Читать книгу The Call of the Road - Chris Sidwells - Страница 13

The year of the first Giro d’Italia saw the Tour de France take a big jump of its own. The start list grew from 109 riders in 1908 to 195 in 1909. The majority were French, but the numbers of Swiss, Italian, German and Belgian entrants all increased. Under pressure from team sponsors, all of them bike manufacturers because interests from outside cycling weren’t allowed to sponsor riders, Desgrange allowed them to list their men together. They weren’t teams as such, because riders weren’t permitted to support each other or engage in any kind of teamwork we would recognise today.

There were twelve pro ‘squads’, ranging from Legnano and Alcyon, with six sponsored riders each, to Le Globe with one. There were also 154 ‘Isolés’ – independent riders from France, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, who looked after themselves, booking their own hotels, and so on, for the entire race.

The first stage produced the first ever Belgian Tour de France stage winner. His name was Cyrille Van Hauwaert and he was the first Lion of Flanders, a title bike fans in the Flanders region of Belgium bestow on the very best of their riders. However, back in 1909 they were given a much less flattering name by French fans and the press. It was a name that stuck for a good few years after that as well. Riders like Van Hauwaert were called flahutes, the word given to long cloth bags in which labourers carried the food they ate at work. The bags were secured on their backs by two shoulder loops, a bit like a rucksack. Many Belgian labourers were employed on a day-to-day basis, and they rode old bikes or tramped around Flanders and northern France looking for their next job, with just a baguette and maybe a bottle of cold coffee in their flahute bags to sustain them. They were a tough breed.

Van Hauwaert was among the first of a long line of cycling champions from Flanders, a small region with a huge impact on road racing. He grew up in Moorslede in West Flanders, the son of a brick-maker, and like so many Flemish kids he came to cycling by chance. An old bike, which he found in a farmyard, gave Van Hauwaert the freedom to explore, and later to race. He became a tough competitor, but he had the soul of a poet as well. So many cyclists have – inside Kevlar body armour maybe, but it’s there nonetheless.

Van Hauwaert wrote an autobiography after he stopped racing, and this passage from it will resonate with anybody who as a kid discovered the joy and freedom of exploring the countryside by bike. He recalls setting off one day in his mid-teens to visit the nearby town of Turnhout. But once there Van Hauwaert saw it was the same distance again to Bruges, so he pressed on. Then, after enjoying beautiful Bruges, a city sometimes called the Venice of the north because of its extensive canal network, he carried on west into an area he didn’t know. He describes what he saw like this:

The road climbed, and on top of a small hill I saw ahead of me the vast green plain of the sea, which merges far in the distance into the blurred line of the horizon. Neighbours told me about the sea when they returned from excursions to it by rail, but I was so proud that my little bike had carried me to see this magical sight.

Van Hauwaert didn’t win the 1909 Tour. Instead it was won by the heaviest man ever to win a Tour de France. Road racers, even big road racers, aren’t big by general standards: 82, maybe 85 kilograms are what the heaviest Tour de France riders weigh. And those are the bigger sprinters and time triallists, or some big strong team workers. François Faber was massive by comparison, weighing 92 kilograms.

His mother was French and his father came from Luxembourg, so although he was born in France and regarded himself as French, Faber held dual French-Luxembourger nationality, so was technically the first foreign winner of the Tour de France. He is listed in the Tour’s Encyclopédie, the official book of Tour de France results, as being from Luxembourg.

The Vosges were included in the 1909 race, as were the edges of the Alps, which Faber could handle, although others handled these climbs better. What played into his hands was the weather. It was very bad; cold and wet through the entire race. Those conditions generally favour big riders over smaller ones. The bigger a person is for a given height, the less surface area of skin they have in proportion to body volume, which helps them preserve body heat. Faber, whose nickname was the Giant of Colombes and who had worked as a furniture remover and a docker before becoming a pro cyclist, won three out of the 14 stages.

It was a fine achievement, but 1909 was the end for big riders like François Faber, as far as winning the Tour de France was concerned. Next year the race went into the mountains, big mountains with passes of over 2,000 metres. The Tour de France began to take the shape it has today.

Alphonse Steinès had heard of the majesty of the Pyrenees, of names like Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. He’d seen their pale grey, snowcapped silhouettes shimmering distantly in the sun when the Tour passed through the southwest. He’d read about the Pyrenees too. Maybe he’d also heard that some intrepid touring cyclists had ridden, or more likely pushed, their way over some of the highest Pyrenean passes, as the London Bicycle Club had done in 1879.

But still, only locals really knew the Pyrenees, a place where wild and mysterious legends grew. The passes were far in excess of anything tackled in competition. Steinès wanted to send the Tour over those passes, so he brought the subject up with his boss, and quickly found out that Desgrange knew little more about the Pyrenees than the same distant profile Steinès had seen.

So Desgrange let Steinès write something in L’Auto about the possibility of racing in the Pyrenees, just to see if any readers responded with informed opinions. They did; people who knew the mountains said that sending racing cyclists over their high passes was crazy. The mountain roads were blocked with snow for most of the year, and when it melted they were revealed to be little more than cattle and sheep tracks.

But Desgrange was more intrigued than put off. He told Steinès to go to the Pyrenees and check out a route – and what an assignment that turned out to be. Steinès drove his car from Paris to Pau, one of the gateway towns to the Pyrenees, and when he told some locals why he was there they laughed. They told Steinès about a Mercedes racing car someone had tried to test by driving it over the Col du Tourmalet, one of the high Pyrenean passes, and one that Steinès wanted to include in his Tour de France stage. Not far up the climb the Mercedes was flipped over by the rough surface.

Locals told Steinès that they were used to outsiders coming to pit their strength against the mountains, but the mountains always won. So Steinès went elsewhere for guidance. He spoke to the superintendent of roads for the region, a man called Blanchet, only to find that he also thought the idea of sending cyclists over the high passes was mad.

Steinès wanted to follow an already defined way, a trail known to drovers, transporters of goods and itinerant workers. The way is the D616 and D918 today and crosses the Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubisque. The stage Steinès wanted would start in Bagnères-de-Luchon, at the foot of the Peyresourde, and cross all those climbs but then continue on through the foothills and the flats to Bayonne, a total distance of 326 kilometres.

Undeterred by the stories he heard, Steinès hired a local guide who agreed to help him, and set off from Bagnères-de-Luchon early one morning in his car. They crossed the Col de Peyresourde and the Aspin without too much trouble, but the Tourmalet nearly killed Steinès. They slipped and slid up the first six kilometres of the pass, then the car got stuck in a snowdrift and the guide, who was driving, wanted to turn back. It was six o’clock, getting dark and it was a long way to the summit. It was even further down the other side to Barèges, the next place of habitation. The guide told Steinès about the local bear population, before leaving him to his own devices.

True Pyrenean bears are thought to have died out now, but in the Seventies the population was augmented by Slovenian bears of the same breed, and about twenty of these Slovenian-Pyrenean hybrid bears exist today. But there were quite a few of the original bears at the turn of the twentieth century. They were a common sheep killer, and a possible threat to anyone wandering alone who might disturb one and be perceived as a threat.

With night falling around him, Steinès abandoned his car, but luckily he soon met a local shepherd, who led him on foot to the top of the pass. But then the shepherd had to turn for home, and we are talking big distances: the two main places of habitation on either side of the Tourmalet, Ste Marie-de-Campan and Barèges, are 36 kilometres apart. So at the summit the shepherd pointed Steinès in the direction of Barèges at the foot of the Tourmalet’s west side, and told him to walk next to the Bastan stream. That would have taken him where he needed to go, where he had told people he would be arriving that day. Unfortunately Steinès lost his way, stumbled and was swept off course by a small avalanche. He was discovered hours later, half-dead, by locals who started a search party when he failed to arrive in Barèges.

Even while he was having that misadventure, Steinès knew that the road over the Aubisque was nowhere near as good as the one over the Tourmalet, but he had a plan. Once recovered from his night out on the mountain, Steinès is said to have sent a telegram to Desgrange, which read, ‘No trouble crossing the Tourmalet. Roads satisfactory. No problem for cyclists. Steinès.’

Then he asked Desgrange for 5,000 francs to make some road improvements he’d noted were necessary along the route. In fact he needed most of the money to help pay for a better road over the Aubisque, which was a chewed-up goat track. Steinès had previously agreed a price of 3,000 francs with Blanchet, the superintendent of roads, but he asked Desgrange for more because he knew his boss would try to knock him down. He did. Desgrange offered 3,000 francs, which Steinès accepted. He could pay Blanchet and his stage would go ahead.

With the road improvements agreed, Desgrange announced in L’Auto that a stage of the 1910 Tour de France would cross the Col de Peyresourde, the Col d’Aspin, the Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque. Interest was huge. Blanchet mended the roads and built a new one over the Aubisque, while Steinès kept the secret of his night on the Tourmalet to himself.

Desgrange was still worried. He realised that the riders would be out on those high wild roads for a long time. The Tour was a race for heroes, but they needed some support. To do otherwise would be inhumane, so Desgrange introduced the Voiture Balai, the broom-wagon, a truck that would be the last vehicle on the road, there to sweep up any stragglers. And the practice has stuck. Almost every road race has at least a token broom-wagon, a last vehicle behind the race, which can pick up stragglers who can’t carry on, or who don’t want to.

The Tour de France broom-wagon has a symbolic role today. The last vehicle in the convoy following the race still has a broom strapped to its back doors, but modern Tour racers who drop out of the race, and it’s not something anybody does lightly, are whisked off to the finish in air-conditioned team vehicles. Or in an ambulance if they have sustained injuries.

That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, though; the broom-wagon served its practical purpose well into the Nineties. Photographers and, later, TV cameras would crowd around it to capture the end of a rider’s race, the ritual removal of his numbers by the broom-wagon driver, and the exhausted last step into its dark insides.

Stage ten of the 1910 Tour de France got under way at 3.30 a.m. to avoid riders being out on the mountains after dark, because the big climbs were all in the first half of the stage. It would only just be getting light as the riders tackled the first, the Col de Peyresourde, but even the slowest of them should cross them all by nightfall. Steinès briefed the riders, telling them not to take risks. He also told them that the time limit would be suspended for the day. It had been introduced to keep the race more compact by disqualifying riders who finished outside a certain percentage of the stage winner’s time, the percentage being calculated according to the conditions and terrain of each stage.

As the stage progressed, Octave Lapize and his team-mate Gustave Garrigou steadily drew ahead of the rest, Garrigou winning a special 100-franc prize for riding all the way up the Col du Tourmalet without once getting off to walk. The two were well ahead by the summit. Alphonse Steinès and Victor Breyer, a colleague from the organisation, then went ahead to the next and final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, and waited at the summit. They thought they’d see Lapize and Garrigou still in the lead, but an almost unknown rider, François Lafoucarde, got there first. He was riding very slowly and Breyer asked Lafoucarde what had happened. Where were the others? But he didn’t reply and just plodded past, staring straight ahead.

A quarter of an hour later Lapize emerged. He was exhausted, half stumbling, half pushing his bike. He looked at Steinès and Breyer and is alleged to have spat out the single word ‘Assassins’. Lapize then caught Lafoucarde, went straight past him and won the stage, but Faber did well too. He was the race leader, and had been since stage two. Lapize was second overall, but the stage that suited him far more than Faber only brought him three points closer to the giant rider. Faber finished ten minutes after Lapize, but still came in third. It took Lapize another three stages to dislodge Faber and finally win the Tour in Paris by four points.

The Pyrenees were judged a success, so the following year the Tour visited the high Alps as well. Stage four went from Belfort to Chamonix, right into the heart of the mountains. Next day the riders climbed the Col d’Aravis, the Col du Télégraphe, and then the giant Col du Galibier. When Henri Desgrange encountered the Galibier it was love at first sight. This is what he wrote about his favourite mountain climb in 1934: ‘Oh Laffrey! Oh Bayard! Oh Tourmalet! I would be failing in my duty not to proclaim that next to the Galibier you are pale cheap wine. In front of this giant I can do nothing more than raise my hat and salute.’

From 1911 on, Desgrange waited at the summit every year the race climbed the Galibier to time the riders through. Near the top of the south side there’s a huge memorial to Desgrange, and whenever the Galibier is in the Tour a special ‘Souvenir Desgrange’ prize is given to the first rider to the top.

The riders climbed the Galibier’s north side in 1911, the hardest side. It starts in St Michel-de-Maurienne with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe, a step to the start of the Galibier. Linked like Siamese twins, together they provide 34 kilometres of climbing, with a short 4.7-kilometre descent into the ski town of Valloire in between.

There’s a steep upwards ramp coming out of Valloire, then about 4 kilometres of false flat, giving space to consider the massive change of scenery. This is another world. Gone are the Télégraphe’s lovely tree-lined hairpins, and the pleasant summit café with its twee little garden. This is a huge landscape, a deep U-shaped valley, bare of trees and edged by enormous scree slopes, and snowcapped mountains beyond. The road barely twists, but it slowly racks up in gradient towards what looks like an impenetrable wall.

Even the great Eddy Merckx found this part of Galibier daunting. ‘The long straight section through the valley is difficult to deal with tactically,’ he says. ‘Attacks have to be timed well before it, or after it. Because if you attack on that section it is impossible to get out of sight. You just hang out in front of the chasers, providing a target for them to aim at.’

Further and further up this section there doesn’t seem any way out of the valley. Then, suddenly, at a place called Plan Lachat, the road veers sharp right and the final fierce phase of the Galibier begins. Hairpin follows hairpin for 7 kilometres of 8 per cent climbing. Until 1978 all traffic on the Galibier, including the Tour de France, passed through the oak-doored summit tunnel. But then the tunnel was shut for repair, and an extra piece of road was built over the top, where the old pre-tunnel Galibier pass went, the pass used by muleteers to get from the Maurienne valley to the villages of the Guisanne and Romanche valleys before 1891.

Emile Georget was the first rider to the top of the Galibier in 1911, and he went on to win the stage from Chamonix to Grenoble. But Gustave Garrigou extended his overall advantage on the big climb, widening the gap on his nearest rival, François Faber, from one point to ten. Faber won the next stage to Nice, with Garrigou second, but then dropped to third overall by the end of stage eight. A new challenger emerged, the stage eight winner Paul Duboc. He closed the gap further by winning stage nine as well.

The race was now in Bagnères-de-Luchon, and the next stage was a repeat of the Pyrenean epic of the previous year to Bayonne. Duboc led over the Tourmalet and looked strong, but then the story goes that he accepted a drink from a spectator, and after taking a sip he became ill. He could hardly ride and limped the rest of the way to the finish, where he arrived in twenty-first place, 3 hours and 17 minutes behind second-placed Garrigou. Within hours Garrigou was receiving death threats from Duboc’s fans, and the threats increased as the race approached Duboc’s home region of Normandy. His fans were convinced that Duboc had been poisoned, and that Garrigou was behind it.

Duboc recovered to win stage 11, then Garrigou won stage 13 to Cherbourg. The next stage passed through Rouen, Duboc’s home city, and Garrigou was terrified of being attacked there by Duboc’s fans. He even talked about giving up the Tour de France. Desgrange had to step in. He confronted Garrigou, convinced that in his worried state he wouldn’t dare lie to him, and asked him outright, was he involved in the alleged poisoning of Duboc? Garrigou said no, and Desgrange took him at his word.

Next day Desgrange got a make-up artist to prepare Garrigou. He fitted a false moustache, a big hat, and gave him sun goggles to wear. He was allowed to change his racing colours, and his bike. Garrigou was unrecognisable, but just to ensure his safety in case he was recognised, Desgrange asked the riders to stay together until after Rouen, where a huge angry mob had assembled. Luckily, though, the disguise and bike riders’ solidarity confounded them. The fans couldn’t pick out Garrigou in the middle of the fast-moving bunch, and once safely through Rouen, Garrigou removed his disguise and pedalled on.

Duboc won the stage, then finished second, one place ahead of Garrigou, on the final stage to Paris. But Garrigou won the Tour by 18 points to Duboc, who lost 19 points on the Luchon to Bayonne stage where he fell ill. A lot of bad feeling still went Garrigou’s way, especially from Normandy.

In 1912 the tenth Tour de France saw its first true foreign winner, a Belgian called Odile Defraye. He was sponsored by Alcyon, which was also Garrigou’s sponsor and had signed Paul Duboc for the Tour as well. There were two other Belgians in Alcyon’s 1912 five-man line-up.

A Frenchman, Charles Crupelandt, won the first stage. Crupelandt, incidentally, is the only man from the Roubaix area ever to win Paris–Roubaix. The last stretch of cobblestones in the race, a ceremonial one, is on the Avenue Charles Crupelandt, which was named in his honour. Defraye won the next stage, then took over the race lead after stage three. Octave Lapize and Eugène Christophe of France fought Defraye hard and got closer to him, but Lapize abandoned on stage nine.

Teamwork wasn’t allowed in the early Tours, but collusion between different teams is harder to prove, and reports of the 1912 Tour contain more than a suspicion that the Belgian riders in the race colluded to help their countryman win. If one of Defraye’s rivals attacked, the Belgians would work hard to catch him. Or they would work with Defraye but not with his French rivals. Eventually the Belgian drew 59 points clear of Christophe to win in Paris.

A Belgian victory was a step up in the international reputation of the Tour de France, but it saw the end of a points system to decide the overall classification. A rider could finish an hour in front of the next man on a stage, but still only gain one point in the overall standings, and that wasn’t fair. Defraye was a consistent rider, but not the best in the 1912 Tour in athletic terms. You can’t say for certain, but if the 1912 Tour had been decided on time there’s a strong argument that Defraye wouldn’t have won. Eugène Christophe led the race on time at the start of the final stage, but as he was already 48 points behind Defraye he didn’t follow the Belgian when he moved ahead with a breakaway, and lost his theoretical time lead.

So Desgrange changed the rules. Total time to cover the whole course would decide the 1913 Tour de France, but the change still produced a Belgian winner, when the very popular Eugène Christophe lost tons of time in the Pyrenees, through no fault of his own.

It was the first ever anticlockwise Tour de France, so the Pyrenees were before the Alps. That suited Christophe, because going anticlockwise meant that the key Pyrenean stage, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon, had its big climbs in the second half, and Christophe was an excellent climber. Previously there was plenty of distance between the last climb, Col d’Aubisque, and Bayonne, making it possible for riders to catch an attacking climber on the flat roads between the Aubisque and the finish. Now the Aubisque was the first climb, and it was followed by the brutal sequence of the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde before a short descent to the finish at Bagnères-de-Luchon.

Defraye took the race lead on stage three, with Christophe in second place. As expected, Christophe made an early move on stage six, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon. Seven riders went with him, but Defraye crashed and ended up so far behind when the Tourmalet was reached that he gave up and dropped out of the race. Christophe led with two Belgians, Philippe Thys and Marcel Buysse, after the Aubisque, which was in a terrible condition following bad weather. Several times they were forced to dismount and push their bikes through ankle-deep mud.

Buysse was quickly dropped on the Tourmalet, where Thys later left Christophe to cross the summit alone. There wasn’t much in it, so Christophe descended as fast as he dared. It must have been terrifying on those old bikes. Mountain descents are so steep that nowadays, riders can reach speeds of 70 to 80 kilometres per hour without trying. Bikes in 1913 were nowhere near as aerodynamic as they are now; neither were their riders and kit. There would have been more friction in a 1913 bike too. But still, they would have descended quickly, and slowing them from any sort of speed with flimsy brakes was no joke. Christophe must have been terrified when 10 kilometres down the east side of the Tourmalet the forks on his bike broke.

He couldn’t swap anything. The only way to continue in the race was to repair the fork. Christophe had learned some blacksmith’s skills when he was younger, but the nearest forge was at the bottom of the climb in the village of Ste Marie-de-Campan. So Christophe picked up his bike and began to jog down the mountain. L’Auto said he ran for 14 kilometres to the village, although that wasn’t held to be anything extraordinary, just typical of the many mishaps that befell riders in early road races. The legend of this stage grew after 1919, when Christophe lost another Tour de France due to a similar incident. And it continued growing because Christophe never did win the Tour de France. He is one of the best riders never to have done so.

Once at the blacksmith’s, Christophe stoked up the forge, took some metal tubing from the smith, and made a new fork blade. It was a difficult job and Christophe needed both hands for the repair, but a forge needs regular blasts of air to keep the fire hot enough to work the metal. Legend has it that Christophe asked the boy who worked in the forge to operate the bellows for him, and doing so was noted by the officials who had stopped to see that he did the repair himself, as the Tour de France rules said he must.

With the repair done, Christophe was ready to complete the stage, but he knew he’d broken race rules by having the blacksmith’s lad help him. He knew the officials who’d watched could penalise him. The story goes that when one of them said he was going out to the village to get some food because he was starving, Christophe growled, ‘Stay there and eat coal. While you are watching me I am your prisoner and you are my jailer.’

Work in the forge took Christophe three hours, after which he set off to climb the Aspin and the Peyresourde, eventually arriving in Luchon 3 hours and 50 minutes behind the stage winner, Philippe Thys. He’d taken nearly 18 hours to complete the 326 kilometres. There’s a plaque commemorating Christophe’s epic day in the village centre of Ste Marie-de-Campin today.

Thys took over the race lead, lost it next day to Marcel Buysse, but took it back after Buysse crashed and had to run to a village to make repairs of his own on stage nine. Then Thys began to pull ahead with consistent rather than flashy riding through the Alps, and won his first Tour de France.

Thys won again the following year in a race that was contested under the gathering threat of the First World War. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on the day the Tour started, and when the race ended on 26 July, Europe was eight days from war. On 3 August the German army invaded Belgium and many of the men who had raced in the Tour were drafted into their national armies. Not all of them survived.