This article was originally published in Rouleur 115. Support our journalism by subscribing here.
Between all the interesting bits of France, sits the la Diagonale du Vide or the empty diagonal – a vast swathe of countryside and farmland. Richard Abraham took his own bike across the empty diagonal and reflected that perhaps we’ve been getting this part of France all wrong when it comes to the Tour de France.
Instead of its predictable, crowd-pleasing cliché of the Tour in the mountains, he believes that the more exciting stages happen here in the empty diagonal, offering up intrigue, unpredictability and endless possibilities.
May 31, 2022: Loiret. I am cycling through France and I’m thinking about my favourite stages of the Tour de France. I like L’Alpe d’Huez and I like the Pyrenees, Mont Ventoux, the Galibier, the Tourmalet and so on. Christian Prudhomme and Thierry Gouvenou evidently like them too, because they have placed the modern-day Tour firmly in the orbit of those high mountains.
Some people go through life eating the same thing for lunch every day, and the Tour now happily chomps its way through Alps then Pyrenees, or Pyrenees then Alps, in order to work itself out. Baked beans for lunch or dinner; good old reliable baked beans. Yet I think the Tour has become too reliant on a predictable, canned form of bike racing.
Imagine France as a large Renaissance landscape tapestry. The département of Indre is somewhere off centre, a patch of field with perhaps a cow standing in the middle of it, nonchalantly watching on as knights do battle somewhere else, only really present because if it weren’t, there would just be a gap. The Indre is flat, featureless and a long way from the action. But on one hot day in July in 2013, in the middle of the centenary Tour, it was right in the thick of it.
July 12, 2013: Indre. The stage was from Tours to Saint-Amand-Montrond, the latter known principally for being close to the cartographical centre of France but about as far away as a French person can get from anything else.
In the mountains the Tour knows where it is and it knows the script, but on this day the peloton was edgy, soaked with collective uncertainty, half of it spoiling for a fight and half of it cowering in the corner. Then the wind started to blow. What occurred was four hours of improv theatre.
Marcel Kittel and Alejandro Valverde soon found themselves killed off after Act One, in that desperate situation where…