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.