Читать книгу The Call of the Road - Chris Sidwells - Страница 11

By 1894 Le Vélo, the newspaper that organised the first Paris–Roubaix, was the leading cycling journal in France. It had an advantage over its rivals because as well as carrying news it was also the official voice of the governing body of French cycling. Le Vélo published the locations and start times of all official races in France, so cyclists and cycling fans alike needed to buy it, to read race reports and interviews, and to find out where future races were being held.

Everything was looking good for Le Vélo. Even if some advertisers grumbled when the newspaper hiked its ad prices up, it didn’t affect their need to be seen in its pages. Then, just when it looked like Le Vélo had French cycling sewn up, its editor Pierre Giffard got involved in something outside of the sport that ended up costing his newspaper dearly. It was the Dreyfus affair, a cause célèbre in which a Jewish army officer called Alfred Dreyfus was framed for treason by a section of the French military and was convicted in 1895 on very dubious evidence.

Dreyfus was sent to the French penal colony, Devil‘s Island. His Jewish heritage and the fact that he was born in Mulhouse in Alsace, which was then part of Germany having been won during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, were accepted as evidence that he had passed French military secrets to the Germans. Somebody had done so; there was no doubt about that, but no direct evidence implicating Dreyfus.

There was public disquiet, and even some of the French Army didn’t believe in his guilt. One officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart, conducted his own investigation, and he came up with credible evidence that the real traitor was a Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. The French high command wouldn’t listen, and Picquart was transferred to Tunisia to keep him quiet, but the questions he and others raised wouldn’t go away. Reports of a cover-up started appearing in the French press.

A campaign led by artists and intellectuals, including the novelist Emile Zola, gathered strength and eventually won a pardon for Dreyfus in 1899, but the case stirred deep emotions. It was a massive talking point in France, with everybody having a view. There were some very public arguments and demonstrations on both sides. At one protest an influential backer of Le Vélo, the Count de Dion, was arrested. He was demonstrating against the campaign to pardon Dreyfus, and was alleged to have hit the President of France, Emile Loubet, on the head with a walking stick he was waving about to emphasise his point.

Le Vélo’s editor Giffard was pro-Dreyfus, and had high principles. Putting principle before business, he criticised De Dion in an article he wrote for a serious newspaper, Le Petit Journal. De Dion was outraged, and even though he was imprisoned when word of what Giffard had written reached him, he withdrew his support for Le Vélo as well as all of the money he’d invested in it. Then, still unhappy, De Dion went further.

When he was released from prison after a fifteen-day sentence in 1900, De Dion formed his own sports newspaper, which he called L’Auto-Vélo. It was funded by his businesses, and by those of his friends who either sympathised with his views or were unhappy with Le Vélo’s advertising rates. They included Edouard Michelin, the biggest tyre manufacturer in France.

The new venture needed an editor, and De Dion went for somebody young and ambitious who knew about cycling. He was Henri Desgrange, a 35-year-old former racer who ran the biggest velodrome in Paris, the Parc des Princes. Desgrange had a law degree, and had started his working life practising law, but he was too adventurous to spend his life in fusty courts arguing arcane cases. He was a racer first and a lawyer second, and he came unstuck when one of his employer’s clients saw Desgrange speeding around a Paris park with his calves exposed. The client complained to Desgrange’s boss, who promptly sacked him.

So Desgrange changed careers, quickly becoming the head of advertising for the tyre manufacturer, Clément et Cie. He continued racing, setting the first official World Hour Record in 1895, riding a distance of 35.325 kilometres on the Vélodrome Buffalo in Paris. There had been unofficial hour records before. James Moore rode 23.2 kilometres in 1873, and Frank Dobbs did 29.552 in 1876, but Desgrange’s hour was the first recognised by the then governing body of world cycling, the International Cycling Association.

While working in advertising, Desgrange wrote articles about cycling for various newspapers, including Le Vélo. He also wrote a best-selling book on training called The Head and the Legs. By the time Desgrange left advertising to run the Parc des Princes he had a big following in French cycling, and influential friends. De Dion chose well.

It was 1900, the beginning of a new century, but starting a new publication is never easy even when there are good reasons to do so. Giffard and Le Vélo were in a very strong position. As well as the backing of the French Cycling Federation, Le Vélo still had a lot of advertisers because Giffard only put up rates for De Dion’s associates. And Giffard held the moral high ground because of his stand over Dreyfus.

But still not willing to make life easy for his new rival, three years after L’Auto-Vélo was launched, Giffard instituted proceedings in the courts that forced it to drop the word vélo from its title. Giffard won, and L’Auto-Vélo had to call itself L’Auto from then on. The newspaper covered many new and adventurous pursuits, but focused on cycling, and now its title said it was about cars. Circulation hadn’t been great since it was founded, so how would it hold up in future? Desgrange needed a marketing plan to cement L’Auto’s association with cycling, the sport people were interested in.

He tried printing the words ‘Motoring and Cycling’ underneath ‘L’Auto’, like a sub-heading to help reveal the paper’s content. He also listed on the front page other adventurous pursuits L’Auto covered, but it was a bit clumsy. With sales falling and his advertisers taking their custom elsewhere, Desgrange needed a big gesture. He needed something that would link L’Auto in people’s minds with cycling for the foreseeable future.

The pressure was on, but then Giffard cranked things up by goading Desgrange in print. Desgrange was furious and called his staff together, telling them they needed to come up with something that would switch attention from Le Vélo to L’Auto. ‘We need to do something big, a big promotion. Something that will nail Giffard’s beak shut,’ he is reported to have said.

Géo Lefèvre was a young reporter who covered cycling and rugby, as well as taking part in both sports. He’d worked for Le Vélo, but Desgrange convinced him that he’d be better off with him. Now, though, Lefèvre had his back against the same wall as Desgrange. Giffard was unlikely to re-employ Lefèvre if L’Auto went under. Maybe Desgrange realised that, because he took Lefèvre out to lunch and asked him what he thought they could do.

The story goes that Lefèvre suggested promoting a six-day cycle race on the road. Six-day races on the track, although popular in Britain and America, were not yet so in France, but this was never-know-until-you-try time for L’Auto. Lefèvre suggested the route should be in the shape of a hexagon, the same shape as the outline of France. There are other versions of what happened at that meal too, and Lefèvre himself was always vague about it. Later, when the Tour de France was part of French life, he said in at least one interview that he only suggested a lap of France for want of something better to say when Desgrange asked him.

A lap of France, a Tour de France, already existed, and it was part of life in the centre of the country. It was a rite of passage for apprentices. The tradition began in Provence and Languedoc, where boys who wanted to learn a trade went between towns around the edges of the Massif Central. Each boy was sponsored by the trade guild he wanted to join. In each town they learned different aspects of that trade, and were looked after by women called guild mothers – not always very well. It was a rough life.

There were other precedents. For example, there’d already been a motor-racing Tour de France in 1899, but Desgrange still wasn’t sure. It couldn’t be done in one go with the clock running and the riders resting only when they had to, as they did in the six-day track races or Paris–Brest–Paris. The race would have to be broken into stages. Desgrange appears to have only made up his mind when L’Auto’s company accountant, Victor Goddet, got behind the prospect. If the guy who controlled the money thought the Tour de France made sense, then maybe it did. So in late January 1903 Desgrange wrote in L’Auto, ‘We intend to run the greatest cycling trial in the entire world. A race more than a month long; from Paris to Lyon, then to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris.’

Desgrange wanted a big spectacle, a route right around the outside of France. He said the race would be broken into different legs, or stages, and run over five weeks from the end of May until 5 July. Spacing the race out like that would give ample time to recover between each leg, and maybe Desgrange thought it would maintain interest for longer, but it was too long a period for any but the top professionals to commit to. It was also probably too long to hold the public’s interest. Above all, Desgrange needed his spectacle to have mass appeal, so he needed lots of racers to provide the stories to report on. To attract more entrants he cut the duration, but not the distance, to just under three weeks.

He also put the dates back, so the Tour de France ran at the same time as what would become a growing feature of French life, the country’s annual two-week holiday. That was a great decision, and would be one of the reasons for the Tour’s success. It came to mean summer in France, the holidays and happy memories, and that helped the race grow.

The first Tour de France was 2,428 kilometres long, split into six stages, with between two and four days separating each one. The shortest stage was 268 kilometres and the longest 471 kilometres. The long gaps between stages helped stragglers finish and still get some rest. And, going against the trend of other road races of the day, no competitors, professional or amateur, were allowed to have pacers. They had to make their own way around the route with no outside help.

Seventy-nine entered, a mix of professionals and weekend warriors, and sixty of them took the start outside the Réveil-Matin café in Montgeron at three o’clock in the afternoon of 1 July 1903. The café is still there, on the Rue Jean-Jaurès, and a little plaque outside records the event. The favourites for victory were Maurice Garin and Hyppolite Aucouturier. Garin had won the 1897 and 1898 Paris–Roubaix, and the second edition of Paris–Brest–Paris in 1901, which was the biggest road race in the world before the Tour de France. Garin had also won Bordeaux–Paris in 1902, while the younger man, Aucouturier, was the rising star, having won Paris–Roubaix earlier in 1903.

On the morning of the first stage Henri Desgrange wrote in his editorial: ‘With the broad and powerful swing of the hand which Zola in La Terre [The Earth] gave to his ploughman, L’Auto, newspaper of ideas and action, is going to fling across France today those reckless and uncouth sowers of energy who are the great professional riders of the road.’ Desgrange continued writing like that for the rest of his life.

Garin won the first stage, riding 467 kilometres from Paris to Lyons in 17 hours 45 minutes and 13 seconds, at an average speed of 26 kilometres per hour. Emile Pagie was just under a minute behind him, and the rest were spread out behind the first two. The last rider, Eugène Brange, took more than 38 hours to reach Lyons. Twenty-three riders didn’t get there, including Aucouturier, who dropped out with stomach cramps. He was allowed to contest the next stage, which he won, although he was removed from the overall standings.

Although the 1905 Tour de France is often referred to as the first to venture into the mountains, when it went to the Vosges and climbed over the Ballon d’Alsace, there were low mountain passes in the first Tour de France in 1903. There was one on the first stage. Not far from Lyons the riders scaled the 712-metre (2,335-ft) Col des Echarmeaux. Then on the next stage, from Lyons to Marseilles, there was a longer and slightly higher climb, the Col de la République, just south of St Etienne. Aucouturier broke away on its slopes with Léon Georget to win the 374-kilometre stage to Marseilles, while Garin stayed close enough to preserve his lead.

Garin won two more stages to round off the first Tour de France, winning 6,000 gold francs, the equivalent to nine years’ earnings for a miner from Lens in the north of France, where Garin lived. The French tax rate in 1903 was less than 10 per cent. So the Tour de France set Maurice Garin up quite nicely, and it did wonders for the sales of L’Auto.

Before the race the newspaper’s circulation was around 25,000 copies per day, but it grew to 65,000 copies during the Tour. Ten years later L’Auto’s average daily circulation was 120,000 copies, which rose to a quarter of a million per day when the Tour de France was on. Apart from the Sun and Daily Mail, no mainstream British newspaper gets anywhere near those figures today. Newspapers were very big business at the turn of the twentieth century. For most people they were the only way to find out what was going on, not just in the world but in their own countries, and even in their own regions.

It had been a big adventure, both for the riders and for the organisers. On each stage after the starters were flagged away, Fernand Mercier of L’Auto set off in his car to drive to the finish, where he would liaise with the paper’s local correspondent to look after and arrange accommodation for the riders who made it through, and who wanted to continue. There were also control stops along the way that Mercier had to check, where riders submitted their official race cards for the obligatory stamp to ensure they covered the whole route. Unfortunately they didn’t all cover it by bike, as the following year’s Tour would show.

Géo Lefèvre had dual responsibilities. He had to help at the finish of each stage, but he also had to report on the race. The story goes that Lefèvre did this by joining the competitors at the start of each stage with his bike, then riding with them a bit to get on-the-spot reports from the top men. After talking to the leaders he slowly dropped through the field, doing interviews as he went, until he arrived at the first major town with a train service that could take him to the finish. This enabled him to jump ahead of the race and help Mercier at the end.

Riders started some stages in separate groups, and with the race decided on time it wasn’t always the first across the line who won the stage. Joseph Fischer was caught being paced by a motor vehicle on the first stage and a penalty was added to his time. There was also a bit of conflict on the fifth stage when Garin and Fernand Augerau came to blows, but all in all Desgrange was happy with the race. It was a success. There would be another Tour de France in 1904.

The route was the same as in 1903, but this time people outside the race got physically involved to help their local heroes. Hyppolite Aucouturier was the first to be affected. Even in the earliest races competitors understood the advantage of slipstreaming and riding in a group to share the pace setting, but there were big variations in their levels of fitness, experience and ambition, as well as variations in the bikes they raced on. Thanks to that and the awful road conditions, the fields thinned out quickly.

So, on stage one in 1904 a group of fans waited just south of Paris. The road was lonely, so there were few witnesses around, and the fans let the first few riders through, but then, just before Aucouturier arrived, they spread carpet tacks across the road. Of course he punctured, but he fitted a new tyre and carried on, only to ride into another patch of tacks and pick up another puncture. Aucouturier ended the stage two and a half hours behind the winner, Maurice Garin, not that Garin had a straightforward journey.

Later on the same stage he and Lucien Pothier were well ahead when somebody tried to run them off the road with a car. They survived, but Garin got into trouble for getting food outside of the stipulated feed zones. The organisers told him to stop, so he threatened to pull out of the Tour if they didn’t allow him to carry on doing what he wanted. They let him carry on. Then after the stage there were reports of riders getting lifts in cars, even taking the train, and an allegation that one rider was towed by a car with a cord that he held between his teeth.

It was a rocky start, and the race continued in the same way. When the riders tackled the Col de la République on stage two, supporters from St Etienne, the city at the foot of the climb, decided to stop or at least delay everybody ahead of their favourite rider, a local called Antoine Fauré. They hid in the woods – the Col de la République is also called the Col du Grand Bois (big wood) – and when Garin arrived in the lead with an Italian, Giovanni Gerbi, the fans jumped out and beat both riders up. Race officials weren’t far behind, but according to reports Desgrange had to fire a pistol into the air to disperse the attackers. Battered and bruised, Garin continued, but Gerbi’s injuries were so bad he left the race.

There were many other incidents. On stage three some men from Ferdinand Payan’s village barricaded the street once their man went through Nîmes. It took Desgrange and his gun to sort that one out as well. The Tour was on the verge of getting out of control, and only dogged determination and help from police got the race to Paris. And once there the organisers had another problem. They had already disqualified several riders for cheating, but stories began circulating that the first four finishers in the overall standings, plus others not already thrown off the race, had cheated as well.

The French governing body for cycling investigated the stories, and it found that there were solid grounds to disqualify the first four finishers, and others. There was proof that some riders had cut the route, and others had been towed by motor vehicles for long stretches. Some had even covered part of a stage by train. There were probably more culprits, but in December 1904 it was announced that the first four overall, Maurice Garin, Lucien Pothier, César Garin, who was Maurice’s brother, and Hyppolite Aucouturier, had all cheated, and they were disqualified along with five others.

That left the rider previously placed fifth, Henri Cornet, as the winner. He was 19 years, 11 months and 20 days old when he crossed the finish line in Paris, and he remains the youngest ever winner of the Tour de France and the only teenager ever to win the race. He was a good rider, who went on to win the 1906 Paris–Roubaix and come second the same year in Bordeaux–Paris, but he never won the Tour de France again.

Garin was banned from racing for two years, ten others were banned for one year, and a few were banned for life. None admitted what they’d done, at least not at the time. Garin stuck to his denials for years, but later, as an older man running his garage business in Lens, he would laugh about it with his friends, saying: ‘Of course I took the train, everyone did. I was young, the Tour de France was different then. It didn’t matter as much as it does now.’

In public Henri Desgrange appeared worried about the Tour, even writing that it was dead, killed by the riders who competed in it and by the public who supported them. But it wasn’t dead. And anyway, Desgrange was already planning the 1905 race. The route would start at the edges of towns and avoid built-up areas as much as possible, which meant fewer people would see the race, but it also meant that big groups of people travelling into the countryside would stand out and could be policed. Stages were shorter too, eliminating the need to ride at night, but their number nearly doubled to eleven. Finally, it was decided that the overall classification of the 1905 Tour would be decided on points rather than on time. But the organisers needed something else, a grand gesture to sweep away the memory of the 1904 race and the scandal surrounding it.

The Vosges mountains in the east were very significant in early twentieth-century France. They had been part of France, and are today, but after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Germany took over control of the eastern half of the Vosges. The highest peaks in the range became the new border between Germany and France, and the Ballon d’Alsace is one of those highest peaks.

France wanted the Vosges back. The mountains were referred to by serious journalists and politicians of the time as ‘the peaks on a blue horizon’, and their return to all-French rule was an object of national desire. Their significance had already been celebrated by a motorbike race between Brest and Belfort, the eastern city that refused to surrender during the Franco-Prussian War. So Desgrange looked to the Vosges, and to its German border, and wondered if a bold statement in that direction might be the grand gesture he needed to help his race.

Desgrange spoke about the mountains to his route planner, a young journalist called Alphonse Steinès: ‘We don’t have to go direct from Paris to Lyons,’ he told Steinès. ‘Instead, why don’t we take a giant side step to the Vosges and run as close to the German border as we can?’

The idea appealed, Steinès was an avid cyclist and great adventurer. He wanted to see if the highest mountain passes could be crossed in a race. After all, some adventurous touring cyclists had done so already. The Vosges weren’t the highest mountains in France, but they would do for now, and his research told Steinès that the ascent of the Ballon d’Alsace ran within metres of the German border. The climb would have huge significance with the French public, making a defiant gesture against the invaders and so helping to focus public attention on the Tour de France for the right reasons.

With the route decided, Desgrange got on with what he did best, influencing opinion with words. In L’Auto he wrote an impassioned ‘advertorial’ for his race: ‘Am I putting my racers in danger?’ he asked. ‘Not only am I asking them to climb a mountain of more than 1,000 metres; I am asking them to do it right under the eye of the enemy.’ To add to the drama perhaps, he also predicted that no rider would climb the Ballon d’Alsace without walking up its steepest pitches.

He was wrong about the last bit, but it was a dramatic claim that increased public interest in the race. And interest was at fever pitch when the 1905 Tour hit the Vosges on stage two, which went from Nancy to Belfort. Six riders reached the bottom of the Ballon d’Alsace together: Hippolyte Aucouturier, Henri Cornet, Louis Trousselier (who was doing military service and only had a 24-hour pass to start the race, so was AWOL), Emile Georget, Lucien Petit-Breton (who was really called Lucien Mazan but raced under an assumed name because his family were wealthy and considered professional cycling beneath them), and René Pottier.

The riders stopped to change to lower gears at the foot of the climb. This involved removing their rear wheels and turning them around to engage the larger of two sprockets, one on each side of the hub. Petit-Breton was distanced because he messed up his wheel change – a tricky operation in the days before quick-release hubs – but the others bent their backs into the slope and made good progress.

The rest stuck together until 4 kilometres from the summit, where Cornet launched an attack and Trousselier was dropped. Cornet went again one kilometre later, this time shaking Georget loose. Then Aucouturier let go, and it was down to two, Cornet and Pottier, with Pottier just managing to get clear and cross the summit first. The press went into raptures. If climbing the Ballon d’Alsace was meant to capture imaginations, the swashbuckling way the best riders did it was even more impressive. One newspaper called Pottier the ‘King of the Mountains’, and the name stuck.

The northern ascent of the Ballon d’Alsace, the one used by the Tour in 1905 and usually since, starts in St Maurice-sur-Moselle, and at the time the German border ran a few metres to the left of the road. That land reverted to France after the First World War, and today the Ballon’s summit is the border of three French regions; Franche-Comté, Alsace and Lorraine, and four départements. There’s a memorial to René Pottier, who took his own life in 1907, close to the summit café, and a clearing in the trees reveals an outstanding 360-degree view over the Vosges, and beyond them to the Alps.

The southern descent of the Ballon d’Alsace is long and quite shallow, but it twists and turns through the trees before levelling out in Giromagny. That’s where Aucouturier finally caught back up to Pottier in 1905, before winning the stage a further 12 kilometres down the road in Belfort.

Once the Tour had conquered the Ballon d’Alsace, the French journalist Philippe Bouvet later wrote, ‘The Tour de France left the hills and entered the mountains, turning from an operetta into an opera.’ Two stages later the race climbed the Col de Laffrey and the Col de Bayard, two outlier passes of the Alps, and public interest for that stage was even more intense.

It started in Grenoble and the climbs were both on the Route Napoléon, now the N85, the main link between Grenoble and Gap. The most common way to make the 105-kilometre journey in 1905 was by stagecoach, which took twelve hours, the coach being pulled by six horses, with four more added for each of the two climbs. The leading Tour riders, Julien Maitron and Hyppolite Aucouturier, covered that part of the stage in four hours, and then they carried on for another 243 kilometres to Toulon, where Aucouturier won.

The Alps had lots of history, lots of mythology, and now here were men, skinny men in knitted shorts and baggy jerseys, riding funny little bicycles where Hannibal marched his elephants, where Romans came to conquer. What’s more, the skinny men were three times faster than a coach and six horses. By taming the mountains, cyclists became heroes. And Louis Trousselier proved to be the biggest hero of all when he ran out the winner of the 1905 Tour de France.

The Tour visited the Ballon d’Alsace again the following year, when René Pottier was once more first to the top, but this time he didn’t pay for his efforts with the tendon injury that forced him to quit on stage three in 1905. Instead he pressed on to win the race. The climb became a regular feature, with Gustave Garrigou storming up it in 1908 in a reported time of 32 minutes, a fantastic record that stood for years.

The Tour de France was a success. It massively boosted the circulation of L’Auto, which quickly outstripped its rival, Le Vélo. News of L’Auto’s success, and the reasons for it, spread through Europe, and in Italy two newspapers were having a similar battle for circulation to the one between L’Auto and Le Vélo. They were Il Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport. La Gazzetta had the cycling pedigree, having promoted the first editions of the Giro di Lombardia, now called Il Lombardia, in 1905, and the first Milan–San Remo in 1907. Both races were thought up by a Gazzetta journalist called Tullo Morgagni, who lived in Milan.

The first edition of the Giro di Lombardia was actually called Milan–Milan and billed as a revenge match between Milanese cyclist Pierino Albini and Giovanni Cuniolo. The ‘revenge’ coming from the fact that Cuniolo had beaten Albini in a short-lived but once important race called the Italian King’s Cup. Milan–Milan went north and along the fringes of the Italian lake district, in which the race is run today, then returned to Milan. The route was mainly flat but the road surfaces were appalling. They were so bad in places that where there were railway lines running alongside the roads, riders stopped, lifted their bikes onto the bed between rail-tracks and continued riding there because it was smoother.

Marginal gains is a phrase bandied about in cycling now to describe the search for advantages, no matter how slight. Well, the winner of the first Giro di Lombardia, Giovanni Gerbi, was a ‘marginal gains’ guy, although back then it was just called being crafty. He went round the route in the week before the race, building little earth ramps next to the rails where there was a really bad stretch of road, and in the race he used the mounds, which only he knew about, to cross over the rails and ride on the rail bed without dismounting.

The first ever Milan–San Remo more or less followed the route of a race between the two places in 1906. That was a two-day stage race for amateurs only, but buoyed by the success of Milan–Milan, which attracted enormous crowds, Tullo Morgagni negotiated with the San Remo Cycling Club, and La Gazzetta dello Sport took over running the race in 1907, making it a single-day race for professionals.

Thirty-three riders, all men, set off from Milan at 5.18 a.m. on 14 April 1907. The distance was 288 kilometres, not long compared with other races of the same period, but Milan–San Remo is now the longest single-day race in the men’s World Tour. It rained throughout. The best riders took over 11 hours to reach San Remo on a course that crossed the plains south of Milan, climbed the Turchino Pass then descended towards the Mediterranean. When the riders hit the coast, they turned right and headed west along the water’s edge and over the headlands: the Capo Mele, Capo Cervo and Capo Berta.

The field included Carlo Galetti, Luigi Ganna, Giovanni Gerbi, Gustave Garrigou. The race finished on the Corso Cavallotti in San Remo, where Lucien Petit-Breton won by 35 seconds from Garrigou and Gerbi. Only fourteen riders got through to the end, with last man Luigi Rota finishing over three and a half hours behind Petit-Breton.

Through Morgagni and the success of his races, La Gazzetta dello Sport planted its flag firmly on early twentieth-century Italian cycling, but then in 1908 word got round that Corriere della Sera were planning a Tour of Italy, a big stage race like the Tour de France. That could have blown La Gazzetta’s lead in Italian cycling, so Morgagni convinced the paper’s owner, Emilio Costamagna, and its editor, Armando Cougnet, to use the experience and goodwill gained from Milan–San Remo and Giro di Lombardia to organise a Tour of Italy as soon as possible.

On 7 August 1908, La Gazzetta announced that the first Tour of Italy, known nowadays almost universally by its Italian title, Giro d’Italia, would run in 1909. It would start in Milan on 13 May with a 397-kilometre stage to Bologna, and end on 30 May with a 206-kilometre stage from Turin to Milan. There were six stages in between: the shortest being 228 kilometres and the longest 378 kilometres.

The first Giro avoided the high mountains, but still included some stiff climbs, like the ascents to Roccaraso, Rionero-Sannitico and Macerone on stage three between Naples and Chieti. The steep Passo Bracco featured on stage six from Florence to Genoa, and the Colle di Nava was a stiff test on stage seven from Genoa to Turin. As well as top Italian racers, other competitors included the French rider Lucien Petit-Breton and the Belgian Cyriel Van Hauwaert, so the first Giro d’Italia was an international race.

Rome was the southern extent, and the riders covered a total distance of 2,448 kilometres over a period of eighteen days; 127 riders started, but only forty-nine made it to the final finish line. The winner was decided on points awarded according to the finish order of each stage. But the problem with awarding the overall victory on points is that the winner might not have completed the course in the fastest time.

That was certainly the case in 1909. Luigi Ganna won the Giro, but he wasn’t the quickest over its entire route. That was the third-placed rider, Giovanni Rossignoli. If the first Giro had been decided on time, Rossignoli would have won by quite a large margin, and deciding the race on points didn’t prevent cheating. Three riders were disqualified before the start of stage three because there was no record of them passing through all the control points on the previous stage. It was later discovered that they had covered quite a large section of the stage by train.

But, like the early Tours de France, the public weren’t put off by such infractions. They probably added spice and intrigue to the race anyway. And going forwards, spice and intrigue created by all sorts of unfair play, scandals and downright cheating became a big part of road racing. And it still doesn’t put too many off the sport.

The first Giro certainly created lots of interest in Italy. An estimated thirty thousand people watched the finish in Milan, and Ganna was a worthy winner. He’d already won Milan–San Remo that year, and he was fifth in the 1908 Tour de France. His prize money helped him set up a bicycle factory in 1912. He also came up with one of the greatest winner’s quotes of all time. At the finish, when asked how he felt now the race was over, Ganna replied, ‘My backside is on fire.’

Second overall, Carlo Galetti raced on a Rudge-Whitworth bike made in the British Midlands. He won the next two editions of the Giro d’Italia, but after his initial second place Galetti switched to Atala, then the Bianchi team, so raced on their brands when he won. The 1912 Giro d’Italia team race was won by Atala. The last Giro decided on points was won by Carlo Oriana in 1913. Then Alfonso Clazolari won on time in 1914, before the race was halted by the First World War.

It resumed again in 1919 when Costante Giradengo won, and from then until after the Second World War the Giro was dominated by Italians. Other nationalities competed, but they found it hard to race against the Italians, who would unite to see an Italian winner, no matter what part of the country he came from, or what team he rode for.

The Giro was suspended again during most of the Second World War, with no race from 1941 to 1945. Straight after the war Italians continued winning through Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi and Fiorenzo Magni. Coppi’s 1947 win was particularly remarkable since he’d had to build himself back up after being a prisoner of war. It also came at the expense of his arch rival, Gino Bartali.

Coppi and Bartali – they are never introduced the other way around despite Bartali being older and ahead of Coppi in the alphabet – were almost at war themselves at the time. The pious Bartali represented the ideals of old Italy, whereas Coppi was seen as a more modern man. Bartali was the hero of the rural and older Italians. Coppi’s fans were younger city dwellers and business people. Before the start of the 1947 Giro, Bartali declared with typical Italian passion that to win the race, ‘Coppi will have to cross my dead body.’ Italy was a froth of widely differing views and passions by the time Coppi won.

The Italian stranglehold was finally broken in 1950 by a Swiss rider, Hugo Koblet. Nicknamed Le Pédaleur de Charme because of his impeccable riding style and appearance, Koblet kept a comb and a sponge soaked in eau de cologne in his racing jersey, so that he could freshen up towards the end of a race and wouldn’t appear in next day’s newspapers covered in mud and sweat.

But Koblet was more than a cycling dandy, he had immense class, as he proved by winning the 1950 Giro, then the Tour de France in 1951, almost entirely without team support in either race. Koblet later suffered from an illness involving his kidneys, from which he never really recovered. He stopped racing in 1958, and six years later he died in a car crash, which some say was suicide. Koblet was travelling at great speed between Zurich and Esslingen when his Alfa Romeo piled into a tree. The road was straight, weather conditions were good and it was daylight, but witnesses said that the driver made no effort to deviate from his course, or to slow down. He just piled straight into the tree.

With Koblet’s victory the Giro’s profile began to grow internationally. Another Swiss rider, Carlo Clerici, won in 1954, then the Luxembourger Charly Gaul won in 1956. And he did it with his trademark devastation of a Grand Tour in one stage in terrible weather. Gaul was a beautiful climber, called the Angel of the Mountains by the press, but he was also incredibly tough, which made him doubly dangerous when bad weather hit the mountains. Cold didn’t seem to affect him, or maybe he could just suffer and push himself more than others.

The final mountain stage of the 1956 Giro d’Italia was cold and wet, with lying snow banked at the sides of the roads on the mountain passes. Perfect for Gaul. He was lying 24th overall, 16 minutes behind the race leader, but with 242 kilometres and several high passes, he still thought he could win. Gaul attacked halfway through the stage and danced away, impervious to anything but gaining time. The others could do nothing about it, and Gaul wiped out his deficit and then gained enough time to win overall. He couldn’t even walk by the end of the stage, which finished on top of Monte Bondone and took him nine hours to complete. Only forty-nine of the morning’s eighty-nine starters made it to the finish.

By 1957 another star of men’s road racing had emerged, Jacques Anquetil of France. Anquetil won his first Tour de France that year, but he wasn’t good enough yet to take on Charly Gaul at full force in conditions that suited the Luxembourger. Gaul crushed Anquetil and everybody else in one horrible wet stage in the Chartreuse mountains to win the 1958 Tour. Then Gaul repeated his defeat of Anquetil in the 1959 Giro d’Italia.

Anquetil was leading the race by four minutes at the start of the twenty-first stage out of twenty-two, but that stage from Aosta to Courmayeur was 296 kilometres long, and included the Col de Petit St Bernard. When Gaul hit it he went into overdrive, holding close to 30 kilometres per hour for the entire length of the climb. That was Gaul’s climbing strength; he hit a high pace revving a low gear and held it there. Rivals thought they could stay with him, so they followed him, and they could stay at first. However, Gaul always rode half a kilometre per hour faster than his rivals could sustain. They hung on and hung on, in a way goaded by Gaul’s pace to do so, but while he could handle it they were slowly going deeper into the red. By the time they realised what was happening they were so deep they cracked, often losing minutes. It was an infuriating way to lose.

That’s exactly what happened to Jacques Anquetil on the Petit St Bernard in 1959. He followed Gaul, and because Anquetil could suffer like no other he held him until three kilometres from the summit, then he cracked – really cracked. By the summit Anquetil had lost seven minutes to Gaul, and he was ten behind at the finish in Courmayeur in the Val d’Aosta. Gaul had won another Grand Tour in one incredible day.

But that was the end of the Angel’s days of cycling grace. Anquetil won the 1960 Giro d’Italia, the first Frenchman to do so, and then he won the 1961 Tour de France. He won the Tour again in 1962 and 1963, then in 1964 Anquetil won the Giro again, the first part of a Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double that year. That made him the first rider in history to repeat Fausto Coppi’s 1949 and 1952 Giro/Tour doubles, and the first to win five Tours de France.

Anquetil also helped boost the international profile of the Giro d’Italia, and Eddy Merckx took the first of his five Giro victories in 1968. Then a Swede, Gosta Petterson, won in 1971. The Giro d’Italia was a truly international race now, and one that every big star wanted to win. What’s more, doing the double by winning the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same year became a mark of greatness.

Coppi did the double, as did Anquetil and Merckx, then Bernard Hinault; and in time Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani would do it too. But road racing’s triple crown is winning the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the world road race championships all in the same year. Up until the start of 1987 only Eddy Merckx had done that; then came Ireland’s Stephen Roche.

Roche’s career by then could be summed up as periods of bike racing genius interrupted by accidents, injuries and slumps. He fought back from a serious knee problem in 1986, which saw him thinking he would have to give up cycling altogether, but then everything just clicked into place, literally.

Roche was sure he could win the 1987 Giro, but his team-mate, the 1986 winner Roberto Visentini, was in the way. Their Carrera team, which was Italian, had told Roche that Visentini would support Roche in that year’s Tour de France, but Roche knew Visentini had no intentions of even riding the race, so he had no choice but to attack. With Visentini leading, Roche attacked and took the pink jersey from him: a move that left the Irishman isolated within his team and the subject of a hate campaign by the Italian supporters, who wanted their countryman Visentini to win, and saw Roche’s attack as treason.

Roche’s only allies in the race were his Belgian domestique, Eddy Schepers, and the British climbing star Robert Millar, who rode either side of Roche for as long as possible to protect him from the fans. They were his only help in controlling the revenge attacks launched by Visentini and a number of other Italians.

Roche won in Milan, the first English speaker to win the Giro d’Italia, and Robert Millar took the climber’s jersey, as well as second place overall. The first jewel in the triple crown was in place. Then Roche went on to win the Tour de France and the world championships, making 1987 his golden year. Still, thirty years later, only Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche have ever done that.

The 1988 Giro was every bit as dramatic as 1987, and its winner, the American Andy Hampsten, just as ground-breaking. Victory was founded with a display of courage and endurance on a day when it snowed on the Passo di Gavia, one of the legendary climbs of the Giro d’Italia. The stage is still referred to as the day grown men cried.

Hampsten was warned well before the start that terrible conditions awaited the race on the Gavia, and he and his 7-Eleven team prepared accordingly. They all packed bags with warm clothing in them to be handed to them before things got too bad on the climb. But, as he recalls, they didn’t know how bad it would get.

I began to realise what was in store when I descended the Aprica that day. It was pouring with rain and my clothes were soaked. In the valley I changed as much as I could, but I kept my neoprene gloves on, which were keeping my hands warm. There’s no point in swapping wet neoprene gloves for a dry pair. Your body has already warmed the layer of water that neoprene lets in, that’s how it works. If I’d taken them off and let my hands get cold, then I wouldn’t have been able to function at all. The climb was still a dirt road from the side we climbed in 1988, and so was the first bit of the descent. As we reached the first 16 per cent uphill section I attacked. The others knew I was going to do it, but I wanted to go early and demoralise them.

Hampsten has recounted that story so many times, but says it still gives him a little shudder when he does so.

The Dutch rider Eric Breukink was the only one not broken by Hampsten’s attack. He was distanced by the American but chased hard on the descent, catching and passing Hampsten to win the stage. But even the descent was factored in to Hampsten’s plan. ‘I took my time putting on the hat and wet-weather clothes I’d arranged to be handed to me before the top of the climb. I also worked out from the wind direction that things were going to be much worse on the descent, so I saved some energy. Breukink descended quicker than me because he had no rain jacket on, but there was no way I was taking mine off,’ Hampsten says.

He made the right choice. Being conservative not only gave Hampsten the pink jersey, but it preserved his strength to defend it, and so he became the first, and only rider so far from the USA, to win the Giro d’Italia, the number two Grand Tour behind the Tour de France.