Alpe d'Huez, by Peter Cossins

Title: Alpe d'Huez - Cycling's Greatest Climb
Author: Peter Cossins
Publisher: Aurum
Year: 2015
Pages: 298
Order: Quarto
What it is: A biography of l'Alpe d'Huez, cycling's Theatre of Dreams
Strengths: Balances the romance and legend of the mountain with cold hard reality
Weaknesses: With its focus on the Alpe and the Tour de France, it misses out on the Alpe and the Dauphiné Libéré, and doesn't really bring in the Col de Sarenne

"Last December he and Pollentier came on holiday to Alpe d'Huez, and by the time they had climbed the mountain a score of times, Maertens had conquered his fear of it. But making the ascent after nine days' defence of his yellow jersey, and with Van Impe not Pollentier setting the pace, was a totally different matter. He did not collapse, as some people had predicted he would; in fact he climbed much better than Van Impe can sprint. But that's irrelevant. In a sprint you don't lose 4-51, even if you come last."
~ Geoffrey Nicholson, The Great Bike Race

For a nation that has sequestered a corner of the Tour de France and called it their own, it may come as a surprise to learn that the Dutch did not discover the grande boucle until 1936, the thirtieth edition of the race, when a team of four riders were dispatched to France and brought home with them a stage win as recompense for their efforts. Following the Tour's resumption after the Second World War, the Dutch - who had become quite adept at bagging stages without troubling the general classification - began to lay claim to the port city of Bordeaux, then the sprinters' stage in the Tour, the notch in the belt all the fast men of the race wanted the most. In 1952, '53, '54 and '55 Dutch sprinters took the top honours in Bordeaux. There was something appropriate in this appropriation of a corner of the Gironde for, as Peter Cossins points out in Alpe d'Huez, it was through the efforts of Dutch engineers that Bordeaux was able to make marshland arable, increasing the amount of land available for the production of wine. Wine which, coincidently, the Dutch had acquired a particular taste for.

The Dutch dominance in Bordeaux didn't continue after 1955 and through the 1960s and 1970s a win there was a once in a decade thing, the exception rather than the rule. That changed again in the 1980s - the era of fast men like Cees Priem, Bert Oosterbosch, Jan Raas and Jean-Paul van Poppel - but by then the Dutch had given up on Bordeaux and laid siege to a new corner of the Tour. That corner was l'Alpe d'Huez's virage sept, where stands one of the three churches riders pass when ascending the Alpe, the Église Saint-Ferréol, in whose graveyard is buried a Dutch priest who was at the forefront in claiming the Alpe for the Dutch.

* * * * *

Mountains have been part of the Tour since its inception in 1903 - when riders climbed the Côte des Echarmeaux and the Col de la République - but really only became part of the legend of the grande boucle as the race extended itself first into the Vosges (with the Ballon d'Alsace in 1905) and the foothills of the Alps (the Col Bayard and Côte de Laffrey, also in 1905) before scaling the heights of the Pyrénées in 1910 (the Col d'Aspin, Col d'Aubisque, Col de Peyresourde and Col du Tourmalet all featuring in the same stage) and then riding into the high Alps the following year (the Col du Galibier, Col du Lautaret and Col du Télégraphe all summitted in the one stage). For a time the Tour organisers tried to tilt the race in favour of the grimpeurs by awarding bonifications at the top of the hardest climbs but it took until 1952 for the Tour to discover the joy of summit finishes, with three thrown into the mix: l'Alpe d'Huez, Sestrières, and the Puy de Dôme.

Alas, such a surfeit of summits was not a joyous experience for the Tour's organisers, Fausto Coppi romping to victory on all three of them and taking such a commanding lead in the Tour that it was necessary to increase the prize offered for finishing second in order to give the rest of the peloton something to race for. Summit finishes themselves didn't fall out of favour thereafter but the Alpe most certainly did. Why is not entirely clear - perhaps the race organisers were unhappy with the barrage the pump-wielding bosses of the peloton laid down on the stage as they sauntered toward the base of the Alpe the better part of an hour behind schedule - but it took the Tour another two dozen years before the Alpe once more featured in the race (apart, that is, from being a rest day host). By then the Dutch had discovered they could climb as well as they could sprint and their annexation of the Alpe commenced.

Dutch riders won on the Alpe in 1976, '77, '78, '79 and - after the climb was skipped in 1980 - for a fifth time in 1981. Each victory brought more and more Dutch fans to the mountain the next time the Alpe appeared in the Tour's itinerary. A sixth win came in 1983 but the next three appearances of the mountain in the Tour passed - like its 1982 appearance - without the Dutch again tasting success. Even so, the Dutch fans continued to come. Their patience was rewarded with two more wins in 1988 and 1989, bringing the tally to eight stage wins on the Alpe for the men from the flat lands. In the years since 1989 no Dutch rider has tasted success on the Alpe but that has not inhibited the fans, who continue to view the Alpe as a little corner of France that will forever Dutch be.

Those wins on the Alpe in the 1970s were where the Alpe's reputation as the Dutch mountain was sealed but that came about not just through the exploits of Joop Zoetemelk, Hennie Kuiper and Peter Winnen. An important part of it was the Dutch priest whose remains now rest in the graveyard of that church on Dutch Corner, Jaap Reuten, who habitually rang the bells of the Église Notre Dame des Neiges atop the Alpe to commemorate Dutch victories. (The first time was actually lucky timing, Zoetemelk taking the victory salute just before the six o'clock Angelus rang out. Today, the bells are rung when the first rider - no matter his nationality - passes through the climb's final hairpin bend.)

Another who played a role in painting the Alpe orange was a Dutch radio journalist, Theo Koomen, a former seminarian whose creative commentaries on those Dutch wins in the 1970s and early 1980s became something of a legend in the Netherlands. Servais Knaven - who never won on the Alpe but did take a victory in Bordeaux - is one Dutch rider Peter Cossins tracked down who recalled Koomen's commentaries and the power they had on him:

"He was like a fan doing the commentary, and he'd get even more carried away when there was a Dutch rider in contention. His commentary on the radio was ten times better than watching on TV. When Peter Winnen won that day on Alpe d'Huez [in 1981] he made me feel like I was there."

Being there is now what the Alpe is about, not just for Dutch fans but for many others too (even the Irish, who have never tasted success on the Alpe and in fact saw Stephen Roche lose the maillot jaune there in 1987, have now claimed as their own a corner of the Alpe, three turns below the Dutch). Those fans can and do impact the race, sometimes in obvious ways - in 1999 Telekom's Giuseppe Guerini was taken down by a camera-wielding fan just three hundred metres from the line - but more often in ways that are less obvious. Andy Hampsten - who won on the Alpe in 1992, with Hennie Kuiper as his DS, thus giving the Dutch a sort of surrogate victory - tells Cossins that, because of the fans, "it's very easy for a rider to get overly excited and go too hard too early and fall flat on their face in the final kilometres." But le petit lapin also acknowledges that the fans can help a rider who is pushing himself hard on the climb: "the huge amount of energy coming out of the crowd matched the rage that I had pushing myself to go faster. It was a potent combination."

Some see the fans on the Alpe as being part of a religious experience, Cossins quoting Daniel Friebe in Mountain High saying that the Alpe is "a place of convergence and gathering for millions of devotees, who come from all of the countries of the world to celebrate this great cycling mass, just as others go in search of spirituality at Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela." (If the climb of the Alpe, with its three churches marking stations of the cross, is a mass then it can also be said that the moneylenders are taking over the temple, with those purveyors of upmarket cycling tat Rapha having a store at the top of the climb, riders ascending through the Alpe's twenty-one lacets into gear-fondling heaven.)

Rather than being a mass, where wine is changed into the blood of Christ, the Alpe is - like many of the Tour's other sacred spots - more and more becoming a site for Bacchanalian excess, with wine - and all other varieties of alcohol - turned into water, not all of which gets pissed away, some of it being stored to douse the Tour's caravane. More and more the Alpe looks like nothing less than an extension of the outdoor festival circuit, Cossins quoting French Revolutions author Tim Moore calling the Alpe "the Glastonbury festival for cycling fans" while he himself describes the crowds on the mountain as being "Spring Break and the X Factor combined." David Millar suggests it's "a bit like riding through a big village fair where everyone is drunk."

But even if the fans are more and more there just for the sake of being there, it has to be remembered that, for the riders, headlining on the Alpe still matters. Almost to a man, every rider Cossins has spoken to about the Alpe sings its praises, calls it one of their most important memories. For Carlos Sastre, the memory of his win there in 2008 - one of those rare days when the Tour really was won on the Alpe - is too special for him to risk returning to the scene of his greatest triumph:

"I went back there again in 2012 for a charity event but I only rode up as far as bend seventeen, which is the one with my name on it. I didn't ride any further because I didn't want to fuck up the memories I have from 2008. It was such a beautiful day."

* * * * *

Like many cyclists approaching the mountain itself, it was with a certain amount of fear and trepidation that I approached Alpe d'Huez. Having already read Jean-Paul Vespini's The Tour is Won on the Alpe I wasn't really looking forward to another account of the big buckle's twenty-nine ascents of the Alpe in twenty-seven Tours and the twenty-one men who have taken the victory salute there. That, fortunately, is not the story Cossins tells.

Threaded throughout Alpe d'Huez is an account of the 1976 Tour's ascent of the Alpe, spread across the book's dozen chapters, which offers Cossins opportunities to branch off into tangentially related tales, some of which deal with the Tour ascending the Alpe, most of which take a much broader view. He talks about the Alpe and French riders, the Alpe and the Dutch. The dark side of the Alpe is looked at in a chapter that deals with doping. You get brief pen portraits of some who won on the Alpe, such as Joaquim Agostinho and Beat Breau, telling stories about them from before and after their victories on the Alpe. Cossins also serves up more detailed portraits of the two key protagonists in the 1976 Tour's ascent of the Alpe, Lucien van Impe and Joop Zoetemelk, in which the myths associated with these two riders are shown to be both true and untrue. Linking all these stories, Cossins keeps returning to a central point: what is it that makes the Alpe so special?

As with Van Impe and Zoetemelk, the myths about the Alpe are both true and untrue. Finding the balance between the romance and reality of the Alpe has defeated many who have written about this mountain in the past, most being too in love with the myth of the mountain to dare challenge it. Cossins, though, manages to thread a fine line, both bigging up the mountain and the men who have won there, but at the same time tearing the mountain down to size. Having approached the Alpe as something of a romantic, writing about it has - Cossins admits - turned him into something of a realist. When David Millar and Andy Hampsten offered him criticisms of the mountain, he wanted to take them apart but has ended up agreeing with them, to an extent: the climb of the Alpe is pretty ordinary, it isn't even the most beautiful climb in its area, let alone in cycling.

Those criticisms offered by Millar and Hampsten have forced Cossins to question the truth behind his own perceptions of the Alpe and allowed him to write a book about it that still celebrates cycling's most famous climb even while acknowledging that the Alpe's critics do have a point.