Jack Thompson: Meet the man trying to ride the Tour de France in 12 days

Jack Thompson will ride two stages per day from sunrise to sundown as he attempts to beat the peloton to Paris and tells Lawrence Ostlere why cycling is his ‘medicine’

Jack Thompson: ‘I always had this fascination with the Tour' (Wahoo)

While the surviving riders of a brutal opening week at the Tour de France enjoy their first rest day in the Alps, flushing out the lactic acid from their legs and repairing battered bodies, one man is back where it all started nine days ago in Brest, getting on his bike and beginning a race to catch them.

Jack Thompson is the Australian ultra-cyclist setting sanity aside in his attempt to complete sport’s most famous endurance event, a gruelling three-week trek from Brittany to Paris via the enormous peaks of the Alps and the Pyrenees, in around half the time as the professional peloton. “My goal is to beat them to Paris having started 10 days behind,” he says. “So I want to win the Tour de France – albeit with a twist.”

With a small support team to help fuel him and film his journey, Thompson’s detailed plan is to ride around 350km per day while covering every inch of road in this year’s race in 12 days. There will be no elite sporting operation around him, nor a peloton to shield him from the wind or a crowd to sweep him along and lift him through the mountains when his legs begin to burn. It will be a rider alone on his bike on one very long road.

Jack Thompson is chasing the Tour de France (Wahoo)

His hope is to ride most of the miles in daylight hours, starting at around 6am each morning and aiming to finish at sundown. The target of 350km per day is effectively two Tour stages in one – “no problem” for the first few days on the relatively flat roads of north-west France, Thompson explains, but that target will drop a little when some of the Tour’s most famous Alpine mountains hove into view, like this year’s double climb to the famous lunar landscape atop Mont Ventoux. “If it’s at night-time I’ll feel like I’m on another planet,” he jokes. “I’ve never climbed it before so I’m excited to ride some of these famous climbs that I’ve never explored, but at the same time worried that it will be on very tired legs.”

At least Thompson has some experience dealing with the moments of potential torture coming his way on what his primary supporter, Wahoo, has dubbed The Amazing Chase. Last year he set a Guinness World Record for the most kilometres ridden in seven days: 3,505, a little more than this year’s entire Tour de France, incidentally, although it was notably flat. His most agonising feat so far was riding the length of Portugal in 24 hours. “We had some really bad weather so I actually changed from riding from the north to the south, which is the easier route, to south to north. There was 50 per cent more elevation gain through the mountains, and it was all in the second half. So mentally I wanted to hold my average speed as high as I could for the first half but I was just going a little bit too hard and I paid the price. I pretty much hit the wall. I had to jump in the car which I wouldn’t normally do and take a 10 minute power nap.”

Cycling is my way of dealing with depression and the dark times I go through

Perhaps that experience is why he is most concerned about practicalities more than the physical demands of the challenge. Each day typically involves three transfers between stages, when his timings will be at the mercy of the traffic gods. The more time Thompson loses, the less sleep and recovery he can achieve before it all starts again the next day. “If you lose half an hour on every transfer that’s an hour and a half every day, which is essentially almost half a day at the end of the thing so I’m just conscious that we need to be on a very strict time schedule. But yeah, I’m confident in the kilometres and the elevations, that’s not what I’m nervous about. It’s more the things I can’t control.”

Thompson’s career completing wild challenges is not an act of self-indulgence but of self-preservation. He began suffering bouts of depression in his teens, and found himself trapped by hedonism at university in Perth. “I have an obsessive personality and, yeah, I found myself partying too hard and developing this addiction to party drugs.” He checked himself into rehab and on the other side his dad encouraged him to get back on his bike, something he’d loved as a child. “My dad continued to pester me and eventually I jumped on a bike, more just to shut him up. That first ride... I loved that. I got that real sense of speed and freedom again. It just so happened that when my dad retired his goal was to ride around the world – we grew up with a dad that was always away travelling on his bike. And so I thought, I’m gonna give this a go, let’s just go and explore. And my obsessive personality kicked in and it grew from there.”

‘I’m not worried about the elevations' (Wahoo)

Now, he says, cycling is his medicine. “Whenever I hop on the bike, it’s like the rest disappears and I have one task and that’s literally to propel myself forward. I love that simplicity, it’s like meditation. I can zone out from everything else and all I have to worry about is what’s in front of me where I’m going to turn. For me it’s like therapy. The haze disappears. I’m in the moment.”

Once a year he still enjoys a jaunt with his dad, crossing Australia together or riding the length of Japan. His mother back home and partner in Spain say they have the stressful end of the deal – Thompson disagrees – but they were never going to deter him from fulfilling a lifelong dream to chase cycling’s most famous race.

“This project has been on my mind for about three years. As a child in Australia, I stayed up watching the Tour de France late into the night. I always had this fascination with the Tour. Every young cyclist wants to wear the yellow jersey and ride down the Champs-Elysees. For whatever reason my cycling journey didn’t take me down that path. I’ve been in and out of rehab in my early twenties and cycling is my way of dealing with depression and the dark times I go through. I still want to ride down the Champs-Elysees at the end of the Tour de France and show that you don’t necessarily have to go about things in a traditional or orthodox way and you can still achieve your goals. It might just mean you have to go about achieving them differently.”