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

86 страница из 104

‘You can get over it. We trained around there. The first half – the first three or four ks – are hard, but if you can get over that, you can settle into it. The last 10km are steady.’

‘Really?’

‘You can go for that one.’

The riders were coming out of the Alps, heading west: the stage was a bridge to the final mountain of the Tour, on the penultimate day: Mont Ventoux. But the stage Riis was talking Cavendish into – stage nineteen, from Bourgoin-Jallieu, in the Rhône-Alpes, into the Ardèche valley, then on to the town of Aubenas – was anything but flat. It was mountainous; the etymological root of the town’s name, ‘Alb-’, means ‘height’. Aubenas sits on a hill overlooking the valley.

It was the kind of stage that Cavendish, the best sprinter of his or perhaps any other generation, would have studied and then probably dismissed. Cavendish and Riis had this in common, if nothing else: both were assiduous in their preparation. Every evening, while some riders were playing computer games or phoning home, Cavendish would study the official road book: the bible of the Tour, detailing every village, every hill, every bend in the road, along with brief tourist-style descriptions of the start and finish towns (‘Aubenas,’ read the entry for stage nineteen, ‘perched on a rocky spur overlooking the Ardèche Valley, with a population of 12,000, benefits from the temperament, the accent and the radiant smile of the south. In the summer, the sunlight illuminates the treasures of the town, captivating the senses of those who visit the city of the Montlaurs …’).