The Rouleur

In my dreams, I am a Rouleur, the unglamorous, unsung workhorse of cycle racing.

The big man who sits on the front; braving the wind and rain and the flat Northern landscapes, dragging the pack down die-straight Roman-built roads until the weak fall from the back.

When I go riding with my neighbour Steve, we make an unlikely pair. He is short and slight, built like a jockey, or the flyweight boxer he once was. Faced with a hill, he stays seated and simply spins his legs a little faster, his lightweight aluminium bike gliding up the gradient as though glued to an asphalt elevator.

I don’t glide.

I’ve never asked Steve about his two-wheeled fantasies, like most cyclists our conversations tend towards the dour and pragmatic, but I imagine he sometimes fancies himself as a summer hero of the Alpine cols. Perhaps Federico Bahamontes, the Eagle of Toledo, whose climbing ability once put him so far ahead of his rivals that he waited at the top of an Alp in the Tour De France, eating an ice-cream, so he didn’t have to make the descent on his own. Or Robert Millar, the eccentric, fragile Scot, still the highest placed Briton in the Tour, who won the red-and-white spotted jersey of the King of the Mountains three times. Even Marco Pantani, “the Pirate”, big-eared and tiny-framed, an Italian mountain specialist who came back from terrible injuries to take on and beat the mighty Lance Armstrong, only to squander his life and talent on cocaine and paranoia – dead in a Rimini motel room at the age of 34. The cocktail of triumph, tragedy, bravery and romance that draws thousands to professional bike racing is easily encapsulated in the frail figure of the climber.

Nearly six feet tall and fourteen stone, I was never going to be a climber, and I have never had the wild-eyed recklessness and brutal aggression of the finish-line sprinter. But in my dreams I could be a rouleur, a flahute, a Flanders hard-man.

At the Tour De France, the big men spend much of their time in the so-called Autobus. By the time the Tour reaches the mountains, this group of heavier, slower riders hang behind the leading racers; one wheel ahead of the Voiture Balai, the minibus with a symbolic broom strapped to its roof, which sweeps up those who’ve decided enough is enough. Someone in their number will calculate mile-by-mile, how slowly they can ride yet still finish within the time limit for disqualification.

By this time, they will already have had their hour in the sun – some will have dropping back to the support car to pick up drinks or extra clothes for him, then fought their way to the front and held their course in the fifty-mile-an-hour dashes to the line, elbows out, nostrils flaring, heads down, which characterise the early stages of the Tour. Some will have babysat their team leader, sheltering him from the wind, straining and sprinting to catch back up.

Others will have spent their time watching rival teams as the peloton picked its nervous way through the early stages, ready to wind up the pace and smash opponents’ resolve; chase down those unwise enough to break away and go for glory; or set off themselves on madcap solo efforts, in a small break of riders doomed to be caught by the finish line but still happy if their sponsors’ jerseys get some prime time TV coverage, and their own names come to the attention of the team managers, the all-powerful Directeurs Sportifs

But for a few, their lives flourish not around the Grand Tours of Summer, but the Classics – the one day races of Spring and Autumn, on flatter roads, in unpredictable weather, when the great cols and alps are impassable and covered in snow. When the wind howls uninterrupted from the North Sea and the roads are wheel-rim deep in the mixture of rainwater, mud, agricultural chemicals and cowshit that American riders christened Flemish Toothpaste.

The Ronde Van Vlanderen - the Tour of Flanders; Ghent-Wevelgem; Liege-Bastogne-Liege; the Het Volk and Amstel Gold – harsh, brutal races in harsh, brutal landscapes. But the Queen of them all remains Paris-Roubaix.