In a similar way to our dog recognizing certain words as familiar sounds and perking her ears up, a couple of weeks ago I heard the words “quatre-vingt-unième Critérium Cycliste International de Quillan”and stopped making soup and listened. I didn’t understand most of the fast-spoken French in a local radio announcement, but a name stood out, Dorian Godon, so I figured that the race had just happened and Godon had won the 81st edition of the Quillan crit.
I haven’t been to bike races for some years but the last one I watched in person I found by accident when looking for a gas station.
Sunday had become adventure day in our household. To quote Harry Dean Stanton in the 1984 movie, “Paris, Texas,” “Together they turned everything into a kind of adventure and she liked that. Just an ordinary trip down to the grocery store was full of adventure.” And so it was to us…C’est la même. That Sunday, a little Pyrenean day trip in our ridiculous but lovable Land Rover that needed refueling quite often was detoured from a hunt for diesel by a hi-viz sign advertising familiar pros of the time: Nacer Bouhanni, Sylvain Chavanel, Maxime Bouet.
I knew Quillan was a bit of a cycling town, but in a couple of hours the oldest crit in France would be rolling out with its usual smattering of pros wanting to add their names to the cup in the unlikeliest of Sunday afternoon corners of my manor in southern France. And that trophy has a decent tally of names too: Poulidor, Janssen, Zoetemelk, Anquetil, Chiappucci, Rominger, Mottet, Delgardo, Voeckler, Sastre and Rodriguez had all won it. Many other famous monikers have had a go too: Merckx, Hinault, Thévenet, Fignon, Jalabert, Bardet, Sagan…the list goes on.
A couple of hours wandering around while they were setting up, talking to neighbors lining up their camp chairs and cool boxes on the street below, washing lines painted a picture of a race with a local pride of place but a down-to-earth one in this small out-of-the-way town under the shadow of the Pyrenees. There was a kind of subtle charm to a scene of mismatched chairs and old Tour jersey cardboard cutouts being wheeled out for a little local organized race that just happened to draw big names and champions without any of the fanfare of a grand tour’s theatre.
There were no team buses, media or sponsors. The publicity caravan was made up of a shortened homemade Kinder egg car and a local’s restored ’70s Renault flatbed truck—presumably polished up for such occasions, with two sets of grandparents and kids in the back chucking penny chews and lollipops out of a supermarket carrier bag for a couple of laps as eager if slightly bemused tourists caught up in it all, alongside kids told of such history by their elders, though mainly just wanting a literal taste of it firsthand.
A Range Rover rolled up with a Direct Energy-BH bike on the back: Chavanel had arrived. Mobbed by generations young and old, all holding out their programs open at the blank page for hero scrawls, he obliged, as did his ProTeam mates and fast-changing AG2R team riders Alexis Vuillermoz and Axel Domont. National champion Bouhanni raised the stakes for the entourage of little people caught up in the fervor, presumably only felt annually among these dappled shadows.
COMPLETE STORY IN PRINT
