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This much-lauded ethos of Team Sky (see Ciel) has become part of mainstream cycling culture, with riders looking for all sorts of implausible ways to seek out any kind of advantage over their peers, however infinitesimal. But it should be noted that the guiding principle of the accroissement philosophy has not always been understood and enacted with total coherence in French cycling culture.

In 2013, the directeur sportif of the little-known Laverie La Poste-Yogadrome team from Brest, Yann Pleyber, changed all the mobile phone numbers of his riders to palindromic numbers.

It was his curious, and perhaps misguided, belief that the numbers would be easier to memorise if they were constructed along a central line of lateral symmetry. This, in turn, would foster a greater tendency for his charges to call and text each other. Such increased communication, in itself, would lead to marginally greater levels of team bonding, an effect that would play itself out to their advantage in the upcoming team time trial in the Tour du Finistère.

Pleyber estimated that this change in the telephone numbers of his cohort would ultimately be worth 2.25 seconds.

As it happened, the results were inconclusive, at best. Laverie La Poste-Yogadrome finished eleventh in the team time trial, and started the race a man short.

Their missing teammate claimed that no one had sent him a text message about the start time, and he turned up twenty minutes late.

An obsession with effecting tiny adjustments to the height of the seat post, the angle of the handlebars and the tightness of the straps on one’s shoes.

This practice divides cycling opinion right down the middle. In some teams, most notably the Russian outfit Katusha, ajustage is frowned upon, and riders found guilty of such a charge are routinely punished by having to gargle a cup of chain lube and sing a Gregorian chant.

Whereas in other cultures, specifically Italian, a ludicrous attention to detail and relentless dissatisfaction with the set-up of one’s bike is considered a virtue.

Riders’ contracts often include a bonus clause for ajustage, thus ensuring that, at winter training camps in particular, the rides often start over two hours late, such is the degree of unbridled fettling and tape-measure work outside the hotel before they set off. It is generally understood within Italian teams that it is in no one’s interests to speed this process up.

A race is considered to be ambulatoire if it displays any of the following features, all of which increase the chances that a rider will be leaving in the back of an ambulance: cobbles, rain, wind, cobbles.

The infamous Paris–Roubaix, of course, normally contains all four of these hazards, but is, for some reason, romanticised for its sheer dangerousness. It is the ultimate course ambulatoire and is celebrated as such by tens of thousands of cycling fans who make their way to the side of the road in the specific hope of taking a selfie with a badly injured rider as he lies face first in a puddle.

In fact, in 1974, the Hornby cycling toy range featured a special edition commemorative Paris–Roubaix set, complete with a two-foot length of recessed cobblestones (see Pavé), tin figures of drunken Flemish and French fans (two of whom are engaged in a fist fight), manure transfers with which to decorate the road and a Citroën ambulance van in French livery, whose rear doors open to reveal a stricken Eddy Merckx, clutching his collar bone and screaming in pain.

Such sets are extremely collectable and routinely fetch prices in the region of £11–11.75 on eBay.

An unwanted addition to a race, such as a sharp climb in the final five hundred metres. Like an anchovy (anchois) on a pizza, it is an unnecessary and ruinous elaboration on an otherwise trustworthy format.

Named after the eponymous tripe-based sausage, often mistakenly ordered by foreign tourists in French restaurants when trying to bluff their way through the menu, this term describes any race that turns out to be unexpectedly unpleasant.

The first, and to this date only, Tour of the Caucasus is often believed to be the ultimate andouillette, featuring as it did in 2008 long flat stages, through grizzled suburbs of war-torn cities, with little or no crowd save for the occasional three-legged, scavenging dog and a procession of Russian partisans passing in the opposite direction in the back of pick-up trucks.

This view of the race was common currency. The continuing bad press it received and the litany of very public complaints from riders about the conditions at the event prompted the organisers to respond.

They posted the following infamous outburst on their Facebook page as a reaction to the growing complaints from the cycling community: ‘What do you expect? Caviar? Haven’t any of you read Bertolt Brecht? The clue’s in the name! Of course it’s an andouillette.’

This is still believed to be the only recorded link between the works of Brecht and professional cycling, except for the recently released Italian documentary, The Resistible Rise of Vincenzo Nibali.

Pertaining to, or descriptive of, the state of bewildered ennui to which riders and the rest of the entourage succumb during the middle week of a Grand Tour.

It is generally accepted that from Stage Seven onwards no one involved in the race has the faintest idea where they are, where they were the day before, nor where they will be the following day. It is because no one actually knows with any degree of exactitude where the French town of Angers is that this most humble of conurbations has become synonymous with a state of ingrained confusion, e.g. ‘Where are we tomorrow?’ ‘I don’t know … Angers?’fn1

Moreover, its usage has further been developed to describe a mental state of indifference and lethargy. ‘Ça va?’, you might enquire of a colleague over coffee in the morning. ‘Un peu Angers’ might be the response, accompanied by a deeply affected shrug and a thousand-yard stare out of the window.

Any team bus driver who enlivens a fairly dull stage by crashing into the finishing arch and getting his vehicle stuck (see Orica).

An irritating rider, preoccupied with the number of kilometres remaining, and unable to keep the information to himself.

A professional cyclist forced to wear a comically ugly team kit, patterned with chevrons, checks and/or primary colours. Anyone who has ever ridden for AG2R La Mondiale.

A rider who times his or her effort to perfection, arriving with uncanny precision and at the very last minute to take the victory, having been entirely invisible for the preceding hundreds of kilometres and having contributed nothing to the chase.

Arrivistes are generally deeply unpopular figures in the peloton, and are known to be loners, shunned at the breakfast table and forced to eat dinner on their own, often with sputum in their pasta, seasoned secretly in the kitchens by their teammates. However, historically they are the best-paid riders in the team, since they win the most races. This does nothing to add to their popularity. As such, the word itself has become a totem for unpleasant characteristics: avarice, selfishness, deviousness, ruthlessness.

Its use has spread beyond cycling into literature. In 1963, the absurdist Romanian poet and former winner of the Tour of Transylvania Gheorghe Zimbrean, writing from exile in Paris, adopted the expression when he published his seminal collection Moi? Arriviste. Toi? Penis, a free-form poetic rhapsody in celebration of cycling. And genitals.

Having not won the Tour de France seven times, the Texan rider then went on to claim that he, and not his namesake Neil, had in fact been the first man on the moon.

This was a phrase originally coined by Lance Armstrong (see Astronaute) during his valedictory Tour (before his valedictory comeback) in 2005. After his famous farewell speech on the Champs-Élysées, in which he claimed to pity those who ‘don’t believe in miracles’, he then went on to claim that he was bigger than The Beatles.fn2

To wind-up, gob-off, sledge or generally ‘give it some verbals’ in the bunch.

Australian riders, it is generally acknowledged, are seen to have imported the habit of attisement to the European cycling scene in the late 1980s, starting with Phil Anderson, who used to own a truly horrid joke about a man’s nose.

The most infamous exponent of the dark art in recent times is Tasmania’s diminutive climber Richie Porte, a man in possession of a jibe so unpleasant that it needs to be kept locked up in the hotel safe every night in case it escapes. It is believed to relate in some way to salad cream (see Badinage).

The dawn serenade of the Campanile hotel, a chain favoured (for purely financial reasons) by teams competing in continental bike races.

Whilst the unwelcome and over-early aubade is associated, if not uniquely, then frequently with Campaniles, the nature of the unprompted wake-up call may vary greatly.

Traditionally, and especially if you are staying anywhere near Tours, Rouen or Macon, this noisy interruption to your sleep will take the form of building work starting outside the window at an unreasonable hour. But an alarm going off and being ignored in the room next door, someone’s bladder giving out and a rush for the toilet in the room above or a riotous fart from a roommate will have the same effect. A return to sleep is rendered impossible by the need to get straight on to Twitter to complain about the fact that you have just been woken up. Often used in conjunction with expletives, a hashtag (#AubadeCampanile) and a bedraggled selfie.

A recently coined term, principally conceived to describe the racing tactics employed by Team Sky (see Ciel).

During the 2012 and 2013 seasons, rumours spread like wildfire through the peloton that Sky had begun an ambitious programme of micro-lobotomies. It was said that, in an effort to reduce the uncontrollable effects of independent thought, thus impairing their riders’ capacity for doing what they were told, the team had identified a troublesome cluster of synapses in the lower temporal lobe, associated with having one’s own opinions about stuff.

Overseen by Sir Dave Brailsford, with input from the brilliant psychologist Steve Peters, this highly secretive project was driven forward by a Canadian trepanist called Akkituyok (an Inuit name meaning ‘dear’ or ‘expensive’).

An investigative report by David Walsh (see Athée) in the Sunday Times revealed that Brailsford had first got to know the Canadian when he was embedded with the mounted police during the winter of 2008 on a clandestine fact-finding mission to see if there was ‘anything cycling could learn from the world of equestrian law-enforcement in extremely hostile environments’.

The forensic dissection of a rider’s failed attempt to complete a race, conducted under duress, and carried out by a quietly furious sports director (see Directeur sportif) shortly after the rider has climbed into his team car (see Corbillard) and abandoned.

For the French-speaking cycling world, it refers to a rider with a strong sense of justice and an in-depth working knowledge of the rules and regulations governing all aspects of the sport.

Brontosaure nm

A lumbering, slow-moving, vegetarian rider. (Obsolete.)

Babiller vi

To ride incoherently and without a plan, as if one has not the faintest idea what one is doing.

The most infamous babilleur of the mid 1980s was the Parisian rider Guy Parfouffe, the son of a chocolatier from the salubrious suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Parfouffe, a rangy figure with a huge beaked nose and a marked lisp, counted the music of difficult-to-listen-to German composer Stockhausen amongst his passions, along with an appreciation of falconry imagery in French Medieval poetry. An aesthete through and through, he was, by his own sometimes tearful admission, so uncomfortable in the coarse hurly-burly of the contemporary peloton that he would frequently feature in the breakaway, or at least try to, simply to get away from all the badinage, not to mention the attisement.

This he did with impulsive abandon, attacking whenever the road turned left, went uphill, turned right or ran over a level crossing. In fact, so predictable were his wild and ultimately doomed attempts to get away on his own, that the bunch would often funnel over to the left-hand side of the road to allow him the passage to launch his over-exuberant attack, waving him forward with impatient gestures and rather rude insults.

Parfouffe always obliged, nose down and avoiding eye contact, legs spinning wildly.

As a result of his trademark and completely pointless attacks, the ‘Prix Parfouffe’ became a fixture of French TV coverage of the Tour. During a long stretch in the 1990s, it was awarded on a daily basis to the rider who had displayed the highest level of babillage.

Parfouffe himself never won the prize.

Bactériologiste nmf

A rider who knows of a cure to almost any illness and will not hesitate for a second in offering advice to a stricken rider, whether solicited or not.

A bactériologiste will also undoubtedly have suffered from said complaint. In fact, they’ll have had it more frequently, more acutely and with more uncontrollable itching than you.

Badinage nm

Ribald, amusing conversation, aimed at effecting team spirit through ritual humiliation.

In the Anglophone peloton (see Super), such boisterous hilarity is known simply as ‘banter’ or even ‘bantz’, and has been perfected into something of an art form by Team Sky’s Welsh star Geraint Thomas, whose dry wit and lively sense of teasing fun has been known on occasion to stray into attisement.

However, banter’s French cousin badinage is considerably more sophisticated, and likely to feature literary allusions.

For example, the recently retired Jérome Pineau was a master of badinage; his jokes often alluded with great wit and elegance to masterpieces of the nineteenth-century French canon.

Pineau was once overheard at breakfast ridiculing his teammate Sylvain Chavanel for his ‘excessive use of pomade, as if he were trying to seduce Madame Bovary herself’, referring to the heroine of the eponymous novel by Gustave Flaubert, who hailed from the same region in which the former French time-trial champion had first signed for a professional team.

Pineau’s wonderfully phrased quip was greeted by a wave of appreciative chuckles from his IAM Cycling teammates, all of whom, at that time, had signed up to a correspondence course in the Tradition of the Novella from the University of Nottingham.

For the record, Chavanel ignored him and poured himself a coffee.

Bagatelle nf

(i) A derisory financial offer, made by a weaker, yet richer opponent to ‘buy’ a race from a stronger, poorer rival.

(ii) The media ‘mixed-zone’ behind the podium of the Tour de France, through which the riders must pass, bouncing from microphone to microphone like a ball on a bagatelle board.

(iii) The Tour of Britain.

Bailli nm

A bailiff, or debt collector. A rider with a long memory for outstanding favours that should be repaid, often years after the event.

A seeming lack of gratitude for a good deed done can quickly become the source of festering resentment within the closeted world of the peloton. Some riders have become famous for their sense of grievance, which they have been known to turn into a form of currency.

The Belgian rouleur Kevin Sandrijder would routinely ‘gift’ other riders virtually irrelevant bonus seconds at intermediate sprints on meaningless stages of unimportant races, in the knowledge that he could exploit this perceived generosity in the future.

Years later, he would expect these favours to be returned, but with considerable added interest. In a tearful radio interview broadcast just after his retirement, Andy Schleck recounted how his entire career had been blighted by the obligation he felt towards Sandrijder and his team of baillis. This indebtedness came about as a result of Sandrijder lending Schleck his pump in 2009 on a training ride. It was a gesture with consequences for Schleck, as well as for Sandrijder’s closest friend in the peloton, Alberto Contador, who was the best man at Sandrijder’s wedding to Contador’s sister.

In 2010, still conscious that the loan of his pump had not been recompensed, Sandrijder called in the debt.

‘I wouldn’t have minded too much,’ recalled Schleck in 2013, ‘had it stopped at me being forced to gift Alberto Contador the 2010 Tour de France. But one day, Sandrijder’s brothers turned up outside my house in Luxembourg and demanded the telly. And my sandwich toaster.’

Bakélite nf

An imposter, a phoney leader, a rider in a falsely elevated position.

The origins of this word are obscure, but it is widely thought to refer both to Bakelite, the brittle forerunner of plastic, and Jan Bakelants, the Belgian opportunist who snuck into an unexpected Yellow Jersey on the 2013 Tour.

Since his subsequent and quite inevitable surrender of the race lead, the expression ‘c’est de la Bakélite’ has become common parlance.

Bakelants has tried to distance himself from the phrase by telling everyone he hears using it to ‘flikker op’.

Banjo nm

A pejorative term to denote a massively annoying rider.

This phrase was first coined by Eddy Merckx in 1972, shortly after the release of the film Deliverance, which featured the famous ‘duelling banjos’ sequence in which a strange inbred delinquent reveals himself to have astonishing virtuosity at the banjo.

Likening his sometime rival, the Spanish climber Benjamin Garcia Carrion, to the character of Lonnie from the film, Merckx was quoted as asking with incredulity: ‘Is Carrion really to be spoken of as my equal? Yes, if the banjo is the equal of a full orchestra.’

This comment came after a series of mountaintop finishes in the Tour of Catalonia in which the taciturn Spaniard clung to Merckx’s wheel, proving annoyingly unshakeable.

Responding some days later to Merckx’s dismissive description of his tactics, Carrion replied in an interview with La Marca that ‘A banjo is a noble and resolute instrument, capable of great expression. If Señor Merckx has not the humility to see that even the humblest of organs can produce wonders, then he has no place pontificating from on high. To me, he is nothing so grand,’ Carrion continued. ‘To me, he is simply a coarse bassoon. Or maybe a euphonium.’

Carrion died in penury in 1995, and a simple headstone bearing the symbol of a banjo marks his grave. The stone was a gift of the Merckx family.

Bassiste nmf

A silent, unheralded, often lugubrious rider, whose function within the team is simply to perform the same tiresomely repetitive tasks over and over again, in a certain dreadful rhythm.

Baudelairien adj

An adjective used to describe a particularly flowery race report in L’Équipe. Pejorative.

Baver vi

Literally, to dribble, slobber or drool.

This verb is closely associated with, and is in many ways a slight precursor to, the American English expression ‘to bonk’, describing collapsing with exhaustion induced by hunger and thirst.

The empty feeling that can overwhelm a cyclist must be warded off at all costs, often by the forced feeding of bananas, flapjacks, horrible little buns, sandwiches, crisps, Cornish pasties and roast pork, all of which are pulled from the rear pockets of riders on the move.

Certain riders (baveurs) develop a reputation for unabashed and continual feeding, starting at the breakfast table, continuing on the bus to the start, during the race, through the finish line, onto the bus to the hotel and straight to the dinner table. They are not popular and tend to sit in isolation, chomping and slavering, wide-eyed and desperate, as their colleagues whisper about them in disgust. ‘Regarde Alain. Il bave encore, le cochon.’

The most notorious baveur of all time, according to legend, was the Danish sprinter Willy Lars Ankerman, who, fearing the ‘bonk’, once stole a Camembert baguette from a child on the slopes of the Col d’Aspin on the 1964 Tour. He was subsequently arrested by gendarmes that evening at his hotel in Lourdes, after a complaint was made by the child’s father.

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