101 Damnations: Dispatches from the 101st Tour de France by Boulting Ned

Author:Boulting, Ned [Boulting, Ned]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781473512306
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

BESANÇON

‘Band of Brothers. The whole box set.’

The sun came out in Besançon, and the race fell asleep. Shortly before midnight the night before, we arrived in a Campanile hotel, inevitably situated in an industrial estate six kilometres from the city centre. There is a certain comforting familiarity in the Campanile range of hotels, born from the fact that the rooms are architecturally identical wherever you are, in just the same way that a Big Mac is a pasty mess of a meal whether it’s ingested in Prague, Preston or Port Stanley.

The gherkin in the bun of a Campanile hotel room is undoubtedly, as Chris Boardman astutely noted over breakfast the next day, the stool, which is provided in each guest’s identical cell. It is circular, backless and made of moulded plastic, and gets marvellously in the way as you try to navigate the thin aisle between the bed and the window, or the bed and the wall. It is not only ugly and uncomfortable, it is also utterly pointless. The notion that you would opt to sit on it, instead of the bed, to rest and admire your surroundings is quite fanciful, and exists only in the imaginations of whichever firm of architects won the multi-million-pound contract to revamp the Campanile franchise, a job which must have taken them most of the afternoon to complete.

But they’re simple, wholesome places, and there is something profoundly reassuring about the twisty pole mechanism which brings down the shutters, and reduces the light in the room to the exact same grey, indistinguishable murk, entirely uniform whether you find yourself in the middle of a burning hot Provençale afternoon, or a stormy Tuesday morning in Rouen. You tend to sleep well in them.

Waking to sunshine for the first time since we left Cambridge and ratcheting up the squeaky blind, I gazed out at a scene of calm renewal. The Tour was licking its wounds.

Riders wandered aimlessly down outdoor staircases from elevated walkways, or rather, they slouched. Families, complete with bald-headed pre-school children had mysteriously appeared on the hotel premises overnight, their kids’ pale scalps like button mushrooms blinking at the morning. Riders’ wives nursed coffees on the hotel’s modest terrace, half their attention turned to the button mushrooms, the other half trying to listen to the sotto voce mumblings of their gaunt, weary husbands or boyfriends, ten days into a torture that knew no end.

I went downstairs too. I opened my laptop in the welcome, bright sunshine of the terrace, and tried to establish what the day had in store. The riders would ride their bikes, slowly, and not for very long. I would interview riders slowly, and also not for very long, with any luck.

Suddenly I became aware that Jean-Marc Bideau, the very rider who had been overtaken by his honourable breakaway companion Jan Bárta on the way into London on Stage 3, was staring at me, intently. He was there with his wife, and they were sitting at the table next to me, drinking a juice.

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