This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 120
They were perfect summers in the Pyrenees, spent between treehouses and afternoons at ‘la plage’, knee-deep in water and the air hot in the afternoon sun. The children called it the beach, even though the ocean was a couple of hours away; in this case the beach was the narrow stretch of rocks and gravel that lay alongside the rushing waters of the Gave de Pau and its tributaries, which chart their course down the valleys of the Pyrenees.
In the village of Lys, north of Pau, the watercourse was quite modest, but Hubert Arbes and his friends had made a fantastic beach of it. They went to play there every afternoon, building dams, but the fish were too smart to be trapped in that way. Arbes did not like the water, but that was no surprise: his parents had never taught him to swim.
Instead, they showed him how to ride a bike and Arbes became one of cycling’s greatest domestiques. He was a key player in four Tour de France Hommes victories, once with Belgian Lucien Van Impe in 1976 and three times with Bernard Hinault between 1979 and 1982. His record as a domestique also includes a Giro d’Italia, in 1980, won by Hinault again. “It’s all because I didn’t like water!” he jokes.
The Pyrenean rider, born in 1950, now lives in a quiet house in Lourdes with his wife Henriette. The city, famous for its own holy waters, is also bathed by the Gave. In a way, Arbes swam upstream, like the salmon did. His life unfolded up in the mountains and along the river. He still doesn’t fish, he still doesn’t swim, but he walks the mountains, some days for six or seven hours.
The day Rouleur visited him last spring, he was devastated because his dog, Lilie, had gone missing on one of his mountain excursions. He spread items of clothing impregnated with his scent across the trail, hoping to lead her back home. He posted numerous messages on the internet, and that proved successful. Lilie and Arbes were later reunited in a happy ending.
Like he does every year, Arbes visited the Tour de France to see his friends again in 2023. He is spoilt for choice of destination. Bayonne? Pau? Laruns? Cauterets? These four stage settings were linked by the Gave de Pau, its tributaries and the rivers it flows into. The Tour de France Femmes also followed the flow of the Gave – its final two stages finished atop the Tourmalet and in Pau itself. The Gave de Pau has been there in the background of many, many Pyrenean Tour de France stages, an ever-present witness to countless battles, following its own journey through the mountains.
Many of the torrents which flow down the big passes feed this 190 kilometre-long stream, which eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean, past the Tourmalet, Aubisque, Soulor, Marie-Blanque, Hautacam... If the Nile is the river of the pharaohs, if the Danube is the river of musicians, the Gave de Pau is the river of the Tour de France.
“My favourite pass is the first one I ever climbed, the Aubisque,” says Arbes, who never tired of sharing the stories he told hundreds of times to his customers when he ran a bike shop in Lourdes. “I was about 16, I went cycling with my big brother Émile and I immediately found this climb very beautiful and very hard. It is the combination of the two that makes mountains interesting. When you climb, the legs suffer but the eyes feast.” Fear is also part of the adventure. Arbes talks about the descent along the precipice between the Aubisque and the Soulor, on a narrow road carved into the side of the cliff. Above the cyclists: the rock. Below them: the rock. It’s a hard place.
Laruns, the town at the foot of the pass, has become a perennial Tour de France location in the modern era. It will host stage five this year, after crowning the Slovenian successes of Primož Roglič in 2018 and Tadej Pogačar in 2020. Laruns, which sits at an altitude of 525 metres, was once also a busy river port. During the reign of Louis XIV, the town supplied the timber that was used to build ships for the French Navy, as the King sought to defeat Britain on the seas. The trunks were loaded at Laruns on to rafts, or directly thrown into the Gave d’Ossau, a tributary of the Gave de Pau, and transported down to the Atlantic Ocean. The port provided work for hundreds of people in the valley, but also destroyed the forests and exhausted the oxen, which were used for carrying wood rather than for labour in the fields. Famine plagued the region… and Britain was never defeated.
Wide, deep and navigable by the time it reaches Laruns, the Gave de Pau is just a bubbling waterfall in the neighbouring valley of Cauterets, where it also has its source. The aristocrats who arrived at this station – by sedan chair, then by carriage, then by train – were very impressed by the thundering falls, a pure expression of the force of nature. The road construction, undertaken at the same time Laruns hosted a port, was epic. Workers had to balance themselves above frightening waters, death waiting for the slightest mistake. Bridge by bridge, the road took shape. In the 19th century, it helped the kings and queens of Europe, rich industrialists and theatre stars, establish boltholes in high altitude palaces. There, a happy few feasted on lamb or fresh trout. Majestic hotels were equipped with baths and electricity, in the middle of villages that had no running water. Since 1953 and Jesús Loroño’s victory there, Cauterets has welcomed another type of celebrity: Tour de France contenders.
The Gave barely quietens as it enters the town of Lourdes, further down the valley. The river then crosses the Sanctuaire de Notre-Dame where, according to Catholic belief, the Virgin Mary appeared to the shepherdess Bernadette in 1858, attracting more than two million pilgrims each year. They buy even more millions of bottles of water, fuelling them from the source that joins the Gave. The Virgin Mary, indeed, is said to have instructed Bernadette to bathe in these springs and many believers, who washed paralysed limbs in this water, claim to have been cured.
For a long time, the Tour de France and the catholic authorities hesitated to create a rendezvous in Lourdes, but then, it’s always difficult for two religions to coexist. The first stage start from Lourdes took place in 1948. A mass was given, in the presence of the Italian yellow jersey holder, the very religious Gino Bartali. There was no official ceremony for the stage start in 2022, which took the race to Hautacam, but riders were invited to pray in front of the Grotto where the Virgin Mary is supposed to have appeared.
The Gave continues its journey through Pau, another holy place in the history of the Tour de France. It flows below the city, next to a strange mausoleum, made up of stelae or totems, which tell the story of the Grande Boucle. Pau, considered ‘the gateway to the Pyrenees’ by the wealthy excursionists of the 19th century, intends to stay true to its reputation thanks to the Tour de France. “It has really become the city of the Tour,” says Arbes.
The city is a regular feature on the route of the Tour Hommes, a convenient stopping place for Pyrenean stages, and one of the only places with enough hotel beds to accommodate both races’ entourages. In 2023, Pau will host a stage start of the men’s race towards Laruns. The city will also make its debut in the Tour de France Femmes, for the race’s final act, a 22-kilometre time trial, that will cross the Gave, then take the riders through the vineyards of Jurançon – an extraordinary sweet wine, less famous than Sauternes but noble as an aperitif or a dessert wine and the only real wine from the Pyrenees – before returning to Pau. Will the general classification be upset here? It’s true Pau exhales a certain languor; it often hosts sprints or breakaways in the men’s race, and the Tour has rarely been decided there. Yet, when approaching the mountains, riders often felt tension rising and in the case of the women’s Tour, Pau must surely be decisive.
“I often hear about the 1980 Tour, where Bernard Hinault quit the race in Pau”, says Arbes. “I went to pick him up with my car, because I had abandoned a few days earlier.” The shocking news hit the caravan that evening, when ‘le Blaireau’, who was in the yellow jersey, left his hotel by the back door, through the kitchens, suffering from tendonitis. It caused a sensation. Dutch rider Joop Zoetemelk took advantage of this retirement and won the Tour.
“Bernard spent the night at home, in Lourdes, before returning home to Brittany,” continues Arbes. “Now everyone asks me to tell this story. But I’ve done more in my life as a team-mate than just drive him around!”
“Hubert was the first rider I put on my Tour list,” says Cyrille Guimard, his sports director at the time. A black and white fresco pays tribute to the relationship between the two men, showing Arbes and Hinault, side by side. This work can be seen on an electric transformer, on the foot of the Cauterets climb and on the edge of the Gave.
Arbes is an archetypal product of the Gave region: a very strong and loyal team-mate.
It’s a sweet irony that Pyrenean riders have not been better climbers. In the 1960s, Robert Cazala won four stages of the Tour, but he was mostly a domestique for Raymond Poulidor. In 1990, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, the Paris-Roubaix double winner, was in a position to seize a mountain stage at home in Pau, but he had to stop on the descent of the Aubisque to wait for his leader Greg LeMond, who had punctured. More recently, Mathieu Ladagnous was a proud road captain for Thibaut Pinot. Only one Pyrenean has gone close to final victory in the Tour: Victor Fontan, a native of Nay, a town along the Gave. In an early start of the 1928 edition, on a very dark road, Fontan was in yellow but he broke his bike on a pothole and stopped, with no hope of repairing his machine and returning to the peloton. That night, a handful of witnesses say they heard the brave Victor crying.
After Pau, the Gave joins the Adour, the other Pyrenean river, which begins on the Aspin, on the other side of the Tourmalet. And its journey ends in Bayonne, a stage town of the Tour de France since 1910, where it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Back in those days Bayonne was linked with Luchon in a gruelling 400km stage including the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet, Soulor, Aubisque and Osquich. Before Pau took over as a more practical choice, the Tour’s ‘gateway to the Pyrenees’ was certainly Bayonne, the city of chilli peppers, produced in the area, chocolate, imported by boat, and jambon de Bayonne.
The Gave de Pau has brought prosperity to its region, some good cyclists and above all, an identity and ambience. Farms are instantly recognisable by their walls of large grey stones, taken from the plages. The river has also yielded some fantastic proverbs in Béarn patois: ‘Bestà com lo gav ei long’ — ‘He/she is as stupid as the Gave is long’ — and ‘Nou troubèris cailhyaùs’ — ‘You wouldn’t even be able to find the pebbles of the Gave.’
But the Gave has also caused carnage, as during its flood in June 2013. Heavy snow from that winter melted too quickly on the western slope of the Tourmalet and the river burst its banks. For one night a quiet stream became crashing waves. Three people were killed, several animals, including a Pyrenean bear, died and seven houses were destroyed. In Cauterets, the tributary of the Gave also overflowed, smashing the access road to pieces and the valley was entirely flooded. In Lourdes, the sanctuaries were under water for several days and access was closed to pilgrims. The lower part of the city of Pau also suffered from the floods. The French government spent 240 million euros to repair the damage. Several private donations were also recorded, notably those of the 2013 Tour de France peloton, which offered its prize money after the Bagnères-de-Bigorre stage.
“Storms are a real threat in the Pyrenees and I still fear them today when I explore the mountains,” says Arbes. The former domestique goes hiking with a sense of humility. “Above 2,200 metres, the landscape is volcanic, so it’s difficult to find the path. You must be careful not to get lost.”
Hubert Arbes has always loved to find new routes and the Tour de France is indebted to him for having discovered one of its iconic ascents. In the 90s he advised the organisers to use a mountain called Hautacam, at a time when they preferred traditional passes and ski resorts to wild climbs in the middle of nowhere. This is how, in 1994, Luc Leblanc outsprinted Miguel Indurain in the fog, on the top of Hautacam.
However, there remain some mountains and some torrents still untouched by the Tour. Gavarnie, where the source of the Gave de Pau springs from the rocks, is the main one, having hosted the Route d’Occitanie in 2022, but not yet the bigger race. The Pyrenean National Park board has been reluctant to allow such an event into an almost sacred place. Until now, Gavarnie has kept its spectacular Cirque a secret. A wall of rock surrounds and towers over the visitors who make the hike up to its base. From that breathtaking mountain, the colossal wall spits out a waterfall more than 400 metres high. In winter, the frozen fall allows skilled mountaineers to climb, at their own risk. When succeeding, they reach the actual source of the Gave de Pau. From the heights of the Cirque de Gavarnie, the Gave falls, trickles and flows its way past the Tour de France’s most iconic locations, all the way to Bayonne. Maybe one day the Tour will follow the Gave upstream to this spectacular place.
Gavarnie is Hubert Arbes’ paradise, and it inspires him to reflect. “At high altitude, the valleys are very close to each other,” he explains. “It takes less time to walk over them than to climb a pass on a bike.” In 2021, Hubert and Henriette Arbes chose the Cirque de Gavarnie to take a long walk in the mountains after the Covid lockdowns. They had invited Bernard and Martine Hinault, who came from Brittany to join them. That day, the weather was sublime and the water from the springs was purring, innocent as a perfect summer’s day.
