backstage at the tour
Ben Trovato
TdF.
Tour de France vendredi16 juillet 2010
Les hommes de main
Texte: Ariane Pellaton
Each morning, beginning at the crack of dawn, the installation of the
finish zone is both a challenge and an adventure. Reportage from Les
Rousses, at the heart of a peloton of the night.
It's a pale early morning on the Tour. It could be Spa, Morzine, or
Bourg-lès-Valence. At five a.m. the Grande Boucle is still merely
notional when Jean-Louis Pagès, an ASO manager, draws a chalk finish
line, breaking the silence. Like so many iron behemoths, dozens of
tractor-trailers park themselves within a centimeter's leeway of the
spots they've been assigned by a finely-detailed plan, France
Televisions's control bus being the cornerstone of the edifice which
constitutes a finish area. It takes around ten men to arrange the big
elements. Under their hands, the trucks unfold into a press box, VIP
bleachers, podium. It's something like a clockwork origami.
No fewer than 150 trucks will take their places, eight containing
security barriers, twenty from France Télévisions, a veritable lung
pumping out the news. As supervisor of the technical zone, Jean-
Claude Cabo reviews the heights of buildings and the tree canopy to
determine if the antennas will function. The pruners, subject to
daily mobilization, won't be required. "One of the challenges comes
from the presence of houses and street blocks. It's the sort of
finish that's a red zone."
6:30 am. The first technicians appear. The ground is strewn with
cables, a tangle that would measure thirty-five kilometers if
stretched out. Beyond the finish line, the giant screen has risen up;
at their windows, the residents peep through their curtains. Jean-
Louis Pagès, who serves as the stage manager for a space of seven
hectares [~ 20 acres], takes care to greet one by one all the
forgotten actors of the Tour, who appear in his field of view
according to an unstated schedule, like well-oiled clockwork in which
everyone plays their role in a visible complexity. "We're all
responsible for one another. The day we no longer have time to shake
hands, it's over. We're all under pressure. You have to understand
that. My job is to manage people's effort over the long term. So
they can hold up." Contagiously upbeat, he covers kilometers. "Keep
in mind the sidewalks when you set up the barriers," he reminds the
young folks marking out the access paths to the line. "And here,
we'll have to create an exit so the residents who have to go buy their
bread can get out." The signage wranglers appear. Jean-Louis Pagès
has eyes everywhere. "There aren't enough directional arrows at the
highway exit."
The Tour de France has gotten dressed. The truck containers have
mutated into flowered terraces and windowed cabins, the grills of the
barriers into fields of color. Everything had been gray. Now it all
pulsates to the background sound system. 8:30 am at a Tour de France
under development: three blasts of a horn resound. A hundred people
converge on the finish line for the scheduled daily meeting, a
ritual. "Watch yourselves", Jean-Louis Pagès concludes. Eyes have
bags under them. The manager of the technical area, Jean-Claude Cabo,
has only had two hours of sleep. "I have to watch out for the
drivers' fatigue," he comments. "This isn't individual work. We all
think of each other, because everyone grafts on someone else's work."
The morning's first arrivals go off.
Backstage slavehands, these men live the Tour de France both
completely bound up with the event, and yet at a remove. They never
really see the race. "Now and then, I watch the stage back at the
hotel, but we usually try to get some sleep during the afternoons,"
says Alain Verpalese, of the technical zone. "I look at the results
of my work. If we're not ready, there's no Tour de France. Every day,
it's a city on the move. The worst are the mountain stages. We go up
at night with the trucks, and every year, we're scared there's going
to be some incident with people partying by the road. Some nights, we
don't sleep, we just grab some rest in half-hour stretches."
Henri Terreaux, the event manager with Orange-France Telecom tasked
with coordinating the installation of 500 communication lines in just
two hours, doesn't say it much differently. "Don't ask me who won
yesterday!" What do they perceive of the Tour de France? "We don't
see the scenery. We could arrive by the shore, and we'll never
glimpse the sea. We have the smell of the fresh air, the lavender,
in Rotterdam the spray . The chirping of the crickets. That's our
journey. The different culinary idioms, as well."
If the setup of the Tour de France is a veritable challenge, rough
patches don't seem to exist. Here, fatigue forms a bond. "It's
enormously enriching, because the values of solidarity and friendship
are paramount, " continues Henri Terreaux. "It like putting up a big
tent. When we separate that evening on the Champs-Elysées, everyone
goes off, careful not to say goodbye. A year later, we come together
as if we'd never parted and the race hadn't stopped. It's very
strange. Every morning we hug, heartfelt, it grabs your guts. That's
why it all holds together. We're not in the phony part of the race.
We're in the human part. Where it's real. So people feel extremely
attached."
Bright morning on the Tour. It's ten o'clock. The line's drawn in
white on the pavement. Above it, they're positioning the last camera
cabling with the help of a pole. The set up of the Tour comes to a
close, in a symbiosis with the days when racers sped night and day
along the roads of France with a lamp attached to their handlebars.
c. Le Temps SA
Anton Berlin
Lemond or Contrador's slimy tactics.
For fucks sake mate !
Ben Trovato
Me fais pas chier avec ton Fortinbas, CitronD et patati. Et puis, le
comptable, merde, il prouve qu'il sait bien compter.