Higher Calling Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Ain’t no mountain high enough

  1. Setting the stage

  2. Hors catégorie

  3. Control, and losing it

  4. The Kings of the Mountains

  5. How KoMs conquered the world

  6. The climb is not the thing

  7. How the Alps were won

  8. Getting high

  9. Counting sheep

  10. Il Giro

  Epilogue: Time passes

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Further reading

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Why do road cyclists go to the mountains?

  After all, cycling up a mountain is hard – so hard that, to many non-cyclists, it can seem absurd. But, for some, climbing a mountain gracefully (and beating your competitors up the slope) represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. The mountains are where legends are forged and cycling’s greats make their names.

  Many books tell you where the mountains are, or how long and how high. None of them ask ‘Why?’

  Why are Europe’s mountain ranges professional cycling’s Wembley Stadium or its Colosseum? Why do amateurs also make a pilgrimage to these high, remote roads and what do we see and feel when we do? Why are the roads there in the first place?

  Higher Calling explores the central place of mountains in the folklore of road cycling. Blending adventure and travel writing with the rich narrative of pro racing, Max Leonard takes the reader from the battles that created the Alpine roads to the shepherds tending their flocks on the peaks, and to a Grand Tour climax on the ‘highest road in Europe’. And he tells stories of courage and sacrifice, war and love, obsession and elephants along the way.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Max Leonard’s previous books include Lanterne Rouge: the Last Man in the Tour de France and Bunker Research. He has also written about cycling, travel and adventure for Esquire, Monocle, Rouleur, Strava, Rapha and others.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Photos in the text are the author’s own snaps, or old postcards from his collection, except where indicated.

  1. The Tour de France climbs the Cime de la Bonette loop in 1993 (© BETTINIPHOTO)

  2. Aurelien unlocks the wooden barrier across the road to the col

  3. The loader cuts through deep snow

  4. Cutting and blowing

  5. The Unimog’s rotorvator; Aurelien, Jean-Marie-André and Serge survey the work still to be done

  6. The Citroën 2CV Fourgonnette

  7. Alphonse Steinès as a young man (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

  8. The 2CV rests

  9. They can get to the top, as this postcard from the 1960s shows.

  10. Joe Dombrowski’s team photo from after the 2016 Giro, when Drapac, the new sponsor, was unveiled (photo: Jake Hamm/Cannondale)

  11. A carved wooden draisienne, or velocipede, in the French National Sport Museum

  12. René Pottier on the track

  13. A postcard showing the Col d’Allos during the 1926 Tour de France

  14. René Vietto (right) sits with Antonin Magne

  15. Vietto on the wall of René Bertrand’s apartment

  16. Vietto and his friend Siciliano, during their military service

  17. Vietto’s amputated toe

  18. Alejandro Martín Bahamontes, young and old

  19. Bahamontes in 1959

  20. Bahamontes was known for his awkward riding position and hitched-up shorts

  21. Nice beach

  22. The pebble at the top

  23. George Mallory’s first Strava Everesting

  24. Firle Beacon Everesting (photo: Andy Waterman)

  25. Finishing the Everesting (photo: Andy Waterman)

  26. George II on the Passo Giau

  27. The Andorra La Vella–Cortals d’Encamp stage profile (© Unipublic)

  28. A reminder of the day’s climbs, taped to a rider’s top tube

  29. The Collada de Beixalis during La Vuelta 2015 (photo: Antton Miettinen)

  30. Jumbo the elephant on her journey through the Alps (photo: John Hoyte)

  31. Artillery movements before the roads

  32. A Blue Devil

  33. The Parpaillon camp, July 1879

  34. Climbing the Parpaillon (photo: Antton Miettinen)

  35. The tunnel du Parpaillon (photo: Anton Blackie)

  36. The Caserne de Restefond barracks

  37. The Blue Devils build the Col de Restefond road; the Camp des Fourches

  38. Watching the Col de la Moutière

  39. The Gros Ouvrage du Restefond (photo: Camille McMillan)

  40. Bunker defences on the Col des Fourches (photo: Camille McMillan)

  41. El Teide, Tenerife

  42. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (oil on canvas, 1818) by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany / Bridgeman Images

  43. Supper time for soldiers on the Parpaillon

  44. Vintage Col de Braus

  45. Dinner on the panorama on the summit of the Bonette

  46. Traditional transhumances in the Alpes-Maritimes

  47. A sheep on the Col de Tende

  48. A ribbon from the Saint Roch Festival in Tende

  49. The model Belle et Sébastien cabin at the Belvédère shepherds’ festival

  50. The real Belle et Sébastien cabin

  51. A deer half eaten by wolves on the Bonette

  52. The church in Bousiéyas

  53. Jean-Pierre Benoit looks for chamois

  54. Taking the flock down the mountain; day-old lambs

  55. Guillestre–Sant’Anna di Vinadio, Stage 20, Il Giro d’Italia 2016

  56. Joe waves at us on the Bonette (photo: Kurt Stefan/Veletage)

  57. ‘Col Closed’ sign at the Pont Haut

  58. The top of the Bonette in autumn – the end of the road

  Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet;

  This is not Done by Jostling in the Street.

  William Blake

  I suppose we really amounted to nothing more significant than a gang of overgrown children delighting in the conquest of altitude by the force of our own muscles. Yet to see a companion arrive for the first time on a sunlit crest, his eyes full of happiness, seemed in itself an adequate recompense. Tomorrow he might return to the valley and be swallowed up by all the mediocrity of life, but for one day at least he had looked full at the sky.

  Conquistadors of the Useless, Lionel Terray

  Prologue

  AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but I want to tell you about a man called George Mallory. George Mallory loves climbing mountains. He’s good at it. His grandfather used to love climbing mountains too, but unlike his grandfather (who was also very good at it and was also called George Mallory) our George prefers to do it on a bicycle.

  Oh, you thought I meant that George Mallory. Sorry.

  George Christopher Leigh Mallory (the grandson) is the inventor of the concept of Everesting. Everesting is diabolically simple: pick a hill, any hill, and ride your bike up and down it until the cumulative elevation gain equals or surpasses the height of Mount Everest itself (8,848 metres, or 29,028 feet, above sea level). George Christopher Leigh Mallory completed the first known Everesting in 1994 by riding eight times up a 1,100-metre road climb on a peak called Mount Donna Buang near Melbourne. He was training for an expedition to the summit of the real Everest via the mountain’s North Ridge, and h
is cycling feat, only achieved after several unsuccessful attempts, seemed to exist in a dialogue with his ancestor. George Herbert Leigh Mallory was, of course, the dashing, brave British mountaineer who was tragically lost on Mount Everest in 1924, as he attempted to become the first man to reach the top. Before that expedition, the New York Times interviewed him and asked: ‘Why did you want to climb Everest?’

  ‘Because it’s there,’ he famously replied.

  Whereas a more appropriate answer for those wishing to Everest on a bicycle (who are therefore contemplating scaling a mountain that exists only in their head) might be: because it’s not there.

  Without the internet, George Mallory II’s cycling achievement might have remained undiscovered by the wider world, and he would have continued life as just another cyclist who loved riding uphill. (In mountaineering circles, on the great scroll of people who have climbed Mount Everest, he’s known as George Mallory II, and, as a way of distinguishing between the two Mallories in writing, it works for me.) But the internet came, Everesting became a thing and we would be destined to meet. Not before, however, the internet convinces me to give Everesting a try, and I find myself on top of a hill in Sussex slightly before dawn, pulling my bike out of the back of the car as a weak sun struggles to rise through the sea mist. As is helpful with any foolish and borderline unhealthy activity, I have an enabler. Jimmy is a guy I have met thanks to Strava, the online community for cyclists, and he will pedal the day next to me. We have met once before, at a cycling event, and now are planning to ride a stretch of asphalt that is 1.3 kilometres long and a 10 per cent average gradient 68 times.

  Not long into our ordeal, a couple of Jimmy’s friends arrive as moral support, to share the road with us for a short while before they go to work. On about their second ascent, one of them says something along the lines of, ‘You must be mad, mate. Why are you doing this?’

  And Jimmy just looks right back at him and says: ‘You know why.’

  That ‘why’ is really the question of this whole book: why do we have this obsession with cycling up mountains?

  As kids, we all love going down things. First on a slide, perhaps, or in a buggy, and then for many of us on a bike. When we’re adults, bicycles return us to the freedom we had as children – the freedom seemingly to go anywhere and do anything, to whizz downhill with our feet off the pedals sticking straight out in the air, almost like flying. But for a few of us, when we take up road cycling, some kind of switch flicks in our heads and we start to love going uphill instead. It’s not a straight swap: I still like the downhills too, but the reward of the downhill (which lots of non-cyclists assume to be the ‘point’ of all that uphill) never factors into my thinking about why I want to ride in the mountains. This a book more about going up, not down. Why do we choose there, and choose that? If the downhill is not the point, what is? Why do we love doing something that’s so hard?

  As a cyclist, it’s always been about the mountains for me. I’m naturally a skinny person, so as a bike rider I’m never going to win a sprint and I’m not built for the cobbled Classics of northern France and Belgium. But that doesn’t mean I was a born mountain goat. I was actually born in London, a good way from any actual mountains, and didn’t show any early signs of unnatural uphill tendencies. I didn’t start cycling seriously (whatever that means) until my early twenties, and didn’t ride a proper mountain until a few years after that, but when I did, something just clicked. Something was right, and I was hooked.

  Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in town, I thought I would cycle about a little and see the mountainous part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to altitude as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the bicycle. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the mountains with me.

  It is, however, definitely a minority interest. If I meet someone at a party, say, and tell them that I like riding my bicycle in the mountains – that I regularly embark on uncertain, self-propelled journeys 20 kilometres or more up exhaustingly steep slopes, from the safety and warmth of the valleys to the storm-threatened, cold and inhuman peaks (and, moreover, that I often base my holidays around them and pay hundreds, maybe even thousands, of pounds for the privilege) – I usually meet one of two responses. One: a disbelieving laugh and a nervous stare, and then a look over my shoulder, a scan of the room for someone else to talk to. And less often, two: a hint of kinship, or jealousy, in my interlocutor, and their eyes mist over as their thoughts travel somewhere beyond the horizon, to deeper wonders than the waves. Closely followed by an inquiry as to where, and a long conversation about routes and gradients, often concluding in a request to come along too.

  OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but it really is polarising. Some people get it, and some people don’t. Ditto if we talk about the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia and their excursions into the high peaks. Take, for example, Irishman Stephen Roche’s superhuman effort climbing to the La Plagne ski station in 1987. On that crucial stage of the Tour de France he hauled himself back towards race leader Pedro Delgado, weaving and bobbing through the follow cars behind the Spaniard, limiting his losses to stay in contention for the yellow jersey he would eventually win. It was a gloomy day, the finish line was in a total whiteout and, when a lone figure emerged from the mists, nobody, least of all TV commentator Phil Liggett, could believe it was Roche. He had pushed himself so far beyond his limits that he collapsed on the finish line and was administered oxygen for half an hour after the stage. I watch it on YouTube now, 30 years distant, and feel a tingle down my spine. Many cyclists will feel the same shiver. They just get it.

  But even if you do ‘get it’, it’s not all that clear what you actually ‘get’.

  Everesting does, after all, look very much like extreme and inexplicable behaviour. I’ve not always been the type of person who wants to spend all the daylight hours (and a few of the night-time ones too) riding up and down an imaginary mountain. Several times on that Everesting day, the question ‘How did I get here?’ passed through my mind. Literally speaking, I drove down to the coast the night before from London and stayed at a pub in Peacehaven, which was good for cheap steak, chips and beer, but which I cannot recommend wholeheartedly on other fronts. Zoom up a level and you could say that George Mallory II is directly to blame for me being on top of a hill in Sussex with a man called Jimmy whom I hardly know. More cosmically, George’s granddad is equally a part of it – he seems to have felt something like the same pull of the mountains that many people feel, and his story of doomed endeavour has undoubtedly added to the romance of the high peaks. Why is the fight against gravity so appealing? Why are mountains so important to pro racing? Why do we amateurs go up there too, and what do we see and feel when we do?

  There is a mystique here that needs, erm, demystifying. Cycling is a simple activity, and a lot of the pleasures you get from it while riding in the mountains – fresh air, beautiful views – are simple too. But the ‘why’ is not a simple question. At times, trying to formulate it, let alone answer it, has been like nailing jelly to a wall. Like a nailed jelly, this book shoots off in many different directions, but they can be grouped into a few main strands.

  Pro cycling. We’re in Andorra and it’s July 2009: Bradley Wiggins – not at thi
s point known as a climber – has surprised the world by placing 12th on the Tour de France’s first mountain stage, keeping pace with renowned grimpeurs including Andy Schleck, Cadel Evans and Lance Armstrong. Later in this Tour he will finish tenth on the legendary Mont Ventoux, helping him to fourth place overall.fn1 This achievement equals the previous highest-ever British Tour finish (Robert Millar, a climber, in 1984) but, more significantly, it is the first step in his transformation into the Tour winner he will later become. And there, in Andorra, a mountaintop kingdom in between France and Spain, he is jubilant. This is real cycling, he tells TV presenter Ned Boulting, at the top of the 10.6-kilometre finishing slope: it’s not about the velodrome (where Wiggins has been world champion in multiple disciplines and already has five Olympic medals to his name); nor time-trialling (where he holds British records); nor road racing on the flat (where he’s pretty handy too). This is real cycling. This is where the glory is and where the dreams come true, he tells Ned. Wiggins reveres the exploits of tiny featherweight climbers such as Marco Pantani. He knows his cycling history – and he’s right. All of road cycling’s most enduring legends and breathtaking rivalries have been forged in the mountains. Every rider, from Chris Froome to Mark Cavendish to the greenest amateur, wishes they could climb better. Climbing a mountain gracefully – and beating your competitors up the slope – represents the pinnacle of cycling achievement. How did the mountains become so important to professional cycling? Who are the characters whose endeavours have ignited our love for them, and why are they so appealing? How come I, a 30-something guy from a major metropolis whose early experiences of sublime infinitude and awe-inspiring wilderness were pretty much limited to Hackney City Farm, knows and loves (and sometimes hates) such a remote and alien place as the Col du Galibier? Some of these founding myths may be familiar in outline, but the real details are surprising. There is a fascinating story behind why the Alps are cycling’s Colosseum, the Dolomites its Wembley.

  Psychology. It has long seemed to me that much of what we seek to know about the mountains – the wheres, the how-highs and how-fars – is fairly easy to discover. You can find those things in Stanfords map and travel bookshop in Covent Garden in London, in the books section at big bike shops, or on computer screens pretty much anywhere. And there are countless articles on how to train for a sportive in the mountains, or how to pace yourself up an Alpine climb. But all these facts presuppose one thing: that you want to be there in the first place.