The Giant of Provence

It’s a good thing I write this blog on Mondays. That’s because Mondays are rest days for riders in the Tour de France, so tapping on the keyboard takes my mind off the awful truth that there is no tour stage to watch today.

If you’re following the 21-stage race, you know that Levi Leipheimer, the pride of Butte, Montana (and Santa Rosa, California), had to drop out last week after breaking his wrist in a fall. But yesterday, his teammate on the Astana team, Alberto Contador, asserted his gravity-defying dominance by virtually dancing on the pedals up the steeps of Verbier, which in the winter is part of the 4 Valleys, the largest ski-area complex in Switzerland (this year’s tour could actually be called the Tour de France, Spain, Andorra, and Switzerland). At the end of the day—as British race announcer Phil Liggett is so keen on saying—Contador had grabbed the yellow jersey and an advantage of 1 minute and 37 seconds over the number-two rider, a relatively unknown fellow Team Astana member by the name of Lance Armstrong.

Even Armstrong appeared impressed by Contador’s performance on Sunday, and perhaps even resigned to the probability of his teammate’s eventual win. Now that the riders are back in the Alps, the Spaniard is going to be tough for anyone to catch. If you can manage to watch only one stage in the rest of the race, make it stage 20 on Saturday, when the boys will be making the climb up the off-the-charts difficult Mont Ventoux, the “Giant of Provence,” which contains grades as steep as 11 percent.

In September 2004, my wife Nancy and I had the pure pleasure of taking a self-guided bicycle tour in southern France. The first day of the ride was up and down none other than Mont Ventoux, which as we learned is a magnet for bicyclists from throughout Europe and the world. It was a Sunday, and literally hundreds of riders of all shapes, sizes, and speeds were making the climb with us. From the small town of Bedoin to Ventoux’s 6,266-foot bald summit, a distance of just over 13 miles, the road gains 5,315 vertical feet. The record time for the climb had been set just three months earlier by another Spaniard, Iban Mayo, who pedaled from Bedoin to Mont Ventoux in just under fifty-six minutes. Nancy and I narrowly failed to better that mark—our ascent took only a little over two hours longer than Mayo’s.

At the top we found, among a lot of people and other things, a woman who had set up a huge makeshift, open-air market, where she was selling nothing but hard and chewy candies. I have a world-class sweet tooth, and sweets have never tasted sweeter than they did on that wind-buffeted summit. Had I known about the lofty candy stand in advance, I no doubt would have come even closer to shattering the Spaniard’s record time.

I’d have to say Mont Ventoux is my all-time favorite climb. What’s yours?


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BIKING WITHOUT BORDERS is posted every Monday by Michael McCoy, Adventure Cycling’s field editor, and highlights a little bit of this or a little bit of that—just about anything, as long as it’s related to traveling by bicycle.