Big Ride: A tale of three passes in Switzerland

Cyclist
Big Ride: A tale of three passes in Switzerland

There is only one conversation more boring than the weather, and that’s a conversation about the weather and what cycling kit a rider needs to wear because of the weather. But in my defence, it was hard deciding what to put on this morning given yesterday’s intermittent barraging rain and this morning’s ‘feels like’ temperature of 4°C (which, by the way, comes from a mathematical model based on air temperature, wind speed and relative humidity, not just some bloke stood outside with his top off).

Thus I have arrived at the Cycle Store – Andermatt’s de facto road cycling hub given it sells very good coffee and is a bike shop – in scuba-level winter gear, while my ride partner Heidi is in bibtights and a rain jacket, albeit she also curiously wears trainers, being a self-proclaimed ‘cleat-hater’ despite her otherwise refined taste in bikes and clothing. I’m only narrowly persuaded not to go home and change by Heidi’s local weather app, which says it’s a genuine 2°C at the top of our first pass.

Andermatt sits at a lofty 1,440m in the middle of the Swiss Alps but we’ll eclipse 2,000m three times today, and though it can be clement below, I’m told the high peaks are prone to wildly different weather. And high we shall go, as today’s ride comprises three of this area’s seventeen 2,000m-plus climbs: the Furkapass (2,436m), the Nufenenpass (2,478m) and the Tremolapass (2,106m). Today’s total elevation works out at 3,161m, a feat all the more spirited given this loop is only 105km long.

Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me

We leave Andermatt for a very gentle 9km of warm-up, the road tilting up near-imperceptibly as it passes through Hospental and Realp; the former the sort of town you’d see in a children’s book about a perfect Christmas, the latter equally charming although more remarkable as the start of the Furka’s easterly ascent.

At this time of year – late July – our surrounds feel more hill than mountain, these lower slopes covered in grassy pasture that’s kept astonishingly neat through grazing livestock and precision strimming, through which sweeps a road I’d wager is the most infamous in the world – even more so than Ramsay Street and the one off the Hovis advert (which featured in issue 171).

This is the backdrop to James Bond’s car chase in Goldfinger. You know the one, where Bond deploys his Aston Martin’s tyre shredders to force Tilly Masterson’s Mustang off the road so he can find out why she’s been shooting at Goldfinger, which turns out to be because she’s avenging her sister Jill’s death after Goldfinger painted her in gold so her skin suffocated in a medically questionable way, and although Bond is really trying to save Tilly (as much as seduce her) from suffering a similar fate, she ends up dying anyway when he interrupts her second shooting attempt, thereby drawing the attention of henchman Oddjob who cuts Tilly’s throat with a perfectly thrown bowler hat, all leading the viewer to wonder if Tilly wouldn’t have been better off without 007.

I have watched Bond too much and I’m only partially ashamed to admit it. Plus at any rate, it’s important to have some context for the ‘James Bond Str.’ street sign we pedal past on the Furka’s fourth hairpin (this marks where Connery spies on Goldfinger below while posing next to his DB5 – a car which, lest we forget, could so easily have been a Jaguar E-Type if Jaguar hadn’t turned down the producers on …