gears. It threw the race back to the early days, when riders had a choice of gear ratios on their bikes but had to dismount to change them. Lévitan thought that would somehow change the outcome of Paris–Tours. It didn’t, not really.
That year a Dutchman, Gerben Karstens, won the fastest Paris–Tours to that date, clocking 45.029 kilometres per hour for 246.8 kilometres. Britain’s Barry Hoban rode that race, and he remembers how Karstens won:
We were allowed three sprockets on a free-wheel, and to change gear you had to stop, get off your bike and swap the chain by hand. That involved loosening the rear wheel. It was quite a long process and not one you wanted to do often in a fast race. If you did you’d end up chasing all the time, and get knackered well before the finish.
I chose 51 x 15 as the gear to start with, and I was going to swap to something a bit higher later on, but the race was so fast I didn’t dare stop at all. About 20 kilometres from the finish Karstens and his whole team stopped together and swapped their chains onto the 13 sprocket, and that’s how he won. By all stopping at the same time his team were able to pace him back up to the bunch. Then, because they had higher gears going into the finale, we were just revved out by them, and nobody could get around Karstens in the sprint.
The funniest thing that day was Jacques Anquetil. He thought the whole idea of not using derailleurs was ridiculous, and he didn’t like Félix Lévitan very much anyway. So he tried to ride all the way in 53 x 13. His team complained like mad because there were some hills in the Chevreuse Valley just after the start, and Jacques made them drop back and push him up them.
The equipment manufacturers disliked the no-derailleur rule even more than Anquetil, so it was abandoned after 1966, when a sprinter called Guido Reybrouck won anyway. But that only renewed Lévitan’s crusade to thwart the sprinters. In 1974 he switched the route around, so Paris–Tours became Tours–Versailles, then Blois–Chaville, and later Blois–Montlhéry, then Creteil–Chaville, all done in an effort to toughen up the race. Eventually its identity got so lost that the race was called the GP de l’Automne. It was a debacle really; it was always meant to be the sprinters’ classic, the perfect race for awarding the Ruban Jaune.
The Ruban Jaune, or yellow ribbon, was created in 1936, and is still awarded to the rider who wins a road race of 200 kilometres or more with the fastest average speed to date. Gustaf Daneels was the first holder of the Ruban Jaune when he won Paris–Tours in 1936 at an average speed of 41.45 kph. It set a precedent.
Of the twelve times the Ruban Jaune has been awarded, Paris–Tours was the race where the speed record was set on nine occasions. Amazingly, Paris–Roubaix has held it twice, and another old race once regarded as a classic, Paris–Brussels, had it once. The current Ruban Jaune was set in 2015 when Matteo Trentin won Paris–Tours at the cracking pace of 49.641 kph.
At times Paris–Tours has been a long way shy of the fastest 200-kilometre-plus road race in the world. In 1988, when it made its comeback as Paris–Tours after being routed all over the place, the riders faced a howling headwind and torrential rain that pinned them down to a 34 kph average. It was almost dark when the bunch sprinted it out on the Avenue de Grammont. The Dutch rider Peter Pieters was the winner of that slow-motion Paris–Tours; the sprinters’ classic.
So far I’ve not written anything about road racing in Spain, because the sport was a little slower to take hold there than in most major European countries. But there were races early on in Spain, some of which are going strong today. The oldest is the Volta a Catalunya, which dates back to 1911 and is the fourth-oldest stage race behind the Tour de France, the Tour of Belgium and the Giro d’Italia.
It was another race created by a newspaper, this time the Barcelona-based El Mundo Deportivo working with the then president of the Spanish Cycling Union, Narcisse Masferrer. The first Volta a Catalunya was very different to the first Tour de France or Giro d’Italia; it was held in early January, was only three stages long, and totalled just 363 kilometres. The modest length and distance probably reflected the factor that held Spanish road racing back for a while: a lack of usable roads. Even as late as the Sixties, stages held to publicise the embryonic Spanish seaside resorts saw riders bussed in over rough gravel roads to ride circuits of the only tarmac strips in town.
The first three editions of the Volta a Catalunya were domestic affairs with all-Spanish podiums. The next two editions in 1920 and 1923 were won by a Frenchman, José Pelletier and Maurice Ville. After that the Volta a Catalunya has run every year, except at the height of the Spanish Civil War in 1937
Spanish racers were insular for a long time. The first Spaniard to take part in the Tour de France, Salvador Cardona, didn’t do so until 1928, when by coincidence, and incredibly considering the journey they had to take in order to get there, the first Australians took part. Cardona, who won the Volta a Catalunya in 1931, was the first Spanish racer to win a stage in the Tour de France in 1929. But even Cardona didn’t ride many races outside Spain, and he certainly didn’t win another big one. He was content to be one of the best in late Twenties and early Thirties Spanish bike racing.
Mariano Carnado was another star of that era. He won the Volta a Catalunya a record seven times, and in 1930 won Spain’s other big race, the Tour of the Basque Country, which started in 1924 and so also has a longer history, albeit interrupted, than the Spanish Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España. Frenchman Francis Pélissier won the first Tour of the Basque Country. It’s a rugged race over tough terrain, and it doesn’t always get the best of weather. The Basque region is close to the Atlantic coast and gets plenty of weather systems in spring. Carnado’s 1930 victory was the first by a Spaniard, and the last for a while.
But that wasn’t due to lack of Spanish contenders. It was simply because there was no Tour of the Basque Country from 1931 until 1935, when Gino Bartali of Italy won. Then the Spanish Civil War intervened, and scuppered the race for a long time. It wasn’t resurrected until 1969, when the five-time Tour de France winner Jacques Anquetil won, but it has grown in stature since. The Tour of the Basque Country is still a very tough race, and as well as being held in high esteem it’s also perfect preparation for Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and another big race in the French-speaking part of Belgium, La Flèche Wallonne.
The first La Flèche Wallonne, or the Walloon Arrow (several Belgian races have the word ‘arrow’ in their titles) was held in 1936. It’s not as big as Liège–Bastogne–Liège is now, but at one time they were seen as being on a par: especially when both races were held over one weekend, called Weekend Ardennais.
Once they were separated, La Flèche Wallonne’s profile suffered a dip because it didn’t have a defined route. Where Liège–Bastogne–Liège had its set-piece climbs, and Paris–Roubaix its cobbled roads, passages of the races that fans look forward to and talk about and compare performances on, for a while La Flèche Wallonne was just a race around the hills between Liège and Charleroi. Sometimes it went east to west, sometimes west to east. It was always hard, though, and always prized among knowledgeable fans and by those who won it. It also satisfied a thirst for bike racing among the huge Italian community working in the steel mills and mines of the surrounding Meuse area. But it had no defining shape. That changed once the Mur de Huy was included in the race route.
Today, La Flèche Wallonne starts in Charleroi and heads east on a big loop north of the Meuse, before plunging down into Huy for the first time. The race then builds in a crescendo, with three ascents of the Mur de Huy in quickening succession on the way to the finish at the top of the final ascent.
But back to Spain and the birth of cycling’s third Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España. When the Tour of the Basque Country was resurrected in 1969, it was done by a cycling club from the Basque city of Eibar, a club with a history of successful race organization. The club’s first promotion was in April 1932 with a race created to celebrate Spain’s
