Classic Climbs - This Sportive Life
Riding the same climbs as the pros is something most riders aspire to, and big events such as the Etape du Tour allow you to do exactly that. But other lesser-known and less crowded events such as Time Megève Mont Blanc, offer the same experience, as Ellis Bacon finds out.
Words: Ellis Bacon
Photography: Richard Lundberg
You can make that decision when it comes to it,” GPM10's Mark Neep tells our collected group at breakfast at our hotel in Megève, a few hours before the start of the Time Megève Mont Blanc cyclosportive event, referring to the choice of the three route lengths – 88km, 115km or 150km. Some of us had already decided on the middle distance, with its total of 2,900 vertical metres of climbing across the Col des Aravis, the Col de la Croix Fry and the Col des Saisies. No need to kill yourself with the extra descent and then ascent of the Saisies from the other side, too...
The previous day in Megève – located between Annecy and Chamonix in the French Alps – had been hot and sunny.
As our group sauntered to the local leisure centre to pick up our race numbers and free jersey, and to take a look at the sponsors' village where displays from event sponsor Time had participants and their friends and families drooling over their latest bikes, and where a number of Time-riding Bouygues Telecom riders, who would also ride the next day, were signing autographs.
There were more than 2,300 riders in town for the June weekend event, which was celebrating its third edition in 2006. With the number of participants growing with each edition, it's expected that numbers will swell yet further for the fourth edition in June.
As with all the larger cyclosportive events, the number of riders taking part makes for a colourful, noisy and downright crazy start. Some wait nervously on the start line, while others are more aggressive, willing the starting pistol to fire, and then there's every sentiment in between. In keeping with other European sportive events, starting order at the Time Megève is dependent on your date of entry, with the event's star names and VIPs at the front, and some fast and angry latecomers stuck at the back. Crashes are common, and are best av oided by keeping your line. A knowledge of French swear words is also useful…
But don't let it put you off. There are always going to be a few idiots when this many people are thrown together, and it's really only for the first few kilometres that things are dicey. And on the descents, but more of that later.
As with the even larger and better known Etape du Tour, the Time Megève also affords the opportunity for some star spotting, with former pros Richard Virenque and Johan Museeuw joined by cycling legend Jeannie Longo and former Formula 1 ace Alain Prost on the starting line.
The organisers knew that procycling was in town, too (although the autograph hunters seemed too shy to approach us), and we were put near the front as VIPs with Mark's GPM10 – an English-speaking, French Alps-based outfit that caters for the serious cyclist looking to improve mainly through weekend training rides and tours around the area, with particular knowledge of the severity of the climbs ahead of us, based as they are in nearby Chamonix. Their Time Megève trip includes all transfers, accommodation and meals, so all you need to do is turn up, collect your race number, and ride. Easy, eh?
Virenque, now retired, and still a hero to many in France despite his eventual admission two years after the Festina Affair to having used performance-enhancing drugs, was the man with the start gun, while Museeuw – banned from working as a directeur sportif for the past two years following his alleged involvement in the Belgian investigation into EPO possession – was alongside him on the start line.
A more tainted duo you would be hard-pressed to find, but most riders' minds were focused on the job in hand, and the climbs ahead.
The rolling road to Flumet serves as a warm-up before the right-turn onto the lower slopes of the 1486-metre-high Col des Aravis via the Gorges de l'Arondine. Even by this point, the mayhem of the start was a distant memory, and instead everyone was concentrating more on their own efforts than what those around them were up to.
That changed once more on the climb proper, where riders' differing climbing abilities meant there were slow-, or indeed fast-, moving objects all over the road. With an average gradient of five per cent on its south side, the Aravis is a veritable wake-up call for the rest of the day. Luckily, there was plenty of support at the roadside going through the tiny village of La Giettaz half-way up the 12km climb, and even larger crowds on the summit, where many friends and families had based themselves on account of the Aravis being the only climb where all participants, no matter which route they chose, would pass twice.
Our first reward was the 19km descent down the other side. Rolling along in the valley through La Clusaz, finding myself temporarily alone, a group rode up from behind, and I joined them. The banter was about how someone had fallen on the descent, and, sure enough, we had to make way for the resultant ambulance 10 minutes later.
Next on the menu was the fearsome Col de la Croix Fry. The road starts rising up from the town of Thônes, but begins in earnest when you reach the fantastically named village of Manigod, which made us English-speakers feel mildly superior for a while, if only for a very short while. I'd managed to find some sort of a rhythm by this point, but not for long as a huge mass of slow-moving riders meant slowing down and eventually stopping. It soon became clear what the problem was: there was no road, and we'd unwittingly become part of an uphill – a very uphill – Paris-Roubaix.
The organisers had tried to help us out by laying down the world's longest red carpet for the section, which ran for around a kilometre. You'd be most unlikely to hear any film stars swearing as profoundly as their cycling counterparts were here though. Barely wide enough to pass another rider, some found it quicker to mash their cleats on the rocks of the unmade road alongside.
Things smoothed out again at the top, where the day's first feed was manic due
to the bunched-up riders, as was the fast descent down to Les Etages, where we picked up the northern side of the Aravis again, where we had come down little more than
an hour earlier. Feeling quite good climbing up the shallower hairpins on this side, it wasn't long before I'd reached the summit and another feed station, where, I discovered later, I did well to replenish myself, my bottles and my pockets for the epic descent back down to Flumet.
Coming down off the Aravis, there seemed to be quite a bit of traffic – albeit cycling traffic – which made for some interesting hairpin-bend manoeuvres, with a real mix of descending abilities taking part this time.
Nearing the bottom, our little group did a double-take as a half-dozen group of CSC riders – among them Ivan Basso and Carlos Sastre, plus team manager Bjarne Riis in a Giro d'Italia leader's jersey – came towards us.
I quickly realised near the bottom of the descent that I had gone off into a daydream about how one of Giro winner Basso's pink jerseys could possibly fit the larger Riis, when a car that had just overtaken suddenly slammed on its brakes, causing me to lock up my back wheel and narrowly miss an ‘Ullrich moment' with the back windscreen. It was a timely reminder of how, despite the roads being semi-closed by the gendarmes – holding back traffic at junctions and roundabouts while the riders go past – it's not possible for them to eliminate cars from the course altogether. It also served as a stark warning not to ponder jersey sizes while descending.
Flumet was the first point at which the 2,370 participants could decide which route to take – left for the run back to Megève on the 88km option, or straight up the Col des Saisies for the 115km or 150km rides.
I pressed on, still unsure which of the two longer options to go for, still feeling reasonably good, but suffering in the heat of the day once the climb began. The Saisies is tough from this north side via the ski town of Crest Voland , although it is the easier side of the mountain, which has more than half a dozen routes up it, which variously join up with each other at different points. Try telling that to any of us once we were on its upper slopes, willing the 1,650m summit to appear.
Approaching the top, faster riders were already heading down on the other side of the road for the 115km option. Quite a number of cyclosportives offer you the chance to choose different ride distances ‘on the fly' by issuing you with sensors, as on the Time Megève, which register your passage through checkpoints on the course. This also gives you intermediate times, such as to the top of a certain climb, often at the same point as the feed stations, while at the same time serving to prevent cheating.
So, which was it to be: 115km or 150km?
Terrible decisions I have made, #487: the Time Megève 150km long-route option.
Choosing the middle-distance option of the Eroica cyclosportive extravaganza in Tuscany , Italy is something that may haunt me forever… With that in mind I pressed on past the turnaround point at the top of the Saisies, and soon regretted it. Filling up at the feed station,
a motorbike marshal rolled up and told the people manning it that the few of us there would be the last riders allowed through and that the cut-off time had been reached. Such cut-off times and the broomwagons that sweep up slackers helps to prevent the event from stretching out all day, and allows the police to go home.
Cue minor panic, and a race against time on the incredibly fast descent down into Villard sur Doron, and to Beaufort where the climb back up the Saisies from the south side begins. Managing to pass a few riders felt like it gave me a bit of a buffer, but soon I was struggling again as the heat joined forces with an amazingly strong headwind. My lowest gear felt huge and my legs like lead.
This was suffering, and it wasn't even blown-apart, bonked suffering. I'd been careful to eat and drink a whole week's worth of calories and water during the day, unlike one unlucky fellow sufferer who was quaking and shaking under a silver blanket while being tended to by a race doctor who'd driven past me further down the climb and given me a cheery “Allez!” and a thumbs-up. No, this was more a kind of… Well, it was seven hours, by this miserable point, of sitting in the saddle and pushing the pedals, and when you weren't pushing the pedals, there was the death-defying feat of concentration around hairpin bends at ridiculous speeds. It was a barely controlled hysteria that made you less ‘Manigod' and more ‘Crappyboy'. Rounding each corner with a hopeful “Surely it's the top now” to myself lost its appeal after one too many false dawns, and the only noise was the squawk of the circling vultures. Far too late in the day, the summit, with its biscuits and jellies and Coke and bananas, appeared, and with it the knowledge that it was, pretty much, all downhill from here.
But on that final descent off the Saisies, I was reminded again how dangerous our sport is when I rounded a bend to see a rider lying comatose on the ground, surrounded by some policemen, plus some motorcyclists. It looked like the rider and one of the motorbike riders may have hit each other, and certainly motorbike tourists are another hazard to watch out for in the Alps and Pyrenees , as they tend to cut across the line in the middle of the road for a better line on climbs and descents. Added to a rider no doubt exhausted and wanting to finish, it's a dangerous combination.
The flat-ish run-in to Megève seemed not very flat at all, but plumping for the longer version and making it, albeit near the back, made nearly seven and three-quarter hours of hard effort on tough climbs worth it.
A hard day in the saddle, then? You bet – up there with the hardest. If you've got a place in July's Etape du Tour, then you could do a lot worse than ride the longest option of the Time Megève as training. What you're going to do to train for the Time Megève, however, is a different matter. Etape or not, the event is a tough challenge for all levels of serious cyclists, and even the ‘short' version is not to be sniffed at.
cyclo analysed
Why sportives offer a challenge to all ages and abilities of cyclist
There are a whole host of cyclosportive events on the Continent, with a huge choice each weekend in the summer months, mainly taking place in France or Italy , where they are known as gran fondos.
Rather than being predominantly youngsters, cyclosportive participants are often on the older side – either reliving their racing youth, or new to the sport and wanting to test themselves on the same roads and climbs as the pros.
Not to be confused with the non-competitive randonnée, a cyclosportive has a race element, and people compete within their different age categories, with prizes and publicity for the winners. But equally, it's also a challenge. In a mass participation event like this everyone has their own individual goal, which could entail beating their time from the previous year, or choosing one of the longer distance options, or getting a high placing in their category, or simply getting through the event unscathed. You can't hang around, either, as there is often a time limit, complete with a broomwagon.
Remember to eat and drink regularly by taking advantage of the feed stations; climbing up a mountain for more than an hour requires it. Be careful, too, if you're not used to 20km-long descents, which require concentration, especially when descending in a group, with everyone tired from the climb.
For insurance purposes, the organisers require you to either be a member of your national cycling federation (bring your membership card with you), or to have a doctor's certificate, which seems to range in cost depending on how busy/friendly your local GP is.
The main thing, however, is to enjoy yourself. It's the closest to being a pro as any of us are likely to get, and luckily most events have official photographers – such as Maindru Photo (www.maindruphoto.com) or First Foto Factory (www.firstfotofactory.com) – who are guaranteed to get some great action photos of you, which you can buy online as a keepsake of your momentous day of at least riding like a pro.