As well as being the world's longest, toughest and most prestigious cycle race, the Tour de France is also a wannabe's dream. You cannot bowl an over at Lords on the morning of an Ashes Test and fantasise about being Nasser Hussein. But any fan can put on a replica cycling team jersey and shorts, and cycle up one of the Tour's mountain passes.
Indeed, that is just what they do, in their hundreds of thousands, every July. They dream the dream in the morning, wobbling up a mountain or two at walking pace, often baring their backs to the noonday sun to horrific effect, and in the afternoon, they cheer by the roadside as the Tourmen struggle up the same strip of hairpinned Tarmac.
The hardest of the hard core can go further. They pay their entry fee, train for months, and get the complete Tour experience in the Etape du Tour.
"Etape" means stage, and that is what you get: a ride along one of the mountain stages several days before the Tour comes the same way, complete with crowds lining the roadsides yelling encouragement, and gendarmes closing the roads to all traffic.
Last July, the 7,000 Etape riders set off over the passes of the Aspin and Tourmalet in the Pyrenean "circle of death", one of the Tour's great, traditional mountain setpieces, first crossed by the race in 1910 amid fears that the cyclists might be waylaid and eaten by bears. These are roads which are steeped in cycling legend.
Since I began reporting the Tour de France in 1990, at least once a year some bright spark or other has asked me: "Do you follow the race on your bike?" Cycling the Etape wouldn't offer me that, but it would be a new way of seeing the mountains I look at every July through the windscreen of a car. It wouldn't show me what it was like being Lance Armstrong, but it would show me how the race looked from the other side of the handlebars.
It was a good reason to get fit, too, because the Etape is not for the fainthearted - in either sense of the word. The best parallel is with the London marathon: a reasonably fit person can complete it, but it takes several months of training to attempt it with a degree of comfort or safety.
The Tour has been said to resemble a miniature sovereign state as it sweeps across the French countryside with the roads closed for hours beforehand. There was a similarly imperious feel to the start of the Etape as we sprinted out of the little town of Tarbes in the early morning, after being sprung from the "pens" used to prevent an unseemly rush for the front of the grid.
The leading 3,000 or so cyclists rode shoulder to shoulder across the road, each front wheel inches from the back wheel in front, seamlessly dividing for traffic islands and roundabouts, and coming back together like a river in flood at a steady 25mph. Knowing that there is no traffic coming the other way leads to an uncanny feeling of detachment from the normal world; the pistol-packing gendarmes standing impassively at every junction to every farm track give the feeling of a state procession.
South of Tarbes in the Pyrenean foothills lies a little known region of fine gastronomy and steep green valleys, the Bigorre. When the clouds parted, I could catch sight of the occasional medieval castle with heraldic flag flapping, vast views across row upon row of foothills that could have been drawn by a child, and, on a 45mph hairpin bend in a wood, one of our number crawling out of a ditch.
The Etappers were a disparate bunch. Grizzled Frenchmen in the main, who looked as if they had known their prime back in Eddy Merckx's time, the 1970s. There was a smattering of corporate guests from the Cannondale cycle company wearing zebra-striped jerseys, one of whom I spotted taking a business call from LA halfway up a mountain. And several hundred Britons, easily spotted thanks to cycling club jerseys from Sydenham to Sheffield, their number including the legendary "unluckiest cyclist in the Sydney Olympics", Rob Hayles, for whom this was merely another day's training.
Those who wonder at the millions of spectators drawn to the Tour de France should reflect on this: there were thousands lining the roads of the Etape. Some were encouraging their friends - and writing their names on the road in the style of the Tour stars - but the rest had just come out of their houses and campsites, lending weight to the old argument that your average Frenchman will support anyone sitting on a bike with a look of pain on their face.
They did karaoke for us, played the obligatory accordion, sang ribald songs about the suffering in front of them ("who's tired? you, you, you" sang three small boys on one hairpin), wrote graffiti - "no to the Euro", "smash the G8" - and handed up newspapers, designed to keep the cold off our chests on the downhills, rather than to get the latest on Armstrong's progress. And, embarrassingly, they greeted my yellow jersey with cheers, both ironic and affectionate in nature.
After 40 miles with nothing more severe than you would encounter in the Chilterns, the Col d'Aspin was the first "difficulty", as the French euphemistically call mountains. In a car, it is a charming seven miles of hairpins across the high hayfields but it was an hour of hard work for the single file of Etappers, spread from one shoulder of the mountainside to the other, trying to steer round giant slugs that slimed over the Tarmac with a shared death wish.
"Suffering" is a facile term to use when writing about the Tour de France, but it is humbling to be reminded of what it actually entails. Instead of the aching legs I had expected, the dull pain spread slowly from my lower back to my shoulders and neck, and down into my backside.
I remembered what Robert Millar, the only Briton to lead over these mountains in the Tour, had told me. "The climbers suffer like everyone else, but they go faster." The aching might be the same for a Tourman, then, but he would be travelling twice as quick. This was stage 14 of the Tour: a Tourman would have had a week or two of it before today, and could expect the same or worse tomorrow and for five more days after that until the finish in Paris.
The mental arithmetic in mountain climbing is on another level of reality. Each time you pass one of the boards saying how far it is to the top, you look at the speedometer to work out how long it will take. Disconcertingly, as you slow down there seems to be exactly an hour to the summit each time you look: seven miles a hour, six miles an hour, and so on.
The Tourmalet is even longer, steeper and more mind-bending than the Aspin, rising to 2,100m through a series of concrete tunnels to an amphitheatre of cliffs where the vultures circle past a ski-station of indescribable ugliness, La Mongie. Miguel Indurain and Eddy Merckx made cycling history by flying clear of the field on this mountain; well before the top, some of the Etappers were walking.
Going down a mountain, with oblivion waiting a few metres beyond the crash barriers, you are supposed to look for "the flow", which will enable you to sweep through hairpins with a minimal touch of the brakes and the grace of a downhill skiier. I did not flow: I froze, with numbed fingers struggling to hold the brakes, my mind deadened by the physical effort of going up and unable to deal with with the sudden transition from 5mph to 45mph.
Even in summer, the mountains can turn nasty. Climbing to the Etape finish at the Luz Ardiden ski-station, the weather degenerated into a gale, sleet and heavy rain; 1,500 of the 7,000 climbed off en route. Who could blame them: cold rain in the mountains "tetanises" the muscles, turns the descents into skating rinks and makes the eyes burn. But there is no way out in the Tour, if you want to keep honour intact - and that is the difference.
Since the great drug scandals of 1998, cycling has been riven with suspicion over what the participants may, or may not be, taking to help them along the way. As a reminder of the colossal physical and mental demands that the Tour makes on its participants, the Etape was a welcome antidote to my cynicism. The difference between the Tourmen, artificially assisted or not, and a reasonably fit mortal is brutally simple. I rode the Etape's 90 miles in seven hours and 18 minutes. Two days later, the slowest man in the real thing, Jacky Durand, was almost 2 hours faster.
Way to go
Getting there: Hoverspeed (0870 5240241, hoverspeed.co.uk) sails Dover-Calais from £270 return for a car and four passengers.
Activities: Graham Baxter Sporting Tours (0113 284 3617, sportingtours.co.uk) offers entrance to the Etape (inc T-Shirt, medal and certificate), three nights' B&B, flights, transfers and insurance for £530pp; longer trips and coach tours available. Leisure Pursuits Group (0800 0186101, leisurepursuits.com) offers similar deals from £499pp. Medical certificate required for entry. Numbers are limited to 7,500. The 2002 Etape du Tour will be run on July 22 over the 88 miles from Aime to Cluses in the French Alps, crossing four mountain passes: the Cormet de Roselend (1,968m), the Col des Saisies (1,650m), the Col des Aravis (1,498m) and the Col de la Colombière (1,618m). For information on the event, contact Velo magazine on +4093 2020, letapedutour.com.
Further information: Maison de la France, 178 Piccadilly, London W1V 0AL (09068 244123, francetourism.com, franceguide.com).
Time difference: +1hr.
Country code: 0033.
Ferry time: Dover-Calais 55mins.
£1 = 1.49 euros.
· With thanks to Condor Cycles (020-7269 6820) for assistance in setting up the bike. William Fotheringham's Put Me Back on My Bike: in search of Tom Simpson, is published by Yellow Jersey Press at £15.99.
