Bad to the Bone E-Book

James Waddington

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 302

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The greatest cycling novel ever published. Bad to the Bone is a surreal comedy firmly rooted in the technicalities of one of the world's most comme rcialised sports, cycling. The novel's concerns are those of the late-20th century affluent nations - health, drugs, and sanity. '

Leseprobe

Bad to the Bone was published in May 1998 in the UK and has received universal acclaim. It has been hailed as the first great cycling novel, one of the truly great insider sport’s novels and for the quality of its language.

Here are some comments from UK critics:

‘Strange goings-on in the cycling world. International races are being marred as competitors suffer fates including crucifixion, brain loss, and death by frog. Fiendish sports doctor Mikkel Fleischman may be involved, and cyclist Akil Saenz has to decide whether to accept the Faustian pact of Fleischman’s training regime, in his bid to retain the Tour de France. Waddington’s weird comedy is told in prose as sleek and stylish as the rider’s lycra shorts, making this a striking debut.’

Andrew Crumey in Scotland on Sunday

‘Out of nowhere, on a subject I give not a big rat’s arse about, here comes one of my books of the year. A comic leg-pull on the Flann O’Brien model.’

Brian Case in Time Out

‘Waddington transforms his novel into a kind of Frankenstein on wheels … an exhilarating free-wheeler of a novel.’

Helen Rumbelow in The Times

‘Waddington obviously knows his stuff; his novel is well observed and keenly felt. Bad to the Bone is a highly original work.’

Kate Glasspool in The Guardian

‘The humour is broad, at times scurrilous, and contrasts pleasingly with the lyricism of the race scenes; earthbound vulgar humans versus angels in flight. The mystery elements are kept spinning by the investigations of Gabriela Gomelez, a policewoman who is determined that some justice be done for the dead racers.’

Ken Neil for Glasgow Herald’s Book of the Day

‘Candid, bizarre and great fun’

Ben Farrington in The Literary Review

‘Fellow cyclists may be sporting enough to applaud such prodigious talent; rival writers only do so with crossed fingers and through gritted teeth. Nevertheless I have to say Mr Waddington has written a book that is elegant, engrossing, funny, civilised and not at all laddish.’

Peter Buckman in The Sunday Telegraph

‘Waddington is not only an expert on the Tour de France but also on the physiology, sociology and cultural anthropology of cycling. Combined with his intelligent, jaunty voice and his sharpness and wit, this makes for an impressive and really original fictional debut.’

John Murray in The London Magazine

‘We didn’t know bike fiction could be so good, an excellent read.’

Cycling Today

‘Can you name three good works of erotic literature in the last five years?’ John Sutherland. ‘… if we’re talking about books that contain passage of good sex writing then: 1. Bad to the Bone – good on sex with crocuses … Your eunuch would like Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh – it is set in a harem. But if he wants to understand how sex can transcend the merely physical, send him the one short sex scene in Bad to the Bone.’

Rowan Pelling in The Guardian’s Erotic Debate

‘an unfailingly entertaining book to read, full of black humour.’

Galway Life Magazine

‘James Waddington’s excellent, gripping and fantastic Bad to the Bone hits the spot with its wonderful exotic language and its obsession with bodily function.’

Summer Book Selection Cycle Sport

‘Setting a blackly comic novel in the commercialised world of sports cycling already marks out Waddington’s hilarious and surreal book as something different. You’ve never read anything quite like this, and Waddington is clearly a unique talent to watch.’

Barry Forshaw in Crime Time

‘Professional cycling hasn’t inspired much fiction: but the ingredients are there: the lust for glory, the limits of human endurance and the arresting details of the sport itself, such as the ideal rider’s physique – huge muscles above the knee, beanpole pistons below it, and excess lung capacity protruding below the ribcage. It is already enough, even before Waddington’s crazed imagination sets to work.’

Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

‘A tale of superhuman athleticism, a Mephistophelian team doctor and a surreal new means of enhancing performance, this page-turner shows Waddington’s interest in the sport and how commercial forces will shape its future. The literary pages of Britain’s heavyweight newspapers hailed the book as a “gothic horror” and “furiously persuasive”.’

Tim Dawson in Bicycling Magazine (US)

‘the slick gearchanges of Waddington’s pacy prose do for cycling what Walter Tevis’s The Hustler and The Colour of Money did for pool-playing. Even if you are not in the slightest bit interested in the sport, you find yourself pulled along. Suddenly it matters.’

Don Watson in The Record

To Judith

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

Email: info@ dedalusbooks.com

www.dedalusbooks.com

ISBN   printed book 978 1 873982 68 6

ISBN   ebook 978 1 907650 52 9

Dedalus is distributed in the USA and Canada by SCB Distributors,

15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248

email: [email protected]      web: www.scbdistributors.com

Dedalus is distributed in Australia by Peribo Pty Ltd.

58, Beaumont Road, Mount Kuring-gai, N.S.W. 2080

email: [email protected]

Publishing History

First published by Dedalus in 1998

Reprinted in 1999

First e-book edition in 2011

Bad to the Bone copyright © James Waddington 1998

The right of James Waddington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Printed in Finland by Bookwell

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

“It’s very difficult to describe and maybe it’s something you have to experience, but suffering very badly – and it never looks the same on television, even for me watching it looks very fluid and the riders are just climbing the mountains – but the suffering side of it, when you think ‘I’ve just got to get another hour and a half of this climb, and then there’s another ten days,’ that’s what sees people finished off. You’ve just had enough of suffering because you can’t take any more.”

Chris Boardman,Channel 4 interview, 10 July 1996

Contents

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

Stage 5

Stage 6

Stage 7

Stage 8

Stage 9

Stage 10

Stage 11

Stage 12

Stage 13

Stage 14

Stage 15

Stage 16

Stage 17

Stage 18

Stage 19

Stage 20

Stage 21

Stage 22

Stage 23

Stage 24

Epilogue

Prologue

There is a man in Finland who anonymises E-mail for you. Its source becomes untraceable. To make it a waste of time anyone asking him questions, the whole process is done by software without having to pass through his brain. The software deletes each process from the hard disc once it is complete. The software has special anti-undelete properties.

The man in Finland’s computer is like a little gap in space/time. There is no point in torturing him or threatening him with the law if he doesn’t disclose information. He doesn’t have it.

What he does is quite legal in Finland.

Of course this is a lot of words for an E-mail. I have tried to keep it as short as possible. I know the Internet is not a comfortable place for reading, more for looking and doing. I compiled the document, cut it down as much as I could, then transferred it to the man in Finland. I didn’t encrypt it because those who watch over us keep encrypted files to unlock later if possible, whereas something that looks like a made-up story will be automatically deleted within seven days at the most.

The man in Finland installed the file in three directories in three anonymous FTP sites – one in Finland, one in Germany, one in the USA. In case you don’t know, an anonymous FTP site is one from which anyone with a computer and a modem can fetch files. Complicated? A thousand times less than knitting a glove.

These files were marked with ON NO ACCOUNT TO BE DELETED. So someone might by and by have a look, say what the hell is this that is on no account to be deleted.

My gain is that this story is out there somewhere. For me, anonymous like the FTP, it is important that it is heard, if only because we cannot be sure that it is all finished with, that those are dead who should be and that which is destroyed should not be re-invented.

My loss is that someone may see the chance to make a bit of money from my labours. If you there, reading this, are what they call a ‘general reader’, then someone has already done so. If on the other hand you are a cyber-surfer who has just downloaded it by mistake and are thinking what the fuck is this? – pause a moment. If you’re the first, we could be doing each other a favour. I assign copyright to you, and you alone.

By the by, what a patronising term ‘general reader’ is. You may share with this story a fascination with love, with good and evil, with ambition, with curiosity, with anxiety about the future of us all, but the way these things mix with your own life, your own story – unique is too trite a word. Unique reader, I salute you!

Stage 1

The first thing that happened was that Jan Potocki’s body vanished. It could be asked whether he was using it at the time. Even so, it was hard to see why anyone should need it more than Jan. It was lying before it disappeared in the most up to date intensive care unit in Grenoble. Some of Jan’s Catholic fans, they put forward the theory that he had been taken up into heaven. The Vatican through an anonymous spokesman said they saw little reason why heaven should require Potocki’s biological remains. Madame Potocki was understandably upset by his vanishing. Her way of dealing with it was to wail a lot. This with the black scarf and mouth not jammed open too wide looks suitable in photos, but it gets on the nerves when you have the sound track as well.

Jan was in the clinic because he had bashed his head. At the moment he bashed it he was one of the best professional cyclists in the world. But once the mind goes missing, the body starts to deteriorate.

There are long distance swimmers, women who climb Everest alone, there are people with very big muscles who run the hundred metres while you blink. But nothing requires as much sustained power as a three week bike race. Nobody argues about that. To fuel this energy, the riders eat huge amounts of scientifically balanced diet, but by the third week when they are in the high mountains the body is just too hungry, no food can keep it satisfied. It begins to eat itself. The racing cyclist’s body can lose between one point five and two kilograms of muscle in the third week of the Giro or the Tour de France.

The third week. That’s when the great Potocki was brought to the clinic by helicopter, out of it. Out of the Tour and out, for sure, of his head. The skull was there and apparently in its usual shape, but no tenant.

There is a clinician’s photo of Jan on that day, lying on his back on a bed which resembles a plinth or a tomb. Naked, he is still dressed like a cyclist in the silver absence of his tan.

The eyes are open and empty. But, creepy thing, the muscle tone is of a man who is at the peak of his form before the contest begins, sleek, almost plump with fibre. How is this, in the last week of the Tour de France, when this weary engine should be far past its peak tune, the muscles knotty and dented from being too long on the edge of agony and exhaustion.

The clinician’s photo on the third day shows a man in even better shape. It seems that from intravenous nutrition alone the muscles have fattened themselves up, flossed more silky, curvier. The eyes alas are still empty.

On the twenty-first day the main cycling muscle groups like vastus and rectus femoris, the bulges that stand out along the front of the thigh, are enormous – they look like they’re going to split, pupate perhaps and little muscles come creeping out. But all around is a sort of decay like you get in the catacombs, like the last stages of cancer. The nose is a frail beak. The skin doesn’t mould the face any more but stretches dangerously between the bones. This body has not moved, has not twitched for three weeks.

There is no photo for the twenty-second day. If there were, it would show an empty bed. But some time in the night Jan’s body has gone. The clinic authorities said it was a complete mystery, they had state of the art electronic security, backed up by trained and trustworthy security personnel. There had been no suspicious circumstances – nothing on the surveillance monitors, nothing on the entry sensors, no traffic movement. The unit had been max secure from 2100 until the police arrived at 0311. At 0257 the duty nurse on intensive care had gone to the toilet and returned at 0303 to find the bed empty. She had immediately phoned the duty manager, and the police were there, as has already been said, by 0311. The correct procedures were carried out with maximum efficiency.

Jan’s body has never been found.

Stage 2

Jan crashed out because of a frog. This is unusual. It was the year the great Akil Sáenz won his fifth Tour de France, equalling the record.

Most cyclists only look good when they’re on a bike. A top rank cyclist gets off the bike and he looks like a chicken. It’s because he has these developed thighs, and the relaxed muscle almost overhangs the knee. And then below the thighs, where the feathers would come to an end on your chicken, he has these fine lightweight calves. See, the calves are not the engine. The engine is in the heart, the lungs, the ass, the thighs. The calves merely articulate the engine to the machine. The man doesn’t want to carry extra meat over the mountain.

Akil, however, it’s got to be said, he looked good off the bike. He was, in my opinion, rather overburdened with grace, that guy. He even got in Vogue magazine – more power to him, and all good for the sport – but he already had the distinction of being the most powerful engine cycling has seen. With the kind of money that brings in it wouldn’t have done him any harm to look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But no, he is six foot three, and his hair is bronze-gold, and his skin is also bronze. (All this comes from Vogue magazine, I never noticed myself.) Many people from that part of the country they are this way, but there is talk also of some montagne African blood, some two-thousand-metres-above-sea-level-ancestry much closer to the equator. Personally I think this is bollocks. The journos, you know, must have their myth.

So, according to Vogue, he has ‘legs like a gazelle’s, tapering from extravagantly muscled thighs to long sharp-thewed shanks and girlish ankles. His resting heart beats only once every two seconds and his lungs are twice the effective size of the deskbound commuter’s.’

They are not entirely besotted by his physique. They do point out that the perfect taper of his finely muscled torso, cinnamon-gold it goes without saying and without a hint of spare flesh oh yeah dooby dooby, is marred by a bulge below the ribcage. Hernia? A secret lager habit? No, it’s where he keeps the extra of his huge lung capacity. It’s nothing special. All top cyclists have it, like the bulges under the bonnet of old fashioned race cars where they couldn’t quite fit the supercharger into the aerodynamics.

But apart from that, just to finish off with Vogue, he has ‘crocus mauve’ eyes and the features of –and then a paragraph creaming themselves over the fantasy of how some Nordic Hollywood hunk on steroids could’a spent a night of love with an Abyssinian catwalk superstar young enough to be Akil’s little sister. Eugenics and incest, don’t it make the bourgeois heart go pit-a-pat.

It is hoped the picture is beginning to paint itself.

But it is necessary to admit that there was some magic about him. When he looked down on a room of ordinary mortals in the clothes of the daily world, from under his gold-bronze hair and out of his damned ‘crocus mauve’ eyes, it wasn’t just the women who had a sensation of loss.

The day Jan hit his head. The peloton is polyglot. I try to do it like Akil might have seen it.

*

Lay-by, I Sáenz make the hand signal, the whole peloton swings in, dismounts, one hundred and eighty seven streams of piss hit the verge.

One hundred and eighty six. Potocki is disappearing alone around the far bend.

It is permissible tactics.

But. Jan Potocki is the rider most dangerous to me at this point in history.

Jan is not a pure climber. He is not one of those little spider men whose lungs are helium balloons, who when they ride up a ten per cent gradient have only the wind to contend with, because they are immune to gravity. Pure climbers suffer descending. Then they are like feathers trying to hurtle. They have not so much overall power.

I Sáenz, like the eagle I close my wings and I hurtle like a rock.But. I cannot waft like Peluso wafts, turning the big gears, floating above the cranks.

Sáenz, a man of power, he has to find the notch.

With your car climbing an Alpine pass there is a combination of revs and gear where the turbo is blowing full. Your foot is flat against the floor, but everything is in balance, power, torque, aspiration. That is Sáenz. I ride the hills on such a balance, on the notch. Surfing on the huge flow of blood and oxygen, I rhythmically drive this body of the gods which I inhabit to the summit. Then, like a thunderbolt, I descend.

But it is not Peluso the specialist climber who has gone up the road while the rest are taking a piss. It is Jan Potocki. Potocki is not a specialist climber. He also is a man of power.

History tells us that I Akil Sáenz can crush such moves. I bear down upon the fugitive like a hunting dog on a rabbit. My rival senses it even before he sees my shadow, his spirit is broken as sharply as if it were his back.

That is at least how things should be. But something has got into Potocki, literally it seems – something sent to unsettle Sáenz. Potocki is not the man he was. He speaks more than the usual rubbish, is lost so deep in himself that he blunders into fixed objects, cannot remember what day it is, what mountain we are climbing. Fuck, who cares about the mind of Potocki. But the strange thing is, this confusion of mind seems to have given his body gratuitous strength. An extraordinary strength.

These are quick thoughts. The gutter streaming with coureurs’ piss, I remount in restrained haste. A clutter of Cosimo domestiques and other nobodies try to upset us with rabble. I call my team behind me. With head high and peak of casquette pulled down – the eyes in shadow staring down from above signify authority – I scatter the peloton to each side by force of will as I ride to the front. This is Sáenz. If they did not part before him his front wheel might touch the rear of one of these, and the eagle would be sprawling in the dirt, cut and perhaps with a wing shattered. Such a dishonour and a crime they dare not. contemplate.

We ride at the head for some minutes, screwing the pace ever higher. For the moment it is my domestiques at. the front in line of four, and on the second rank my lieutenants, Patrul, Menaleon, Agaxov. I ride with them at an easy gait – yes for me this withering speed is an easy gait, a rhythmic pulse of power that has no end to it. However, back down the road already there will be weaker bodies suffering, so exhausted with two weeks’ riding that they are overcome with the sensations of illness, like flu. They struggle and suffer, waver and pant and sweat and then suddenly, as if the bicycle had a mind of its own, it swoops and flutters to the side of the road and they have to twist their feet from the pedals quick before the asphalt smacks them. Then they weep.

Sáenz cares little for them. This time I have worries of my own. Ten minutes have passed. I am aware of Sarpedón, Baris, Arkhangelski trying to be invisible a few ranks behind me. They are Jan’s men, and they are watching me. They are watching for me and my lieutenants to explode from the front of the group like hunting barracuda out of a shoal of fry.

Sarpedón, Baris, Arkhangelski. A pod of the flesh-eating killer whales that hunt in silence.

Patrul, Patrul Azafrán my trusted compañero, is at my right elbow. I turn for a fraction of a second and look him in the eye. I signal Agaxov to come up on my other side so we ride like one, we three, Sáenz, Azafrán, Agaxov. And Jan’s men, the Cosimos, they watch us.

Out of the blue, so even me, I start with surprise, Azafrán rises on the bars, tilts back his head and roars like an ejaculating bull. Then he ducks his skull as if to charge and his legs seem to accelerate till his feet blur.

But after the start of surprise, I immediately recognise the moment. I go so far as to feel a fleeting sympathy. The adrenalin hits the blood even before the attack has been sprung. I hear the whip! whip! of accelerating tyres above the rush of the air stream as the three Cosimo riders slide by on my right in a blur of silver, Sarpedón, Baris, Arkhangelski.

A move both heroic and empty. They were made fools of by a fiction, the deception of that master of deceivers Azafrán. The three of them waiting nerves on edge for us to go for the break, watching for our every sign, each slight turn of the head, each pressure of the finger on the gear lever; at Patrul’s illusion of escape the tension snapped and brute force took over.

But Patrul had done nothing. He had merely seemed to act. The Cosimo guys were thirty metres up the road in front of us before they looked back and saw they had been duped. They had meant to go with our break, and instead they had gone on their own. Fighting the wind for nothing. Instead of heroes on their wheels they had two of our domestiques who had come from the shadows and dived down the gutter after them, every ligament straining.

Menaleon tucks in behind us and we three become four as we calmly accelerate in unison. We close with the vain fugitives. Their two Qik escorts, at a bark from Azafrán, exhaust the last of their strength with a spurt onto our wheels, cut the Cosimo contact from the vacuum in our wake, then slightly ease the power, slow, fencing them from our escape. It is a beautifully executed movement that takes only a handful of seconds. And now it is our turn to screw up the power, the power which the Cosimo guys wasted in false anticipation a minute before. They are spent, and we are free.

‘We go across to Potocki, boss?’ You can never tell with Agaxov whether his apparent dumbness hides a super-complex but unexpressed tactical cunning. I think not. He seems to see the whole of human life in just a few big squares, like ultra low resolution video when they’re blanking out the significant face in the news picture.

‘Good man, Axo,’ I say to him. ‘No dramatics, just accelerate quietly and take us to the bottom of the climb.’ This man, so immensely strong, but he is also so heavy. – We go across to Potocki, boss? Poor Axo. He can no more go across to Potocki than cows can leap from rock to rock. He can lead us to the foot of the mountain, no more. Then while we take wings he will have to haul himself up like a stone block on a pulley. He will not see Potocki again on this stage.

I get behind Agaxov’s bulk, and watch the slow quickening of the rippling limbs. It’s like being behind a lycra-covered cart-horse. Every time he gets up to full gallop he drops the chain another cog. Finally I watch him move his finger with repetitive puzzlement on the lever. There are no more cogs to drop. I wonder if he can count. He is on 53/11, an enormous gear, and we are beginning to climb.

‘Steady,’ I soothe him. Like a horse, he will go on until he falls, unable to raise his head from a pool of slather. But I can sec the sudden steepening of the road into the ascent proper two hundred metres ahead. ‘Just keep it there, gently gently.’

We hit the ramp. Agaxov falls away like one of the dead to the underworld. I will pat him at supper. Menaleon works at the front for a few minutes, then he too fades. It is just the knight and his squire, Sáenz and little Azafrán.

Now we begin to work on the larger scale. Sáenz is of course the stronger, hut in this situation there is no finer man than Patrul Azafrán. It is freely admitted. Sáenz does not give praise lightly. But here in Patrul we have a man, of humble peasant stock OK, but whose intelligence to his vanity is as infinity to zero, who, entirely self taught, understands machines, computers, sponsorships, contracts, even women. And as if this were not enough Patrul is the man to be with on a mountain.

We are committed. We immediately rise to that level which is not quite pain, he and I, but to the edge. Every muscle from ankle to spine, in the abdomen, the chest, the arms and shoulders is registering a warning that the edge is close, that the abyss of physical collapse – albeit temporary, overwhelming – is about to call us down. Just as it should be. The edge is where we must be riding. This rhythm we are sharing, the rhythm of being on the edge, it’s almost restful. Each circle of the pedals is something shared, like the oar strokes of the galley slave, and we have to make 4000 circles, 8000 contractions of the muscles, before we reach the pass.

We work for five minutes. We know, Patrul and I, we know Jan’s maximum and we know our own. This is almost like a law of nature. Our computers tell us we are going at a steady 21 kph, an astounding speed for this degree of climb. Our bodies tell us that nobody could go faster. There remains another thirty five minutes of climbing. We should be gaining about nine seconds a minute, and come up with a tiring Jan in twenty minutes. Then we either go straight past him or, if he hangs in, we wait until a few hundred metres off the summit and jump him there.

After five minutes Jan’s lead should have fallen to two minutes fifteen.

So when our team car draws level and tells us that instead it has built up to three and a half minutes – you feel it in the heart, an unnecessary addition of pain.

Soon the catastrophe is confirmed. Potocki has increased his lead by another thirty seconds.

There are moments of realisation that all is not to be as you had hoped. Not small things. That your comrades laugh at you behind your back. That cancer shadows you. That your woman has long been in love with another man.

These things make the heart hurt. Physically. It is therefore more catastrophic when such a moment hits you as your heart is labouring at its extreme.

The realisation dropped on Sáenz like a small hawk of failure that suddenly blots out the sky. I was, it seemed, no longer about to join the four greatest bike riders in history. Victory in my fifth Tour de France was being stolen from me by a man who was ascending about ten seconds a minute faster than it was possible for any human being to climb.

And it was then that a sort of panic seized me. One that was to lie below the heart for the rest of time; now sleeping fitfully, now whimpering piteously in its burrow. There, always. There, sitting on the bicycle, my limbs began to shake. And at the self same moment as despair hit me Patrul, he too seemed to lose his head. Without any warning of mental instability he suddenly sat up and he yelled the most undeserved obscenities. ‘Go, go go you fat ponce, piss off you Turk’s whore, you prancing fairy, get off your fat arse and join in the race, you pig’s pizzle, you rat’s rectum, you …’

By the time I had pulled a hundred metres ahead and out of range of Azafrán’s unjust insults I had regained control. I was climbing on the drops, up one of the steepest cols, at a speed most people could not achieve on the flat. I was going so fast that the wind was rippling over the shoulders of the maillot jaune, the race leader’s jersey. Nobody could withstand the force of Sáenz’s attack.

Five minutes later the team car relayed that I was still three minutes twenty seven behind Potocki.

Beneath the power, the beast’s whimpers shook my frame.

It wasn’t just that Jan was having a good day. When you have been racing for a long time you recognise that phenomenon – somebody suddenly finds an unaccountable strength in their legs, and wins a stage by an incredible twenty minutes. It is their day of transfiguration. The next they come 145th.

Something more permanent had happened to Jan. Without there being any apparent reason for it, he had ceased to be the second best. He had suddenly become – I was not being defeatist to feel this – unbeatable. It was a fact against nature.

*

Hey, that man Sáenz, sometimes he entertain a certain opinion you might say about the place he take up in the world. But it is, you might say, not so unjustified. No way he gave up, and of course he won the Tour that year. By Paris he was the winner of five Grandes Boucles. He had equalled the best. He was secure now in his position at the head of the Pantheon of the great, of Coppi, Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain. Next year he would vault up on their shoulders, no problem.

What went on in Potocki’s head before it went vacant for good, that is not so clear. Jan, to be honest even at his best he was a descender like Arnold Schwarzenegger is a ballet dancer, and the last few months his clumsiness had increased, making with the brakes too much or not at all, lurching, running out of road, he was lucky that his bones were still attached at the joints and whole.

Sáenz made up two minutes on him in the snaking plunge. Then came the final few kilometres, a broad road into the village, well surfaced and with gende curves through big trees that came right to the edge. The gradient was now less extreme, but Akil was still doing about 65 kilometres per hour when he passed Jan looking at a sign post.

Azafrán, who had made a truly brilliant descent, passed not long after. I tell you, it is frozen into the mind. It was one totally bizarre scene, so bizarre that one could nearly hit the brakes oneself. Jan, who moments before’d had the Tour de France in his hand, was off the bike, holding it in front of him, gazing up at this little signpost pointing up a track into the forest. His team car was stopped beside him, and Mikkel Fleischman was talking to him, one arm on the shoulder, the other hand pointing down the road to the finish. It was only an impression, but despite the madness of the situation, the impression was that Fleischman wasn’t shouting as any normal team manager might do when his best rider has just thrown away the richest race in the world. He was talking to Jan calmly, like he was trying to talk a valuable racehorse out of a burning stable, something like that.

The grotesquerie was past in a couple of seconds, so to take in the reality, that was something that only came after. But Akil Sáenz had won. Azafrán crossed the line less than a minute after him, a minute twenty seconds up on Sarpedón. Jan Potocki, who by his imperfect challenge had now assured Sáenz of victory, never completed the stage. The uneasy riders at the finish saw the helicopter rise over the trees and head on down the valley.

Apparently he lost his way. He couldn’t be quite sure, he said, where he was supposed to be going, and when he saw this signpost, he thought he’d better check.

Jan would’ve been doing close on seventy kph when this thought wavered across his mind. They said you could see the skid marks. He came back, got off the bike, and stared at the signpost. It was hand painted. They say it was for an hameau, Le Goguenard, three chickens and a goat up a narrow stony track.

Leaders have lost their way before – Robert Millar followed the cars into the slip road at the top of Alpe d’Huez one time and sacrificed the stage – but these are maddening split second errors. Jan, you could only say he had lost his way in a much deeper sense. ‘I just thought it better to check, rather than to be in error,’ he had said, ‘and then I couldn’t recall the name of my destination. I may have become a little confused.’

Fleischman unconfused him sufficiently to get him on his bike and down the road, though with no chance of catching the leaders. It must have taken a minute or two, because Menaleon was up with him, saw his crash, in fact nearly came down with him. He says he was on Jan’s wheel, they were going very fast indeed now Jan was more sure of his destination, and this big frog was hopping out from among the spectators across their line on the apex of the bend.

A professional bike rider, even when he is laid right over on a fast curve, is secure in his reactions. The road is not wet, there is no gravel. You deflect by a few millimetres, you miss the obstacle – or if it is something soft you go over it. A frog is slippery, it will roll skin to skin, but only for a fraction of a second, you calculate not enough to cause a skid.

Apparently Potocki reacted to that frog as if it were a boulder or a cow or a phantasm in the road. He flipped up, lost his line, went straight out across the bend and hit an oak tree like Superman with his bike still clipped to his feet. He was not killed, but what was left of his mind seems to have carried on into the tree when his skull stopped against his helmet. That’s what some of the guys say about helmets. Better to let the job be done properly.