Checkpoints in time

Jacopo Guarnieri had done some research. So last night we broke our long journey from Vire into the heart of Brittany by stopping off for dinner in the wonderful little town of Dinan, one of the region’s many inland ports, navigable by boat and barge. Once, when he was riding for FDJ, Jacopo had spent a blissful few days there with a team mate, training on the rolling terrain of Brittany, preparing for the Giro. The place had stuck with him, so he’d booked us into a dockside fish restaurant, where Alex Dowsett, David Millar and I all shared with him a fabulous meal of oysters followed by moules marinières.

We chatted about this and that, the conversation brought alive by associated memories, recollections of past encounters triggered one after another in a domino effect of recalled events; stories, basically. Where would we all be without stories? Instead of being humans, we’d simply be a blank experience interface, buffering in the face of reality.

Alex told us of the first time he roomed with his hero, Tony Martin, with whom he rode at Katusha. Tony apparently had a morning routine that involved sticking a blob of blu tac onto his tooth brush, closing one eye, and holding the brush in the peripheral field of vision of the other, then flipping it around. Then he would stick the blu tac to a wall, stand in the middle of the room, and he would stare at it.

Eventually, Alex plucked up courage to ask what he thought he was doing.

‘Well, Alex,’ the great German explained. ‘I crash a lot. And I’m training my eyes to spot the danger.’

We both remembered with fondness Tony and his idiosyncracies. I sent him a photo of the two of us, which he replied to very early this morning. He works as a schoolteacher now, I believe, so I guess he has early starts.

We woke up in the Lion d’Or hotel in the little Breton town of Lamballe. It was a comforting place to spend the night, run by a family who were proud of their establishment, and were solicitous in their enquiries the following morning about how we’d all slept. They also couldn’t quite believe that three ex Tour de France riders had come to stay the night.