Paul Fournel is very much of this later order, that rare breed: a cycling author who serves up something you can actually enjoy reading. That something isn’t a how-to manual or techs-mechs porn. It isn’t about heroes or villains, biography or autobiography. It isn’t about roads or races. It’s neither novel nor poem. What it is is Vélo and the story it tells is a mix of all the things that it isn’t.  

The essays that make up Vélo have gone through an interesting publishing history. They first appeared in Fournel’s native France in 2001 as Besoin de Vélo. In 2003 they got a North American publication when Allan Stoekl translated most of Besoin de Vélo – leaving out Sur le Tour de France 1996, seventy-five pages about following the 1996 Tour – and published them as Need For The Bike (University of Nebraska Press). In the UK, after Rouleur magazine appeared on the scene six years back, the essays began to be serialised there, with translation tweaks from Claire Road. Fournel began to add new essays to Rouleur, translated by Graeme Fife, and the two – the fifty-five essays that appeared in Besoin de Vélo and Need for the Bike plus the more recent Rouleur essays – are now collected in Vélo. As well as the essays themselves, Vélo serves up Jo Burt’s illustrations which accompanied the essays in their Rouleur appearances.

Martin Ryle in a recent essay – Vélorutionary, collected in The Bicycle Reader – has criticised Fournel’s essays by saying this of them:

A dispiritingly ‘hard’ ethos of competition as much as conviviality, and speed rather than ambling […] is also present in Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike, many of whose sketches celebrate the pains and rewards of close-to-the-limit physical exertion, in a virtually all-male French subculture whose unquestioned heroes are the coureurs of the gruelling long-distance stage-races. Fournel is associated with Oulipo, the French avant-garde writers’ collective whose best-known member was Georges Perec. Reading Need for the Bike, I thought of Perec’s W, in which obsessional and ruthless athletic competition is the basis of a fascistic social order; and then I thought of the Olympic Velodrome in London. Here is the bike as fetishised speed-machine, not the antithesis but the very sign of turbo-culture’s conquest of mind and body: flesh is imagined as steel, rather than vice versa. For every potential cyclist who might be encouraged onto the roads by such images, a dozen must be put off.”

Paul Fournel as a champion of a fetishised turbo-culture? Let’s try this excerpt and see what you think of that:

The speed of a cyclist forces you to select what you see, to reconstruct what you sense. In this way you get to the essential. It’s the title of a book or a cover which your gaze brushes against, it’s a newspaper which catches your eye, a potential gift in a shop window, a new bread at the baker’s. That speed is the right one for my gaze. It’s a writer’s speed, a speed that filters and does a preliminary selection.

Or try this:

For me, road maps are dream machines. I like to read them as one reads adventures stories. As a driver, I use them to find the shortest route, to find the long roads which join towns without going through the countryside. As a cyclist I use them for everything else. If I know the area, every centimetre of the map is a landscape laid out before me. If I don’t know it yet, every centimetre is an imagined landscape that I will explore. For example, I like maps of Brittany, which is cycling country where I’ve never ridden. It’s my storeroom, my wine cellar. It’s the masterpiece that you have in your library and which you still haven’t read.

Paul Fournel as a champion of a fetishised turbo-culture? Bollocks to that.

What Fournel’s essays really are is an exercise in mapping the geography of cycling. Geography is not just limited to the physical world and Fournel’s explorations encompass the whole landscape of cycling: from the outer world of roads travelled to the inner world the cyclist’s mind. And, like the road maps Fournel reads, the essays collected in Vélo are dream machines, transporting the reader into his or her own inner world of cycling. This is the real joy of Fournel’s essays: from the particular of his own cycling experiences Fournel is exploring universal truths which readers can relate to through their own cycling experiences. If, for every reader who finds truth and beauty in Fournel’s essays, a dozen are put off cycling by them then those dozen are no loss, for they can only be soulless, heartless creatures.

That Fournel’s essays are dream machines makes Vélo something of a oddity: a book you can claim you kept putting down and mean as praise. An example for you. Here’s Fournel talking about wind:

The strongest wind that I can remember having faced is the wind of the extreme west of Ireland. I pedalled along the coast, somewhere south of Galway, and I saw to it that I always set off riding against the wind to be sure that I could get back. I was alone, and it was a bitter flight. There was no forgiveness. All the things that can, elsewhere, allow you to cheat and to shelter yourself are not welcome here: no tress, no houses, no hedges, no hills. Nothing but the ocean wind – wet, powerful, inexhaustible. Flat out on my bike, I had the feeling I was going dead slow, condemned to using the gears of high mountains on a road that was flat.

Reading that, you effortlessly empathise with Fournel as you recall your own experiences with the wind. For me, I remember an Easter away, trying to get from Enniskillen to Killybegs and being blown to a virtual standstill as we crossed the Pettigo Plateau. Even the wheel in front seemed to provide no shelter. By the time we made it into Donegal – half as far again still to go – the thought of suffering more into that wind blowing in off the Atlantic was too much and we just stayed where we were. If, back then, I’d known about Costante Giradengo and the 1921 Giro, I’d have scuffed a line in the road with the toe of my shoe and said no further.

It isn’t always empathy that made me put Vélo down and slip off into memory. In 2000 Fournel was appointed France’s cultural attaché to Cairo:

In Cairo – where I’ve written some of these pages – I’ve had, after forty-five years of continuous cycling, my first experience of cycling severance. I just couldn’t see where I could slip a bike into this city, nor do I see – between the overburdened valley of the Nile and the deserted desert tracks – any shady countryside I could explore. […] So I’m biding my time. My bike’s wrapped up in the cellar in Paris, ready to go. I stay seated and wait, heavy and immobile.

I’m watching my thighs melt and me belly get round. I write about the bike while alternately flexing my legs under the table. I plan out routes in the desert; I read maps that show straight, arid lines stretching three-hundred kilometres between oases. I ask myself where on my handlebars I could attach compass and GPS.”

I can empathise with watching thighs melt and belly round – the real subject of Fournel’s Cairo essay – but of Cairo itself I can only say that in my experience, it’s an amazing city to cycle in. Seen from the pavement or the passenger seat of a taxi, Cairene traffic can seem like the dodgems, but once you get in between the cars its sense opens itself up and you quickly adjust to its rhythm and ways. Out of the traffic, riding along rutted Nileside tracks – or up the Sinai peninsula from Moses’s mountain to the Israeli border – were like slipping into another world, silent and beautiful. In later years I have gone back to Cairo, to explore the desert west and south of the city in a four-by-four, and each time have kicked myself for not having had the good sense to bring a bike with me.

You, obviously, won’t find the same thoughts creeping into your mind about Cairo. Maybe what Fournel writes of Paris or San Francisco will fire some mental fuses for you, make you agree with or question his experiences. Or maybe not. Not everything Fournel writes will send you off into a reverie. But you will find such launching pads in most of his essays.

The places that crop up the most in Vélo are French: the roads of the Haute-Loire where Fournel grew up, or roads defined by the Tour de France and other bike races. Martin Ryle is wrong to write Fournel off as a champion of turbo-culture but he is not entirely wrong when he says that Fournel writes of the pains and rewards of close-to-the-limit physical exertion and the heroes of bike races. Fournel himself says that “to get on a bike is to enter into a history and a legend that you’ll discover in thousands upon thousands of copies of L’Équipe.” He goes on:

It’s to forge your own fork in Saint Marie-de-Campan; it’s to jump into an air taxi after having won the Dauphiné to catch the nighttime start of Bordeaux-Paris; it’s to win the Tour de France five times; it’s to drop Merckx on the climb to Pra-Loup; it’s to keep Poulidor at bay on the Puy de Dôme; it’s to enter the vélodrome in Roubaix alone and for the second time; it’s to win the Giro d’Italia in the snowstorm of the Gavia; it’s, whether you like it or not, to fall into the chasm of the Perjuret and to die every time you climb the Ventoux on the Bedoin side … The divine solitude of the cyclist is peopled with shadows that the sun lengthens on the grain of roads.

Where Ryle is wrong in the way he writes off Fournel is to miss the soft edges of this ‘hard’ ethos Fournel – and many of us – subscribes to. Ryle is wrong to miss the conviviality of competition. All those memories Fournel recalls – of Eugène Christophe, of Jacques Anquetil, of Eddy Merckx, of Bernard Thévenet, of Marc Madiot, of Andy Hampsten, of Roger Rivière and Tom Simpson – what they’re really about is a sense of belonging, a shared heritage.

This shared heritage is one of the treats of Fournel’s essays. The real treat, though, is the effortless ease with which Fournel sucks you into his world: as I said at the start of this, Fournel is one of those rare cycling authors who you can take pure reading pleasure from, as everyone who has read Need for the Bike – which is often paired with Tim Krabbé’s The Rider when cyclists recommend books to one and another – will attest.

If you’ve already read Need for the Bike, should you want a copy a Vélo? The updating of cycling books is one of oddities of cycling publishing, how every few years an old book gets another couple of dozen pages stuck into it and you’re expected to buy it one more time. As an updated version of Need for the Bike, Vélo adds eleven new essays and some textual changes in the translation. But it also adds Jo Burt’s illustrations, the text and images combining to produce a book that is a pleasure simply to own. Of the new essays themselves, they are markedly different from the old, both in style and content and this – in a way – has the unfortunate result of upsetting the thematic unity of the original text (which tends to be the case with virtually every cycling book that gets the update treatment).

A few of those new essays do stand out, though. In one Fournel attempts to climb inside the mind of Jacques Anquetil. In another he offers a self-portrait of Abdel Kader Zaaf. The two that really stand out are further autobiographical sketches, Fournel once more revisiting his past. In one he revisits a incident that made up a brief paragraph in an earlier essay and this time spins it out to three pages. In the other Fournel writes of his father whose cycling life had come to a close while his other life carried on:

The bike left my father one Sunday morning ten years ago. It happened between Bas-en-Basset and Aurec in the Haute-Loire region of France, in solitude. He was climbing a small hill which I would not describe as laughable because cyclists – even those who are used to the Ventoux or Izoard – well know that you can explode in a two kilometres hill which doesn’t go up that much.

Let’s just say that this incline should not have been sufficient to end his riding.

‘Something’ tightened in his chest, imperiously letting him know that the bike was leaving him after seventy years of companionship.

He went home without saying anything, at the pace of his pain.

The rest of the essay picks up the story a decade on, Fournel’s father still able to recall the roads he once rode over. That, one day, the bike will leave all of us is not something we tend to give much thought to. But it will and all we will have are our memories. If nothing else, Fournel’s essays as a lock-pick for those memories, opening up for everyone who reads them memories parked from days gone by. If that’s not a good enough reason to read a good book then I don’t know what is.

Paul Fournel’s Vélo is published by Rouleur (2012, 159 pages)

NB: The UCI ProTour Reserve Fund and the UCI  ProTour operating statement detailed in the notes to the UCI Financial Statements relate to two entirely separate things and should not be confused one with the other. The UCI ProTour operating statement details the total income and expenditure relating to the ProTour (now WorldTour), not the ProTour Reserve Fund. 

The amounts disbursed from the ProTour Reserve Fund to GCP being the topic du jour, chaque qour, some comment on them is necessary. Between 2009 and 2011 a total of €758,000 has been disbursed to GCP. Nowhere in UCI’s Financial Statements is this described as a loan. There is no provision within the relevant regulations requiring that funds disubursed from the ProTour Reserve Fund be repaid to the ProTour Reserve Fund.

Why and how the ProTour Reserve Fund can legitimately be used to fund GCP is best explained by reference to the UCI Cycling Regulations, Part 2 Road Races, Chapter XV UCI WorldTour, clauses 2.15.243 through 2.15.253 (pages 129-130). To save you the time and effort of seeking this out for yourself, the relevant sections are set out below (as taken from version 01.07.11 of the Regulations):

This special feature has been brought to you with the assistance of a lot of Nurofen.

~ Raymond Chandler

If David Millar’s Racing Through the Dark is this generation’s A Rough Ride then Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race must be Breaking the Chain. And if that alone doesn’t tell you what went wrong in our sport as cycling dragged itself into the twenty-first century then you really do have to read Hamilton’s story. It’s the story of a sport so corrupted by its own mythology that it has lost all touch with reality and seems incapable of heeding the warnings given to it.

In his introduction to the 1998 edition of Rough Ride (in which the title lost its indefinite article), Paul Kimmage noted how his original intention for the re-issue of the book was that it would be re-worked in the style of a hard-boiled noir:

Its opening chapter would be scripted straight from the Raymond Chandler school of thriller writing (‘When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun’) and begin not in 1962 with a baby boy and a kindly staff nurse at the Rotunda hospital in Dublin, but twenty-two years later when the boy arrives in Paris in search of fame and fortune. I even had the opening line worked out: ‘A man with huge shovel-like hands, greying hair and a tanned, weather-beaten face was waiting at the airport.’ OK, so it would have taken a couple of chapters before the gun was produced, but you get the drift.”

(Had, in 1998, Kimmage realised just how much of a role blood doping was playing in our sport, I suspect he might have switched from Chandler to Dashiel Hammett. As a way of explaining just how fucked up cycling had become, Kimmage could have had a lot of fun playing with Hammett’s Red Harvest (the unacknowledged basis of Akira Kurosowa’s Yojimbo, which then begat Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars). I can just imagine Kimmage casting himself as Hammett’s Continental Op, setting the various factions against one and other as he sets about cleaning up cycling’s own sordid Poisonville.)

For many cycling fans – those of us who’ve wanted to understand the reality behind the feats we’ve watched or read about and not just live in the moments of epic heroism – following cycling has been like living in a real-world crime thriller: week by week, month by month, the evidence mounted up about just how mired in doping our sport had become. The evidence of a crime was obvious, but it was not always clear just who the guilty parties were, or even what the real crime was.

In Breaking the Chain Willy Voet (aided by his own Agatha Christie, Pierre Ballester) served as a sort-of Hercule Poirot, pointing out the evidence and the missed clues that would explain much of what had gone on in cycling prior to 1998 and that Tour de Farce which had rolled off in Dublin and ended caught up in what we all hoped was to be the worst doping scandal our sport would ever see. Eight years later Operación Puerto showed us just how much our hope had been misplaced.

In The Secret Race Hamilton serves as our guide through some of the clues and red herrings that led up to that latter scandal. Read as the dénouement of a crime thriller – the detective recasting the story you’ve just read so that things makes sense – The Secret Race is less Christie and more Ross Macdonald and Hamilton is less Poirot and more Lew Archer.

In a standard Lew Archer story, Macdonald’s Californian private investigator is called in to solve a recent crime – a stolen painting, a missing child, a dead body, whatever – but the more he digs for clues the more he unearths a problem that transcends generations and has its roots in secrets buried in the past. And this is true of cycling’s doping problem: Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, all the rest of that generation, they didn’t create the problem. They are, in part, victims of a problem rooted in cycling’s past. Victims of a culture of doping. Victims of a culture in which a blind-eye was turned to doping by everyone, from the UCI at the top down to the fans at the roadside. And in that they deserve, if not some sympathy, then certainly some understanding. And that’s what Hamilton’s ultimate plea in The Secret Race is for: understanding, not sympathy.

However, there is another crime going on here. And in many ways it’s a crime much bigger than doping. Cycling’s hustlers and grifters, cycling’s confidence tricksters, cycling’s players of the big con, they stole something they can never give back. They stole the innocence – the presumption of innocence – of those who chose to follow a different path. And they didn’t just steal from their peers. They stole from the generations that are following them: Hamilton and Landis, Bjarne Riis, David Millar, all those who lied about their doping and pleaded with us to believe that they rode clean, only to turn around and fess up, through their lies they have made it all but impossible to simply accept that the problems of the past have now gone away and that the riders coming up today are taking the opportunity afforded to them to do it clean.

Riis may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by assisting in the ushering in of independent anti-doping programmes, thus helping to force the UCI’s hand on longitudinal testing. Millar may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by helping to build and lead a clean team. Landis and Hamilton may have stopped being part of the problem and become part of the solution by giving USADA the evidence that might finally force cycling to really confront its past. But it will take a generation and more for the trust of the fans that they and others like them squandered to be rebuilt. It will take a generation and more for anyone but the most naïve cycling fan to not have doubts about, want to ask questions of, the stars of today and tomorrow. That is and will continue to be the biggest crime of Gen-EPO. Sadly, this is the crime that The Secret Race fails to acknowledge. I wonder if Hamilton or Landis or Riis or Millar or any of them realise it’s a crime they’ve committed. Or even care about.

* * * * *

Before turning to some of the things said in The Secret Race – the clues highlighted by Hamilton to explain some of what we saw between Festina and Puerto – a couple of other holes in the story need to be considered. The first is the UCI. There are two main mentions of our sport’s governing body in the story Hamilton tells. The first is the now-familiar story of Armstrong and the 2001 Tour de Suisse. The second concerns Hamilton and the 2004 Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré. Both of these I’ll return to momentarily. Apart from those two tales, though, Hamilton has little to say about how cycling was governed during his time in the peloton.

Perhaps had Daniel Coyle framed the story as less of a continuation of his earlier Lance Armstrong’s War (here, Armstrong versus Hamilton) more might have been said of the role played by the UCI in cycling’s inability to clean up its act. (Me, I couldn’t help but find some irony in the fact that Hamilton’s first experience of doping, in 1997, occurred on the eve of the GP Luis Puig, Puig being Hein Verbruggen’s predecessor as head of the UCI.) More needs to be said of the role played by the UCI in this story, through both their actions and their inactions.

The second absence is of stories that might have put some perspective on the position Hamilton found himself in. As Hamilton tells it, he had no choice but to dope. I accept that it was difficult not to dope, that the system positively encouraged it. But it wasn’t impossible. Nor was it impossible to turn your back on doping. There are riders who took those paths. Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters are just two who did and were close to the story told in The Secret Race. Perhaps Coyle should have said more about them, even if only in his footnotes. But perhaps in doing that he would have only highlighted even more Hamilton’s sense of entitlement, made us realise that the only real differences between Hamilton and Armstrong were that the Texan was far more efficient at controlling his environment and much, much better at not falling off and breaking bones at inopportune moments.

* * * * *

And so to the stories told, the clues revealed. It’s not my intention here to highlight all the revelations made by Hamilton in The Secret Race. Most of them you’ll already be familiar with anyway, they’ve been seeping out in the two years since Floyd Landis had his Damascene conversion and became the prodigal son of the anti-doping fraternity. They’ve been seeping out in the eight years since David Walsh and Pierre Ballester published LA Confidentiel. They’ve been seeping out in newspapers and on websites in the decade and a half since the Festina affaire kicked off. And, of course, they’ve burst forth since Hamilton’s book was published earlier this month.

There are some new revelations. Or, in my innocence or laziness, stories that are new to me. Those are the ones worth looking at here. There’s a story I don’t recall appearing in Breaking the Chain, that in 1997 the Festina squad had added perfluorocarbons (PFC) to their armoury (is Hamilton here just peddling peloton gossip? He does later when he says that Stefano Garzelli’s probencid bust was an echo-positive). There’s the picture offered of pro cycling’s kidult culture of codes and cliques and perceived slights that would ultimately drive even blood brothers apart.

Or there’s a story which Bjarne Riis forgot to mention in Stages of Light and Dark, about using blood transfusions before the 1996 Tour de France and on its two rest days (conventional wisdom has it that blood doping burst onto the cycling scene around about 1984, when Francesco Moser set his Hour records, but then disappeared again until 2000/2001, when the EPO test arrived. In reality, the early history of blood doping in the peloton can be pushed back into the 1970s, when Joop Zoetemelk admitted to having given it a try. What was really happening between 1984 and the new millennium is shrouded in mystery). If Riis forgot to discuss his transfusions in his autobiography, then what other recent tell-all autobiographies have been equally economical with the actualité in this regard?

Some of the stories in The Secret Race mean that we must reconsider some of the revelations previously made about cycling’s recent doping history. Take the story of the genesis of doping in US Postal in 1996, how Marty Jemison, backed up by Hamilton, had approached the team’s then doctor, Prentice Steffen, and attempted to get him to move with the times and implement a doping programme. Here Hamilton – supported by Jemison – suggests that Steffen may simply have misunderstood what was being suggested, that all that was being proposed was IV transfusions to aid recovery.

Or consider the story of Hamilton, after the 2004 Dauphiné Libéré, having been warned by the UCI’s Mario Zorzoli that his blood values were out of whack. The previous understanding of that incident was that this was a case of the UCI warning Hamilton off, trying to protect him and stop him from taking a fall when the new test for homologous blood transfusions came in later in the year. In The Secret Race Hamilton redraws that picture, tells us it was a case of Armstrong reaching out through the UCI to either put the frighteners on him or bring him down. Perhaps had Hamilton done as Armstrong had when he got called to the headmaster’s office in Aigle after the 2001 Tour de Suisse – put an apple on the headmaster’s desk and promised to write a cheque to the UCI – all his problems might have gone away.

(In one of our sport’s grandest ironies you have to laugh when you realise that Armstrong played the role of the UCI’s mole in the peloton, telling them what riders to pay attention to. The poacher as gamekeeper. Only to have himself brought to ground by the guys he’d fucked over. That’s both comic and karmic at the same time.)

For me, one of the bigger challenges to the current received wisdom concerns the role played by Luigi Cecchini in our sport. Cecchini is said to have been a protégé of Francesco Conconi, but this is a claim he denies:

Everywhere they call me a pupil of Conconi,” Cecchini has said, “but I only know him from conventions for sports physicians. I met him only once. I also was only once at the Ferrara university. Still my name is being linked with that university in the media. Why? I don’t have a clue.”

We have long been schooled to believe that Cecchini, along with Conconi and Michele Ferrari, was one of the dirtiest doctors in the sport, one of the chief architects of Gen-EPO. Pat McQuaid has even gone so far as to warn riders off working with the Italian doctor.

Others have been equally critical of Cecchini and – publicly at least – sought to distance themselves from him. Dave Brailsford had to tell David Millar to cut his ties with Cecchini after Millar hooked up with him as he prepared to return to the pro peloton following his two years on the naughty step:  “If he had a relationship with Cecchini,” Brailsford is reported to have said of Millar, “we would say, ‘Thank you and goodbye.’ I told him he shouldn’t have done it and that Team GB don’t want to have any association with Cecchini. David knows that in this climate he has to be very careful as to who he associates with.” (Why Team GB were only too willing to have an association with a client and friend of Cecchini – Max Sciandri, the man who hooked Millar up with the Italian doctor – is one of the great unasked questions of recent years.)

But those who have worked with Cecchini paint a different picture of the Italian doctor. Jörg Jaksche had only kind words to say of his Italian trainer:  “Cecchini and his family belong to the best people I have met in the cycling scene, he has nothing to do with doping, those who claim the opposite are lying!” Bjarne Riis echoed this in his autobiography:  “in his time as my personal trainer he had never given me any banned products nor written me out any prescriptions for any.” Millar said something similar in his autobiography:  “There was never ever money involved and it was never even discussed. I’m sure I’m probably the only professional rider he has ever trained for free. We got on extremely well, and I never even got a hint of him being involved in anything to do with doping.”

According to Hamilton, Millar was far from the only rider Cecchini worked with on a pro bono basis: “though we worked closely together for years, Cecco never charged me a dime.”

Hamilton’s picture of Cecchini and his methods is worth considering:

Cecco had short gray hair and big, perceptive eyes; he looked a little bit like Pablo Picasso. He also had a revolutionary and refreshing attitude about doping, which is to say he encouraged me to dope as little as possible. He never gave me any Edgar; never handed me so much as an aspirin, because Cecco believed that most riders dope far, far too much. Insulin, testosterone patches, anabolics – bah! To win the Tour, you need only three qualities.

• You have to be very, very fit.
• You have to be very, very skinny.
• You have to keep your hematocrit up.

Rule number 3 was regrettable in Cecco’s eyes, but ultimately unavoidable, a simple fact of life. Cecco made it clear: he never got involved in the dark side. He constantly told me that I did not have to engage in the risky, medically questionable, stress-inducing arms race of chasing after Substance X or Substance Y, or some Russian anabolic jelly beans. He constantly warned me about Fuentes, telling me I didn’t need all the stuff he provided. I could simplify my life and focus on what mattered: my training.”

Does this mean that we have to consider Cecchini as one of the good guys? Of course not: throughout his time with Cecchini Hamilton was doping in order to keep his hematocrit up. Cecchini was far from a latter-day Paul Köchli, determined to win clean. He seems to have believed in the Clintonian ethic of compartmentalisation and learned to play the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ game when it came to doping.

This, though, might suggest that Cecchini had more in common with Köchli than with other doctors who believed that victory could only be found in the barrel of a syringe. This might suggest that we should revise our view of trainers like Cecchini. This might suggest we should open our minds to the possibility that the likes of Cecchini might actually have something positive to offer athletes who are willing to play clean. Something positive to offer a sport that is actually determined to police its century-old doping problem.

* * * * *

Endings are hard. The end of The Secret Race is especially hard because deadlines saw it being completed before Armstrong threw in the towel and decided not to contest USADA’s charges against him. We’ve yet to see the damage limitation, character assassination tricks that will be employed when the USADA file is finally made public. Hamilton probably has an idea of what’s in store: a repeat of his own performance in 2002 when Prentice Steffen claimed that Jemison and Hamilton had asked him about doping products back in 1996. Hamilton aimed both barrels at Steffen and pulled the trigger, questioning Steffen’s motives and pointing out his past problems with recreational drugs. “I was learning,” Hamilton says of his actions here, “when the accusations come, hit back twice as hard.”

But the ending of The Secret Race, as imperfect as it is, does reveal something. There’s a tale told early in the book which resonates in its ending and is illustrative of something important in the story of Hamilton and Armstrong. In that tale, the two were out for a ride one day when a driver cut them off. Armstrong gave chase, caught the car and laid into the motorist, punching him. Toward the end of the book Hamilton echoes this with a story from just before he quit Boulder earlier this year. He was out on his town bike, it a beat-up with fat tyres and he in jeans and tennis shoes. Two lycra-clad riders on thousand-buck bikes passed him at a junction and one of them gave him a look. On seeing the slogan on the guy’s jersey – Dopers Suck – Hamilton took this as a personal affront to his dignity and gave chase. (Hamilton doesn’t even consider that the guy might just have been eyeing up his ass.) It took him a mile to reel them in, and when he did Hamilton shook the hand of the guy with the “Dopers Suck” jersey and introduced himself as a doper who doesn’t suck:

…I rode home, and my heart was full of happiness. Because, I realized, that’s my story. Not a shiny pretty myth about superheroes who win every time, but a human truth about one normal guy who tried to compete in a messed-up world and did his best; who made big mistakes and survived. That’s the story I wanted to tell, and keep telling, partly because it will help the sport move forward, and partly because it helps me move forward.

I want to tell it to people who think that dopers are bad, irredeemable people. I want to tell it so people might focus their energy on the real challenge: creating a culture that tips people away from doping. I want to tell it because now I need to tell it, in order to survive.”

Which is where we loop back to the opening of this review and the problem with The Secret Race being this generation’s Breaking The Chain: we’ve been here before. Back then, we’d just been delivered a new hero, a guy the world could believe in, a hero with a big engine, a long history, and a great story. And the lesson was lost in the adulation of our new hero. He came from a different culture and so was beyond the taint of our sport’s past. He was clean and anyone who said different was just a fun-sucking troll. There’s no way that could happen again, is there?

* * * * *

Having started thinking of Hamilton as a kind-of Lew Archer plotting a path through a story about a part of the past still echoing in the present, let’s end this with a bit of Ross Macdonald. Here’s Archer, from the end of The Doomsters:

I stopped and leaned on a white wall and lit a cigarette. When you looked at the whole picture, there was a certain beauty in it, or justice. But I didn’t care to look at it for long. The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.”

* * * * *

The Secret Race – Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (2012, 291 pages) is published in the US and UK by Bantam.

By the time Marty Nothstein hung up his wheels in 2006 he was the most decorated American track cyclist of all time. In his time he had won thirty-five national championships. He’d won gold in the Pan-American Games four times. He was a triple World Champion. He was the first American to win the professional sprint World Championships in eighty years. He was the first American to win a Six Day race in half a century. And he was an Olympic gold medallist.

It’s said that one of the key benefits of hosting the Olympic Games is that the host nation pours a ton of money into sport in the hope of showing the world just how brilliant they really are. The investment starts as soon as the host city is announced and the legacy is supposed to last for years after. Host the Games and, across a range of sports, you should produce a generation of talent.

At the 1996 Atlanta Games US cycling threw a pot full of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars – at the Games in the hope of buying gold. EDS and GT Bicycles teamed up to produce the Superbike, a state-of-the-art light-weight carbon-fibre speed machine. Like many Superbike projects – think, perhaps, Lance Armstrong’s infamous F-One project – it was money down the drain. Going into the last day of the track competitions all USA Cycling had to show for their effort was one lump of metal: Erin Hartwell’s silver in the kilometre time trial. And then came Marty Nothstein’s shot at glory in the individual sprint.

Nothstein is up against the reigning Olympic champion, Jens Fiedler, a product of the East German medal factory. Fielder’s a protégé of Lutz Hesslich, himself the Olympic champion in ’80 and ’88 (the East Germans boycotted the LA ’84 Games, payback for the Western boycott of Moscow ’80). Nothstein himself has his own Eastern Bloc coach, USA Cycling’s sprint coach, the Pole Andrzej Bek, a tandem bronze medallist at Munich ’72.

In a test of pure speed, Nothstein should be able to beat Fiedler. But sprinting isn’t just speed. It’s nerve and tactics too. And tactically the German is the superior rider.

I say a prayer, as I do before every race, not to crash. I pray my competitor and I will stay safe. I’m not especially religious, but if there’s a time to believe in God, this is it. […] I prayed we won’t get hurt, but I want to kill him. I want to rip his fucking throat out. I want to win this race, and I want to make his death quick, decisive.”

In the first heat Fiedler leads off. Nothstein tries to take the lead and the two go elbow to elbow. The American backs down first and resumes his place in the German’s slipstream. The he tries a feint, moving to come around Fiedler on the outside before dipping on the in. The German blocks him, leaves Nothstein trailing in his wake. In the final lap Fiedler starts to wind it up to top speed. Out of turn one and into the back straight Nothstein’s closing on the German’s rear wheel. The he starts to pull out of the slipstream and fight though the dirty air.

Through the last turn he’s pulled level with Fiedler’s rear wheel. Fiedler pushes him high on the banking, taking the long way round, forcing Nothstein to go even longer. Fiedler’s above the sprinter’s red line, he tries to flick Nothstein. But the American’s ready. He’s well used to roughhousing it. They may be clocking seventy but Nothstein’s not backing off. In the home straight he’s up to Fiedler’s hip. Fifty metres out and every ten metres Nothstein’s closing on Fiedler’s front wheel a foot at a time. Five feet: he’s not down yet. On the line the American and the German are side by side, arms outstretched, heads down, arses up.

Photo finish. Say cheese and smile for the birdie.

The camera, shooting 10,000 frames per second, decides my faith. But I don’t need a camera to know I crossed the line first. Every racer knows whether they won or lost, no matter how close the finish. It’s instinctual. I’m my own camera. Even NASCAR drivers travelling 200 miles per hour can tell if they won or lost by an inch. But my victory is in the hands of the officials.”

After twenty minutes of scrutinising the photos the blazers call the sprint in Fiedler’s favour. One thousandth of a second. One centimetre. One nil, advantage Germany.

In the second heat it’s Nothstein’s turn to take the lead. That’s where he wants to be, where his turn of speed can leave Fiedler standing. Except the German jumps him on the start. In three pedal strokes he’s half a wheel up and again Nothstein is on the back foot. Again Nothstein is stuck in Fielder’s slipstream. Again the German holds off all the American’s attempts to take the lead as they lap the Stone Mountain track.

One lap to go. Fiedler’s weaving all over the track as I charge toward his rear wheel. He’s above the sprinter’s lane, below the sprinter’s lane. Never flagrant enough to draw the ire of the officials, just enough to keep me at bay. I’d do the same thing if I had the front. We round the last corner, and again I’m gaining ground on him. I’m the faster rider. I reach his hip, his shoulders, there’s the line. Fiedler beats me by half a wheel. He wins the gold medal. I lose.”

Note the “I lose” bit. Note that it’s not “I won silver.” Who really wants to be the first loser? Who really goes to the Games just to pick up one of the baser metals? To celebrate being given a consolation prize? If it was really the taking part that mattered, everyone would be on the podium. It’s only the winning that counts.

Nothstein and Fiedler in action, Atlanta ’96

Confession time:  I like sprinters. I like their self confidence. Maybe that’s a product of discovering this sport through Sean Kelly. You know what they say about your first love being the deepest? Maybe that’s me and sprinters. A lot of people, though, don’t like sprinters. They see them as arrogant, cocky bastards. Self confidence and arrogance, there’s a thin line between the two. Most of the sprinters I like fall on the right side of the line. Nothstein, in The Price of Gold, falls comfortably on the right side of the line. Take this bit, right after he’s been defeated by Fiedler:

As we let the gears spin out on our bikes, I ride next to Fiedler. I shake his hand. I rub his round white helmet. He pumps his fist in the air, triumphantly. It was a fair fight, a good match. I lost to a worthy competitor, one of the greatest Olympic track cyclists of all time.”

The day after his defeat in Atlanta, Nothstein started preparing for his second bite at the Olympic cherry:  Sydney 2000. The day after his defeat in Atlanta, Nothstein reset his sights on the only colour that matters in the Olympics:  gold.

Nothstein in action, Sydney, 2000

The meat and two veg of The Price of Gold is the story of the four years between Atlanta and Sydney, and the sacrifices made along the way. The story of the years before Atlanta and after Sydney are the hors d’oeuvre and dessert.

Starters first. Nothstein comes from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, his family roots tracing back to the German-Deutsch immigrants William Penn enticed to Lehigh Valley in the years before the Revolutionary War. Typically, the PA Dutch are blue collar through and through. They understand the value of hard work. But the Protestant work ethic hasn’t turned them into Puritans. They drink and they brawl. Nothstein’s father was a drinker. The son became a brawler. Through brawling he became a cyclist.

In the 1970s Lehigh Valley became a Mecca for U.S. cycling when a former Olympic skeet shooter, Bob Rodale (of Rodale Press, publishers of Bicycling magazine and of The Price of Gold), donated twenty-five acres of farmland near Trexlertown – T-Town – to the county and built a vélodrome on it. Rodale had been bitten by the cycling bug and this was his gift to the local community:  an outdoor concrete oval, a third of a kilometre round. Jack Simes – scion of one of America’s cycling dynasties – was appointed one of the new track’s directors. Friday nights at Lehigh Valley became cycling night. Even Eddy Merckx strutted his stuff in T-Town’s vélodrome.

The story of Lehigh Valley is something I’m only vaguely familiar with. Reading Bill Strickland’s Bicycling pieces, it’s a place that crops up time and again. It’s become somewhat familiar, though still somewhat vague in my mind. Nothstein’s description of the Valley fleshed the picture out a lot for me. Added focus. Made me want to learn more.

There’s a part of the way Nothstein sketches the history of Lehigh Valley that reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s description of the early days of Andrews Air Field in The Right Stuff. This is – no doubt – me carrying baggage to the table here. (Fact is, we all carry baggage with us to the table every time we pick up a book.) But there is something about the history of cycling in Lehigh Valley that recalls the early devil-may-care drinking-and-driving-and-flying years of the Andrews test pilots. Except in Lehigh Valley it was drinking-and-driving-and-cycling.

There’s a story Nothstein tells, a piece of Valley folklore, about the way T-Town drew in the best of the best, which recalls Wolfe’s description of the way Andrews drew in the flyboys. One night in 1980 a couple of SoCal cyclists, Gil Hatton and Pat McDonagh, climbed into a Plymouth Champ and headed east. Along the way they crashed, rolling the car in the desert after falling asleep at the wheel. They put the car back on the road, kicked out the shattered windscreen, tied bandannas round mouth and nose as bug shields, and continued on their way. When, days later, they pulled up in the gravel parking lot outside the T-Town vélodrome they looked a sight, dust-covered and in their thrashed car.

Another story for you:

One day in high school, I’m washing cars at my dad’s dealership, earning money for bicycle equipment, when a blue Ford Torino blows into the parking lot and launches off a three-foot slope separating the dealership from the house next door. The Torino slides to a stop in the neighbor’s gravel driveway.

From the plume of white dust the car kicks up, out steps a bike racer with a scraggly handlebar moustache and a shaggy head of red hair. I look at him in awe. That’s Whitehead. The Outlaw. Whitehead’s antics at the Friday night races inspire even reserved fans to boo and hiss. And he loves every minute of it. He flips the bird after crossing the finish line. He’s been ejected for hocking loogies at hecklers. And the louder the boos, the more Whitehead seems to win. […] I’ve never met Whitehead before, but I know that when he’s in town, stunts like this tend to occur regularly.

“Whitehead lives in California and is in T-Town for the wedding of his best friend, Gil Hatton. Together they’re the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of cycling. They’re crazy as hell, but calculated too. They don’t win bike races by accident. […] These are the bike racers I aim to emulate.”

All the regular’s in T-Town’s track nights earned nicknames. As well as the Outlaw there was the Bear. The Animal. The Torch. Art the Dart. Nothstein earned his nick in the keirin, slicing through the field to win from the back. He became the Blade.

T-Town’s races taught Nothstein a lot about track racing. But there was a problem with Nothstein learning his metier in the Valley’s Friday night bear-pit. In T-Town’s track races rules were seen as more like guidelines as the riders thrilled the crowd, throwing hooks, elbows, shoulders and head butts in the race for the line. Old school rough-and-tumble sprinting.

Problem is, the rules aren’t just guidelines in National and World Championships:  they’re the rules. There to be enforced. Time and time again the young Nothstein lost because the aggression – the hooking and slicing – that helped him win in T-Town got him DQ’ed. And – again – here is something good about Nothstein’s telling of his tale:  he recognises his own errors. Here he is after getting dumped out of the 1989 junior Worlds in Moscow after the second round:

I’m inconsolable. I worked so hard. I wanted a medal so badly, and it’s over just like that. Tears stream down my face and won’t stop. If I’d ridden clean, I could have won. But I didn’t control my aggression.”

Hooked

The Price of Gold is all told in the first person present tense. That’s not just a tricksy stylistic flourish, a way of adding intensity to the story. You quickly feel that these aren’t memories being dragged up from the past for Nothstein. You quickly feel that the past is very much alive for him. That the pain and the pleasure is an ever-present vivid feeling. You quickly realise just how intense Nothstein himself is.

One of the benefits of the present-tense telling of the story is that Nothstein sucks you into his world, puts you there on the bike with him. This is something only a few cycling books pull off. The race descriptions The Price of Gold are well worth reading. Yes, they’re macho, testosterone-fuelled depictions of bike racing. Cycling as a boxing match. Cycling as hunting. But that’s track sprinting at its best:  it’s the physicality of it that impresses the most. This is, after all, the side of cycling that attracted Ernest Hemingway in his Paris years.

Physicality doesn’t mean hooks and head butts and crashes (though let’s be honest here – hooks and head butts and crashes are part of the attraction):  it’s about the explosive nature of sprinting after all the tactical foreplay. Some of that foreplay has been lost in recent years as track sprinting has commoditised itself into, repackaged itself for TV schedulers, all but banning track stands. But enough of it is still there for the best sprint matches to be a magical mix of balletic beauty and athletic ability.

So how did Nothstein get hooked on his single-minded pursuit of Olympic glory? That would have been with the 1976 Games. On the TV Nothstein watched Nadia Comaneci, Bruce Jenner, and Greg Louganis win golds in the Montréal Games:

I’m enthralled with the pageantry of the Olympics, the intensity of the competition. I’m only five and the Olympic dream is becoming my dream, already. An athlete bends forward as the gold medal is draped around his neck. The national anthem plays. I jump up on the coffee table and raise my arms, ‘I’m going to win the Olympics someday,’ I shout. Cute, my family thinks.”

It was years later, though, that the role the Olympics could play in Nothstein’s life really came home to him. As a kid Nothstein would go on hunting trips with his father and his father’s PA Dutch friends. Around the campfire, stories would be told. War stories, often. This was the 1980s and the men Nothstein’s father hunted with were veterans of America’s perpetual war for perpetual peace:

‘Listen to and respect these men,’ my father told me. ‘Serving your country is a great honor.’ I’m no soldier. But when I see Ken [Carpenter], dressed head to toe in the U.S. colors, it occurs to me that I can serve and honor my country by representing the United States at the Olympics.”

This, for me, is one of the curious things about Nothstein’s story (bearing in mind my somewhat skewed view of the Olympics). For sure, yes, there is a national pride thing going on with Nothstein, the lure of the Cold War’s five-ring circus is partly about doing Uncle Sam proud. But much of what seems to have driven Nothstein seems much closer to home. He’s more community focussed. The Olympics, when he says they were a way of serving and honouring his country, I get the feeling they were more a way of honouring his father and his father’s friends. Of honouring the community – the family and extended family – he grew up in.

The community thing comes back at the end of The Price of Gold, after the Sydney Olympics and after Nothstein’s stint on the European Six Day circuit and on the road in the States. In all his years Nothstein never left Lehigh Valley. Trexlertown was always his home. Post-retirement Nothstein went on to take over the vélodrome he learned his trade in, handing on to others that which had been handed on to him. And this is the hook for me in Nothstein’s picture of Lehigh Valley:  it’s a living, breathing, real community. A cycling community:

The vélodrome [in Lehigh Valley] is my second home. The track served as my childhood playground; the lush, green infield grass, an immaculate front lawn; the concession stand, an always stocked pantry, an expansive living room seating my extended family – the fans.”

Nothstein was, largely, a product of his own drive and of the support structures that grew up around Lehigh Valley. Yes, he had the Fed’s sprint coach, Andrzej Bek, in his corner. But his personal coach was Gil Hatton, that guy who turned up in T-Town one day dust-covered and in a thrashed Plymouth. Not being a product of the U.S. Cycling Fed, Nothstein worked out his own training programmes. In preparing for the 2000 Games he looked at the time between Atlanta and Sydney as one big training block. Rather that gearing his schedule around World Cups or National and World Championships, everything was focused on Sydney:

I know this training plan will likely cost me dozens of World Cup wins, and probably a few world titles, but I don’t care. I train right through World Cup races without resting (in training lingo, tapering), so that I’m fresh for competition. Let my competitors rest and beat me now, I think. They’ll pay in Sydney. […] I’m cognizant of the risks of this training plan. If I don’t win gold in Sydney, I will surely regret the potential World Championship wins I gave up by not tapering.”

At a USOC training camp in Colorado Springs in early ’98, Nothstein watched a group of weight lifters playing basketball. The way the weightlifters burst off the ground to slam a basketball home amazed him:

I know the Olympic lifters are strong, but the explosiveness they display boggles my mind. It’s the same type of strength I use during a sprint, power combined with quickness. I need to know what they’re doing in the gym.”

 

Nothstein starts to incorporate Olympic weight lifting – clean and jerk – into his training programme. Later, in Lehigh Valley, he hooks up with a coach who’s studied the old Soviet way of training and who helps him hone his reaction time and work on his fast-twitch muscles by getting him running short sprints, sometimes held back by elasticated ropes, sometimes pulled by them. Today, these are the sort of innovative counter-intuitive training techniques you’d expect a national federation to be on the lookout for. For Nothstein, he had to find them himself.

Atlas shrugged (Howard Schatz’ iconic image of Nothstein)

Ok, isn’t it about time the D-word cropped up here? This is, after all, the height of Gen-EPO, these are the years BALCO was on the rise. Here, sadly, I have to offer the one big regret about The Price of Gold:  the manner in which it which it skates over the doping issue leaves an awful lot to be desired. Nothstein manages to be blunt and forthright on a lot of other issues. On the issue of race fixing on the track he doesn’t try to hide the fact that it goes on. On doping, though, I really felt he could have done a better job.

Sprinting for gold in Sydney

Who was paying for all of this if Nothstein wasn’t being handsomely remunerated by his fed to bring home international pride in the form of Olympic bangles and baubles? EDS. Ross Perot’s little company had turned an employees’ cycling club into “perhaps the most talent-laden track cycling team in the world.” As well as funding a track team – for which Nothstein rode – EDS had invested heavily in a $4 million state-of-the-art vélodrome in Frisco in the suburbs of Dallas. They funded a nationwide series of track meets. And they were funding the U.S. Fed to tune of about a million dollars a year. As well as paying Nothstein to ride for their team, EDS also took Gil Hatton on board as coach.

Then one day in 1999, the cycling-loving CEO of EDS got the chop and his replacement took the axe to the sporting side of the company’s marketing operations. Bye bye the Superdrome and the EDS Cup. Bye bye Marty Nothstein and Gil Hatton. Bye bye USCF. Nothstein got lucky quick enough, AutoTrader.com picked him up, albeit on a much-reduced salary. I guess you know what happened with the USCF. (Later it was revealed that the guy who ran the cycling side of EDS, Nick Chenowth, was lining his own pocket:  he got ordered to repay $1.3 million to the company, and then got more than two years in the big house.)

What it’s all about, Marty? Top: Nothstein on the podium in Sydney, flanked by Florian Rousseau and Jens Fiedler. Bottom: Nothstein with his wife Cindi, daughter Devon and son Tyler.

The price of gold can be measured in dollars. It can be measured by hours in the gym. But the real price is personal. With Nothstein, it’s not just the world titles foregone (and widening your focus here a moment, whether an over-emphasis on the Olympics diminishes World Championships). It’s the sacrifices he made on the home front. And the sacrifices his wife and children made on the home front.

 

After the medal ceremony, someone hands me an American flag. I ride another victory lap. I wave the flag above my head. Six thousand people stand and clap and cheer for me. But they’re cheering for me alone, and I didn’t win a gold medal by myself. I stop in front of my family again. I lift Tyler up like a lion carrying a cub.”

So, was it all a price worth paying? What do you think?

* * * * *

The Price of Gold, by Marty Nothstein (with Ian Dille), is published by Rodale Press (2012, 256 pages).

The 1987 Tour de France’s final transition stage saw the peloton tackling the 225 kilometres from St Julien en Genevois to Dijon. The riders took things easy until an eight man break got away thirty-some kilometres out from home, containing Panasonic’s Henk Lubberding (architect of the attack) and his team-mate Eric van Lanker along with Jean Claude Leclercq (Toshiba), Frédéric Brun (Z), Régis Clère (Teka), Alfred Achermann (Kas), Rudy Patry (Roland) and Gerrie Knetemann (PDM). In the final kilo Clère, ever the escape artist, managed to break free of his brothers in arms and held on by three seconds to take the stage. For Teka it was back-to-back stage and for Clère it was a second stage victory, following Millau. Superconfex’s Jean-Paul van Poppel won the bunch sprint, nearly three minutes back, the whole peloton rolling home together, Fagor’s Sean Yates bringing up the rear. Van Poppel was back in green. Temporarily.

In the women’s Tour, France’s Jeannie Longo held onto her near three minute lead in the GC over Italy’s Maria Canins. The Soviet rider Alla Jakovleva won the ninety-five kilometre stage from Lons le Saunier, beating the Finn Tea Vikstedt-Nyman in a two-up sprint for the line.

Dijon is famous not just for its mustard but also for being where James Joyce’s Ulysses was first printed. Okay, maybe not famous for that, but well known in certain circles. The sort of circles where people actually read Ulysses. My sort of circles. So it’s famous in my mind for that anyway. The convoluted point being that Ulysses is supposed to afford me an opportunity to compare Stephan Daedulus and Stephan Roche and draw an analogy between Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through Dublin’s streets with the Tour’s odyssey through the towns and villages of France. But come on, do I have to do all the hard work around here? You’ve got the raw materials, work it out in your own heads this time.

The real point is that on this final weekend of the 1987 Tour Dijon was taken over by tricolour-waving U2-singing Guinness-drinking converts to the cycling cause: the Irish were having a grand time discovering the grand buckle. There’s an interview William Fotheringham did with Jeff Connor in 2004, included in Fotheringham’s Roule Britannia, in which Connor talked of the Irish fans at the Tour in 1987. They were, he said:

generic sports fans [who] just follow anything Irish, anywhere around the world, dressed in green. Apart from one guy, Oliver McQuaid, the ones I met at the end of the 1987 Tour had no idea about cycling: I found myself the expert. I’ve watched sport in Ireland – football at Lansdowne Road, Michelle de Bruin – and panning around the crowd I notice they are the same people. Even now [seventeen years on] I go to Lansdowne Road and see one or two familiar faces from that Tour.”

That Oliver McQuaid guy, by the way, is – in case you’re wondering – one of the clan McQuaid. Son of Jim. Brother of our glorious leader, Pat. A former teammate of Roche’s, at the 1979 Rás, where Roche, McQuaid and Alan McCormack acted less like a team and more like three individual riders each trying to beat the other to crap and claim the overall glory. Here he is again, from toward the end of Connor’s Wide-Eyed and Legless:

By the time the Tour arrived in Dijon the Republic of Ireland had cottoned on to the fact that one of their most famous sons was about to win cycling’s greatest prize. The ancient Burgundy city was awash with tricolours and Irish accents. Most had arrived without accommodation and a large group, including Oliver McQuaid, a member of a famous Irish cycling family, had solved the problem by drinking all night in the bar of the ANC hotel close to the railway station in Dijon.”

There is much truth in Connor’s comments about the travelling Irish fans at the 1987 Tour. We are a nation of sporting gad-flies. We discovered boxing through Barry McGuigan – and will rediscover it at the 2012 Olympics through Katie Taylor – and we discovered football through Jack’s Army, the fans who followed the football team through European and World Cup campaigns when Jack Charlton came along. Michelle de Bruin (née Smith) turned us into a nation of swim fans. Eddie Irvine made us love Formula One. We dally with rugby in Triple Crown years or when Munster or Leinster do well in the Heineken Cup. These days we’re a nation of golfers after the successes of Rory McIllroy, Pádraig Harrington, Darren Clarke and Graeme McDowell. Wherever there’s an Irish man or Irish woman doing well in the sporting world, you’ll find an army of tricolour-waving U2-singing Guinness-drinking Irish sports fans cheering them along.

And this is the way sport is everywhere. Americans discovered the Tour de France through Greg LeMond, the 7-Eleven team and Lance Armstrong. The British discovered it through Robert Millar, Sean Yates, Chris Boardman, David Millar and now Team Sky. The Spanish re-discovered it through Pedro Delgado and Miguel Induráin. And the Colombians discovered it through Luis Herrera and Fabio Parra. At times, this constant influx of new fans, cheering along only on the basis of a rider’s passport, can become a bit tedious. It’s not that they don’t know the history of the sport. None of us did when we first found cycling. The history is important but you don’t have to know it if you don’t want to. Where it all becomes tedious is when the fans turn into jingoistic pains in the arse.

For the Irish fans in Dijon, the Tour was as good as Roche’s. The geansaí buí would be on Roche’s shoulders at the end of the penultimate stage’s time trial. Hell, everyone knew that. But shit could still happen. No one wanted it too – well, maybe the Spanish did, deep down, who wouldn’t in their shoes? – but everyone knew that all it would take would be a puncture or a crash to end Roche’s hopes and leave the yellow jersey with Delgado.

Delgado (l) and Roche (r) time-trialling in Dijon

All through the Tour – well, since Delgado emerged as Roche’s key rival – everyone had figured on the Irish rider being good for at least a minute over the Spaniard in the final time trial. In the end he was better than that. By four seconds. Sixty-four seconds separated them on the timesheet, Delgado crossing the finish line in Dijon four minutes and one second after Roche did. Three minutes after Roche had rolled down the start ramp Delgado had set out on his time trial. At the half-way mark he was a minute fourteen down on Roche and only clawed back thirteen seconds in the final kilometres as Roche started to take the corners cautiously. Roche was in yellow by forty seconds. And also green: the maillot vert once more switched back from Van Poppel to him.

Jean-François Bernard

The other race – for the stage win – went to Jean-François Bernard who led at every time check. His minute forty-four advantage over Roche (who finished second) on the stage reduced his final deficit in the maillot jaune to just two thirteen, encouraging him to claim that, had it not been for the four minutes plus he lost on the road to Villard de Lans – when the big boys ganged up on him and ran away when he punctured – he would have won the Tour. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. If it wasn’t for the minute PDM lost in the team time trial would Delgado have won the Tour? Roche’s take (in My Road to Victory) was this:

“I could say that Bernard was five minutes down at the summit of the Aubisque on the second Pyrenean stage and if he was considered a real threat at that time, he would never have got back. Bernard must forget about criticising others and making excuses for himself. He should pay attention to the fact that at the end of the season there were not many riders who wanted to ride in his team. He must mature.”

Bernard, it should be said, was not the kind of rider Roche liked. After Bernard Tapie, the Toshiba team principle, had given him a Porsche for winning a stage in the 1986 Tour Roche made a catty comment about young riders driving Porsches without ever having won anything of great import. Sadly, when Bernard mentioned this comment to Roche the Dubliner claimed not to know that Bernard had a Porsche and a wonderful opportunity for handbags at dawn was missed.

Two riders failed to take the start that day in Dijon: Maarten Ducrot (Superconfex) and Sean Yates (Fagor). Like Roberto Amadio, Jean-René Bernadeau, Erik Breukink, Guido Bontempi, Herman Frison, Marc Madiot, Allan Peiper and Maurizio Piovani, Yates is still Touring and is a part of the 2012 Tour’s contingent of directeurs sportif.

And then it was the last day of the 1987 Tour de France. In the northern Parisian suburb of Créteil the remaining 135 riders in the seventy-fourth Tour prepared themselves for the final day’s racing. In nearby Chaveille the remaining seventy-odd riders in the fourth Tour Fémin prepared similarly. In Créteil Stephen Roche smiled for the cameras in his yellow jersey. In Chaveille it was Jeannie Longo who was smiling for the cameramen.

France was happy. A French-speaking Irishman with a Parisian wife and a house in Paris’s suburbs was about to win the Tour de France while Longo was about to finally win the Tour Féminin for France (the first win, in 1984, had gone to America’s Marianne Martin while Maria Canin’s had taken the next two victories for Italy). Jean-François Bernard and Charly Mottet may have missed out on the maillot jaune but Bernard had confirmed himself as a champion time trialist and Mottet had shown himself to be one of the coming men of French cycling. If they could both improve their climbing, the future was bright. And Laurent Fignon, despite his dismal efforts in the Tour’s five time trials, had shown flashes of what he used to be with that win on La Plagne. It wouldn’t be long before the French were top dogs in cycling once more.

The final stage of the Tour is a promenade. Not an easy day, the riders have to ride and they do go balls out once they hit the finishing circuit on the Champs Elysées. But, in some ways, it’s a little bit like a critérium, the handover between the Tour de France proper and the Shadow Tour – the post-Tour critérium circuit – that used to follow the grande boucle (and still does, but in a much reduced format). Not since 1968 had the yellow jersey changed hands on the final day of the Tour and many people were talking of 1968: Herman van Springel had beaten by Jan Janssen in the tightest Tour ever, just thirty-eight seconds separating first and second. Now Roche looked set to defeat Delgado by a similar margin, forty seconds.

To spice up the final day’s racing there was the question of the green jersey. Carrera held it. Superconfex wanted it. And Panasonic would do everything in their power to stop that happening. Cyrille Guimard may have disliked Bernard Tapie but Panasonic’s bossman, Peter Post, really seemed to hate Superconfex’s boss, Jan Raas. At stake for the two were bragging rights, who was the top dog in Dutch cycling. Raas and Post duked it out at every opportunity for those rights. A fight between the two on the road to Paris could see Roche suffer collateral damage. So he did a deal: on the Sunday morning he approached Van Poppel and promised to finish outside of the points on the Champs Elysées in return for the Superconfex boys keeping the race together. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth Van Poppel agreed. The green jersey was as good as his before the sprint had even begun. Roche now had his own team, the Del Tongos and Superconfex looking out for him on the run-in to Paris. Such is the way this cycling game is played.

For the 7-Elevens Paris was their last hurrah in the Tour (Jim Ochowicz’s boys wouldn’t win another Tour stage until the Motorola years rolled round). They already had Raúl Alcalá had in the white jersey of the best young rider (as well as the memory of his eight stages in the polka-dot jersey) and they had two stage wins under their wheels Davis Phinney in Bordeaux and Dag-Otto Lauritzen on Luz Ardiden). Which was a jersey and a stage win better than their début Tour the year before (and they’d managed to not make total arses of themselves in the team time trial).

On the Champs Elysées Jeff Pierce made it three stages for the Slurpees. At the end of the circuits of the cobbled central-Parisian thoroughfare Pierce was away with a group of about a dozen riders. An estimated half-a-million fans thronged the pavements from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries gardens, cheering the riders home. Pierce had gone clear two laps earlier when he and three others slipped off the front of the peloton. It was all attack and counter attack as the break tried to stay clear of the chasing peloton and win the biggest sprint prize in the race. Pierce made his move just as an attack had been brought back and went away on his own. Steve Bauer (Toshiba) started bridging across to him and Pierce chose to back off the pace gently. Then, as soon as Bauer bridged the gap, he opened up the throttle again and flew. One second was all he had over Bauer at the end. It was more than he needed.

The remnants of the break filled the next six placings and then, in the bunch sprint, it was a Superconfex-Panasonic head-to-head, Van Poppel pipping Phil Anderson to the post. Peter Post’s boys went home with just one stage win (Erik Breukink in Pau) compared to the four stages (Jelle Nijdam in the prologue, Nico Verhoeven in the opening stage, Rolf Gölz in Blagnac and Van Poppel in Avignon) as well as the maillot vert won by Jan Raas’s boys. Advantage Raas in the game of bragging rights.

The 1987 podium – Roche, Delgado, Bernard with Tour Féminin winner Jeannie Longo in the foreground

Roche, almost true to his word, rolled home in twenty-ninth, arms thrown wide, Massimo Ghirotto riding shot-gun and keeping his team leader safe, Fagor’s Martin Earley a couple of bike lengths behind him. On the final podium in Paris the Irish Taoiseach – our prime minister – hugged Roche. Charlie Haughey was one of the cutest whoors in Irish politics (a despicable game played by cute whoors) and had flown to Paris to make sure that everyone back home knew that Roche’s victory was down to his party’s policies (screw the economy and force as many to emigrate as possible): a vote for Fianna Fáil was a vote for the future of Irish cycling (more emigration). It was hilarious to watch (especially for someone like me who grew up in a Labour household).

What’s even more hilarious – for me, anyway – is listening to those who claim that Lance Armstrong somehow sullied the podium on the Champs Elysées by waving an American flag from it. But never had Bill Clinton or George Bush flown to Paris to hug their hero in his moment of triumph. Can you imagine the response if they did? Or if David Cameron was on hand to welcome home a British Tour winner and remind the people of the UK that it was a Tory PM who had opened up the Lottery’s purse strings and given birth to Britain’s cycling renaissance? But Haughey could get away with it because no one outside of Ireland knew who he was.

In the other tour, the Tour Féminin, the USSR’s Tamara Poliakova slipped away for a solo victory, her second stage win in the race. Longo was home safe in the bunch and kept her maillot jaune. Maria Canins had to settle for the consolation prize of the mountains jersey. Australia’s Elisabeth Hepple was the best placed of the English-speaking riders, in fifteenth. In all twenty-five English speaking riders finished the race (Liz Chapman the best American in twenty-third, Clare Greenwood the best Briton, in twenty-fourth, Kelly-Ann Way the best Canadian in thirty-fifth). Given the presence of so many English-speakers in the race it’s somewhat surprising that so little has been told about the Tour Féminin. Hopefully the new renaissance of cycling in the English-speaking world will encourage some of those riders to share their stories of the other Tour de France.

Sadly, for women’s cycling, the departure of Félix Lévitan from the Société du Tour de France helped seal the fate of the Tour Féminin. The Société du Tour continued with the race for another couple of years (both won by Longo, with Canins second) but then cut it free. For a couple of years there was no race, then it returned, only to get into trouble with the newly created Amaury Sport Organisation. And then it died again.

* * * * *

So how did the pundits do, how finally fared the dozen riders identified before the start of the 1987 Tour as being the men to watch? Not bad is the answer to that question. The first seven riders in the final GC were all on that list of the dozen pre-race favourites:

How had the individual teams fared?

The Italian Supermacati squad and the Colombian Ryalco outfit were, by a country mile, the worst performing teams at the Tour. Whether ANC were better or worse than Reynolds depends, I suppose, upon what store you place on the lanterne rouge.

In one of the post-Tour guides I have, the following comment appears in connection with the British team that tried:

It was suggested within the team that twenty years would be necessary to prepare a British team fully for the Tour. Such talk is both irresponsible and nonsensical. It is irresponsible because it hardly does anything for team morale; and it is nonsensical because it is patently untrue.”

 

History, alas, shows that the twenty years estimate was optimistic: no British team – bossed by British directeurs and with a core of British riders – started the Tour again until Team Sky came along in 2010. No one in the Sky set-up appreciates comparisons with the team that Tony Capper built. Like the ghost of Tom Simpson the ghost of ANC is something British cycling has spent a long time trying to exorcise. But maybe – just maybe – they could find some way to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of ANC’s Tour. Maybe the guys at Sky could help the rehabilitation of the memory of a team that failed, pay a lasting tribute to the little team that tried. Maybe it is time for the British to finally win the Tour. America, Ireland and Australia have all produced Tour winners for English-speaking fans, isn’t it about time the British joined the club?

And what of the Irish? What of their twenty-fifth anniversary dreams? The dream is as it was that day on the Champs Elysées: another victory. We’ve waited twenty-five years, which is two less than the French have endured since they last won their own race, so I guess we can’t really complain. But at least the French have had the consolation of days in yellow and stage wins. Stephen Roche never again wore another maillot jaune after that one presented to him on the Champs Elysées in 1987. No Irish rider has. Kelly did bring home another green jersey (his fourth) in 1989 (along with a red one, for the intermediate Catch sprints). And the only stage wins since 1987 came from Martin Earley in 1989 and Stephen Roche in 1992. One day in yellow in memory of times past is clearly too much to ask to mark twenty-five years. Is a stage win too too much?

* * * * *

Sources (throughout this series): Born to Ride, by Stephen Roche (with Peter Cossins), Yellow Jersey Press; Field of Fire, by Jeff Connor, Mainstream Publishing.

Also: Team 7-Eleven, by Geoff Drake; The Happiness of Pursuit, by Davis Phinney (with Austin Murphy); We Were Young and Carefree, by Laurent Fignon (translated by William Fotheringham); Wide-Eyed and Legless, by Jeff Connor; The Tour is Won on the Alpe, by Jean-Paul Vespini (translated by David Herlihy); Kings of the Mountains, by Matt Rendell; In Search of Robert Millar and Slaying the Badger, both by Richard Moore; A Rough Ride, by Paul Kimmage; A Peiper’s Tale, by Allan Peiper (with Chris Sidwells); My Road to Victory and The Agony and the Ecstasy, both by Stephen Roche (with David Walsh); Kelly, A Man for All Seasons and Inside the Tour de France, all three by David Walsh; Rule Britannia, by William Fotheringham; Breaking the Chain, by Willy Voet (with Pierre Ballester, translated by William Fotheringham); The Sweat of the Gods, by Benjo Maso (translated by Michiel Horn), In High Gear, by Sam Abt; The Story of the Tour de France, Volume 2, by Bill and Carol McGann.

Bottecchia at the conclusion of the 1924 Tour

Le Maçon de Frioul – the mason from Fruili –was born in the Veneto in 1894. The stories have it that Ottavio Bottecchia only discovered a passion for the bike during the first World War, when he was a member of one of the bicycle-mounted Bersagliere divisions, which rode to war on fold-up Bianchi bicycles. The Bersaglieri are frequently referred to as ‘the elite Bersagliere division,’ usually by authors who then go on to point out that, before taking up arms, Bottecchia had never ridden a bike before. Which makes you wonder just how elite the Bersaglieri were if they recruited men who didn’t even know how to ride a bike. Or how true the story of Bottecchia’s lack of pre-war cycling ability really is.

What is not in doubt however is that a number of the greats served with the Bersaglieri. Before Bottecchia there was Carlo Oriani, who won the 1912 Giro, at which time he was serving with the Bersaglieri in the Libyan conflict. Giovanni Brunero – Bottecchia’s Legnano rival in the 1924 Tour – also served his time in one of the bicycle-mounted regiments before going on to win three Giri. And after Bottecchia came Learco Guerra, another former Bersagliere, who rode his first Giro in 1929, was so unlucky in the 1930 Tour and finally won the Giro in 1934.

After Bottecchia had achieved fame in France, he described some of his war experiences:

[I remember] a long ride in the mountains, with a machine gun on my back, which I was to take to a lookout post that was under heavy fire. I had to ride on paths and tracks that were steeper than the Galibier or the Izoard. I arrived at my destination later in the evening after a risky Alpine climb. The next day I found out that my efforts had not been in vain. The Austrians attacked in the night and had failed to take the post thanks to the new machine gun.”

Bottecchia was a runner, ferrying messages and supplies between the trenches and firing positions at the front and the supply and command zones at the rear. Sometimes he himself got to use the machine gun he was ferrying, receiving a medal for his action in November 1917. The official citation states that:

calmly and bravely under violent enemy fire he returned fire efficiently and in a deadly manner with his own machine gun, inflicting serious damage on the enemy and stopping their advance. Forced on numerous occasions to retreat, he ignored the danger and carried his weapons with him so that he was able to open fire again and again.”

When the war ended Bottecchia moved to France and got a job working construction. There he put to work the cycling skills he’d learned in the army and took up bike racing, his winnings augmenting his income as be began to lay the foundations of family life. It turned out that he was pretty good at this cycling lark.

In 1923 Bottecchia, already 29, entered the Giro as one of the isolati, an unsponsored independent, isolated compared to those riders with team support, left to fend for himself. He finished the race just forty-five minutes behind the winner, Costante Girardengo (Maino): he was first in the isolati class and fifth overall.

Alphonse Baugé, the Automoto head-man – the Marshal mocked by Londres during the 1924 Tour –was impressed by Bottecchia’s Giro ride and offered the Italian a spot on the French Automoto Tour squad. Automoto were making moves on the Italian market, opening a showroom in Milan, and wanted a decent Italian rider on their squad so they’d get some column inches in the Italian press. Girardengo had reportedly turned them down when they came knocking on his door. Bottecchia was more than happy to take up their offer. Officially he was to be a gregario for Henri Pélissier. In the end he proved to be more than just another domestique, winning a stage, twice donning the maillot jaune himself – a first for Italy – and finishing second overall to Pélissier. The Alps proved to be Bottecchia’s downfall, the Italian having a mare of a day. The following year, as we’ve seen, he put those demons to rest.

During the 1924 Tour Le Gazzetta ran an appeal to raise funds for their new hero, even though he had shunned the Giro. Mussolini showed his support, contributing a symbolic lira. Il Duce was full of symbolics. The Italian public in general were a lot more generous than their dear leader, raising more than 60,000 lire for their new campione. That, added to his salary and bonuses from Automoto and the money won at the Tour (10,000 francs for winning, plus whatever his four stage wins earned him), meant that Bottecchia was, if not wealthy, then certainly armed with the foundations for a comfortable life.

That same year Bottecchia was also approached by Teodoro Carnielli, who wanted to produce bicycles bearing the champion’s name. Carnielli had a workshop in Vittorio Veneto and a few years earlier had come across Bottecchia, competing on poorly made bikes, the best he could afford at the time. Carnielli gave him a bike from his shop, a Ganna. With Bottecchia himself now a man of the Tour Carnielli suggested he do as Luigi Ganna and others had done before him and out his name on a range of bicycles. An astute businessman, Carnielli saw the profit potential in Bottecchia’s name and Bottecchia certainly appreciated the royalty that was being offered on every bike sold. He signed on the dotted line.

Bottecchia added to his wealth at the 1925 Tour, again winning four stages (including, again, the first and last stages) and again coming out on top. While the Tour’s overall prize fund fell marginally, the prize for winning was increased to 15,000 francs. The following year, though, Bottecchia was unable to make it three on the trot. The myths have it that he was defeated by bad luck (multiple punctures on the first stage), inclement weather and the very mountains he had soared over so effortlessly for the previous two years. Pre-echoing the myth of René Vietto, on the day he abandoned he is said to have sat on a wall and cried, telling journalists that it was all over: “I have had enough of the Tour. This is the last time. You need to think too much.” He was right: it was his last Tour.

In June 1927, just weeks before the commencement of what would have been his fourth Tour, Bottecchia was found mortally wounded on a road near his home in Fruili. He had been out for a training spin. Twelve days later he died in hospital of his wounds. For the past eighty-five years people have been arguing over how those wounds were inflicted. No one wants to believe that a great champion simply fell from his bike during a training ride and so the question of how inevitably leads to that of who it was who inflicted the wounds that killed Bottecchia. From there it’s but a short hop skip and jump to the why of it all. Money, sex, politics, they’ve all entered the mix. John Foot, in his Pedalare! Pedalare!, argues that this “tells us a lot about contemporary Italy, a country where the justice system is not seen as legitimate by many, and where disputes over the facts of the past, over history and memory, can drag on for years.” It also tells you a lot about our basic inability to accept that, sometimes, shit happens.

Although Bottecchia only ever rode one Giro, bikes bearing his name won in 1957 (Gastone Nencini), 1966 (Gianni Motta) and 1979 (Giuseppe Saronni). They also bagged a Tour de France, when Greg LeMond beat Laurent Fignon by that teeny tiny margin in 1989. The man who, it is claimed, was Christened Ottavio by virtue of the fact that he was the eighth child born to his parents (ottavo is Italian for eighth) lived again in the legend of a Tour won by just eight seconds.

* * * * *

A decade after Bottecchia’s death, they buried Henri Pélissier.

Henri Pélissier in the 1924 Tour (source: http://surfabike.wordpress.com)

Pélissier’s full palmarès includes not just that sole Tour victory in 1923, but also three Giri di Lombardia (1911, 1913 and 1920), Milan-Sanremo (1912), Bordeaux-Paris (1919), two editions of Paris-Roubaix (1919 and 1921), and Paris-Tours (1922). Looking at any rider whose career spanned years of war, you always wonder what he could have achieved had he had an uninterrupted run at the sport. There’s more than enough coulda, woulda, shoulda stories in this sport though. If you are going to wonder, remember the obvious: many cyclists were killed in the Great War.

The Luxembourgher François Faber (who won the Tour in 1909) enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to do his bit in the war and was carrying a wounded comrade at Clarency in May 1915 when he was killed. Lucien Petit-Breton (who won the Tour in 1907 and 1908) was serving on the font lines June 1917 when he was killed in an automobile accident. Octave Lapize (who won the Tour in 1910) became an airman when the war commenced and he was killed in Combat over Verdun, also in June 1917. Many, many other professional cyclists were killed during the war, men like Henri Alavoine, Edouard Watteleir or Emile Engel, men who had achieved minor fame on the bike before the war. And then there was Carlo Oriani, a winner of the Giro d’Italia and a Bersagliere during the Libyan conflict. He contracted pneumonia when swimming across the river Piave during the retreat of Capoletto in November 1917 and died shortly after.

No one knows what races those who died might have been won, what champions they might have become, had war not cut their lives short. If you’re going to play coulda, woulda, shoulda, play it with them, not with the lucky ones who lived to race on.

During the 1924 Tour we’ve just looked at how Pélissier joked to Albert Londres that, one day, the riders would be made carry lead weights in their pockets, because someone would declare God had made them too light. That sort of thinking wasn’t far off the mark when it came to some of Henri Desgrange’s more wacky ideas. In 1925 he hit upon a brilliant new wheeze: no rider would be allowed eat more than another, all would receive the same food.

Pélissier changing his own tire during the Tour (photo courtesy the National Union of Professional Cyclists, uncp.net)

Pélissier had by this stage attempted to organise his fellow pros, forming a riders’ union, a forerunner of sorts to today’s CPA. On this issue – food – Pélissier had the support of the other riders and Desgrange was faced with the prospect of a riders’ strike. And a real one too, not the faux boycott faced by the organisers of the 1924 Giro d’Italia. On mature reflection Desgrange decided not to press ahead after all with his food idea. Victory for the riders.

But just about the only victory for Pélissier’s union. Few riders could be bothered siding with him on other issues. The Belgians saw no reason to join his crusade: they were profiting from a sport which rewarded cart-horses. As for Pélissier’s compatriots, few of them needed the trouble that being visibly aligned with Pélissier would bring them. Trouble with men like Alphonse Baugé and Henri Desgrange. The union died.

Pélissier died in 1937, shot by his mistress, Camille Tharault, during a domestic dispute. He’d pulled a knife and she’d reached for a gun. The same gun which, two years earlier, had been used by Pélissier’s wife, Léonie, when she committed suicide. It was a clear a case of self-defence, if somewhat excessive: Tharault had put five bullets into Pélissier. He was forty-six years old.

If you were to cast about for a contemporary equivalent of Pélissier someone like Roy Keane would perhaps be a good analogue. Pélissier was a talented athlete with his own views on the way things should be done and unable – or unwilling – to compromise when it came to expressing his opinion. After he’d retired – a decade before his death – Pélissier tried a comeback of sorts, as a manager, but that didn’t last long. The best athletes rarely make good managers, they don’t understand how others struggle to reach the heights they scaled so effortlessly. So Pélissier then tried his hand at punditry. Well you can guess how that worked out, can’t you?

A journalist, Alber Baker d’Issy – creator of the GP des Nations – wrote an obituary for Pélissier which probably got the man just about right:

He had few friendships because of his absolute opinions, and the way he expressed them cost him many friends. […] But they all bowed to the great quality of a champion they considered the greatest French rider since the war.”

It probably would have killed Desgrange to admit it but Pélissier’s criticism of the Tour was right. The stages were too long. Desgrange himself had to acknowledge this, not because he finally began to empathise with the riders, but because the super-long stages became ever more boring. Riders would simply ride together until close to the finish when the real racing would begin. Desgrange’s attempts to enliven the stages with bonifications ultimately failed. At one point he even resorted to setting the riders off in time-trial fashion in an attempt to make them race the whole stage long. Soon he had no choice but to accept reality. In 1927 the Tour was redrawn: twenty-four stages with only seven rest days but with stage lengths reduced. Stages ranged in length from 103 kilometres to 360, ten of them were below 200 kilometres. The conditions the riders toiled in were still primitive but the Tour’s parcours had entered the modern era. The cart-horses were being consigned to history and the Tour was becoming a race for Thoroughbreds.

* * * * *

Had Albert Londres lived long enough, perhaps he would have written a fine obituary for Henri Pélissier, championed him for standing up to Henri Desgrange and trying to bring some humanity to the sport of bicycle racing. Londres, alas, was himself five years dead by the time Pélissier was buried.

The last-known picture of Albert Londres, in Shanghai in 1932 (source: Assouline’s monograph, “Albert Londres”)

In the years after 1924 Londres had reported from Senegal and the Congo, where he raged against colonialism and condemned the manner in which slavery was being used there. Then it was on Palestine to report on the attempt by Jews to establish a Jewish state. His last completed report came from the Balkans, where he covered Macedonian nationalists who had turned to terrorism in protest at the division of their land between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. Londres’ final assignment was in China, where he was investigating attempts by the Bolsheviks to stir up unrest. It was while he was returning from China that Londres died, when the ocean liner on which he was sailing caught fire and sank.

In the eight years between his reports from the 1924 Tour de France and his death in 1932 Albert Londres never again reported on the grande boucle. I guess there was always some greater injustice out there needing to be written about, no time to circle back and revisit stories already told once. But the fact that Londres did cover the Tour, even the once, is some indication of how important the race had become just twenty-one years after its creation. And how cruel and unfair cycling as a sport was then. Nothing like the sport we know today. Nothing at all like the sport we know today. Right.

Next: When we resume, we’ll look at the Giro di Lombardia and some other races from the 1924 cycling season.

The road from Nice to Briançon

The Tour entered the Alps with a 275-kilometre trundle from Nice to Briançon, taking in the Col d’Allos (2,250m), the Col de Vars (2,110m), and the Col d’Izoard (2,361m). With a comfortable lead Ottavio Bottecchia (Automoto) could afford to take things easy. Giovanni Brunero (Legnano) and Nicolas Frantz (Alcyon) got away on their own, the man from Luxembourg leading over all three climbs, but the Italian pipping him to the post in Briançon, taking the stage and the three minutes in bonifications. Romain Bellenger (Peugeot) rolled home third, 8’32” down, with Bottecchia alone another 1’23” behind him. There was no change in the podium positions, but Frantz was now down to ‘just’ 41’52” off the lead, Brunero another 3’45” behind. A lot of time today, but back then the sort of time that could still be made up were Bottecchia to have a nightmare day.

Two days later the racing resumed and the peloton tackled the Col du Galibier 2,556/2,645m), the Télégraphe (1,566m), and the Aravis (1,498m). Bartolomeo Aymo (Legnano) lead them over the Galibier and the Télégraphe, with Brunero leading over the Aravis, but the peloton arrived as one into Gex, 307 kilometres after leaving Briançon. Frantz took the stage and the three minutes time bonus, cutting his deficit on Bottecchia to 38’52”, Brunero now 6’45” behind him.

A picture portrait of The Galibier in the 1924 Tour de France

Londres’ report from the Alps reads like many of the race reports of that time:

Crossing these cols, they seemed no longer to be pushing on the pedals but tearing up huge trees by the roots, heaving with all their might at something invisible hidden deep in the earth, something that refused to budge; grunting ‘Ghanh … Ghanh …’ like bakers kneading their dough in the middle of the night. I didn’t speak to them; I knew them all but they wouldn’t have replied. When their eyes caught mine, it reminded me of a dog I had, staring imploringly at me, just before he died, because he was so profoundly sad at having to leave this earth. Then they lowered their eyes over the handlebars once more, and rode on, their gaze fixed to the road as if to find out whether the drops of liquid they were sprinkling over its surface were sweat or tears. This spectacle is part of what they call pleasure. That’s what the regional papers have decided it is. The people of the Dauphiné and Savoie départments will be setting out for the Galibier tonight at 12.45am. At the summit they’ll be able to get a cold supper and a glass of champagne for 45 francs all-in.”

On the descent of the Lizard, Londres witnessed a crash:

One of them brakes, zig-zags across the road … he’s going to go over the edge, he hurtles into the rock face, which planes a slice off his leg, but the rock brings him to a halt. I go over to him. His chain is broken.

–         I had a small lead today. What a disaster. […] How am I going to mend that? I’d need an anvil.

He finds one big stone, one small: the big one for an anvil, the smaller for the hammer.

–         If I can fix it, I’ll get drunk at the finish.

The repair doesn’t work.

–         Something like this and you have to abandon.

“He’s a routier, [Giuseppe] Ercolani, a native of Froges [near Grenoble]. His wife’s about to have a baby.

–         If it’s a boy, I’m going to call him Benjamin.
–         Why?
–         Because I’m the Benjamin of the Tour [the youngest rider]. I’m twenty-one.

He succeeds in repairing the chain. ‘I’m happy,’ he says.

Other routiers go past downhill. It reminds him of his unhappiness.

–         I started well today. I could have moved up a bit in the classification … anyway, now I’m back on course.

His chain fixed, as he puts his wheel back on he asks me:

–         ‘You’re not a doctor as well, are you? You’d be able to tell me why the baby hasn’t arrived yet. I ordered everything, all the medicine, from the pharmacist before I left. It’ll go bad.

He leaps into the saddle.

–         Ah, they won’t let me ride the Tour de France again. I’m too young; it’s cleaning me out. I’ll come back when I’m 25.

But he rides off, quick as a zebra who’s spotted a creepy lion. If Ercolani doesn’t get a telegram in Gex, I’ll forge one for him: the anxiety about the baby has gone on too long.”

No sooner has Ercolani set off than Londres comes across another rider in distress, Henri Collé, whose exchange with Baugé, the Marshal, Londres had reported a few days earlier. Collé has collided with a wagon and is out of the race. Coming from Geneva he had been looking forward to the reception that would have awaited him in Gex, fourteen kilometres over the border from his home town. Collé is upset:

What stinking luck. I was keeping something in reserve for the day after tomorrow. […] What rotten luck, mister, what rotten luck. […] This job’s a death ride. I only hope they still make a collection for me in Geneva.”

That was one of the attractions in riding the Tour: passing through or near to your home town and raising money there. For a few stars of the sport, international fame was a possibility. National fame could be achieved by quite a few riders, but for most the best they could hope to be was to become a local hero. That alone was often enough to keep them riding. Certainly it was better than working the family farm, or being a labourer.

Londres put Collé and his bike into his Renault and drove him to the finish:

What’s to become of a man that can’t ride any further? I give him a lift in my car. In accepting, Collé has, apparently, committed a grievous infraction. When a rider can no longer ride he must walk. Otherwise, he gets hit with a 500 franc fine. In his place I’d have killed myself on the spot. That way there’d be no infringement of the rules.”

Driving to Briançon Londres witnessed another incident which adds more to his picture of how inhuman bike racing back then could be:

Ahead of us is the lanterne rouge, the name they give the man who is last overall. It’s [Augusto] Rho, alias d’Annunzio. Difficult to say whether Rho is skinnier than he’s stubborn. He is replacing a tyre and appears to be deep in thought.

–         What are you thinking about?
–         I’m thinking about signor Bazin …

Bazin is the timekeeper. At twenty-one hours, forty-one minutes and 3.35 seconds, Monsieur Bazin presses a small object under his table, a timepiece which cost 2,500 francs. Then he calls out: ‘Gentlemen, the control is closed.’ He might see d’Annunzio three metres away, crawling in on his stomach and, with an exaggerated shrug of desperate commiseration, signal that he is not going to bend the rules. Monsieur Bazin knows the vital significance of a tenth of a fifth of a second. Monsieur Bazin is a sort of cuckoo who inhabits a clock.”

The Bazins of the Tour still exist and riders still have to race against him. Few cycling biographies today are complete without the rider telling a tale of the day they had to race against the cut-off, suffering alone well off the back of the race. In the 1924 Giro d’Italia, the story of the cut-off was illustrated by Alphonsina Strada’s misfortunes on the road into Peruggia and her expulsion from the race. In the 1955 Tour there’s the story of Shay Elliott nursing Brian Robinson to the finish, only for both to be outside the cut-off, the Irishman sent home, the Briton allowed ride on having started the day inside the top ten riders. Pretty much every Tour produces at least one such story.

The Alps behind them, the Tour entered its final week and the race swept from Gex to Strasbourg, taking in the Col del la Faucille (1,323m) en route, which the peloton crossed as one. Into Strasbourg Frantz led home a group of four which contained Bottecchia. The three minutes in bonifications allowed Frantz to close to within 35’52” of the Italian. Brunero, who had won the Giro in 1921 and 1922, lost 4’50” on the day, finishing outside the top ten, but still held on to third place, now 50’27” off Bottecchia and 14’35” off Frantz.

Strasbourg to Metz, a 300-kilometre haul, saw Armor’s Arsène Alancourt take the stage, 2’38” ahead of Peugeot’s Georges Cuvelier. Frantz led home a small group, 3’09” down on the day but 3’26” up on Bottecchia, who could afford to dawdle: even at the end of the stage Frantz was still 32’26” in arrears. Brunero rolled home another twenty seconds down on Bottecchia but held on to his podium position.

The penultimate day’s racing saw the riders hauling their tired bodies the 433 kilometres from Metz to Dunkerque, setting out just as the clock struck midnight. In 1919 these roads scuppered any hopes Eugène Christophe had of overall victory. Le Viuex Gaulois broke his forks, the second of three Tours in which fork failure would snuff out any hope of victory for him, and a near half-hour advantage at the start of the day turned into a deficit of forty minutes. The peloton this time dawdled along at a sedate twenty-one kilometres an hour, taking more than twenty hours to complete the stage.

Romain Bellenger, who’d won the second stage, was first from a group of five. The main bunch arrived 4’02” down, Hector Tiberghien (Peugeot) taking the sprint for eighth, Bottecchia close behind Frantz’s wheel. He’d covered the wheel he needed to and survived the stage without a major mishap. The loser of the day was Legnano’s Brunero, who abandoned, saddle sores finally driving him off his bike, allowing Bottecchia’s Automoto team-mate Lucien Buysse to take the bottom step of the podium, almost an hour and a half behind Bottecchia. Brunero’s gamble to favour the Tour over the Giro had failed to pay off.

Londres’ description of the stage reads as follows:

Let’s start at the beginning. It was pouring rain and there was a howling wind; you wouldn’t put a guinea pig out on the balcony in such weather. The riders shuffled up, one by one, dragging their bikes, and they were given the off right into the teeth of the wind. Think what that would do to you: from midnight till four in the morning. The men pedalled through the night, chilled to the bone, in pouring rain. A sight to see. As soon as the sky began to lighten, the blackness slipped onto the men. I can tell you, these men who’d been white when they set off at midnight were black by four am. It’s true.”

From eating dust over the early stages of the race, the peloton was now sucking on the spray of the mud thrown up by their wheels and the passing cars. The race was passing over the pavé of the north of France, riders seeking the comfort of the pavement to ease their passage. The towns they passed through – Sedan, Lille, Armentières – were well known to most everyone in France in those days, they had been indelibly inked in their minds. Signposts marked the distance to Ypres:

In short, it took us back some years to our youth. Yet this was no war we were engaged in; it was a race. Judging from appearances there was no very great difference in the faces of those taking part.”

 

Londres’ reports from the 1924 Tour de France close with the journalist pressing home the central theme of his reportage, the suffering endured by these men in the name of sport and the hope of an income:

Sixty-one are going to make it. You can come and see them – these are no faint hearts. For a month they have fought with the road. The battles have taken place in the middle of the night, the early hours of the morning, though midday, groping their way through fog so thick it makes you retch, into headwinds which laid them flat, under the sun which, as in Crau, spit-roasted them on the handlebars. They have taken the Pyrénées and the Alps by the throat. They’d climbed into the saddle at ten o’clock one evening and not climbed off till the following evening at six – between Les Sables d’Olonne and Bayonne, for instance. They used roads not intended for bicycles. People barred their way. They’ve had level-crossing gates shut in their face. Cows, sheep, dogs have run into them. Yet, this was not the great torture. The great torture started from the moment they left and will last till they ride into Paris.

And there were the cars. For thirty days, these cars have driven alongside the riders and planed a layer off the road surface. They’ve planed it uphill, they’ve planed it downhill and thrown up a copious waste of dust without a word of complaint. Eyes burning, mouth parched, the riders have suffered the dust without a word of complaint. They’ve ridden over flint. They’ve devoured the coarse pavé of the north. When it was too cold at night, they’ve wrapped up their stomachs with old newspapers; by day, they’ve tipped pitchers of water over themselves, fully clad, and gone on watering the road until the sun had dried their jerseys out.

When they split open a leg or an arm in a fall, they climbed back on the machine. At the next village, they searched out the pharmacist. It might be a Sunday, as at Péznas, where the pharmacist told the injured man: ‘I’m closed for business.’ And, instead of shaking him by the neck till his teeth rattled, the rider replied: ‘Okay, sir’ and carried on riding.”

This, for me, is what is so special about the reports Albert Londres filed from the 1924 Tour de France: they concentrate on the human story, the inhumanity of cycle sport as it existed in those days.

The stage itself was a formality for Bottecchia: in those days it was still possible to lose the race on the last day, the riders had yet to get around to declaring the final day’s racing neutralised. But Bottecchia’s lead was more than sufficient for anything but the most dire of emergencies. In winning he became the first Italian to take the victory and the first rider to wear the maillot jaune from the first stage to the last (before 1919, when the maillot jaune was introduced, several riders led from the first day to the last: Bottecchia was the first to do it while wearing the yellow jumper).

Bottecchia put a ribbon on his overall victory by winning the bunch gallop on the track of the Parc des Prince, his fourth stage win in the Tour, adding another three minutes in bonifications to his lead over Frantz and Buysse. Of the sixty-one riders Londres thought were home and dry, spare a thought for Giovanni Canova, one of the touristes routiers. With Paris all but in sight, he failed to finish the stage.

And so ended the 1924 Tour, a race dogged by a doping controversy, a race that was won on the first day in the mountains. Some things don’t change down through the years.

Next: We skip forward in time to consider what became of Bottecchia, Pélissier and Londres.

* * * * *

Sources (throughout this part of the series): for most of the day-by-day racing, Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Tour de France, Volume 1 (McGann Publishing). Some of the Londres translations are taken from Graham Fife’s Inside the Peloton (Mainstream Publishing). Les Woodland’s The Unknown Tour de France is one of the many that repeats the Jules Banino incident.

A scene from the 1924 Tour de France

As the Tour completed its first week of racing, the peloton completed the 412 kilometre stage four haul from Brest to Les Sables d’Olonne, sixteen and a half hours of saddle time. The peloton again finished together, Ottavio Bottecchia (Automoto) finished two places behind Théophile Beeckman (Griffon) but still retained the yellow jersey, the two still tied on time. Nicolas Frantz (Alcyon) finished outside the top ten and the third place was now a tie between Hector Tiberghien (Peugeot), Marcel Huot (Griffon), Giovanni Brunero (Legnano), and Léon Scieur, all still 2’36” behind Bottecchia and Beeckman.

Londres’ report from that day’s racing mainly concentrates on the quality of the roads the riders raced over, the journalist drawing particular attention to the amount of dust kicked up by the passage of the race. His report of the race into Les Sables d’Olonne could easily have been called Eat The Dust:

There are certain freaks who swallow bricks, others who eat live frogs. I’ve seen fakirs tucking into molten lead. These are normal people. The real nutters are certain lunatics who left Paris on 22 June to tuck into dust. I know them well: I’m a member of the club. We’ve scoffed 381 kilometres between Paris and Le Havre, 354 kilometres between Le Havre and Cherbourg, 405 kilometres from Cherbourg to Brest. It didn’t satisfy us. When you’ve got a taste for it, you can’t get enough. Even the waiter at the hotel in Brest, registering what an appetite we had, was sympathetic. An hour after midnight, he knocked on our bedroom door. ‘It’s 1 am,’ he called. ‘Time to eat your dust.'”

Londres’ reporting generally displays a sense of the ridiculous, humour used gently to press home his points. Here he is comparing the quality of the dust in the different départements the race crossed:

We crossed Finistère and on through the départements of the Morbihan, the Lower Loire and the Vendée. The dust of the Morbihan is poor stuff compared to Finistère’s and the Lower Loire dust is a bit more tangy. As to the Vendée dust, it’s a real delicacy. I only have to think about it and my mouth waters. I just hope that the dust in Landes – next Monday – is as good.”

At Landernau, which the peloton whizzed through in the dead of night, Londres noted the silence of their passage:

It’s the only town since the start where there’s no noise to be heard. It’s 2.30 in the morning, Landerneau is asleep. It’s cold. Châteaulin is asleep. The wheels of 100 bicycles crunch over the ground.”

 

By Quimper, though, the crowds were once again out to greet the passage of the men of the Tour. Londres used a comment from a local to draw attention to the poor pay earned by the racers, a theme he would soon be returning to:

One Breton, thrilled by the sight of them, said: ‘It’s sad. We lay out 250,000 francs on a horse for a 2 ½ minute race and men who work a lot harder than any horse get chicken feed.'”

 

While much of Londres’ reporting can correctly be classed as colour, painting the broad picture around the race more so than the picture of the race itself, he does occasionally comment on some of the racing action:

Ottavio Bottecchia

 

We pass a wild beast at the side of the road, ferociously devouring rubber. It’s the maillot jaune, Bottecchia. He’s punctured. To get the tyre off more quickly he’s tearing at it with his bare teeth. [Peugeot’s Romain] Bellenger remounts after puncturing. He calls out as he goes past: ‘They’re blowing it apart at the front.’ It’s [Peugeot’s Philippe] Thys shaking things up. He escapes with two accomplices. Frantz and [Jean] Archelais riding elbow to elbow. A touch of drama. Frantz has been instructed to keep the tempo high. I don’t really know why Archelais is here. He’s a shadow man [a touriste routier], a rider without a stable, riding for himself since the start, no manager, no thighs, no calves, no nothing. At the finish of each stage he’s in such distress he weeps like a child, but he’s always in at the finish with the ‘aces.’ You feel like giving him a push on the bike, whereas Frantz is brutally strong. If Frantz dared to say ‘I’m tired’ the telegraph wires by the road would convulse with laughter. Result? We wouldn’t be able to telegraph our reports through from Brest to Nantes.”

The next day’s racing, the fifth stage and the second Monday of the Tour, saw the peloton riding a mammoth 482 kilometres from Les Sables d’Olonne to Bayonne, more than nineteen hours in the saddle. Omer Huyse (Lapize) slipped away from the peloton, taking the stage with an advantage of 1’11” over the group behind, which was led home by Bottecchia. Beeckman, who had started the day second overall, slipped down the rankings. Hector Tiberghien (Peugeot) and Giovanni Brunero were now in second, tied on time. For the Legnano rider, Brunero, this was a bonus, he having been one of the riders to miss the Giro earlier in the year, either in the dispute over appearance fees or to save himself for the Tour, choose for yourself whichever you think the more likely. A good ride in France would more than make up for shunning his home Tour.

The 1924 Tour entered the Pyrénées on Wednesday July 2nd. A 326 kilometre haul from Bayonne to Luchon, taking in the Col d’Aubisque (1,709m), the Col du Tourmalet (2,115m), the Col d’Aspin (1,489m), and the Col de Peyresourde (1,569m). It was here that Bottecchia put his rivals to the sword and won the Tour de France. The Italian ace led the race over all four climbs and arrived into Luchon 18’58” ahead of his Automoto team-mate Lucien Buysse bagging another three minutes in bonifications to cushion his lead. Buysse leaped up to second overall in the race, 30’21” down on his team-mate. Third in GC, 42’185″ behind Bottecchia, was Nicolas Frantz, who finished the stage in fourth, two minutes behind his Alcyon team-mate Louis Mottiat and 35’34” behind Bottecchia.

Bottecchia leading the peloton, Tour de France 1924

The next day’s racing, Friday, saw the Tour tackle another four Pyrénean climbs: the Col des Ares (797m), the Portet d’Aspet (1,069m), the Col de Port (1,249m), and the Puymorens (1,915m). Buysse led the race over the Ares, Beeckman over the Portet d’Aspet, Bottecchia and Arsène Alancourt (Armor) crossed the Port together, while Thys led over the last of the Pyrénean summits, the Puymorens. Racing into Perpignan, 323 kilometres after leaving Luchon behind them, Bottecchia, Thys, and Alancourt were 3’48” clear of a group of five, Bottecchia taking his third stage on the Tour and another three minutes in bonifications. Frantz, who finished first in that chasing group of five, moved up to second overall, with the third place now held by Marcel Huot, 55’54” behind Bottecchia. Bottecchia’s team-mate, Buysse, who’d started the day second and led the race over the first climb, finished more than half an hour down on the day. Exiting the Pyrénées, only 20 of the 46 first class riders were left in the Tour.

With now two weeks of racing under their wheels the peloton started into week three of the race, Sunday’s stage eight serving up a testing 427 kilometres from Perpignan to Toulon. Alcyon’s Louis Mottiat led the race home on his own, 2’25” ahead of Giovanni Brunero and 4’21” ahead of Bottecchia. The Italian Automoto rider now had a 50’56” lead over Frantz, with Brunero taking third place on GC, 58’32 behind his compatriot.

At Toulon, the Pyrénées behind the peloton, Londres’ report concentrated on the role of Alphonse Baugé, the directeur sportif of La Sportive:

“The Marshal is Alphonse Baugé. He is commander in chief of racing cyclists … those of the Tour de France, those of the Six Days, those of the classics, road-riders and track cyclists. Alphonse Baugé leads French cycling. He is the only man who, nowadays, I think is capable of accomplishing a miracle. He could mount a boy on a bicycle that had neither saddle nor handlebars! Alphonse Baugé will one day be canonized!

“His uniform is dark blue and cut in the form pyjamas, a red woollen braid borders the jacket. Baugé is particularly recognizable by his toothy smile, like the actor Mistinguett. He follows the race in a closed car, and it s not just the car that is closed, but also his mouth.

“At the départ the secretary general secretary of the event sows shut his lips with brass wire. The other day, out of pity, I wanted to push a straw into the corner of his mouth and send him some air; he refused to let me do this: he’s a stickler for the regulations.

“At the arrivée, the secretary general takes from his pocket a pair of shears and cuts the brass wires. Then Baugé breathes three times, finds that his heart is still beating, pauses for thought and then seeks out the hotel of the riders.”

Good knock-about stuff from Londres there, a fun caricature of one of the true characters of French cycling. Londres here is, in some ways, using Baugé as a stand-in for Henri Desgrange, or the way cycling is run in general. Like Desgrange Baugé epitomised the authoritarian nature of the Tour and cycling in general. A former rider himself – he was French amateur national champion in 1896, the year of Teddy Hale’s win in the Madison Square Garden Six – Baugé covered the 1903 Tour as a journalist for L’Auto-Vélo‘s great rival, Le Vélo. When François Faber won the Tour in 1912 and 1914 for Peugeot it was with Baugé as his directeur sportif.

Londres then reports an exchange of words he’d witnessed in Brest, at the end of the third stage. Baugé is talking to one of the riders, Joseph Curtel, who wanted to abandon the race, having only earned 650 francs in 1,200 kilometres of racing:

–         So it does not bother you, whether you sing at the Operá or at the Batignolles? [a music hall in Montmartre]?
–         In [a race at] Marseilles, I got 5,000 francs for 300 kilometres.
–         So, no, you’re not a great artist you only see yourself as a provincial baritone who plays comic scenes?
–         Hey! I prefer a hundred francs at the Batignolles to pennies at the Opéra!
–         So you have no pride? You have not even that? You do not think about the pride your elderly parents have in your?
–         Hey! My parents are not that old …
–         You do not want to know, your mind is closed. Here, I’ll take an example, you know Kubelik, the great violinist? Good! Do you think Kubelik would stop playing the violin if he got only 650 francs? No! Kubelik is an artist. Well! You too are an artist, an artist of the pedal. For the first time, you have the honour of riding the Tour de France, the beacon of cycling, and because of some story about 650 francs, you would let that go?
–         If I’m dying for 650 francs, how am I going to earn a living?
–         Well then, you’re just a labourer, a bungler of plaster, a bootblack, a dish washer. You do not understand the beauty of the handlebar. Do what you want … You disgust me …

A later exchange, from the fifth stage, the race readying itself for its assault on the Pyrénées, is next reported. Another rider was preparing to abandon when Baugé chimed in with his patented pep talk:

–         You’re going to abandon, you who have a system for the Pyrénées?
–         But I have no system for the Pyrénées, Mr. Baugé!
–         Yes you do have a system for the Pyrénées. You will abandon, you who everyone is expecting on the cols.
–         No, Mr Baugé, nobody is waiting for me on the cols.
–         Everyone is waiting for you, I tell you, you know that as well as I do, you whose ancient Pyrenean grandmother will offer you flowers at the summit of the Tourmalet!
–         I don’t give a fuck for flowers, Mr. Baugé! I tell you I have no tendons.
–         It’s not about the tendons.
–         With what will I push then?
–         Go to your masseur, he’ll make tendons for you. Listen, my boy, have you heart?
–         Yes, but I have no tendons.
–         Do not think about that, think about your success, your name in the big newspapers of Paris, the band who will welcome you at the station when you return home if you finish the Tour.
–         But, good Lord, Mr Baugé, I tell you …
–         Yes, you tell me that you have no tendons … that is understood … Well then! Become an undertaker and not a racing cyclist, you hear me, farewell!

And then in Luchon, after the first stage in the Pyrénées, Londres had witnessed yet another exchange of words between Baugé and a group of riders. The riders this time are questioning whether cycling is any kind of trade, when Baugé chips in:

 –        Do you believe it’s a trade?
–         It’s not a trade, it’s a mission.
–         [Henri Collé] Our mission is to be with our wives, and not to work like slaves rowing a galley.
–         Your wife is your bicycle.

Hector Tiberghien, the playboy of the peloton, interrupted Baugé to say that bikes and women had nothing in common but Baugé was in full flow, banging on:

 –         If it’s a trade, what a great trade! In what other trade would the whole of France spend a month crying out ‘Alavoine! Thys! Sellier! Mottiat! Bellenger! Jacquinot!’ and so on?
–         [Alavoine] When you’re puking your guts up that’s not going to make you stronger.
–         Here, take Bottecchia; do you suppose that, if Rockefeller had offered him fifty big ones at the top of the Tourmalet, Bottecchia would have quit? No. Because Bottecchia has an ideal.
–         Yes, to buy land in his native Italy to build a house, since he is a mason, and plant his spaghetti …
–         But no …
–         [Bottecchia] Yes, yes, it is so.

In Perpignan at the end of the following stage Baugé had commiserated with Robert Jacquinot (JB Louvet) and Félix Sellier (Alcyon), who had quit the race, complaining it was too tough:

 –         I understand that, my children, but know that there are no great riders without great suffering.

In Toulon the riders were complaining about crashes, particularly riders being taken down by cars following the race, when Baugé chipped in:

 –         My friends, I too have fallen, I too have been knocked down by cars. I am a child of the game, I know what it is. There are wooden cross in our business as in others. Do you know what I would do? I would read Duhmael’s Lives of the Martyrs. After that, you’ll have the courage for tomorrow’s stage. It is I who tells you this.
–         It is found in Toulon?
–         It is found everywhere
–         Well, we will buy it then …

* * * * *

From Toulon the peloton had 280 kilometres to cover before getting to the Côte d’Azur and finish of stage nine, in Nice. One of the stories of that stage concerns one of the shadow men, a touriste routier by the name of Jules Banino, a fifty-one-year-old policeman from Nice who, it is said, rode the Tour during his vacations. Roger Dries, in Le Tour de France de Chez Nous, offers this picture of Banino:

You saw him in all the sports events ever organised. There was a swimming meeting? He’d be the first to turn up, perched on his bike, and he’d dive into the sea and take part. A pole-climbing contest? Banino would be there. He once even took on the same wager as the Count of Monte Cristo, tying himself in a sack and being thrown into the Mediterranean, at Tabau-Capeu. He nearly drowned. He had to be pulled out in a hurry and was hardly breathing when they got to him.”

On the ride into Toulon, Banino – it’s reported – had been caught by the cut off and forced to leave the race. He decided to make the most of the rest day before setting off home for Nice. Banino just happened to set out for home an hour or two ahead of the peloton.

At some point after the stage got underway word reached the peloton that, somehow, a rider was ahead of them. The pace was ratcheted up and soon enough the headlights of the cars leading the way were illuminating the figure of a cyclist ahead. The peloton couldn’t work out what was going on, everyone was either present or accounted for: who was this rider up the road ahead of them? They chased hard to close in on Banino. When they finally closed in on him they demanded to know who he was and how’d he’d slipped ahead of them.

Banino gave them his story: that he was a touriste routier who was out of the race and just happened to be riding home along the same roads as the Tour. The stars were less than pleased with Banino’s story and the energy he’d caused them to waste. Bottecchia – it’s claimed – landed a thump on him. And then a few more. Other riders joined in the melee, including Peugeot’s Jean Alavoine. Alas for Banino, some fans of Alavoine were nearby and – without understanding what was really going on – decided their man must have been attacked and was simply defending himself. Acting first and thinking later, they leapt to his defence, joining in on the assault on Banino, beating him with sticks. (The fanaticism of some fans hasn’t changed down through years, though today they’re slow to reach for sticks and stones in defence of their idols. Tossing names at those who pick on their heroes is the best they can manage. Thank God.)

That’s the accepted version of the story of what happened on the road from Toulon to Nice, as it appears in various Tour texts. How true is it? For a copper, Banino seems to have been slow to press charges against those who assaulted in him. Certainly in the standard stories of Bottecchia’s life there’s no mention of the incident. And there’s one very big problem with this story: while Jules Banino did start the 1924 Tour de France, he was a DNF on the first stage. But this is what happens in cycling: stories get added to the legend, get repeated, become fact. And when the legend becomes true – such and such is the most tested rider in the peloton, such and such is the most successful directeur of all time – it is the legend that gets printed. Only sometimes do we bother to stop and check the legend against the facts.

A solo Bottecchia, Tour de France 1924

Whatever really happened on the roads between Toulon and Nice in July 1924, Thys and Bartolomeo Aymo (Legnano) slipped away from the peloton to finish first and second, Thys taking the stage and the bonifications. Six minutes behind them Alavoine led home Bottecchia, Brunero and Frantz, leaving the GC unchanged.

The Tour took another rest day as the riders gathered their breath before their assault on the Alps. In the previous year’s Tour Bottecchia had seemed to climb effortlessly until he came to the Col d’Izoard and its Casse Déserte. Would that again be the site of his downfall or was the Italian set to make history and become the first Italian to win the Tour de France?

Next: Into the Alps and on to Paris.

Londres with Ville and the Pélissier brothers in the café in Coutances

With rest days alternating with racing days, it was Thursday before the riders undertook the third stage of the Tour, 405 kilometres down the coast from Cherbourg to Brest. It should have been another innocuous stage, nothing save punctures or mishaps stopping the main contenders from all finishing together. It proved to be a lot more eventful than that.

Albert Londres’ report picks up the race just as dawn is breaking:

We were in Granville and six o’clock struck. The riders, suddenly, filed past. Immediately the crowd, sure of the situation, cried out:

– Henri! Francis!

Henri and Francis [Pélissier] weren’t with the rest. We waited. The two categories passed, the ‘shadow men’ passed – the ‘shadow men’ are the touristes-routiers, the little men with courage, who are not part of the rich teams of the cycle manufacturers – neither Henri nor Francis appeared.

The news came: the Pélissiers have abandoned. We returned to the Renault and, without pity for the tyres, returned to Cherbourg, The Pélissiers are well worth a set of tyres …”

As the defending champion, Henri Pélissier’s withdrawal from the Tour was definitely a story. But Pélissier was more than just another Tour winner: Pélissier was a star of the day who seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the Tour. He was also a man who spoke out against Henri Desgrange’s authoritarian streak.

Londres found the Pélissiers in a crowded bistro in Coutances, the Café de la Gare:

You had to make with the elbows to enter the bistro. The crowd was silent. They said nothing but watched, mouths agape, the back of the room. Three jerseys were installed in front of three bowls of chocolate. It is Henri and Francis, and the third is none other than the second, I mean [Maurice] Ville, who arrived second in Le Havre and Cherbourg.”

Londres joined the trio of Automoto riders and questioned them as to what had happened, putting his questions to Henri Pélissier:

– A whim?
– No, only we’re not dogs.
– What happened?
– A question of boots, or rather a question of jerseys! This morning, in Cherbourg, a commissaire approached me and, without saying anything to me, lifted my jersey. He wanted to be sure I wasn’t wearing two jerseys. What would you say, if I raised your waistcoat to see if you were wearing a white shirt? I didn’t like his manners, that’s all.
– Why would he want to see that you didn’t have two jerseys?
– I could have fifteen, but I’m not allowed leave with two and arrive with one.
– Why?
– That’s the rules. They don’t just treat riders like brutes, they want us to either freeze or suffocate. That too is part of sport, apparently. So I went to find Desgrange.

Pélissier then repeated his exchange of words with Desgrange:

– I’m not allowed to throw my jersey by the roadside then?
– No. You must not throw away anything belonging to the team.
– It’s not the team’s, it’s mine.
– I’m not discussing this on the road.
– If you won’t discuss it in the road, I’ll go back to bed.
– We’ll sort it out in Brest.
– At Brest, everything will be sorted, because I will have thrown in my hand.

And with that the defending champion threw in his hand and quit the 1924 Tour de France. Along with him went his brother, Francis, and their team-mate Maurice Ville, who was then sitting second overall. Ville was in real time actually faster than Bottecchia, but stuck in second by virtue of the bonifications picked up by Bottecchia on the opening stage. Francis Pélissier justified his quitting by saying he wasn’t feeling well, claiming an aching stomach. Ville claimed to have been suffering with his knees, that the Pélissiers had found him by the side of the road both knees seized up. Truth or fiction, no one knows. What we do know is that, especially back then, you didn’t abandon a race – especially one as grand as the Tour – without having a good excuse to hand to justify your withdrawal.

The reason that the commissaire, André Trialoux, had checked how many jerseys Henri Pélissier was wearing went back to the previous stage, two days earlier. On the road to Cherbourg Pélissier had dumped a jersey, in full view of Erberado Pavesi, direttore sportivo of the Italian Legnano team. With the stages starting between ten at night and six in the morning, riders would often start wearing extra clothing. Pavesi, who reported Pélissier to the race commissaires, was looking out for his own rider, Giovanni Brunero, winner of the 1922 Giro and one of the stars who boycotted the corsa rosa in the dispute over revenue sharing and appearance fees (or, more likely in Brunero’s case, to save himself for a tilt at the Tour).

The relevant rule – that a rider must finish with the same equipment he started with – had been introduced in 1920. You think Stephen Roche is nutso with some of the suggested rule changes he dreams of? The man is merely in touch with cycling’s past and the raft of daft rules that used to govern this sport.

In one of those strange twists of fate, it was the behaviour of Henri Pélissier that had caused Desgrange to introduce the rule about finishing with the same equipment you started with. He’d watched, aghast, as Pélissier prepared for a sprint finish one day, discarding not just spare food, but also spare tyres, his pump and repair tools, in the same way riders today empty their pockets and dump their bidons on the run in to the finish. Not good enough, decided Desgrange. Disrespectful, he argued. An insult to the sponsors, he claimed. Time for another rule change.

For a reporter who is commonly dismissed as having little or no grasp of cycling – usually by writers who go on to call him a muckraker for what he reported from that café in Coutances – Londres’s reports form the 1924 Tour display an astute understanding of cycling’s peculiar language, particularly in this next part of his report, where he borrows from the notion that a rider needs la tête et les jambes, the head and the legs, in order to win races:

The Pélissiers not only have legs, they have a head. And in that head they’ve got judgement.”

 

There then followed a description of the true hardship of racing in those days, as the two Pélissiers and Ville launched into a full description of just what it takes to tackle the grande boucle:

– [Henri Pélissier] You have no idea what the Tour de France is. It’s a Calvary. And more, the Way of the Cross had only fourteen stations, while ours has fifteen. We suffer from the départ to the arrivée. You want to see how we march? Here. This, that’s cocaine for the eyes, that’s chloroform for the gums.
– [Maurice Ville] This is ointment to warm my knees.
– [Henri Pélissier] And the pills? Would you like to see the pills? Look, here are the pills.
– [Francis Pélissier] In short, we march on dynamite.
– [Henri Pélissier] You should see the bath at the arrivée. You should pay for that session. The dirt removed, we’re white as shrouds, emptied by diarrhoea, we fall asleep in the water. At night, in our rooms, we dance the jig, like St Guy, instead of sleeping. Look at our shoelaces, they’re leather. They do not hold always, they break, and they are tanned hide, at least we think they are … Imagine what happens to our skin!
– [Francis Pélissier] The skin of our bodies, it’s can’t hold to our skeleton.
– [Henri Pélissier] And the toenails. I’ve lost six of ten, they die bit by bit every stage.
– [Francis Pélissier] But they grow back for the following year.

For most people today it is the drugs – the chloroform, the cocaine, the pills – which grab the attention in Londres’s report from Coutances. While doping was not banned in those days – it would take until the 1960s before the UCI were pushed into taking a stand on the subject – people still believed in the purity of athletic endeavour.

As early as 1865, a swimmer in an Amsterdam canal race had been expelled from the event for taking an unnamed performance-enhancing drug. The Jockey Club was ahead of the curve, banning the doping of horses as early as 1666 and actually carrying out tests since 1910. In 1894, a French sports physician, Philippe Tissié, performed the first scientific doping experiments using a racing cyclist whose performances could be timed and who could be primed with measured doses of alcohol and other stimulants.

In 1897 the British cycling authorities, the NCU, banned the trainer James ‘Choppy’ Warburton from their events because of his association with doping. Warburton was famous for his little black bag, depicted in a lithograph by Henri Toulouse Lautrec, from which he would theatrically produce magic potions for his riders. “If his charge showed any undue sign of distress, out came the black bottle, the contents of which seemed to act like magic on the distressed rider,” claimed the 1903 Cycling training manual. One of Warburton’s riders, Arthur Linton, died of typhoid fever a few months after finishing first in the Bordeaux-Paris race, in which it is alleged he had doped heavily. In a track event, another of his riders, Jimmy Michael, collapsed on the track, picked himself up and then, in a daze, set off in the wrong direction. It was that incident which lead to Warburton’s ban, but it is claimed that Michael may have been simulating his stupor in an attempt to extract himself from his contract with Warburton.

While the contents of Warburton’s little black bag may be doubted – the man was a showman who played to the gallery – there is no disputing the fact that doping was endemic in cycling, even then. Six Day racing in particular had become firmly associated with doping, as the authors of Foul Play (Drug Abuse in Sports) note:

The riders’ black coffee was ‘boosted’ with extra caffeine and peppermint, and as the race progressed the mixture was spiked with increasing doses of cocaine and strychnine. Brandy was also frequently added to cups of tea. Following the sprint sequences of the race, nitroglycerine capsules were often given to the cyclists to ease breathing difficulties. The individual Six Day races were eventually replaced by two-man races, but the doping continued unabated. Since drugs such as heroin or cocaine were widely taken in these tournaments without supervision, it was perhaps likely that fatalities would occur.”

Lucien Petit-Breton, who won the Tour de France in 1907 and 1908, was sufficiently shocked by the assertion that he had doped to issue the following proclamation:

It has been said that I owe my greatest victories to drugs. Allow me to contest these absurd rumours. Do you seriously think a man, however strong, could survive such treatment for twenty-eight days?”

 

In 1920, Henri Desgrange himself used the pages of l’Auto to complain about the problem of doping at the Tour de France:

Some of our riders think nothing of doping. We cannot reproach strongly enough similar procedures, which run so counter to our idea of sport. The vigour of our condemnation is aimed less at the riders who drug themselves than at the managers, and above all certain doctors who don’t hesitate before using such means. Those, like us, who would like our race to become magnificent will never accept such procedures.”

Quite what was doping was something people, even then, disagreed on. Some riders took a very strict view of what was and wasn’t morally acceptable, even arguing against the use of alcohol. A true hero, seemingly, should be able to complete the Tour on bread and water.

So while doping was not then the issue it is today, it wasn’t just ignored. Londres’ reporting of it did cause a fuss. But the true target of Londres’ reporting from the 1924 Tour was not doping itself. It was the suffering of the riders that Londres most wanted to expose. Just twenty-one years after the race had been launched, the Tour had already achieved mythic proportions. The nobility of men like Eugène Christophe had been championed by the press in France: not just in the pages of L’Auto, but also in other newspapers.

Years later, after Francis Pélissier had become directeur sportif at La Perle, he tried to distance himself from the doping exposed in Londres’ report, claiming that he, his brother Henri, and Maurice Ville had been pulling the leg of a credulous journalist who wasn’t a part of cycling’s family:

Londres was a famous reporter, but he didn’t know much about cycling. We kidded him a bit with our cocaine and our pills. Even so, the Tour de France in 1924 was no picnic.”

 

The final part of Londres’ report from the third stage of the 1924 Tour clearly demonstrates what his real target was. In it, the journalist quoted Henri Pélissier, who for a second time in his conversation with Londres, compared the treatment of the riders to that of dogs, using the name Azor, a sort of French form of Fido or Rover:

All that – you haven’t seen anything yet, wait for the Pyrénées, that’s hard labour – all that, we can accept. What you wouldn’t make mules do, we do. We’re not lazy, but in the name of God, don’t annoy us. We accept the torment, we don’t need the harassment! My name is Pélissier, not Azor! If I leave with a newspaper up my jersey I must finish with it. If I throw it away, penalty! When we’re dying of thirst, before we fill our bidon with water from the pump, we must check that no one, fifty metres away, is working the pump. Or else, penalty. To drink, you must work the pump yourself. A day will come when they put lead in our pockets, because someone will discover that God made man too light. If it continues on this path, there’ll be nothing but plenty of tramps and no artists. Sport has gone mad …

All those who reduce Londres’ report – not just of that one day in Coutances, but of the whole of the 1924 Tour – to a few lines about doping do the man a disservice. He wasn’t there to condemn the riders for failing to live up to the ideal of pure sport: he was condemning a sport – and the Tour in particular – that was inhumane and itself caused doping. Londres was a champion of the underdog, as his reports from China, from Russia, from the Balkans all prove, and in the riders of the Tour de France he saw a group of men who were being exploited in the name of sport. Acknowledging that, though, requires us to accept our own complicity, even today, in their exploitation. Something we don’t really want to do.

* * * * *

There is another aspect of the reporting of that day in Coutances that intrigues me: the excuses offered for why Pélissier really abandoned. One of the issues that interests me about the manner in which many write of the 1924 Tour is the excuses offered for Pélissier’s withdrawal. Somewhere along the way, an odd notion has entered the Tour’s mythology: that Pélissier’s withdrawal was really a protest against the high number of riders who’d withdrawn early in the race. This is something that’s worth looking at in some detail.

The post-War Tours had a remarkably stable formula, with the same stages – more or less – each year. Apart from a little bit of flexing between the Pyrénées and the Alps, the Tour’s route was unchanging. Toulon replaced Aix en Provence which itself had replaced Marseille. Briançon replaced Grenoble. Gex replaced Genève. But the stage distances didn’t change materially. The real changes were in the mountains which cols were in and which were out. This consistency in the parcours enables us to compare the rate of attrition in 1924 with previous years, on a stage-by-stage basis:

What we see here is that the 1924 Tour had the highest number of starters since the war (it was actually highest in the Tour’s history and, while it was surpassed in 1928, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Tour was consistently starting with more riders). It also had the highest number of finishers since the war (it was the 1950s before that number was surpassed and the Tour was consistently finishing with more riders). The notion that it was the Tour of Suffering – and not just another Tour of Suffering – doesn’t really stack up.

While the rate of attrition in the first three stages was high when compared with the previous year, it was better than in the years before that. The notion then that Pélissier pulled out in protest at the severity of the opening stages of the race does look rather silly. Those who defend this notion though would no doubt point out that Pélissier was a silly person.

Given that the stages themselves were more or less the same as in previous years, one possible excuse for so many abandoning so early is that the quality of the entrants simply wasn’t all that good. Try another set of stats:

While the Tour was attracting a higher quality field each year – with more riders in the Premier Class – the real increase in participants was coming from the cannon fodder, the second class teams and the independent riders.

Let’s try one more set of stats then to see what the rate of attrition was like among the first class riders, the men Pélissier was really going wheel to wheel with:

Overall, the rate of attrition among the Premiere Class riders was quite high in 1924. But at the point Pélissier pulled out – during stage 3, Cherbourg to Brest – it wasn’t particularly noteworthy. You can understand the manner in which the commentariat got into a tizz during the 2011 Tour, when so many big name riders dropped out so early in the race, but this wasn’t happening in 1924. All that was happening was that the wheat was getting separated from the chaff by monstrously long stages.

And this is what Pélissier was really in dispute with Desgrange over. Pélissier simply didn’t like the Tour. He saw it as a race for cart-horses, and he saw himself as a thoroughbred. The Tour was a race which rewarded endurance, not skill. Pélissier wanted to see shorter stages, arguing that this would produce better racing. The best Desgrange could do to improve the quality of the racing was to offer bonifications.

Pélissier’s Tour record is worth considering:

In 1919, he abandoned after an argument with Desgrange over a glass of wine. In 1920, he left the Tour when penalised for throwing away a tyre. The next two years he didn’t even bother starting the Tour, but in 1923, having switched to Automoto, his sponsor insisted he ride it. He won. A year later, Automoto again required his presence at the Tour, and this time the excuse to abandon was that argument over a jersey. It almost seems like Pélissier was just looking for an excuse to give up and go home.

But you have to look beyond the Tour de France. Pélissier was a formidable rider. Consider his palmarès:

Desgrange himself put it most clearly: “Pélissier can win any race except the Tour.” Pélissier’s failures at the Tour were, for Desgrange, easily explained: “Henri Pélissier is saturated with class but he does not know how to suffer.” I’m not sure it’s fair to say Pélissier didn’t know how to suffer: he did after all win Bordeaux-Paris. Pélissier’s real problem was that he was headstrong. Desgrange called him “this pigheadedly arrogant champion.” But it’s Oscar Egg, one of the great Hour-men of our sport, a man who traded Hour records with Marcel Berthet before the war, who made what seems like one of the best assessments of Pélissier:

I don’t agree with those who said that he was a master tactician. He had an instinct for racing but if he’d been able to master his reflexes, keep control of the way he reacted, he would have been a phenomenal champion thanks to the extraordinary talent that he had.”

* * * * *

The actual racing that day was as predictable as it was assumed it would be, the bunch finishing en masse. There’d been punctures aplenty, Bottecchia himself flatting, but none of the major riders lost time switching tyres. In the sprint for the finish Théophile Beeckman was first across the line and bagged the bonifications. There was a minor controversy, when Philippe Thys, who had been out-sprinted by Beeckman, complained that the commissaires had failed to ring the bell signifying the final lap of the vélodrome finish. It was Beeckman though who picked up the three minutes in time bonuses and, having finished alongside Bottecchia in the previous two stages, this now put him level with the maillot jaune, which stayed on Bottecchia’s back. Nicolas Frantz stayed in third, 2’36” off Bottecchia’s pace.

Next: The 1924 Tour continues.

Pick up any Tour guide – you’re spoiled for choice, the bookshop shelves creak under the weight of Tour-centric texts – and you’ll typically find the 1924 Tour reduced to two stories: les forçats de la route and the short life and mysterious death of Ottavio Bottecchia.

Les forçats de la route is where, for me, this look at the 1924 cycling season started. Albert Londres had covered the whole of the 1924 Tour, yet just about all most of us know of those reports is that one story, that day in the Café de Gare in Coutance when Henri and Francis Pélissier, along with their team-mate Maurice Ville, spat on the soup and showed Albert Londres just what it took to ride the Tour de France. Yes, it was an important story. But what of what else Londres wrote, what did his other reports from the 1914 Tour have to say?

Albert Londres

Those other reports appeared in Le Petite Parisien over the course of the Tour. Today they would be described as colour pieces, supplemental reports which give colour and depth to the basic story of what happened as the peloton raced between A and B. Anyone reading Londres’ reports would already have been familiar with what was actually happening in the race. Disconnected from the actual race, Londres reports lose something (similar to the way books like Bradley Wiggins’ On Tour or Nicolas Roche’s Inside The Peloton lose something). So it became necessary to read, alongside Londres’ reports, an account of what happened in the 1924 Tour. That, somehow, then led me to looking at what else was happening in the world of cycling in 1924.

Some people tend to get a little bit sniffy when it comes to Albert Londres and his Tour articles for Le Petite Parisien. Londres was an outsider, what could he possibly know of our sport? Our sport is far too complex for outsiders to properly understand. Some people really do need a slap around the head with a rolled up newspaper. The whole point of getting outsiders to look at our sport is so that we can see it as others see it.

More importantly, Londres was far from ignorant when it came to cycling. He was far from ignorant when it came to most of the subjects he reported. He was, in today’s parlance, a crusading, investigative reporter. And that – by 1924 – had earned him a considerable reputation in France. Each of his major investigations for Le Petit Parisien was published in book form. In 1920 there had been Dans La Russie Des Soviets, Londres’ look at Russia after the October Revolution. Then came his most famous work, Au Bagne, an investigation into the French penal colonies in Cayenne and in Guyana (in the latter, the Iles de Salut, which encompassed Devil’s Island). The story Londres told shocked a French nation which thought itself civilised.

The same year that Londres reported on the Tour de France he published Dante N’Avait Rien Vu. Its title – Dante saw nothing – suggested that French military battalions in North Africa were even worse than any of the circles of hell depicted in Dante’s Inferno. And, before turning his attention to the Tour de France, Londres had already written Chez Les Fous, an investigation into conditions in French mental institutions. To cover this story Londres had had himself incarcerated in one such asylum in order to tell his story properly.

How true, then, were Londres’ reports from the 1924 Tour? The easiest way to answer that is to show by example. And in order to do so, we need to look at the 1924 Tour.

By 1924, Henri Desgrange’s Tour de France had established itself in the minds of the French public and the shape and structure of the race was pretty firmly fixed. Starting in Paris it headed west and then south in an anti-clockwise circuit of the hexagon, taking in the Pyrénées and then the Alps. As with the Giro d’Italia, racing days alternated with rest days.

Officially, 182 riders were entered for the 1924 Tour, of whom 157 actually took the start. The Tour back then had three categories of riders: premier, deuxime and touristes-routiers. The first two were the hard-core pros, allied to trade teams of different sizes. The touristes-routiers were the isoles of old, the independent riders who looked after themselves as they trundled around France.

Among the starters at the 1924 Tour were five former winners of the grande boucle: Henri Pélissier (1923), Firmin Lambot (1919 and 1922), Léon Scieur (1921), Philippe Thys (1913, 1914 and 1920), and Odile Defraye (1912). (And, in that 1924 Tour, taking the line were three men – Ottavio Bottecchia, Lucien Buysse and Nicolas Frantz – who, between them, would win the next five Tours. Think about that a moment: a Tour with eight past and future Tour winners in it.) The big buckle was also playing host to a couple of champions of the corsa rosa: Giovanni Brunero (1921 and 1922) and Giuesppe Enrici (1924). Yes, the just-crowned Giro champion was riding his second Grand Tour of the year, with just three weeks between the end of one and the start of the other.

That someone should ride both Grand Tours was not particularly unusual. Alongside Enrici in the 1924 Tour were his Legnano team-mates Bartolomeo Aymo, Arturio Ferrario, and Ermanno Vallazza, who had all started the Giro with him. And there were also the likes of Gianbattista Gilli, Ottavio Pratesi (Ostende), Giovanni Rossignoli, Enrico Sala (Ganna), and Luigi Ugaglia, who had also all started the Giro.

How unusual was it for a just-crowned Giro winner to take on the Tour? We know that it wasn’t until the arrival of Fausto Coppi that the Giro-Tour double was pulled off. But, before 1949, how many times had that even been a possible outcome, how many times had a just-crowned winner at the Giro turned up for the Tour?

Luigi Ganna started the Tour in 1909, but abandoned on the third stage. In 1919, Costante Girardengo had been entered in the Tour, but didn’t take the start. Gaetano Belloni took the start in 1920 but didn’t finish the first stage. And that was it. So Enrici’s participation was quite unusual.

Post-1924 – and before Coppi in 1949 – four just-crowned Giro winners tackled the Tour: Francesco Camusso in 1931 (DNS stage 10); Antonio Pesenti in 1932 (who was the first reigning Giro champion to finish the Tour, ending the race just off the podium, in fourth, and with one stage victory to his name); Vasco Bergamaschi in 1935 (DNF stage 15, after winning one stage); and Gino Bartali in 1937 (DNF stage 12a, having won one stage and held the maillot jaune for two stages). All of which – for me at least – helps add perspective to Coppi’s 1949 Giro-Tour double: before him, only seven had tried, of whom only three had even won stages and only one had managed to lead the race. Coppi’s achievement – the stage wins  as well as the overall victory – really did rewrite the history books. (If you want to know how often the Giro-Tour double was even a possibility after Coppi, ask a statto.)

* * * * *

One of the biggest oddities about cycling in those days was start times. Organisers usually wanted their races to finish in the mid-afternoon: fans would be on hand and journalists would have enough time to write their story up, briefly for an evening edition, in more detail for the morning edition. Start time, then, was based on desired end time, taking into account stage duration. With stages running three and four hundred kilometres, start times were early. Very early. Throughout the 1924 Tour they ranged between ten at night and six in the morning.

So it was that the 1924 Tour rolled off from Luna Park in Paris at a quarter to one in the morning of Sunday, June 22nd. The first hour and a quarter of the 381 kilometre haul west to Le Havre was neutralised, the real race not commencing until two o’clock, when the riders reached Argenteuil.

Londres opened his report of the first stage with a scene from Porte Maillot, on the western outskirts of Paris, 11.30 at night and riders still in restaurants, their last supper before setting out on the Tour de France. Londres’ impression is of a Venetian festival, the riders’ jerseys making them seem to him like festive lanterns. A last drink and the riders leave, cheered off by a crowd of onlookers. And this is what Londres finds most striking about the Tour’s start: the crowds cheering it on its way. Here he is just after the off:

For my part, I took, at one in the morning, the road to Argenteuil. Respectable gentlemen and ladies were pedalling through the night: I would never have supposed there were so many bicycles in the département of the Seine.”

 

When the riders arrive in Argenteuil, night seems to become day:

Then, the suburb came alive: the windows came alive with spectators dressed for bed, people crowded the crossroads impatiently, old women, who normally take their sleep with the sun, waited in front of their doors, sat on chairs, and if I didn’t see infants on the tit, it’s most likely that the night hid them from me.”

Shortly after the off Londres comes across a rider on the pavement, fixing a puncture. He stops to chat, when from behind suddenly comes a volley of insults. Quickly Londres realises he is the target: his Renault is blocking the road, and behind him is a passionate throng of people trying to follow the race.

An hour later – the time now about 3.30 – and the road is travelling through a forest, the passage lit by braziers on either side of the road, reminding Londres of tribes watching for the presence of a lion. Londres espies among the onlookers a couple dressed for the Opéra. These were Parisians, awaiting the passage of les géants de la route.

Day breaks and it is clear that, on this night, the people of France haven’t slept a wink. The entire province stands at its doorways, hair in curlers.”

 

Riders have been falling by the wayside, suffering punctures, already suffering stomach cramps. Then Londres comes to a level crossing which splits the peloton: five riders who missed the break slip beneath the barrier just as the train arrives, crossing ahead of it and then pedalling off into the waking day.

The towns roll by. Montdidier, Berthacourt, Flixecourt, Amiens. More crowds cheering:

–         Vas-y, Henri!.. Vas-y, Francis!

–         Vas-y, gars Jean!

–         Vas-y, Ottavio!

–         Thys! Thys! Hardy!

–         Vas-y, ‘la pomme!’

Henri and Francis are the Pélissiers. The boy Jean is Alavoine (brother to Henri, one of the many cyclists to die during the Great War). Ottavio is Bottecchia. Thys and Hardy are Phillipe Thys and Emile Hardy, two Belgians. And la pomme, the apple, is Eugène Dhers.

Onwards. Abbeville. Le Tréport, Dieppe, Fécamp. Finally, Le Havre. Fifteen hours after leaving Paris. Twenty riders sprinting for the bonifications. Bottecchia takes the stage, the three minute time bonus and the first maillot jaune, ahead of his Automoto team-mate, Maurice Ville. (Bonifications had been introduced the year before, then at two minutes per stage for the first rider home, to spice up dull stage finishes. So impressed with them was Desgrange that, for 1924, he increased the bonus to three minutes.) Five hours after Bottecchia et al, the last rider rolled in. Twenty riders already eliminated, 381 kilometres down, 5,044 to go.

After a rest day in Le Havre, the riders set out for the second stage, 371 kilometres from Le Havre of Cherbourg, again getting underway in the black of night. Coming into Cherbourg a group of six riders got a twenty-four second advantage on the peloton and Peugeot’s Romain Bellenger took the stage (and the bonifications) ahead of Ville and Frantz. Bellenger had lost time on the first stage – he was in the chase group, three minutes down on the bunch – and, though Bottecchia finished in the main group, twenty-four seconds down on the day, the Italian still held onto his maillot jaune, his three minute advantage over Ville whittled down to 2’36”. Another 371 kilometres down, 4,673 remaining, 125 riders left to ride them.

Next: Coutances.