Road Hazards

As it moves on to the Pyrenees, the Tour de France has been traversing the deeply cupped valleys and rolling hills of an almost unbearably picturesque region of rural calm. Caramel cows cluster at the roadside, plump sheep are nearly lost in the dense grass.

But although the landscape is lovely, the roads are cruel. During the first windy, wet week of the Tour, more than half of the 188 cyclists hit the asphalt, victims of tire punctures, misjudged turns and shaky nerves.

Most of the riders hopped back on their bikes -- their surging adrenaline masking any discomfort -- but broken collarbones, noses, ribs and unbearable pain have ended Tour dreams for some.

This Tour started off with an unprecedented number of crashes, but crashes are nothing new to the race.

Neither is pain.

Every athlete has felt the pain of injury and exertion. But experts acknowledge that cyclists are the sports world’s greatest masochists. The flaming feeling of lactic acid building up in the thighs from ceaseless pumping, the excruciating aches in the neck, back and shoulders from hunching over handlebars for hours on end -- even without the crashes these are normal sensations for riders.

Suffering is a point of pride. It is said that the Tour is won by the man who can suffer the most.

It’s tempting to say there is something uniquely French about the way the anguish of the Tour is glorified. Explaining the value that the sport offers young people, the director of a cycling program for children tells French radio, “This is a school of suffering. And when you know how to suffer, you learn a lot about satisfaction.”

You wonder, would this kind of promo hook American kids?

Yet, withstanding pain is a universal virtue, as two of the favorites to win this Tour can attest. It was chemotherapy that hardened five-time winner Lance Armstrong to the punishments of the Tour. He has been through metastasized testicular cancer -- what can shake him now? But Armstrong is not the only competitor with a seemingly unnatural pain threshold.

Last year Tyler Hamilton, a former Armstrong teammate from Marblehead, Mass., crashed and snapped his collarbone in two places when he was a half-mile from the finish of the Tour’s first stage. Making a choice as intimidating to his opponents as it was medically extraordinary, Hamilton sucked it up. Despite the nauseating pain of jagged bone grinding against bone and flesh, he won a stage race later in the Tour and went on to finish fourth overall.

“For me it’s about accepting the pain,” said Hamilton, leader of the Swiss team Phonak, just before the start of Stage 9. “If you don’t accept it, if you always resist, it makes it twice as bad.”

When he hit the ground last year, he said, his first thought was: “My Tour is over.” It was a realization far more agonizing than the screaming nerves around his clavicle. “I had the best form of my life, and it was one of the lowest points of my career. But cycling is all about ups and downs. You probably have more bad days than good days.”

That day, in fact, ended up being a good one. After other doctors advised him to abandon the race, Hamilton found one who said that as long as he didn’t fall again, he might be able to make it through the three weeks of racing to the end. This news, Hamilton said, “was like a ray of sunshine.”

It was all he needed to hear.

There is pain throughout the sprints, through the races on flatter land. Now, with the mountains on the agenda, the suffering is heightened.

“You’re in pain all the time in the mountains,” said Frankie Andreu, a former member of Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team. This is when the strongest riders will gauge the suffering of their opponents and make their moves. Armstrong is the ace of the mountain attack. Possessed of an extraordinary lung capacity and the blessed ability to produce less lactic acid than most, he simply hurts less. And even at his fullest capacity he can be poker-faced when the other riders are open-mouthed and grimacing, noses on their handlebars.

“He loves winning,” says Andreu. “Also, he loves making other guys hurt.”