They are called “Angels of the Mountains”. Cycling’s climbing specialists, the greatest ones anyway, are called so for the speed with which they ascend mountain stages.
Not entirely unrelated, they are also thought of as a little askew, a breed slightly apart.
The progenitor was Charly Gaul from Luxembourg, who won the 1958 Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in 1956 and 1959, but built a legend on the ferocity with which he attacked steep ascents.
Once he finally left cycling in 1965, Gaul left public life, too. He ran a cafe for a while before slipping into hermitude. For years nobody knew where he went until he was discovered living in a small hut in an Ardennes forest.
The man who eventually pulled Gaul back into the racing community to a degree was Marco Pantani, another great climber and another man apart.
These men are cherished a little more fervently than your average cycling hero and even to the casual observer it is easy to see why. Watch, for instance, the stage-end duel between Pantani and Lance Armstrong up Mount Ventoux in the 2000 Tour de France.
Tainted as it now stands, it remains such an overtly visceral spectacle you need not know anything about cycling to have your insides rise up in an uncontrollable rebellion of feeling.
Pantani’s greatness was built on such attacks, rising up off the saddle as the gradient became improbably steeper, for one last push, except there never was a last. He always had another. A “murderous climber, always the same sustained rhythm, a little machine with a slightly higher gear than the rest, turning his legs at a speed that would break your heart” – it is how Gaul was once described, but it applied equally to Pantani.
And it is the apparent wrong-headedness at the centre of what these specialists do that makes it, in a perverse way, so appealing. They are, after all, trying to pace up a mountain, on wheels – out of such words, jokes are made. They are racing gravity and enjoying it.
“You have to stay right at the edge of what you can do,” said Cyrille Umnik, an amateur cyclist with the Abu Dhabi-based Raha Cycling Club.
Umnik should know. Those words were said minutes after completing the 11.7-kilometre Jebel Hafeet climb on Saturday, a week before the world’s top riders do the same in the third stage of the Abu Dhabi Tour.
It was the third time Umnik had done the climb, considered the most difficult in the UAE. He did it in 47 minutes (his best is 45), and he prefers hilly terrain.
“When you’re climbing, you need to know your limits and stay five per cent below and keep it consistently there.”
Only those who get lost find new ways
If you have spent too long city-bound, Jebel Hafeet can be life affirming – early in the morning, it opens up the entire day to possibility.
Man can create beautiful structures but it is comforting to know that had we not built anything, there would still be enough to marvel at.
It did, of course, require man to build a road through it for truer appreciations. But the jagged, diagonal jabs of its limestone peaks, as if the ground was angrily pointing at the sky, remain as they have probably been for centuries.
A number of amateur cyclists gathered last Saturday at Green Mubazzarah, at the mountain’s base. At 7am, it was clear they should have started earlier, so high were the temperatures. And Jebel Hafeet hardly needs to be made more difficult.
Dr Mugheer Al Khaili, chairman of the Health Authority – Abu Dhabi, was among the gathering. He is an avid cyclist (he had cycled 80km the day before) and now a veteran conqueror of Jebel Hafeet. But he remembered how difficult the first few times were.
“The first time I stopped six times. It is not easy. The second time was even more difficult because I didn’t have the right bike but I started learning more about climbing, and it became a habit that I do every week.”
How not easy? Well, driving up in a car feels like hard work.
There are 21 turns, some of them tight hairpins and others more grand sweeping curves, but ultimately there are pretzels that are straighter. And the climb seems to go on forever, eventually gaining 1,219m of altitude from valley floor to peak.
All of it is tough. But by common consent, the sharp bends at the 5km and 9km mark are truly hellish, mostly because of a sudden rise to gradients as steep as 12 per cent.
“After it ramps up again [at the 9km mark], you see the Mercure Hotel and kind of think you are there,” said John Twine, also of the Raha Cycling Club. “But it’s a false horizon and you keep going again until the finish.”
This summer, Umnik completed a stage used in the Tour de France, with a greater aggregated climb than Jebel Hafeet. But he knows how tough this one is.
“In France we have the Alpe d’Huez which is pretty famous” as a regular stage in the Tour. “That is the same kind of difficulty.”
In the classification of climbs, Jebel Hafeet is thought of as category 1 (though a local rider suggests it is category 2). In either case, it still translates to among the hardest climbs you can find. What it loses in distance, it more than makes up in steepness.
May the weather on the mountain be fine
The length of the ascent is not even a 10th of the Al Ain stage, the Tour’s third (140km). And Jebel Jais in Ras Al Khaimah is actually a higher peak – the UAE’s highest – and almost as vaunted for local riders. It is much longer, but not as steep, a gradual beating down of the will and strength, as opposed to the sudden, sharp toll of Jebel Hafeet.
But the Jebel Hafeet climb, to finish the stage, is the one that many think will decide the overall winner of the Tour, based on time.
The Italians Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru, this year’s Vuelta a Espana winner, are expected to do well on the climb , which forms the stage finish. Unlike the amateur cyclists on Saturday, they are likely to complete the climb in less than half an hour. As a rough guide, Dubai Skydive’s Moroccan rider Soufiane Haddi has completed the ascent in 29 minutes.
The weather will almost certainly have some bearing. On Saturday, a number of the cyclists worried that it was too warm. The Al Ain stage of the Tour begins at 1pm, so the final ascent will be in the late afternoon.
On Saturday, the heat forced Fabio Gaidini – and he was not alone – in stopping several times on the way up. As it was his first ascent as well, it was understandable. His friend, who he has been riding with, had challenged him to get up Hafeet.
After five stops, he made it in an hour and discovered a truth about what unites climbers. “I’m feeling tired but it’s amazing to do it. I cycle regularly but nothing as difficult as this. When I started to climb, I thought this is for crazy guys. I wanted to go back.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
Follow us on twitter at @NatSportUAE
