Peyresourde are mentioned in the sporting press for months before and after each race. They roll from the tongue as fans argue about who will be strong and where. Fathers tell their children stories about these places, and old men look back at when they raced and dreamed of conquering their lofty peaks.
The mountains are theatre in which the Tour de France is played out in front of its most loyal fans. On the biggest peaks the diehards will arrive with their tents and camper vans up to three days before the race is due to pass. On the day there can be as many as half a million people on one climb, all cheering, drinking, eating and sharing the moment in a big party.
The mountains are where the greatest battles of this historic race have been enacted, and its tragedies played out. In the heat of competition they are fearsome places to be, but away from that, taken at whatever pace you decide, conquering their slopes is something that any reasonably fit cyclist with the proper equipment can do. I hope that this book will help you on your way.
Lucien Van Impe – simply the best © Universal/TempSport/Corbis
The mountains of the Tour de France
They have been part of the Tour almost since it started. The mountains of France have been the Tour’s theatre, where its dramas, its successes, failures and tragedies have been played out.
Anyone with designs on winning the race has to master the mountains, has to be able to soar upwards in defiance of gravity. To see some of the great climbers of this race is to witness a combination of brute force and ballet. Such men appear to have wings on their feet as they dance effortlessly upwards.
Of course it’s not like that at all. It takes years of hard work and application, natural talent, supreme physical fitness and sometimes shear bravery to take on these giant climbs at race pace.
But the bike is a truly beautiful machine. While the racers of this world will use theirs to force their way up the gradients, set records, break personal bests and punish the opposition, others prefer to shift down a gear and take their time.
The mountains belong to both, to all of us really. If you enjoy cycling you can enjoy climbing the mountains of the Tour de France in your own way, and what a lot there is waiting for you.
From the intimacy of the Vosges, through the dark and rugged Massif Central, to the unpredictable Pyrenees and the off-the-scale splendour of the Alps, all of the French mountains are accessible to cyclists. A bit of training, a bit of application, a bit of know how, a sound bike and the mountains are yours for ever. Enjoy!
The mountains of the Tour de France
‘HOW TO RIDE THEM’
Climb every mountain, or so the song goes. And with the right equipment, preparation, a bit of technique and the correct mental approach you can do just that. You can climb every mountain of the Tour de France.
The mountains are a huge challenge in a race, they separate the champions from the very best in the sport, but any averagely fit person who has done a bit of training can get to the top of them, too. Slower yes, much slower in many cases, but that’s not the point. Mountain climbs are a personal challenge and all that matters is that you enjoy your journey to the top.
So what is needed to take on the mountains of the Tour de France? The first answer is obviously a bike. But just any bike? Well, basically yes. The pros in the Tour de France ride on road race bikes made from the latest space-age materials at a cost of thousands of pounds a piece, but you can climb the Tour de France mountains on a road bike, a mountain bike or a hybrid bike. The latter being a bike with some of the features of both road and mountain bikes. All these bikes are suitable for climbing mountains, although you might want to swap some of the equipment on yours to make life easier when you do.
Road bikes
These are what are classically called race bikes. They have dropped handlebars, thin tyres and multiple gears. Entry level models costs about £400 and the amount you pay, as with most things in life, reflects the quality and sophistication of the machine. However, you don’t have to break the bank to buy a good bike. What you are looking for in a road bike suitable for climbing mountains are lightness and gear ratios low enough to allow you to pedal up the climbs in a seated position, and at a reasonably high cadence.
This is the crux of climbing up mountains. You can muscle your way up a short hill by climbing out of the saddle to put more power into the pedals, but you can’t climb the mountains of the Tour de France like that. Not even the pros can. The Tour de France climbs are long, and sometimes they are long and steep. You have to take your time with them. You have to gear down and ride within yourself.
There are two options that give you the low gear ratios you need for climbing Tour de France mountains: triple or compact chainsets. Chainsets are the part of a bike’s drive train that the pedals are attached to. Gear ratios are determined by the size of the chainring on a chainset and the size of the teethed sprockets on the rear wheel. Small chainrings and large sprockets give you low gears, so on a triple chainset there is an extra small chainring, and on compact chainsets both chainrings are smaller than standard.
What goes up must come down
The best system is the compact system because it is the simplest to use, and it’s lighter. You don’t lose high gears either, because most road bikes now have nine or ten sprockets on the rear wheel, more than enough to provide a wide range of gear ratios.
You can buy bikes with triple or compact chainsets, but it’s quite a simple procedure to fit one and adapt almost any road bike to work with them. A good bike shop will advise you on the swap, and happily take on the job if you don’t want to do it.
Touring bikes and cyclo-cross bikes are classified by shops with road bikes. These come equipped with low gears already, so there is no problem there in using either of them to climb mountains. However, cyclo-cross bike have tyres with heavy knobbly treads to give you grip when riding on loose or muddy cross-country surfaces. You should swap these tyres for smooth road tyres if you want to use a cyclo-cross bike in the mountains.
Mountain bikes
Mountain bikes have triple chainsets and very low gears, but their tyres are designed to grip in even worse conditions than cyclo-cross tyres, so they are especially heavy and will cause excessive drag on the hard-surfaced roads of the mountain climbs.
You need to swap these for what mountain bikers call slicks. They are the same diameter as normal mountain bike tyres, but come in a number of widths. As a general point wider tyres are more comfortable to ride on than narrow ones, but no mountain bike slicks are that narrow for this to become an issue. So go for the narrowest you can get.
Otherwise your mountain bike is excellent for climbing mountains, and especially good for descending them. Mountain bikes have a low centre of gravity and they are longer than the equivalent-sized road bike, so they are very secure when cornering.
Hybrid
