Rolf Rae-Hansen

Dinner On The Pass

Cycling and food are two of my passions. Sometimes I wonder if the main reason for the former is to create a calorie deficit that excuses my intake of the latter.

View from the hot seat

I recently had the privilege of enjoying Dinner on the Pass in The Sheraton hotel’s One Square kitchen. The cycling equivalent of this foodie experience would be to ride in a pro-team car that’s driving alongside the peloton: sitting at the pass, watching the kitchen work at full steam; the brigade of chefs in perfect synchronisation, gathered around their leader, selflessly doing his bidding, preparing the ground for a team’s grand victory; at the feed zone, the musettes hold more promise than energy gels and rice cakes. Continue reading “Dinner On The Pass” →

December 7, 2013 0

High-Mountain Heroes

Erik & Rolf in hell

In 2004 I went to the cinema in Edinburgh to watch Hell on Wheels (Hollentour, in its native German). The movie is a documentary by French director Pepe Danquart’s and tells the story of the 2003 Tour de France through the eyes of the T-Mobile team and two of their riders, sprinter Erik Zabel and his faithful domestique, Rolf Aldag. Continue reading “High-Mountain Heroes” →

July 29, 2013 0

Remembering Marco

pic from cycling-passion.com

The late Marco Pantani was a cyclist I greatly admired, a climber whose exploits further fuelled my admiration of the cycling climber and stoked my ambition to go to Europe and try the mountains for myself. He was also the cycling inspiration of Drew, my companion during the travels that make up my book, The Breakaway – Cycling the Mountains of the Tour de France. Without Marco I might never have ridden Alpe d’Huez, the Stelvio, Mont Ventoux, et al. Continue reading “Remembering Marco” →

July 25, 2013 0

Lightning Quick

The thunder and lightning currently blasting my neighbourhood of Edinburgh into submission is pretty scary, but none will ever be as scary (I hope!) as that which nearly welded me onto the tarmac of the Col d’Aubisque:

Whilst I clung onto Drew’s back wheel and chuckled at what I saw as an irrational fear, the lightning caught up and cracked directly overhead. That explosion of noise was the loudest thing I have ever heard, hopefully the loudest thing I will ever hear. The air turned bright blue as its water content sizzled to the boil. The hairs on our necks stood on end as if we’d stuck our fingers into a electric socket; those power lines I had so recently joked about hissed, buzzed and visibly jerked on their pylon mounts like a sack full of body-popping snakes — the danger I had dismissed suddenly all too real. I shifted up a gear and raced passed Drew, no longer as brave nor as forthcoming with suggestions as to what the lightning might do next. It was all too bloody obvious: we were about to be cooked alive!

July 23, 2013 0

Best of Times, Worst of Times

One of the great things about having ridden a load of Tour climbs is pretending to know how the peloton feels as the Tour cruises and crawls over the same roads. Stage 19 takes in the Col du Glandon and the Col de la Madeliene, both of which I tackled during The Breakaway. For me the Madeleine was a total and utter nightmare. I suffered like a dog (trapped inside a hot car) the whole way up. The Glandon was that day’s second ascent and, surprisingly, I recovered enough to find it, dare I say, enjoyable.

Click to enlarge profile

Continue reading “Best of Times, Worst of Times” →

July 19, 2013 0

Ride the Helter Skelter

For stage 18 the Tour de France will tackle Alpe d’Huez twice. The GC contenders will surely be

Double-ouch stage profile

nervous about this stage. The sprinters and rest of the autobus regulars will be absolutely bloody dreading it. Alpe D once in a Tour stage must hurt enough. Twice will purgatory, for them. For us voyeuristic public it will be an unmissable spectacle. Continue reading “Ride the Helter Skelter” →

July 17, 2013 0

The Breakaway Reviewed

I’m not one to blow my own trumpet (tuba, trombone or cornet) so I’ll let the rather excellent blog inthegc.com do it for me. Here’s an extract from their recent review of The Breakaway:

Rae-Hansen seamlessly manages to combine a real knowledge of the climbs, the facts and figures, their place in history, both in and away from the Tour, whilst tackling some difficult, altogether more serious issues like the passing of his Father and the frailty of emotion that comes with such a huge undertaking. The trivia that Rae-Hansen plucks from an obvious deep understanding of cycling, the legend and terrain of the Tour de France is wonderfully dispersed amongst the wider narrative, providing plenty for the pure cycling enthusiast, whilst the book could just as easily reach out to a non-cycling audience as a story of (mis)adventure, longing, relationships and loss.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

July 13, 2013 0

Click to enlarge stage profile

Sunday July 14th July sees stage 15 of the Tour de France, the longest in this year’s race. As if the distance of 242.5 kilometres wasn’t enough, the organisers have lumped the climb of Mont Ventoux on at the end – just to make sure no one gets the idea that July 14th is some kind of French holiday and an excuse for a day off work.

By the time The Breakaway reached Carpentras for the the Giant of Provence the mood in our travelling camp was like the weather around it: oppressively hot, shocked and scarred by rumbling thunder and bolts of lightening.

The morning of our ride up the Mont, however, and the weather broke, the cool and wet conditions at least partially easing the tension.

The late, great Tom Simpson

We had absorbed all of this mountain’s many myths and legends, including the tragic tale of Tom Simpson, who died on its slopes in the ill-fated 1967 Tour de France. As a result we had expected furnace-like heat, had spent months on end bracing ourselves for such a searing slog. Pedalling insouciantly into the rain and I couldn’t help but feel that it was all a little too easy. As I soon found out, on the Ventoux easy is wrong, just plain wrong…

Drew shifted up a gear and began to sprint, suddenly deciding that grovelling off the back was less than acceptable on this climb of all climbs. He took off up the road so I duly accelerated and pulled level, expending too much puff to be able to demand an explanation. Had he been faking earlier on, psyching me out or just warming up? Either way, I wasn’t about to dismiss the opportunity for a duke on the Ventoux. In turn I shifted up a gear and kicked hard, my move eliciting his mirror reaction. So we remained, locked together, front wheels edging each other out of the photo finish until the next ramp kicked right and Drew finally came off the gas. I relaxed back into the saddle, assuming the game was up, only for him to go again, three more attempts to drop me, somehow to no avail. As each ramp turned into the headwind, our hurt intensified and my satisfaction increased: pain was exactly what I wanted; pain was what the Ventoux demanded, all that it was said to be about.

The Semi-Circle of Death

Click to enlarge stage profile

Saturday sees the 100th Tour’s first foray into the mountains (about bloody time too, I say). This year La Boucle is running clockwise and so the Pyrenees come first. On Sunday, stage 9 heads from Saint-Girons to Bagnères-de-Bigorre over quite a few Pyrenean passes, including the Col de Peyresourde.

For me the Peyresourde will forever remain a part of Robert Millar Day, an unofficial, never to be repeated event about which you can read more here. Continue reading “The Semi-Circle of Death” →

July 4, 2013 0