Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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The clock counts on: 7.44 … 45 … 46 … 47 … 48 … 49 … And still Indurain powers up the finishing straight. Liggett again: ‘Boardman is the leader of the Tour de France! He’s done it!’

Indurain lunges across the line and the clock stops at 8:04: a full 15 seconds slower than Boardman.

Boardman remembers little of that eight-minute wait. ‘It’s a blur. You do something, there’s loads of noise, then people say: “You’ve done it!” And that’s the first time you start to have self-belief.’

Boardman is perhaps not as impassive as Indurain, but he is not exactly emotional, or sentimental. ‘I was happy,’ he says. Then corrects himself: ‘Relieved. That there had been this opportunity and I’d taken it. I had done what I came for.’

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Bernard Hinault Leads Over the Pavé Early in the Stage

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1 July 1980. Stage Five: Liège to Lille

236.5km. Flat, cobbles

The French call it pavé. It sounds exotic and benign – it could be a succulent cut of beef – but for cyclists it has a different meaning. It is the pavé that defines Paris–Roubaix, the ‘Hell of the North’ one-day classic that includes twenty-odd sections of cobbles, or pavé; hell because these cobbles are not the small stones polished by thousands of cars in a city, but large, uneven boulders planted in mud, arranged to run in narrow strips across the plains and fields of northern France and Belgium.