Off the Roof

In the official reckoning of the ninth stage, the eight kilometres immediately east of the Mont Bessou crest carry nothing at all. No categorised climb is marked upon them; no intermediate sprint is contested across them; no town the route troubles to name lies along them. On a stage that files its summits with the care of a clerk, the Suc au May, the Croix du Pey, and, a few kilometres back, the roof of the whole day at Mont Bessou, this stretch is entered as a blank, a passage of road between two accountings, of interest, the document seems to say, to no one.

What the blank covers is the roof itself, or rather the long eastern edge of it. Off the gentle crest of Mont Bessou the road runs out across the high granite of the Plateau de Millevaches, the pale impermeable leucogranite that holds the rain where it falls and gives the plateau its bogs and its thousand springs; it crosses open heather and the dark walls of planted conifer at somewhere between about eight hundred and seventy and nine hundred and seventy metres, neither climbing nor falling with much conviction, for these eight kilometres give back, if the survey is to be trusted, a little more height than they take. The printed profile knows none of this. It marks the high point at Bessou and draws from there a single descending line to Ussel, and files the whole of the long run home, this rolling stretch with the rest, under one word: descent.

We turn, then, from the profile to the question the profile cannot answer. It is among the most settled errors of the armchair to suppose that a bicycle race is decided by its mountains. The mountains are merely where the deciding is easiest to see. A gradient is a thing a profile can draw, and what a profile can draw it can also warn against; the rider climbs in full knowledge of what is asked of him, and the strong are sorted from the weak by an arithmetic both can read. The wind is of another kind. It leaves no mark on the page, it announces nothing, and on high open ground, swept and treeless and turned at every angle to the sky, it will do in a quarter of an hour what a fourth-category climb could not do in a season: break the race in pieces, and break it not where the road is hard but where the road is easy.

The history of the race is full of the proof, and the proof is never on a col. In the crosswinds before Saint-Amand-Montrond, on the twelfth of July 2013, the very date on which this stage will be run thirteen years on, the bunch came apart on a flat and unremarkable road in the Berry; a side wind and a well-drilled team did the work, and a rider who had begun the day among the favourites lost the better part of ten minutes and, with them, his place in the race, none of it surrendered on a climb.¹ What the heathland east of Bessou offers is precisely such a road, lifted to nine hundred metres and stripped of every hedge. A break that means to be clear before the true plunge toward Meymac begins will force the pace here; a peloton that loses its concentration will pay for it here; and the shallow ramps the day has left to give will have nothing to do with either.

There is a deeper deception in the country itself, and it bears on the same point. The traveller crossing this moor would take it for a wilderness, ancient and unpeopled, the last of some original Gaul. It is nothing of the sort. Within living memory the plateau stood all but bare, a near-treeless waste of heath and rough grazing; the sombre conifer plantations that now close the horizon are a work of the twentieth century, set out by men within the lifetime of men still living, and the wildness the cyclist admires is as made a thing as the road he rides on.² Under it, older still and likewise out of sight, lies the deep past the plateau does not advertise: a little to the south, off the line of the stage, the Gallo-Roman temples and tombs at Les Cars were raised and abandoned and forgotten centuries before the first forester set a seedling.³ The plateau, in short, is a practised deceiver. It shows the eye a wilderness and conceals a plantation; it shows the map a descent and conceals a climb; it shows the profile a quiet stretch and conceals the one place on the run home where the race might break. Appearances, here, are the whole of the difficulty.

The smaller ledger the four of us keep ourselves has been overturned on exactly this kind of ground, and the timing is hard to miss. At Mont Bessou, two segments and four days back, three of us stood level at the front and Wally trailed; the whole catalogue of climbs from Malemort had not parted us, and the roof had barely begun to. It is the flat days since, the quiet unremarkable ones, that have done the parting. Wally, last and something past a kilometre adrift at the summit, has put together four steady days and hauled the entire deficit back; he now stands level on a hundred and sixty-two, which is to say exactly at the line that ends this segment, with twenty-three still to ride. Justin and Nan are level beside him, the three on the same mark. Marian, who had climbed with the leaders the whole way up, was in these same days making the long crossing from Scotland to British Columbia, and the travelling told on the ledger: a run of short days has slipped her to the back of the four, a touch over a hundred and sixty and a half, something past a kilometre behind. The reshuffle, like the kind the wind deals out, came nowhere near a summit, and owed nothing to the road at all.

The roadbook was right, then, to leave the stretch unmarked, and wrong about why. It left it blank for want of a climb to name; it should have left it blank as the one passage of the afternoon whose difficulty no clerk could enter, because no clerk can enter the wind. Everything the profile is able to draw on this stage has, by now, been drawn and survived. What remains is a high road across an open roof, a town and a finish still some way below, and the oldest lesson the mountains are too honest to teach: that the gradient is the adversary a map can show, and the wind the one it never can.

Sources

• The Plateau de Millevaches, its leucogranite high country and its twentieth-century afforestation (the enrésinement from 1945 onward): Plateau de Millevaches – Wikipédia; "L'enrésinement du Plateau de Millevaches de 1945 aux années 80" (rapport, faux-la-montagne).
• The Gallo-Roman site of Les Cars at Saint-Merd-les-Oussines: Ruines gallo-romaines des Cars – Wikipédia; Tourisme Corrèze – ruines gallo-romaines des Cars.
• The 2013 Saint-Amand-Montrond crosswind stage as an instance of a flat road deciding a Grand Tour: Cyclingnews – 2013 Tour Stage 13 results; Cycling Weekly – Cavendish wins, Valverde loses.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.8. Voice register: edinburgh-review-essay (registers-framework).