In the first week of July, as the Tour de France meandered joustingly down the flat western side of the country, I visited a small cycling museum in the mid-Wales spa town of Llandrindod Wells. Halfway around this testament to curatorial obsession, among the velocipedes and the 1896 Crypto Front Wheel Drivers, the passionate arrangements of cable clips and repair-outfit tins, there is a small display window containing the vestimentary leavings of the British cyclist Tom Simpson. A grubby white jersey with zippered neck, maker’s emblem (Le Coq Sportif), big Union Jacks on each shoulder, and discolored glue bands across the thorax indicating the removal of perhaps a sponsor’s name, perhaps the colored stripes awarded for some previous triumph. Black trunks with “PEUGEOT” embroidered in surprisingly delicate white stitchwork across the left thigh. Chamois-palmed string-backed cycling gloves with big white press buttons at the back of the wrist, and the fingers mittenishly cut off at the first joint. This is what Simpson had been wearing on July 13, 1967, during the thirteenth stage of the Tour, when he collapsed on Mont Ventoux, the highest of the Provençal Alps. Thirty-three years to the day of his death, the 2000 Tour was due to climb the mountain again.

Back in 1962, Simpson had been the first British rider ever to wear the race leader’s yellow jersey (only three other Britons have acquired it since); he had been World Champion in 1965, and in 1967 had already won Paris-Nice, the early-season classic flatteringly known as the Race to the Sun. He was a strong, gutsy cyclist, popular with fellow-riders, the press, and the public. He also played up cheerfully to the Englishman’s image, posing emblematically with bowler hat and furled umbrella. A memorial to him near the summit of Mont Ventoux lists his achievements as “Olympic Medallist, World Champion, British Sporting Ambassador,” and the last of these three is no sentimental piety. If sport increasingly becomes a focus for brain-dead chauvinism, it also, at its best, acts as a solvent, transcending national identity and raising the sport, and the sportsperson, above such concerns. Simpson was one of those transplanted stars who won over a foreign public, and his martyrish suffering on a French mountain added to the myth. His name is still widely remembered in France—more so, probably, than in Britain.

Mont Ventoux, which rises to just over nineteen hundred metres, doesn’t appear especially sharp-sided or rebarbative from a distance. For those on foot, it is comparatively welcoming: Petrarch climbed it with his brother and two servants in 1336, and a local hiking firm offers nighttime ascents for the reasonably fit with a promise of spectacular sunrises. For the Tour rider, it is another matter. Other mountains in the race may be higher or steeper but seem more friendly, or more functional—or at least more routine, being climbed more often. The Ventoux is a one-off. Its appearance is perpetually wintry: the top few hundred metres are covered with a whitish scree, giving the illusion of a snowbound summit even in high summer. A few amateur botanists may scour its slopes for polar flora (the Spitzbergen saxifrage, the Greenland poppy), but there is little other recreational activity on offer here. The Ventoux is just a bleak and hulking mountain with an observatory at the top. There is no reason for going up it except that the Tour planners order you to go up it. Cyclists fear and hate the place, while the fact that the Tour, which follows a different route every year, makes the ascent only once every five years or so increases its mystique, builds its broodingness. The American Lance Armstrong called the Tour de France “a contest in purposeless suffering” in his autobiography, “It’s Not About the Bike”; the climb of Mont Ventoux epitomizes this implacably.

When the tree line runs out, there is nothing up there but you and the weather, which is violent and capricious. The story goes that on the day Simpson died a thermometer in a café halfway up the mountain exploded when registering fifty-four degrees centigrade (officially, the temperature was in the nineties Fahrenheit). But there is one thing cyclists fear as much as heat: wind. One task of the support riders in a team is to protect their leader from the wind; they cluster around him on windy stretches like worker bees protecting the queen. (This abnegation is also self-interested, for in the Tour the monarch is also a cash crop, his prize money being divided among the team at the race’s end.) But on the mountains, where the weaker fall away, the top riders are often left to themselves, unprotected. And the Ventoux, where the mistral mixes with the tramontane, is officially the windiest place on earth: in February, 1967, the world gusting record was set there, at three hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. Popular etymology derives Ventoux from vent, “wind,” making it Windy Mountain; appropriate but erroneous. The proper etymology—vinturi, from the Ligurian root ven, meaning mountain—is duller but perhaps truer. Mount Mountain: a place to make bikers feel they’re climbing not one peak but two; a place to give bikers double vision.

As I drove toward the mountain the day before the Tour climbed it, there was cloud hanging over its summit, but otherwise the day felt clear, if breezy. This changed quickly on the upper slopes. Cloud covered the top fifteen hundred feet or so; visibility dropped to a few yards; the wind rose. By the side of the road, hardy fans who had arrived early to claim their places were double-chocking the wheels of their camper vans and piling stones halfway up the rims for extra security. The Simpson memorial—the profile of a crouched rider set on a granite slab—is placed a kilometre and a half from the summit on the eastern side. It has a handsome simplicity subverted by the clutter of heartfelt junk laid on the steps in front of it. Some mourners have simply added a large white stone from the nearby slope; but more have overlaid the site with a jumble of cycling castoffs—water bottles, logoed caps, T-shirts, energy bars, a saddle, a couple of tires, a symbolic broken wheel. It is part Jewish grave, part the tumultuous altar of some popular if dubious Catholic saint. All this was difficult to take in because the cold and the wind were pulling so much water into my eyes. It felt locally strange to be attempting some vague act of homage while being barely able to stand; more largely strange in that the winds—gusting at more than a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour that day—seemed to have absolutely no effect in dispersing the cloud. After a few minutes, I got back into the car and drove down the mountain to Bédoin, where I found that the bones of my fingers and toes still ached from the cold. I craved a whiskey. An hour or so later, snow fell on the summit.

When Petrarch set out on his ascent, he encountered, like any modern journalist, a quotable peasant who just happened to have climbed the mountain himself fifty years previously. However, the fellow “had got for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him.” Petrarch’s brother headed for the summit by the most direct, and therefore hardest, route; while the poet, being wilier or lazier, kept trying to find an easier way. Each time the trail would prove false, and this shameful halfheartedness brought Ovid to mind. “To wish is little: we must long with the utmost eagerness to gain our end.” For Petrarch, the excursion up the Ventoux turned out to be a metaphor of the spiritual journey: it is uphill all the way, and there are no shortcuts.