“Meeow”, I said again to a couple of my French mates. They looked at me blankly, wondering whether a screw had rattled loose and I was suddenly identifying as a cat.
I elaborated…
“Viaduc énorme,” enormous viaduct… “Pont grand,” big bridge…
“Ah!..Me-Oh!” They chorused.
Jeeze! OK, yeah, ‘Me-Oh,’ sorry… My quest for French language mastery continues, one excruciating word at a time.
Me-Oh or Millau as it’s spelt was Thomas and my destination for the weekend. First race of the season and a chance to test out the benefits of his additional winter training prep amongst some of the best in the country.
Millau is in fact the location of a massive viaduct, the tallest in the world until a Chinese contender knocked it from its 20-year reign last year. Millau viaduct is cooler though, because it is both tall in structure and has a high deck height.
I used to be in the construction management game and have wanted to visit this bridge since it opened in 2004. I remembered it having some slick design features and that they’d had to come up with some amazing construction techniques to push the road platforms out across the void from each side until they met in the middle.
Whilst Thomas watched POV track videos, I ‘nerded out’ and bored the family with Millau viaduct construction vids to refresh my memory and whet my appetite. The bike park and race track are practically underneath the bridge, so a weekend of bike racing and bridge appreciation beckoned.
Thomas finished his mock Brevet exams at lunchtime on Friday and we scooped him up from school as soon as he was done. The bike, kit and van were prepped, packed and ready to go. We shovelled in a quick lunch, keyed Ibis Millau into Maps, pressed ‘Go’ and hit the road.
Millau is a fair schlep from Les Gets. Four hours due west, past Geneva, skirting Lyon and on to the volcanically pockmarked landscape of Clermont-Ferrand, located almost slap-bang in the centre of France. From there, you hang a 90-degree left turn and head south for another couple of hours.
Six hours and two pee stops after departure, we got our first glimpse of the Millau viaduct standing majestically in the milky dusk. Violent red strobes pulsed intermittently and simultaneously from the top of each of its seven towers, warning any unsuspecting flying things that something monstrous lurks high in the night sky.
Purely by coincidence, our second pee break was at a rest stop and viewpoint for the Viaduct de Garabit, designed by Gustave Eiffel of tower fame… You wait 20 years for a famous bridge and two come along in one day.
We found our Ibis and checked in with a lovely lady, grabbed a bite to eat and hit the sack.
Our alarms chirped up in unison at 6am and we hustled up and out of the hotel to pick up coffee and croissants en route to the track.
The landscape around Millau has a canyon and plateau feel to it, covered in scrubby woodland over burnt-orange sandstone. The town itself cascades down the south-facing valley face to the Tarn river, meandering east to west in the valley below.
Before the viaduct’s construction, streams of summer traffic used to clog Millau’s roads as scores of holidaymakers migrated south for their summer vacations. Those same streets were clear and peaceful as we rolled down through town to the Tarn and on downstream towards the viaduct.
We were greeted at the venue by friendly, high-viz vest-wearing blokes who stopped us for a quick chat and parking instructions. We dutifully obeyed, shut the van down and brushed away the layer of croissant pastry flakes that were now coating us and the whole of the cab.
The next job was to collect Thomas’s number plate and timing chip. We wandered down the road, past the uplift station, where four medium-sized flatbed trucks were reversed up to the side of an articulated lorry flatbed. This had an earth ramp at one end and was acting as a makeshift loading bay. Five more flatbeds were waiting in the wings to take their place and help ship hordes of bikes and riders up to the start of the track.
Beyond the trucks was the ubiquitous bikepark traveller camp, with an array of camper vans, roof-tents, motorhomes and gazebos all loaded with bikes, tool boxes, work stands, picnic tables and chairs.
We ‘bonjour-ed’, flat-mouth smiled and nodded our way through the crowds towards the registration tent, dodging incoming bikes and Surrons as we went.
The real estate gets premium towards the finish line. The bikes get blingier, the kit gets flasher and the tents get bigger as you venture into team, pro and sponsored rider territory. This is the dream…
This race attracts a lot of top riders in France and is a great chance for them to get some early race practice in. There would be former world champions, World Cup overall winners, junior champions, and national champions. Basically champions of some description in each sex and every age category. Pretty cool.
The likes of Loris Vergier, Myriam Nicole, Henri Kiefer, Lisa Bouladou, the Alran twins and Marine Cabirou would be dropping in to the SR Suntour Millau 2026 along with a raft of rising stars and up-and-comers.
We picked up Thomas’s race pack from some lovely ladies at the registration tent. There was a theme developing with the fine people of Millau… A good one… We liked it.
With his plate fixed, timing chip zip-tied to his forks and a final bike check completed, I waved him off as he rolled down the road to join the queue and clamber aboard one of the flatbeds for the start of group B training at 8.15 am.
I got my own stuff together and set off for my first hike of the weekend. It was videographer duty for me now to try and get as much good footage as possible for the social media accounts and the hunt for future sponsors.
I actually love this part of it. I love a hike. I love scrabbling around in the woods, on sketchy terrain, and I love watching downhill racing. I’d rather be riding my bike as well, but if I’m not, it’s a pretty good second.
The track at Millau is a relatively short one, with a race descent around the two minute mark. That made it easy enough for me to get up and down on foot repeatedly. I went all the way to the top and found a few good spots to get some action shots. I also ended up crossing and following a few of the other trails in the bike park and they looked like a lot of fun. I look forward to getting some laps in there myself someday. I have considered entering myself in these races as an old fart, but the risk of me binning it and leaving Thomas stranded isn’t worth it.
The track itself looked like a minter. A flowy, jumpy, bike-parky section out of the gate, followed by some fast, flatter corners. They then hook into some rocky steps and drops ahead of a tasty little rock garden chute. A fast traverse sets riders up for a tricky right-hand turn into a steep wall before a full-gas motorway section through the trees at the end. Nice!
The canyon-y landscape was messing with the phone signal big time and was making communication a problem. Find my iPhone is a huge help for us as I can normally see where Thomas is to time my filming or to find out where he is to meet up. It was a bit more hit and miss on this occasion, although he put in three runs and luckily, I managed to get three decent clips.
We met back at the van for lunch and a debrief and Thomas’s morning had gone well. Despite having missed the previous day’s track walk, his three runs were good ones and he was beginning to find flow, lines and confidence that he could build on.
I shared some insight into what I’d seen trackside and he put in his requests for filming spots in the afternoon. A quick bike check, rear wheel spoke tighten and back to it for the afternoon sesh.
A speed trap had been set up in the motorway section and there was a 250€ prize up for grabs for the fastest rider of the weekend. Thomas had clocked 63 km/h in the morning and some of the top elites were up into the 70s!
As I set off up the track again for the afternoon session, someone was lying in a heap beyond the speed trap and were being attended to by a small crowd of medics and marshals. It turned out that he’d apparently clipped a tree after the jump at the speed trap and had a huge high-speed off. The session was red-flagged while they took care of him and whisked him off to hospital. Hope he’s all good.
The speed trap disappeared after that.
Three runs and three vids later at 3.30pm, Thomas checked in and said he felt comfortable with the track and that he’d done enough for today. He said he probably wouldn’t have time for another run during the session anyway, so we decided to head off, wash and service the bike, prep the kit for race day, get cleaned up and go out for a nice little bit of din-dins.
Hold your horses though sunshine!.. I wasn’t coming all this way and not driving over the viaduct! Much to Thomas’s teenage indifference, we took a 40-minute detour, over the old single-lane bridge and out on the original road southwest away from town.
As we did, we passed swathes of parked cars and vans on either side of the road for several kilometres. Our decision to get there in good time that morning had been a wise one… We’d do the same tomorrow.
20 minutes later we joined the motorway at the next junction and came back at the bridge. I can confirm it is indeed flipping tall, high and cool. The architect, Sir Norman Foster had even curved it so that drivers can see and appreciate the structure as they drive across it. Nice touch.
With bike and bodily ablutions out of the way, we moseyed from the Ibis to Leonie’s restaurant next door. I’d already scoped it out online and liked the cut of its jib.
I’m a sucker for menu items with ‘local’ or ‘specialty’ in the title or description, and this whole restaurant was billed as a local specialty specialist. ‘Come on!’.. Aveyron this, Aveyron that. Local this, local that – “Small producers, fresh products and local sourcing.”
We were now unsurprised by the warm welcome from even more fan-freakin-tastic Millauois staff and got stuck into our menus.
T played it safe-ish with a Lasagne (local beef) and I went with local Aveyron lamb in garlic sauce. I’d been tempted with “Coufidou Millavois Aubrac beef stew, cooked with pig’s trotters” but bottled it at the last minute on account of the trotters.
A couple of cast-iron pans were sitting on a hot plate to the side of the room. I could see over Thomas’s shoulder that every time a waiter went past, they stirred and whipped up the contents. Whatever it was, it was soft, white, fluffy and stretchy. As if a ball of bread dough had mated with a cloud.
I asked our waitress what it was and where it had been on the menu and she said it was Aligot – potato, garlic and some kind of cheese. Mashed potatoes basically. “Do you want to try some?”
She came back enthusiastically with a plateful that would have sufficed for my entire meal and it was indeed a delicious taste and texture combo. It was essentially mashed potatoes but pimped to the max with bags of cheesey, garlicy flavour. It had the stretchy texture of baked mozzarella, yet still with an element of substance that delivered a delicate but snappy bite. Very nice indeed… I polished off the whole lot out of politeness and waxed lyrical about how good it was.
We left full and content, set our alarms for 6am again and were catching ZZs by 9.45pm.
Race day!!
Let’s go!
We arrived earlier but ended up a few spaces further away. We obviously weren’t the only ones who’d hatched that plan.
The deal for the day was three runs for each rider. One reconnaissance run, then a timed run in the morning and another one in the afternoon. Fastest timed run of the day wins.
The order of the morning runs would be based on plate number order, which had been seeded in advance based on previous results. The second run would be reordered for everyone in the U17 category and above based on their first run time, running from slowest first to fastest rider last.
Thomas set off and I scrabbled up the hill to my first video vantage point of the day. The forecast had said it would feel like -7C this morning with the wind chill and it wasn’t flipping kidding!
It’d be worse and windier for Thomas and the other riders up top and as they started to come through most of them were all still wearing their jackets.
T put his reconnaissance down no problem and managed to find a pocket of reception to ring me and tell me that he had tried and subsequently ruled out a couple of alternate lines that had been percolating in his mind overnight. He went back up for his race run and my heart rate cranked up a few decimal BPMs.
It dialled up again as we got to 10 riders before him. I usually end up recording the five riders in front of him on a race run just to be sure I get him. I’ve missed him in the past when there’ve been a couple of no-shows and he’s come hurtling through unexpectedly.
I’d installed myself facing the big wall from the other side of the valley and he eventually came through looking good. He skipped down the face, across the bridge and on towards the motorway. Phew! So far so good. I slipped my phone back in my pocket and hot-footed it back towards the finish line.
By the time I got there, he was already back at the van, tucking into his pasta salad and buzzing about his run. He was pleased with it, although he’d had to go off track and around a jump because the rider in front of him was off his bike and on the landing.
“Do you want to go and ask about a re-run?” I said.
“No” he said. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. That’s not what this one is about. It’s about getting back into it and I don’t want to make a fuss and then have to rush and stress.”
Furry muff.
We kept an eye on the timing and it looked like another red flag was in effect. Nobody was coming through the finish line on the live timing website. It was still like that when we’d finished our lunch and the poor beggars waiting in the icy wind at the top must have been freezing their tatties off.
Seeing as the schedule had slipped, we decided to go and watch some of the action together when it restarted.
We went back to the wall and as things got going again, we watched in awe as some of the top lads were sending a big gap on the wall and landing in a small pocket at the bottom. It looked insane but it was cutting out all the chatter over the rough stuff and was giving them a pump boost in the landing transition.
As we prepared for run 2 back at the van, Thomas found a clip on Instagram of Max Alran doing the same wall gap we’d just seen. I just gave it the big ‘Wow’ but otherwise kept my mouth shut. Thomas’s knowledge, experience and judgement is now way beyond mine, so I’m in no place to really influence his riding choices. Ultimately these are the things that cut run time, move your riding up to the next level and are necessary to compete at the highest level, but being ready and capable of doing them before you do them is essential for keeping yourself in one piece and your progression rolling.
The start list times for run two came out but a couple more red flags had pushed things back another 30 mins. We guesstimated the adjusted timing and Thomas loaded onto another truck and set off for run two. I trudged back off up the track again but would stay closer to the bottom this time so I could meet up with him quickly when he came across the line.
I found a nice little den seat in the undergrowth beside the track where the speed trap had been. ‘Find my’ managed to find him at the start of the track and my heart rate responded accordingly.
Whoosh!..
Whoosh!..
Whoosh!..
One rider after another came hurtling through. I monitored the plate numbers and the live timing and raised my shaky hand 5 riders out to start filming…
And then it was him.
Whoosh!
And then he was gone. Yes though! Looking fast and comfortable.
I crunched and ducked back through the undergrowth to the footpath and quick-marched back to the finish area. I found him breathing heavy, beaming from ear-to-ear and buzzing with adrenaline and excitement.
“It was great.” he said, “I don’t remember most of it.”
“And Dad, I did the wall gap!”
“Jeeze! I had a feeling you might.” I said.
“It was brilliant.” he said, “There were so many people spectating all the way down and everyone cheered when I pulled the gap. It was like getting a mushroom on MarioKart when I landed in the transition and got the boost!”
Haha. Phew! I’m well proud that he’s doing what he loves with such commitment and enjoying it so much, but it’s a stressful gig for a parent. Pretty sure I’m getting better though. I’m definitely spending much less time with an elevated heart rate over a race weekend.
I didn’t want to mention this in the last post ahead of the weekend but there was even more to his setback sandwich story. He’d had the winters focused on ski racing, the broken collar bone, ankle ligaments and the compromised season, but after his return to racing, he struggled to find the race form that had made him an overall Regional Enduro Cup winner before it all.
He kept crashing… He crashed in every single race run for a year, but he kept picking himself up and going again. Finally, in the penultimate race last year, he only crashed in one race run, and in the last race of the season, he put down two fast, clean runs. Progress!
In the van on the way home from that race, he said, “Wow!.. It’s so nice travelling home without being in pain.” Bless his freakin’ cotton socks.
He finished in the top half of the table at Millau, both in his U17 category and overall but this weekend wasn’t about the position, it was about the progress. Starting the season with a clean weekend where he felt stronger, faster, fitter and more confident with each run was everything we’d hoped (and worked hard) for. Well done kiddo!
Mind you, those setbacks knock on. It’s ground to make up but it’s also room for improvement. There’s bike time, skill progression and conditioning. There are tracks to learn that others have already ridden and raced multiple times. There are the margins that improve with results and seeding and for sponsorship opportunities to invest more and ultimately to get on the radar of teams.
Who knows what’ll happen, but we’ve got a plan, there’s loads of room for improvement and it’ll be a fun journey finding out… If a little stressful.
He did complain on Sunday that his hands were wrecking while he was riding and that something might be wrong with his suspension. Then, yesterday, we discovered that he’d been adjusting his fork rebound speed in the wrong direction. He kept thinking it felt too slow and was giving it another click, but every time he did so, he was clicking it slower.
The next job and potential significant improvement is getting this rig set up and dialled in ahead of the next race.
It was 4 pm when we got back to the van after run two and whilst we’d have loved to stay and watch the rest of the riders come through, followed by the podiums, the six-hour drive home was weighing heavily on our minds.
It had been a long day and the summertime hour change had made it feel even longer.
The racing, the hiking, the wind, the cold, the heat, the dust and the low-key anxiety had left us both a bit drained. The first three hours dragged, then a Subway stop lifted the spirits and a fresh supply of coffee, redbull, sweets and a soundtrack of 90’s house got the job done in the 2nd half.
It was 11 pm when we got home. We hugged the girls, crawled into our own beds and I drifted off to sleep with the image of his beaming little face at the finish line running through my mind.
Cheers Me-Oh. See you next year.
