Finally, Bicycle Racing! Stage 18 - Alpe d' Huez

July 18, 2013

When speculating about how this trip might go, back in May & June, I envisioned rolling out of bed late, grabbing a late breakfast and coffee, exploring the town a bit and then, in time to arrive at the days finish line around 5:00, we'd hop on a bus in the middle of the afternoon, see the excitement, and head back for a late dinner and drinks. Ummm - I was a little bit off. At dinner last night Alina, our guide, announced that we needed to be at the lobby of the hotel at 7:30, fed, and ready to board the bus. After a couple of hours on the bus we would be boarding ski lifts to take us to the finish line and there we would wait for the fun a few hours later. Oh, and by the way, it was forecasting rain.

Keep in mind that, for most of the group, this was their first morning in France and needed their sleep to recover from jet lag. There were about 20 "but, why's?" from the group so she explained. The roads that the riders will be on are closed well in advance, sometimes more than a day. "This isn't like the Tour of Italy where they go shoo-ing people off the roads just as the bikes are approaching..." We had to be on the roads and off the ski lifts before everything got so plugged up we couldn't move.

So this morning we were off. A bus ride to a ski village on one side of the Alpe d'Huez (Oz en Oisans - nicknamed "Oz"), a ski lift (enclosed) to the top of the mountain, then another ski lift down the other side to the pass where the racers would be. Beautiful vistas, cool pubs, good pizza, entertaining people, a hand-made wooden bike; and it rained.

For the uninitiated, the Alpe d'Huez is one of the most famous climbs of the Tour de France and is included every year or two since the 70's. Many of the most memorable finishes have occurred on top. The climb has 21 switch-backs and is 12 km long at over an 8% average grade making it one of the harder climbs in any tour of which it is a part. On this day, the racers would be climbing it twice! The first time they would veer off just before the finish, take a short downhill, climb to an even higher peak, descend to the bottom, and do it again to the finish at the top.


The trick was to find a good position for the first climb then fight the crowds to a good viewing location at the finish. Sadly, our guides weren't much help on figuring this out. Luckily, we had Australians. The Australians, fanatic tour followers, especially since Cadel Evans' win in 2011, always seemed to know what was going on and were friendly enough to share - with the help of an interpreter.

The other thing that we had to work out was "the caravan". This is something that I had never heard of before but an hour or two before the riders a caravan made up of the various sponsors rolls past the crowds and tosses SWAG (stuff we all get) out to them. From t-shirts to hats to candy to laundry soap (ask Wayne if you ever need some) it all comes hurtling out to the crowds. And they do this for all 2,000 miles of the tour. Some spectators will cause bodily harm to capture a free refrigerator magnet. At one point, one of our neighbors, who will be forever remembered as "the SWAG-inator" because he could grab SWAG like nothing I ever saw before, dove for something at my feet and send me tumbling through the open doorway of a ski shop to the surprise of the shoppers and staff inside. The Swag-inator, nice guy that he was, gave me a hat and a cookie for my trouble. Good thing, too, because I was getting nothing on my own.

We ended up in a great spot to watch as the rider we were cheering on, T J Van garderen, was part of a break-away and crested the first climb on the heels of a French rider. Now, TJ was out of contention for the overall tour victory already by this point but it didn't stop us from cheering him on, or the Australians from doing the same for Cadel. So we saw his group come through and then the rest of the riders, including a close pass by the the overall leader, and eventual winner, Chris Froome. The rain had let up by this point but continued to threaten but we moved on the finish line where the bikes would pass by again in an hour.

Little did we know from our vantage point, and hearing the excited announcements in French, that TJ had lost 40 seconds on the next climb due to a mechanical problem. All we knew was that when the jumbo-tron showed the lead racers coming up to the top of the final climb TJ was in first with Riblon, the French rider, in close pursuit. It looked good for a while until, finally, TJ just ran out of gas and Riblon passed him to the stage victory. And the French spectators, justifiably, went crazy.

We quickly left the area to get back to the line to the ski lifts and took a couple of hours to get back to the bus and to Grenoble to dinner and bed.