by Mark McDermott 

If all goes according to plan, Jeff Davis will rise sometime before dawn on July 2 and face a notorious giant in the French Pyrenees.

The Col du Tourmalet is known in cycling lore as the Géant des Pyrénées, the Giant of the Pyrenees. At 2,115 meters — nearly 7,000 feet — it is the highest paved pass in the central Pyrenees, and the most legendary climb in the Tour de France. The mountain looms over the entire day, visible from the road for hours before the climb begins. By the time Davis reaches its base, he will have already crossed another major climb, the Col d’Aspin, a category-one ascent that on any other day would be the hardest thing on the schedule.

Then comes the Tourmalet. The road climbs more than 17 kilometers — about 10.7 miles — from the village of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, rising 1,268 meters, or roughly 4,160 vertical feet. That is the height of three Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other. The average grade is 7.4%: imagine climbing a 4,160-foot vertical wall, spread across 10 miles of road. Long sections pitch above 10% — the gradient at which most casual cyclists either stand up on the pedals or stop. The final approach climbs at a sustained 12%.

There is no tree shelter. The landscape is severe rather than pretty — broken stone above, dry grass below, the switchbacks visible miles ahead. As a cyclist, you can see what you have left to do, all of it, all at once. This is why this giant is known for its cruelty: it shows you what it’s going to do to you long before you are upon it.

Davis will not approach this climb as a professional cyclist, and the ride he is about to undertake is not the Tour de France. He is a 53-year-old amateur cyclist from Redondo Beach. Davis, along with 11 other riders, will be riding in the Tour 21, which follows the same route as the Tour de France one week before the professionals, in order to raise money for Cure Leukaemia. The full route runs 2,071 miles — 3,333 kilometers — across 21 stages, from Barcelona to Paris. Its riders climb a cumulative 54,450 meters along the way, the equivalent of summiting Mount Everest more than six times from sea level.

The Tourmalet is the climb that helped make the Tour de France famous. When the race began in 1903, it had no mountain passes. But it was punishing on its own terms: six stages, more than 1,500 miles, with an average stage length of over 250 miles — more than double the distance of a modern Tour stage. Some stages were so long the riders had to start before dawn, and the slowest were on the road for nearly two days. They carried their own supplies and performed their own repairs. The Tour was, from the beginning, a test of pure endurance.

The mountains turned it into something else. The Pyrenees were added in 1910, against the better judgment of nearly everyone involved. The route reconnaissance had been done in March of that year by the Tour’s assistant director, Alphonse Steinès, who nearly died in a snowstorm on the Tourmalet and had to be rescued by villagers. He famously wired the Tour’s founder, Henri Desgrange, with a lie: Crossed Tourmalet. Very good road. Perfectly feasible.

The first rider to cross the pass that July was one of the great hard men of the era, a curly-haired force of nature named Octave Lapize, who dominated French cycling in the years before the First World War. He would go on to win that stage, and that year’s Tour de France. But as Lapize crested the Tourmalet, exhausted past speech, he caught sight of the Tour organizers waiting at the top. He found his voice. Vous êtes des assassins! he shouted at them. You are assassins!

Lapize was not a man easily daunted. Seven years later, at 29, he was shot down over Flirey as a fighter pilot in the French air service. He died of his wounds the next day. But in 1910, at the height of his powers, he felt brutalized by Tourmalet.

That is the climb Jeff Davis will face on July 2. The Tour 21’s ride leaders have told this year’s riders that of the last six editions, only one has crossed the Pyrenees without rain or snow. 

“When we start that climb, we will be 80 miles into our day and have already covered a category-one climb, the Col d’Aspin,” Davis said. “When I look at a climb like that, I know in my mind that I can only do what I can do. Settle into a pace that is comfortable. This will be a mental battle, and positivity is key. I tell myself, I get to do this, not I have to do this. How lucky am I to be able to ride the most iconic climb in the history of bike racing.”

Davis will also have somebody propelling him forward as he makes this climb. When he needs to, he will look down at the handlebars of his bike, and see the words emblazoned there: “I ride for Lucy Davis.”

Diagnosis, not definition

On the Monday morning after Thanksgiving 2023, Lucy Davis went back to school. She was 17, a senior at Redondo Union High School, and she had spent the previous three days in Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach being told that she had cancer. None of her classmates knew. She had decided, somewhere in the hospital room, that she was not going to walk into AP Literature looking different than she had the Friday before.

Her diagnosis came during the holiday break.

“She was getting some random bruising,” Jeff Davis said. “She was tired a lot. She had an elevated heart rate, and she’s not an athlete, so it wasn’t something that we would have recognized as parents. She was a teenager, she studied a lot, so maybe it was just because she was studying all the time.”

Her parents took her for a physical on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The blood work came back later that day with a white blood cell count of 534,000. A normal count is around 12,000. White blood cell counts above 150,000 generally warrant a trip to the emergency room. Lucy was sent directly to Miller Children’s. She spent the next three days undergoing tests until the diagnosis was confirmed: chronic myeloid leukaemia, or CML, a cancer of the blood.

“Obviously nobody wants to have cancer, but if there’s one that you’d want to have, it would be that one,” Jeff Davis said. “It’s highly treatable.”

Twenty years ago, a CML diagnosis was a death sentence. The disease has been transformed in the last two decades by a class of drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors — TKIs — which target the cancer cells without destroying the body’s immune system the way chemotherapy does. They are taken as a daily pill. Many CML patients on TKIs live with the disease for decades. Some reach deep remission and come off the drugs entirely. The research that made these drugs possible, and that continues to refine them, is exactly the work Cure Leukaemia and organizations like it fund. It is the reason a diagnosis that was terminal in 2003 is highly treatable in 2026. And it is the reason Jeff Davis is riding on The Tour 21: out of gratitude for the everyday miracle that this progress represents, and in hope that the ongoing grind of such research continues to reap such rewards.

By Monday morning, Lucy had a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and a daily pill. She also had a decision to make about how she would proceed. She had been a journalist on the school paper since freshman year, and served as editor in chief as a senior. She had done Model UN and mock trial. She was an extraordinarily gifted student with a broad curiosity for the world and a strong intention to serve in a way that could make the world a better place. None of those things had changed, and she was not interested in her diagnosis becoming the way that anyone defined her.

So she went back to AP Lit. She asked her teacher if she could reschedule an essay she had been due to turn in. He said yes without asking why. That was the entire conversation.

Some people she told. Most she didn’t. She kept up with her schoolwork, her clubs, and the labyrinthian task of college applications. She got accepted into some of the more prestigious schools in the country, Boston University and American and George Washington, but her parents asked her to stay closer to home for the first year because of the medical situation. She went to El Camino College, in the Honors Transfer Program, and a year later transferred to UC Davis, where she is now studying political science with the intention of going into intellectual property law.

In June 2024, at the senior awards night at Redondo Union, she stood up to give a speech. She had been selected for a scholarship from the Avery family — named for Kalea and Noah Avery, the children of Redondo Union surf coach Duncan Avery and his wife Nohea, who had both died the previous year of a rare form of brain cancer. Coach Avery had been Lucy’s P.E. teacher at Parras Middle School. They had been close in those years.

She did not know, when she was first asked to give a speech, that the scholarship came from his family. She knew only that it was for adversity, that her counselors had nominated her, and that the framing made her uncomfortable.

“They wanted me to give a speech about adversity,” she said, “because the greatest adversity that they can conceptualize is the fact that a 17-year-old has cancer. They wanted me to talk about the fact that I have cancer.”

She almost did not give the speech. She had three weeks to prepare it, and in those weeks, she said, she went through a lot of growth. She decided to write the speech she wrote partly because of how it had been framed.

“I had worked so hard to be known in so many other ways,” she said, “that it didn’t feel significant enough just to characterize me that way. There’s also so much stigma about the way cancer is discussed and the way that cancer patients are discussed.”

She gave the speech. Though her voice shook as she spoke, it was not from anger — the anger she’d felt when first given the task — nor from fear. It was from outright passion, because the message she had arrived at was bigger than her own dilemma.

“In the past year, I’ve thought a lot about what defines me,” she told her classmates. “Sometimes it felt like my entire identity had been reduced to my diagnosis. But I’m still learning, as all of us are, and as we will continue to do. And if I know one thing, it’s this: my adversity does not define me, as yours does not, and will not, define you. No matter how flattened you may feel, no matter how uncertain you are about your way forward, remember that you have so much to contribute to this world. You all have talents, ambition, creativity, and joy to keep sharing as you look throughout your lives. Face each day with the clarity of knowing who you are and who you want to be. With that vision, paired with resilience, no challenge is too difficult. Thank you.”

The speech was not about leukaemia. It was not about Lucy. It was about adversity, and how each of us will be tested by something, and what we decide to do when we are.

Two and a half years into living with cancer, Lucy is studying political science at UC Davis. She is 20 years old. She’s living the life of a normal, albeit unusually brilliant, college student.

“I don’t really do anything,” she said. “I take medicine every night, and I keep a pretty strict sleep schedule, because otherwise my oncologist, I think, would kill me.”

She does one other thing. Every Tuesday, on her Instagram, she opens a check-in to anyone who follows her. How are you doing? she asks. Do you need someone to talk to? This is the inversion that the speech, in retrospect, was rehearsing. She’s not telling people about her cancer journey. She is asking do you need to talk? What challenges are you facing?

“That sums up Lucy,” said her mother, Jackie Nguyễn. “Here she is going through this, and yet she’s in tune about how people around her are feeling.”

Lucy Davis is private. She has been clear about that since the diagnosis, and she has been clear about it through the reporting of this story. This is not about her, she said. It is about the challenge and hope that The Tour 21 represents. And it is about her father.

“The thing you need to know about my dad is that he’s a good man,” she said. “Really, truly. He’s a wonderful father and a great husband. Dad doesn’t love to travel. I have always wanted to travel, and I’m so excited to go to Paris and see art and museums, and to eat a bunch of amazing food. But he’s never had that want. He’s a very content person. But the thing that really gets him excited is cycling, and the fact that he gets to cycle through one of the most beautiful terrains on earth — I think wasn’t ever something he would allow himself to do, or even conceptualize dreams about. He wouldn’t really think to ask it. But because he’s doing it — well, he says that he’s doing it for me, and I think that in a lot of ways he is — but I think it’s also beautiful that he also gets to do it for himself.”

A good man

Last summer, Jeff Davis was on his couch watching replays of the Tour de France on YouTube. It was something he had done before. He had followed the Tour for 30 years. He had owned a bike shop in the early 2000s. After the recession of 2008 took the shop down he had kept riding — on weekends, on early mornings, the way an amateur with a job and two kids keeps riding. He had thought, sometimes, about doing a single stage of the Tour, or one of the famous climbs. He had not thought about doing the whole thing.

After his daughter’s diagnosis, the bike, which had always been a hobby, had become something else.

“One of my coping mechanisms is cycling,” he said.

At the end of a replay, the platform auto-played a short documentary that NBC Sports produced about The Tour 21 — the amateur ride that follows the Tour de France route a week ahead of the professionals, raising funds for the British charity Cure Leukaemia. At the end of the documentary was a call to action: Join the team for 2026.

He clicked the link. He filled out the application. He was accepted in September.

“He came home and said, ‘I got selected to ride 21 stages of the Tour de France,'” said Jackie Nguyễn, his wife of nearly 25 years. “I was speechless. Speechless and terrified.”

She still is. “If you ask me, I’m still terrified now,” she said. “But I am assured that it’s not a race. He’s just got to be able to complete it. So that brings me some comfort. But he’s still got to be able to survive it and do it.”

Davis has put in approximately 6,000 miles in training.

“Jeff is probably the most disciplined person that I’ve ever met in my life,” Nguyễn said. “He gets up at four o’clock in the morning. He has a full-time job, he’s got an hour commute to work, sometimes an hour and a half home — and so he gets up at four o’clock in the morning and trains in the garage. I think it takes that kind of discipline and probably a little craziness too to say yes to something like this. You’ve got to be a little bit crazy to accept this kind of challenge.”

On weekdays, she said, her husband is in the garage training for two to three hours at a time. On weekends, he is on the saddle for four to six hours, sometimes seven. “I don’t really see him a whole lot,” Nguyễn said, laughing, “unless I’m refilling his water for him.”

The Davis household has watched the Tour de France for as long as Lucy and her older brother Caleb can remember. Caleb, now 21, is a Division I soccer player at Lipscomb University in Nashville. Lucy, in her own description, never quite took to the bike. “I was a little slow on the uptake,” she said, “which disappointed him a little. Biking has never been my strong suit.” But she absorbed the Tour anyway. She has, somewhere in her room, a Tour de France bandana she has owned since she was small.

“I don’t know where he got it,” she said, “and I couldn’t even tell you how old it is. But I wear it all the time.”

The shop Davis owned was called Ladera Cyclery. Davis opened it two years into his marriage to Nguyễn. He wanted to pursue his passion for cycling and to be his own boss. He told her he was going to cash out his retirement savings to make it happen.

“And I said sure,” Nguyễn said. “We were crazy and young.”

The shop did well in the first years. Customers were paying $10,000 and $12,000 for high-end bikes. In its first year, Nguyễn said, Ladera Cyclery did close to a million dollars in sales. Then 2008 arrived, and the recession with it, and the shop didn’t survive.

Today, Davis is an operations manager for Bosch Building Technologies, which provides HVAC and building automation systems for non-residential construction. But he never stopped riding. He has kept taking  the bike out before work, on weekends, on the long ride days that amateurs do.

“I’m just a casual cyclist,” Davis said. “Probably riding 50 to 100 miles a week at the most.”

He was, by Nguyễn’s account, a stronger cyclist than he ever admitted to being. He used to race criteriums in Orange County, on what had once been airport runways. He was modest about it, and still is.

What changed last fall, after he applied to the Tour 21, was the structure of his weeks. He began riding 200 to 250 miles a week, mixing indoor and outdoor training. He also traveled to Calpe, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, for a Tour 21 training camp — a week riding with the men he will be riding with in France.

Two months ago, on a 100-mile training ride in Santiago Canyon, east of Orange County, Davis was coming down a hill when he ran into the back of a Jeep that had pulled out of a driveway. He needed shoulder surgery. The Tour 21 begins in nineteen days. His shoulder, by Nguyễn’s account, is still not at 100%.

“I just told him he’s got to heal that shoulder as much as he can,” she said, “before he actually has to get himself exposed to the elements and the road.”

Since the wreck he has trained almost entirely indoors, on the stationary bike in his garage. The smart trainer can put any climb of any Tour de France stage in front of him. He will be on the actual road on June 27.

Nguyễn has been watching all of this for nine months. After the wreck, she watched him navigate another way to train, as he healed. Through the indoor training, she watched him keep going. 

“He’s pretty amazing,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a story like this. It’s kind of crazy.”

Her husband is a man of somewhat understated but deep passions. This challenge has brought about a different kind of intensity, because it touches both on his devotion to his daughter and his dedication as a cyclist. Nguyễn echoed what her daughter said about him.

“He is a good man,” she said. “That’s such simplicity, but it’s the truth. He’s actually a very quiet man. He’s a bit of an introvert. He’s a man of few words. But yes — he is a very good man. Those three words capture his essence very well.”

Asked, on a Cure Leukaemia podcast recorded earlier this year, what watching his daughter go through cancer had taught him, Davis answered slowly.

“I think it’s given me more strength, seeing my daughter’s strength,” he said. “Knowing that she is resilient through the adversity of being a teenager, and the troubles that a teenager goes through, and then also having to deal with having a blood cancer, dealing with that every day in her mind — but then also making sure that she’s still getting straight A’s, and achieving the other goals that she has as a teenager. That’s really given me a lot of strength, in my job, in my everyday life. I shouldn’t complain about anything.”

Asked whether he had been a strong person before her diagnosis, Davis paused.

“I think I was mentally strong,” he said. “But as a man, you know, I hide a lot of strength. I think men tend to hide things just in general, so that we look strong. But internally there were probably some weaknesses that she’s been able to help me draw out.”

Lucy’s name also appears on the front tire of his bike, larger — turning over with every revolution of the wheel for every one of the 2,071 miles between Barcelona and Paris.

Davis will be riding with 11 other people, all of whom are riding for someone.

The long riders

The man who started all of this knows what Jeff Davis is about to face better than anyone.

Geoff Thomas was a fixture in English football in the late 1980s and early 1990s — captain of Crystal Palace, capped nine times for England, a midfielder known more for grit than for grace. He retired from the game in 2002. Eight months later, at 37, he was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia. His doctors gave him three months to live.

This was the same disease Lucy Davis was diagnosed with in November 2023. But it was a different diagnosis in 2003.

“Chronic myeloid leukaemia was a killer back in 2003,” Thomas has said. “It was just a lack of infrastructure, and Cure Leukaemia built that infrastructure that allows so much science to come out to benefit patients.”

Thomas survived. He received a stem cell transplant from his sister Kay, entered remission in January 2005, and six months later — having not ridden a bicycle since childhood — set out to ride the entire route of that year’s Tour de France to thank the medical teams who had kept him alive. He finished. He kept coming back to it, and kept raising more money. In 2020, his solo undertaking became the Tour 21, the organized event Jeff Davis is now part of. Thomas was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2021 for his charity work, which has raised more than £15 million for leukaemia research. He rode the Tour 21 for the seventh and final time in 2025. The 2026 edition is the first in which he is not riding. Jeff Davis is one of the men going in his place.

The 12 riders — Davis and 11 others — gathered earlier this spring at a training camp in Calpe, on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where they began to get to know each other. They sat together on a sofa for a Cure Leukaemia podcast and introduced themselves.

“My name is Jeff Davis,” Davis said. “I’m here because my daughter has chronic myeloid leukaemia.”

“My name is Scott,” said the man next to him. “I’m here because my daughter has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.”

Scott McGowan, a British rider, was riding for his daughter Daisy, who had been diagnosed in September 2024. He described the moment of diagnosis.

“She had various symptoms over the summer, culminating in an abscess in the thigh, which we didn’t know what caused it,” McGowan said. “They were looking to drain the abscess, did the blood test, redid the blood test because they thought there was an error with it, and it was as simple as that. The consultant came in with another nurse, which we figured was a bad sign, and there, and then we got the diagnosis. Devastating, of course. Everything changes in an instant. But there was no time. It was ambulance up to Bristol Hospital, and straight into treatment the next day.”

Davis recognized the symptoms. “There are a lot of similarities,” he said. “My daughter was getting some random bruising. She was tired a lot, she had an elevated heart rate.” He said if he has any advice for parents, it’s to pay close attention to any unusual symptoms your child might be experiencing. The earlier any kind of condition is detected, the better the likely outcome.

One of the men on the sofa was a leukaemia survivor. David Brayshaw, a returning Tour 21 rider, had survived blood cancer in 2016. The other men on the sofa had their own reasons. Phil Howard, a Michelin-starred chef, was riding in memory of his father-in-law, Bob, who had died of leukaemia. And then there was Austin Reynolds. The other riders called him the Governor, for reasons not fully explained. He had no personal connection to leukaemia, but simply wanted to go for a bike ride while doing a bit of good in the world. 

Last summer, in 2025, a film crew followed the previous group of Tour 21 riders across France for three weeks. The footage shows a great deal of suffering, and an equal amount of laughing. It shows men climbing in 36-degree Celsius heat — 97 degrees Fahrenheit — through villages where schools had been closed because of the temperature. It shows them climbing in cold rain. It shows them lining up at the start each morning, sometimes shivering.

“The tour is brutal, it’s merciless,” says Joe Dominey, a bald, barrel-chested American rider. “It pounds you every day, but it’s nothing like being in a battle for your life. My mom’s been terminal for five years, and I would say, if I can have half the tenacity and stubbornness and will and fight that she has, I’ll be okay.”

It also shows how non-elite these riders really are. Stephen Moody, an Irish rider on the 2025 tour, was asked at one point how he kept his strength up.

“I do a lot of crunches in the morning,” Moody said. “Mainly Nestle Crunches.”

Pete Georgi, the ride captain that year, gave the riders some encouraging insight at the beginning of the first rain-drenched day. 

“You only get wet once,” he said.

Georgi, before the tour began, also framed how utterly unique was the challenge nearly all the riders were about to face. 

“Most of the riders here, a couple of stages are going to be the longest they’ve ever ridden in their lives,” he said. “Then they’ve got to do it again the day after.” 

The footage also reveals that mixture of steely dedication and outright craziness that appears to be a necessary precondition for any of the riders who answer the call of The Tour 21. Ray Loewenberg, from Israel, had been diagnosed with leukaemia in March 2024 and undergone a bone marrow transplant on May 1, 2024. He registered for the Tour 21 one week after his transplant. He was still in a hospital bed.

“We had a Zoom call with the organizers, and they asked me if I’m nuts — what do I think to myself when I’m registering for this kind of event one week after a bone marrow transplant?” Loewenberg recalled.

“I really believe, deep in my heart, that when the time will come for this event, I will already be better,” Loewenberg said, in footage taken when he was still a patient in recovery.

Another scene shows Loewenberg on his cycle, drenched in a combination of sweat and rain water, riding with pure glee. He grins at the camera. “Most beautiful road I ever rode,” he says.

John Coleman, an Irish rider on the 2025 tour, is likewise shown grinning broadly on his cycle, looking as much like a little kid on a bike as the 60-something man he is. “My favorite day on a bike ever,” he says. 

Dominey, the American, is joyous as the team cruises through a town at the end of one of the stages.

“We’re blowing through red light stop signs through town with a motorcycle escort,” he says, triumphantly.

Austin Reynolds, aka the Governor, was a serious cyclist two decades and a couple dozen pounds ago. He has dedicated the latter part of his life to fundraising for good causes, most recently through another long distance feat, sailing around the world.

“I’ve raised lots and lots of money over the years for various charities,” Reynolds said. “I wanted an additional challenge. A couple of years ago, I sailed around the world, and that was a most wonderful challenge. When I came back from that, I needed something else to sort of focus on, and I thought, you know what, I’ll go for a bike ride.”

He paused. His eyes filled with tears.

“I think for me, not knowing anything about Cure Leukaemia, listening to the guys’ stories — I’ve only been with them now for three days,” he said. “I haven’t understood leukaemia at all. It just makes me — I’m getting emotional because of them.”

He gestured to the men on the sofa next to him. He could not speak for a moment.

“Our family is so blessed that we’re all healthy,” Reynolds said. “And I care for these guys and their daughters. So we’re raising money for them.”

That is the spirit of the Tour 21. It is not a race. It is 12 men moving 2,000 miles across France together, carrying each other and each other’s reasons. But this isn’t just about comradery or adventure.

The financial commitment alone is significant. Each rider pays an entry fee of £12,000 — roughly $16,000 — and commits to raising a minimum of £30,000 for Cure Leukaemia, or about $40,000. Travel, insurance, and the bike itself are all on top of that. The collective fundraising goal for the 2026 team is more than £1 million, roughly $1.35 million. The money funds the Trials Acceleration Programme, a network of specialist research nurses at twelve blood cancer centres across the United Kingdom, coordinated through a hub at the Centre for Clinical Haematology at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

The drugs are the daily pill that has kept Lucy Davis, and many like her, not only alive but living lives of blessed normalcy. 

Thomas, as a survivor of leukemia who has ridden a bike several thousand miles for this cause, has experienced a visceral connection between cancer and cycling. 

“I used to be in a waiting room with loads of people with cancer,” he said. “We all used to ask each other, how are you feeling? We all used to say, yeah, I’m fine, I’m okay, are you? Yeah, I’m fine. And that’s the same mentality that you need when you’re doing something extreme like this. You can’t accept that you feel rubbish, because all that does is take you down.”

These are the men on the ride, together. It’s not about the bike, and it’s not about the next big climb, or one after it. It is about the relentless grind, the search for cures, the fight for hope. And though losses accrue, so do victories. It’s a long ride.

The descent

If all goes according to plan, Jeff Davis will rise sometime before dawn on July 17 and climb a mountain known for the way it counts down.

Alpe d’Huez sits in the French Alps, fifteen days into the Tour 21, two stages from Paris. Its summit is at 1,860 meters — about 6,100 feet, just over a thousand feet shorter than the Tourmalet. The climb from Bourg d’Oisans below is 13.8 kilometers, or 8.6 miles, at an average gradient of 8.1%, with the first kilometer and a half pitching above 10%. It is shorter than the Tourmalet and steeper at the bottom. What it is most famous for is the way the road goes up.

The ascent has 21 numbered hairpin bends. They count down, not up. Bend 21 sits at the base. Bend 1 sits at the summit. Each hairpin bears the name of a stage winner from the Tour de France — Fausto Coppi, who won the first ascent in 1952, is on bend 21. When all 21 bends had been named by 2001, the numbering started over at the bottom, with newer winners replacing the old.

The numbered countdown was not, originally, for cyclists. The signs were placed there to guide snowploughs to the ski resort at the top during winter storms. The 21 bends t were copied from a road in Slovenia — the Vršič Pass, which a businessman from Alpe d’Huez had visited in 1964 and admired for its numbered switchbacks. He brought the idea home. Three decades later, the mountain became the most-watched climb in cycling.

The geometry of the bends does something useful for a rider, beyond marking distance to the summit. Each one turns the road back on itself. You climb in one direction, then the opposite, then forward again. You can see, on a clear day, the lower bends below you and the upper ones above. You can also see, in retrospect, that progress on a mountain like this is not a straight line. The road doubles back. It doubles back again. The summit still rises.

This is, more or less, what treating leukaemia is like. Numbers move up, numbers come down. Drugs work, drugs stop working. New drugs. New trials. The path back to health is not a road that climbs cleanly. It is a road that climbs by reversing direction, and reversing direction, and reversing direction.

By the time Jeff Davis reaches bend 21 on July 17, he will have ridden roughly 1,900 miles. Two and a half weeks of mountains will be behind him. The Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Vosges, the Alps. He will have crossed the Tourmalet, the Col d’Aspin, the Col du Galibier, the Col de la Croix de Fer. His shoulder, presumably, will have held. The handlebars of his TIME Scylon will still read I ride for Lucy Davis. The front tire will still carry her name.

His bike will also be carrying other names — names added each morning of the tour.

On June 11, three weeks before Davis leaves for Spain, the Davis family will host a fundraiser called Hot Havana Nights at the Rex restaurant in Redondo Beach. The event is the centerpiece of the family’s effort to meet the Tour 21’s $40,000-per-rider fundraising commitment. At the event, there will also be a sign-up board with 42 spaces — two for each of the 21 stages of the Tour 21. Anyone in attendance can add a name. The idea, Davis said, came from past Tour 21 riders. Two new names every morning, written on his helmet, on his handlebars next to Lucy’s, and along the front fork of his bike. The names do not have to be cancer patients. They can be anyone the attendee wants Davis to think of for a day in France. A parent in a hard year. A friend in chemotherapy. A spouse who is struggling. A child who needs a good day.

Davis described what cycling has come to mean for him since his daughter’s diagnosis.

“I have a sticker on my handlebars,” he said. “I can look down and see my daughter’s name. It’s a different type of motivation. I go out for a ride, and I know that there’s a purpose, and there’s a reason that I’m doing what I’m doing, as opposed to just being more self-centered. It’s much more than just myself and my own health. I’m not just pedaling for her. I’m pedaling for the people who are supporting us, and the other riders and their families, and who they’re riding for.”

It is not a given he will finish. A lingering shoulder injury over the course of all the miles and mountains, through waves of heat, sleet, rain, and possibly even snow — even for an elite rider  represents a far-flung finish line. But in some sense, however far Davis gets will be an epic and meaningful culmination. And it somehow seems overwhelmingly likely he’ll go the distance.

“I’m in awe,” Jackie Nguyễn said. “I love him dearly for following his passion.”

Hopefully, on July 19, having descended Alpe d’Huez two days earlier, Davis will arrive in the suburbs of Paris with 11 other men. The final stage of the 2026 Tour de France includes three ascents of the Rue Lepic up to Montmartre before the traditional finish on the Champs-Élysées. He will climb Montmartre. He will descend toward the river. He will turn onto the most famous boulevard in the world and ride the last kilometer toward the Arc de Triomphe.

His wife and children will be waiting in Paris. Davis’s mother and sister will be there. They will have flown in for the finish — the trip Davis, as his daughter said, had never let himself dream of taking.

“He’s completing not only a physical trial that a very, very small percentage of people could even dream about doing,” Lucy said, “but the fact that he gets to do it with people he really admires, and for a cause that means a lot to us.”

“I’m happy because it’s a lifelong dream of his. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity any other way. It’s like the silver lining in all of this, that he gets to do something so cool.”

Davis has not let himself dwell on what the finish will feel like.

“To be honest I haven’t put much thought to how I’ll feel seeing them at the finish line,” he said. “It gets me a little emotional just thinking about it. But I have a long road ahead, a lot of mental and physical battles to overcome. My focus is finishing — but it is also just the next pedal stroke to get me there.”

For more information or to contribute, scan the QR code printed here, or go to JustGiving.com and search for Jeff Davis. ER