Twenty-one numbered bends, each carrying a sign with the name of a stage winner. The Tour first finished here in 1952, won by Fausto Coppi, and the Alpe has since become the most recognisable climb in cycling — not the hardest, not the highest, but the one where the race is most often decided in front of the largest crowd in the sport.
Fourteen kilometres and 1,118 metres from Le Bourg-d'Oisans. The difficulty is loaded at the front: the first three kilometres average 9.3, 10.2 and 8.6 per cent, straight out of the valley with no warm-up at all, and they are where most first attempts go wrong. After that it settles into a long eight-to-nine per cent through the bends, and only the last two kilometres into the village relent.
A climb decided in its opening ten minutes rewards a frame that feels right immediately. There is no settling-in period here in which to find a rhythm the bicycle is comfortable with — the rhythm is set by the road, from the first bend.
Photography
Michael Blann
Rider
Every SWI is laid up for one rider — their weight, their power, the way they actually ride. One uninterrupted carbon shell, formed in a single mould, built for a body rather than a size chart. It is the whole reason the same mountain feels different underneath two frames.
Michael Blann
For the people who live beneath them the great European ranges are simply a way of life. For everyone else they are scenery. For a cyclist they are none of those things — they are an appointment with your own limits, and the reason a road that goes nowhere useful is worth riding at all.
Michael Blann has spent years photographing the climbs that made the sport: the Alps, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Ardennes. The pictures are landscape photography of a very high order, but the book is really about what those places do to the people who ride them — an argument built from light, weather and altitude, with recollections from professional riders threaded through it.
If you have ever ridden one of these roads, or intend to, it is the closest thing to being back on it.
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