
The Col du Lautaret is not a destination; it’s a long and innocuous climb which carries you somewhere, usually to or from the Col du Galibier or the Alped’Huez. When combined with Galibier, as it was in the 2006 Tour de France, it becomes a completely different prospect. The additional 8 kilometres of near 9% gradient makes it a formidable challenge. Looking up at the long string of young Italian riders above me, I was glad I was not climbing it from Valloire, on the other side. After numerous switchbacks nearing the top of the road pass, it finally levelled off at 2,645metres, not much below Bonette, but this time, thankfully, with not a breath of wind.
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Junction where Lautaret finishes and Galibier goes off to the right. |
Close
to the summit of Galibier stands a statue commemorating the life of Henri
Desgrange, the “father” of the Tour de France. A journalist for L’Auto newspaper, he and fellow sports
journalist Geo Lefèvre were given the responsibility for organising a cycling
event that would more than compete with the renowned long-distance cycling
event, Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1,200-kilometre cycle race sponsored by a rival
publication, Le Petit Journal. The
initial idea for the structure of the new race—to hold it in stages—was reportedly
Lefèvre’s, but it was Desgrange who sought to ensure that it maintained its
quickly won reputation as the most gruelling and unrelenting sporting event on
the French calendar.
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The road uo the Col du Galibier. |
The
Tour’s media circus has ensured that cyclists are now lauded like Hollywood
film stars. That aside, their miraculous feats of endurance are no acts,
despite state-of-the-art technology and the ongoing controversy raised by
performance-enhancing drugs. When it boils down to it, the Tour de France is
just that, a tour through significant parts of a spectacular and diverse
country, acting as its showcase to the rest of the world. Like a soap opera,
the actors play their part, gladiators who muster every ounce of physical and
mental courage to be first over the line. What a great recipe for prime-time
television viewing.
* * * * *


What
makes climbing Alpe d’Huez so difficult is not just its length and unrelenting
gradient. For Tour riders anyway, it’s more to do with the fact that the summit
comes at the very end of a long mountain stage. At the end of my long day, I
was happy to have reached the very top in less than 90 minutes, only some 50
minutes slower than Marco Pantani’s 1995 record climb of 37 minutes, 35
seconds. The comparison beggars belief, but as I left the swarm of eateries,
hotels and shops behind me, I still felt like a winner...
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