Chapeau! The French Divide

The French Divide vaguely entered my consciousness when my daughter Anna, who has been enjoying some challenging riding with her partner Graham, including an introduction to Cyclocross, announced that she was going to do an endurance race in France.  Nobody seemed to know much about it.  It had only been run once before, and was the brainchild of a French cyclist called Samuel Bécuwe.  It was known that the route was from the sea at the Franco-Belgian border to the Spanish border in the Pyrenees but not much more.  Anna called her campaign ‘bikingforbrioche’ and decided to raise funds for World Bicycle Relief – a charity that provides rugged reliable no-nonsense bicycles for poor countries where owning a bicycle might make the difference between being able to go to school or not.  She and Graham embarked on a punishing training regime, which most weekends seemed to feature a minimum of 200 miles on the road, and in order to prepare for the trip also bivouacked in fields, including a memorable night of thunderstorms on Golden Cap in Dorset.  I also received updates stating that Graham or Anna had done a Zwift race around London, or even popped over to Holland to participate in some event there.  Eventually I discovered that Zwift is a digital link from a stationary bicycle turbo trainer to a computer, whereby one can choose a route of varying difficulty virtually anywhere in the world to make indoor training less boring.

Eventually the information and the route arrived, in a piecemeal fashion.  The proposal was over 2200Km of cycling, 70% off road, using VTT bikes (Vélo Tout-Terrain), and entirely unsupported, i.e. find your own accommodation or camp, your own water, your own food.  The time limit was 15 days.  Consider for a moment what that entails.  The distance – approximately ⅔ of the distance covered in the Tour de France, in only ⅔ the time.  The bikes – much more rugged and less easy to ride than Tour bikes.  The support team – none, compared with extensive mechanical and domestique assistance, luxury coaches, comfortable beds, adequate feeding and water.  It seemed a very tall order to even consider undertaking the journey.

The time arrived.  I wondered why the bikes were so difficult to fit into the 4x4.  They were the newer type of off-road bicycle – 29 inch wheels, not 26, with a single front chain ring and a huge rear cassette on the derailleur.  The white cliffs of Dover (which are grey close up, not like our lovely Dorset Jurassic coast) faded as we travelled Southeast towards Dunkirk, and we descended the ramp into France to make our way around the ring road in search of the most remote spot on the top right hand corner of France – Bray-Dunes.  Arriving at the Mairie, there were a number of rather athletic looking males in lycra, all looking terribly serious, waiting to register with the French Divide team.  After hanging around and chatting to some of the other participants, many of whom had undertaken other endurance rides, the briefing began.  It was followed by a repeat in broken English.  The major learning point for me was that if looking for fresh and drinkable water, the place to look in France is a cemetery!  For some reason, most French cemeteries have a source of l’eau potable.  We were asked to reassemble on the beach at the Belgian border at 5.30am the following day.  Getting up at 03.30 English time on the Sunday was hard, and unsurprisingly there were few spectators as we reached the Dunes du Perroquet at the end of the beach road where Belgium begins.  After assembling the bikes, checking the tires and inserting the latex mixture which protects against punctures, the French Divide team checked the lights, high-viz gear, and roll out was at 0615, led by a cyclist in Le Coq Sportif costume.

Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard speaks of the ploughman leaving ‘the world to darkness and to me’ but the reverse was true for me.  Left alone in the dark, the glimmer of dawn on the horizon, I climbed the dunes, and saw the sun breach the line of the coast to the East.  It was time for me to leave, to return to the UK, leaving the team to plough on into rural France and indeed Belgium, the organisers having cunningly arranged for the ‘Dividers’ as they now became known to experience ‘The Hell of the North’.  This term refers to the cobbled or pavé byroads in Belgium which many major cycling events, including Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France, pass over.  The FD team had arranged for some of Le Tour’s greatest routes to be followed, including a final challenge over the infamous Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees.  The participants had been issued with full GPS coordinates of the route in GPX codes, with a minimum requirement of checking in at four checkpoints, in Epernay, Quarré-les-Tombes, Cahors, and the Col du Tourmalet, before finishing at a tiny village called Mendionde in the Pyrenees just above the Spanish border.  Some of the off-road route was designed to follow the classic pilgrims’ way from France to Santiago de Compostella.

Much more than that – I can’t tell you.  But here are the pictures…  Anna was the fastest of the nine female riders.  She and Graham completed the route in under 13 days.  A total of 2222Km, an estimated 35000m of ascent, one puncture, a disintegrated bottom bracket, in an event where almost 30% of the riders abandoned the race.  Chapeau!

Leaving the Grey Cliffs of Dover

29 inch wheels take up a lot of room

On vous propose...

The Profile

Amazingly there were two cyclists there before us

Apprehensive but excited

Tous pret

It's important for Le Coq Sportif to check his phone...

...Before leading them out

...And leaves the world to darkness and to me...

Somewhere in Northern France

Great scenery, especially when it's flat

They needed crampons for some of the Parc National Regional du Morvan

Calories that we could only dream of - eight croissants each for breakfast

FD wanted them to do the Col du Tourmalet the hard way

...but maybe it was worth it

...and Le Coq Sportif is there at the finish in Mendionde

Duncan s'est déguisé en coq pour accueillir ses compatriotes Anna et Graham. Ce dernier avait accepté le pari de suivre sa copine sur la French Divide. Il est prêt à repartir pour une nouvelle aventure mais seulement si elle choisi un pays plus petit à traverser. 

Elation at the finish

Avec Samuel - chef de la route 'French Divide'

Anna's track by GPS over 13 days, an average of 178Km per day!

Well done!

Val d’Isère – a renewed acquaintance

A ‘corner of a foreign field that is forever England’.  Or so it seems.  Where would Val d ‘Isère be without the English?  In general we ski in a resort where never an English voice is heard, a little resort in Graubünden, Switzerland.  It has a certain Alpine charm, a gemütlichkeit of its own, and even the Swiss have had to at least try to become friendly.  The forbidding wood leading to the See from the village is now entitled ‘Wilkommen in Zauberwald’, and smiles sometimes even replace grunts as one gets on a skilift.  But the Espace Killy, as the vast area around Val and Tignes styles itself is certainly in a different league, more cosmopolitan, and even the French sometimes seem to be outnumbered by the English.  Boris Johnson, our Mayor of London, has recently added to the debate on ski instructors in France.  I quote:

I’ve just got back from the French Alps and the place is just as beautiful as it was when I first went there 30 years ago: the air like champagne, the sky blue, the snow like gulfs of icing sugar wafting over your skis – and the mind-numbing beauty of those high white landscapes, silent except for the soft clank of the lift. Yes, it’s still the same, the French skiing experience – and so is the great ski-school scandal: a complete, naked, shameless and unrepentant breach – by the French – of the principles of the European Single Market.

It is still the case that if you want to find someone to teach your kids to ski, that teacher will have most or all of the following characteristics. His face will be deeply tanned and handsomely creased; his eyes will twinkle roguishly at his female charges; he will say “HOP!” as he plants his pole to turn; he may or may not have a paunch, a hip-flask of cognac and a smell of cheroot.

But one thing is for sure: he will be dressed in an all-in-one red ski uniform emblazoned with the logo of the École du Ski Français – and he will be French, mes amis. And only French.

In defiance of every basic principle of the Common Market – free establishment, free movement of services, you name it – the French continue to make it virtually impossible for a UK national to set up a ski school, in the French alps, to cater for the vast numbers of English speakers who flock there every winter – and who think dérapage is something to do with a woman’s cleavage.

There are certainly a number of deeply tanned instructors with the ESF uniform, just as Boris says.  But  on the slopes, the Sophies, the Piers’s, the Charlottes and the Sebastians all vie with the French for piste-room.

So after an absence of nearly 30 years, what do I make of the French experience?  First, I would urge you to be very very cautious about walking.  I am reliably informed that the Mayor of Val d’Isère prefers that in the winter it remains a ‘white town’.  This means that the sidewalks are uniformly covered in ice, and extremely dangerous.  The rond-point des pistes in particular is very hazardous.  The Swiss, for whom the village where we ski is still a Swiss inhabitants’ village, would never tolerate the risk to their residents’ health in this way.  Second, in the cleanliness stakes, there is little to touch the Swiss.  Toilets remain an afterthought in France, and though there are more in Val than there used to be, they lag behind other nations in convenience and maintenance.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that the residents don’t have a bigger say in the town – in the winter there are approximately 2000 permanent residents and approximately 3000 ‘Seasonnaires’, many of whom will be British.

But it is the skiing that is the big draw.  Located in what must be one of the most remote, hardest to access valleys in the Haute Tarentaise, Val d’Isère is a Mecca for skiers of all abilities.  The resort is served by a good bus service from Geneva airport – but it does take forever to get there.  Returning on a Sunday evening it was four and a half hours, compared with less than two from Zurich to our own little resort.  This does mean that it suffers less from weekenders that many, indeed, Saturday which is the main changeover day is a pleasure to ski on unlike more accessible resorts.

I spent so much time skiing in a long weekend, that opportunity for photography was limited, but here are some views, and delightful pictures of a chalet girl (who happens to be my daughter), and I hope that you too will have the opportunity to ski there...

Restaurant Les Clochetons

Above Le Fornet

Above Le Fornet

Above Tignes

Les Clochetons

Katie on La Grande Motte

Above Le Fornet