PAU, France — So on a lark, a chance encounter, I have ended up in the chase car for Natnael Berhane, an Eritrean cyclist, as he twists and turns and pedals like a banshee along a 16.9-mile time trial through the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Berhane is a member of the Cofidis team, and right now he is weaving and bobbing through the countryside as several thousand men, women and children cheer him on.

My driver, Jean-Luc Jonrond of Cofidis, is multitasking, to say the least. He has one hand on the wheel as we twist down a road that is a cross between country lanes and paved goat trails while somehow, in his lap, he balances a cellphone and sheets of paper showing the elevation and the coming 160-degree turns, all as he barks to Berhane with a microphone:

“Allez! Allez! Allez!”

Translation: Go! Go! Go!

Whoops. We have gone into a centrifugal (I looked up the word: moving or tending to move away from the center, that’s us) spin around one turn and another around the next one. Berhane, who rides about nine yards in front of us, has all but molded his body to his bike, his legs slicing up and down like knives.

“I’m not going to lie,” Michel Bajorek, a Belgian with the Cofidis team, says from the back seat. “I feel sick sometimes.”