wearing?’ No matter that the route had clearly been decided well before the release of the basic outline in September, some six months previously.

    ‘We do not announce zis informations,’ said the voice defiantly, ‘until fifteen May.’ The line went dead; you could just imagine her flinging the phone down in petulant exasperation as a sympathetic press-office colleague looked up from her Paris Match and, slowly unwrapping another bon-bon, said, ‘Don't tell me — another journalist.’

    Anyway, it was a date. The plan, as it stood, was to complete the Tour route before the race itself set off on 1 July. Departing on 15 May gave me six weeks in which to do so — double the time allotted to the professionals; it also meant I would be 35 for three whole days of the period. On the other hand, all I now had to plot and prepare for my odyssey were a month and a postcard-sized map of the country with a squiggly line linking the start and end points of each stage, torn from the October issue of procycling.

    Each Tour has a new route — travelled clockwise one year, anticlockwise the next. The 2000 Tour was an anticlockwise one. Starting in the centre-west of the country, the line meandered briefly north into Brittany before turning back on itself, sweeping down to the Pyrenees, then across Provence via Simpson's Ventoux to the Alps. Here it flailed madly about for a disturbing amount of time, working its way circuitously northwards: ‘The entire length of the French Alps from the south, a route last taken in 1949, with the Cols d'Allos, Vars and Izoard, all over 2,000 metres high,’ panted procycling eagerly. Then it was two days in Switzerland and Germany, crossing back over the Rhine in Alsace and working westwards to the traditional Parisian finish.

    The accompanying map had the benefit of being small, but most of the important figures in a box alongside did not.

    5 July, stage five: Vannes-Vitré, 198 km.

    6 July, stage six: Vitré—Tours, 197 km.

    7 July, stage seven: Tours-Limoges, 192 km.

    Six hundred kilometres in three days, as near as ‘dammit’ is to swearing, though not quite as near as ‘fuck that’. Can I have a rest now?

    8 July, stage eight: Limoges—Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 200 km.

    9 July, stage nine: Agen-Dax, 182 km.

    10 July, stage ten: Dax-Lourdes/Hautacam, 205 km.

    11 July, stage eleven: Bagnères-de-Bigorre-Revel, 219 km.

    Apparently I could not. In seven days, the riders would cover a distance that in different and rather foolish circumstances would see them pedalling up to the outskirts of Warsaw. Worse, I knew from my television experiences that a lot of these kilometres would be breezed through by riders idly chatting to team-mates with their arms off the handlebars as they maintained speeds which even the ugliest exertions would leave me some way short of.

    Not that there'd be any of that when the mountains got going. The route might change, but every Tour is won and lost in the second week, when the Pyrenean and Alpine climbs meet an angry sun halfway, the last stragglers wobbling over the line in graphic distress after eight scorched and airless hours in the saddle. Footballers whine if they're asked to play more than a single ninety-minute game a week. Olympic athletes demand a day of rest after running half a lap of the track. But when the Tour de France hits the mountains, its competitors have to haul themselves to the ragged edge of exhaustion from dawn to dusk, day after day, inching agonisingly up the highest roads in Europe and then careering lethally down them.

    To this end, procycling had also helpfully included a ‘gradient profile’ of stage twelve, Carpentras—Le Mont Ventoux. As learning curves go, they didn't come much steeper: an alarming succession of peaks and troughs that looked like the printout of a lie-detector test. Two impressive 3,000-foot cols caused jerky fluctuations of the sort you'd expect from Jeffrey Archer comparing O-level results with Pinocchio, then — whoosh! — there was Jonathan Aitken booking Baron von Munchausen into the Ritz as up to Ventoux the line soared crazily off the scale.

    All in all, there were 3,630 kilometres (which may be more familiar to you as 2,256 miles) and sixteen mountains to be conquered in three weeks. It was the equivalent of cycling from London to Bristol every day, only with Swindon wreathed in cold mist atop a towering peak so steep you'd be kneeing yourself in the face if you walked up it.

    Slowly, certainly, the wrongheadedness of my initial pledge was dawning on me. With two weeks to go and my train ticket to Dover already rashly purchased, I knuckled down. I took out temporary membership of a gym, bought Chris Boardman's Complete Book of Cycling, and tried to fix the Peugeot's brakes.

    I didn't take too much notice of the text side of Mr Boardman's volume after reading of the importance of training on Christmas Day to establish a psychological advantage over one's rivals, and coming across phrases such as ‘The Tour came close to destroying me because it slowly drained my spirit ... The Tour is the limit. It is the Olympics, Wimbledon and the World Cup all rolled into one. It is the highest level of sport ... That feeling in the pit of your stomach that the next three weeks are going to hurt.’

    On this basis, it didn't seem ideal that with less than a fortnight before departure I didn't actually own a roadworthy bicycle. Jogging for half an hour up and down the towpath every evening was a step in the right direction, but not a very big one. I needed to do some cycling. Or anyway some cycling-type exercises.

    Chris Boardman, a former Olympic gold medallist and the first Englishman since Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour, might reasonably be expected to know something about preparatory exercises. Holding a hand over the accompanying words (the mere mention of ‘the muscle group at the front of your thighs’ made me feel squeamish), I was soon mimicking Mr Boardman's line-drawn simulacrum on a twice-daily basis. Pressing a heel back to a buttock, pushing a wall, even lowering nose to (or anyway towards) thigh with my leg up on a chair (I'd work up to the illustrated table option just as soon as the sensation that my knees were about to snap forward the wrong way seemed less compelling): these at least had an authentic air, the kind of thing you might see footballers doing on the touchline, albeit with fewer daughters hanging on to their legs and necks. Others, notably the spinal mobility and gluteus maximus stretches, cajoled me into whimsical poses last struck when Miss Pillins asked 2Y to imagine we were spring's first snowdrops emerging from the frosted soil.

    In recent years, those snowdrops have invariably been accompanied by a savage and ridiculous new gym fad, and they don't come much more savage or ridiculous than spinning. Melding an exercise bicycle to the traumatic peer-pressure, barked commands and hysterical hi-NRG soundtrack of aerobics, I'd been told that spinning was to a jog around the river what bear-baiting was to yoga. It seemed sufficiently drastic. With a week left I went off and spun.

    The airless spinning room at my local gym consisted of a claustrophobic mass of exercise bicycles arranged in tight, respectful semicircles before the instructor's machine; settling myself indelicately into the lofty saddle amid two dozen sinewy women in their forties and a fat, red Irishman, it occurred to me that if (or ideally when) we were all vaporised by Martian invaders the first member of the mopping-up squad to poke his little green head round the door would imagine he had discovered some hallowed chamber where obscure rotary homage was paid to King Spin. Only later did I realise that with all that tiresome bellowed encouragement, those clashing elbows, the soul-destroying, out-of-the-saddle, give-no-quarter competitiveness, a spinning class was a static peloton, the closest approximation to a desperate bunch finish I would ever experience.

    I'd sat next to the Irishman in the hope of faring well by comparison, but after ten minutes of hectoring, Flashdance and increased wheel resistance (‘Crank it up a notch, and one and two and UP on the pedals and give me ten and GO!’) the sweat was already cascading in an unbroken stream from lowered chin to pumping knees, flying off the uselessly whirring front wheel and splattering toned, hairless flesh in a generous radius. Part of the deal in gyms, and indeed in professional cycling, is never to exhibit real pain or distress. Consequently, when we got into the uphill double-time sprinting the instructor, perhaps noting my uncanny visual impersonation of a man being exorcised in a sauna, slipped quietly off his bike and sidled over. ‘Take it easy, eh?’ he whispered soothingly as Donna Summer began to feel love. The phlegmy, rutting grunt that was all I could manage by way of response did not help my case.

    After that I started lowering the resistance control a notch whenever he said to turn it up, but, even so, winding down at the end of the forty-minute session I felt very, very bad; worse, in fact, than I had ever felt. The techno thump of a shell-shocked heart filled my head; most of my muscle groups had disbanded and a leather-aproned medieval butcher was clumsily yanking my hamstrings. As I shakily dismounted into an unsightly puddle of body fluids, I had a strong sensation that my feet had somehow been stretched and extruded into platform-soled appendages.

    ‘First time?’ said the Irishman, who somehow looked further from death than he had before.

    ‘Last time?’ tinkled a hollow-cheeked, hawser-armed woman, her lilac crop top blemished with the merest sprinkling of perspiration that in any case was probably mine.

    I didn't (or rather couldn't) say anything in reply, but explained myself to the instructor after the following day's session. ‘That's quite an undertaking,’ he said, implying that I would need quite an undertaker. One of ‘his’ women had recently returned from cycling over the Andes; another was off to the Himalayas. ‘Don't worry,’ he said, noting that this news had failed to comfort or inspire, ‘that was a pretty big hill we just simulated. About 22 kilometres. And you'll only need to work at maybe 20 per cent of that rate.’

    I nodded wetly. All I could think was that I'd just wasted 22 kilometres going nowhere in a room full of hot Lycra. There would be times, I imagined, when I would dearly want those 22 kilometres back, saving them up as a joker to be played in some epic Alpine crisis. ‘Except,’ he said, squinting thoughtfully, ‘I suppose you'll need to be at it for about eight hours a day.’

    Somehow blanking out the enormity of this task, I managed one more spinning class and two jogs. Then, gingerly consulting Chris Boardman, I came across the starting revelation that ‘with one week to go, training should be finished ... It is highly unlikely that you will generate more form in this time.’ With five days left, interpreting this theory of ‘tapering’ a regime as a competition approached ('the volume of work is slowly reduced as the objective approaches'), I tapered my training rather more abruptly to a standstill. Everyone knows what the tough are said to do when the going gets tough. But I went shopping.

    The sporting-goods industry prospers from the eternal truth that people who are not very good at something would rather blame a lack of expensive equipment than their own physical failings. Certainly rectifying the former is a lot quicker. Every time I looked at those little line drawings of Mr Boardman down on all fours howling silently at an unseen moon or getting his leg over the dining table, I felt an itching desire to slam his scary book shut and go into town to buy things made out of carbon fibre.

    Not knowing anything about bikes, or at least bikes costing more than fifteen quid, flicking helplessly through the cycling-magazine adverts in Smith's was a sobering experience. It seemed to be quite easy to spend considerably over £1,500 just on a frame, a wheelless, chainless, pedalless diamond-shaped assemblage of metal tubes. Almost randomly, I came up with a figure of half this amount as my budget for a complete bicycle. Venturing much below this price raised fears of another two-wheels-on-my-Trabant DDR special, meaning that metal fatigue would set in after four days, and that on the way to pick it up my father would appear out of nowhere to place a kind, worldly hand on my shoulder and explain that the male menopause was nothing to be scared of. Beyond £750, I would be too crap to notice the difference, as well as potentially falling foul of the general rule that very expensive pieces of machinery require regular expert maintenance. I didn't want a Fiesta or a Ferrari. A nice Golf would do me.

    I can't quite remember why the GT ZR3000 first appealed. It may have been the memory of the slanting GT logo flashed along many of the peloton's crossbars; it may have been because that crescendo of numerals and digits conjured images of an enormously overpowered motorcycle, thereby suggesting great speed with minimal human effort. When a call to GT's Martin Warren revealed that the ZR3000 was last year's model and could therefore be offered at an attractive discount, the deal was done. ‘Do you want to assemble it yourself, or ...?’ he asked, ending the whimper-punctuated silence that followed with, ‘Or ... yes, I'll, um, put you down for the "or" option.’

    The bike, of course, was only the start of it. An astonishing 4,000 people make up the Tour's travelling entourage — journalists, officials, members of the crap-chucking publicity caravan — and 600 of them are there to support the twenty teams who each enter nine riders. Ferried about in over a thousand official vehicles, they carry food, drink, spare parts, spare clothing, vitamins and, er, ‘vitamins’. I would have to get all this stuff, and carry it myself in panniers.

    There are plenty of people whose dark, dull lives are lit up by opportunities to patronise and humiliate those they encounter in their professional capacity. Although most of these people work in the police force or Paris, while acquiring the peripherals for my trip I was intrigued to note the number that had made their horrid little homes behind the counters of bicycle retailers.

    I'd avoided them up to now, but with time running out I had to get help where I could. In tones normally reserved for asking small children to pop down the shops for a tin of elbow grease, I was scathingly informed that the ZR3000, as well as being last year's model and therefore on a competitive par with a swingbin full of fag-ends and used teabags, was risibly inappropriate for my task. The lugs, whatever and wherever they might be, would snap clean through as soon as I attached panniers, and actually the pannier rack wouldn't fit anyway, and in any case only a really major prannet would ever use panniers — and listen to this, Dave, there's a bloke here reckons he's doing the Tour de France, right, and he doesn't even know if his bike's got Presta valves or Schraders.

    It was Martin Warren, perhaps mindful of the extraordinary number of wankers I would be encountering, who had suggested I talk to Richard Hallett, technical editor of Cycling Weekly, a man apparently much sought after for his rare ability to offer advice on clothing and equipment without snorting in helpless derision. I hadn't really wanted to trouble him, but being told by two awful men in a shop on the Fulham Road that I didn't walk like a cyclist was the last straw and I gave the man Hallett a call. He listened patiently while I explained my quest, then, rather sharply, asked his only question.

    ‘Are you fat at all?’

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from FRENCH REVOLUTIONS by Tim Moore. Copyright © 2001 by Tim Moore. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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