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The Broken Desert

The Col d'Izoard and Casse Déserte

The 10km between the small village of Arvieux (1600m) to the summit of the Izoard (2360m) are reckoned by many riders to be amongst the most difficult on any Tour itinerary and it’s not just the gradient: upwards of 12% near the top, uneven slopes all the way, long straights lower down. The Izoard presents one of the most intimidating climbs in the mythology. The southern approach winds past the sinister orange rock stacks of the Casse Déserte towering out of a bleached lunar wasteland of stones like a petrified mudslide to either side of the exposed corniche. When the sun is full, its heat is merciless, its glare blinding. As the road twists through the parched gulch of the Broken Desert, the notch of the col cut into the bare shoulders of mountain appears impossibly far away, impossibly high up. The Izoard looks hard every inch of the way. It is hard, every inch of the way.

Just below that Shangri-la where the roads dips away north, stands a memorial to two men who wrote their names into the history of the Izoard by crossing it alone: Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet. Coppi rode over the Izoard in yellow, 1949, the year of his first Tour win. The year before, his great rival Bartali did the same on the way to his second win and in 1953, when the road over the col was still no more than a rustic track, thick with dust, littered with flints, Coppi stood next to the French directeur Marcel Bidot at the side of the road, where the plaque is now, with a camera slung over his shoulder.

As Bobet rode by, in yellow, he gave the campionissimo, his hero, a friendly nod and Coppi remarked to Bidot: ‘Beautiful.’ Years later, Bobet told Bernard Thévenet that the mark of a real Tour champion was to lead the race from the front through the awesome wilderness, in yellow. And, in 1975, Thévenet did just that. Merckx, who’d lost yellow to the Frenchman the day before, attacked him again and again but Thévenet didn’t falter and finally pulled away. Nearing the top, he passed a young woman holding up a banner which read: ‘Merckx, the Bastille has fallen.’ It was 14 July.

Thévenet used the Izoard as an example of how a rider must parcel out his effort: to expend every iota of his strength up to the col, saving only a bare a fraction with which to jump start recovery on the way down. Speaking of that day, when he reinforced his superiority over Merckx he said the experience of the crowds cheering him deliriously up and over the Izoard was one of the great moments of his life.

Everyone who rides this colossus of a climb will retain an indelible memory of it. And, if the ghosts of the Tour gather routinely anywhere on the route, you feel it must be in the lonely canyon of the Casse Déserte, amid the atavar menhirs, under the blazing furnace of the Dog Star. Those rock stacks might be the statue embodiment of the implacable juges de paix, the arbiters of human frailty who preside over the Tour, who punish the jour sans without pity, who oversee with a cold eye the terrible défaillance and the superhuman acts of bravery, endurance and tenacity alike.

Graeme Fife is author of: Tour de France: the history, the legend, the riders

and: Inside the Peloton, riding, winning and losing the Tour de France