This is one I worked on for quite a while, and made several completely
different versions, before I decided to focus on one moment, not the entire
Tour de France.
When Sir Bradley Wiggins got up on the podium at the end of
the Champs Elysées, with Chris Froome and that bloke who came third, a load of
dignitaries, the sprinter Maurice Green and two skinny birds in yellow frocks
carrying daffodils and stuffed toys, he addressed the gathered millions, and
suggested that it looked like time the draw the raffle numbers.
He did it for the British cycling fans who’d travelled to
Paris specially to see him there, the winner of the Tour de France, in his
yellow jersey. He wanted to say something that would be meaningless to the rest
of the world, because only the British know that when it’s all over, just
before we all go home, that’s when we do the raffle. It was outrageous,
original and funny. And I wanted to put it in a perfume.
This is a perfume of parts. I wanted the scent of a crowd on
a hot day; coffee, tobacco, hot tarmac and linden trees of the Champs Elysées;
oiled bicycles; marmalade on toast. I’m not sure if Sir Wiggo had marmalade on
toast for breakfast but I’d like to think it was his petit dejeuner of choice
the day after.
I’d considered other parts of the Tour, but decided against
mountains, sunflowers, the rest of France. I wanted the smell of the moment
that Bradley Wiggins led the peloton into the Champs Elysées ready to catapult
Cav into a position where he could cross the line first. Again. Where other
Tour winners are generally taking the applause at a leisurely pace, Bradley was
belting around the cobbled corners, part of the team, because it wasn’t over
until it was really over. Then when it was over it was time for the raffle.
The materials
For the Champs Elysées: coffee, tobacco, aniseed, linden.
Vetivert for the scent of hot tar and helional to symbolise sunshine, just
because it’s named after the sun god. For the bikes I used damascone alpha
because I think it smells of clean shiny metal; bitter orange and a CO2
extract off brown bread – not kidding - for marmalade on toast.
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