The Peyresourde is the gateway to the central Pyrenees. It was one of the four cols on the 1910 stage from Luchon to Bayonne that the riders christened the Circle of Death, and it is still the pass the Tour uses most often to enter or leave the Luchon valley.
From Bagnères-de-Luchon it is fourteen kilometres and 927 metres of climbing. The shape is unusual: a mild opening, a short flat third kilometre, then a sudden ramp at kilometre five — the steepest of the climb — and after that an almost unbroken seven-to-eight per cent for the remaining nine kilometres. There is no wall and no respite either — the road simply keeps the same angle across open pasture, hairpin after hairpin, with the summit visible for most of the way up.
It is the most rhythmic climb in this collection, which makes it the one where a badly matched frame is hardest to hide. At a constant cadence on a constant gradient, the only variable left is what the bicycle does with the power.
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.
Find the book
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