By Gillian Graham
Staff Writer
    
After years of cycling through southern Maine, Kevin Lafortune fulfilled a lifelong dream of pedaling along the Tour de France route in the French Alps.
Lafortune, who lives in Saco with his wife and two sons, spent his summer vacation on a nine-day tour with Discover France. Along with five other cyclists and two tour guides, he had the opportunity to see different stages of the 98th Tour de France and cycle the course while crowds cheered from the sidelines.     

What prompted you to make this trip?
I’ve followed the tour and professional cycling in general for many, many years. It’s always been a dream to actually see it and ride in France.
The tour I went on had VIP access, so I had access to the start village. The tour is essentially 23 individual races. It’s like the Super Bowl 23 times in a row. They set up the starting and finishing villages for that day, the race happens and they pack it all up and move it for the next day. We were sort of in the middle of the race as they progressed through France.
One day, we wandered around the start village. The highlight was we were there when the team buses came in and the members get off. What’s really interesting when you see it in person, unlike sporting events here, is it’s almost like half of the race is around interaction with the public. Cycling is huge in Europe and there are a lot of fans who follow cyclists from their country.
You wait for the bus to open up and slowly the riders trickle out. The riders will ride right by you or they’ll come out of the bus and be jovial and do autographs. There were 10,000 other people milling about at the same time. It was really pretty cool to see all of this happen. You felt really part of the whole thing.
One of the highlights of the whole trip was they had organized a D-Day ride, which basically gives a select few people the ability to ride on a portion of the day’s course. The cool thing about it was the people who sit and watch the race were already camped out on the roadside. When you ride by, they’re into the fact that there are cyclists coming. They’ll cheer and toot horns. It was pretty special to have that treatment as we went through. We got to cross the finish line for the day and stand on the podium to have our picture taken.

Did you go to one of the finishing villages?
We saw the finish at Alpe d’Huez. That was unbelievable. The local newspapers estimated there were 500,000 people there on the mountain. It was wall-to-wall people. There must have been thousands of campers and tents and cars parked up there. This was the last VIP access experience we had. We were able to stay to hang out in a mobile skybox set up at the finish line. We basically hung out there and waited watching the TV for a point we knew they were close enough to go stake out a spot. We went out and had a commanding view of the last turn and the finish line. That was amazing for multiple reasons. It was loud –– people were screaming as the riders were coming through. It was a battle amongst the favorites basically right to the finish line. It ended up being an exciting race that day.

What surprised you about the Tour de France when you saw it in person?
One thing that really surprised me was the rider interaction and how close to the action you really can be. When you see it on TV, people are right in the road and running after the cyclists. That’s something I sort of expected to see, but the idea that you go to a start village or finish village and have them be right there and interacting with the fan base is something you don’t see on TV.  
The other thing that was really cool and a little scary is you don’t get the real feel from TV of how extreme some of the roads are. The scale of the Alps was unbelievable. On television you don’t get the true scale of how grand the scenery is as well as what it’s like to ride on the roads with switchbacks. It’s a little scary at times, but it’s exhilarating to see. It was like something out of the “Sound of Music.” It was absolutely breathtaking.
One day, one of the guides took us off into this area with vineyards. Again, it was so amazing just to see some of this stuff. The amount agriculture in the south of France was just unbelievable. Any stretch of highway had off to the side an orchard or a vineyard or olives or sunflowers. There was not one piece of land that was not used for agriculture. It was unbelievable to see all of that.

How long have you been cycling?
I’ve been cycling since I was a kid. I’ve been cycling at the level I’m at for the past 20 years. I had done amateur mountain bike racing in Maine, that’s how I got into cycling. That was 25 years ago. Now I cycle almost daily. I usually go for a couple hours. It depends on the day and the weather. My ritual is I get up before sunrise and I ride in the morning. It’s quiet, there’s no traffic to speak of.
What do you enjoy about cycling?
That’s a tough question. It’s always been enjoyable to me. It’s freedom. That’s probably what it really boils down to – it’s freedom. When I was a kid and I learned to ride a two-wheeler, we rode all over the place. We’d ride around the neighborhood, we’d ride up to town. We went everywhere on our bikes.
I like to climb hills, so it’s sort of a sense of accomplishment when you get to the top of something. You earn the benefit of going downhill.

Staff Writer Gillian Graham can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 213.