The latest incumbent, Prudhomme, is no great fan of the prologue. For the first time since 1967, he opted not to include one in 2008 – then did the same in 2011, 2013 and 2014. It isn’t just a question of taste: this is also commercial. Prudhomme (formerly a television journalist) points to statistics that show the television audience is at its lowest when the Tour opens with a prologue time trial. It might be better for those who are there to watch – with the action spread over many hours, and the chance to see the riders individually and up close – but there is another and increasingly important audience to think of: TV. Like Sam Abt, and arguably most others, they prefer the spectacle of a road race.
Lévitan’s motivation for adding the prologue was to increase the Tour’s earning potential. Back then, the main source of income was the money paid by cities and towns along the route. They paid to host a start, even more to host a finish, and so Lévitan began to add what he called split-stages: more than one stage in a day. On occasion, he even managed to squeeze three stages into one day. The riders hated it.
The prologue time trial was a marginally more popular innovation than split-stages, and it was Lévitan’s way around the rule, from cycling’s world governing body the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), that stated a race could not last more than twenty-two days. Just as an hors d’œuvre is not considered a proper course in a meal, the prologue, which must be less than 8km, does not count as a proper stage. Thus it exploited a loophole in the UCI rules. And yet the first prologue, on a Thursday evening in Angers in 1967, was not actually called a prologue. It was called stage 1a (1b followed the next day). Two years later, the name ‘prologue’ was adopted.
That first one was won by an unheralded Spaniard, José María Errandonea, who held the yellow jersey only until the next day. Including stage 1a, the 1967 Tour comprised twenty-five stages over twenty-three days and 4,780km (the 2013 race was 3,400km over twenty-one stages). But the 1967 Tour is mainly remembered for tragedy. This was the Tour that saw the introduction of a new, short stage to add another day’s racing to an already packed schedule, and which saw the death of a rider, Tom Simpson, on the barren slopes of Mont Ventoux. If the two events were linked, little heed was taken – the Tour was again run over twenty-three days and 4,684km in 1968.
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There are fans of the prologue, too. Thierry Marie in the 1980s, Boardman in the ’90s, Fabian Cancellara in the 2000s. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: it’s as pure a test of speed as you can get in professional cycling.
The prologue to the 1994 Tour de France was a classic. Held in the centre of Lille over a pan-flat 7.2km course, with wide boulevards and only a few sweeping bends, it was the perfect test. It was perfect in other ways, too, since it served up a tantalising confrontation between two masters in quite different fields.
It pitched the three-time Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, against a novice, Chris Boardman, whose only experience of the Tour had been as a spectator twelve months earlier. In terms of their background, they couldn’t have been more different. Indurain was steeped in the traditions of road racing on the continent, slowly ascending the hierarchy of his team until emerging as leader in 1991, the year of his first Tour victory. The twenty-five-year-old Boardman had arrived on the continent fully formed, as the finished article – but a complete contrast to Indurain, given that he came from a very different tradition. His apprenticeship was served in the obscure backwater of British time trialling.
Boardman felt like a fraud. ‘I felt like I cheated my way into this game,’ he says.
The Indurain–Boardman match-up was a little like the annual shinty–hurling international between Scotland and Ireland. They are essentially the same sport, but they exist in isolation, one quite separate from the other. When one tradition takes on another, there is always fascination and intrigue, in the same way that there might be with twins who are separated at birth and brought up in different families, in different countries. What, if anything, do they have in common?
Continental road racing and British time trialling appeared to have nothing in common, other than that both involved people riding bikes. One took place on the closed roads of Europe, often against the backdrop of the Alps and Pyrenees, and involved tactics, teams, courage and panache. The other was held in the early morning on fast, busy roads, against a backdrop of speeding lorries and cars, and involved calculation and pacing.
The British scene had never produced a champion able to convert his talent to continental road racing. But by 1994 Boardman had showcased his talent in shop windows more glamorous than dual carriageways in Britain; at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, where he won the pursuit, and then a year later at the Bordeaux Velodrome, where he went for the ultimate time trial, arguably the only one that resonated on the continent: the world hour record.
It was in July 1993 that Boardman took on the hour record in Bordeaux, 24 hours before a stage of the Tour de France finished in the French city. The timing was both deliberate and ingenious, because it allowed for a kind of cross-pollination. ‘The Hour’, already a big deal in the cycling world, became even bigger: it was amplified by its proximity to the Tour, not least because so many journalists were able to attend. At least one team manager was able to take it in, too. Roger Legeay, who ran the French Gan team, was more open to Anglophones than most, since his team, previously sponsored by Peugeot Cycles, had a history of having English-speaking riders, from Tom Simpson and Shay Elliott, through Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Phil Anderson and Stephen Roche, to his current star (albeit a fading one), the American three-time Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond.
Boardman had gone as far as he could in Britain. The only place for him to go now was the continent’s professional scene. Yet it was a step he was reluctant to take. ‘I was an outsider,’ he says. ‘I was a time triallist from Britain. The Olympics were amateur, so you either wait for someone to knock you off the top step, or you turn pro.’
The hour record that Boardman set out to break was held by the Italian road racing star of the 1980s, Francesco Moser. But by the time he came to tackle it, it no longer belonged to Moser. A week before Boardman’s attempt it was beaten by his domestic rival, the Scotsman Graeme Obree, on a track in Norway. ‘I’m disappointed not to be breaking Moser’s record,’ said Boardman at the time. He feared that Obree’s astonishing feat might remove some of the gloss from the record. He needn’t have worried. If anything, it raised interest. It meant Boardman had much to gain, but perhaps even more to lose.
He beat Obree’s mark, and with that, as Ed Pickering notes in his book, The Race Against Time, ‘The first part of Boardman’s PR ambush on the Tour was complete.’ The Tour reciprocated, staging their own ‘ambush’ as they invited Boardman to the podium in Bordeaux at the end of the next day’s stage, to share the platform with the man in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain, on his way to his third successive overall victory.
Tellingly, Boardman stood on the lower step, grinning like a schoolboy as ‘Big Mig’, in the yellow jersey, waved at the crowds with the bearing of a member of the Spanish royal family. It should also be noted that, although Indurain himself was gracious and humble, Boardman’s achievement did not meet with universal respect in the professional peloton. Luc Leblanc, the leading French rider, expressed his view that, if they put their minds to it, most members of the Tour peloton could better Boardman’s distance.
Less than a year later, in Lille, Boardman and Indurain met again, this time on the road. Indurain had built the foundations of his three Tour de France wins on his domination of time trials. He then rode defensively in the mountains, rather than with the attacking flair and panache of some previous Tour winners. If that didn’t fire the passions of many fans, it was impossible not to admire his prowess against the clock. He was a machine, most obviously in Luxembourg in 1992, when he averaged 49kph (30mph) over 65km and finished three minutes ahead of his closest challenger. ‘I thought
