Austin Escorts: Tour de France diary
A day off in a Swiss hacienda: a small hotel surrounded by snow-capped Alpine peaks. Can it get any better? Yes. Parked outside are Tour publicity caravan vehicles – a giant coffee cup on wheels, and two doughnut-shaped trucks. Each summer, hundreds of attractive, exuberant young people give up three weeks to take part in the caravan. If you have to spend hours in a Swiss hacienda, there are worse crowds to be with.
TUESDAY (Martigny)
Dave Brailsford, the British Cycling performance director and man behind the new Team Sky, is spotted in the Village Départ, deep in conversation with Jonathan Vaughters, who runs the Garmin-Slipstream team of Tour revelation Bradley Wiggins. Were they discussing Wiggins, and for whom he might ride next season? “Actually,” says Brailsford, looking serious. “We were talking about Swiss chocolate.” Wiggins excels again on the second day in the Alps, but he is apprehensive about day three. “It’s going to be more of a brothel,” he says, which confuses the French journalists. And the British ones, for that matter.