Читать книгу Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races - Ellis Bacon - Страница 17
Оглавление| Start: Paris, France, on 5 JulyFinish: Paris, France, on 1 August | |
| Total distance: 4488 km (2789 miles)Longest stage: 415 km (258 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col de Porte: 1326 m (4350 ft)Mountain stages: 4 | |
| Starters: 150Finishers: 55 | |
| Winning time: 37 pointsAverage speed: 28.658 kph (17.807 mph) | |
| 1. François Faber (Lux) 37 points2. Gustave Garrigou (Fra) 57 points3. Jean Alavoine (Fra) 66 points |
True to his word, 1907 and 1908 winner Lucien Petit-Breton retired from racing and followed the 1909 Tour as a journalist, leaving the door open for his former team-mate, François Faber, to take the race.
At 6 ft 2 in and weighing 91 kg, ‘The Giant of Colombes’ must have taken advantage of his bulk to help keep him warm in a race run in freezing conditions, and thought to still be the coldest weather ever encountered by the Tour.
Faber, to all extents and purposes a Frenchman but officially a Luxembourger, blazed to six stage wins – five of them consecutive – on his way to becoming 1909 Tour champion, and the race’s first non-French winner.
Mondialisation – globalisation – is an oft-bandied-around term in modern Tour de France circles to describe the ever-growing number of countries that the race has visited and the ever-increasing number of nationalities that have taken part as riders. But the 1909 Tour saw not only its first foreign winner in Faber, but after Belgium’s Cyrille van Hauwaert won the opening stage, non-French riders and French riders shared the fourteen stages with seven wins apiece.
The 1909 race had again followed a very similar route to that used in both 1907 and 1908, but the Tour was about to become much more mountainous…
François Faber won six stages on his way to overall victory in 1909
France’s Octave Lapize trudges up the Col du Tourmalet in 1910. It was the first time that the 2115-m (6939-ft) pass had been used at the Tour, and was in fact the first time that the Pyrenees had been used at all. Despite having to walk, he was the first rider across the summit, and on the next climb — the Col d’Aubisque — he accused the race organisers of being murderers for taking the race over such difficult terrain. Lapize nevertheless went on to win the 1910 Tour overall.
