Friday, July 02, 2004
KRT Wire | 07/02/2004 | Covering Tour can be a fog, yet fantasticCHICAGO - Remember Luz-Ardiden? Of course you do. It was the stage last year where Lance Armstrong nailed down his fifth Tour de France victory after he crashed, got up, almost crashed again and then charged past everyone else on the misty mountain, mashing the pedals with feverish intensity.
OK, so Armstrong had a tough afternoon. But when his day was done, he was airlifted off the mountain directly to a massage, a meal and a good night's sleep.
Me? My day was barely half over.
By 9 p.m., after I had filed my story and emerged from the big platform tent that serves as a pressroom on mountain-top finishes, the romantic mist had thickened into a full-blown fog. Luz-Ardiden was socked in. And I was roaming the uneven, cow-pie-strewn pasture where my car was parked, carrying my laptop and about 20 pounds of reference material.
I couldn't locate the car. I couldn't see two feet ahead of me.
Just then I heard an engine rev and made out the rear end of a big navy blue bus carrying the gendarmes - the national police who secure the roads during the Tour - taking off down the road.
Bad sign. I knew that meant most of the people left on the hill were inebriated Basques.
"Je ne peux pas trouver ma voiture (I can't find my car)," I said to the first person I encountered.
I got a grunt, a baleful stare.
I tried my grammatically challenged Spanish on the next guy.
"La coche esta perdida."
That elicited a string of slurred words, a shrug.
Right around that time I started to hyperventilate.
Hey, I'm not asking for sympathy. I know I'm privileged to cover one of the world's most exotic and chaotic sporting events that this year runs July 3-25.
When people ask me what it's like, I always say the same thing. There is one Tour for the riders and another for the journalists. We all lose weight and occasionally lose our tempers during the race.
We show up full of energy and happy to renew acquaintance with comrades from our little United Nations of a press corps. We limp into Paris three weeks later haggard, hollow-cheeked and, in my case, incapable of obeying American speed limits.
On a typical day, we drive to the start, grab a strong coffee, do interviews at the team vans (competing with mobs of camera-wielding fans), drive to the finish, find the press room, watch the stage, drink more strong coffee, scramble to the team vans (competing with mobs of autograph-seeking fans) to do more interviews, write a story, drive to a hotel, eat, crash.
Sounds fairly straightforward, right? But I haven't mentioned the gridlock created when half of France is vacationing and the other half is at the race, or the roadblocks that aren't on the map, or searching, exhausted, for a tiny auberge late at night knowing you'll have to wake the proprietor.
All those pampered cyclists have to do is ride 2,000-plus miles.
Trust me, this gig seems just as taxing and dangerous when your clutch starts smoking on the way down Alpe d'Huez. Or when some well-meaning villagers in the Pyrenees suggest a "shortcut" that takes you a mile high on a narrow, winding road with no guard rails, sheer drops and helpful signs that warn "surface deteriorated."
Right after mountaintop finishes, the Tour organizes what fittingly is called an "evacuation," with police escort, for officials who want to beat the tourist traffic. The high-speed caravan often takes the back way on what we refer to as "the goat road" for obvious reasons.
I usually can't evacuate with the gang because I'm writing, but I've done it and I can attest that it would be safer if you had horns and hooves.
On one epic climb I took with a colleague, the car stalled on a tight switchback and we couldn't get it back in gear.
It was hot - it's always hot in the mountains during the Tour, except when it's raining or there are gale-force winds. We were sweating profusely. The race was supposed to come through in about two hours. Meanwhile, a convoy of approximately 500 cars and trucks was stacking up behind us and there was nowhere to pull over but a deep, inviting ravine.
"They're going to throw us off the side of the mountain," I said.
I waded into the crowd to ask for help. A young man gallantly stepped forward. His mother grabbed his arm and yanked him back.
"Don't. You never know who these people are," she hissed.
An impatient driver behind us eventually got in, rustled around and threw the emergency brake as the engine roared to life. We throttled up the rest of the hill in first gear to derisive cheers.
I once bailed out the same colleague after she committed a traffic faux pas.
"Madame is having a crise," I said, ad-libbing to the angry gendarme with his head in our car window as my colleague obligingly began to cry. "Her grand-mere has just died. She is very upset. It will not happen again."
He nodded sagely and waved us on. Famille is sacred in France.
I have two rules during the race. One is to avoid low blood sugar by remembering to eat. The French understand this, and I've been shown many kindnesses on the culinary and hospitality fronts.
After last year's Stage 1 pileup extended my workday until 11 p.m., I arrived in the hamlet of Domptin expecting to go to bed hungry, only to have the hotel manager greet me with a plate of cold cuts and a glass of champagne. A few minutes later, her two children shyly knocked on my door, thrilled to meet an American reporter.
The second, more important credo is to make no enemies in the press peloton. Everybody needs somebody to draft behind sometime.
On Luz-Ardiden, I groped my way back to the press tent and found the three intrepid men of VeloNews magazine, who drive every mile of the course every year.
They thought my damsel-in-distress act was a little over the top until they walked outside, rubbed their eyes and realized they couldn't see, either.
We eventually found our cars and snowplowed down the switchbacks, aiming our headlights at the course barriers to see where we were before turning.
The fog lifted. I drove 40 miles to the city of Pau and checked into a hotel. Restaurants were long closed, so I walked to a bar, ordered a beer and struck up a conversation with the bartender.
He was horrified, as any French person would be, to learn I had missed a meal, and set a bowl of peanuts in front of me.
"The Tour? You follow the whole Tour?" he said. "Do you like doing that?"
I told him I loved it.
OK, so Armstrong had a tough afternoon. But when his day was done, he was airlifted off the mountain directly to a massage, a meal and a good night's sleep.
Me? My day was barely half over.
By 9 p.m., after I had filed my story and emerged from the big platform tent that serves as a pressroom on mountain-top finishes, the romantic mist had thickened into a full-blown fog. Luz-Ardiden was socked in. And I was roaming the uneven, cow-pie-strewn pasture where my car was parked, carrying my laptop and about 20 pounds of reference material.
I couldn't locate the car. I couldn't see two feet ahead of me.
Just then I heard an engine rev and made out the rear end of a big navy blue bus carrying the gendarmes - the national police who secure the roads during the Tour - taking off down the road.
Bad sign. I knew that meant most of the people left on the hill were inebriated Basques.
"Je ne peux pas trouver ma voiture (I can't find my car)," I said to the first person I encountered.
I got a grunt, a baleful stare.
I tried my grammatically challenged Spanish on the next guy.
"La coche esta perdida."
That elicited a string of slurred words, a shrug.
Right around that time I started to hyperventilate.
Hey, I'm not asking for sympathy. I know I'm privileged to cover one of the world's most exotic and chaotic sporting events that this year runs July 3-25.
When people ask me what it's like, I always say the same thing. There is one Tour for the riders and another for the journalists. We all lose weight and occasionally lose our tempers during the race.
We show up full of energy and happy to renew acquaintance with comrades from our little United Nations of a press corps. We limp into Paris three weeks later haggard, hollow-cheeked and, in my case, incapable of obeying American speed limits.
On a typical day, we drive to the start, grab a strong coffee, do interviews at the team vans (competing with mobs of camera-wielding fans), drive to the finish, find the press room, watch the stage, drink more strong coffee, scramble to the team vans (competing with mobs of autograph-seeking fans) to do more interviews, write a story, drive to a hotel, eat, crash.
Sounds fairly straightforward, right? But I haven't mentioned the gridlock created when half of France is vacationing and the other half is at the race, or the roadblocks that aren't on the map, or searching, exhausted, for a tiny auberge late at night knowing you'll have to wake the proprietor.
All those pampered cyclists have to do is ride 2,000-plus miles.
Trust me, this gig seems just as taxing and dangerous when your clutch starts smoking on the way down Alpe d'Huez. Or when some well-meaning villagers in the Pyrenees suggest a "shortcut" that takes you a mile high on a narrow, winding road with no guard rails, sheer drops and helpful signs that warn "surface deteriorated."
Right after mountaintop finishes, the Tour organizes what fittingly is called an "evacuation," with police escort, for officials who want to beat the tourist traffic. The high-speed caravan often takes the back way on what we refer to as "the goat road" for obvious reasons.
I usually can't evacuate with the gang because I'm writing, but I've done it and I can attest that it would be safer if you had horns and hooves.
On one epic climb I took with a colleague, the car stalled on a tight switchback and we couldn't get it back in gear.
It was hot - it's always hot in the mountains during the Tour, except when it's raining or there are gale-force winds. We were sweating profusely. The race was supposed to come through in about two hours. Meanwhile, a convoy of approximately 500 cars and trucks was stacking up behind us and there was nowhere to pull over but a deep, inviting ravine.
"They're going to throw us off the side of the mountain," I said.
I waded into the crowd to ask for help. A young man gallantly stepped forward. His mother grabbed his arm and yanked him back.
"Don't. You never know who these people are," she hissed.
An impatient driver behind us eventually got in, rustled around and threw the emergency brake as the engine roared to life. We throttled up the rest of the hill in first gear to derisive cheers.
I once bailed out the same colleague after she committed a traffic faux pas.
"Madame is having a crise," I said, ad-libbing to the angry gendarme with his head in our car window as my colleague obligingly began to cry. "Her grand-mere has just died. She is very upset. It will not happen again."
He nodded sagely and waved us on. Famille is sacred in France.
I have two rules during the race. One is to avoid low blood sugar by remembering to eat. The French understand this, and I've been shown many kindnesses on the culinary and hospitality fronts.
After last year's Stage 1 pileup extended my workday until 11 p.m., I arrived in the hamlet of Domptin expecting to go to bed hungry, only to have the hotel manager greet me with a plate of cold cuts and a glass of champagne. A few minutes later, her two children shyly knocked on my door, thrilled to meet an American reporter.
The second, more important credo is to make no enemies in the press peloton. Everybody needs somebody to draft behind sometime.
On Luz-Ardiden, I groped my way back to the press tent and found the three intrepid men of VeloNews magazine, who drive every mile of the course every year.
They thought my damsel-in-distress act was a little over the top until they walked outside, rubbed their eyes and realized they couldn't see, either.
We eventually found our cars and snowplowed down the switchbacks, aiming our headlights at the course barriers to see where we were before turning.
The fog lifted. I drove 40 miles to the city of Pau and checked into a hotel. Restaurants were long closed, so I walked to a bar, ordered a beer and struck up a conversation with the bartender.
He was horrified, as any French person would be, to learn I had missed a meal, and set a bowl of peanuts in front of me.
"The Tour? You follow the whole Tour?" he said. "Do you like doing that?"
I told him I loved it.
