us back. Riders start to tire, dropping gears, grimacing.
Fabrice is concentrating. Discussions of dreams ceased long ago. Tsutomo and I ride ahead of him, pushing hard, seeking to keep up with two teams, one sponsored by a northern European banking group, the other by a French manufacturer of farm machinery, who are raising the pace. People break from the lines of spectators at the roadside and run beside us. They bellow, wave their hands wildly. A fat man wearing lederhosen and a cowboy hat jogs at a speed one would not expect his build to allow, shouting into Fabrice’s ear.
Pedals creak on their spindles. Some riders stand, some sit and spin, their bodies rocking in the saddle. Fingers dig into handlebar tape. “You’re into the red zone, Tsutomo,” says Rafael over the radio. The red zone means that Tsutomo’s pulse is high, that he is exerting himself in a way that cannot be maintained. There is so much data taken from us that it must be returned simplified into a color-coded system. From the car, Rafael has access to our pulse rates, our speed, and the power we push through our pedals. Tsutomo slows and drops behind me and Fabrice in order to recover. I look back and realize that we have broken from the majority of riders. They are strung out behind us, down the switchbacks of the mountain, their progress assessable by flashes of their brightly colored kits and the activity in the crowd as they pass.
I am nauseous. We have to summit this hill, descend, and then summit another before the day’s finish. There are forty kilometers to go. I try to give myself to my pace, convince myself of its inevitability. The bankers and the agricultural machinists have lost riders too. Our group is now forty or so riders strong. I think of my feet making circles. I try to imagine these circles as being independent of me, mechanical and necessary.
Two kilometers from the top of the climb, Tsutomo passes me and settles in front. He seems to have energy back but his pacing is erratic. He surges and slows a little. I see his forearms quiver with the effort.
“Very good, boys,” says Rafael into our earpieces. “Let’s keep this.”
I stand on my pedals and glance back at the other riders, at the road falling away behind us. To my rear, Fabrice just holds his head down. He offers no hint of his condition. We crest the peak in the same group of forty. We begin to descend. As we start to freewheel, we do the zips of our cycling jerseys right up. The road dips away and we crouch into our bicycles. Having been unable to separate from each other, riders now work together, stringing out into a line. The wind rushing past chills us. Our sweat-soaked kits quickly become clammy. The air tears through the insubstantial lycra to our skin. There are few fans on this side of the mountain. The action is too fast to really appreciate. The only sounds are the wind and the buzz of our wheels against asphalt. If things are going right in a race, there is little pure fear. Instead, the experience is vivid, consuming. Fear is not quite fear if it does not have time to settle, but an energy, a strange quality of attention. My real anxiety comes to me in the evening, when I reflect upon past descents and anticipate new ones.
On the lower slopes of the mountain we enter a village. Shouts and clicks of gears echo off the walls of houses. Out of the village, the road levels. The riders bunch together into a group, two riders wide and twenty deep. We take turns to ride on the front, pushing into a crosswind. The detente which has prevailed during the descent will soon be broken. We anticipate the last climb: the thing that will decide the stage, determine the day’s beneficiaries and victims.
Through our earpieces, Rafael reads out our pace, the distance to the finish line. Tsutomo and I need not make it to the finish with this group, many of whom are team leaders, favorites to win the Tour. We must simply pace Fabrice for as long as we can bear, then we may slow and grind toward the end with the stragglers.
In the flat of the bottom of the valley, hay is being harvested. The air is filled with the rich, peppery smell of cut grass stalks. People stand on the edge of ditches, between the fields and the road, calmer than the crowds on the hillside. They hold up signs or simply applaud.
Gradually, the road tilts into a climb. As a group, we keep pushing, though we know the pace to be unsustainable for all but a handful of us. At times like this I feel it is hardly worth breathing. Something is escaping from me and all my sucking in of air will not return it. My vision closes to encompass just the space in front. Now that we are back on an upslope the crowds are all around us, a blur of replica kits and banners and sunburnt skin. “Concentrate,” says Rafael in my earpiece. “Ten kilometers left.” Tsutomo is behind me and I can feel him faltering. I hear the click of Fabrice’s gear shifter. Fabrice moves past Tsutomo and settles at my rear wheel. We ride a few moments longer and when I look back I see Tsutomo off the back of the group, suddenly just a man cycling up a steep hill alone.
As we go on, other riders begin to drop. Soon there are few more than thirty of us. Someone in the crowd sprays us with water. Spectators are forever proffering water. One may pour it over one’s head, but it should not be drunk. It has been decided that the crowd could contain any number of psychopaths with any variety of designs on our insides. The water could be poisoned, unsanitary, tainted with substances that would interest the dope testers. “You are accountable,” Rafael likes to say, menacingly, “for what goes into your bodies.”
One of the members of the banking team stands on his pedals and attempts to stamp away from the group. The rest of us are alert, however. The group lurches, and draws itself around him.
The life has gone out of my legs. The pace is a machinery greater than any one of us. I feel I am being dragged into it, like a Victorian unfortunate caught in a factory apparatus.
Heroes, here, are made in ten-second increments. I tell myself, Ten seconds more, and then when those ten seconds have elapsed, I tell myself the same thing again. If you can put off your collapse long enough, there is no reason you can’t take everything. However, in the moment, it all feels as rigged as a game at the fair. These increments just get longer.
Then I just drop. Fabrice gives me a nod as I seem to slide backward down the hill. I wait for that slower pace to calm me. I wait for my legs to return. They do not. No pace is slow enough. I pedal in hollow, aching strokes toward the line.
* *
The finish plays out over the radio. Rafael’s exhortations go from encouraging to disappointed and then to slightly threatening, the tone ever detectable through the static. One of the leaders kicks ahead in the final few kilometers, and Fabrice can do nothing to stay with the man. He loses time.
As I approach the line later, Rafael addresses me through my earpiece. “One more kilometer,” he says, “you lazy piece of shit.”
I just keep pedaling. Everybody is passing me. Who knows how many have passed me. Soon, perhaps, a clown on a tiny bicycle will come squeaking up the hill.
Tsutomo, even, is gaining on me. We need just to cross the line, however. Fabrice is the racer; we are his assistants. The fans don’t concede or even seem to know this. They are still hollering, urging us on, trying to hook into some submerged sense of pride. The last kilometer is cordoned off. They lean forward and beat high notes on the bars of the metal barricades. They seek some residue of spectacle, some desire, some fight in our eyes. They don’t get it.
* *
The leading riders, those who haven’t been packed off to massages, podiums, or interviews, roll back down the course warming down, spinning their legs idly. That’s how we recover from cycling: more cycling. I keep my head down and continue to pedal. I pedal and I live in my little increments, endure these blocks of time, and eventually I am across the line.
At the finish, we fight through crowds and trail back to the bus. We reassemble easily because there are no commitments for our riders, no prizes to collect. Fabrice does a couple of
