Tour de France 2013: Chris Froome faces his ultimate challenge - the Giant of Provence Froome talks almost like a boy scout about how "excited" he feels over the challenge. Today, he has a 119-mile transitional stage from Saint-Porçain-sur-Sioule to Lyon, including seven categorised climbs, so cannot afford to get overly ahead of himself, but Ventoux must dominate his thoughts. All the stories of tragedy, suffering but also exhilaration associated with the mountain so perfectly named by the French filmmaker and writer René Clair as "God's Tomb" offer both dire warnings yet the alluring promise of cycling immortality. If Froome and his Sky train performed as they did on Ax 3 Domaines in the Pyreenes - and that looks an increasingly big "if" with the team now looking so wounded - he could actually make history as the first British rider to triumph in the Tour on the mountain which claimed Tom Simpson's life. About 1,600 metres from tomorrow's summit finish - a British mile, so they say - the riders will pass the "Stele Simpson," the granite memorial paid for and maintained by British cyclists in honour of their first to wear the maillot jaune. It will, as always, be a place of pilgrimage for thousands tomorrow, but also a jolting reminder of Ventoux's power. The 13th stage, July 13, 1967. A man from County Durham pushes ever higher up the "Bald Mountain," weaving wildly to either side of the road through heat exhaustion prompted seemingly by a nightmarish combination of dehydration, diaorrhea, alcohol and amphetamines. He falls from his bike but, delirious, demands to go on, is put back on his bike and manages to ride another 500m before wobbling again. Spectators help lay him down at roadside. He is dead at just 29. Three years later, Simpson's old team-mate, the great Eddy Merckx, determined to win the Ventoux stage in his old friend's honour and tipped his cap to the memorial as he rode past all alone. By the top of the mountain, though, he too was so shattered, he had to be given oxygen. Afterwards, he admitted the experience had "scared" him. Because Ventoux, even if Simpson, thank heavens, was its only fatality among more than a few riders who have collapsed there, is scarily different from the moment riders leave the little town of Bédoin at the foot of a mountain which stands out in glorious isolation, overlooking the valley of the Rhône. It is going to be brutally hot - tipping 90C on the slopes is being forecast - and when the wind blows on Ventoux, they say it is one of the windiest places on the planet. At first, riders say, they can be lulled into a false sense of security, meandering through vineyards and three miles of gentle climbing. Yet then it jolts suddenly upwards, through a cedar forest at a dizzying, steepling rate and from there the hurt never seems to stop, averaging out at 9.3 per cent gradient over nine miles. Suddenly, though, the trees thin out and the vista completely changes, the deforestation carried out by Napoleon to build ships at his navy dockyard having left just an arid, barren white, windy limestone world ahead. Lance Armstrong, who famously reckoned he "gifted" Marco Pantani a victory there in an epic 2000 stage only for the Italian to wage a third world war by saying how insulted he was by the suggestion, was perhaps the nearest to ever mastering Ventoux. Er, and we now have an idea why. Yet he also painted the most vivid picture of its trials. 1,900 metres up there is completely different from 1,900m any place else. There's no air, there's no oxygen, there's no vegetation, there's no life," said Armstrong. There's no life! Rocks. Any other climb there's vegetation, grass and trees. Not on the Ventoux. It's more like the moon than a mountain. Which is, presumably, why one rival reckoned he handled the climb like an astronaut. From Froome, nobody is expecting something out of this world. If he is still on top atop Ventoux as he approaches the imposing observatory which signals the end of an ordeal, that will be enough. The road through hell will be over.