We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo
by the start line, playing the greatest hits of the Police. Above us, a broadcast helicopter flies around, taking in the city, testing the thin morning sky.
Rafael comes over. The starting paddock is a small village, and Rafael has been walking it like a local notable, greeting journalists, organizers, other directeurs. He takes a moment to watch us. “Raise the tempo,” he says. Fabrice’s expression becomes stern. He shifts his weight to the front of his saddle. The hum of the trainer’s flywheel rises.
I think of Liz saying that she will try to watch us on TV this afternoon. Last year one of the other teams’ riders broke away from the pack and rode ahead of everyone for three hours. He was alone and riding hopelessly into a headwind. The peloton, with all the aerodynamic efficiency of a large group, caught and overtook him easily before the finish. He never really had a chance of winning.
Questioned afterward, he said it was his wife’s birthday. He knew that if he rode off the front she’d get to see him for three hours on her TV screen. Also, his sponsor, a manufacturer of household cleaning products, saw its logo displayed upon his sweat-soaked race kit for most of the day.
* *
When we start, we start slowly. Spectators cheer and blow air horns and we press down on our pedals and roll gradually up to speed. On the road something loosens inside us, because we are no longer dreading anything.
We are people who understand each other. We talk together. Cyclists from other teams often pull alongside Fabrice to ask him about their dreams. Teeth, I am led to understand, are powerful and recurring metaphors.
Tsutomo and I fall back to the support vehicle to collect water bottles for the other riders. Most often, this is what our assistance entails.
We roll through alpine foothills. We are on a highway cleared by gendarmes who now stand to the side of the road watching the crowds.
Our team surrounds Fabrice as we ride. We try to keep him near the front of the pack of riders, ready to chase down any competitors who might sprint off ahead.
Rafael shouts all sorts of technical details through our earpieces: speed, wind direction, projected wattages. He says, “I’m happy. Let’s not fuck this up.”
* *
Cycling is about moving through air. There are technicalities—distinctions like “turbulent” and “laminar flow,” for instance—but really it is that simple. To push alone through the air is so much harder than moving along in the slipstream of another rider. The peloton—the group composed of the majority of riders, moving close together, sharing turns at the front—is much more efficient than any solitary cyclist. Victory in a tour is about staying with the peloton first of all, and then breaking from it to gain time when other factors, such as steep gradients, crosswinds, conflicts, or confusions, temporarily diminish its capability. The role of myself and Tsutomo is to keep Fabrice ensconced safely within the group for most of the race, to leave him enough energy to push ahead when the rest of us falter.
I still remember explaining all of this to Liz for the first time: the pleasure she took in it, and the satisfaction I took in turn in her engagement. She has a biologist’s interest in adaptive strategy, in hidden motives and cooperation. We were in a coffee shop. She listened intently, leaning forward, fiddling with a sugar packet which eventually tore, spilling brown grains of sugar onto the wooden tabletop. “It’s kinship selection,” she said.
“Sorry?” I said.
“An evolutionary concept. You’re like a honeybee, giving up a chance to breed for the queen.”
“Yes?”
“The best strategy for your own reproductive success is to assist another who shares your genes,” she said. “Speaking figuratively.”
“Right.”
“ ‘Genes’ in this case being your team, your sponsors.”
“A maker of chicken nuggets,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said, laughing.
It was flattering to be considered in this way, to have my dedication regarded as something worthy of inquiry. Until I met Liz, I thought of charm as a proactive quality, something one deployed upon others. And yet she is charming in the opposite way, finding interest in the lives of those she meets, drawing out their stories.
Presently, she has turned her earnestness to B. She doesn’t just observe his actions as I do but considers them in the context of his development. She hides a toy and speculates on whether he knows it hidden or considers it destroyed. She builds a narrative of his growth, threads events into a rich story, which, to my discomfort, currently advances forward without me.
* *
Lunches are canvas bags thrust out into the road by team helpers. We catch them as we move past, hook them temporarily over our shoulders, pick out energy gels and rice cakes.
There is an alpine river thundering along beside the highway, a railway on the other side. We roll past the outskirts of a town, past its supermarkets, lumber yards, and warehouses.
We leave the straightness of the highway. We begin to climb more steeply up a thinner, winding road toward some ski towns. Here the crowd is deeper. The spectators are attracted by the gradient: the chance to see us slow, suffer, begin to exhibit our differing capabilities. They have waited, written messages onto the road in whitewash. As the slope steepens, the peloton is less effective. Air resistance becomes a smaller portion of what holds us back. Riders start to tire, dropping gears, grimacing.
Fabrice is concentrating. Discussions of dreams ceased long ago. Tsutomo and I ride ahead of him, pushing hard, seeking to keep up with two teams, one sponsored by a northern European banking group, the other by a French manufacturer of farm machinery, who are raising the pace. People break from the lines of spectators at the roadside and run beside us. They bellow, wave their hands wildly. A fat man wearing lederhosen and a cowboy hat jogs at a speed one would not expect his build to allow, shouting into Fabrice’s ear.
Pedals creak on their spindles. Some riders stand, some sit and spin, their bodies rocking in the saddle. Fingers dig into handlebar tape. “You’re into the red zone, Tsutomo,” says Rafael over the radio. The red zone means that Tsutomo’s pulse is high, that he is exerting himself in a way that cannot be maintained. There is so much data taken from us that it must be returned simplified into a color-coded system. From the car, Rafael has access to our pulse rates, our speed, and the power we push through our pedals. Tsutomo slows and drops behind me and Fabrice in order to recover. I look back and realize that we have broken from the majority of riders. They are strung out behind us, down the switchbacks of the mountain, their progress assessable by flashes of their brightly colored kits and the activity in the crowd as they pass.
I am nauseous. We have to summit this hill, descend, and then summit another before the day’s finish. There are forty kilometers to go. I try to give myself to my pace, convince myself of its inevitability. The bankers and the agricultural machinists have lost riders too. Our group is now forty or so riders strong. I think of my feet making circles. I try to imagine these circles as being independent of me, mechanical and necessary.
Two kilometers from the top of the climb, Tsutomo passes me and settles in front. He seems to have energy back but his pacing is erratic. He surges and slows a little. I see his forearms quiver with the effort.
“Very good, boys,” says Rafael into our earpieces. “Let’s keep this.”
I stand on my pedals and glance back at the other riders, at the road falling away behind us. To my rear, Fabrice just holds his head down. He offers no hint of his condition. We crest the peak in the same group of forty. We begin to descend. As we start to freewheel, we do the zips of our cycling jerseys right up. The road dips away and we crouch into our bicycles. Having been unable to separate from each other, riders now work together, stringing out into a line. The wind rushing past chills us. Our sweat-soaked kits quickly become clammy. The air tears through the insubstantial lycra to our skin. There are few fans on this side of the mountain. The action is too fast