he stopped.
By the mid-Twenties the Tour of Flanders was by far the biggest race in its region, which led to problems because hundreds of people were following it in motor cars. That was solved by an appeal to fans in Sportwereld, thanking them for their support and encouraging them to continue being involved in the race, but only in a responsible manner. Later, after the Second World War, the race would face a much bigger problem, or rather its organisers would.
During the occupation the German authorities allowed several things to happen in Flanders, providing the locals didn’t cause them trouble, which they didn’t allow in the rest of Belgium, and in many other areas of occupied Europe. One of those things was cycle racing in general, and the Tour of Flanders in particular.
The race was shorter during the war, but it had top-quality winners; Achiel Buysse in 1940, 1941 and 1943, Briek Schotte in 1942 and Rik Van Steenbergen in 1944. Schotte was a remarkable racer with a remarkable Tour of Flanders record. He took part an incredible twenty times during his racing career, winning it twice (the other occasion was 1948), and he racked up a total of eight appearances on the podium. Then, after he stopped racing, Schotte presided over five Tour of Flanders victories and eleven podium places in the teams he managed.
Paris–Roubaix was created to publicise a new velodrome in Roubaix, and it’s the only big race to finish in a velodrome today. That wasn’t so in the early days of road racing, when lots of races finished in velodromes. Liège–Bastogne–Liège finished at Rocourt for many years. The Tour of Lombardy, Il Lombardia, has finished in the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan, and on a track in Como. Grand Tours stages often had velodrome finishes. The Tour of Flanders is no exception.
Its first editions finished on an open-air track in Mariakerke, but a couple of times the race finished on the indoor track located in the Sportspaleis in Ghent’s Citadel Park. That track is known as the Kuipke because it’s so small and steeply banked it resembles a bowl, kuipke being Flemish for a small bowl.
Briek Schotte’s first Flanders victory was on the Kuipke, and shortly before he died in 2004 he described the 1942 race finish to me:
Part of the banking near the big doors to the Sportspaleis, where the track was housed, was removed. We rode through the doors, then up onto the track on some loose planks that were put there for the race. It was a really tricky finish, because as well as the loose planks you had to turn sharp right to get into the Sportspaleis, then sharp right again once inside to get on the track. There was never a sprint inside, the first man through those doors always won.
The Tour of Flanders continuation through the Second World War came back to haunt its organisers when the hostilities ended. Many Flemish nationalists were accused of collaborating with the Germans, and Sportwereld was one of several newspapers that became controlled by the Belgian government. Several journalists, most of them not sports writers, were convicted of collaboration with the Germans. Karel Van Wijnendaele wasn’t convicted of any offence, but he was banned from ever working as a journalist again.
But Van Wijnendaele was no collaborator. It was love of cycling, and love of the race he’d grown from seed, that led him to continue running the Tour of Flanders during the war, not sympathy for fascism. In fact Van Wijnendaele had secretly worked for the Allies by hiding downed British pilots in his house. In response to being banned from doing the job he loved, he sought support from the British authorities, and received it in the form of a letter from General Montgomery that verified Van Wijnendaele’s heroic acts. As a result he was back in the game, but straight into another fight.
Before the war Sportwereld and the Tour of Flanders had been taken over by the newspaper that runs the race today, Het Nieuwsblad. And, once the war-dust settled, Van Wijnendaele was employed by Het Nieuwsblad to write about cycling, and to run the race. But by then Het Nieuwsblad had a growing rival in Flanders called Het Volk, which is Flemish for The People, and it was politically left leaning, where Het Nieuwsblad was centrist. Het Volk started their own new bike race in 1945, and called it the Omloop van Vlaanderen.
Omloop and ronde have similar meanings in Flemish, so Het Nieuwsblad protested to the Belgian Cycling Federation, which insisted that Het Volk change the name of its race to Omloop Het Volk. So another famous Flemish race was born, although Het Nieuwsblad and Het Volk merged in 2009, and what was Omloop Het Volk is now Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. However, it still marks the opening of the Belgian racing season on the last Saturday in February each year.
So with the Ronde cracking on into the Fifties, and a new big Flemish race established, we turn to an older French race, once highly regarded but, sadly, less important in cycling today. Paris–Tours is one of the oldest races on the calendar, and until quite recently was regarded as a classic. It was first held in 1896, when it was for amateurs only, and became a pro race in 1901. After that it only missed three editions through two world wars. Like most early races it was long, sometimes as much as 350 kilometres, and in early editions it was how well riders coped with the distance and rough roads that decided the winner.
Then in 1911 Paris–Tours was switched from September to the spring, when it was billed as the revenge race for Paris–Roubaix, which at the time was always held on Easter Sunday, giving rise to another name, La Pascale, for Paris–Roubaix. So if Easter was early, difficult weather could hit Paris–Tours. The worst conditions were in 1921 when the riders had to battle through freezing cold and snow. Only eight made it to Tours, with Francis Pelissier the winner. But gradually road conditions improved, the race distance was cut and, since the direct route to Tours is flat, Paris–Tours came to be known as the sprinters’ classic.
In 1951 the race moved to early October, so that it coincides with the start of the French hunting season. That’s when the obligatory Paris–Tours photographs first appeared, with the peloton cruising across the treeless Plaine de la Beauce, cheered on by groups of heavily armed men with hungry-looking dogs.
Paris–Tours settled nicely into its autumn slot, and the fact that a sprinter won most years didn’t upset anybody very much, apart from cycling journalists and the race organisers. Sprinters got a bad deal in the Fifties and Sixties, when they were regarded as a lower form of cycling life by the press. It was as if they thought sprinters won because they had been sneaky and duplicitous.
Happily, things have changed, and sprinting is seen in its true light today as one of the arts of cycling. Sprinters are admired for their speed, skill, race-craft, bravery and raw power. But back in more unenlightened times, a series of experiments began in 1959 designed to thwart sprinters and produce more ‘worthy’ winners of Paris–Tours. The organisers tried to change the race, to break it up and make it more difficult, which they thought would make it more interesting. But the changes either didn’t thwart the sprinters, or they were so big they altered the whole character of the race, so it wasn’t Paris–Tours any more. The event has gone back to its roots now, but with a few twists to ensure that the sprinters, if they win, don’t get the race handed to them on a plate.
Tours straddles the River Loire, and the northern approach to the city, the way you arrive direct from Paris, is flat. However, just south of the Loire there are lots of short sharp hills, so for the last edition of the race in the Fifties the organisers sent the riders through Tours, across the Loire, to complete four laps of a circuit in the suburb of Joue-les-Tours, which included the Côte de l’Alouette. The race finished at the top of this stiff little hill. In a wonderful irony the winner, Rik Van Looy, was one of the fastest sprinters of his time – and he dropped the field on the final climb. But he was a sprinter with a difference; he could do other things as well. More of Van Looy later.
So even with the Alouette climb near the end, more often than not Paris–Tours was still won by sprinters. Félix Lévitan, the race organiser and joint Tour de France director
