Nearly seven centuries ago, the poet we know as Petrarch, a hero of the early Italian Renaissance, scaled a minor Western alp. So the story goes. Even if he wasn’t the first to ascend Mont Ventoux as he claimed, and though the bald mountain is no Matterhorn, the climb itself proved noteworthy. An ancient shepherd, bearing conventional wisdom, advised him against the climb. Whoever, and for what purpose other than for finding a shortcut or fleeing hot pursuit, would want to undertake such a journey?
The modern answer “because it’s there” (also said of the summit of Everest and the surface of the Moon) would have made no sense to Petrarch’s contemporaries. Adventure was a novel idea. As Petrarch’s nineteenth-century champion, the art historian Jacob Burckhardt put it, “an indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him.” And this magnetic pull for a singular viewpoint and fresh, grand perspective culminated in the poet’s ascent.
The famous letter that the poet wrote about the novel experience to his father-confessor, however, has been cited as a turning point in the Western attitude toward the grandeur of nature and the audacity of personally connecting with the remote natural world. And let me say here, climbing Mont Ventoux also stands as a milestone in the history of strenuous play; play for its own sake. Play for the sake of audacious challenge.
Audacious Play at the Windy Summit
Ventoux means “windy,” more or less. At its peak, higher than 6,000 feet, persistent high winds still scour the limestone bare. The summit serves as the site of the finish line of one of the most grueling stages of competitive cycling’s premier event, the annual Tour de France. (Only the FIFA finals attract more eyeballs, worldwide.)
The wind often figures heavily in the climb up Mont Ventoux. In 2016, Bastille Day, as it happened, storm winds topping 80 mph forced race officials to move the finishing line half a mile down. The resultant crowding with official motorcycles caused one of the strangest and most chaotic crashes in the history of the event.
A Greuling Contest
It is hard to imagine a sporting contest more mentally and physically demanding than a bicycle tour. Teams plan elaborate strategies and athletes deliver performances over the edge of technological and muscular capability. Anticipating the looming expenditures, competitors begin slightly beefed up. Riders travel faster uphill than casual riders do on a slope. Over the course of three weeks, they gain more than 170,000 feet in elevation, roughly six Everests. Despite refueling with as much as 9,000 calories a day during the mountain stages, they end as skeletons.
Descending, though different in its demands, is no less arduous. Harrowing descents reach speeds of more than 80 mph. This calls for steely nerves on the straightaways and lightning quick reactions in the chicanes. Higher elevations promise fog and threaten rain, too, adding danger and demanding closer calculation as road surfaces become iridescent with floating grease.
Cyclists’ bodies react in real time, tuning to a kind of intelligence that senses instantaneously the stickiness or slipperiness of the road surface, that provokes a response just below a level of ordinary conscious discourse. Speed and direction and inclination feed into the ongoing telemetry. And so does a perception of other riders’ trajectories, a spatial intelligence that plays out in real time.
The input isn’t entirely visual, as hearing contributes to a suite of understanding of the moving vicinity, especially so in the peloton. Peloton riders travel in a bunch, reacting to minute changes in direction and velocity and proximity packed in tightly, skilled in the multitude, sensibly tugged along aerodynamically, reacting at speed, and moving like a school of fish. Remarkably, they crash only rarely. A moment of inattention or traffic furniture placed awkwardly can lead to a spectacular chain reaction.
From Intelligence to Wisdom
In his writing about this year’s Tour de France, Finn Janning, a philosopher at the University of Copenhagen, makes an important distinction between intelligence and wisdom. His is not the commonplace observation that very bright people do not necessarily excel in common sense. Instead, he takes as a case in point the current star of the Tour, the young Slovenian Tadej Pogačar, who with his fourth win is already being hailed, plausibly, as the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).
For Janning, the champion turned a corner from intelligence toward wisdom when he balanced the youthful sense of invincibility and drive with an appreciation of vulnerability. The steeling moment of doubt came in the chilly fog nearly 7,000 feet up at the top of the Col de Tourmalet when his teammate, just ahead and heading down, disappeared into the mist.
In his nearly blind descent that followed, Pogačar admitted to being “pretty scared.” “What’s the point?” he wondered. He had “built his life around the bike.” It came to him that he would forget “99%” of the bike racers in time. But cycling had brought him his close friends and his fiancée, which he valued more highly.
With Pogacar’s “Tour essentially won,” Janning writes, “something shifted. He discovered the fear of losing it.” The descent that could have been a headlong pursuit tactically became defensive.
Back to the Poet
And here we turn back to the ascent of Mont Ventoux. Petrarch’s letter bothered me on first reading, long ago. Upon reaching the top, so he said, he sat down and pulled a book out of his pocket. Scenery pulled Petrarch less magnetically than the Latin text. With the splendor stretching below him, Petrarch immersed himself in Augustine’s Confessions! He really didn’t get the nature-appreciation thing, I thought. So much for a turning point.
The story itself has since further unraveled. Scholars find reason to believe that Petrarch fabricated his account. But let’s extend conditional absolution on grounds of poetic license and allegory. Taking to heart Augustine’s passage, “and men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains… but consider themselves not,” the poet extracted a useful lesson not dissimilar from the modern cyclist’s self-revelation, his new perspective on a consuming pursuit.
Poised at the edge, the competitor tempered his craving for conquest as he discovered what he most cherished. Racers cannot prosper without heedlessness, but neither can they survive long without care.