Wiggins has certainly enjoyed his red carpet ride around France, courtesy of Froome and the rest of Sky’s serfs (photo courtesy of ITV)

“I’ve always been someone who wishes to move on to new challenges. Now that I’ve conquered my first Tour de France it’s time to attempt a feat that has only been accomplished three times in the history of the Tour. I want to wear yellow from the prologue all the way to the Champs-Elysées next year,” declared Wiggins.

As an avid student of cycling history, Wiggins stumbled upon the legend of Ottavio Bottecchia – the first person to wear the yellow jersey from start to finish as winner of the 1924 Tour – via a conversation with famed Scottish cycling journalist, Richard Moore. Moore was turned on to the story of Bottecchia by Herbie Sykes over an espresso in 2006 during a very animated Giro d’Italia.

“I know that I’ve promised Chris (Froome) that he could have a shot at the Tour in 2013 and that I’d support him, but I think my goals are more important than his. After all, I’m higher on the seniority scale in GB Cycling and I don’t feel I’ve reached my peak yet,” continued Wiggins. “I think I have a chance at equalling a feat only done three times in Tour history, and one that hasn’t been accomplished since 1935.”

Team Sky boss David Brailsford confirmed his support for Wiggins in his plan for 2013.

“Considering that Brad and Fabian were the only two to wear the yellow jersey in the entire 2012 Tour, and the fact that we pretty much intimidated every single team in this race, it is distinctly possible that Brad could wear yellow from start to finish in 2013. No one can match our team strength on any stage on any day,” mused Brailsford.

Eurosport cycling pundit David Harmon concurred with Brailsford.

“Until the rest of the peloton grows a backbone, or Contador stays out of doping troubles, cycling is Wiggins’ domain to plunder as he wishes. He rides on the front for the sprints, and otherwise sits third wheel the entire race. He is a throwback to the great Kings and Queens of England. He truly is the king of cycling, no offense to Mark Cavendish or Sir Chris Hoy,” declared Harmon.

Former Tour de France champion Greg LeMond weighed in with his thoughts.

“Wiggins could lead the race, but only if Team Sky buys Alberto Contador’s and Andy Schleck’s contracts to sit them out of the Tour de France for the rest of their careers, or have them ride the front in support of Wiggins like they forced Froome to do this year. It’s what Hinault did, and also wanted to do to me back in the 80s,” stated LeMond.

When asked about Wiggins’ statement, Chris Froome refused to comment directly.

“We’ll start with the Vuelta and the Olympics, and see what happens from there. Anything is possible for 2013,” said a muted Froome.

Stage 19 is Saturday, which should be the 53.5 km time trial coronation of Wiggins into his role as King of the Tour de France.

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.

* * * * *

In 1930, a non-appearance fee was paid by the Giro organisers. Alfredo Binda had by then established a stranglehold on the corsa rosa, winning in 1925, 1927, 1928 and 1929, in all of them riding for Legnano. It wasn’t just that Binda kept winning, it was the manner of his victories. In 1927 he had won twelve of the fifteen stages, in 1928 seven of twelve and 1929 nine of fourteen. In all, that’s thirty-three out of forty-one stages in three years. Giro boss Emilio Colombo was getting more than a little bit bored by il campionissimo. More to the point, La Gazzetta dello Sport‘s readers were getting bored by il campionissimo: circulation was down. So a plan was hatched between Colombo and his sidekick Armando Cougnet on one side and Legnano owner Emilio Bozzi and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi, on the other: Binda would be politely asked to bugger off.

Alfredo Binda (Source: Cycling Hall of Fame)

Bozzi was willing to play ball because Binda taking a dive made commercial sense: another Binda victory wasn’t go to help sell many more bikes. But, at the same time, Bozzi didn’t want to simply surrender and allow Maino or Atala or Bianchi to step in and bag an easy victory. Here Pavesi came to Bozzi’s assistance, promising that he had a talented young rider waiting in the wings who could, quite possibly, profit from the absence of Binda. Pavesi was also concerned that Binda was having life just a little too easy, and had stopped taking cycling as seriously as he should be (or, at least, as seriously as Pavesi thought he should be).

With everyone else on board, it was time to pitch the deal to Binda. He listened to what was being told to him. And he agreed that yes, he was strangling the Giro and that yes, that was unfortunate. It would be best if he stayed away. You can imagine the sigh of relief this must have elicited. Only then Binda delivered an upper cut of sheer elegance. He demanded that, if Colombo really wanted him to stay away, he’d have to pay a non-appearance fee: the equivalent of the first prize, plus six stage wins, plus the bonus Bozzi would have had to pay him if he won. All in, the thick end of 22,500 lire. And even there, Binda claimed, he was being exceedingly generous, as failure to win the Giro would cost him a packet on the post-Giro critérium circuit (even then, riders needed the appearance fees paid on the critérium circuit). Colombo swallowed hard but saw he had little or no choice in the matter. The deal was done. Colombo, having stared down the demands for appearance fees in 1924, caved to the demand for a non-appearance fee. Once again commerce triumphed principles.

At which point appearance fees re-enter this story. Up to now Binda hadn’t taken a tilt at the Tour de France, preferring the Giro. It is said that the reason for this was that Legnano had no business interests in France, but this isn’t entirely true: they were there in force in 1924, and Ottavio Bottecchia’s two victories for Automoto demonstrate clearly that the Italian media gave the French Tour ample coverage, so long as one of their own was winning. The main reason Binda hadn’t bothered with the Tour is more likely to have something to do with that post-Giro critérium circuit; having won the corsa rosa and then filled his boots with the round-the-houses races and track appearances, it’s highly unlikely he was ever in much of a state to tackle the Tour. The fact is, few Giro winners had the legs to tackle the Tour, as we’ll see when we come to look at the 1924 Tour itself, which was graced by the presence of the reigning Giro champion Giuseppe Enrici.

The post-Giro critériums sapping Binda’s strength would not, of course, be the case in 1930. So with Binda now sitting out the Giro, and the Tour having just switched to national team format, Henri Desgrange – it’s claimed – saw an opportunity to get the best Italian rider of the day riding in his race. He offered Binda a generous appearance fee to ride the Tour.

It’s said by some that the reason Binda eventually pulled out of the Tour, ten stages in, eleven stages to go, is that he’d bled Desgrange dry and there was simply no more money to pay him to continue. If you look, though, at the 1930 Tour, you see a possible alternative reason: alongside Binda on the Italian team was Maino’s Learco Guerra, a rising star. When the Italian squadra snatched the maillot jaune on the second stage of the race, it was Guerra who wore it, not Binda, who was twelve seconds off yellow and in third place. The hills were yet to come and he was more than capable of clawing back time once the road went upwards. So Binda had nothing to worry about. Until he lost more than an hour after suffering a major mechanical on the road from Bordeaux to Hendaye, just before the race reached the mountains. That was his race for yellow done for. Time for him to turn to consolation prizes.

The next day, Hendaye into Pau, the campionissimo took the stage win. The same again the day after, Pau to Luchon. And on the third day – Luchon to Perpignan – he retired from the race, with his compatriot Guerra having finally surrendered the maillot jaune and eleven minutes to André Leducq. When the race made it back to Paris, Guerra was just fourteen minutes off Leducq’s pace, and stood standing on the second step of the podium.

It took a lot of spinning to explain Binda’s abandonment of the race, especially with his teammate in yellow and in need of support. Hence, perhaps, the legendary stories of Binda having bled Desgrange dry. The Italian cycling federation tried to claim that their campionissimo was saving himself for the Worlds (which, in fairness, he did go on to win). But many, many years later Binda finally offered his own reason: Colombo had welshed on the Giro deal and the agreed 22,500 lire non-appearance fee had failed to materialise. Even so, Binda was still proud of his ‘victory’ in that 1930 Giro, as he explained to Pierre Chany:

It was my best Giro. I didn’t just get the prizes without riding, but I took up about ten contracts on the track in France, Germany and Belgium. The records say I won the Giro five times, but I consider that I won it five and a half times.”

The appearance fees issue was put to rest – sort of – after the war, with the establishment of the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo, a precursor of the old Super Prestige Pernod trophy and today’s World Tour. To encourage the big teams to send their best riders to all the races making up the season-long competition, the organising journals – L’Équipe in France, La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy and Les Sports and Sportwereld-Het Nieusblad in Belgium – dangled the carrot of generous travelling expenses under the noses of the teams. Today, Pro Teams in the World Tour races are guaranteed a minimum appearance fee of €7,500 each, with the ASO raising that to €51,443 at the Tour de France. The teams don’t think it’s enough and – as in 1924 – are still agitating for more.

The deal hammered out for the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo races clearly wasn’t the end of the issue. The Tour de France may have been able to attract the cream of the peloton, but the two other Grand Tours – the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia – suffered a little in the shadow of other races, especially the Tour. Too often the Giro was used just as a training ride for the Tour, no more important – for some riders – than the Tour de Romandie which itself served as a leg-loosener for the Giro. So sometimes the Giro organisers had to take out the cheque-book and entice the best riders to put in an appearance.

Appearance fees weren’t the only thing that had the Giro organisers reaching for their cheque-book. Sometimes certain riders – certain Italian riders – needed a little bit of help when it came to ensuring that the maglia rosa stayed in Italy. The stories here are legion, although the facts supporting them are few. But it does seem that the Giro organisers paid for the right result on several occasions. (And sometimes they didn’t even pay, they just helped in other ways, such as cancelling stages and turning a blind eye to infringements of the rules.)

Other times, extra money was spent to liven a race up: consider, for instance, the 100,000 wager La Gazzetta‘s Rino Negri had with Roger de Vlaeminck over how many stages he could win at the 1975 Giro. And, of course, the issue of disappearance fees was also on the agenda that year. When Eddy Merckx‘s Molteni squad was pulled from the 1975 corsa rosa just before the start, the official reason given was that Merckx had taken ill at the Tour of Romandie. Some suspected that Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa, had paid the Belgian off. Italy, at this stage, was so bored with the Cannibal’s reign of terror in the Giro – five victories, plus that near victory in 1969 – that RAI had stopped covering the race live. With Merckx gone and Torriani delivering a corker of a race in 1975, RAI returned to the corsa rosa the following year. Whatever money Torriani had spent on that 1975 Giro, it was a wise investment.

Chucking out money to the odd team or rider here or there was relatively easy to do. Paying off everyone in the race is of a different order of magnitude. Especially given the precarious financial position of the Giro and of its organising journal, La Gazzetta dello Sport. Which, in 1977, was taken over by the RCS group. One of the grand ironies of this take-over was that La Gazzetta was now part of a stable of newspapers that included the Corriere della Sera, that newspaper whose guns La Gazzetta had spiked back in 1908 with their pre-emotive announcement of the Giro d’Italia. And the paper to which La Gazzetta had needed to go cap in hand in order to ensure they had sufficient finances to actually run the inaugural Giro in 1909.

The RCS group had started life in the 1920s when Angelo Rizzoli created a small publishing company, Rizzoli & Co, later to become Rizzoli Editore. In 1974 Rizzoli took over Corriere della Sera and the newly-merged company became Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera. By the end of the seventies, with La Gazzetta now part of the company’s publishing empire, the future should have been bright for RCS.

Things went tits up for RCS in the eighties when they found themselves caught up in the Banco Ambrosiano and the P2 scandals and – in 1982 – went in and out of bankruptcy. The 1982 Giro itself was very nearly cancelled. Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa,  had to stand personal guarantor of its debts. Torriani was by now into his sixties and had been running the Giro for three decades. He certainly didn’t need the headache, but he wasn’t going to sit back and watch his race – and it would be fair, at this stage, to call it his race – to be ruined by the financial incompetence of others. Knowing his own shortcomings, Torriani called in a man to do the jobs he himself couldn’t do. That man was Carmine Castellano and, together with Torriani, he set about saving the corsa rosa.

The Giro was saved, in the end, by the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry. Well, the American Coca-Cola corporation, which stepped up to the plate. It wasn’t their black gold that the men from Atlanta showered on the Giro, it was one of their other brands, Sprite (about to be launched in Italy), which became the drink that saved the Giro. (If you think that Coke entered cycling when their bidons began appearing at the Tour de France after 1985, think again. You can even date Coke’s interest in cycling to earlier than 1982: back in 1968 it was their money which had been used in one of the failed attempts to get a young Eddy Merckx to ride the Tour.)

Scroll forward to 2000. In the post-Festina years the Giro suffered heavily from an association with doping, not just through stars like Marco Pantani being laid low by controversy, but also through the Italian judicial authorities making their presence felt at the Giro, raiding hotel rooms and tickling collars with alarming regularity. You would imagine that the teams had enough on their plates at the time but – surprisingly – revenue sharing was again high on their agenda. A group of teams – through the Assogruppi, the Association of Italian Sporting Groups, headed by Moreno Argentin – demanded a share of the Giro’s TV and merchandising revenues. And they figured they knew just what it would take to grab the race organiser’s attention: strike!

Rather than boycotting the race itself – clearly someone had learned a lesson from the 1924 Giro – this time the Italian teams decided they would refuse to participate in their media duties: post-race interviews and podium ceremonies were to be boycotted. Nor would they wear any of the race leader’s jerseys, including the maglia rosa. This they announced on the eighth stage. Moreno Argentin made his position clear:

They are prepared to talk […] but they never talk of the congestion of television rights and advertising. They want to see how strong we are. This is the only sport in the world in which ninety-five percent of the costs are covered by sponsors and five percent by television rights. Riders are paid by us and without riders, there would be no cycling.”

On the tenth stage of the race the Assogruppi took action. Stage winner Ivan Quaranta (Mobilvetta) and maglia rosa wearer Francesco Casagrande (Vini Caldirola) were no-shows on the podium and refused to talk to journalists from La Gazzetta or RAI. Polti’s direttore sportivo Gianluigi Stanga, speaking on behalf of the Italian teams, had this to say:

Bicycle racing changes. Twenty years ago, TV rights were not a topic, but today I think that it’s normal that the teams – and their sponsors who invest in them – get a say in where the money goes.”

 

The reason the dispute was limited to the Italian teams was that they believed foreign teams were being paid more than they were to ride the Giro. This sort of complaint was typical of the Spanish teams and riders in the Vuelta, especially in the sixties and seventies. Riders regularly complained about the vast sums being lavished on foreign teams in the form of appearance fees, especially when they fielded half-strength squads or just used the Spanish Tour as a warm-up for the Giro. Or even used the Vuelta as a way to make money, selling their services to the highest bidder. Pedro Delgado complained about this aspect of the Vuelta in his autobiography:

Apart from getting paid a good starting fee by the organisation, [the foreign teams] would accept ‘offers’ from the team of an escaped rider in return for not chasing him down. The system of these strong teams, especially the Dutch, was to only allow solitary breakaways, letting them build up a considerable leeway. These teams, filled with powerful road-men, were so dominant they could close down the escape in the final kilometres unless they found some other ‘interest’ in the stage.”

But the fact was the Vuelta needed to pay appearance fees in order to attract the stars of continental European cycling: in the years before and after Franco’s death, Spain was not high on people’s must-visit lists. How much the Giro needed foreign stars – and whether or how much they paid for them – is debatable.

RCS Sport responded to the Assogruppi’s actions with more words. They pointed out the long history of the race. They pointed out how the profits made on the Giro subsidised other RCS Sport events. Then they tried to kick the issue upstairs to the UCI:

The situation demands a careful analysis, in which the organisers and rider representatives must debate responsibly. After that we can perhaps change things. RCS Sport does not believe that such a serious problem can be resolved through a unilateral imposition of a solution, without assessing all of the information and comparing accordingly. The organisers have tried every effort to invite the Assogruppi to the discussions, but emotion seems to have prevailed over logic.

Before answering negatively to the ultimatum given to us by the Assogruppi, we want to verify our own position in the dispute and are seeking UCI president Hein Verbruggen’s opinion. We hope, however, that the Giro can continue as normal, and we would like to start the debate at its conclusion, rather than coming to a hasty compromise.”

The promise of talks, though, was sufficient for the Assogruppi to back down and life in the 2000 Giro returned to normal, or what passed for normality in the Giro in those days. What came of the subsequent talks between Assogruppi and RCS Sport isn’t clear, but nothing really changed, except for the UCI amending its rules with regard to travel expenses and participation allowances.

Appearance fees at the Giro became an issue again when the un-retiring Lance Armstrong made his return to the peloton, with the corsa rosa joining races like the Tour Down Under and the Tour of Ireland in the rush to hand over big bags of swag to the American in order to get him to put in an appearance at their races.

Then we come to last year, and the return to the centre of the stage of the appearance-fees issue, once again linked to TV revenues. At the Tour we had that little strop some of the AIGCP teams pulled, refusing to cooperate with ASO on certain media duties, specifically the issue of in-car race coverage (ironically, one of the points on the AIGCP’s ten-point plan to improve cycling). That doesn’t seem to have endeared them greatly to Marie-Odile Amaury and the attempts to get ASO to hand over a share of their profits – or even engage in talks over handing over a share of their profits – made little progress.

This week’s announcement from Jonathan Vaughters, that the AIGCP and RCS Sport were in advanced negotiations with regard to the issue of revenue sharing at the Giro, suggests that the AIGCP have adopted a different tactic in their negotiations: it’s easier to talk to someone who’s willing to listen and has something to gain from what is being proposed. On the surface, the notion of the Giro sharing a slice of their TV income with the teams makes sense. Michele Acquarone, interviewed by Daniel Friebe, has acknowledged that, over the last few years, the Giro has stood still while the Tour de France has marched forward. This, he knows, has to change:

Now we have to make up ground, and we can do it by trying to convince the biggest stars to come to our race, but it’ll still be their decision. Our biggest weapon in that battle for hearts and minds is the audience; the more people are watching, the more stars will want to come.”

 

The converse of that is equally true: the more stars who take on the Giro, the more people will watch the race. The Giro, after years of going toe-to-toe with the Vuelta over who can find the toughest climbs, is now living up to its marketing slogan: the hardest race in the most beautiful place. But, in audience share, it is still a league below the Tour. A revenue-sharing deal that’s structured around teams bringing their ‘A’ game to the Giro would help the race as much as it would help the teams. The Tour’s status in the minds of ordinary sports fans as the great bike race could even, finally, be challenged.

Acquarone, Bisconti, and Vegni in Milan at the Giro unveiling (Source: Pedalare Tricolore)

But Acquarone has also indicated that he is willing to play a long game with the Giro, and will not necessarily rush to bribe the biggest stars of the day to race the Giro:

What we can do, the only thing, is to build up the biggest possible international audience and grow our race so that our team is ready when a huge star comes along and captures the imagination again. We haven’t had that pied piper effect for the last few years, that excitement, and yet the race has grown, so that at least shows we’re moving in the right direction.”

On the issue of the proposed revenue-sharing deal with RCS Sport, though, it would appear that Vaughters may have jumped the gun to some extent. He himself did indicate that no deal was actually on the table, that the two sides were merely in discussion:

I’m very pleased with the negotiations with RCS and hope to have a deal that’s mutually beneficial at some time in the near future. I’ve been really happy with how RCS and Michele Acquarone has treated the teams. We’re really excited about the possibility of this partnership.”

Now, though, it is being reported that no deal is likely to be reached in the short term. Acquarone has indicated to VeloNews that talks are more likely to take place in the off season, November and December. Acquarone has also indicated that he was surprised to hear an announcement from Vaughters so soon and that any deal would be tied to future TV deals, not current ones. And here one needs to take a step back and look at the RCS Media group as a whole. The group may have turnover north of €2,000 million, but in 2011 they reported losses of more than €300 million, compared to a profit of €7 million in 2010.

A deal with RCS Sport would, of course, open the door to deals with other race organisers and, eventually, ASO. However, what those race organisers have to gain from such a deal needs to be considered. For the smaller events, some form of revenue-sharing deal that guarantees teams will bring their A squads would help generate more revenue from TV rights, a portion of which could be shared with the teams. But what’s in this for ASO?

TV rights for ASO events are currently sold in a package that includes the Tour as well as Paris-Nice, the Critérium International, Paris-Roubaix, the Flèche-Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Tours, and other ASO events. A race like Paris-Nice could, perhaps, benefit from the teams taking it more seriously, but is there much to be gained at Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège or even the Flèche-Wallonne? Or take the Critérium du Dauphiné – ASO are still trying to bed that race down having only taken it over in recent years, and the level of prize money being paid there suggests it is not yet profitable. But serving as it already does as one of the major pre-Tour warm-up events, can the teams offer ASO more at the Dauphiné?

Consideration also needs to be given to the fact that ASO’s current deal extends through to 2015. If RCS Sport tie a revenue-sharing deal to future TV deals, you can expect the same from ASO. Which suggests no deal with ASO is likely to be forthcoming within the next year or two.

A lot has changed in cycling since Italian teams tried to hold a gun to the heads of the Giro organisers in 1924 in an effort to gain a greater slice of the cake. Down through the years progress has been made on the issue of appearance fees and the teams have managed to extract a larger slice of the cake from race organisers. Whether we’re really on the cusp of a new deal, or whether we are seeing a repeat of 2000 – talks that ultimately go nowhere – well, only time will tell.

Alfonsina Strada, the woman who had helped save the 1924 Giro d’Italia, was buried in 1959. Ottavia Bottecchia, Henri Pélissier and Albert Londres – the other three names most remembered from the 1924 cycling season – were already in their graves. There are some races you’re happy to finish behind others in. Strada was sixty-eight when she died. Not a bad innings for someone born in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Cycling was Strada’s escape from a peasant’s existence. While many of her male contemporaries appreciated and applauded her, cycling was then very much a male-dominated sport. It still is, I suppose, but more and more people are beginning to wake up to the existence of the distaff peloton and who knows, maybe within our own lifetime the publicity scales may even balance out and it will receive the media attention it deserves. But the way it is today is far, far better than it was in Strada’s time. The women who rode bikes in those days were too often seen as little more than vaudeville acts, not treated as athletes. Cycling itself, though, was – to some extent – itself a vaudeville act. Men like Henri Pélissier wanted to turn it into a sport about athleticism, men like Henri Desgrange wanted it to be about who could endure the most suffering and still ride into his vélodrome.

From the age of ten, when she first rode her father’s newly-acquired bike, to her dying day, Strada was a cyclist. The fame her cycling exploits earned her enabled Strada to travel, to Russia, to Spain, to France, to Luxembourg, and earned her a better income than her parents had known, and more too than she would have earned had she followed their advice and become a seamstress. As late as 1937 and 1938 Strada was still racing, and still winning.

Cycling may have enabled her to escape poverty, but nothing could save her from a hard life. Her husband, Luigi Strada, the man who gave her a racing bicycle as a wedding present, suffered a mental collapse and was institutionalised. The 50,000 lire Strada won at the 1924 Giro went to the Milanese mental institution to which he had been confined. He died in 1946.

Four years later Strada remarried. Her second husband was Carlo Messori, the cyclist from her native Emilia who had encouraged a teenaged Strada – then still Alfonsina Molini – to continue with this cycling lark. He himself had by then retired from cycling and was running a bike shop in Milan. During their marriage Messori tried to put together a biography of his wife’s life and cycling career, but no publishers showed an interest in her story.

Messori died in 1957 and Strada was widowed for a second time. She continued to run the bike shop herself and continued to support the sport she loved, even though she herself was increasingly being forgotten by a sport which each year churns out new heroes for us to get excited about. In September 1959 Strada returned from a day at the bike races, the Tre Valli Varesine, where Dino Bruni had won. She told the porter at her apartment house that she’d had a wonderful day. She then suffered a fatal heart-attack. Another page of cycling history had been turned.

Strada’s story though was too good to be forgotten for long. In 2004 Paolo Facchinetti was able to publish his Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada) and when the Giro started from Amsterdam in 2010, a publisher in the Netherlands published a Dutch version of it, Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada. An English-language publisher has yet to show an interest in the book. Strada’s story has been put on the stage, in Italy – a version of which is playing in London this year – and featured in an album of cycling tracks by the band Tete de Bois. And, if you visit the chapel of the Madonna on the Ghisallo, you can see one of Strada’s bikes among the other relics of cycling’s glorious past.

But does Strada’s story matter today? I think it does. First, and foremost, it’s a good story, a story that deserves to be told and retold. But cycling is full of good stories that deserve to be told and retold. And Strada’s is, at least, told: there are many names in the forgotten history of our sport who have yet to have their stories told.

And of course, yes, the cycling of those days is now anachronistic; we can’t even imagine bikes that weighed twenty kilograms and didn’t have gears, let alone get our heads around the condition of the roads over which the riders of the day raced. But that’s just detail: look at the big picture and see that what was happening in 1924 is still happening in 2012. The big teams are still pleading with the Giro and other race organisers for a bigger slice of the pie.

And why should we bother with the retelling of a story from the past when – for female cyclists especially – the story of the present is only barely being told in the mainstream media and even in the main cycling journals? Would we not be better just forgetting all about Alfonsina Strada and telling the stories of the women racing today? If it was simply a choice between one and the other, than yes, forget the past, talk only about the present.

But can’t we do both at the same time? Cycling’s past is, after all, what makes its present seem so alive. The riders of today are not just racing against one and other, they are racing against the legends of the past. This is one of the areas where women’s cycling still needs help: its past is being forgotten and, without its past, its present doesn’t shine as brightly as it should. Connect the stars of today with the stars of yesterday and both will shine brighter. Maria Canins, Beryl Burton, Connie Carpenter, Keetie van Oosten-Hage, Yvonne Reynders, Petra de Bruin, Ingrid Haringa, Elsy Jacobs, Hélène Dutrieux, Oenone Wood, Louise Armaindo, Anna Millward, Leontien van Moorsel, Yvonne McGregor, Jeannie Longo – all of those names should be as recognisable as any of the giants of the road from Coppi to Anquetil, Merckx to Hinault, Kelly to Cavendish. How many of them are?

Help people undertand who they are, what they did, and you do actually help the current peloton, by providing a yardstick against which it can be measured.  And that’s why Alfonsina Strada’s story still matters. It’s not just about the past. It’s also about today.

* * * * *

Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada), which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann&’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

Those three books are the main sources for the above, with additional information on Strada drawn from the Italian Cycling Journal and Radio Marconi blogs.

The Giro d'Italia, circa 1924

In the 1920s, cycling had but two Grand Tours. The Spanish were only slowing getting into gear, in 1924 launching a tour of the Basque Country. A Tour of Spain itself was still a long, long way off. For the two Grand Tours that did exist, the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, a comfortable formula had established itself: racing days alternating with rest days.

The racing days themselves were mammoth affairs, the shortest about the length of the longest stage in modern Grand Tours, the longest more than 400 kilometres. Riders would start in the dead of night, racing over roads that were little more than rock-strewn dirt tracks, to finish in the mid-afternoon, often in crowd-filled vélodromes, hopefully in time for the journalists covering the event to get their stories off so fans could spend the next morning reading about what had happened the day before. And fans did have to wait until the next morning to find out what happened, it was the 1930s before the Giro and the Tour went multimedia, with the arrival of radio.

The percorso of the 1924 Giro went like this:

Alfonsina Strada, legend has it, was officially entered in the Giro under the name Alfonsin Strada, with the big reveal – He’s a she! – coming after the race had set off. The Italians love their polemica and really know how to stir it. Certainly the column inches Strada generated for La Gazzetta easily helped make up for the lack of big-name riders. And helped to sell lots of newspapers. Here was a point that the teams and their stars had overlooked with their attempt to extort more money from the race organisers: La Gazzetta was faced with a new rival, the Corriere dello Sport, and circulation was down. And, consequently, so too was profit. Not only could La Gazzetta not afford the extra costs the teams wanted to impose upon them but they also desperately needed a circulation boost. The scandals – a lack of stars and the Devil in a Skirt – gave them just that.

In both her Giri di Lombardia, Strada had finished at the back of the field. Little more of her was expected in the corsa rosa. Even La Gazzetta acknowledged, from the start, that this would be the case, saying:

Alfonsina doesn’t challenge anybody for victory, she just wants to show that even the weak sex can do the same as strong men. Might she be a vanguard for feminism that demonstrates its stronger capacity in order to demand the rights to vote in local or national elections?”

La Gazzetta could present her as an icon of feminism, but the truth was they were using Strada to create a spectacle, to give the tifosi something to get excited about in the absence of the likes of Costante Girardengo (Maino), Giovanni Brunero (Legnano), and Ottavio Bottecchia (Automoto). And a spectacle is exactly what Strada gave the Giro. La Gazzetta, describing Strada and the crowd that cheered her passing, had this to say of the woman “with a short baby haircut and even shorter shorts from which the hems of her jumper in particular protruded:”

She pedalled with self-confidence and cheer, like a schoolboy playing truant. The public that lined the streets in the passing villages immediately noted her with exclamations of wonder, the women in particular perhaps scandalised to see her like this […] hardly representing their sex.”

But, for Strada, the Giro was not just about spectacle. Every day – well, every other day – she still had to get from A to B. At the end of the first stage, 300 kilometres from Milan down to Genoa on the Ligurian coast, Strada was an hour off Bartolomeo Aymo’s stage-winning pace (eleven hours two minutes and three seconds, nearly ten minutes faster than second placed Federico Gay, of Alcyon). In the last three Giri, Aymo had finished third, second, and third (the first two with Legnano, the last with Atala) and already looked set to secure another podium finish as a minimum. Rolling home in fourth on the day, 18’39” down on Aymo, was the winner of the 1920 Giro, Gaetano Belloni, accompanied by his Legnano team-mate Giuesppe Enrici. That was the best Belloni could do in the 1924 Giro. As for Enrici, who’d stood on the bottom step of the podium in 1922, his first proper season in the pro peloton, well he was down, well down, on the day. But far from out.

Giuseppe Enrici in the 1924 Giro (Source: BikeRaceInfo.com)

For Enrici, the second stage was about pulling back some of that time lost on that first day. At the end of the second stage – 307 kilometres from Genoa to Florence – Gay had taken the stage, just ahead of Enrici, with Aymo ceding seven minutes and finishing down in fifth. The peloton itself was already whittled down to just sixty-five riders, thirty-five riders already no longer part of the race. Strada, a real stayer, wasn’t among the thirty-five, she was still riding on when others had fallen by the wayside. Slowly riding on, yes, but still riding and not always the last one home: arriving into Florence she was fifty-sixth and just over two hours behind Gay. The time differential hardly seemed of consequence to the tifosi. Of that day’s racing La Gazzetta noted:

In only two stages, this little lady’s popularity has become greater than all the missing champions put together.”

 

On the 284 kilometre run from Florence to Rome Strada was two and a half hours off the pace set by Gay, who again won the stage. Aymo was forced to abandon the Giro early, leaving Gay to take the lead, with a fourteen minute advantage over Enrici. The Giro would now be a straight fight between an Alcyon rider (Gay) and a Legnano rider (Enrici).

On the 249 kilometre sprint from Rome to Naples Strada was again more than two hours behind the stage winner, Zanaga. Gay put another couple of minutes into Enrici, extending his overall lead out to sixteen minutes. La Gazzetta, in its reporting of that day, noted how much attention Strada had received during the Giro’s stay in Rome:

“There was the usual hullabaloo around Alfonsina who arrived at the checkpoint in a new bright outfit. This woman is becoming famous. Yesterday some receptions were held in her honour. The good Romans gave her flowers, a new jersey and even a pair of ear rings. She is radiant.”

Back in those days Grand Tour stages typically started where the previous stage ended. In the 1924 Giro this was true, with the exception of the fourth and fifth stages: on the rest day between the two the riders had to travel south from Naples to Potenza, about 150 kilometres as the crow flies, by-passing along the way Mt Veseuvius.

Nothing much changed on the last of the southward bound stages, the run down to Taranto from Potenza. Ditto could be said – or not said – of the ride north up to Foggia. But the next two stages – into the heart of the Apennines, Foggia to L’Aquilla and L’Aquilla to Perugia – were where the 1924 Giro was won and lost.

On the first day in the Apennines Enrici put more than seventeen minutes into Gay, overturning his deficit and taking the overall lead with a margin of just one minute. The next day Enrici again won the stage and this time Gay ceded more than thirty-nine minutes to his rival.

As for Alfonsina Strada, well her Giro officially ended on that second day in the Apennines, 296 kilometres of racing that would have made a Flandrian weep: shitty roads and shittier weather. Strada crashed and thrashed her handlebars. A broom handle was used to effect emergency repairs (broom handles were often used in those days to effect emergency fork repairs – early cyclists were a resourceful crowd). But by the time Strada reached Perugia – four hours behind Enrici – the control was closed. Strada had been caught by the cut off. Colombo really wanted Strada to get to the finish in Milan – hell, she was selling newspapers – but he was overruled by the men in blazers, the commissaires declaring that rules is rules. Strada was off the 1924 Giro d’Italia.

The Apennines behind them, the remaining riders then faced a gentle sub-300 kilometre haul up to Bologna, followed by the mammoth 415 kilometre leg taking them eastward to Fiume on the Dalmatian coast, now in present-day Croatia but then still a part of the Kingdom of Italy. Into Bologna Enrici finished second, behind his Legnano team-mate Arturo Ferraro, with Gay ceding another eight minutes on the day. The fight back was not on. Into Fium it was Romolo Lazzeretti (Jenis) who took the stage, beating Legnano’s Ferraro and Alfredo Sivicci in a straight sprint. Gay tossed away another nine minutes.

From Fiume it was westward-ho and home to Milan via Verona, staying clear of the Dolomites, for a finish in the Vélodrome Semplone. Into Verona, Ferraro again took the stage win with Gay second on the day in a bunch sprint. And then it was Milan again, the end of the road, the Vélodrome Semplone. In a hotly-contested sprint, Giovanni Bassi – one of the proper isolati in the race, a man used to riding without team support – edged out Gay, only for both riders to be demoted for an irregular sprint, the victory then going to Legnano’s Sivocci, the seventh stage won by a Legnano rider. Enrici – born in Pittsburg but Piedmontese to the bone – took the title. A third place in his first season, a win in his third, boy but did that guy have a bright future ahead of him.

Half an hour after Bassi and Gay had battled for the final stage win, the Vélodrome Semplone again erupted in applause: Alfonsina Strada had just raced in, battling on despite her exclusion from the race. Following Strada’s disqualification in Perugia, Colombo had had a quiet word with her. There was business to discuss. She was helping him sell newspapers. Yes, here she was, battered and bruised, beaten by the race. But it didn’t have to end there. She could ride on, shadow riding the Giro, apart from the race but still a part of it. And for this service she would be paid, handsomely. While Colombo had refused to meet the teams’ demands for appearance fees, he was more than willing to pay Strada to just stay on her bike and keep the punters happy. There’s principles and then there’s commerce: commerce usually trumps principles.

So Strada rode out the remaining four stages, alongside two other riders who’d also been turfed off the race (in early Tours Desgrange had also allowed riders officially out of the competition to continue racing, on a daily basis). It’s claimed that Strada was the highest-earning rider in that year’s Giro, pocketing 50,000 lire for her efforts (remember, the overall prize fund was 100,000 lire).

That Strada was a draw for the fans is evident in the fact that, even when she was finishing way down on the leaders, the tifosi still awaited her arrival at the end of each stage, cheering her home. At Fiume, the race’s tenth stage, that mammoth 415-kilometre haul down the Dalmatian coast, by which time Strada was officially off the Giro but still shadow riding it alongside the peloton, the crowd waited for her to arrive before they left. Strada’s luck hadn’t improved: as in the Apennines she’d again crashed and arrived at the finish in a bad state and well down on the front runners. The tifosi didn’t care and showed their appreciation of her effort by lifting her off her bike: proving, if proof were needed, that sport isn’t just about winning. The next day, Fiume to Verona, a 366-kilometre haul that the peloton tackled at a sedate twenty kilometres an hour, Strada was just seven minutes down on the main bunch.

Strada’s popularity during the race was such that she spent a lot of time handing out photographs and signing autographs. The King, Victor Emmanuel III, sent her an official communication, congratulating her. Even Il Duce, Mussolini, wanted to muscle in on the act, declaring that he wanted to meet the Queen of the Cranks.

The following year the Darling of the Giro attempted to enter the corsa rosa again but – as with the post-War Giri di Lombardia – Colombo and Cougnet didn’t need her and the big teams and their star riders didn’t want her: to be upstaged by second-string riders was one thing, but to be upstaged by a woman was something entirely different. The Giro was still in dispute with the teams – Bianchi and Maino were still shunning the race – but the Queen of the Cranks had been usurped by Colombo and Cougnet’s new saviour: Emilio Bozzi.

As well as his Legnano squad, Bozzi – and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi – now had the Wolsit outfit (after the second world war he would add Frejus to his portfolio of bike brands). The Wolsit and Legnano teams of 1925 were really just one team, with one team car to support them both. And what a team they were: Bozzi and Pavesi lost Enrici to Armor and Aymo to Alcyon but gained Costante Giradengo – the first campionissimo – from Maino. And they also gained a rider from La Française, a kid called Alfredo Binda. You’ll be hearing of him again before this is out.

Alfonsina Strada was the story of the 1924 Giro, a publicity coup for the race organisers in their fight against the revenue-sharing demands of the teams and the competition they faced from rival publishers. Enrici was a worthy winner of the race, a solid rider, but Strada’s fame has lasted far longer than his. Elsewhere in the 1924 cycling season – at the Tour de France, to be precise – it was to be the reporting of a French journalist, Albert Londres, that would last longest in public memory. But before turning to them let’s take a look at Strada herself, and what happened to the revenue sharing demanded faced by the Giro organisers.

Next: How Strada spent her 50,000 lire.

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Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada), which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

* * * * *

The reason Emilio Colombo and Armando Cougnet invited Alfonsina Strada to ride the 1924 Giro d’Italia was simple: the big teams were pressing the Giro organisers to pay appearance fees simply for starting the race. The Giro was refusing their request. So the big teams were threatening to boycott the Giro.

Appearance fees were – still are – a part of cycling. If you can’t count on the stars to willingly ride your race, sometimes you just have to cross their palms with silver in order to ensure their presence. When Lance Armstrong returned to the peloton in 2009, his palm was greased generously by the organisers of many races, including the Giro d’Italia. But there’s a world of difference between paying off a star or two to grace your race with their presence and having to pay off whole teams who should be entering your race as a matter of course. There is also a world of difference between buying in a star now and then and having to fork out for both stars and bit-part actors every single year.

One can presume that, once the teams had won their battle with the Giro d’Italia, they would soon turn their attention to La Gazzetta‘s other races, particularly Milan-Sanremo and the Giro di Lombardia. Colombo and Cougnet were in no mood to meet these early revenue-sharing demands. The Giro was already paying generous prize money. When it was launched, the race was trumpeted (hyperbolically) as the richest in the world, with a prize fund of 25,000 lire. By the mid-twenties, that was up around 100,000 lire annually between 1923 and 1926. In the same period, the Tour’s prize fund had grown from 25,000 French francs in 1909 to 100,000 in 1924. (Exchange rates in 1924: approx 87 French francs to the pound, 19 to the dollar; 102 lire to the pound, 23 to the dollar.) As far as Colombo and Cougnet were concerned, they were already being more than generous when it came to paying people to ride the Giro. In the pages on La Gazzetta dello Sport, race director Cougnet accused the teams of “behaving like spoilt theatre actors.”

This, of course, wasn’t the first time the teams at the Giro could be accused of behaving like spoilt theatre actors, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Bianchi, in particular, had a reputation for throwing strops at the Giro. In the second race, 1910, the whole Bianchi squad had withdrawn on the second stage, for reasons unknown. And 1922 saw one of the best strops in Giro history.

It’s a long and somewhat convoluted story, but at its heart is the simple rule that technical assistance was, back then, outside the rules. So Legnano’s Giovanni Brunero was clearly breaking the rules when, having flatted, he took a wheel change from teammate Alfredo Sivocci (who then took a wheel change from teammate Pietro Linari, who took a wheel from the next Legnano rider to turn up, Franco Giorgetti, who had to wait for Ruggero Ferraro in order to get a crossbar to the next control station).

Maino, who were expecting Costante Giraradengo to do the business for them, and Bianchi, who were resting their hopes on Gaetano Belloni, both leaped at the chance to get a serious threat like Brunero turfed off the race. They both complained about his illegal wheel change. The commissaires listened to them. Brunero was out. Legnano appealed. Not for nothing was their DS, Eberardo Pavesi, known as l’avvocat. Pending his appeal, Brunero was back in the race. It was like an Italian hokey-kokey.

It took the Italian cycling fed another two stages to decide Brunero’s fate: a 25-minute time penalty. With the hills still looming and Brunero a scalatore of some skill, that time penalty was little more than a slap on the wrist. Realising they were about to get their arses kicked again – Brunero had won the previous year – both Maino and Bianchi used the affair as an excuse to pull out of the race, muttering loudly about the unfairness of it all as they left.

With the teams having incidents such as these in their past, and now threatening to not even take the start unless they got what they wanted, you can see why Cougnet was minded to call them spoilt theatre actors.

The teams, of course, couldn’t imagine Colombo and Cougnet not bending to their will. They themselves had been there at the birth of the Giro: Atala got word that Bianchi, along with the Corriere della Sera, intended to launch a Tour of Italy, and took the news to La Gazzetta dello Sport, who then gazumped their rivals by pre-emptively announcing the birth of the Giro d’Italia.

From the outset the Giro had declared itself a race for teams, unlike the Tour de France, where Henri Desgrange was fighting a long and losing battle with the mighty marques. The Giro had even once been run purely for teams, in 1912, when (technically) there was no individual winner. But while that race was won by Atala, it was Carlo Galetti who was the real star and still gets the credit for the victory. La Gazzetta quickly realised that the tifosi cheered for riders, not teams and reverted to individual winners thereafter. Even so, the teams, figured they had the weight of history on their side and stuck to their guns: appearance fees, or else.

Colombo and Cougnet were having none of this and dug their heels in: no appearance fees, no matter how big the stars. The race made the stars, not the other way round, a point many race organisers had proved down through the years, especially Pierre Giffard (at the 1891 Paris-Brest-Paris) and Henri Desgrange and Géo Lefèvre (at the Tour). If the stars of the day didn’t want to ride their race, then Colombo and Cougnet would just have to create new stars to replace them.

The teams continued to withhold their stars, figuring Colombo and Cougnet would cave, that they simply had to be faking their moral indignation. They weren’t. Thumbing their noses at the teams, Colombo and Cougnet called on Strada. The Queen of the Cranks was in and the stars were out.

That the teams were willing to pass up the biggest publicity opportunity of the season demonstrates that they did at least believe in what they were arguing for, that this wasn’t just about petty posturing and silly name-calling. The fact is, cycling was turning into a very expensive sport, and the people who funded it were being bled dry by the demands it was putting on them.

Back at that first Giro in 1909, Atala hadn’t just spiked the guns of Bianchi in the birth of the race by taking the news to La Gazzetta. They had also snatched Luigi Ganna from under Bianchi’s nose, topping the 200 lire a month Bianchi were paying him with an offer of 250 lire. Ganna signed on the dotted line and then went on to win the inaugural Giro for Atala. (Ganna actually finished the race 37 minutes behind Bianchi’s Giovanni Rossignoli – who was still racing in 1924 – but the early Giri were based on points, not time, and the Bianchi rider placed fourth on GC.) The next year it was an Atala lock-out on the Podium (Bianchi had thrown a hissy-ft and left the race), with Ganna finishing third, behind Eberardo Pavesi and Carlo Galetti. Bianchi had to wait until 1911 before they got their first Grand Tour victory, they having lured Galetti away from Legnano (who had lured him away from Atala) by offering him yet more money. A year later Atala upped the ante and had Galetti back on board. In Italy in those days, the best riders were very mobile and regularly changed teams.

Throughout the sport, salaries had spiralled before the war as teams, awash with cash from a booming bicycle trade, outbid one and other for the stars of the moment. The world was rich and the riders reaped the reward. The war brought all that crashing down. Coming out of the war, the main French marques – Alcyon, Automoto, La Française, Labor and Peugeot – banded together under the title La Sportive, which was ruled over by the man they called the Marshal, Aphonse Baugé. No longer capable individually of financing strong teams, collectively they were able to exert a stranglehold on French cycling and keep the lesser lights of the French bicycle industry in their proper place. Most riders signed to La Sportive rode for expenses, only a select few receiving a salary. Even for those who were paid monthly, what they received was tiny compared with what was being paid before the war. Henri Pélissier, for instance, was earning 3,000 francs a month before the war at Peugeot. After the war La Sportive were paying him just 300 francs a month.

La Sportive lasted for three years, before being broken up in 1922. Or partly broken up: the member marques created a cartel, setting salary and budget caps. For a cartel to work, though, two things need to happen: the members need to abide by the rules; and the cartel has to be strong enough to strangle non-members before they can become a threat. In France, La Sportive’s members failed first at the latter, the Pélissiers helping JB Louvet rise to power, and then at the former, when Automoto broke ranks – and the salary cap – and outbid Louvet for the services of the Pélissiers. By 1924, the French cartel had more or less crumbled.

In Italy at this time Bianchi and Atala were relatively weak on the road, their best riders having been lured away from them. But they still carried political clout. The real teams of the moment were Maino and Legnano. The argument with the Giro organisers over appearance fees was being led by Bianchi and Atala and was supported by Maino. Legnano … well Legnano managed to hedge their bets by both supporting and not supporting the boycott.

The man behind the Legnano marque was Emilio Bozzi. He had bought the Legnano marque from Vittorio Rossi shortly after the end of the war. In 1924 he was one of the rising men of Italian cycling. And with Pavesi as his DS he was writing the name of Legnano into Italian cycling’s history books. In 1924, Bozzi and Pavesi were fielding a team of champions: in their pay at this time were the winners of the 1920-22 Giri – Gaetano Belloni (1920) and Giovanni Brunero (1921 and 1922) – as well as Pietro Linari, who was Italy’s sprinter par excellence. They also had Giuseppe Enrici, an American-born Italian who, in his first season just two years earlier, had finished on the bottom step of the Giro’s podium.

Bozzi and Pavesi withheld Brunero, a two-time winner, from the Giro. Were they supporting the boycott? Obviously that position could be argued. But the reality is that Brunero was being saved for a serious tilt at the Tour de France, which so far no Italian rider had been able to win (the best Italian riders typically having ridden the Giro before the Tour). A large number of Bozzi’s riders did turn up for the Corsa Rosa, including Belloni, Enrici, Bartolomeo Aymo, Arturo Ferrario, Alfredo Sivocci, Ermano Vallazza, and Adriano Zanaga. Belloni wouldn’t figure in the race after the opening stage but Aymo, Enrici, Ferrario, Sivocci, and Zanaga would all feature prominently.

Also absent was one of the stars of the 1923 Giro, Ottavio Bottecchia, who was riding for the French Automoto squad. Automoto had signed the Italian the previous year partly because they were making a move on the Italian market, and having a native rider in their ranks would help them get column inches in the Italian press. But they were still a French team at heart: the Tour was their race, not the Giro.

In the absence of the major stars – Girardengo, Brunero, Bottecchia – La Gazzetta sought to encourage individuals to enter the race. Technically, all the riders in the 1924 Giro were isolati, riding without the support of a team network, but many riders – including the lads from Legnano – were still sponsored and the sponsor would still get a boost from whatever success they could achieve in the race. But, without the major riders from the mighty marques, the Giro organisers still needed to find a way to entice the lesser lights of the sport to enter their race. Other race organisers before them had already faced similar problems in cycling’s short history.

Back in the nineteenth century, Véloce Sport organised the first Bordeaux-Paris race, a 575 kilometre jaunt for the two-wheeled stars of the day. The real stars of the day happened to be British, and they managed to knobble the opposition early by insisting they wouldn’t race against professionals. The British sense of fair play, the fabled Corinthian Spirit and all that what, what, what? Hardly. The British just knew the power they held over Véloce Sport: if they demanded that the race exclude pros, Véloce Sport would bow to their will. They also knew that their real opposition – the French riders – all rode as pros. Defeating them before the race even got underway was far, far easier than defeating them on the road. And once the French riders were barred from riding their own race, the British were able to sign them up and set them to work on pacing duty (most early races featured some form of pacing: Paris-Roubaix was still being paced as late as 1909, and – of course – pacing was a feature of Bordeaux-Paris right through to its demise in the 1980s).

When Pierre Giffard at Le Petit Journal saw the success of Bordeaux-Paris, he decided to launch his own race: Paris-Brest-Paris, a mere 1,200 kilometres of pedalling. But Giffard had seen the way the British riders had bent Véloce Sport to their will and he decided he wasn’t going to let the teams and the riders hold him over a barrel. Giffard figured he actually held the upper hand: he was a media man who didn’t just believe in the power of the pen, he knew full well the power of the printing press. He appealed to one of his readers’ most base instincts: patriotism. Paris-Brest-Paris would be a French race for French riders. Giffard then proceeded to talk up the fact that rank amateurs would probably outride the stars of the day. Not only did this ensure that the stars of the day would have a point to prove, but it also encouraged a lot of amateurs to suffer delusions of grandeur. Paris-Brest-Paris’ entrants topped 600, with 200 of them actually turning up for the start. And at the end of it Charles Terront – one of the French pros the Brits had sought to knobble in Bordeaux-Paris – won the race. As he steamed over the Porte Maillot, 10,000 people cheered his progress. Giffard had played a blinder: the public loved his race and a real star had won it.

Skip the story forward a couple of decades. When Géo Lefèvre hit upon the bright idea of the Tour de France, L’Auto Vélo had to face up to the fact that their race might be too tough for the stars of the day, most of whom rode short distances on the track. Not a problem, they decided, they would make the men who did ride it into stars. But they still had to entice enough men to get on their bikes for such a crazy endeavour as a race around France. In the end, the only way they could do this was by lowering the entrance fee, shortening the race, and raising the per diem that was being paid to all participants.

History, then, was affording Colombo and Cougnet at least two examples for dealing with their problem: patriotism and filthy lucre. Neither was really a runner in 1920s Italy, so they found a third way: they figured that the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. As part of their lure they published details of how much food they were providing for participants: chickens (600), other meat (750 kilograms), eggs (7,200), bananas (4,800), bottles of mineral water (2,000), and butter (50 kilograms) along with assorted bread, jams, biscuits, chocolate, apples, and oranges.

On a daily basis, each rider was getting 250 grams of meat, a quarter of a roasted chicken, two sandwiches of prosciutto and butter, two jam sandwiches, a hundred grams of biscuits, 50 grams of chocolate, three eggs, two bananas, and a litre of mineral water. Today, you might question whether you’d be willing to ride to the shops for such fare, but in 1924 Italy, that was a veritable feast for the cycling classes. The Giro got its desired number of entrants. Ninety riders, all officially riding as isolati, would leave Milan on May 10th, with Alfonsina Strada among them.

Next: The 1924 Giro gets underway.

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Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada). , which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

Those three books, along with Benjo Maso’s Sweat of the Gods: Myths and Legends of Bicycle Racing (Mousehold Press), are the main sources for the above.