The rider jumped away from the pack as soon as he passed The Devil. He rose out of his saddle, stood on the pedals and sent his bike powering up the last hundred metres of the Col De Tourmalet. He thought he heard the whisper of a groan from the rest of the peloton as they went out the back. He knew none of them had an answer to his strength today plus, as insurance, his two remaining team members, his domestiques, who had come to the front with him suddenly slowed, disrupting the counter-attack and giving it no time to form before he crested the hill, after which there was only descending. And no one descended like him.
The plan had always been to jump as soon as The Devil was reached. The Devil was really a bike builder from some Eastern German town who positioned himself and his giant bicycle on a trailer towards the end of every stage of the Tour De France, dressed in a full scarlet Satan outfit complete with trident, tail and horns. When the leader appeared he ran alongside him, gibbering and jumping for the TV cameras.
For the last minute on the steep upward slope the rider had been riding through a huge, screaming crowd in a space only just as wide as his bike. Hands reached out and touched him on his head, his back, slapping him and trying to push him along. Then he felt a sudden ice-cold shock, which he always forgot was coming. There were always some of the crowd whose fun was to throw water in the faces of the riders; they pretended they were helping to cool them down but really the rider thought they were taking the rare chance to piss on the face of a sportsman. This was one of the many ways in which cycle racing was the greatest, most difficult sport of all. There was no other sport where you got a chance to do that and for free, no entry fee at all.
Then the crowd were behind the barriers, he was at the top of the hill and they were gone. The very last five metres were almost vertical, suddenly he felt a stab of pain in his chest and a spin of dizziness that put him in a confused fog for a second; when that cleared he was at the very pinnacle of the climb — below him was a twenty kilometre road more or less straight down the mountain to the finish line at the bottom. He sat back briefly and zipped his top up to the neck in readiness for the sandblast of alpine air that was to come. As long as he didn’t crash, the stage was his and tonight the yellow jersey would be on his back. All — all! — It was a very big all. All he had to do now was to freewheel down the mountain at speeds of up to ninety kilometres an hour, not touching his brakes, ass in the air, head on the bars, leaning in and out of corners, slender tyres shimmying on the gravel at the bends, looking out to a drop of clear oxygen miles below.
Descenders are the bravest men in a brave sport. Sure the sprinters pushing to the front in the last quarter mile risk slipping down and bringing fifty riders on top of them, sure the climbers push themselves to bursting, pedalling fast up the sides of mountains so steep that spectators standing looking back down the road find that the tarmac is almost touching the back of their head, and sure every rider in the Tour De France has pedalled for nine hours and more with leaking abscesses in their skin and blood trailing from wounds in their knees, and sure they all take the new drugs which leave no trace except that your life is decreased by a month or a year or two and they all know that the average life expectancy of a racing cyclist is fifty-eight, so what the hell. But the descender goes through all that and still it is only the descender who risks sailing out into space at ninety kph, legs milling away, like some aeroplane explosion victim still strapped in their seat, his feet locked into the pedals, unable to break free even when they bounce to the ground.
His speed increases as the drop begins to pull him along the road, past the pine woods that flicker away on either side in a susurrating rush. The rider changes into his top gear, biggest front cog, smallest back, but after a few seconds of grip his legs spin uselessly, the wheels turning faster in their belabouring cones than he can pedal, gravity is doing all the work now but gravity won’t be getting a bonus from the team sponsors tonight, gravity won’t be standing on the podium in a yellow jersey waving a stuffed lion about and making sure the cameras see the name of the insurance company that is written all over him, gravity won’t be the winner of the Tour De France — he will.
He notices the motorbike-borne TV cameras have gone and he is alone, their pilots can’t keep up with a descending racing bike, titanium alloy and carbon fibre, wires and chain weighing only seventeen pounds and a rider who weighs not much more. He glances down at the computer on his handlebars, forty kilometres per hour, forty-five kilometres per hour coming up and now there is nothing to do except hang on.
Unusually during a race he has time to think and to look around.
The police keep all the cars and the crowds away from the drop so he is by himself, himself and the onrushing air. For a few seconds the woods stop and the road flattens, on one side there is a meadow coated with alpine flowers, a lovely small, crystalline pond filled with water lilies. At the side of the pond a family is picnicking. A woman, two small children, they wave and call to him in his own language to stop and rest with them, are they crazy? This is the culmination of his life. This day is what he has avoided the entanglement of friendship and family for. He can’t stop now.
When he had started racing as a boy the communists had still been in power, at the academy they had told the boys and girls that their deeds brought honour on the people’s republic. Well, not their deeds but their wins, their losses counted for nothing. To win, they were told, was simple; all they had to do was to dedicate their entire lives to the idea of winning. To only associate with winners, to eat what winners ate, to think what winners thought. Sometimes there was no medicine in the hospitals but the state’s laboratories could always manufacture poison for him to put into his body, or there might only be size two shoes left in the shops but he always had the latest Italian components for his bike. He didn’t think about it, a winner didn’t.
After the communists went and the democrat playwright briefly took over, and then the democrat playwright went and the gangsters who seemed to be a lot of the old communists took over, he joined a team based in Belgium. His life didn’t change that much: the people’s republic was replaced by the insurance company, he didn’t take much interest in the world outside of cycle racing, he never went to plays or the cinema, never read a book, the only thing he watched on the TV was sport. Somebody had told him that things were bad back home, he couldn’t remember who or what.
The trees seem darker now, almost black and very tall, shutting out a lot of the light as he rips past. Then a gap appears and he gets a view of the valley below: a man in strange old-fashioned dress is ploughing and behind him, unnoticed, some kind of hang-glider with wings made out of feathers seems to be about to fall into the sea. Sea? There shouldn’t be any sea here, he must have imagined it. He can’t check, the trees close around him again, a fast right-hand bend comes up, he sticks his knee out to add a little extra gravity and hurtles round it not touching the brakes, then a plateau, and another gap on the right. There seems to be a huge lake, black and polluted with dead trees around its edge and half-sunken ships poking out of the tarry waters. Then that vision too is gone and it is more rocks and scrub on both sides and steep downhill again, faster and faster, flicking left and right and left again, not slowing for a second.
The road flattens now, almost coming to the end of the drop and a village is approaching. Doesn’t look like a French village though, more like the wooden board and picket-fenced houses from back home. Several of the buildings are on fire and others are black burnt shells. In the main square just off the road, an armoured personnel carrier pulls up to the door of an onion-domed church and opens fire with its turret-mounted machine gun, the tracer rounds soon set the building on fire. A woman and two children run out into the road and wave at him but the rider swerves round them — after all, the Tour’s own corps of gendarmes on their blue BMWs will be along in a second and they’ll be able to deal with whatever the hell is going on. Some kind of farmers’ demonstration perhaps.
Around the final bend now, doing a steady thirty-five K, the finish line coming up, but where are the crowds? Must be something to do with what’s going on in the village up the road. The only one there is The Devil — how did he get down here so quick?