STAGE 20
Disneyland-Paris. 149.5 kilometres

We’re getting there, all of us who’ve experienced this Tour de France on whichever level. We’re almost in Paris, the finish line is 149.5 kilometres away. We just have to leave Euro Disney, travel up to Barcy, turn left, drop down, turn right and keep going due west until the outskirts of the exquisite city are upon us. Then we’ll head for the hallowed cobbles of the Champs-Elysées, the most beautiful avenue in the world, where the Tour de France has had its grande finale since 1975.

Enter the circuit at the Avenue du Général Lemonnier, race alongside the Tuileries gardens, dash over the Place de la Concorde, whoosh up the Champs-Elysées to the Place Charles de Gaulle, curve round, pelt down the Champs-Elysées, back through the Place de la Concorde, along the Quai des Tuileries before turning to race the 6.5 kilometre lap another nine times. Having already covered 86.5 kilometres. Having previously raced 3,696.8 kilometres.

Cat almost couldn’t bear to go to the last village, having had a lump in her throat since breakfasting with Josh and Alex that morning. A huge Mickey Mouse hot air balloon smiled inanely over the proceedings and Cat wandered about the village trying to absorb absolutely everything for posterity, to concentrate on the infuriating jingles in a bid to lighten the profound emotion enveloping her. She saw the pretty girls at the Coca-Cola marquee crying and hugging all the lithe bronzed Italian domestiques who had visited each morning over the past three weeks. She noted how the population of the village had swelled with the arrival of wives, girlfriends and families and she regarded them enviously but also with a certain satisfaction.

I’ve had the boys for three whole weeks. I’ve experienced it with them. From Vuillard to Le Cap D’Arp, from Valadon to Aix-les-Bains. I’ve shared their Tour in real time and at first hand.

Having said, ‘Enjoy’, as she had done recently to riders whom she now knew, and happy for them that finally today they could indeed do so, Cat drove the 30 kilometre itinéraire direct with a quiet Josh and a subdued Alex. Paris. L’arrivée. A staggering and rather unnerving contrast suddenly completing her three weeks with the peloton. She was used to the Tour de France being the largest entity, the centre of attention, in the places it had visited, enveloping the towns, the landscape and being welcomed and treated like some mammoth VIP. In Paris, it was swallowed up. Even the parking for the presse cars was today a far cry from the leafy enclosures near to the finishes, or spacious lots near the salles de presse. Today, in Paris, it was a free-for-all in the grim underground car park at the gargantuan Hôtel Concorde Lafayette. In the vast hotel where most of the entourage of the Tour de France, the teams, the officials, the presse, would be staying, the salle de pressé was in a claustrophobic conference room.

There weren’t enough cables. There was no complimentary buffet. No welcome. No pampering. Even the signs for the salle itself were comparably small against those for the boutiques and restaurants and those directing important businessmen to some convention or other.