Paris Chronicles: Stage 19, Tour de France

A quick train trip from Paris to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains to catch a mountain stage of the Tour de France (stage 19).  Saint-Gervais-les-Bains is just a few kilometers from Chamonix, and the area is completely packed with TdF fans.

Here's the stage profile:

We'll position ourselves near the finish at Le Bettex

Should be pretty fun.  We got booked into about the last room in the entire valley, some flea bag place that will no doubt be an experience but which will be fine (and this was in February when we booked the room).

The Tour de France is just an enormous show.  There’s really no other way to describe it.  A traveling extravaganza that moves around the country with hundreds upon hundreds of monstrous trucks that ferry every type of equipment, thousands of cars, tens of thousands of Gendarmerie, and countless hucksters who promote everything from fruit juice to supermarkets to water to laundry detergent to banks to anything else you can imagine.  It was great fun to experience a stage, especially a mountain stage such as the one we watched yesterday in Saint-Gervais!

After the train ride from Paris we woke up early, excited for the day ahead.  A constant drizzle promised that the stage racing would be challenging since there were numerous high passes the riders had to negotiate, and that means lots of fast descents and surely many unfortunate crashes.  

A dreary morning promised an exciting race day.

Le Fayette, where we stayed.  This is on our hike up to the route for the TdF.

Coffee first at a small café near our hotel – café au lait with croissant and we were ready to go.  Even though there apparently are a variety of shuttles that take fans up the hill, we decided to walk because we wanted to see the route and what the riders were going to face.  We had packed a great picnic lunch with sandwiches, fruit, cheese, and since it was going to be a long day, 2 bottles of wine.  Thankfully, the rain slowed and for our long walk up the hill not a drop came down.

Hiking up

And looking back.

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Only 5 km for the race...we wanted to go to about 3, maybe 3 and 1/2 km

Only another 1/2 km for us.   That's not a Tdf rider, BTW...

The road was quiet for the first couple of kilometers but soon started filling with cyclists and walkers.  Five km up it started to get very busy and caravans and cars lined both sides of the roads.  Fans of every nationality and allegiance to various home riders were everywhere – flags, banners, barbeques, booze, kegs, you name it.  Fun.

We decided to hike to a spot in the final switchbacks about 3 km from the finish.  That meant about 14 km from our hotel.  All uphill and all pretty steep.  But the fun was in seeing all the fans and crazies along side the road. 

We found a great spot just after a steep switchback, with an overhanging tree in case the rain resumed, and we parked ourselves.  We had a nice grass spot to sit on, a group of sheep across the road that were fitted with Swiss cow bells, and we figured it couldn’t get much better than this.  The Tour time tables predicted that the first riders by our position at about 1500.  The “caravan” should arrive at 1330.  We were just on time.

Our neighbors on the road were fun, too.  The area is a ski village and just behind us was a chalet that is owned by a Swiss family with 5 boys, the oldest of whom is maybe 13.  They are all skiers and the older boys were dressed in traditional alpine climbing gear and the younger ones were in full ski clothing, boots and skis, too, standing on top of their cars.  Everyone took lots of photos.  The boys’ Mom and grandma appeared with trays and trays of hot coffee and small cups, offering coffee to everyone in their neighborhood.  We politely declined since we were tucked into our wine already, but dozens of others up and down the hill enjoyed the courtesies of these folks.

Just uphill from us was a group of 5 Danish guys rooting for their homey, Edvald Bossan Hagan.  They had been at their spot a long time and had downed a lot of beer.  They were singing and laughing and loud, but they must have decided that our spot was a bit boring so they moved their entourage up the road a few switchbacks.  We could still here them when they got to their new spot!

And we started in on our lunch and a bottle of red.

Ahh, lunch

Coffee for the gang

The coffee angel, or at least one of them

Mont Blanc shadowed in clouds today

The first riders -- a club group that surely made this a
once-in-a-lifetime ride

The older boys in their retro alpine gear

Another club group

These guys got a lot of attention

Pointing to Mont Blanc

The littler siblings joining in on the fun

Not sure what this group was all about...

A pitre.  Clowns are scary in all languages!

And the caravan was just on time, too.  The caravan is an hour-long procession of commercial vehicles – floats as we would call them in an American-style parade – that race up the hill with music blaring and girls throwing out hats and shirts and goodies to the crowd.  It is pandemonium and good fun.  Thousands of motos, too, with Gendarmerie.  We got our share of swag, most of it totally useless and silly, but fun anyway.  Unabashed hucksterism and 100% fun.

Credit Lyonaisse

Mickey Mouse, but WTF?

Don't ask

Don't know

A friendly German guy from Berlin stopped by to chat.  He is a serious tour-junkie and we had a good time talking about who would win, who would blow up, beer, etc. etc.  And then we heard the helicopters – there are about 5 helis that film from above and there is often one heli for each group of riders on the road.  We knew the first riders were close.  The, the lead motos came around the corner trying to clear the road (actually, very successfully; most folks were very courteous to the riders).

And just like that, the first two riders rounded the corner – a French climber (Roman Bardet) and a former World Champion, Portuguese Rui Costa.  Costa looked toasted; he’d been in the break all day.  Bardet looked strong and was spinning comfortably on the 10% grade.  He looked like he had a chance.

Bardet leads Rui Costa, who is clearly toasted

Irishman Dan Martin is next, having the tour of his life and wearing his constant grimace.

The yellow Mavic moto then came by with the reader board that tells the riders the time differences between groups.  The board read 1:25.  We knew that the next group was close and in a moment they rounded the corner.  Less that 1:25, for sure.  The Maillot Jaune. Chris Froome from Team Sky Racing was in this second group on the road, led by three of his teammates.  As they neared us it was clear that Froome had crashed somewhere – his jersey and shorts were shredded and he was bloody down his entire right side.  But for all that, he seemed to be riding OK and was less than 1 minute down on the Bardet group.

Team Sky shepherding and leading its leader, Chris Froome. Sky is an amazing team.
No other teams can come close to their dominance this year.

Froome.  Hard to see his torn kit, but he's in pretty bad shape.  And even though the gradient is 10+%, they really are moving as fast as it appears

Roman Kreutziger

Team cars

 The other “bigs” were right behind Froome, Martin, Quintana, Porte, Yates.  All of them looked OK but the day had been long and this final climb was steep.  None of the others appeared to be anxious to attack Froome even though he was hurt.

We had no idea what happened after the riders passed us, until the father of the Swiss family shouted out “BARDET!!!” – he was listening to the radio and had heard the result.  Bardet had distanced Rui Costa and had won the stage.  Huge result for Bardet, and a much-needed tonic for France, who haven't had a TdF winner since 1985 and who frankly need something to cheer about.

The groups of riders kept coming by in ones, twos, and then the “autobus” rounded the corner.  This is the big group of riders whose job is to get their team leaders to the climb and then just make it to the finish.  And the sprinters, who can’t climb a mountain anyway.  A huge group of perhaps 100 riders, including Sagan (the Green jersey wearer) and huge sprinter Andre Greipel (knicknamed “The Gorilla”).  Both Lorie and I were surprised at how skinny even the sprinters are.  On TV these guys look pretty big.  But up close they are rail thin (although the sprinter’s legs are the size of tree trunks).

L'autobus -- Sagan is right center in green

The last rider on the road probably got the biggest cheers.  Not visible in the picture, but he'd crashed
miserably and the fans pushed him on.  Chappeau!

 

Fans come in all outfits and sizes: the Ballet Boys from Holland

 The descent was kind of dicey since pedestrians were on the left side of the road (the gendarmes tried to keep things civilized) and descending cyclists were on the right.  Some of the cyclists were going way too fast under the circumstances, but then we realized that a lot of the pro racers were descending, too, though they had warm-up jackets on.  Apparently there is only one way down from the top and the racers who wanted to get to their hotels before their team bus could get off the hill had to ride.  Since it would be many hours before a car or bus could get down the hill, a lot of them rode. 

And they rode downwardly very fast.  Hell, they do this for a living.  But there were tons of pedestrians and each pro had a contingent of pilot fish amateur riders who wanted to ride by their heroes, if just for a minute.

We kept well to the side and then took a small turnoff onto a road that would take us to a trail that we could hike down to our town, Le Fayette.  The skies opened up and rain poured down on us.  We had our rain gear and put it to good use, but we got totally soaked anyway.  We arrived out our hotel at about 2000 and were tired and totally satisfied from our day at the races.  This was a dream come true kind of day for me and I really had a great time.

We're on the TGV to Paris as I write this, speeding over the French countryside at 300 kph (that's 190 mph in a train!).  And so smooth you'd never notice until you look out the window.  

We're planning our days ahead, with a bunch of work thrown in.  Thanks for reading.

A demain.