American vowed to come back in 2002 and gain revenge for being beaten by the climb into hell

With echoes of the Terminator, Lance Armstrong said after finishing a frustrated third atop Mont Ventoux in the 2002 Tour: “We’ll come back, I’m sure.” Seven years later, Armstrong, a man who thrives on personal battles, has a score to settle with the peak which will decide whether he stands on the podium tomorrow. He has never won there, in any race. The tale of frustration began in 2000, when he and Marco Pantani approached the top to contest the stage win, back in the days when the American’s dominance of the Tour was only just beginning.

Pantani was clinging on, a pale, tormented shadow of the (EPO-fuelled) climber who had won the 1998 Tour. Repeatedly he lost contact with Armstrong’s wheel, repeatedly he clawed his way back. Finally, the Texan appeared to let him reach the summit first. He later said he regretted the gesture, because he never managed to get to grips with the “Bald Mountain”. He suffered there in the Dauphiné Libéré race – which goes up almost every year – and lost again in the Tour in 2002, when he gave Richard Virenque a seven minute start at the foot of the mountain, in what seemed like a handicap race.

So it is personal today for Armstrong, but that is the way it has been with the Tourmen and the Ventoux since it appeared on the route in 1951. As Roland Barthes wrote, no other ascent seems to have a personality. “A god of evil, a despot of cyclists,” he called it. Barthes’s point was this: most of the Tour’s great ascents are passes, between two mountains. The Ventoux is unique because the cyclists have to go up a whole mountain, 5,000 feet from its vineyards at its base at Bédoin to its wind-blasted summit with the famous observatory. There is nothing else higher for many miles around. Ventoux stands alone, visible from 65 miles away. If the weather is clear, at some point today the Tourmen will come up a rise after leaving Montélimar, and they will see it, even if it is several hours of pedalling away. That plays on the mind, as does the steepness of the road, particularly the early kilometres, which go straight up the side of the mountain through a rock cutting and between stunted oak trees, without a single hairpin to give even a few seconds’ respite. It is also a relatively rare feature in the route: this is the 14th visit since 1951.

The mountain has its own microclimate: stifling heat one day – on his first time up there, Tom Simpson said he sweated so much his shorts nearly fell down – freezing cold the next. The conditions are intensified on the bare scree slopes at the top, where there is no shade on a sunny day and no shelter from the wind, only the vast view of Provence far far beneath the “sloping desert, the Sahara of stones”, as the late organiser Jacques Goddet called it.

Unlike any other climb on the Tour, the Ventoux has an evil reputation. Before the road was built to the top, Ventoux was fabled for wolves, and flash floods that wiped out herds of sheep, and its caves were said to lead to hell. Soon after the Tour’s first visit in 1951, Antoine Blondin wrote of the extreme effort it demanded of the cyclists: “We have seen riders descend into madness due to heat and stimulants, some going down the hairpins when they think they are going up. There are few happy memories attached to this witches’ cauldron, climbed with a heavy heart.”

It was this way even before the death of Simpson, in 1967, due to a cocktail of intense heat, amphetamines, alcohol and his indomitable willpower. Now, however, the two legends, mountain and man, are inextricably tied. Simpson’s monument stands near the summit, the goal for the many amateur cyclists who take on the climb, but, as I wrote in Put Me Back on My Bike, he has appropriated the whole mountain as a memorial visible from 65 miles away: you look at the mountain and think of the man.

But the 1965 world champion is not the only life claimed by the Giant of Provence. There was a host of crosses on the slopes to pilgrims who failed to make it to the chapel just below the summit. More recently, a cycling fan was struck by lightning on the day the 1994 race went over, soldiers from the observatory were frozen to death in blizzards, at least one driver died in the motor races that use the mountain, while most surreal of all, a woman tourist was killed in the 1970s by stones picked up by a particularly vicious wind on the summit.

Other cycling careers, besides that of Simpson, have ended here: the great French hopeful Jean-François Bernard pushed himself to the limit to win a time-trial here in the 1987 Tour, and was never the same again. In 1955 the Frenchman Jean Malléjac, a decent Tour rider from Brittany, keeled over and never raced again, and in the same year, the Swiss Ferdi Kübler, winner in 1950, had what seemed to be a nervous breakdown in the searing heat.

“Ventoux has killed Ferdi,” he muttered, words echoed half a century later by Armstrong. “Mont Ventoux doesn’t like Lance Armstrong,” said the seven-time winner. Many of the field will share that feeling, tempered by the fact that this year, the day before the finish in Paris, they will see the Champs Elysées from the top.