Roadside Stage 17: The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.. and that’s the same for Tour de France journalists if they want to drive over the Col d’Allos on stage 17. Never to be out done, Ed always has a ‘Plan B’ at his finger tips. Where there is a bike race there is a story to tell pictures to take. Pra Loup? We can’t go up there; not when I remember what happened 40 years ago . . .Merckx lead over the Col d’Allos and descended like a demon, he led on to the Pra Loup climb but that day, July 13th 1975, saw the Belgian suffer, ‘une norme dfaillance’ – we’d say, “blow up horribly” and cool, handsome, ever-smiling Bernard Thevent was there to put his revolver to Eddy’s temple and administer a ‘coup de grace.’ We’d never see the same Eddy again; as a Merckx fan for 45 years, I can’t go up there. It would be profane.The plan is to climb the monster Col d’Allos – 14 K @ 5.5% and the 2015 Tour’s highest point @ 2250 metres – from the ‘wrong’ side and embed up there.The scenery on the way over is fabulous with views over impossibly blue lakes. Happily en route to the Allos, the BlackBerry beeps; “For the stage 17, the riders of Le Tour de France will climb the Col dAllos. Because of the weather conditions and in order to keep a good quality of the road...
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