PARIS—The Italian slalom whiz Alberto Tomba, who won five Olympic medals between 1988 and 1994, had a particular pre-race tradition: downing a shot of espresso right before skiing out of the starting gates.
Even disregarding the recent scholarship that argues that caffeine is one of the last totally legal performance-enhancing drugs (WADA chief Dick Pound is giving an angry press conference outside of a Tim Horton’s in Ottawa as we speak), Tomba’s behaviour continues to baffle such laymen as myself who would surely rather down a shot of Pepto Bismol in such a high-stakes setting. I guess that’s what distinguishes the great athletes from the pretenders – the ability to overcome the pressure of the moment and rise to the occasion. I know that, if I were in the starting gates behind Tomba, I’d be twitchy and jittery enough without coffee.
Which is all a roundabout way of introducing my most recent heroic sporting achievement: navigating the ten-lane traffic circle at Paris’s Place de l’Etoile.
I’d never driven in Paris until this week, and it’s not an experience I’m eager to reproduce anytime soon. The streets are narrow, the drivers and the pedestrians are equally aggressive and unpredictable, and the traffic circles and criss-crosses of one-way streets require epic levels of concentration to navigate without incident.
Still, on the way back to town from a short wine-tasting and castle-touring trip to the Loire Valley, I felt that familiar physical sensation of pre-match excitement crossed with absolute terror, that rush of nervous energy that accompanies the final seconds before the opening kickoff of a football cup final, or the last moments before you jump up on the starting blocks at a championship swim meet. Sometimes, the moment gets so big that your race strategy regresses to something as base as, “Please don’t throw up in the pool. Please don’t throw up in the pool.”
That delicate balancing act of hyper-alertness and overpowering nausea kicked into high gear yesterday evening, just before 6pm Paris time, as I navigated my rented Ford Somethingorother (a thoroughly sub-mediocre set of wheels, in case anyone’s wondering why Detroit continues its epic struggles, and I’m not talking about the Lions) up Avenue Foch, the finishing kick of last Sunday’s Marathon de Paris.
(Quick bout of related-yet-unabashed self-promotional: here’s the link to my article on “destination marathons” in the April issue of enRoute.)
“Do you need us to start, like, punching you in the back and shoulders, to psyche you up for this?” asked one of my two South African passengers, recognizing the monumentality of the coming challenge.
(While I’m at it, here’s the link to my article on sports in Johannesburg, also in the April issue of enRoute. OK, I’m over it now.)
“No, just let me know what exit to take,” I replied, sufficiently amped as it was.
“OK, bru. This is going to be schweet!”
The Place de l’Etoile comprises the Arc de Triomphe, a monument to the heroism of French soldiers and generals, and the surrounding traffic circle, a monument to the insanity of French motorists. Early on a Sunday morning, navigating the meeting-point of twelve of Paris’s most important avenues is a challenge not for the weak of stomach. On a Wednesday evening, at the heart of rush hour, it’s pure masochism.
Like any good rally driver, I had my co-pilot, Marten, barking out directions: “OK, we’re going to enter at Foch, then you’ve got five exits before the Champs Elysées, and three more to Wagram. Just relax, keep your eyes on the road, and I’ll talk you through this.”
We entered the flock easily enough: a bus, waiting to exit one avenue past ours, slowed down, blocking enough traffic to allow me to slip in at the eight o’clock point of the twelve-spoked ring. I fired the gas, and I was in.
Everything happened so quickly after that. The traffic circulates counter-clockwise. There are no prescribed “lanes” on the Etoile. It’s a veritable free-for-all. Urban legend has it that the traffic circle is the only place in all of France where auto insurers don’t cover accidents, but apparently the reality is that all accidents in the circle are considered no-fault – your insurer pays your damages, and the guy you smash works it out with his own.
I got in deep pretty quickly, progressing in fits and starts as cars slunk across my nose and threatened to t-bone me at a moment’s notice. Turn signals mean nothing here, but a good rule of thumb is that you fill the space that’s available to you. We needed to get from eight o’clock all the way back to high-noon, a good two-thirds of a circuit, so there was no point hanging around the outside of the loop, at the confluence of all the entering and exiting.
Things were moving nicely – no giant city busses had honked at us, no Renaults or Citroëns had bumped our bumper, we were making good time – when we passed the Champs Elysées. Suddenly, with only two more exits to go before our turn, we were in the hole. And I needed to get out.
Apparently, the Avenue de Wagram is a popular point of egress, because it seemed like everybody else was exiting there, too. A thick stream of cars entering the loop cut us off – once one brave soul manages to merge into the action, everybody else in that queue follows close behind, cutting off entire chunks of traffic. But fortune favours the bold, and a black Volkswagen shot the gap. We were golden.
Until, out of nowhere, an old man with long grey hair cut me off on his bicycle.
What was this maniac doing on my racetrack? I mean, I know for a fact that there are those out there who see navigating the Etoile on two wheels as an even greater sporting achievement – just ask Charles Montgomery (who, coincidentally, shares a hometown on Vancouver Island with this column).
But this was my maiden voyage. I was a rookie. Hadn’t I suffered enough?
I didn’t kill the guy on the bike. We avoided a few more crashes and exited safely. As quickly as it had started, my thirty-second Formula One–slash–Dakar Rally career was over.
I speak the honest truth when I say that, as we hit the first stop light on Avenue Wagram, I put my first two fingers to my jugular and took my pulse. We were still mostly in the shit, so I didn’t have time to do a proper, timed count. But it was beating fast, certainly faster than it normally does.
A cup of joe at the finish line? No thank you. I’m a high-performance athlete. Now, who needs a drink?
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