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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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.

Tour de France history 101 tells us that, away back in 1900, a French sports paper  was created as a rival to Pierre Giffard’s then dominant Le Vélo. With the assistance of fellow industrialists Adolphe Clément and Edouard Michelin, Jules-Albert (the Comte) de Dion launched L’Auto-Vélo. Henri Desgrange and Victor Goddet – who were making names for themselves managing the Parc des Princes vélodrome – were brought on board to act as editor and financial controller.

Initially, things went well for the men at L’Auto-Vélo but by the closing months of 1902 the future was looking far from bright. Their rival, Le Vélo, was challenging their right to include the word “vélo” in their title, claiming it was a clear case of passing-off and would confuse readers as to which paper was which. In early 1903, L’Auto-Vélo was forced to change its name, becoming L’Auto.

How long the paper would last under that moniker though was open to debate: circulation was in the doldrums and making the paper pay its own way was proving difficult. A variety of publicity stunts, such as sports events to be promoted by the paper, were dreamt up by the paper’s editorial team. One of these was to take the notion of a Six-Day track race and put it on the roads of France. The race would be a bicycling tour of France. Thus was born the Tour. A circulation-boosting publicity stunt for an ailing newspaper.

The Father Of The Tour 

Géo Lefèvre, L’Auto-Vélo‘s cycling editor, was the man who came up with the idea of the Tour de France in late 1902 and it was to him that the task of organising the first Tour in 1903 fell. His boss, Desgrange, stayed very much in the background. Once success was assured, Desgrange stepped forward. And became the Father of the Tour.

In fairness to Desgrange, he did earn the right to be called the Tour’s father. He tried to mould the race in his own image, make the nascent sport of cycling bend to his will, his vision of what it should be. And – crazy and all as some of Desgrange’s ideas were – during the three decades that he ran the race it grew and grew. Better, it captured the public’s imagination, became a French institution. And, on the back of the Tour’s success, L’Auto prospered, becoming France’s dominant sports newspaper, either taking over its rivals or driving them out of business.

The Son of the Tour

Joop Zoetemelk, Jacques Goddet, Felix Levitan and Bernard Hinault. Photo: © AFP Photo, courtesy of CyclingNews.com

Ill health hit Desgrange in the mid thirties and the next generation stepped up to the plate: his assistant, Jacques Goddet. The son of Victor Goddet – the man who held L’Auto-Vélo‘s purse strings when Géo Lefèvre first punted the idea of the Tour de France in 1902 – he had briefly tried his hand at cycling before joining the newspaper his father had helped to establish, as a reporter. Upon the death of Victor Goddet, his shares in L’Auto and the Parc des Princes passed to his sons, Jacques and Maurice. The latter is generally overlooked in most histories of the Tour but he did make one contribution to its history: toward the end of the thirties, he sold his shares in L’Auto to a group of businessmen who were sympathetic to the Nazis.

Maurice Goddet was not the only L’Auto shareholder who cashed in with the Germans. Raymond Petenôtre had held the major shareholding in the company but, as the thirties drew to a close, was living in the US. Managing his affairs back in France was Albert Lejeune, a man with his own newspaper interests in Paris and Nice. Lejuene sold Patenôtre’s shares. Like Maurice Goddet, he sold them to men sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

The 1939 Tour de France ended shortly before the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war. Plans were made for a Tour in 1940 – Desgrange was even hopeful of welcoming an American team for the first time – but these were shelved after the Germans blitzkrieged France into submission. In August 1940 Desgrange died and full responsibility for the Tour and L’Auto fell to Jacques Goddet.

Goddet’s management of the Tour during the years of the German Occupation is generally praised: simply put, while other bike races continued during the war years, there was no Tour. The authorities had requested that he run the race in 1941 but – after first arguing that sport and politics should not mix and therefore the Tour should continue during the Occupation – Goddet declined.

In 1942, Jean Leulliot, a former L’Auto staffer and manager of the French team that won the 1937 Tour, organised an imitation Tour de France – the Circuit de France – under the aegis of the right-wing La France Socialiste. L’Auto responded by organising a fantasy Tour, inviting its readers to nominate a fantasy French team to ride a fantasy Tour de France. The following year, L’Auto followed that up by promoting a Grand Prix du Tour de France, which was based on the results of a series of one-day races it still ran in France, including Paris-Roubaix and Paris-Tours races. The GP Du Tour de France was again organised in 1944.

During this time, L’Auto had continued to publish, tending to be sympathetic toward both the puppet Vichy government of Marshal Pétain and the occupying Germans. Goddet, who had been editing the paper since the early thirties, could (and did) argue that he was only following orders from his board of directors. However, some believed that he was unnecessarily zealous in the carrying out of those orders. Upon the liberation of France in 1944, L’Auto – like all papers which had continued to publish during the Occupation – was closed and its assets seized by the state.

Goddet’s war record is complicated somewhat by his role in the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv:  the 1942 round-up by French police in Paris of more than 10,000 non-national Jews – men, women and children – and their subsequent deportation to concentration camps. Many of them were held for nearly a week at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, originally built and owned by Henri Desgrange and Victor Goddet. Jacques Goddet was the man in charge of the stadium when the round-up commenced. When the authorities asked him to hand over the keys, he complied.

Post-Libération France began to try and recover its pre-war normalcy. And to come to terms with the Occupation. New newspapers were licensed to replace those closed upon the Libération, first came general-interest newspapers and then, in early 1946, a number of sports titles. Goddet was granted permission to launch one of the latter, in offices across the road from his old ones at L’Auto. That paper was L’Équipe. It was L’Auto in all but name and the yellow newsprint the old paper had been published on. It also differed from the old L’Auto in that it didn’t have title to the Tour de France. That was still suspended.

In 1946 two ersatz Tours were run, five-day stage races which sought to capture the spirit of the Tour. In early July, Ce Soir – one of the pre-war general-interest newspapers to survive, having been banned during the Occupation – organised La Ronde de France, running from Bordeaux to Paris. For this venture Ce Soir partnered with the newly launched Sports newspaper. In late July, Le Parisien Libéré – a general interest newspaper launched by Émilien Amaury on the eve of the liberation of Paris – promoted La Course du Tour de France, running from Monaco to Paris. In this, Le Parisien Libéré teamed up with La Société du Parc des Princes, the company which controlled Paris’s vélodromes. And was co-owned – and controlled in all but name – by Jacques Goddet.

The Tour’s New Uncle

Émilien Amaury was a self-made man who, the story goes, left home before he was a teenager and, associating himself with men of influence, quickly rose through the ranks of power. At the outset of the war he fought against the invading Germans. During the Occupation, Pétain gave Amaury a role in the new Vichy regime, putting him in charge of propaganda for the well-being of the family. Amaury, though, was a résistant (codenamed Jupiter) and used his position to help the cause. Résistance was not just about blowing things up; there was also the clandestine publishing of news and propaganda. Amaury was able to use his position within the Vichy power structure to help here, procuring newsprint and access to printing presses. One of these was L’Auto‘s.

With the end of the Occupation in sight, Amaury became one of France’s post-Libération oligarchs, deciding to get into the newspaper and magazine business. From the ashes of Le Petite Parisien – the newspaper which had published Albert Londres’ denunciation of the Tour de France in 1924 – he created Le Parisien Libéré, which was initially housed in Le Petite Parisien‘s former offices. Amaury added other titles to his embryonic empire, including a weekly magazine, Carrefour, in which Goddet invested.

Having used L’Auto‘s printing presses to publish Résistance propaganda during the Occupation, Amaury – who had significant clout in Gaullist circles – came to Goddet’s aid when, during France’s post-Libération purge, Goddet was charged with collaboration. The seriousness of the collaboration charges faced by Goddet should not be underestimated: more than 26,000 collaborators were sentenced to terms of imprisonment; more than 13,000 were sentenced to hard labour; as many as 7,000 death sentences were handed down (although fewer than 800 of them were actually carried out). One man of the press who received the ultimate sanction was Albert Lejeune, publisher of the Paris-based Le Petit Journal and the Nice-based Le Petit Niçois. Lejeune was creator, in 1933, of Paris-Nice, and the man who was responsible for the sale of L’Auto‘s majority shareholding to the Nazis.

Goddet also had Amaury’s support when it came to reclaiming title to the Tour de France. The spirit of the Tour having been resurrected in 1946, it was time to engage in the fight proper over its name and its heritage. This fight was a microcosm of the greater fight that was then ongoing for the soul of France itself: it was a fight between the left and the right. Ce Soir and Sport were papers of the left, the latter a Communist paper. Amaury and his Le Parisien Libéré were Gaullists. Goddet and his L’Équipe, while not quite Gaullist, were firmly on the right.

The fight proper commenced in the Autumn of 1946 when two rival applications were submitted to the FFC and the UCI to run three-week stage races in France in 1947. Ce Soir put in an application for the Ronde de France, to run from June 20 to July 14. La Société du Parc des Princes put in an application to run the Tour de France from June 24 to July 20. Two rival national tours, running at the same time. Someone would have to lose. At it’s December 1946 congress the UCI granted the calendar slot to the Tour de France.

The new UCI-sanctioned Tour de France was to be run by the Goddet-controlled La Société du Parc des Princes, with Amaury’s Le Parisien Libéré as financial partner. But, before the war, La Société du Parc des Princes was co-owned by L’Auto and the assets of L’Auto were now owned by the state, through the Société Nationale des Entreprises de Presse (SNEP). In collaboration with the Fédération Nationale de la Presse Française (FNPF) the SNEP claimed title to the newly-sanctioned Tour through L’Auto‘s 49.5% stake in La Société du Parc des Princes. Having been shunned by the UCI in their attempt to win the Tour’s calendar slot, Ce Soir and Sports then publicly called on the FNPF to organise the 1947 Tour itself, with the FNPF’s member journals underwriting some of the costs.

Émilien Amaury, though, was busy behind the scenes spiking the guns of Ce Soir and Sports. Using all the political clout he had available to him, he convinced the SNEP and the FNPF to ignore Ce Soir and Sports and grant full control of the Tour to La Société du Parc des Princes, leaving it up to them to decide how to finance the race. La Société du Parc des Princes was not without suitors offering to come on board and shoulder the financial burden of running the race. In the end – just weeks before the 1947 Tour commenced – two were chosen: L’Équipe and Le Parisien Libéré.

Jacques Goddet had finally and categorically won the battle to secure the rights of the Tour for L’Auto‘s spiritual successor, L’Équipe, though at the price of having to cede 50% of the race to Émilien Amaury. Within two decades Amaury would own the Tour outright when, in 1965, Goddet found himself in financial straits and sold L’Équipe to Amaury’s growing media empire. Goddet would remain a feature of the race until the late eighties, but the destiny of the Tour was now in the hands of the Amaurys.

Next: The rise to power of a cycling dynasty.