Col Agnel is the highest border crossing between France and Italy and the third-highest paved pass in the Alps. From Château-Ville-Vieille the road runs up the Queyras, a valley dry enough at the bottom to feel Mediterranean and bare enough at the top to feel arctic, and the two are separated by about an hour.
Twenty-one kilometres and 1,367 metres, but the average describes almost none of it. The first eight kilometres sit around seven. Then the road slackens through Molines and Pierre Grosse to barely two, long enough to cool down and lose rhythm. Then the last six kilometres climb above the treeline at eight to nine and a half, with nothing left standing to break the wind.
A climb in three acts asks three different things of a bicycle, and the transitions are where a mismatched one shows itself. The false flat rewards a frame that holds speed for free. The wall above it rewards one that wastes nothing of what little is left. Very few bikes are honest in both places.
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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