Higher Calling: Road Cycling’s Obsession with the Mountains

"The reason this is an interesting book is twofold. The mountains in cycling, in competitive racing, hold a particularly prominent position. In grand tours like the Tour de France, it’s the mountains that separate the overall contenders, the people who are apt to win the race from everyone else. I was a sprinter and a track racer and an absolutely abysmal climber. Here, I’m speaking from a position as a fan of the sport and certainly not as someone who is a capable climber myself. When you think about the time differences that manifest in a stage race, all that happens in the mountains where a leader will put five, seven minutes over his rivals in a stage. And when you rattle off the iconic stages of the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta a España, they’re all mountain stages, like Alpe d’Huez. Whether it’s the Alps or the Pyrenees, you can imagine these moon-like, barren landscapes, above the tree line, and riders emerging from small groups to really punish themselves. You can even think back to a rider like Tom Simpson. Certainly, amphetamines were involved, but back in the 60s, he died on the slopes of the mountain climb from the combination of amphetamines and exhaustion—literally riding himself to death. Yes, climbers certainly are physiologically very different from a sprinter or time trialist. It’s a niche facet of the sport unto itself. But Higher Calling is not just a book about climbing or climbers, it’s also about the continental European mountains. Leonard does this beautifully. He opens the book with the snow being cleared on this mountain pass and closes the book with it being snowed in again. This road is only available for a very limited number of months during peak summer so there is this finite temporal element to it. Riding on these roads, he is a reflective enough person to raise the basic question, ‘Why is this road even here?’ So, very quickly, you see concrete and battlements from World War II. You unpack the history of the Alps as a border between France and Italy going back to the Napoleonic Wars, when many of these roads that were initially dirt tracks were paved or became passable. So there’s a military and historical element to it. He does a wonderful job of unpacking the mountains as a place and figuring out why they hold this mythos, this appeal for cyclists. We’ve talked about some of the cycling elements already, but there are fascinating historical elements woven in. He does somewhat. The descending becomes a little bit easy to take for granted among the skills that are involved in road cycling. When you start to look at it, it’s quite frightening and periodically— probably every other year—there’s a death of a professional cyclist, and it does tend to be on the descents. Very famously, before helmets were compulsory, the Olympic champion, an Italian by the name of Fabio Casartelli, died on a descent in the Tour de France. When you think about the speeds that cyclists are traveling at on a descent like that, 100 kilometres an hour is not unreasonable. Now crash helmets are mandated, thankfully, but you’re still in Lycra shorts and a jersey. If you compare that to Moto GP or F1 and how protected they are, yes, the speeds are higher, but levels of protection are also astronomically better, and certainly not proportionate to what’s happening on a bicycle. I’ve ridden in the Alps and Pyrenees though not in a race situation, and I’ve ridden in the Rockies in a race situation. Oddly, at least when one is 19 or 25 years old, it almost doesn’t cross your mind. But when one is 40 years old and a father, one’s attitude to such things shifts radically. That youthful bravado or nerve, where I didn’t even consider descending as being particularly hazardous, is long past for me personally."