Etape. Richard Moore

hardy had bothered to come out and brave such atrocious conditions. Still Pelier could not be sure that he would hang on. ‘It was only when I was two kilometres from the finish that I knew I was going to win. I knew then that it was impossible for them to catch me.’

      Inside the final kilometre, with barriers lining the road, the crowd didn’t thicken until the final 500 metres. The road rose to the finish and Pelier lifted himself once more out of the saddle. The clock ticked past six hours, 57 minutes. He had spent four and a half hours alone.

      Behind Pelier as he approached the line, the official car, containing Hinault, flashed its headlights twice as though in celebration. And then, finally, Pelier sat up, at last able to straighten his back, and wearily lifted his arms. The peloton arrived a minute and a half later: they had been closing all the time.

      Beyond the line, Pelier was intercepted by an army of Tour workers clad in Coca-Cola outfits, and behind them the photographers and reporters muscled in as the winner slumped over his handlebars, absolutely exhausted. ‘It was a bit suicidal,’ he managed to tell reporters, ‘because of the headwind. I think nobody behind me believed I could make it to the finish. They all thought they would see me again before the end of the stage.’

      Then Pelier looked up, and stretched to see over the crowd. Word had reached him that his parents were there. But he refused to believe it until he saw them with his own eyes, and the TV cameras captured the moment when his face crumpled and tears began streaming down his cheeks. He raced towards them and as he neared his father, reached out, saying, ‘Mon père, mon père!’

      It altered the narrative of the stage; surely, thought reporters, Pelier had been spurred on by the knowledge that his parents, Pierre and Janine, were at the finish. But Pelier had no idea. ‘No, absolutely not,’ he says now. ‘It was a total surprise. I didn’t know they had decided to come. To see them at the finish was a big surprise.

      ‘My dad had had the opportunity to see me at some races in my career, but my mum could never make it because she always cared for my brother, and stayed with him. But my brother was in a specialist centre for the holiday, and it fell during the Tour de France. My parents found themselves with a few days free and alone. It was the first time in six years my mum came to see me in a race. It was very emotional, very special.’

      It was evident to all the world when he appeared on the podium and Pelier, jaw quivering and tears still streaming, accepted his prize, and his place in history, with the second longest solo breakaway in Tour history.²

      * * *

      ‘I was married, I had four children, and I was thinking of my future.’ Pelier is talking about his retirement, just over a year after Futuroscope, when he was still only twenty-eight. ‘I had an offer to join LeMond at Z, but in 1990 I had another accident. I fractured my knee in the Tour of Spain. I had to stop for a month and during that period I decided to retire. Having two serious accidents in two years influenced my decision. The career of a sportsman hangs by a thread. A rider is like a Kleenex. Once it’s been used, you throw it away.’

      He was offered a job with the Regional Council of Franche-Comté, helping professional sportspeople manage the transition to ‘civilian’ life. ‘They wanted a sportsman to run this and they gave me a budget to put in place a programme that allowed top sportspeople to retrain and find a job after their career.’

      Pelier’s own transition did not run smoothly for long. His wife, whom he described as ‘an extraordinary woman’, passed away. And after three years running a programme for ex-athletes, Pelier left to set up his own business, a bike shop. It didn’t work out, and now with five children to look after he struggled with financial problems. These days, he works part-time for the municipal council in the tiny village of Chaux-la-Lotière in Franche-Comté, western France. In this role, Pelier is a handyman who might be cleaning the streets, or clearing rubbish. It is not what he dreamed of, he has said, adding: ‘If it is not rewarding, it is not dishonorable.’

      But that is not all. Pelier has something else. Art. He is a sculptor, producing in his workshop magnificent wooden objects, from figurative representations of animals to swirling abstract creations. Some of the abstract objects are large but delicate looking; one could represent an athlete, perhaps a cyclist, head tilted back, arms in the air. ‘Even as a rider, I was passionate about art,’ Pelier says. ‘But I really started in the last ten years and I progressed quite fast. I have a feeling for it, and I now have a job that allows me to do it.’

      When the 2012 Tour visited Belfort, close to Pelier’s home, the 1989 stage winner paid a visit. He had something for Bernard Hinault: a wooden sculpture, almost like a giant hand, with five prongs, one to represent each of Hinault’s Tour wins.

      As for his previous life: ‘I follow cycling from afar, and the Tour always makes me excited, but I don’t feel the need to go to races.’ The only memento in his wood-carving workshop, where he spends so much time and where he says he feels happiest, is a framed picture of his first mentor, The Viscount, Jean de Gribaldy. ‘I have my life now,’ Pelier says, ‘and I give myself one hundred per cent to that. Cycling is behind me.’

      Classement

      1 Joël Pelier, France, BH, 6 hours, 57 minutes, 45 secs

      2 Eddy Schurer, Holland, TVM, at 1 minute, 34 secs

      3 Eric Vanderaerden, Belgium, Panasonic, at 1 minute, 36 secs

      4 Adrie van der Poel, Holland, Domex, same time

      5 Rudy Dhaenens, Belgium, PDM, s.t.

      6 Eddy Planckaert, Belgium, ADR, s.t.

      2 Two years later, another Frenchman, Thierry Marie, managed an even longer solo breakaway, staying clear for 234km to win stage six in Le Havre. The record, 253km, still belongs to Albert Bourlon, who died a month short of his 97th birthday in October 2013.

      L-R: Thor Hushovd, Mark Cavendish, Gerald Ciolek

      24 July 2009. Stage Nineteen: Bourgoin-Jallieu to Aubenas

      178km. Undulating

      On 20 July, at his hotel in the Swiss Alps, on the second rest day of the 2009 Tour, Mark Cavendish was approached by a rival team manager, Bjarne Riis.

      A controversial figure who had admitted to doping when he won the Tour in 1996, Riis was now running the Saxo Bank squad, and one of his riders, Andy Schleck, was still in contention to win the 2009 Tour. As a manager, Riis had earned a reputation as one of the sport’s thinkers and innovators, whose teams were tactically astute and exceptionally well organised. Partly this reputation might have been due to his demeanour: Riis, a Dane, was cold and inscrutable, his aloof manner suggesting he was in possession of a secret code.

      But today, Riis had something else on his mind when he walked over to Cavendish’s table as he ate dinner.

      ‘Have you looked at the profile for stage nineteen, the finish in Aubenas?’ Riis asked.

      ‘Yeah,’ said Cavendish. ‘Kind of. Looks like a massive climb at the end.’

      ‘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,