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‘Jesus!’ cried Massimo Lipari, grasping his left leg and stroking his hamstring tenderly. ‘Holy Mother Mary – you are in one fuck of a bad mood.’

Rachel McEwen looked down on the rider’s prostrate nakedness, his nether regions covered only by a towel, nappy-style; his lanky, lithe frame the colour of mocha ice-cream, which enabled him to skip up mountains like a gazelle, his huge brown eyes regarding her dolefully, full lips puckered into a somewhat theatrical pout. She looked at her hands, bit her lip and apologized.

‘I’m sorry, Mass,’ she said, using her hands more gently and reminding herself that his thighs were flesh and not meat, ‘I have a lot on my mind.’

Shit, poor Vasily – I must have pummelled him to hell and back half an hour ago. And yet I never heard even a wince – just a ‘thank you, Rachel, thank you’. Vasily Jawlensky, the committed and consummate sportsman for whom, no doubt, ‘pain is gain’, a man frugal with words but abundant in his triumphs. And now Massimo, Italy’s heartthrob, the team’s key personality, one who loves to make drama out of the ordinary, let alone a crisis. Was I rough? Did I hurt you? Sorry.

Rachel shook her hands as if they were wet and, despite fingers glistening with massage oil, scrunched her wavy hair into a haphazard pile on top of her head. She returned her hands to the rider’s inner thigh and then moved her fingers as if she was playing the piano.

‘You know,’ said Massimo, ‘when they said we were to have a female soigneur – well, I almost went on strike, I could have left the team, to and fro.’

Rachel laughed. ‘You mean there and then, Mass. I thought you’d have been delighted, being the Casanova that you are.’

Massimo grimaced as Rachel worked at a particularly tight knot near his knee, as if she was making pastry. ‘Well, girl, if they had said we were going to have a, how do you say, female doll?’

‘Mascot?’ Rachel suggested.

‘Si! Mascot – that would have been different. But I never thought the words female and soigneur could really be – how do you say? Married?’

‘What you mean, you nasty man,’ Rachel retorted with no malice, ‘is that you didn’t think a female soigneur would be any good.’

‘Si,’ said Massimo, his eyes still closed, ‘paint and pasta.’

‘Chalk and cheese,’ Rachel corrected. ‘You thought that she’d be too weak to give a good massage.’

‘Si,’ Massimo smiled, looking at the ceiling of Rachel’s office at the team’s Cambiago headquarters while she continued to untie his muscles and unravel his ligaments.

‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’

‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.

‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’

‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.

‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’

‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.

‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’

‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’

Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are men, women and soigneurs. I mean, I know I’m a woman, but it is a fact of negligible interest to the cycling fraternity.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says out loud, allowing herself a fleeting glance in the mirror and thinking her hair really does need a cut. ‘This is my job. It’s appallingly paid but I love it.’

Rachel McEwen is twenty-seven years old and looks far too slight to be hoiking the heavy limbs of exhausted men and dispelling the lactic acid in their tense, brutalized muscles. But that is what she does and she does it very well.

‘But what the fuck is a signor?’ her best friends had enquired when she told them she was leaving Edinburgh for Italy to be one two years ago.

‘Soigneur,’ she stressed. ‘It means “one who looks after” – the riders’ needs are my responsibility.’

This was greeted, much to her consternation, by a rapid chorus of wink-wink, nudge-nudging.

‘I’ll be doing their laundry, for Christ’s sake!’ she retorted, twisting her hair around and around in frustration before pinning it to her head precariously. ‘And preparing their race food each day. And going on ahead to the hotels to check out the rooms and the menus. And giving massage and minor medical assistance. And counselling – many riders look on their soigneur as their confidante.’

‘Back track, back track,’ they had implored, ‘to the “massage” bit.’

‘Yes?’ Rachel had replied ingenuously. ‘It’ll be good to put it to some practical use after two years of training.’

‘They’ll devour you,’ one friend said. ‘You’re such a wee lass and all that friction against the chamois lining of their shorts must make ’em horny bastards.’

‘Numb, more like,’ Rachel had said, ‘and anyway, I can’t be doing with love at my age.’

I haven’t the time, Rachel reasons, remembering that conversation well and realizing with horror that she hasn’t been back to Scotland for almost a year. She prepares the table for Stefano Sassetta’s arrival and skims through the sheaves of lists for the Tour that she started compiling during the Giro.

Shit! Frangipane.

Is that an expletive?

No, I really do mean the cake. It is a fantastic energy burst for the boys and it keeps moist and fresh for ages. I’m in cahoots with a local baker – he has broken an age-old family custom to make the cake square just for Zucca MV, because it’s much more practical to cut and divide.

So, a soigneur is a masseuse and a patisserie expert?

And a rally driver too – watch me bomb along the Stage route to the feed station or the arrivée where often I have to rescue my riders from the media scrum.

It is my job to be the first person my rider sees on finishing a Stage.

‘Shit,’ says Rachel, running fingers still rather oily through her long-suffering locks, ‘I must check on disposable flannels. Stefano is due in ten minutes and I’m a little concerned about that shoulder of his.’

Stefano Sassetta, who should have been on Rachel’s massage table ten minutes ago, was parading around his apartment in his Zucca MV team strip.

‘God, this blue and yellow suits me,’ he commented to his current girlfriend. ‘If I had taken up Team Mapei’s offer, I wouldn’t look half as good. It was reason enough to stay with Zucca MV.’

While Stefano gazed at his opulent if vulgar kitchen extension, a gift from the team’s sponsors and designed by Stefano himself, his girlfriend could barely keep her eyes from the semicircle of stitching around the reinforced groin area. It was like a magnificent sunburst and she was hot for what was behind it.

‘You want to work up an appetite, baby?’ she said coyly, fingering the spaghetti straps of her negligible sundress. Everything about the man was big – his baritone voice, his legendary thighs, his hands, his nose; they all complemented the biggest treat of all, currently concealed but far from hidden behind his shorts.

‘I just did a good ride,’ Stefano countered as if his appetite were indeed her exclusive concern.

For Zucca MV’s Stefano Sassetta, Système Vipère’s Jesper Lomers was his nemesis. Jesper was undoubtedly a better rider technically; Stefano knew it and loathed the Dutchman for it; loathed, too, the way Jesper was always so courteous and affable towards him. Jesper might be the better rider but the crowds loved Stefano’s flamboyance. However, though the fans might adore Stefano, the peloton had more respect for Jesper.

Whereas Jesper regarded his physique merely as a by-product of his career, at this point in the season Stefano was increasingly obsessed with his own beauty. Specifically, his thighs. Measurements, dimensions and cross-comparisons with last year, and with the thighs in the peloton in general, had become a fixation. Stefano was almost more preoccupied with having his thighs praised over Jesper’s than he was with taking the green jersey off him. He thus presented his body to his girlfriend as if it were a statue. You can look but you cannot touch. He has told her to expect no sex until September.

Consequently, it is also around this time of year that a change of girlfriend is imminent. They leave him. It’s an occupational hazard. He would never ask them to stay. For Stefano, riding slowly is boring. It’s nice to have a change of strip.

‘Did you read that thing?’ Stefano asks Rachel who is trying to loosen his right shoulder.

‘God, you’re tight,’ Rachel murmurs.

‘Hey,’ Stefano jests, ‘that’s my line.’ Rachel does not react. ‘Did you?’ he repeats, his contrived nonchalance failing to mask his unease.

‘Did I what?’ Rachel asks, feeling something give high in his neck, and glancing at the flicker of subconscious relief across Stefano’s face.

‘Read that thing?’

‘What thing?’

Stefano, you’re such a dick. It’s the bloody Jesper issue, isn’t it?

‘That thing. About Lomers. In Vogue.’

‘Stef,’ Rachel chides in a very grave way, ‘would you give up? The look of a thigh is utterly superficial. It’s what they can do that’s the issue.’

She rubs his hard for emphasis.

He looks like a sulky schoolboy. And he won’t race well. OK, Stef, for the millionth time, I’ll say it again.

‘Don’t your women go wild for both the look and the feel of you?’ Rachel asks in a totally fresh way, despite it being an enquiry Stefano likes to hear on a weekly basis at least. Nevertheless, Stefano squints at Rachel as if she has just posed a really taxing question.

‘Who does the crowd love?’ she presses kindly and with convincing ingenuousness.

Stefano pulls a face as if assessing every member of the peloton. ‘Stefano Sassetta,’ he declares, as if it was a most considered answer.

‘How many Stages did Lomers win in the Giro?’ Rachel asks. Stefano holds up one finger.

‘And how many did you win?’ she furthers. He holds up three fingers and then starts laughing.

That’s better, thinks Rachel, laughing at him and not with him.

‘And how many are you going to win in the Tour?’ she pushes, taking his foot in her hand to work on.

‘It is not the Stages of the Tour,’ Stefano says, his eyes dark and glinting, ‘but the colour of the jersey. You know, I think green on your back completely alters the impression of the thigh. If they see me in green, they’ll think of my physique as supreme within the peloton. I want it to be written that Stefano Sassetta, this year’s winner of the green jersey, has the thighs of a Greek god.’

‘Och, you’re so full of crap, Sassetta,’ laughs Rachel, for whom it is impossible to look on Stefano’s thighs as anything other than pistons for which she is caretaker. ‘What was that saying you taught me?’

‘More shit than in the backside of a donkey.’

‘Aye, that’s you,’ Rachel laughs again. ‘Now turn over. I need to do your glutes. By the way, how are your haemorrhoids? I think that new cream is probably better – yes?’

‘Oh la la, chica chica la la. Le Tour, oh yeah, le Tour. Yeah. Yeah. Le Tour. La!’

Massimo Lipari, pleasantly rejuvenated from his session with Rachel, is singing in his apartment, gyrating his way from bathroom to bedroom, giving a good shimmy by the cupboard door and then delving around his quite extensive wardrobe. Never mind the imminence of the Tour de France, it is the team supper itself tonight that requires greatest application from Massimo. He repeats his song and sings it fortissimo.

If I were not a professional cyclist, I would be a pop star. He regards his handsome reflection and gives himself a wink. His cheekbones are as sharp as his eye reflexes when he’s descending mountains at 100 kilometres an hour. His smile is as dazzling as the way he can dance up the ascents of the most unforgiving climbs. He sings his pop song again. The tune is the one he recorded as the official song of the Giro D’Italia last year which made it into the top ten.

It was almost as thrilling as finishing third overall in the race itself Almost – but not quite. Cycling defines me. A cyclist could, conceivably, become a celebrity. But a pop star could not decide to become a pro racer.

Off his bike, Massimo lives as a star and loves it. He’s on adverts on television and billboards, he’s been in the hit parade, his face is on a particular brand of chocolate-hazelnut spread and his local bar is bedecked with Massimo memorabilia. And yet astride his bike, he is utterly focused, racing brilliantly and seemingly independent of crowd adulation. The transformation to superstar occurs the moment he crosses the finish line. He always wipes his mouth and zips up; there are thousands of cameras, press and TV, fans staring everywhere – he believes it his duty to delight them both in and out of racing conditions. He wants to take the King of the Mountains jersey this year, to make his hat trick.

He goes to the vast gilt mirror above the flamboyant paved fireplace that his sponsors built for him. He gazes at himself and nods.

‘I am Donna magazine’s “Sexiest Man on Two Wheels”,’ he remarks. ‘Nice! But if I can take the polka dot jersey for a third time – well! National hero comes home to party time!’

Looking like a healthy composite of mafioso, pop star and Milanese advertising executive, Massimo Lipari leaves his apartment for the team dinner. He could drive. He could take a cab. He could have taken up Rachel’s offer to taxi him there as she is doing for other members of the team. But Massimo decides to walk. He likes to hear the calls of ‘Ciao, Massimo!’ He likes to feel people looking, he likes to sense the recognition, he likes to imagine what they say to each other when he has passed by. He is a local hero, all the Zucca MV boys are, living in close proximity just north of Verona and in the shadow of the foothills of the Dolomites.

With his hair gelled and tweaked, his goatee beard clipped to perfection, his jet-black eyes hidden from view behind Oakley sunglasses despite it being dusk, Massimo Lipari cuts a dashing figure, slicing into the fantasies of the women he passes on his way to the restaurant with much the same force as when he slices through the pack on a mountain climb.

Rachel is wearing a skirt, not that anyone has noticed and not that she’s noticed that it’s gone unnoticed. It is pale blue linen, straight, and to the mid-calf. She has teamed it with a white linen shirt and white lace-up pumps. It suits her. Her hair is down but scooped away at the sides. She is wearing perfume but no make-up, her fresh complexion giving a radiance to her already pretty features.

It’s the last bloody time for over three weeks that I’ll be able to wear light colours and not smell of embrocation. The Tour de France, and the perils of being a soigneur, mean dark plain clothes are not just practical but a necessity. Anyway, I still haven’t had the chance to do my own laundry. Poor Paolo has had a very bad stomach which he is playing down because this will be his first Tour and he doesn’t want to miss it. However, his shorts have really taken the brunt. Terrible mess. It’s taken me most of the afternoon. Poor boy.

Rachel, you’re a saint.

Bollocks. I’m a soigneur. It’s my job.

She looks around the table at the team and realizes she is on tenterhooks on their behalf.

Look at you all, seemingly so relaxed. My God, when I think what’s in store for you.

And for you, Rachel. It’s your first Tour de France.

Me? Oh, I’ll be fine. The Tour, the Giro, the Vuelta – surely just the scenery is different. But the boys have the Col du Galibier, the Madeleine, L’Alpe D’Huez – not to mention the fucking Pyrenees beforehand. Shit, I must remember cashmere socks.

‘I must remember cashmere socks,’ Rachel all but shouts. The table falls silent, pieces of pizza halt half-way to mouths; spaghetti unravels itself from motionless forks.

‘Huh?’ says Massimo shooting glances to his team-mates.

‘In case it becomes cold, in case you develop sore throats. If Benylin is a banned substance, a cashmere sock worn round the neck at night surely is not.’

‘Rachel,’ said Stefano very seriously, stretching his arm across the table and laying his hand on her wrist for emphasis, ‘we finished work for the day. Shut the fuck up, relax, eat. Please.’

The team cheered and raised their glasses in support. Rachel twitched her lip and then raised her glass too.

‘Here’s to you lot,’ she said with immense feeling. ‘Have a good race.’

Rachel knows that she is to be one of only two female soigneurs on the Tour de France and the thought doesn’t worry her in the least. Cat has no idea that, in the salle de pressé of 1,000 journalists, she will be one of only twelve women.

If I were to meet Vasily Jawlensky, Cat muses, coming home from the Guardian office, what on earth would I say to him? Ought I to bow? Curtsey? In his presence, surely major genuflection is highly appropriate. I wish I could speak bloody Russian.

I can’t wait to meet Massimo Lipari, he always kisses everyone three times, regardless of their sex or relationship to him. Remember how last year, Phil Liggett from Channel 4 was given the Lipari smackers live on TV after Massimo won at L’Alpe D’Huez? Liggett looked lovestruck and told the viewers he’d never wash his face again. I’d like some Massimo kisses. But how would I go about getting them? What exactly would I ask him?

I’d love to set Stefano Sassetta off against the inimitable Mario Cipollini. They’re both the most extravagant, over-the-top personalities in the peloton. Stefano tall, dark and handsome; Cipo with blond highlights, a pony-tail and a great line in outrageous one-liners. There’s Stefano banging on about the aesthetic excellence of his thighs, and there’s Cipo saying if he wasn’t a cyclist he’d like to be a porn star. Italian stallions, both.

But.

I suppose it’s not so much what I’d say to them, but whether or not they’d talk to me.

Oh.