Rafael stands in the aisle and speaks, working hard for our attention. He does something with eye contact. There are rules, and he is as brazen in the breaking of these as any New Ager: holding gazes longer than should be bearable, really staring into us. “Be ready,” he says. He indicates Fabrice. “Keep him with the other leaders. Be ready every moment.” As he is finishing up, he looks at Johan. “Other than Sebastian,” Rafael says, “we won’t dedicate anyone else to lead you out in the sprint. Fabrice’s place is too precarious. Do what you can. Follow one of the sprint teams’ lead-outs. Get in their space.”
Johan nods reluctantly.
* *
Shinichi is once more waiting when we disembark at the start line. He waves a Japanese flag, part-bundled in his fist, when Tsutomo walks past. “Good luck,” he says to me. I nod appreciatively but choose not to stop.
We wear running shoes when not in our cycling cleats: brilliantly colored, with reflective piping and technical flourishes rendered in different polymers. Provided by a sponsor, they’re clumpy and incongruous beneath our tight shorts and shaven legs. We have no need for them, we who do not run or walk any great distance. Like the sneakers of the elderly, of young children, of Americans holidaying abroad, they accentuate our immobility. We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.
I have pictured my inflexibility when B will be bigger, when he will play in our back garden and seek companions in this play: the awkward, loping stride, the hunched way in which I will kick a ball.
Today’s stage begins on cobbled streets, and our rubber soles squeak across the polished bellies of the cobblestones as we congregate outside the bus. The mechanics do final checks on our bikes, working in order. Fabrice’s is looked over first, my own fifth. The Butcher comes by, pressed into another role: exhorting us to drink a concoction of electrolytes and syrup. Stationary cycle-trainers are assembled and we’re summoned one by one to begin warming up. Fabrice and Tsutomo stamp into their cycling shoes and start to pedal. The increasing fluidity of their movements, and the rising zip of the electromagnetic resistance wheels, makes me think of something taking off.
Later, as I stand by the bus inventorying my kit, Fabrice wheels over on his bike. “Two men are in a bar watching the Tour,” he says.
“Right.”
“It’s raining, and the riders are going up a mountain.” Fabrice rubs at his hair and smiles. “Really filthy weather.”
“I know the kind,” I say.
“‘Why do they do that?’ says the first man. He does not understand. He shakes his head. ‘The winner gets half a million euros,’ says the second man.” Fabrice waits. Watches me with a faint smile. “ ‘I know that,’ says the first man, ‘but why do the others do it?’ ”
I laugh. “It’s good,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, chuckling. “It has truth in it.”
“Yes.”
He winks. “Luckily I am the winner.”
Rafael has been chatting with the directeur of the German banking team, over by their bus. He turns, laughing, finishing his own joke. He points at his colleague, smiles. “Be good,” he says. He walks toward Fabrice and me. “Steady,” he says. “No fuck-ups today.” He stands over the front wheel of Fabrice’s bike, slaps Fabrice’s cheek playfully. Rafael has more faith in his team leader than anyone. Rafael discovered Fabrice, so the story goes, on a holiday to Corsica, coming across a skinny twelve-year-old coaxing a rusty mountain bike up a pass as he himself drove to a hunting lodge. He had his mentor, an ancient Italian, visit Fabrice to examine the boy and feel his legs. The mentor sucked his dentures, it is said, and declared Fabrice a future great. On Fabrice rests not just Rafael’s hopes for the Tour, but the validity of Rafael’s judgment and an uncharacteristic sentimentality: his belief in a lineage of talent conferred upon small boys in remote towns, as sure and unpredictable as the rebirth of the Lama.
Riders are making their way toward the start now. Fabrice clicks into his pedals, rolls off toward the line with a little push of encouragement from Rafael. I put on my glasses. I climb onto my bike, and ride off in pursuit of Fabrice, offering my apologies as I cut through the crowds, past vehicles. I stop behind the line among the tight press of other racers. I smell sunscreen, saddle ointment, washing powder. Riders ratchet closed cycling shoes, do up helmet straps, adjust the placement of cycle computers.
It is the period before the starting horn goes when to be still is harder than anything. We shift and fidget: energy spilling over into action, like water from a brimful glass.
* *
When Liz and I had been together for a couple of months, she brought her mother and stepfather to watch a race of mine. It was an evening racing series in London: laps of a small urban circuit on the streets of Bermondsey. Sebastian and I did it without team support. It was nothing, a training session, but I felt as I rode a desire to do well. It was dusk, and there had been rain in the day. The air smelled of wet concrete, and the streets were slick. I pushed hard around the last laps. There were semipros who wanted the victory, for whom beating Sebastian or me would have been a great coup, and they were testing us, taking risks. On the penultimate corner, I went into the bend in first place yet skidded over as my front wheel lost traction. I lay in a crumple under a barrier as riders zipped past me.
I remounted and came home in the middle of the pack. I wheeled my bike over to where Liz, Thomas, and Katherine stood. I felt the burn of having wanted that small race too much. “You were close,” said Katherine.
“It was just a silly thing,” I said.
She nodded. “Of course.”
“It was the cobblestones,” I said. “They’re lethal in the wet.”
“Technically,” said Thomas, “those are sett stones. They’re worked stones. Granite. A nice job, I must say.” Liz frowned at her stepfather. She studied the bike as I leaned on it; it was undamaged but for some of the handlebar tape, which was torn and uncurling, hanging like ringlets from the bars. She shook her head. She knew that it was just a small race, an insignificant thing, and yet I saw that she had been seduced, as I had, by the thought that it was a chance to show her mother the seriousness of what I did.
It was a consolation, actually, to realize that Liz had felt the stakes too. I thought of something she had said about my career before: “It must be nice to be able to succeed so clearly,” she said. “To have such definite parameters. Clear successes. No one is cheering me in my lab.” That night, however, demonstrated the drawbacks of performing one’s profession so publicly: the way in which expertise and preparation could be occluded by bad luck, the way that an expected success can buckle under the weight one has put upon it.
* *
Less than a kilometer after we begin, a handful of riders from opposing teams sprint away from the front. The peloton does not react to this but instead grinds along. Most of us are still finding what the day will be, trying to conserve and gauge our energies. We compete on each of the twenty-one days of the race, but there are unwritten rules, expectations and traditions which reach back to the men with their steel bikes, bad teeth, and muddy visages, to the stutter and shimmy of old newsreel footage. Not every minute of every day is heedless competition. There are truces and lulls, and moments of peace. Some of Liz’s friends were disappointed to hear this, I remember, as if I were telling them that my sport was nothing more than professional
