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.
