not very often. The only thing that was missing from the first event really was the mountains. But once the organisers saw that racing around France was possible, they decided to make it harder. And to do that they headed for the hills.
Going into the mountains
France has four mountain areas; in order of increasing height, the Vosges, the Massif Central, the huge peaks of the Pyrenees and the giant Alps. To see how cyclists would fare in them, the organisers decided to include a stage through the Vosges in the 1905 race, and to visit the very edge of the Alps.
They had climbed the Col de la Republique during the first Tour, but that is a pass over the low shoulder of a mountain range, and there was no way around it. Now though, the riders would take on a real mountain, virtually crossing its summit, and its name was the Ballon d’Alsace.
© Universal/TempSport/Corbis
In his editorial before the race, Desgrange predicted that no competitor would be able to ride all the way to the top. They would have to dismount and walk for at least part of it, he thought. But Ren Pottier proved him wrong. He was the only one to do it, but Pottier pedalled all the way to the top. He even overtook Desgrange, who was sitting in the lead motor vehicle at the head of the race.
The effort he made destroyed Pottier’s chances. He was caught by other more prudent riders on the descent and later forced to retire from the stage through exhaustion. But as the riders pedalled on to the stage finish in Besancon, right on the edge of the Jura, Pottier had made a point to Desgrange
On the next but one stage the race climbed the Col Bayard, while travelling from the Alpine gateway city of Grenoble to Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. Everyone wanted to know if the riders would beat the stage coach that went over the climb from Grenoble and south to Gap. The coach was drawn by six horses on the flat and ten on the climbs, but the riders beat it by hours, and then carried on to Toulon.
Before the first Tour de France the daily circulation of L’Auto was 140,000. By 1910 the race had grabbed people’s interest to the point where Desgrange was selling 300,000 copies a day. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. The mountains were a big success. The pedalling heroes could conquer them, so in 1910 the Father of the Tour planned an epic stage, a stage to top all others, a stage that would capture the imaginations of everyone in France.
It was 326 kilometres long, it ran east to west from Luchon to Bayonne and crossed some of the most famous mountain passes in the Pyrenees; the Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubisque. Almost no one had climbed these passes on a bike, and certainly no one had climbed one after the other on a single ride. In 1910 there were passes used by mountain people to get from one valley to the next, and often they were not much more than rutted tracks.
© Universal/TempSport/Corbis
It was a big adventure, and one guaranteed to make L’Auto the number one sports publication in France, but the thought of the challenge that lay ahead of the riders filled Desgrange and his staff with dread. Desgrange wasn’t any more at ease when he drove to the top of the Peyresourde to see the riders on the first climb.
He had an anxious wait. It was the first time that Desgrange had seen the climb. All he had to go on before were reports from his staff, who had visited the Pyrenees to see if the stage was possible. He learned that morning that there had been reports of bear attacks in the area. The news didn’t make him feel any better while he waited
Then he saw a dishevelled figure trudging towards him pushing a bike. It was a Tour de France rider, but Desgrange couldn’t identify him as he was covered in mud and he refused to speak to the race organiser. The next rider was easy to identify, and had a little more to say. He was Octave Lapize, a great rider and one of the favourites to win the 1910 Tour. Desgrange asked him what had happened to the others, but Lapize looked straight through him and spat out a single word: “Murderer!”
Desgrange loved that. He once said that his perfect Tour de France would have only one finisher, one hero who had battled through it all to the end. Lapize won the first Pyrenean stage at an average speed of 23 kph, and over 40 riders managed to haul themselves over the mountains, the last three admittedly over seven hours behind the winner. Every rider hated Desgrange, but no one had died. His race was now the most important and most popular sporting event in France. The mountains would be part of it for ever.
The yellow jersey
The First World War called a halt to the Tour shortly after the 1914 race, but as soon as was humanly possible, Desgrange and the Tour were back again. In 1919 the riders raced across the bombed-out battle fields of northern France, a symbol of hope in a grey rubble-strewn wasteland.
But the colour of the 1919 Tour de France was yellow. Desgrange always looked for ways to improve his race. One criticism he’d heard was that spectators could never tell which of the riders was the overall race leader when they pedalled by, so Desgrange decided that the Tour leader should wear a distinctive jersey. The legend goes that yellow was chosen because it was the colour of L’Auto’s pages. However, it is also said that yellow was the only colour left in suitable numbers when Desgrange needed the jerseys in a hurry.
© Luc Claessen
The Tour grew into the number one international cycling event between the two World Wars. Cycle road racing was very a popular sport in many European countries and in 1909 the Tour had its first foreign winner, Francois Faber of Luxembourg. The Tour of Italy was born in the same year. Odile Defraye of Belgium won the 1912 Tour de France, and his countrymen followed him to victory in the next six editions of the race.
Ottavio Bottechia was the first Italian to win in 1924, and he did it again in 1925. Then in 1949 the Tour de France was won by cycling’s first really big international superstar, a compatriot of Bottechia’s, Fausto Coppi. Coppi could win every kind of race, he was a superb athlete, but he was more than a cyclist.
Media stars
The media had grown by 1949. Fans could read about Coppi, and they could see films of him racing, as well as watch by the roadside. He had more coverage than any other cyclist before him. This made Coppi a celebrity, and a controversial celebrity at that.
Coppi earned more money than any other cyclist had before him, and money gave him a lifestyle to be envied, but it was also one that fascinated his fans. He fell in love with the beautiful wife of his doctor. He left his own wife to live with her. They had a son, and Coppi was excommunicated from the Catholic church.
Coppi won the Tour de France again in 1952, before Frenchman Louison Bobet became the first man to win the race three times in a row. Bobet was another rider who made a lot of money from cycling, so much that he often piloted his own aircraft to races. Cycling had come of age, its top riders were wealthy men, and even though it was, and still is, a brutal struggle to succeed, professional cycling now carried with it a gloss of glamour.
In the 1960s the sport was dominated by Jacques Anquetil, a Frenchman, who from humble beginnings as a strawberry grower’s son in Normandy became the first five-time winner of the Tour, the first French winner of the Tour of Italy, and when he won the Tour
