Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

This William Collins eBook edition published in 2019

Copyright © Chris Sidwells 2018

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Cover photograph © ullsteinbild/Getty Images

Chris Sidwells asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Source ISBN: 9780008220808

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008220785

Version: 2019-04-17

‘An intriguing read for almost any reader, not only those who are interested in cycling’

Tuam Herald

‘[An] engaging and accessible account of the race’s history’

Sunday Business Post

‘The Call of the Road is the definitive story of cycle road racing … Sidwells dissects the seemingly ever-present question of doping, and brings the story of road racing completely up to date’

The Sports Book Club

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

1 Call of the Road

2 The First Road Races

3 The Tour is Born

4 Racing Into the Sky

5 Growing the Roots of Tradition

6 The Freelancers

7 Rainbow, Yellow, Pink and Polka-dot

8 Women’s Road Racing

9 Behind the Iron Curtain

10 The Great British Anomaly

11 Brentry, Britain Joins Cycling’s EU

12 Time Lords and Ladies

13 D is for Domestique

14 E is for Echelon

15 Round the Houses

16 Aussie Roules

17 American Flyers

18 The Greatest

19 Dark Side of the Road

Picture Section

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Chris Sidwells

About the Publisher

1

Call of the Road

A road race is many things. It includes many aspects of life, but magnified; a maelstrom of ambitions, plans, desire, cooperation and treachery. A road race ebbs and flows through the countryside like a living thing, a kaleidoscope of colour, a visceral mass of muscle and machine, a chess game played on wheels. And it doesn’t matter what level: whether it’s the Tour de France or evening league, road races share the same basic qualities. Only speed, distance, stakes and the sophistication of the game are different.

Road races are battles, pure battles where social norms are replaced by personal or cohort needs. Basic needs like food and drink to re-fuel and shelter to save energy, and higher needs like peer approval, money, victory and admiration. It’s rare to experience physical battles in everyday life, and on that level the fight to succeed brings out something primitive, making road racing wonderful to experience and wonderful to watch.

But the best professionals raise road racing to an art; the art of warfare maybe, the art of a hunter perhaps, but still art and glorious to behold and appreciate. Especially since road racing is not played out in stadiums or on pitches, but on incredible natural canvases. Some are stark, set on the cobblestone roads and brutish hills of northern Europe. Others are stunning, like races in the great mountain ranges of Italy, France and Spain. But all are beautiful in their unique way.

There are single-day road races and stage races. Some single-day races have more history or more notable terrain, and they are called the classics. Of the classics five are the biggest and the best, and they are known as the ‘monuments’ of cycling. Stage races are at least two or three days long, most are around one week, but the biggest stage races last for three weeks. They are the Grand Tours: the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta a España, and the biggest and oldest of them all, the Tour de France.

The Tour de France is not just the biggest bike race in the world, it’s the biggest annual sports event in the world, only ever surpassed by football’s World Cup and the Olympic Games. Figures from 2011 show that the Tour de France, or simply the Tour as it’s referred to in cycling, was covered by seventy radio stations, four thousand newspapers and press agencies, and seventy websites, who between them sent 2,300 journalists from thirty-five countries to the race. The Tour de France website, www.letour.fr had 14 million unique visitors that year. Over 100 TV channels broadcast the race to 190 countries in 2011, sixty of them receiving live pictures. And that’s just the media coverage, which has grown since 2011; the Tour de France has a truly worldwide audience today.

The number of roadside spectators is harder to gauge, but the Tour organisers Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) reckon that a staggering 12 to 15 million people watch the race pass by at some point each year. And that’s one of the big attractions of road racing: it goes to the places where people live, it comes down their roads and past their houses. Still, many spectators want to see the race on a famous mountain climb, and they must either walk or bike there on the day of the stage, or they must drive there two or three days beforehand to get any chance of finding a place to park. Many camp on the mountainside, turning their visit into a holiday.

By the time the race gets there the crowds on mountain roads are huge. Police estimated that half a million people stood on Alpe d’Huez to watch a time trial stage in 2004. The atmosphere is always electric and often a little bit mad. Some fans wear bizarre costumes, and so many spill out onto the road that the race leaders often face a wall of hysterical humanity, which parts just ahead of them, leaving only the narrowest gaps to ride through. It’s an incredible sight, and unforgettable to be part of. So let’s look at a typical mountain stage of the Tour de France.

The race fills almost any place where it starts or finishes. Parking anywhere near the start is impossible, so planning ahead is vital if you are to see anything. The focus is the Village de Départ, a temporary structure erected by a travelling team, then taken down as soon as the race leaves town, and transported to wherever it’s needed next.

In Tours gone by everybody had access to all areas, but the race has outgrown the charming informality it once had. Riders, race officials, accredited media and VIPs are the only people allowed in the Village now. Everybody else stands behind barriers, people-watching and star-spotting, and there are plenty of both to see. Old champions and former team-mates meet for a coffee in the Village, where they gossip about the old days; celebrities are shown around by sponsors or race officials, while members of the media pretend to check their smartphones but are continually looking for somebody, anybody, to interview. They don’t find many current riders, just the few who are sent out by their teams to keep the press happy.

The Tour de France has changed a lot. It was always big, always serious for the top riders, but now it’s very big and ultra-serious for every rider. Everybody takes their A-game to the Tour de France – they have to; anything less won’t do. Riders don’t mingle much with the public now; they are cocooned behind black glass in massive team buses. Inside they chat in air-cooled calm, or get lost in i-pods and laptops, but they are all focusing on the day ahead. The last team briefing is done. Everybody knows their job, their part in the team’s stage plan has been explained. This is their quiet time before battle.

Some of the more garrulous riders emerge from the buses first, sign autographs and pose for selfies. Some like the attention, the interaction, but they are rarely the contenders, who stay in their bus shells until the last minute. They want to avoid questions from news-hungry press. How do they feel? What do they think will happen today? Is this a crucial stage? Things the top guys know, or hope they know, but are unwilling to talk about because they don’t want input from anybody else, or in case they are just plain wrong. Contenders emerge in time to wave, nod politely at well-wishers, and head for the signing on. They have a job to do in the race, and it takes all they’ve got to do it. There’s no spare capacity to answer questions, not now, not before the stage. Afterwards they’ll talk at length.

Signing on for a stage is a cycling tradition. In days gone by it served to inform officials which riders were still in a race, but now it’s used as a device for the race speaker to introduce the riders to the spectators, so they know who is who and what they’ve won. One at a time the riders mount the steps to the speaker’s stage, walk stiffly to where they sign, wave to the crowd and by the time they’ve gone the speaker has been through their career in detail, and maybe had a word or two from them. The speaker never asks difficult questions, that’s his side of the bargain. It’s all done quickly and professionally, then the riders head for the start line and the race rolls out.

Tour de France stages have two starts; a nice smiley ceremonial one in the middle of town, then the real one when the race gets out in the countryside. The man in charge, the Tour de France director, the ultimate word on the race, Christian Prudhomme is driven ahead in a distinctive red car. The riders follow it closely, crowding its back bumper. Prudhomme emerges through the sun-roof, a red flag stretched between his hands. The riders watch it, waiting for him to drop it, and when he does all hell breaks loose.

The director’s car accelerates away, and the riders always attack. It’s like the cork coming out of a Champagne bottle, the start of each team’s stage plan, a release of pent-up energy as every rider is anxious to play his part. Tour stages need breakaways, more often referred to as breaks. On stages that suit sprinters their teams work to ensure the whole bunch is together for the finish, but part of doing that involves letting a group go ahead early and stay ahead for a while. The early attackers are trying to form such a breakaway.

In professional road races an early break creates order where otherwise there would be chaos. Breakaways provide a focus for the race; they give it shape so long as there’s nobody in them who threatens somebody else’s plan. Breakaways stop races becoming a free-for-all for the whole distance, with attack after attack until the peloton is cut to ribbons. The trick is not to let a breakaway get so far ahead it can’t be caught later. Just keep it there, keep the gap, then reel it in before the finish. Pro teams have that down to an art.

But this isn’t a sprinter’s stage, this is a mountain stage with other agendas going on. A breakaway still brings order, but the riders trying to get in today’s break come from two distinct groups. One is trying to win the stage, and the other is made up of riders trying to help their team leaders win the race overall. I’ll talk more about both groups in later chapters, but for now let’s look at how a breakaway forms at this level of racing.

For a start the other riders don’t say, ‘Go on, lads, you go ahead and we’ll see you later.’ Quite the opposite, and there’s an incredible scrap before a breakaway forms. Its mix must be right, and the other riders won’t let anything go until it is. For example, if an outside favourite for overall victory or a high overall placing tries to slip into a breakaway unnoticed, it won’t happen. It will be noticed, and the other teams will pounce on it and snuff it out.

Neither will the other favourites’ teams let one of their rivals get too many team-mates in a breakaway. If they did that, they could find themselves outnumbered later in a stage. So there will be attack and counter-attack, embryo breakaways forming and being brought back, until the right combination is allowed to go. Then things calm down, and the break is on.

But if all that sounds too choreographed, many things can spoil the script. Crosswinds, early steep climbs and other factors can and do upset the course of all the above. Early difficulties in a race provide opportunities for the strongest riders or teams to attack early and turn everything on its head. It happens a lot, especially in single-day races, but that’s another thing I’ll cover later in the book.

The British rider Steve Cummings is a current top dog at spotting the right combination of riders for a breakaway to succeed, and when a stage suits him he’ll be in it. ‘I focus totally on the first ninety minutes of a stage I know I can do well in,’ he says. ‘I don’t even think about the rest of it, I just psyche myself up for the first ninety minutes, because that’s when you have to give everything you’ve got to ensure you get in. Once I’ve done that, and I’m in, then I think about the rest of the stage.’

Cummings’s preference is for rolling terrain, or medium mountains in cycling parlance, a route with several quite long climbs, but not the big mountains of the Alps and Pyrenees. The stage I’ll try to describe here isn’t like that. It’s a typical, if imagined, stage in the Alps. One that finishes on top of one of the famous climbs: Alpe d’Huez, say, or the Col du Galibier.

Okay, on with the stage. Let’s say an early break has formed, so now the race leader’s team by tradition assumes control at the front of the peloton, trying to go fast enough to discourage further attacks but not so fast that the breakaway is caught early. If it is caught, the attacks will start all over again.

With the race leader’s team in control, the race is in perfect balance, and will stay that way for a while. Time to consider the physical presence of the Tour de France, because it’s immense. For a start there’s the Caravane Publicitaire, the procession of vehicles that precedes the riders, and it’s spectacular and weird in equal measure.

If you watch the Tour de France by the roadside – and everybody should do it once because it’s an incredible experience, very different from seeing the race on TV – the first race vehicles start zooming past you at least two hours before any cyclist is seen. They might be media or logistics vehicles on the way to the stage finish, vehicles involved with safety or official duties; cars, lorries, motorbikes and buses all zoom by. Then, after a short pause, the Caravane arrives.

Have you seen a giant fibre-glass insect lying on a flat-bed truck, or a man driving a huge gas canister or a giant wheel of cheese? Or have you been pelted with cheap plastic knick-knacks flung from a float by moonlighting students? Well you will; you’ll see them all, along with more elaborate creations, in the Caravane Publicitaire. All are products of the imaginations of publicists or design agencies, who embrace the maxim ‘weird is wonderful’, and weirder is always better for the Tour de France.

The Caravane takes forty-five minutes to pass. Some vehicles stop to better distribute their branded plastic tat, while those in others just chuck it in the direction of spectators as they drive by. Woe betide you if you try to race a French granny for a free Esso keyring. She will trample you down and her grand-kids will dance on your spine.

Once the Caravane has gone there’s another lull, an even shorter one punctuated by waves of motorbikes and cars, all part of the Tour, all speeding to where they are needed next. To marshal the race, maybe, or man one of the feed stations. They pass like squally showers, with an increasing number of French police connected to the race mixed in. Team vehicles too. Each passing batch is greeted with enthusiasm. Is this the race? Are the riders coming now? No. You can’t mistake it when they do.

First there’s a Mexican wave of noise. It’s been noisy so far but the noise has been random, without any order to it. This noise has order, and depth, and it grows louder and louder. On flat stages the noise travels from village to village towards you, drowning the throbbing of the helicopters above the race at first, but then they get too near to be drowned out. There are always at least two helicopters above the riders, swapping with others, leapfrogging to provide total stage cover for TV directors to switch to. Nothing is better than a view from above to show what’s happening in a road race.

You feel as well as hear the race long before you see it, but that feeling is magnified in the mountains. Go high and you might be standing directly above the race as it approaches. It ascends to you, passing thousands of spectators lining the route below you. The sound of their cheers and cries is trapped by the surrounding rocks and bounces off them, reverberating upwards. Alpe d’Huez, for example, is a natural theatre. The climb is named after a ski village at its summit, and it starts directly below the finish in Bourg d’Oisans. The road between the two places goes up in tier after tier, twenty-two hairpin bends and twelve straights, one piled on top of the other.

Standing, waiting for the race near the summit of Alpe d’Huez or Mont Ventoux, as I have done, the sound rises up to meet you, to engulf you. The helicopters fly slowly upwards, their blades beating the air, sending pulses of sound pushed by thousands of shouting, screaming voices, rolling upwards like thunder, charging the air so it prickles with anticipation.

The riders get nearer and nearer, clawing their way upwards like a giant bellowing beast. Nearer and nearer, our anticipation growing. Cars, motorbikes, police whistles, revving engines, shouting and screaming. A solid wave of sound crashing up a rocky wall, rolling onwards and upwards. The anticipation grows stronger and louder, until …

They’re here, the first riders, though you can’t see them yet because people further down the road have rushed out to see them before you do. The early breakaway has been caught, and now the best in the race are fighting it out for the stage. They include most of the overall contenders.

Anticipation turns into hysteria now, and formerly responsible people with good jobs and old enough to know better go glassy-eyed. They jump up and down, shouting themselves stupid. Kids grab their parents’ hands for reassurance. What’s happening? Now you can taste the Tour, it’s an actual physical thing, like a summer storm and the relief of rain.

People crowd the riders, some run alongside, roaring incoherently at them. They ignore everything that isn’t a clear threat, but fans who get too close risk a slap from their hero, and possible rough treatment from the rest of the crowd.

The stage leaders’ faces are masks of concentration. Only total commitment and solid self-belief keeps them where they are. Let go now, and it’s over. There’s a belief in pro road racing that everybody at the pointy end of a mountain stage in a Grand Tour is three minutes from letting go. That’s how they get through, they hold on for these three minutes, then the next three, and the next, and the three after that, until they cross the finish line or they cross their physiological and/or mental thresholds.

Then, one by one, riders let go. That’s what they call it. They say, ‘I had to let go’ or ‘I blew’ – another cycling word. The stage is over for them now, and all they can hope for is to limit their time losses.

Sometimes they lose ground slowly, agonisingly. They drop to the back of a group then fight forwards, drop back, then forwards again, then back until this time there’s a gap to the back of the group, and it grows bigger. Limitations accepted, they join the group behind, promising to challenge later. It’s not all over, they think. They will come back, they think. They seldom do, not at this stage. Others fail in a worse way. They go into the red, a zone of effort the body can’t maintain. It goes into oxygen debt, a debt that can only be repaid by slowing down. And if they stay too long in the red, and some can because toughness is high up on a pro road racer’s job description, they slow down rapidly and irretrievably.

All the above has played out on this final climb. We are three kilometres from the summit now. The front group of five looks good. Behind them more flog past where I stand, some don’t look so good, but others have found something; they are chasing, eyes full of hope and fixed ahead. Ones, twos, little groups and bigger groups, pass until the last big one, known as the auto-bus.

That’s where the sprinters live on mountain stages, helping each other get through and beat the time limit. It’s not easy, because their physiques, so powerful and so fast on the flat, work against them here, but they push on, trying as hard as the climbers at the front but with less encouragement.

The wave of emotion rolling up the mountain peaks with the passing of the first riders, then slowly ebbs away as the others pass. The sprinters get respect, they certainly deserve it, polite applause and encouraging words mostly. There’s occasional abuse too, but even the front riders can get that. It comes from people who should know better, and some do, but alcohol has turned off their inhibitions. Considering the millions of people they pass, the riders don’t get abused so much.

Up front the battle is on, war is being waged. Two kilometres to go now, and four riders are chasing one who has launched a decisive attack. Attacks must be 100 per cent, especially at this point in a stage. The best road racers in the world are fighting for the biggest road racing prize. Attacks in this company at this point must stick. If they fail, the rest will blow right by and the attacker will lose time, and probably any chance of winning the Tour de France this year.

But this attack looks good. This rider is on top of his game, at full stretch but totally in control, making a superhuman effort he can keep all the way to the finish line. His legs are on fire, but his will to win overrides them. Total concentration, his pain-face some call it, not strained, just set: a steely glare ahead. One kilometre to go, keep it going, this is good; this will work.

Push, push. At this point a rider might feel everything around him starting to fade. His peripheral vision is slowly fading, even the colours he sees become muted. His muscles are demanding so much oxygen that his body sends everything to them. His eyes can wait; his legs, lungs and heart can’t. They must have oxygen now.

But there it is: the last corner, the final straight, the finish line. The noise is just as loud now as it was lower down, but crowds are corralled behind barriers for the final kilometres. Safety and space, the riders need both. He will win. The others aren’t far behind, but they aren’t closing, and they have started watching each other. They have lost time to one man, but can’t afford to lose to another.

The leader knows now; he punches the air, still low over his bike, still absolutely on it. Pushing as hard as he can, determined to gain every precious second he can. Attacks like this cannot be mounted every day, so he has to make it count.

At last the stage is his, and depending on how much his attack has gained, the Tour de France might be too. Across the line, under the banner; a salute, two hands off the handlebars, but only briefly – he’s given too much for joy to sustain him any longer. He falls into the arms of a team helper, a carer who has waited with colleagues from other teams, all looking for their man. They are the confessors of cycling, the first person a rider sees after a race, the person to whom they confide their unmitigated joy, or their disappointment, before they tone either down and put on a different face for the press and other team personnel.

That’s road racing at its highest level: a sensory feast; a battle, raw and beautiful. It can even be noble at times, but it’s always intensely human. This book tells its story, good and bad, from the first ever road race to road racing today, and seeks to explain its language and the way it works.

2

The First Road Races

There’s debate about when the first ever bike race was held. Many quote a race in Parc St Cloud, Paris, on 31 May 1868. It was won by an Englishman, James Moore, but it was part of a series of races in the same park on the same day. The names of the other winners were lost, and only Moore’s survived.

It’s possible that other races pre-date the St Cloud meeting, although it can’t have been by much. The first bike with pedals – the act of pedalling is what I think defines cycling – was made in 1864, and the first patent for a pedal-powered bicycle given in 1866. So there wasn’t much time between those dates and the Parc St Cloud races.

But because they were held on a 2-kilometre lap of prepared cinder paths inside the park, not on the open road, they weren’t the first ever road races. The first proper road race of which there is a record happened in November 1869. It went from Paris to Rouen on normal roads. But since James Moore also won that race, he is the father of road racing.

There are stories of races on the public roads of Europe in the spring and summer of 1869, but they weren’t very long and only attracted local riders. For example, the writer and researcher Rosemary Southey discovered an account of a short bicycle race on the roads of what was then the English county of Cumberland, now part of Cumbria, in May 1869.

‘The race is recorded on the 21 May 1869 issue of the Carlisle Patriot newspaper,’ Southey says. ‘Under the title “Grand Picnic and Sports at Keswick: A Velocipede Race”.’ The report continues: ‘Perhaps the greatest novelty of the day was the bicycle race. The course was along the Lake-road to Portinscale and back. The winner took the lead at a rattling pace, was never headed, and came in victorious by a great distance. Much merriment was created as the defeated competitors returned through the streets, many of them not riding their “iron horses” but, puffing and flushed, one foot propelling them along to the point from which they had started. The greatest good humour, however, prevailed, as was evidenced by one of the disappointed, struggling at the tail of his “steed,” replying to the badinage with which he was assailed, “Well, never mind, there’s three more behind.”’

‘The results read “Velocipede Race: 1 Mr Irving, Carlisle. 2. Mr G Graham, Carlisle. 3. Mr Stalker, Carlisle.” The Keswick event is the earliest I can find on the road in Cumberland, but there were others in the same year on the path,’ Southey says. ‘The path’ was a 19th century term for a cycle track – like running tracks – surfaced with cinders or red shale.

Southey continues, ‘Cycling seems to have taken off in the county very early on, though of course there were plenty of sceptics, and disapproving magistrates and horse owners. I have records of cycling clubs in around a dozen places. Carlisle for instance had three clubs in the 1890s.’

The first mass-produced bikes were called ‘boneshakers’ in Britain and vélocipèdes in France. They were made from wrought iron, had wooden wheels with iron bands around their circumference to reduce wear, and one rudimentary brake. The pedals were attached to the front wheel, so these early bikes were direct drive; one revolution of the pedals meant one revolution of the wheel. And because wheels with greater circumference cover more ground per pedal revolution, the front wheels of early bikes were slightly bigger than the rear.

A Paris blacksmith and coach builder called Pierre Michaux was the man who put pedals on a two-wheeled running machine of the type that had become very popular in Germany, France and Britain. Or it may have been his son, Ernest. Again, there are conflicting accounts. But by creating the first pedal cycle, Pierre and/or Ernest Michaux made France the birthplace of cycling. By 1869 there were around sixty bicycle manufacturers in Paris, and about fifteen in the provinces. But the possibilities of this new invention were quickly being discovered on both sides of the English Channel.

The first newspaper dedicated to cycling was also born in 1869 in France. It was called Le Vélocipède Illustré, and although there had been news sheets about bikes before, Le Vélocipède Illustré was professionally produced, lavishly illustrated and lavishly written. This is what the editor, Richard Lesclide, also known by his pen name of Le Grand Jacques, wrote at the beginning of the first issue, which was published on 1 April 1869:

The Vélocipède is rapidly entering our lives, and that is the only justification we need for starting this new magazine. And yet never has the famous phrase: ‘People began to feel the need for a special organ devoted to a fashionable conveyance’ been so appropriate.

Indeed the Vélocipède is gaining ground at amazing speed, spreading from France to the rest of Europe, from Europe to Asia and Africa. Not to mention America, which has outstripped us and now has the advantage of us in the race for further improvements.

The Vélocipède is not a mere flash in the pan, here today and gone tomorrow. As you can see from the fact that, as it obtains a footing in the fashionable world, the government and the major public services are using it for special duties. It has now won complete acceptance in France, and we are founding a magazine under its patronage in order to bring together, in the same fellowship, its adherents and believers.

His piece set the timbre of cycling journalism, or at least French cycling journalism, for the next 100 years. A few months after Lesclide wrote those words, the long association between the cycling press and race promotion began when Le Vélocipède Illustré organised the Paris to Rouen race. Or Paris–Rouen, following the accepted protocol that the ‘to’ in the names of place-to-place road races is always replaced by a dash.

It was 7 November 1869, and Paris–Rouen set a pattern of place-to-place road races that was copied and developed over the years as the template for some of cycling’s biggest races. Thirty-one men and one woman gathered at 7.15 a.m. outside Le Pré Catalan, on the Route de Suresnes in the Bois de Boulogne for the first Paris–Rouen. Le Pré Catalan is now a restaurant with three Michelin stars, but was then an exhibition centre where a cycle show had been held for five days preceding the race.

According to James Moore’s son, also called James, speaking to Sporting Cyclist magazine in 1968 on the occasion of the centenary of the historic Parc St Cloud race, before the inaugural Paris–Rouen his father announced: ‘Unless I arrive first, they will find me lying beside the road.’ Gritty, determined words that set the mood and mind-set for road racing that still dominates the sport.

The riders set off for Rouen at 7.25 a.m., and at 6.10 p.m. the same day Moore crossed a finish line drawn by members of the Rouen cycling club at the gates to their city. A fine drizzle fell, and it was dark when Moore finished. The first prize was 1,000 gold francs and a Michaux bicycle, the race having been organised by the Michaux brand owners, the Olivier brothers Aimé, René and Marius.

Roads outside cities were appalling. They were either made of bone-jarring hard-packed clay or stones, or were muddy tracks with puddle-filled ruts and holes. They were very muddy that November day between Paris and Rouen, and the mud sucked at the riders’ heavy bikes. Even Moore walked up the hills, and he finished 15 minutes ahead of the next man. The female competitor, made mysterious by her pseudonym of Miss America, finished 12 hours after the winner, but she wasn’t last. That honour fell jointly to E. Fortin and Prosper Martin, who crossed the line together 14 hours and 15 minutes after Moore.

Moore was to all intents a professional cyclist by 1869. His success in the Parc St Cloud race was followed by more victories on cinder cycle tracks, which was where cycle racing grew quickest at first. At the St Cloud event Moore raced on a standard Michaux vélocipède, with a front wheel slightly bigger than the rear, but by the time he won Paris–Rouen he was riding a prototype bike made under the direction of a Parisian manufacturer, Jules Suriray.

It was far lighter than Moore’s original bike, had ball bearings to reduce friction in its hubs, and was custom-built in the workshop of Sainte-Pélagie prison in Paris.

Suriray invented ball bearings, but needed the forced labour of prisoners to make and polish the steel balls he needed. Moore’s bike also had Clément Ader patented rubber tyres. Plus its front wheel measured 48.25 inches in diameter, while the rear was just 15.75 inches. It was one of the first ‘penny-farthing’ bikes, which were called ‘ordinaries’ or ‘high-wheelers’.

There was a boom in French manufacturing during the late 1860s, but it was stopped dead by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and bicycle development switched to the UK. With the French bicycle industry stymied, investment flowed into what at first was just a few British bicycle companies, and they became big. New companies formed, and older manufacturers started including bikes in their product range. Some even changed their names, like the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, which became Coventry Machinists so it could manufacture bikes.

The French were still leaders in bike design, but the English bought patents on nearly everything they invented. For example, a major step forward affecting racing was made by Jules Truffault, who reduced the weight of bikes he made from 25 kilograms down to 15 by using a cheap consignment of steel scabbards (sword holders) that he had obtained. By adapting scabbards, Truffault manufactured hollow forks and wheel rims, but the British bike industry bought the patent on his idea, used it to manufacture their own bikes, and paid him a small royalty for each one sold.

Getting back to racing, even though Paris–Rouen sparked some interest in France, and later in surrounding countries, track cycling was the focus in Britain. Big crowds attended track meetings, and the first race billed as the world cycling championship was held on 6 April 1874, over one mile on a cinder track in Wolverhampton. James Moore won the race from John Keen in a time of 3 minutes and 7 seconds, setting a new world record for the distance.

Across the Channel confusion reigned for several years after the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871. There were a few short road races in 1870, mostly in Paris and Toulouse. Leon Tarzi and Jean-Marie Léotard won them, but the longest race in France in this period was only 63 kilometres, and most were around the 30-kilometre mark. Not nearly long enough for road racing to capture people’s interest and imaginations. Long place-to-place races did that, something people could compare their own journeys by train or by carriage to.

The first road race in Italy was in 1870: a time trial between Florence and Pistoia. It was won by an American, Rynner Van Heste. The first Italian bunched road race appears to have been in Milan in January 1871. It was just 11 kilometres long and won by Giuseppe Pasta. The next bunched race in Italy was 46 kilometres from Milan to Novara, held in December the same year. The winner was Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi. However, it’s always possible that there were others that preceded these races.

Documentary evidence of road racing is thin after that. There could have been races in Italy during the next couple of years, but the next race about which there is certainty was the Milan–Piacenza race in 1873. It was 63 kilometres long and the winner, Valsecchi again, did the distance in 3 hours and 44 minutes. There were at least two more races in Italy that year, one in Florence and the other from Milan to Cremona. There’s also evidence of a road race in Bagnères-de-Luchon, France.

After that the numbers of road races rose slowly until 1876 when Europe, and in particular France, was more settled. That was the year when road racing started to gain more interest, maybe because races were much longer by then. Angers–Tours–Angers, for example, was 222 kilometres long. It was won by M. Tissier, who beat a top track racer Camille Thibault using a light bike of Truffualt’s design, to win in 11 hours and 25 minutes.

Another longer road race, one that still exists today, was born in 1876, this time in Italy. It went from Milan to Turin and was won by Paolo Magretti, who went on to be an eminent entomologist, discovering a number of new species of African Hymenoptera. Magretti was the best of just ten initial competitors, and the race wasn’t run again until 1894. After that, editions were intermittent until 1913, when Henri Pelissier of France won. Apart from times of political upheaval, war, lack of sponsorship and on one occasion a flood, Milan–Turin has run fairly consistently ever since.

All the bikes used in races so far were penny-farthings, but racing on these was quite dangerous, given the road conditions. On a smooth track a penny-farthing is stable and not too bad to ride, but out on a road it’s a different story. Hit a pothole with that big front wheel, or apply the brake a bit sharply, and you could be pitched straight over the handlebars. It was so common the term ‘taking a header’ was coined to describe it.

But then came the safety bicycle. Safety bicycles had two wheels of equal size, slightly smaller in diameter than most road bike wheels are today, and the rider sat balanced between them. Safety bicycles were much easier to ride than penny-farthings, so they were safer, hence the name, but the safety bicycle’s appeal for racers was that they had gearing through a roller chain.

The safety bicycle was partly invented by an Englishman, John Kemp Starley. In the 1870s he was working for his uncle, James Starley, whose bike manufacturing business made one of the best penny-farthings, the Ariel. But Starley junior saw the danger in high-wheeled bikes, and the fact that they were tricky to get on and off and to handle. He thought there had to be a better, more stable, way to go cycling.

In 1876 John Lawson designed a bike with equal-sized wheels, where treadles transferred the rider’s leg power to the rear wheel, but treadles are complicated and heavy. Starley thought that Lawson was on the right track, but treadles were the wrong way to drive the rear wheel, so along with fellow enthusiast William Sutton they came up with the ‘Safety Bicycle’. Drive came from pedals on cranks turning a chain-wheel, or chainring as it’s more commonly known today. The chain-wheel was connected by a roller chain to a sprocket on the bike’s rear wheel, and the chain-wheel was bigger than the sprocket, so every pedal revolution meant several revolutions of the rear wheel. That is basic gearing, and it meant that for the first time a bike’s potential speed was determined solely by the power its rider applied to the pedals, not a combination of that and the size of its direct-drive wheel.

Safety bicycles made cycling more popular because riders could place their feet on the floor while they were still seated on their bikes. This increased people’s confidence in them. Once under way, safety bicycles were easier to ride and control than penny-farthings, which made them much safer. Safety bicycles saw an increased uptake of cycling among women, and they played a big part in the emancipation movement, which is well documented in other books.

Road racers first saw the benefits of safety bicycles in 1877, the year that Starley and Sutton founded their company, when a Bordeaux bike mechanic called Georges Juzan covered 100 kilometres from Bordeaux to Libourne and back in 4 hours and 40 minutes. He rode a French version of the safety bicycle, proving they were ideal for covering long distances. And long-distance rides were how road racing became well established.

People understood long-distance rides by comparing them with their own experiences. One hundred miles back then was like a thousand now. The less well-off rarely travelled far, while for the rich a 100-mile carriage ride, even a rail journey of that length, was an undertaking. By helping cyclists cover long distances relatively quickly the safety bicycle was pivotal in the development of road racing in Europe.

British cyclists already did long rides on penny-farthings, and 100 miles became the mark of the serious British cyclist. It’s the same for cyclists today. One hundred miles is a challenge, but doable on a bike. The safety bicycle made 100 miles more accessible, and it provided a jump in performance for those who wanted it.

In 1878 Frank Dodds set a British 100-mile record on a penny-farthing of 7 hours, 18 minutes and 15 seconds. His time stood for six years before George Smith broke it riding a Kangaroo brand safety bicycle made by Hillman, Herbert and Cooper Ltd. The following year, on an improved version of the Kangaroo, Smith reduced his 100-mile record by nearly 6 minutes. Then, on 20 October 1885, Teddy Hale knocked almost half an hour off Smith’s record by riding 100 miles, again on a Kangaroo safety bicycle, in 6 hours, 39 minutes and 5 seconds.

That sealed the reputation of the ‘safety’ for speed on the road, and more manufacturers started making them. To show it was best, and hopefully sell more, manufacturers employed top racers to ride their bikes, sowing the seeds of professional road racing. In 1886 the Rudge Bicyclette became the pre-eminent safety bicycle, due mainly to the efforts of H. O. Duncan. He was a British racer who settled in France to compete in a growing programme of long road races there, against a growing number of top riders – men like De Civry, Medinger and the first big star of road racing, Charles Terront.

Terront was born in St Ouen in 1857 and took up cycling with his brother Jules. Success came almost immediately. Charles won eight races in 1876, including Paris–Pontoise, where despite being only 19 years old he beat a well-established star in Camille Thuillet, covering 62 kilometres in 2 hours and 53 minutes. Terront was described in Le Vélocipède Illustré as wearing ‘a spotted shirt, coloured breeches, black and white stockings and a magnificent red scarf flung over the top’.

Terront started racing on a Michaudine Vélocipède, similar to the one James Moore rode when he won the St Cloud race in 1868, and he graduated through the racing ranks by riding bigger and better penny-farthing bikes in road and in track races. But Terront switched to a safety bicycle as soon as they proved to be faster. His fame grew rapidly, and Terront’s racing career coincided with a huge growth in interest in cycling. Soon books were being written on the subject, and more cycling newspapers were founded. The distances of races grew rapidly too.

Cycling fans loved reading about their champions struggling through long, gruelling races, defying the odds, suffering setbacks and yet still coming through to glory. The fascination was such that newspapers begin to vie for who could organise the longest, most gruelling race. This gave rise to two incredible road races, which in different forms still exist today. They aren’t races now, but are long-distance challenge rides. They aren’t run every year; one was so long it was never made into an annual event.

The first race is Bordeaux–Paris, a 572-kilometre slog from the southwest of France to the nation’s capital, which was first held in 1891. It was a tough journey by train in those days, but unimaginable on a bike. And it was raced all in one go. The clock started in Bordeaux and it stopped in Paris; if riders stopped to eat or sleep the clock carried on, and the stationary period was included in their time. The roads were nothing like they are now, still stage-coach tracks. It sounds overwhelming, but there had already been a lot of long-distance track races, as well as the growing number on British roads.

Long-distance track cycling took a big jump in profile in 1878, when David Stanton, a gambler and a professional racer, bet that he could ride 1,000 miles inside six days. His attempt took place in the Agricultural Hall in London’s Islington, and the man who took his £100 bet was called Davis. A flat, oval track was marked out inside the hall, and Stanton rode his penny-farthing bike round and round it.

Planning on riding up to eighteen hours a day, Stanton completed 172 miles on the first day, and 160 miles on each subsequent day until he hit 1,000 miles with 27 minutes left of the sixth day. His total riding time was 73.5 hours, giving an average speed of 13.6 miles per hour.

Watching a man ride in circles on a big bike at thirteen and a bit miles per hour doesn’t sound like a spectacle now, but Londoners flocked to watch Stanton. Another six-day race was quickly organised in the Agricultural Hall, but with other competitors involved. They were cyclists and one horse rider, who won with 969 miles covered in six days. The first cyclist was 59 miles behind the horseman, and all the cyclists complained because the horseman was allowed to change mounts as each one grew tired.

The result stood, but no more horses were allowed in six-day races, while the Agricultural Hall became a regular venue. The next six-day race held there had ten cyclists competing, including Charles Terront, and a Sheffield rider called W. Cann, who won with 1,060.5 miles. His prize was £100, which is worth about £12,000 now. The public loved it, and in April 1879 a race billed as the six-day world championships was held at the same venue. George Waller of Newcastle won with 1,172 miles, including 261 miles ridden on the first day. Events came thick and fast after that. The six-day distance record grew and grew, and so did the riders’ fame. Soon there were six-day races in other British cities, then in Europe and in America, where it really took hold.

But while that was going on inside halls and stadiums, British long-distance road races were growing in number. Many were run over set distances, 50 and 100 miles, but in the most popular races competitors rose as far as they could in 12 or 24 hours.

George Pilkington Mills quickly became the man to beat in all long-distance road races. He started cycling aged 12, and in 1885, when he was still only 18, Mills set a new British 24-hour record of 259 miles in the Anfield Cycling Club race, riding a penny-farthing.

Mills won the Anfield 24-hour again the following year, then between 5 and 10 July 1886 he rode from Land’s End to John O’Groats, just over 900 miles in the days before bridges shortened it, in a new record of 5 days and 1 hour. Again, Mills rode a penny-farthing, but he was slowly changing his mind about what was the most efficient and fastest way to go racing. Mills set his last record on a penny-farthing on 5 August 1886, when he did 273 miles in 24 hours.

A few days later he started another ‘End to End’, as the Land’s End to John O’Groats record is called. This time he rode a three-wheeled version of the safety bicycle, which some long-distance road racers preferred because of its stability. Mills set a new tricycle record of 5 days and 10 hours, but he still wasn’t done for the year. In September 1886, along with his partner A. J. Wilson, Mills broke the British tandem tricycle records for 50 and 100 miles. Then on 5 October Mills switched to a safety bicycle and set a new 24-hour figure of 295 miles. Six long-distance records in one year must be a record in itself.

But as time went on, although still setting records, Mills was pushed hard by a club-mate: Montague Holbein, who broke a number of Mills’s records as well as setting new ones of his own. That’s why Mills and Holbein, along with Selwyn Edge and J. E. Bates, all members of the North Road Cycling Club, were invited to take part in the first ever Bordeaux–Paris race by its organisers, a newspaper called Le Véloce Sport.

When the British riders were invited, Bordeaux–Paris was scheduled to be a professional race, but Mills and the other Brits were amateurs. So the National Cycling Union (NCU), which like so many early British sporting bodies didn’t approve of professionalism, asked the French organisers to change the race’s status and only allow amateurs to enter.

They did, and the first ever Bordeaux–Paris, held on 24 May 1891, was a race for amateurs only. The 38 entrants started at 5 a.m. from the Pont Bastide in Bordeaux. As well as four British riders, there was one Swiss, one Pole, and the rest were French. All rode safety bicycles apart from 56-year-old Frenchman, Pierre Rousset, who rode a tricycle.

Holbein had recently set a new British 24-hour bicycle record of 340 miles, and a 12-hour record of 174 miles. The bookmakers were impressed and made him the race favourite. To ensure everybody covered the same course, and did so entirely by bicycle, or tricycle in Rousset’s case, each competitor had a booklet with fourteen towns and villages in it, which had to be signed by race officials and stamped at the fourteen designated towns and villages. Gold medals and objets d’art were offered for the first ten to arrive in Paris. Silver medals and palm branches were given to each of the next finishers, if they arrived within three days of starting. Bronze medals were awarded to finishers inside four days, and there were diplomas for those inside five days.

The race started in the dark and fog. There were few spectators early on, but a big crowd awaited the riders at Angoulême, where the four Brits arrived together at 10.30 a.m. They had a good lead, and stopped for five minutes. They ate soup, replenished the stores of food they carried with them, had their control books stamped and signed by officials, then remounted and rode off into the grey gloom.

A Frenchman, Henri Coulliboeuf, was next to arrive at 10.55 a.m., then Joseph Jiel-Laval at 11 a.m. He was half an hour ahead of the next rider, and tricyclist Rousset rolled into Angoulême around 1.45 that afternoon.

Pacers could join the race at Angoulême, and after meeting his first one, Lewis Stroud, Mills tucked in behind him and drew away from his compatriots. By the time he reached Châtellerault, Mills led by half an hour from Holbein, then Edge, and then Bates. And so it went on, Mills drawing further ahead as pacemaker after pacemaker relayed him towards Paris, where Mills passed the finishing post 26 hours and 36 minutes after he’d set off from Bordeaux. The total distance ridden was 356 miles.

It was a very professional and disciplined display by the British amateur. As well as having fast pacers, Mills spent minimal time when he stopped at controls, just taking morsels of food. He carried anything else he needed with him. The race was big news in Britain, and several British newspapers followed it, placing journalists at various points along the route. At Tours the Birmingham Daily Post correspondent noted that ‘Mills swallowed a dog-mouthful of finely-chopped meat and drank a bottle of specially-prepared stimulant.’

British riders took the first four places. Holbein was second in a time of 27 hours and 52 minutes, Edge was third in 30 hours and 10 minutes, and Bates was fourth, just 8 seconds behind him. The first French rider, Jiel-Laval, was fifth, nearly two hours behind Bates. And the stately Rousset? He finished 15th on his tricycle in 63 hours and 29 minutes.

The race was a great success, and Bordeaux–Paris soon became a professional race and a fixture in the pro calendar. For a while it was considered one of road racing’s classics, especially from 1945 onwards, when competitors were paced for the last two-thirds of the race by men riding small motorbikes called Dernys, after their inventor Roger Derny. Pacing was preserved in Bordeaux–Paris long after similar marathon bike races died, because it meant they covered the distance in a reasonable time, but the race required specific and dedicated training which, as the sport developed, fewer riders were prepared to do. The last Bordeaux–Paris was in 1988.

Le Véloce Sport achieved a coup by staging Bordeaux–Paris, which was irksome to Pierre Giffard, the editor of Le Petit Journal. So in response he came up with something absolutely staggering, something he hoped would make Le Véloce Sport’s 572-kilometre race pale into insignificance, and for a while it did. Paris–Brest–Paris was the longest road race in the world. The trip from Paris to Brest, near the tip of the Breton peninsula, and back to Paris is close to 1,200 kilometre and, like Bordeaux–Paris, it was done all in one go. Riders could rest, sleep, sit down to eat, do what they liked, but the clock kept ticking, and any non-riding time was included in their finishing time.

Giffard called his race an épreuve, a French word that can mean test, trial or ordeal. He chose the word because he saw the race primarily as a test of bikes, something designed to show the durability and capability of what was still a fairly new invention. The founding rule of Paris–Brest–Paris was that competitors must complete the course on the same bike, which had to be delivered to the organisers before the start. Identifying seals were placed on each bike and on its parts, and the bikes were kept in parc fermé conditions until the start. That doesn’t happen in cycling any more, but the French stuck with épreuve as a word to describe bike races. It helps convey the sense of bike races being tests of man or woman and machine.

When news of Paris–Brest–Paris got out, entries came from abroad and from a few women, but they were all refused. So, on 6 September 1891, a group of 207 Frenchmen set out from Paris and headed for Brest. There were ten riding tricycles, four on two tandems, and one die-hard listed as Monsieur Duval who was riding a penny-farthing. The other 192 competitors raced on safety bicycles. Amateurs and professionals were mixed together, but the pros were allowed up to ten pacers each to meet them at different points along the way. The pacers carried extra food and drinks for their riders. Racers weren’t allowed to swap bikes with anybody, but they could make repairs, so long as they did them without help.

Charles Terront raced without sleep for 71 hours and 22 minutes to win the first Paris–Brest–Paris by almost eight hours. Ninety-eight riders battled through to finish behind him. Some competitors took days longer than Terront, sleeping in hotels overnight. It was a success. The race captured the imagination of people who lined the route and followed the riders’ progress through newspaper dispatches and reports.

Ten thousand people welcomed Terront at the finish line in Paris, and Giffard waxed lyrical about the race in Le Petit Journal: ‘For the first time we saw a new mode of travel, a new road to adventure, and a new vista of pleasure. Even the slowest of these cyclists averaged 128-kilometre a day for ten days, yet they arrived fresh and healthy. The most skilful and gallant horseman could not do better. Aren’t we on the threshold of a new and wonderful world?’

Giffard was bewitched by cycling, and in 1896 he joined the cycling newspaper Le Vélo as joint editor with Paul Rousseau. Le Vélo was founded in December 1892, and was the pre-eminent source of cycling news and information in France until 1903. By then, though, it had picked a battle with a rival, which Le Vélo lost badly.

But going back to Paris–Brest–Paris, it was a victory for Terront, but also a victory for the bicycle, and for pneumatic tyres. The first two riders, Terront on Michelin and Jiel-Laval on Dunlop, both used pneumatic tyres, which were relatively new. They both had punctures, and took around one hour each in total to repair them, but the tyres were demonstrably faster than solid tyres when they were rolling. Above all, though, Paris–Brest–Paris was a victory for long-distance road racing.

The following year, 1892, saw the return of Bordeaux–Paris, and the race was repeated annually, apart from 1955, 1971 and 1972, and during the two World Wars, until 1988. Paris–Brest–Paris, however, because it was longer and harder to organise, was run only every ten years, the next edition being in 1901. By then the race was so famous the organisers commissioned a top pastry chef, Louis Duran, to invent a cake for it. It was called Paris-Brest and is still a popular dessert in France today. It’s even been made by contestants of the Great British Bake-Off TV programme.

After a relatively slow uptake, by the last decade of the nineteenth century road racing was becoming a feature of European life. Races were analysed in the press, riders written about, their thoughts recorded and their performances and characters dissected and discussed. More long races were organised: Vienna–Berlin, Rennes–Brest, Geneva–Berne, Paris–Besançon and Lyons–Paris–Lyons. All have disappeared from the race calendar now, but some races born in the early days of road racing still exist.

Milan–Turin, first run in 1876, is the oldest race from this period still in existence. Two others born a little later have grown to become two of the five single-day races called the monuments of cycling. They are Liège–Bastogne–Liège in Belgium, and Paris–Roubaix in northern France.

Liège–Bastogne–Liège was first held in 1892, a race for amateurs that actually ran from Spa, close to the city of Liège, south through the green hills of the Ardennes to turn at Bastogne, then head back to Spa. Liège is the capital of the French-speaking Walloon region of Belgium, and according to legend Bastogne was chosen as the southern turnaround because it was the furthest point the Liège-based organisers and cycling officials could reach by train which would still allow them to check the riders through and return in time for the first riders to finish.

Liège soon replaced Spa as the start and finish, and the race became about its hills, which are anything from 1.5 to 3 kilometres long. They are very British hills; in fact, the Ardennes are a bit like the North York Moors or the Scottish border country. It took a while for the race to get the shape it has today, where the selection and order of the climbs vary only slightly from year to year. Then again, it took Liège–Bastogne–Liège a while to get going at all.

A Liège man, Léon Houa, won the first three editions, after which it was shelved from 1895 to 1907. Two more editions were run in 1908 and 1909, then nothing in 1910. After that there were three more, 1911, 1912 and 1913, then nothing for the whole of the First World War. There is even some dispute about when professionals were first allowed to take part. Some authorities put it as early as 1894, others say as late as 1919.

The reason for the on-off start of Liège–Bastogne–Liège was because cycle racing in general went through a hard time in Belgium during the very early twentieth century. Velodromes closed in both the Walloon and Flanders regions. The number of road races dwindled, and the best Belgian riders had to compete in other European countries for foreign sponsors in order to make a living.

The next big race, Paris–Roubaix, was created to publicise a new velodrome. Track cycling had moved from flat cinder tracks, or indoor ovals, to tracks with straights and bankings, which allowed faster and more exciting racing. Some tracks were indoors, similar to new velodromes today, but bigger banked tracks of 400 to 500 metres a lap were in big open-air velodromes. There were a lot in northern France, and they were in competition with each other to get the paying public to come through their gates to watch their racing.

Many early road races finished in velodromes, but Paris–Roubaix is the only big one that still does, albeit on a newer track in a slightly different position to the original. The original Roubaix velodrome was at the junction of Rue Verte and the main road from Hem, not far from Paris–Roubaix’s route into town today. It was built by two local textile magnates, Maurice Perez and Théodore Vienne, to make money.

Perez and Vienne needed to publicise races at their velodrome. When the Roubaix track opened in 1895, the legendary African-American sprinter Major Taylor made one of his first European appearances. Perez and Vienne had other big events planned, but needed publicity because velodromes in nearby Lille and Valenciennes put on good meetings too. They thought that hosting the finish of a big road race from Paris could grab attention away from their rivals. With the help of the major French cycling publication Le Vélo, Perez and Vienne put on the first Paris–Roubaix in 1896.

The route was different to today, but it was still a race of cobbled roads. The difference was that in 1896 the organisers didn’t have to look for cobbles; all roads in the industrial north of France were cobbled. So the race went from Paris almost directly to Roubaix. It started outside the offices of Le Vélo, went due north to Amiens then continued to Doullens, where it veered northeast to Arras, then went north again to Roubaix. The total distance was 280 kilometres.

Almost all the roads used in 1896 are now tarmac or concrete, which is why a modern Paris–Roubaix starts north of Paris so it can seek out the back roads, those that still have cobbled surfaces. In fact the cobbled back roads the race uses now are protected, and they are maintained by a group called Les Amis de Paris–Roubaix. Going this way and that to find those roads, and not direct from Paris to Roubaix, is why the start is now a bit nearer Roubaix as the crow flies, but not as the race goes.

Good prize money, the winner receiving the equivalent of seven months’ pay for a French miner, the number one industry around Roubaix, attracted a large entry. But most had entered blind and hadn’t a clue what the race held in store for them. Come to that, neither did the organisers. Paris–Roubaix wasn’t long by the standards of the day, but the roads were appalling, as the man charged with finding a route quickly found out.

He was a Le Vélo journalist called Victor Breyer. In planning the race he simply drew a direct route on a map, then followed it. He drove the first leg from Paris to Amiens, where he stayed overnight. Next day he set off for Roubaix by bike, and by the time he got there he thought the idea of holding a race in this part of France was mad. He was cold, wet, muddy and exhausted, and determined to send a telegram next morning to his boss asking him to cancel the race. But after sleeping on it, Breyer saw the epic potential of Paris–Roubaix. A potential the race has lived up to ever since.

However, it did not have the most auspicious start. Many entrants for the first edition had never seen the roads of the north, and when word spread about Breyer’s ride, and especially as there was a lot of rain just before the race, half the field didn’t start. The professional riders were all there, though, with their eye on the big first prize. Professionals were allowed to use pacers, some riding tandems, to help them, and the field soon split up across the rolling roads of Picardie. Even a lot of the roads in Picardie were cobbled, and the cobbles and weather conditions grew worse as the riders went further north.

The reason they were worse, and the reason why there were so many cobbled roads in the first place, was that the north was the heart of heavy industry in France. Hundreds of coal mines, steel mills and factories, often barely 100 metres apart, belched fire and filth across the countryside. Mining subsidence buckled the roads and warped the houses, while heavy carts lifted loose stones and spread mud and coal dust wherever they went.

Josef Fischer of Germany won the race in a time of 9 hours and 17 minutes, which is an average speed of 30.162 kph (18.742 mph). He entered the Roubaix velodrome 25 minutes ahead of the next rider, Charles Meyer of Denmark. And when Fischer arrived, the crowd, who were enjoying some track racing while being informed of the progress of Paris–Roubaix, were shocked by his appearance. He was covered from head to foot in coal dust and mud from the roads, and with dried blood from his frequent crashes.

Apart from Meyer, only two other riders finished within an hour of Fischer. The first of them was Maurice Garin, who would win Paris–Roubaix the following year and again in 1898; the other rider was a Welshman called Arthur Linton; and both would continue to feature in the story of early road racing.

Once he’d cleaned off the mud and muck, Fischer was remarkably casual about his victory. ‘The race was quite easy for me,’ he told reporters. ‘You must be strong to ride so far over cobblestones, and I am strong. I know that about myself.’ Given his domination, and how seemingly straightforward it was for Fischer to win, it’s incredible that Germany had to wait 119 years for its next Paris–Roubaix winner, which was John Degenkolb in 2015.

Promoting and/or organising road races helped make the names of many newspapers and periodicals, but it also saw an intense rivalry grow between them. A rivalry that had them trying to outdo each other with longer, bigger and more attention-grabbing races. This inter-publication war moved the sport along, and it helped write the next page in the history of road racing, with the creation of the biggest road race in the world: the Tour de France.

3

The Tour is Born

By 1894 Le Vélo, the newspaper that organised the first Paris–Roubaix, was the leading cycling journal in France. It had an advantage over its rivals because as well as carrying news it was also the official voice of the governing body of French cycling. Le Vélo published the locations and start times of all official races in France, so cyclists and cycling fans alike needed to buy it, to read race reports and interviews, and to find out where future races were being held.

Everything was looking good for Le Vélo. Even if some advertisers grumbled when the newspaper hiked its ad prices up, it didn’t affect their need to be seen in its pages. Then, just when it looked like Le Vélo had French cycling sewn up, its editor Pierre Giffard got involved in something outside of the sport that ended up costing his newspaper dearly. It was the Dreyfus affair, a cause célèbre in which a Jewish army officer called Alfred Dreyfus was framed for treason by a section of the French military and was convicted in 1895 on very dubious evidence.

Dreyfus was sent to the French penal colony, Devil‘s Island. His Jewish heritage and the fact that he was born in Mulhouse in Alsace, which was then part of Germany having been won during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, were accepted as evidence that he had passed French military secrets to the Germans. Somebody had done so; there was no doubt about that, but no direct evidence implicating Dreyfus.

There was public disquiet, and even some of the French Army didn’t believe in his guilt. One officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, conducted his own investigation, and he came up with credible evidence that the real traitor was a Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. The French high command wouldn’t listen, and Picquart was transferred to Tunisia to keep him quiet, but the questions he and others raised wouldn’t go away. Reports of a cover-up started appearing in the French press.

A campaign led by artists and intellectuals, including the novelist Emile Zola, gathered strength and eventually won a pardon for Dreyfus in 1899, but the case stirred deep emotions. It was a massive talking point in France, with everybody having a view. There were some very public arguments and demonstrations on both sides. At one protest an influential backer of Le Vélo, the Count de Dion, was arrested. He was demonstrating against the campaign to pardon Dreyfus, and was alleged to have hit the President of France, Emile Loubet, on the head with a walking stick he was waving about to emphasise his point.

Le Vélo’s editor Giffard was pro-Dreyfus, and had high principles. Putting principle before business, he criticised De Dion in an article he wrote for a serious newspaper, Le Petit Journal. De Dion was outraged, and even though he was imprisoned when word of what Giffard had written reached him, he withdrew his support for Le Vélo as well as all of the money he’d invested in it. Then, still unhappy, De Dion went further.

When he was released from prison after a fifteen-day sentence in 1900, De Dion formed his own sports newspaper, which he called L’Auto-Vélo. It was funded by his businesses, and by those of his friends who either sympathised with his views or were unhappy with Le Vélo’s advertising rates. They included Edouard Michelin, the biggest tyre manufacturer in France.

The new venture needed an editor, and De Dion went for somebody young and ambitious who knew about cycling. He was Henri Desgrange, a 35-year-old former racer who ran the biggest velodrome in Paris, the Parc des Princes. Desgrange had a law degree, and had started his working life practising law, but he was too adventurous to spend his life in fusty courts arguing arcane cases. He was a racer first and a lawyer second, and he came unstuck when one of his employer’s clients saw Desgrange speeding around a Paris park with his calves exposed. The client complained to Desgrange’s boss, who promptly sacked him.

So Desgrange changed careers, quickly becoming the head of advertising for the tyre manufacturer, Clément et Cie. He continued racing, setting the first official World Hour Record in 1895, riding a distance of 35.325 kilometres on the Vélodrome Buffalo in Paris. There had been unofficial hour records before. James Moore rode 23.2 kilometres in 1873, and Frank Dobbs did 29.552 in 1876, but Desgrange’s hour was the first recognised by the then governing body of world cycling, the International Cycling Association.

While working in advertising, Desgrange wrote articles about cycling for various newspapers, including Le Vélo. He also wrote a best-selling book on training called The Head and the Legs. By the time Desgrange left advertising to run the Parc des Princes he had a big following in French cycling, and influential friends. De Dion chose well.

It was 1900, the beginning of a new century, but starting a new publication is never easy even when there are good reasons to do so. Giffard and Le Vélo were in a very strong position. As well as the backing of the French Cycling Federation, Le Vélo still had a lot of advertisers because Giffard only put up rates for De Dion’s associates. And Giffard held the moral high ground because of his stand over Dreyfus.

But still not willing to make life easy for his new rival, three years after L’Auto-Vélo was launched, Giffard instituted proceedings in the courts that forced it to drop the word vélo from its title. Giffard won, and L’Auto-Vélo had to call itself L’Auto from then on. The newspaper covered many new and adventurous pursuits, but focused on cycling, and now its title said it was about cars. Circulation hadn’t been great since it was founded, so how would it hold up in future? Desgrange needed a marketing plan to cement L’Auto’s association with cycling, the sport people were interested in.

He tried printing the words ‘Motoring and Cycling’ underneath ‘L’Auto’, like a sub-heading to help reveal the paper’s content. He also listed on the front page other adventurous pursuits L’Auto covered, but it was a bit clumsy. With sales falling and his advertisers taking their custom elsewhere, Desgrange needed a big gesture. He needed something that would link L’Auto in people’s minds with cycling for the foreseeable future.

The pressure was on, but then Giffard cranked things up by goading Desgrange in print. Desgrange was furious and called his staff together, telling them they needed to come up with something that would switch attention from Le Vélo to L’Auto. ‘We need to do something big, a big promotion. Something that will nail Giffard’s beak shut,’ he is reported to have said.

Géo Lefèvre was a young reporter who covered cycling and rugby, as well as taking part in both sports. He’d worked for Le Vélo, but Desgrange convinced him that he’d be better off with him. Now, though, Lefèvre had his back against the same wall as Desgrange. Giffard was unlikely to re-employ Lefèvre if L’Auto went under. Maybe Desgrange realised that, because he took Lefèvre out to lunch and asked him what he thought they could do.

The story goes that Lefèvre suggested promoting a six-day cycle race on the road. Six-day races on the track, although popular in Britain and America, were not yet so in France, but this was never-know-until-you-try time for L’Auto. Lefèvre suggested the route should be in the shape of a hexagon, the same shape as the outline of France. There are other versions of what happened at that meal too, and Lefèvre himself was always vague about it. Later, when the Tour de France was part of French life, he said in at least one interview that he only suggested a lap of France for want of something better to say when Desgrange asked him.

A lap of France, a Tour de France, already existed, and it was part of life in the centre of the country. It was a rite of passage for apprentices. The tradition began in Provence and Languedoc, where boys who wanted to learn a trade went between towns around the edges of the Massif Central. Each boy was sponsored by the trade guild he wanted to join. In each town they learned different aspects of that trade, and were looked after by women called guild mothers – not always very well. It was a rough life.

There were other precedents. For example, there’d already been a motor-racing Tour de France in 1899, but Desgrange still wasn’t sure. It couldn’t be done in one go with the clock running and the riders resting only when they had to, as they did in the six-day track races or Paris–Brest–Paris. The race would have to be broken into stages. Desgrange appears to have only made up his mind when L’Auto’s company accountant, Victor Goddet, got behind the prospect. If the guy who controlled the money thought the Tour de France made sense, then maybe it did. So in late January 1903 Desgrange wrote in L’Auto, ‘We intend to run the greatest cycling trial in the entire world. A race more than a month long; from Paris to Lyon, then to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris.’

Desgrange wanted a big spectacle, a route right around the outside of France. He said the race would be broken into different legs, or stages, and run over five weeks from the end of May until 5 July. Spacing the race out like that would give ample time to recover between each leg, and maybe Desgrange thought it would maintain interest for longer, but it was too long a period for any but the top professionals to commit to. It was also probably too long to hold the public’s interest. Above all, Desgrange needed his spectacle to have mass appeal, so he needed lots of racers to provide the stories to report on. To attract more entrants he cut the duration, but not the distance, to just under three weeks.

He also put the dates back, so the Tour de France ran at the same time as what would become a growing feature of French life, the country’s annual two-week holiday. That was a great decision, and would be one of the reasons for the Tour’s success. It came to mean summer in France, the holidays and happy memories, and that helped the race grow.

The first Tour de France was 2,428 kilometres long, split into six stages, with between two and four days separating each one. The shortest stage was 268 kilometres and the longest 471 kilometres. The long gaps between stages helped stragglers finish and still get some rest. And, going against the trend of other road races of the day, no competitors, professional or amateur, were allowed to have pacers. They had to make their own way around the route with no outside help.

Seventy-nine entered, a mix of professionals and weekend warriors, and sixty of them took the start outside the Réveil-Matin café in Montgeron at three o’clock in the afternoon of 1 July 1903. The café is still there, on the Rue Jean-Jaurès, and a little plaque outside records the event. The favourites for victory were Maurice Garin and Hyppolite Aucouturier. Garin had won the 1897 and 1898 Paris–Roubaix, and the second edition of Paris–Brest–Paris in 1901, which was the biggest road race in the world before the Tour de France. Garin had also won Bordeaux–Paris in 1902, while the younger man, Aucouturier, was the rising star, having won Paris–Roubaix earlier in 1903.

On the morning of the first stage Henri Desgrange wrote in his editorial: ‘With the broad and powerful swing of the hand which Zola in La Terre [The Earth] gave to his ploughman, L’Auto, newspaper of ideas and action, is going to fling across France today those reckless and uncouth sowers of energy who are the great professional riders of the road.’ Desgrange continued writing like that for the rest of his life.

Garin won the first stage, riding 467 kilometres from Paris to Lyons in 17 hours 45 minutes and 13 seconds, at an average speed of 26 kilometres per hour. Emile Pagie was just under a minute behind him, and the rest were spread out behind the first two. The last rider, Eugène Brange, took more than 38 hours to reach Lyons. Twenty-three riders didn’t get there, including Aucouturier, who dropped out with stomach cramps. He was allowed to contest the next stage, which he won, although he was removed from the overall standings.

Although the 1905 Tour de France is often referred to as the first to venture into the mountains, when it went to the Vosges and climbed over the Ballon d’Alsace, there were low mountain passes in the first Tour de France in 1903. There was one on the first stage. Not far from Lyons the riders scaled the 712-metre (2,335-ft) Col des Echarmeaux. Then on the next stage, from Lyons to Marseilles, there was a longer and slightly higher climb, the Col de la République, just south of St Etienne. Aucouturier broke away on its slopes with Léon Georget to win the 374-kilometre stage to Marseilles, while Garin stayed close enough to preserve his lead.

Garin won two more stages to round off the first Tour de France, winning 6,000 gold francs, the equivalent to nine years’ earnings for a miner from Lens in the north of France, where Garin lived. The French tax rate in 1903 was less than 10 per cent. So the Tour de France set Maurice Garin up quite nicely, and it did wonders for the sales of L’Auto.

Before the race the newspaper’s circulation was around 25,000 copies per day, but it grew to 65,000 copies during the Tour. Ten years later L’Auto’s average daily circulation was 120,000 copies, which rose to a quarter of a million per day when the Tour de France was on. Apart from the Sun and Daily Mail, no mainstream British newspaper gets anywhere near those figures today. Newspapers were very big business at the turn of the twentieth century. For most people they were the only way to find out what was going on, not just in the world but in their own countries, and even in their own regions.

It had been a big adventure, both for the riders and for the organisers. On each stage after the starters were flagged away, Fernand Mercier of L’Auto set off in his car to drive to the finish, where he would liaise with the paper’s local correspondent to look after and arrange accommodation for the riders who made it through, and who wanted to continue. There were also control stops along the way that Mercier had to check, where riders submitted their official race cards for the obligatory stamp to ensure they covered the whole route. Unfortunately they didn’t all cover it by bike, as the following year’s Tour would show.

Géo Lefèvre had dual responsibilities. He had to help at the finish of each stage, but he also had to report on the race. The story goes that Lefèvre did this by joining the competitors at the start of each stage with his bike, then riding with them a bit to get on-the-spot reports from the top men. After talking to the leaders he slowly dropped through the field, doing interviews as he went, until he arrived at the first major town with a train service that could take him to the finish. This enabled him to jump ahead of the race and help Mercier at the end.

Riders started some stages in separate groups, and with the race decided on time it wasn’t always the first across the line who won the stage. Joseph Fischer was caught being paced by a motor vehicle on the first stage and a penalty was added to his time. There was also a bit of conflict on the fifth stage when Garin and Fernand Augerau came to blows, but all in all Desgrange was happy with the race. It was a success. There would be another Tour de France in 1904.

The route was the same as in 1903, but this time people outside the race got physically involved to help their local heroes. Hyppolite Aucouturier was the first to be affected. Even in the earliest races competitors understood the advantage of slipstreaming and riding in a group to share the pace setting, but there were big variations in their levels of fitness, experience and ambition, as well as variations in the bikes they raced on. Thanks to that and the awful road conditions, the fields thinned out quickly.

So, on stage one in 1904 a group of fans waited just south of Paris. The road was lonely, so there were few witnesses around, and the fans let the first few riders through, but then, just before Aucouturier arrived, they spread carpet tacks across the road. Of course he punctured, but he fitted a new tyre and carried on, only to ride into another patch of tacks and pick up another puncture. Aucouturier ended the stage two and a half hours behind the winner, Maurice Garin, not that Garin had a straightforward journey.

Later on the same stage he and Lucien Pothier were well ahead when somebody tried to run them off the road with a car. They survived, but Garin got into trouble for getting food outside of the stipulated feed zones. The organisers told him to stop, so he threatened to pull out of the Tour if they didn’t allow him to carry on doing what he wanted. They let him carry on. Then after the stage there were reports of riders getting lifts in cars, even taking the train, and an allegation that one rider was towed by a car with a cord that he held between his teeth.

It was a rocky start, and the race continued in the same way. When the riders tackled the Col de la République on stage two, supporters from St Etienne, the city at the foot of the climb, decided to stop or at least delay everybody ahead of their favourite rider, a local called Antoine Fauré. They hid in the woods – the Col de la République is also called the Col du Grand Bois (big wood) – and when Garin arrived in the lead with an Italian, Giovanni Gerbi, the fans jumped out and beat both riders up. Race officials weren’t far behind, but according to reports Desgrange had to fire a pistol into the air to disperse the attackers. Battered and bruised, Garin continued, but Gerbi’s injuries were so bad he left the race.

There were many other incidents. On stage three some men from Ferdinand Payan’s village barricaded the street once their man went through Nîmes. It took Desgrange and his gun to sort that one out as well. The Tour was on the verge of getting out of control, and only dogged determination and help from police got the race to Paris. And once there the organisers had another problem. They had already disqualified several riders for cheating, but stories began circulating that the first four finishers in the overall standings, plus others not already thrown off the race, had cheated as well.

The French governing body for cycling investigated the stories, and it found that there were solid grounds to disqualify the first four finishers, and others. There was proof that some riders had cut the route, and others had been towed by motor vehicles for long stretches. Some had even covered part of a stage by train. There were probably more culprits, but in December 1904 it was announced that the first four overall, Maurice Garin, Lucien Pothier, César Garin, who was Maurice’s brother, and Hyppolite Aucouturier, had all cheated, and they were disqualified along with five others.

That left the rider previously placed fifth, Henri Cornet, as the winner. He was 19 years, 11 months and 20 days old when he crossed the finish line in Paris, and he remains the youngest ever winner of the Tour de France and the only teenager ever to win the race. He was a good rider, who went on to win the 1906 Paris–Roubaix and come second the same year in Bordeaux–Paris, but he never won the Tour de France again.

Garin was banned from racing for two years, ten others were banned for one year, and a few were banned for life. None admitted what they’d done, at least not at the time. Garin stuck to his denials for years, but later, as an older man running his garage business in Lens, he would laugh about it with his friends, saying: ‘Of course I took the train, everyone did. I was young, the Tour de France was different then. It didn’t matter as much as it does now.’

In public Henri Desgrange appeared worried about the Tour, even writing that it was dead, killed by the riders who competed in it and by the public who supported them. But it wasn’t dead. And anyway, Desgrange was already planning the 1905 race. The route would start at the edges of towns and avoid built-up areas as much as possible, which meant fewer people would see the race, but it also meant that big groups of people travelling into the countryside would stand out and could be policed. Stages were shorter too, eliminating the need to ride at night, but their number nearly doubled to eleven. Finally, it was decided that the overall classification of the 1905 Tour would be decided on points rather than on time. But the organisers needed something else, a grand gesture to sweep away the memory of the 1904 race and the scandal surrounding it.

The Vosges mountains in the east were very significant in early twentieth-century France. They had been part of France, and are today, but after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Germany took over control of the eastern half of the Vosges. The highest peaks in the range became the new border between Germany and France, and the Ballon d’Alsace is one of those highest peaks.

France wanted the Vosges back. The mountains were referred to by serious journalists and politicians of the time as ‘the peaks on a blue horizon’, and their return to all-French rule was an object of national desire. Their significance had already been celebrated by a motorbike race between Brest and Belfort, the eastern city that refused to surrender during the Franco-Prussian War. So Desgrange looked to the Vosges, and to its German border, and wondered if a bold statement in that direction might be the grand gesture he needed to help his race.

Desgrange spoke about the mountains to his route planner, a young journalist called Alphonse Steinès: ‘We don’t have to go direct from Paris to Lyons,’ he told Steinès. ‘Instead, why don’t we take a giant side step to the Vosges and run as close to the German border as we can?’

The idea appealed, Steinès was an avid cyclist and great adventurer. He wanted to see if the highest mountain passes could be crossed in a race. After all, some adventurous touring cyclists had done so already. The Vosges weren’t the highest mountains in France, but they would do for now, and his research told Steinès that the ascent of the Ballon d’Alsace ran within metres of the German border. The climb would have huge significance with the French public, making a defiant gesture against the invaders and so helping to focus public attention on the Tour de France for the right reasons.

With the route decided, Desgrange got on with what he did best, influencing opinion with words. In L’Auto he wrote an impassioned ‘advertorial’ for his race: ‘Am I putting my racers in danger?’ he asked. ‘Not only am I asking them to climb a mountain of more than 1,000 metres; I am asking them to do it right under the eye of the enemy.’ To add to the drama perhaps, he also predicted that no rider would climb the Ballon d’Alsace without walking up its steepest pitches.

He was wrong about the last bit, but it was a dramatic claim that increased public interest in the race. And interest was at fever pitch when the 1905 Tour hit the Vosges on stage two, which went from Nancy to Belfort. Six riders reached the bottom of the Ballon d’Alsace together: Hippolyte Aucouturier, Henri Cornet, Louis Trousselier (who was doing military service and only had a 24-hour pass to start the race, so was AWOL), Emile Georget, Lucien Petit-Breton (who was really called Lucien Mazan but raced under an assumed name because his family were wealthy and considered professional cycling beneath them), and René Pottier.

The riders stopped to change to lower gears at the foot of the climb. This involved removing their rear wheels and turning them around to engage the larger of two sprockets, one on each side of the hub. Petit-Breton was distanced because he messed up his wheel change – a tricky operation in the days before quick-release hubs – but the others bent their backs into the slope and made good progress.

The rest stuck together until 4 kilometres from the summit, where Cornet launched an attack and Trousselier was dropped. Cornet went again one kilometre later, this time shaking Georget loose. Then Aucouturier let go, and it was down to two, Cornet and Pottier, with Pottier just managing to get clear and cross the summit first. The press went into raptures. If climbing the Ballon d’Alsace was meant to capture imaginations, the swashbuckling way the best riders did it was even more impressive. One newspaper called Pottier the ‘King of the Mountains’, and the name stuck.

The northern ascent of the Ballon d’Alsace, the one used by the Tour in 1905 and usually since, starts in St Maurice-sur-Moselle, and at the time the German border ran a few metres to the left of the road. That land reverted to France after the First World War, and today the Ballon’s summit is the border of three French regions; Franche-Comté, Alsace and Lorraine, and four départements. There’s a memorial to René Pottier, who took his own life in 1907, close to the summit café, and a clearing in the trees reveals an outstanding 360-degree view over the Vosges, and beyond them to the Alps.

The southern descent of the Ballon d’Alsace is long and quite shallow, but it twists and turns through the trees before levelling out in Giromagny. That’s where Aucouturier finally caught back up to Pottier in 1905, before winning the stage a further 12 kilometres down the road in Belfort.

Once the Tour had conquered the Ballon d’Alsace, the French journalist Philippe Bouvet later wrote, ‘The Tour de France left the hills and entered the mountains, turning from an operetta into an opera.’ Two stages later the race climbed the Col de Laffrey and the Col de Bayard, two outlier passes of the Alps, and public interest for that stage was even more intense.

It started in Grenoble and the climbs were both on the Route Napoléon, now the N85, the main link between Grenoble and Gap. The most common way to make the 105-kilometre journey in 1905 was by stagecoach, which took twelve hours, the coach being pulled by six horses, with four more added for each of the two climbs. The leading Tour riders, Julien Maitron and Hyppolite Aucouturier, covered that part of the stage in four hours, and then they carried on for another 243 kilometres to Toulon, where Aucouturier won.

The Alps had lots of history, lots of mythology, and now here were men, skinny men in knitted shorts and baggy jerseys, riding funny little bicycles where Hannibal marched his elephants, where Romans came to conquer. What’s more, the skinny men were three times faster than a coach and six horses. By taming the mountains, cyclists became heroes. And Louis Trousselier proved to be the biggest hero of all when he ran out the winner of the 1905 Tour de France.

The Tour visited the Ballon d’Alsace again the following year, when René Pottier was once more first to the top, but this time he didn’t pay for his efforts with the tendon injury that forced him to quit on stage three in 1905. Instead he pressed on to win the race. The climb became a regular feature, with Gustave Garrigou storming up it in 1908 in a reported time of 32 minutes, a fantastic record that stood for years.

The Tour de France was a success. It massively boosted the circulation of L’Auto, which quickly outstripped its rival, Le Vélo. News of L’Auto’s success, and the reasons for it, spread through Europe, and in Italy two newspapers were having a similar battle for circulation to the one between L’Auto and Le Vélo. They were Il Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport. La Gazzetta had the cycling pedigree, having promoted the first editions of the Giro di Lombardia, now called Il Lombardia, in 1905, and the first Milan–San Remo in 1907. Both races were thought up by a Gazzetta journalist called Tullo Morgagni, who lived in Milan.

The first edition of the Giro di Lombardia was actually called Milan–Milan and billed as a revenge match between Milanese cyclist Pierino Albini and Giovanni Cuniolo. The ‘revenge’ coming from the fact that Cuniolo had beaten Albini in a short-lived but once important race called the Italian King’s Cup. Milan–Milan went north and along the fringes of the Italian lake district, in which the race is run today, then returned to Milan. The route was mainly flat but the road surfaces were appalling. They were so bad in places that where there were railway lines running alongside the roads, riders stopped, lifted their bikes onto the bed between rail-tracks and continued riding there because it was smoother.

Marginal gains is a phrase bandied about in cycling now to describe the search for advantages, no matter how slight. Well, the winner of the first Giro di Lombardia, Giovanni Gerbi, was a ‘marginal gains’ guy, although back then it was just called being crafty. He went round the route in the week before the race, building little earth ramps next to the rails where there was a really bad stretch of road, and in the race he used the mounds, which only he knew about, to cross over the rails and ride on the rail bed without dismounting.

The first ever Milan–San Remo more or less followed the route of a race between the two places in 1906. That was a two-day stage race for amateurs only, but buoyed by the success of Milan–Milan, which attracted enormous crowds, Tullo Morgagni negotiated with the San Remo Cycling Club, and La Gazzetta dello Sport took over running the race in 1907, making it a single-day race for professionals.

Thirty-three riders, all men, set off from Milan at 5.18 a.m. on 14 April 1907. The distance was 288 kilometres, not long compared with other races of the same period, but Milan–San Remo is now the longest single-day race in the men’s World Tour. It rained throughout. The best riders took over 11 hours to reach San Remo on a course that crossed the plains south of Milan, climbed the Turchino Pass then descended towards the Mediterranean. When the riders hit the coast, they turned right and headed west along the water’s edge and over the headlands: the Capo Mele, Capo Cervo and Capo Berta.

The field included Carlo Galetti, Luigi Ganna, Giovanni Gerbi, Gustave Garrigou. The race finished on the Corso Cavallotti in San Remo, where Lucien Petit-Breton won by 35 seconds from Garrigou and Gerbi. Only fourteen riders got through to the end, with last man Luigi Rota finishing over three and a half hours behind Petit-Breton.

Through Morgagni and the success of his races, La Gazzetta dello Sport planted its flag firmly on early twentieth-century Italian cycling, but then in 1908 word got round that Corriere della Sera were planning a Tour of Italy, a big stage race like the Tour de France. That could have blown La Gazzetta’s lead in Italian cycling, so Morgagni convinced the paper’s owner, Emilio Costamagna, and its editor, Armando Cougnet, to use the experience and goodwill gained from Milan–San Remo and Giro di Lombardia to organise a Tour of Italy as soon as possible.

On 7 August 1908, La Gazzetta announced that the first Tour of Italy, known nowadays almost universally by its Italian title, Giro d’Italia, would run in 1909. It would start in Milan on 13 May with a 397-kilometre stage to Bologna, and end on 30 May with a 206-kilometre stage from Turin to Milan. There were six stages in between: the shortest being 228 kilometres and the longest 378 kilometres.

The first Giro avoided the high mountains, but still included some stiff climbs, like the ascents to Roccaraso, Rionero-Sannitico and Macerone on stage three between Naples and Chieti. The steep Passo Bracco featured on stage six from Florence to Genoa, and the Colle di Nava was a stiff test on stage seven from Genoa to Turin. As well as top Italian racers, other competitors included the French rider Lucien Petit-Breton and the Belgian Cyriel Van Hauwaert, so the first Giro d’Italia was an international race.

Rome was the southern extent, and the riders covered a total distance of 2,448 kilometres over a period of eighteen days; 127 riders started, but only forty-nine made it to the final finish line. The winner was decided on points awarded according to the finish order of each stage. But the problem with awarding the overall victory on points is that the winner might not have completed the course in the fastest time.

That was certainly the case in 1909. Luigi Ganna won the Giro, but he wasn’t the quickest over its entire route. That was the third-placed rider, Giovanni Rossignoli. If the first Giro had been decided on time, Rossignoli would have won by quite a large margin, and deciding the race on points didn’t prevent cheating. Three riders were disqualified before the start of stage three because there was no record of them passing through all the control points on the previous stage. It was later discovered that they had covered quite a large section of the stage by train.

But, like the early Tours de France, the public weren’t put off by such infractions. They probably added spice and intrigue to the race anyway. And going forwards, spice and intrigue created by all sorts of unfair play, scandals and downright cheating became a big part of road racing. And it still doesn’t put too many off the sport.

The first Giro certainly created lots of interest in Italy. An estimated thirty thousand people watched the finish in Milan, and Ganna was a worthy winner. He’d already won Milan–San Remo that year, and he was fifth in the 1908 Tour de France. His prize money helped him set up a bicycle factory in 1912. He also came up with one of the greatest winner’s quotes of all time. At the finish, when asked how he felt now the race was over, Ganna replied, ‘My backside is on fire.’

Second overall, Carlo Galetti raced on a Rudge-Whitworth bike made in the British Midlands. He won the next two editions of the Giro d’Italia, but after his initial second place Galetti switched to Atala, then the Bianchi team, so raced on their brands when he won. The 1912 Giro d’Italia team race was won by Atala. The last Giro decided on points was won by Carlo Oriana in 1913. Then Alfonso Clazolari won on time in 1914, before the race was halted by the First World War.

It resumed again in 1919 when Costante Giradengo won, and from then until after the Second World War the Giro was dominated by Italians. Other nationalities competed, but they found it hard to race against the Italians, who would unite to see an Italian winner, no matter what part of the country he came from, or what team he rode for.

The Giro was suspended again during most of the Second World War, with no race from 1941 to 1945. Straight after the war Italians continued winning through Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi and Fiorenzo Magni. Coppi’s 1947 win was particularly remarkable since he’d had to build himself back up after being a prisoner of war. It also came at the expense of his arch rival, Gino Bartali.

Coppi and Bartali – they are never introduced the other way around despite Bartali being older and ahead of Coppi in the alphabet – were almost at war themselves at the time. The pious Bartali represented the ideals of old Italy, whereas Coppi was seen as a more modern man. Bartali was the hero of the rural and older Italians. Coppi’s fans were younger city dwellers and business people. Before the start of the 1947 Giro, Bartali declared with typical Italian passion that to win the race, ‘Coppi will have to cross my dead body.’ Italy was a froth of widely differing views and passions by the time Coppi won.

The Italian stranglehold was finally broken in 1950 by a Swiss rider, Hugo Koblet. Nicknamed Le Pédaleur de Charme because of his impeccable riding style and appearance, Koblet kept a comb and a sponge soaked in eau de cologne in his racing jersey, so that he could freshen up towards the end of a race and wouldn’t appear in next day’s newspapers covered in mud and sweat.

But Koblet was more than a cycling dandy, he had immense class, as he proved by winning the 1950 Giro, then the Tour de France in 1951, almost entirely without team support in either race. Koblet later suffered from an illness involving his kidneys, from which he never really recovered. He stopped racing in 1958, and six years later he died in a car crash, which some say was suicide. Koblet was travelling at great speed between Zurich and Esslingen when his Alfa Romeo piled into a tree. The road was straight, weather conditions were good and it was daylight, but witnesses said that the driver made no effort to deviate from his course, or to slow down. He just piled straight into the tree.

With Koblet’s victory the Giro’s profile began to grow internationally. Another Swiss rider, Carlo Clerici, won in 1954, then the Luxembourger Charly Gaul won in 1956. And he did it with his trademark devastation of a Grand Tour in one stage in terrible weather. Gaul was a beautiful climber, called the Angel of the Mountains by the press, but he was also incredibly tough, which made him doubly dangerous when bad weather hit the mountains. Cold didn’t seem to affect him, or maybe he could just suffer and push himself more than others.

The final mountain stage of the 1956 Giro d’Italia was cold and wet, with lying snow banked at the sides of the roads on the mountain passes. Perfect for Gaul. He was lying 24th overall, 16 minutes behind the race leader, but with 242 kilometres and several high passes, he still thought he could win. Gaul attacked halfway through the stage and danced away, impervious to anything but gaining time. The others could do nothing about it, and Gaul wiped out his deficit and then gained enough time to win overall. He couldn’t even walk by the end of the stage, which finished on top of Monte Bondone and took him nine hours to complete. Only forty-nine of the morning’s eighty-nine starters made it to the finish.

By 1957 another star of men’s road racing had emerged, Jacques Anquetil of France. Anquetil won his first Tour de France that year, but he wasn’t good enough yet to take on Charly Gaul at full force in conditions that suited the Luxembourger. Gaul crushed Anquetil and everybody else in one horrible wet stage in the Chartreuse mountains to win the 1958 Tour. Then Gaul repeated his defeat of Anquetil in the 1959 Giro d’Italia.

Anquetil was leading the race by four minutes at the start of the twenty-first stage out of twenty-two, but that stage from Aosta to Courmayeur was 296 kilometres long, and included the Col de Petit St Bernard. When Gaul hit it he went into overdrive, holding close to 30 kilometres per hour for the entire length of the climb. That was Gaul’s climbing strength; he hit a high pace revving a low gear and held it there. Rivals thought they could stay with him, so they followed him, and they could stay at first. However, Gaul always rode half a kilometre per hour faster than his rivals could sustain. They hung on and hung on, in a way goaded by Gaul’s pace to do so, but while he could handle it they were slowly going deeper into the red. By the time they realised what was happening they were so deep they cracked, often losing minutes. It was an infuriating way to lose.

That’s exactly what happened to Jacques Anquetil on the Petit St Bernard in 1959. He followed Gaul, and because Anquetil could suffer like no other he held him until three kilometres from the summit, then he cracked – really cracked. By the summit Anquetil had lost seven minutes to Gaul, and he was ten behind at the finish in Courmayeur in the Val d’Aosta. Gaul had won another Grand Tour in one incredible day.

But that was the end of the Angel’s days of cycling grace. Anquetil won the 1960 Giro d’Italia, the first Frenchman to do so, and then he won the 1961 Tour de France. He won the Tour again in 1962 and 1963, then in 1964 Anquetil won the Giro again, the first part of a Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double that year. That made him the first rider in history to repeat Fausto Coppi’s 1949 and 1952 Giro/Tour doubles, and the first to win five Tours de France.

Anquetil also helped boost the international profile of the Giro d’Italia, and Eddy Merckx took the first of his five Giro victories in 1968. Then a Swede, Gosta Petterson, won in 1971. The Giro d’Italia was a truly international race now, and one that every big star wanted to win. What’s more, doing the double by winning the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same year became a mark of greatness.

Coppi did the double, as did Anquetil and Merckx, then Bernard Hinault; and in time Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani would do it too. But road racing’s triple crown is winning the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the world road race championships all in the same year. Up until the start of 1987 only Eddy Merckx had done that; then came Ireland’s Stephen Roche.

Roche’s career by then could be summed up as periods of bike racing genius interrupted by accidents, injuries and slumps. He fought back from a serious knee problem in 1986, which saw him thinking he would have to give up cycling altogether, but then everything just clicked into place, literally.

Roche was sure he could win the 1987 Giro, but his team-mate, the 1986 winner Roberto Visentini, was in the way. Their Carrera team, which was Italian, had told Roche that Visentini would support Roche in that year’s Tour de France, but Roche knew Visentini had no intentions of even riding the race, so he had no choice but to attack. With Visentini leading, Roche attacked and took the pink jersey from him: a move that left the Irishman isolated within his team and the subject of a hate campaign by the Italian supporters, who wanted their countryman Visentini to win, and saw Roche’s attack as treason.

Roche’s only allies in the race were his Belgian domestique, Eddy Schepers, and the British climbing star Robert Millar, who rode either side of Roche for as long as possible to protect him from the fans. They were his only help in controlling the revenge attacks launched by Visentini and a number of other Italians.

Roche won in Milan, the first English speaker to win the Giro d’Italia, and Robert Millar took the climber’s jersey, as well as second place overall. The first jewel in the triple crown was in place. Then Roche went on to win the Tour de France and the world championships, making 1987 his golden year. Still, thirty years later, only Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche have ever done that.

The 1988 Giro was every bit as dramatic as 1987, and its winner, the American Andy Hampsten, just as ground-breaking. Victory was founded with a display of courage and endurance on a day when it snowed on the Passo di Gavia, one of the legendary climbs of the Giro d’Italia. The stage is still referred to as the day grown men cried.

Hampsten was warned well before the start that terrible conditions awaited the race on the Gavia, and he and his 7-Eleven team prepared accordingly. They all packed bags with warm clothing in them to be handed to them before things got too bad on the climb. But, as he recalls, they didn’t know how bad it would get.

I began to realise what was in store when I descended the Aprica that day. It was pouring with rain and my clothes were soaked. In the valley I changed as much as I could, but I kept my neoprene gloves on, which were keeping my hands warm. There’s no point in swapping wet neoprene gloves for a dry pair. Your body has already warmed the layer of water that neoprene lets in, that’s how it works. If I’d taken them off and let my hands get cold, then I wouldn’t have been able to function at all. The climb was still a dirt road from the side we climbed in 1988, and so was the first bit of the descent. As we reached the first 16 per cent uphill section I attacked. The others knew I was going to do it, but I wanted to go early and demoralise them.

Hampsten has recounted that story so many times, but says it still gives him a little shudder when he does so.

The Dutch rider Eric Breukink was the only one not broken by Hampsten’s attack. He was distanced by the American but chased hard on the descent, catching and passing Hampsten to win the stage. But even the descent was factored in to Hampsten’s plan. ‘I took my time putting on the hat and wet-weather clothes I’d arranged to be handed to me before the top of the climb. I also worked out from the wind direction that things were going to be much worse on the descent, so I saved some energy. Breukink descended quicker than me because he had no rain jacket on, but there was no way I was taking mine off,’ Hampsten says.

He made the right choice. Being conservative not only gave Hampsten the pink jersey, but it preserved his strength to defend it, and so he became the first, and only rider so far from the USA, to win the Giro d’Italia, the number two Grand Tour behind the Tour de France.

4

Racing Into the Sky

The year of the first Giro d’Italia saw the Tour de France take a big jump of its own. The start list grew from 109 riders in 1908 to 195 in 1909. The majority were French, but the numbers of Swiss, Italian, German and Belgian entrants all increased. Under pressure from team sponsors, all of them bike manufacturers because interests from outside cycling weren’t allowed to sponsor riders, Desgrange allowed them to list their men together. They weren’t teams as such, because riders weren’t permitted to support each other or engage in any kind of teamwork we would recognise today.

There were twelve pro ‘squads’, ranging from Legnano and Alcyon, with six sponsored riders each, to Le Globe with one. There were also 154 ‘Isolés’ – independent riders from France, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, who looked after themselves, booking their own hotels, and so on, for the entire race.

The first stage produced the first ever Belgian Tour de France stage winner. His name was Cyrille Van Hauwaert and he was the first Lion of Flanders, a title bike fans in the Flanders region of Belgium bestow on the very best of their riders. However, back in 1909 they were given a much less flattering name by French fans and the press. It was a name that stuck for a good few years after that as well. Riders like Van Hauwaert were called flahutes, the word given to long cloth bags in which labourers carried the food they ate at work. The bags were secured on their backs by two shoulder loops, a bit like a rucksack. Many Belgian labourers were employed on a day-to-day basis, and they rode old bikes or tramped around Flanders and northern France looking for their next job, with just a baguette and maybe a bottle of cold coffee in their flahute bags to sustain them. They were a tough breed.

Van Hauwaert was among the first of a long line of cycling champions from Flanders, a small region with a huge impact on road racing. He grew up in Moorslede in West Flanders, the son of a brick-maker, and like so many Flemish kids he came to cycling by chance. An old bike, which he found in a farmyard, gave Van Hauwaert the freedom to explore, and later to race. He became a tough competitor, but he had the soul of a poet as well. So many cyclists have – inside Kevlar body armour maybe, but it’s there nonetheless.

Van Hauwaert wrote an autobiography after he stopped racing, and this passage from it will resonate with anybody who as a kid discovered the joy and freedom of exploring the countryside by bike. He recalls setting off one day in his mid-teens to visit the nearby town of Turnhout. But once there Van Hauwaert saw it was the same distance again to Bruges, so he pressed on. Then, after enjoying beautiful Bruges, a city sometimes called the Venice of the north because of its extensive canal network, he carried on west into an area he didn’t know. He describes what he saw like this:

The road climbed, and on top of a small hill I saw ahead of me the vast green plain of the sea, which merges far in the distance into the blurred line of the horizon. Neighbours told me about the sea when they returned from excursions to it by rail, but I was so proud that my little bike had carried me to see this magical sight.

Van Hauwaert didn’t win the 1909 Tour. Instead it was won by the heaviest man ever to win a Tour de France. Road racers, even big road racers, aren’t big by general standards: 82, maybe 85 kilograms are what the heaviest Tour de France riders weigh. And those are the bigger sprinters and time triallists, or some big strong team workers. François Faber was massive by comparison, weighing 92 kilograms.

His mother was French and his father came from Luxembourg, so although he was born in France and regarded himself as French, Faber held dual French-Luxembourger nationality, so was technically the first foreign winner of the Tour de France. He is listed in the Tour’s Encyclopédie, the official book of Tour de France results, as being from Luxembourg.

The Vosges were included in the 1909 race, as were the edges of the Alps, which Faber could handle, although others handled these climbs better. What played into his hands was the weather. It was very bad; cold and wet through the entire race. Those conditions generally favour big riders over smaller ones. The bigger a person is for a given height, the less surface area of skin they have in proportion to body volume, which helps them preserve body heat. Faber, whose nickname was the Giant of Colombes and who had worked as a furniture remover and a docker before becoming a pro cyclist, won three out of the 14 stages.

It was a fine achievement, but 1909 was the end for big riders like François Faber, as far as winning the Tour de France was concerned. Next year the race went into the mountains, big mountains with passes of over 2,000 metres. The Tour de France began to take the shape it has today.

Alphonse Steinès had heard of the majesty of the Pyrenees, of names like Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. He’d seen their pale grey, snowcapped silhouettes shimmering distantly in the sun when the Tour passed through the southwest. He’d read about the Pyrenees too. Maybe he’d also heard that some intrepid touring cyclists had ridden, or more likely pushed, their way over some of the highest Pyrenean passes, as the London Bicycle Club had done in 1879.

But still, only locals really knew the Pyrenees, a place where wild and mysterious legends grew. The passes were far in excess of anything tackled in competition. Steinès wanted to send the Tour over those passes, so he brought the subject up with his boss, and quickly found out that Desgrange knew little more about the Pyrenees than the same distant profile Steinès had seen.

So Desgrange let Steinès write something in L’Auto about the possibility of racing in the Pyrenees, just to see if any readers responded with informed opinions. They did; people who knew the mountains said that sending racing cyclists over their high passes was crazy. The mountain roads were blocked with snow for most of the year, and when it melted they were revealed to be little more than cattle and sheep tracks.

But Desgrange was more intrigued than put off. He told Steinès to go to the Pyrenees and check out a route – and what an assignment that turned out to be. Steinès drove his car from Paris to Pau, one of the gateway towns to the Pyrenees, and when he told some locals why he was there they laughed. They told Steinès about a Mercedes racing car someone had tried to test by driving it over the Col du Tourmalet, one of the high Pyrenean passes, and one that Steinès wanted to include in his Tour de France stage. Not far up the climb the Mercedes was flipped over by the rough surface.

Locals told Steinès that they were used to outsiders coming to pit their strength against the mountains, but the mountains always won. So Steinès went elsewhere for guidance. He spoke to the superintendent of roads for the region, a man called Blanchet, only to find that he also thought the idea of sending cyclists over the high passes was mad.

Steinès wanted to follow an already defined way, a trail known to drovers, transporters of goods and itinerant workers. The way is the D616 and D918 today and crosses the Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubisque. The stage Steinès wanted would start in Bagnères-de-Luchon, at the foot of the Peyresourde, and cross all those climbs but then continue on through the foothills and the flats to Bayonne, a total distance of 326 kilometres.

Undeterred by the stories he heard, Steinès hired a local guide who agreed to help him, and set off from Bagnères-de-Luchon early one morning in his car. They crossed the Col de Peyresourde and the Aspin without too much trouble, but the Tourmalet nearly killed Steinès. They slipped and slid up the first six kilometres of the pass, then the car got stuck in a snowdrift and the guide, who was driving, wanted to turn back. It was six o’clock, getting dark and it was a long way to the summit. It was even further down the other side to Barèges, the next place of habitation. The guide told Steinès about the local bear population, before leaving him to his own devices.

True Pyrenean bears are thought to have died out now, but in the Seventies the population was augmented by Slovenian bears of the same breed, and about twenty of these Slovenian-Pyrenean hybrid bears exist today. But there were quite a few of the original bears at the turn of the twentieth century. They were a common sheep killer, and a possible threat to anyone wandering alone who might disturb one and be perceived as a threat.

With night falling around him, Steinès abandoned his car, but luckily he soon met a local shepherd, who led him on foot to the top of the pass. But then the shepherd had to turn for home, and we are talking big distances: the two main places of habitation on either side of the Tourmalet, Ste Marie-de-Campan and Barèges, are 36 kilometres apart. So at the summit the shepherd pointed Steinès in the direction of Barèges at the foot of the Tourmalet’s west side, and told him to walk next to the Bastan stream. That would have taken him where he needed to go, where he had told people he would be arriving that day. Unfortunately Steinès lost his way, stumbled and was swept off course by a small avalanche. He was discovered hours later, half-dead, by locals who started a search party when he failed to arrive in Barèges.

Even while he was having that misadventure, Steinès knew that the road over the Aubisque was nowhere near as good as the one over the Tourmalet, but he had a plan. Once recovered from his night out on the mountain, Steinès is said to have sent a telegram to Desgrange, which read, ‘No trouble crossing the Tourmalet. Roads satisfactory. No problem for cyclists. Steinès.’

Then he asked Desgrange for 5,000 francs to make some road improvements he’d noted were necessary along the route. In fact he needed most of the money to help pay for a better road over the Aubisque, which was a chewed-up goat track. Steinès had previously agreed a price of 3,000 francs with Blanchet, the superintendent of roads, but he asked Desgrange for more because he knew his boss would try to knock him down. He did. Desgrange offered 3,000 francs, which Steinès accepted. He could pay Blanchet and his stage would go ahead.

With the road improvements agreed, Desgrange announced in L’Auto that a stage of the 1910 Tour de France would cross the Col de Peyresourde, the Col d’Aspin, the Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque. Interest was huge. Blanchet mended the roads and built a new one over the Aubisque, while Steinès kept the secret of his night on the Tourmalet to himself.

Desgrange was still worried. He realised that the riders would be out on those high wild roads for a long time. The Tour was a race for heroes, but they needed some support. To do otherwise would be inhumane, so Desgrange introduced the Voiture Balai, the broom-wagon, a truck that would be the last vehicle on the road, there to sweep up any stragglers. And the practice has stuck. Almost every road race has at least a token broom-wagon, a last vehicle behind the race, which can pick up stragglers who can’t carry on, or who don’t want to.

The Tour de France broom-wagon has a symbolic role today. The last vehicle in the convoy following the race still has a broom strapped to its back doors, but modern Tour racers who drop out of the race, and it’s not something anybody does lightly, are whisked off to the finish in air-conditioned team vehicles. Or in an ambulance if they have sustained injuries.

That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, though; the broom-wagon served its practical purpose well into the Nineties. Photographers and, later, TV cameras would crowd around it to capture the end of a rider’s race, the ritual removal of his numbers by the broom-wagon driver, and the exhausted last step into its dark insides.

Stage ten of the 1910 Tour de France got under way at 3.30 a.m. to avoid riders being out on the mountains after dark, because the big climbs were all in the first half of the stage. It would only just be getting light as the riders tackled the first, the Col de Peyresourde, but even the slowest of them should cross them all by nightfall. Steinès briefed the riders, telling them not to take risks. He also told them that the time limit would be suspended for the day. It had been introduced to keep the race more compact by disqualifying riders who finished outside a certain percentage of the stage winner’s time, the percentage being calculated according to the conditions and terrain of each stage.

As the stage progressed, Octave Lapize and his team-mate Gustave Garrigou steadily drew ahead of the rest, Garrigou winning a special 100-franc prize for riding all the way up the Col du Tourmalet without once getting off to walk. The two were well ahead by the summit. Alphonse Steinès and Victor Breyer, a colleague from the organisation, then went ahead to the next and final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, and waited at the summit. They thought they’d see Lapize and Garrigou still in the lead, but an almost unknown rider, François Lafoucarde, got there first. He was riding very slowly and Breyer asked Lafoucarde what had happened. Where were the others? But he didn’t reply and just plodded past, staring straight ahead.

A quarter of an hour later Lapize emerged. He was exhausted, half stumbling, half pushing his bike. He looked at Steinès and Breyer and is alleged to have spat out the single word ‘Assassins’. Lapize then caught Lafoucarde, went straight past him and won the stage, but Faber did well too. He was the race leader, and had been since stage two. Lapize was second overall, but the stage that suited him far more than Faber only brought him three points closer to the giant rider. Faber finished ten minutes after Lapize, but still came in third. It took Lapize another three stages to dislodge Faber and finally win the Tour in Paris by four points.

The Pyrenees were judged a success, so the following year the Tour visited the high Alps as well. Stage four went from Belfort to Chamonix, right into the heart of the mountains. Next day the riders climbed the Col d’Aravis, the Col du Télégraphe, and then the giant Col du Galibier. When Henri Desgrange encountered the Galibier it was love at first sight. This is what he wrote about his favourite mountain climb in 1934: ‘Oh Laffrey! Oh Bayard! Oh Tourmalet! I would be failing in my duty not to proclaim that next to the Galibier you are pale cheap wine. In front of this giant I can do nothing more than raise my hat and salute.’

From 1911 on, Desgrange waited at the summit every year the race climbed the Galibier to time the riders through. Near the top of the south side there’s a huge memorial to Desgrange, and whenever the Galibier is in the Tour a special ‘Souvenir Desgrange’ prize is given to the first rider to the top.

The riders climbed the Galibier’s north side in 1911, the hardest side. It starts in St Michel-de-Maurienne with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe, a step to the start of the Galibier. Linked like Siamese twins, together they provide 34 kilometres of climbing, with a short 4.7-kilometre descent into the ski town of Valloire in between.

There’s a steep upwards ramp coming out of Valloire, then about 4 kilometres of false flat, giving space to consider the massive change of scenery. This is another world. Gone are the Télégraphe’s lovely tree-lined hairpins, and the pleasant summit café with its twee little garden. This is a huge landscape, a deep U-shaped valley, bare of trees and edged by enormous scree slopes, and snowcapped mountains beyond. The road barely twists, but it slowly racks up in gradient towards what looks like an impenetrable wall.

Even the great Eddy Merckx found this part of Galibier daunting. ‘The long straight section through the valley is difficult to deal with tactically,’ he says. ‘Attacks have to be timed well before it, or after it. Because if you attack on that section it is impossible to get out of sight. You just hang out in front of the chasers, providing a target for them to aim at.’

Further and further up this section there doesn’t seem any way out of the valley. Then, suddenly, at a place called Plan Lachat, the road veers sharp right and the final fierce phase of the Galibier begins. Hairpin follows hairpin for 7 kilometres of 8 per cent climbing. Until 1978 all traffic on the Galibier, including the Tour de France, passed through the oak-doored summit tunnel. But then the tunnel was shut for repair, and an extra piece of road was built over the top, where the old pre-tunnel Galibier pass went, the pass used by muleteers to get from the Maurienne valley to the villages of the Guisanne and Romanche valleys before 1891.

Emile Georget was the first rider to the top of the Galibier in 1911, and he went on to win the stage from Chamonix to Grenoble. But Gustave Garrigou extended his overall advantage on the big climb, widening the gap on his nearest rival, François Faber, from one point to ten. Faber won the next stage to Nice, with Garrigou second, but then dropped to third overall by the end of stage eight. A new challenger emerged, the stage eight winner Paul Duboc. He closed the gap further by winning stage nine as well.

The race was now in Bagnères-de-Luchon, and the next stage was a repeat of the Pyrenean epic of the previous year to Bayonne. Duboc led over the Tourmalet and looked strong, but then the story goes that he accepted a drink from a spectator, and after taking a sip he became ill. He could hardly ride and limped the rest of the way to the finish, where he arrived in twenty-first place, 3 hours and 17 minutes behind second-placed Garrigou. Within hours Garrigou was receiving death threats from Duboc’s fans, and the threats increased as the race approached Duboc’s home region of Normandy. His fans were convinced that Duboc had been poisoned, and that Garrigou was behind it.

Duboc recovered to win stage 11, then Garrigou won stage 13 to Cherbourg. The next stage passed through Rouen, Duboc’s home city, and Garrigou was terrified of being attacked there by Duboc’s fans. He even talked about giving up the Tour de France. Desgrange had to step in. He confronted Garrigou, convinced that in his worried state he wouldn’t dare lie to him, and asked him outright, was he involved in the alleged poisoning of Duboc? Garrigou said no, and Desgrange took him at his word.

Next day Desgrange got a make-up artist to prepare Garrigou. He fitted a false moustache, a big hat, and gave him sun goggles to wear. He was allowed to change his racing colours, and his bike. Garrigou was unrecognisable, but just to ensure his safety in case he was recognised, Desgrange asked the riders to stay together until after Rouen, where a huge angry mob had assembled. Luckily, though, the disguise and bike riders’ solidarity confounded them. The fans couldn’t pick out Garrigou in the middle of the fast-moving bunch, and once safely through Rouen, Garrigou removed his disguise and pedalled on.

Duboc won the stage, then finished second, one place ahead of Garrigou, on the final stage to Paris. But Garrigou won the Tour by 18 points to Duboc, who lost 19 points on the Luchon to Bayonne stage where he fell ill. A lot of bad feeling still went Garrigou’s way, especially from Normandy.

In 1912 the tenth Tour de France saw its first true foreign winner, a Belgian called Odile Defraye. He was sponsored by Alcyon, which was also Garrigou’s sponsor and had signed Paul Duboc for the Tour as well. There were two other Belgians in Alcyon’s 1912 five-man line-up.

A Frenchman, Charles Crupelandt, won the first stage. Crupelandt, incidentally, is the only man from the Roubaix area ever to win Paris–Roubaix. The last stretch of cobblestones in the race, a ceremonial one, is on the Avenue Charles Crupelandt, which was named in his honour. Defraye won the next stage, then took over the race lead after stage three. Octave Lapize and Eugène Christophe of France fought Defraye hard and got closer to him, but Lapize abandoned on stage nine.

Teamwork wasn’t allowed in the early Tours, but collusion between different teams is harder to prove, and reports of the 1912 Tour contain more than a suspicion that the Belgian riders in the race colluded to help their countryman win. If one of Defraye’s rivals attacked, the Belgians would work hard to catch him. Or they would work with Defraye but not with his French rivals. Eventually the Belgian drew 59 points clear of Christophe to win in Paris.

A Belgian victory was a step up in the international reputation of the Tour de France, but it saw the end of a points system to decide the overall classification. A rider could finish an hour in front of the next man on a stage, but still only gain one point in the overall standings, and that wasn’t fair. Defraye was a consistent rider, but not the best in the 1912 Tour in athletic terms. You can’t say for certain, but if the 1912 Tour had been decided on time there’s a strong argument that Defraye wouldn’t have won. Eugène Christophe led the race on time at the start of the final stage, but as he was already 48 points behind Defraye he didn’t follow the Belgian when he moved ahead with a breakaway, and lost his theoretical time lead.

So Desgrange changed the rules. Total time to cover the whole course would decide the 1913 Tour de France, but the change still produced a Belgian winner, when the very popular Eugène Christophe lost tons of time in the Pyrenees, through no fault of his own.

It was the first ever anticlockwise Tour de France, so the Pyrenees were before the Alps. That suited Christophe, because going anticlockwise meant that the key Pyrenean stage, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon, had its big climbs in the second half, and Christophe was an excellent climber. Previously there was plenty of distance between the last climb, Col d’Aubisque, and Bayonne, making it possible for riders to catch an attacking climber on the flat roads between the Aubisque and the finish. Now the Aubisque was the first climb, and it was followed by the brutal sequence of the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde before a short descent to the finish at Bagnères-de-Luchon.

Defraye took the race lead on stage three, with Christophe in second place. As expected, Christophe made an early move on stage six, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon. Seven riders went with him, but Defraye crashed and ended up so far behind when the Tourmalet was reached that he gave up and dropped out of the race. Christophe led with two Belgians, Philippe Thys and Marcel Buysse, after the Aubisque, which was in a terrible condition following bad weather. Several times they were forced to dismount and push their bikes through ankle-deep mud.

Buysse was quickly dropped on the Tourmalet, where Thys later left Christophe to cross the summit alone. There wasn’t much in it, so Christophe descended as fast as he dared. It must have been terrifying on those old bikes. Mountain descents are so steep that nowadays, riders can reach speeds of 70 to 80 kilometres per hour without trying. Bikes in 1913 were nowhere near as aerodynamic as they are now; neither were their riders and kit. There would have been more friction in a 1913 bike too. But still, they would have descended quickly, and slowing them from any sort of speed with flimsy brakes was no joke. Christophe must have been terrified when 10 kilometres down the east side of the Tourmalet the forks on his bike broke.

He couldn’t swap anything. The only way to continue in the race was to repair the fork. Christophe had learned some blacksmith’s skills when he was younger, but the nearest forge was at the bottom of the climb in the village of Ste Marie-de-Campan. So Christophe picked up his bike and began to jog down the mountain. L’Auto said he ran for 14 kilometres to the village, although that wasn’t held to be anything extraordinary, just typical of the many mishaps that befell riders in early road races. The legend of this stage grew after 1919, when Christophe lost another Tour de France due to a similar incident. And it continued growing because Christophe never did win the Tour de France. He is one of the best riders never to have done so.

Once at the blacksmith’s, Christophe stoked up the forge, took some metal tubing from the smith, and made a new fork blade. It was a difficult job and Christophe needed both hands for the repair, but a forge needs regular blasts of air to keep the fire hot enough to work the metal. Legend has it that Christophe asked the boy who worked in the forge to operate the bellows for him, and doing so was noted by the officials who had stopped to see that he did the repair himself, as the Tour de France rules said he must.

With the repair done, Christophe was ready to complete the stage, but he knew he’d broken race rules by having the blacksmith’s lad help him. He knew the officials who’d watched could penalise him. The story goes that when one of them said he was going out to the village to get some food because he was starving, Christophe growled, ‘Stay there and eat coal. While you are watching me I am your prisoner and you are my jailer.’

Work in the forge took Christophe three hours, after which he set off to climb the Aspin and the Peyresourde, eventually arriving in Luchon 3 hours and 50 minutes behind the stage winner, Philippe Thys. He’d taken nearly 18 hours to complete the 326 kilometres. There’s a plaque commemorating Christophe’s epic day in the village centre of Ste Marie-de-Campin today.

Thys took over the race lead, lost it next day to Marcel Buysse, but took it back after Buysse crashed and had to run to a village to make repairs of his own on stage nine. Then Thys began to pull ahead with consistent rather than flashy riding through the Alps, and won his first Tour de France.

Thys won again the following year in a race that was contested under the gathering threat of the First World War. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on the day the Tour started, and when the race ended on 26 July, Europe was eight days from war. On 3 August the German army invaded Belgium and many of the men who had raced in the Tour were drafted into their national armies. Not all of them survived.

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