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
