Col du Tourmalet

The Tourmalet is the highest paved pass in the French Pyrenees and the most used climb in the history of the Tour de France. The race first crossed it in 1910, when the road was a gravel track and parts of it were walked. It has been back more than eighty times since.

From Luz-Saint-Sauveur the ascent is eighteen kilometres, from 714 metres to 2,115. There is very little of the switchback architecture that makes the Alpine passes legible from a distance. The road runs mostly straight up an open valley, through the ski village of Barèges at the halfway point, and then out above the treeline onto bare grass where the gradient stops relenting. The last eight kilometres sit between eight and nine per cent, and the steepest of them arrives second from the summit.

It is a climb of accumulated load rather than sudden violence. Nothing here breaks a rider in a hundred metres. What it exposes, over an hour, is a frame that returns less than the rider puts into it — which is the argument for building the laminate around the rider rather than the mountain.