Up!

Since it is the Vuelta, and the Vuelta does a lot of this, let us talk of ‘up’.

‘Up’, in case it had escaped your attention is the thing that makes cycling both wonderful and sickening.

I remember well how, midway during the first Tour de France I was dispatched to cover in 2003, I turned to my colleague Matt Rendell, and asked him, incredulously, whether he had ever ridden up an Alp.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

‘What, a whole one? Right to the top?’ I couldn’t fathom such an endeavour. ‘There’s no way I could do that.’

And in my imagination, I felt again the kind of choking nausea the slight rise of the road on which I lived in London could generate, with its harmless gradient that made even a trip to the shops an arduous adventure.

‘Of course you could,’ Matt naively assured me. ‘Besides, climbing is cycling,’ he explained, before adding, mysteriously the single word, ‘Mountains.’

I nodded sagely, as if I had the faintest idea what he was talking about.