How I Won the Yellow Jumper (25 page)

Before driving off, however, we balanced Liam's camera somewhere precarious and took a self-timed picture in which we all managed to smile simultaneously.

But, although dinner is a lottery, and breakfast, no matter how you dress it up, is something to be endured, lunch is a thing of beauty. Ever since the days when Channel 4 used to show the Tour, the same production company has made the programmes. And over those many many years, the same caterers have fed the programme makers. A considerable (and in the interests of commercial confidentiality, undisclosed) portion of the annual production budget goes towards the preparation and presentation of fabulous, hearty, regionally sourced fresh French food.

An extended French family who live, for reasons I have never established, in Forest Hill in south London, have the catering contract for lunch. The day they lose it is the day I resign.

Romain is a pleasant, harmless maniac. In his mid-twenties, no more than five foot seven tall, a little round of physique with a military haircut and a matching beard, he collects free Tour stuff with a passion. Most days, therefore, you will find him wearing some sort of T-shirt, donated to him by an American TV network, in an ever-advancing state of decay as the sauces of a hundred lunches are rubbed into its fabric, and the sweat of a hundred stocks eat into its weave.

He will normally offset this with a baseball cap from a German station, worn at the jaunty angle of a Brooklyn MC. Sometimes, if he is feeling particularly outré, he will wear two. Just because he can. And because he's a maniac.

Romain's mother, Odette, who barely looks a day older than him, works tirelessly loading and unloading the fresh produce from the back of their hired Petit Forestier refrigerated truck, wiping down surfaces, fixing the temperamental coffee machine, and basically ensuring that all the life-sustaining trimmings are in place and in operational order. By the middle of each Tour, Odette begins to turn dark hazelnut-brown, and as her tiredness increases with the murderously demanding schedule, so her low-key, chilled cheerfulness becomes a more and more precious commodity. A simple, ‘'Allo, Ned' can bring a smile to an otherwise damp and miserable mountain morning. That and the endless supply of apricots, peaches and plums.

Odette is married to Philippe, Romain's stepfather. He towers over the whole enterprise, a bolt-upright, bespectacled pony-tailed giant. Clearly born in the wrong century, Philippe could have enjoyed a passable career as a cameo actor in every series of
Blackadder
other than perhaps the fourth. A medieval knight, an Elizabethan explorer, a Regency fop. He has it all in his compass. As well as making a
tartiflette
that fills you up just by looking at it.

Apart from being a gentle, wry, dependable man, he cooks with great love and significant pride. Philippe sets the day's menu, and while Odette and Romain are detailed to churn out the volume, he whips up the fresh mayonnaise, finesses the
jus
or puts together one of his exceptional cold soups which are served as an amuse-bouche in daily rotating variation. He has a taste for introducing fruit in the most unexpected places, which down the years has taught us all a thing or two. Not for him the pineapple-chunk-on-the-slice-of-ham routine of my seventies British upbringing. He's much more of a post-modern how-about-a-bit-of-grapefruit-in-your-artichoke-salad type.

It's proper cooking. Knocked out every day on gas rings balanced on trestle tables set out under a couple of easy-up marquees in whichever bit of France (or Belgium, Italy or Andorra) we happen to want our lunch served that day.

So, these three characters, accompanied by a supporting cast of peripheral family members and friends who drift in and out of the Tour (Romain has recently married and his wife joined in the fun in 2010), determine to a large extent the mental health and spiritual welfare of a host of Tour operatives. It is a growing congregation, which extends further and further each year, as their reputation for serving up the most outstanding catering the Tour de France has ever known spreads throughout
the compound.

You need only look at the expressions of all the others as they wander past our catering tent to sense what deprivation they must feel. While Philippe and Odette look after the needs of the anglophone world, as well as the Scandinavian countries and the upper echelons of ASO, the rest of the world must fend for themselves.

France Télévisions, with their 300 staff, set up a military camp, which more closely resembles a field hospital than a canteen. They seem to eat in well-ordered shifts, but a glance over in their direction normally offers up the impression that they are subsisting on bread and cheese alone. And wine, obviously.

The Germans have a vast presence in the compound, which appears undiminished despite the waning of interest back home. Indeed, in 2008, when they ‘weren't covering the race' in protest at the spate of doping offences, they still had four times as many staff on-site as we did. It has to be said, they cater miserably for themselves. Unable to eschew national cliché, they serve up a resolutely German-looking and largely pork-and-starch-based affair every day. It is mostly beige in colour. They don't appear to enjoy it.

I have no idea what the Belgians and the Dutch – or, come
to that, the Spanish and the Italians – do to keep themselves fed. I suspect that they forage. I know that the Australians do. Having blown all their budget on getting to France in the first place, they have nothing left over in the kitty for lunch. They dig the compound over for dry tubers and nibble the succulent ends of overhanging branches.

Yet we eat like kings.

Philippe and his team of four live in the smallest caravan on the planet. For a month they try to grab a few hours' kip squeezed up alongside each other like cornichons in a jar, their Union Jack curtains letting in the morning light as the sun breaks out over an alpine ridge.

And when that happens, they know, we know, and the Tour knows: it's time to start peeling the spuds.

Nobody had spoken for a while. It was midnight, and we hadn't eaten since breakfast. The starters had just been plonked down in front of us. Then Liam broke the silence.

‘I think he's brilliant.' Liam cracked a wide smile, and then went back to spreading a wedge of hot foie gras onto slice of baguette.

He shook his head, a contented chuckle beginning to spread out within him. As it began to take hold, he looked up again, and spitting a little goose liver towards us, restated his new-found affection for Kazakhstan.

‘Vino. I just think he's fucking brilliant.'

He reached for the glass of Madiran in front of him. ‘Vinokourov!'

Liam raised his wine, almost religiously, and saluted us across the table with the name of the disgraced Astana rider.