The Call of the Road: The History of Cycle Road Racing

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.