Sporting immortality awaits victor at Alpe d’Huez

The Tour de France loves a celebration, and this year’s 102nd edition is paying tribute to the 40th anniversary of its introduction of the distinctive red polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey by plotting out the most mountainous route for years. A third of the 21 stages take place in the high mountains, where there are no fewer than five summit finishes. The last of them is at Alpe d’Huez, the most famous climb in cycling, which features on the penultimate day of the race for the first time and could very well decide the destiny of the fabled yellow jersey.

There was never any chance of the Tour bypassing Alpe d’Huez when it became clear its organisers wanted to honour the polka-dot jersey. The climb from the small town of Bourg d’Oisans at the foot of the mountain via the 21 hairpins that pile on top of each other to reach the ski station has long been regarded as a Tour classic, as ‘the Hollywood climb’. But this wasn’t always the case.

When Alpe d’Huez first appeared on the Tour route in 1952, becoming the first high-altitude summit finish in the race’s history, many observers questioned the thinking of the Tour’s organisers. One suggested they needed to spend time with a psychiatrist after the great Italian rider Fausto Coppi breezed away from his rivals on its slopes and all but wrapped up the title with a single assault.

Almost a quarter of a century passed before the Tour returned to the Alpe. By 1976, though, cycling and the Tour had fully embraced summit finishes, because they both guaranteed drama within a shortish, TV-friendly time frame and took the race into a resort that had thousands of empty beds to accommodate the race caravan.

Victory on the Alpe that year went to Holland’s Joop Zoetemelk, which triggered a run of success for Dutch riders. By 1989, when Gert-Jan Theunisse scooped the eighth Dutch win at the French resort in 13 attempts, Alpe d’Huez had become ‘Dutch mountain’.

Every time the Tour visited the Alps, which it did most years during that period, tens of thousands of orange-clad fans thronged the climb, many of them gathering around bend seven (the bends are numbered in reverse order starting with 21 at the bottom), from which there is a long view back down the mountain and which was quickly dubbed ‘Dutch corner’. One writer observed that Amstel beer was flowing so copiously here that a pipeline must have been laid from Holland.

While most of the credit for the mountain’s huge popularity in Holland was due to those eight wins, some should also go to a figure who is far less well known, outside that country at least. Theo Koomen was a radio commentator for the Dutch state network NOS who had cemented his reputation covering Dutch skating successes at the Winter Olympics and Ajax’s glory years in the European Cup. With a machine gun delivery and boundless enthusiasm, Koomen became Holland’s go-to-man when covering major sporting events, and the Tour allowed him to lift his performances to a new level.

Koomen’s fervour carried him into frequent flights of fantasy. At the Tour, where live TV coverage in the mid-1970s extended to just hour at the end of a stage, Koomen entered the realm of make-believe. With up to a million Dutch tuning in to his broadcasts, he described action that would have been sensational if any of it had been true. He spoke of the race’s big guns were attacking each other non-stop, of fortunes ebbing and flowing, of all manner of heroics. Back in Holland, his listeners were gripped and work often stopped, and this despite the fact that no one was fooled. Most realised Koomen was glossing the action race ridiculously, but couldn’t resist his gusto and passion.

It is now 26 years since the Dutch last tasted success on Alpe d’Huez, but the fans still come in their thousands when the Tour pitches up on its slopes. Mixing with tens of thousands of other fans from all across the globe, they create an atmosphere that is unique to the sport. It becomes cycling’s Wembley or Hampden, transforming what is far from the most attractive mountain road – 1992 Alpe winner Andy Hampsten describes it as “a very good road to get to a ski resort” – into a great sporting amphitheatre, into what Tour historian Serge Laget says is “like all the Alps encapsulated in one mountain”.

Searching, as he always does, for a new twist to Tour favourites, race director Christian Prudhomme has scheduled the latest finish ever on the Alpe, just the day before the finale in Paris. The danger is that the title might well have been decided by that point, but that won’t stop the fans from turning up or the riders from regarding the stage between Modane and Alpe d’Huez as a very special occasion.

Hampsten describes the Alpe d’Huez stage as “the most exciting for a racer to be on” and his victory there as being “better than winning the World Championship… it was the one stage that meant the most to me”. Winning there is the holy grail for any rider, and especially the sport’s most adept climbers. It guarantees sporting immortality because it is cycling’s greatest climb.