While Fen and Pip were too high up to see the super domestique at work, they would later see what Cat could not: how ravaged a state Fugallo was in. The pictures beamed in to the salle de pressé focused on the race lead, not the domestique struggling with the mountain in a body struggling to cope. Fen and Pip yelled and leapt as Fabian and Carlos, and soon enough Vasily, passed by.

‘I can’t believe I’ve been so self-centred with my Evian,’ Pip said in horror, watching the fans pour water over the riders as they passed. ‘You can have one last sip, Fen,’ she said.

‘Look at all these people,’ Fen marvelled, taking two sips less than she actually required, ‘they’re like an ever-converging corridor, stepping aside but a wheel away from the approaching riders.’

‘If you were a dog,’ Pip reasoned, scanning downhill for the cyclists, ‘you’d have to wag your tail up and down, it’s so narrow. Here they come!’

‘Two and a half minutes off the lead,’ said Fen, checking her watch and focusing on four specks of lycra approaching. ‘Look! Someone’s bolted off.’

‘Lipari! Lipari!’ sang neighbouring Italians who’d been most generous with their Amaretti biscuits and their Amaretto, and they burst into the Zucca MV climber’s Giro pop tune.

‘Will he catch them?’ Fen wondered. ‘Fabian and Carlos and Vasily?’

‘He’s Massimo,’ one Italian said to her, raising his hands as if her question bordered on blasphemy, ‘of course he catch them – he eat them!’

‘Indians,’ says Hunter to Luca in a group of twelve, 24 minutes behind the leaders.

‘What?’ says Luca, who feels surprisingly strong but is riding carefully.

‘Indians,’ Hunter repeats, nodding ahead. Luca follows his gaze and his heart drops.

‘Oh fuck,’ he gasps, ‘no way, man, no fuckin’ way.’

He’d thought the summit couldn’t possibly be much further off. But, as he looks ahead, he spies lines of fans in the distance, snaking up and around the mountain, a zig-zag of spectators demarcating horribly clearly the severity and length of the route to the summit.

‘You can do it,’ Hunter says, ‘we can both make it.’

‘We can,’ says Luca, ‘but I’m not sure about poor Fugallo. Shit, did you see the state he was in?’

Still none of the McCabes knew how Gianni Fugallo was suffering. When Luca’s bunch neared Pip and Fen, Pip glanced at her sister, beamed a smile of inordinate proportions, grabbed the bottle of Evian and ran along the tarmac splashing the water over as many riders as she could. Cat saw her sister on the press TV, thought that’s my girl and wondered if any of the riders were as drenched as Pip appeared to be. But, with the three leaders beginning the descent, the cameras focused on the head of the race and Cat did not see Gianni Fugallo limp his way up the Madeleine, almost thirty minutes behind.

Fen and Pip, of course, did, It was the most repulsive yet poignant, heart-rending yet stomach-churning sight.