Читать книгу Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races - Ellis Bacon - Страница 21
Оглавление| Start: Paris, France, on 29 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 27 July | |
| Total distance: 5388 km (3348 miles)Longest stage: 470 km (292 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col du Galibier: 2556 m (8386 ft)Mountain stages: 7 | |
| Starters: 140Finishers: 25 | |
| Winning time: 197 h 54’ 00”Average speed: 26.715 kph (16.600 mph) | |
| 1. Philippe Thys (Bel)2. Gustave Garrigou (Fra) at 8’ 37”3. Marcel Buysse (Bel) at 3 h 30’ 55” |
As well as reverting back to cumulative time rather than points deciding the race’s overall winner, the Tour headed off from Paris for an anti-clockwise circuit of France for the first time in 1913. That said, it followed an extremely similar route to the previous two editions of the race, visiting almost all of the same towns, from the other direction.
Some went as far as to say that organiser Desgrange’s decision to revert to time as the measure of his race’s winner was in an effort to help a Frenchman win – namely Eugène Christophe, runner-up in 1912.
However, what happened to Christophe on stage 6, on the road between Bayonne and Luchon, soon put the kibosh on that theory. While descending the Col du Tourmalet, Christophe’s forks snapped, requiring him to run the rest of the way down the mountain to the town at the bottom – Ste-Marie-de-Campan – where he found a blacksmith willing to allow him to use his tools to effect a repair. However, the fact that the blacksmith’s assistant operated the bellows to help Christophe contravened race rules that stipulated that a rider couldn’t receive any outside assistance.
The Frenchman was handed a time penalty, and Belgian rider Philippe Thys went on to win the race by just eight-and-a-half minutes over Frenchman Gustave Garrigou, meaning that, for the second year in a row, there was a foreign winner, which wouldn’t have pleased an organiser trying to promote a French newspaper to a French public.
In fact, Belgian riders would win the race seven times in a row before a French rider would win his home race again.
Anyone who thinks that today’s maladie of there having been no French winner since 1985 need only look to the past to see that everything goes in cycles.
Eugène Christophe’s repairs are in vain as he is subsequently penalised for accepting outside assistance
