One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers

Such a writer has never been born, so we must look elsewhere. No need to waste time with, for instance, the vile scribes of Les Temps modernes, except to say that French intellectuals have missed a wonderful subject that lay right before their eyes. Personally I prefer French journalists. They have more relish for life than academics. The vast majority of people who have added to our knowledge of the Tour have been from the press; but, alas, their accounts and interviews are mainly hidden in the archives of newspaper libraries. Many general books recount the history of the Tour, generally beginning with its origins in the press.

The Tour de France was founded in 1903 by Henri Desgrange, a racing cyclist (the first recordman de l’heure, with 35.325 kms) who was also a journalist. Desgrange had the idea of a very long race as a publicity vehicle for his paper L’Auto. It was in rivalry with Le Vélo, which organised the two longest cycling events of the time, Bordeaux – Paris and Paris – Brest – Paris. A race all the way around France, Desgrange thought, would give L’Auto an advantage over the other publication. The pattern of the Tour was established very early in its life. First, it was to be a circuit of the country. Second, there were to be long stages between different towns and cities. Third, the difficulty of the Tour would be augmented by climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees. Mountain stages were an essential part of the race from 1910. The winner of the Tour – the person who rode back to Paris with the shortest aggregate time in a race that lasted for three weeks or more – would need to be a climber.

The development of the Tour de France was interrupted by the two world wars but enjoyed a ‘renaissance period’ between 1947 and 1953, the year of its golden jubilee. It is difficult to say when the ‘modern’ Tour de France began. Was it formed by commerce, or by publicity, or by globalisation, mondialisation? Did it begin with the rise of trade teams rather than regional or national teams, after 1961? Or with television coverage, which began in 1955 and was first transmitted en direct in 1957, and with the help of helicopters after 1975? Or with the failure of French cyclists in their own national event, for a Frenchman has not won since Bernard Hinault in 1985?

On another view, the ‘modern period’ belongs to riders who have won the Tour three times or more. There had been multiple winners before Hitler’s war, notably the Belgian Sylvère Maes (in 1936 and 1939), but the tendency to win again and again began in 1953. Here is a list of the dominating multiple winners:

Louison Bobet, 1953, 1954, 1955.

Jacques Anquetil, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964.

Eddy Merckx, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974.

Bernard Hinault, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985.

Greg Lemond, 1986, 1989, 1990.

Miguel Indurain, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995.

Lance Armstrong, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.

These seven men have achieved thirty-one victories between them.

In the years when the multiple champions did not take the Tour there were some equally memorable victors. On rare occasions they won because their team leader had crashed or had been taken ill. In 1966, for instance, Jacques Anquetil – suffering from bronchitis and, at the age of thirty-two, exhausted by a career that had begun in his teens – climbed off when there were only six stages left before Paris, having first ensured that the Tour would be gained by a modest teammate. Lucien Aimar saw his opportunity and took it, riding into the Parc des Princes in yellow, but without a single stage win to his credit.

Let no one imagine that Aimar was a cyclist of the second rank. It is true that he regarded Anquetil as a revered elder brother. Although they shared rooms for five years Aimar always addressed his team leader as vous. But Aimar was a vital presence and a potential winner in any race. In 1968 he won a stunning victory in the French national championship, beating Roger Pingeon, who had outdistanced him in that year’s Tour de France. Pingeon, like Aimar, could have won the Tour more than once. Both men had their victories and failures in the political team tactics of the Tour in the 1960s. Pingeon was the more calculating of the two. Aimar often said that he had the relaxed attitude of his homeland, the Cote d’azur, while Pingeon was reserved (he would not share a room with anyone) and a perfectionist. After 1968 his career and his spirits were destroyed by the rise of Eddy Merckx.

The most surprising winner of the Tour has been Roger Walkowiak, a miner’s son from the Polish enclave in Alsace. He rode the 1956 Tour as an unnoticed member of the Nord-Est-Centre regional team. When he finished in yellow there were no extended plaudits, though the Tour had been run at a record overall speed of 36.268 kph. Walkowiak gave his winnings to his old dad, raced intermittently for three more seasons and then went back home to a job in a factory. It is said that ‘Walko’ was a stupid man who lacked the will to dominate. In 1956 he was certainly directed by his team manager to get into the right breaks and then to take it easy. Would it have been better if he had gone for senseless adventures off the front of the bunch, and then lost the race?

Another unexpected winner was Joop Zoetemelk, who wore the yellow jersey on the Champs-Elysées in 1980. As a competitor, he was the superior of Aimar or Walkowiak. The reasons why people were surprised that he won were, first, because he was Dutch; second, because he was old (thirty-four); and, third, because they were used to him failing to win. Zoetemelk’s palmarès is in some ways unmatched. He started and finished no fewer than sixteen Tours and was second on six occasions. His long and admirable career was concluded when he won the world professional road race tide in 1985, at the age of thirty-eight. On the Giavera di Montello circuit he used finesse and then sheer speed to defeat Greg Lemond and Moreno Argentin.

That may well have been Zoetemelk’s favourite victory. ‘There are those who win the Tour once and then no longer speak about it,’ says Zoetemelk. ‘I was one of them.’ The Dutchman is also one of the sizeable number of former Tour heroes who become reclusive in later life. Some of them are very odd and anti-social. We hear of them living on a farm in a remote part of their native region, or in a forest, not much liking human contact, a gun-dog their preferred companion. Others, by contrast, make their living from former sporting renown. Old Belgian champions often own bars. The more renowned a cyclist, the more likely that he will enter the public relations business. French Tour veterans contribute to the vast, and still growing, hospitality industry that accompanies cycle sport. Or they drive team cars and supporting vehicles. Retired cyclists are better at this task than rally drivers or other professional motorists.

A select number of Tour winners become team managers. One of them is Bjarne Riis, the Dane who put an end to Miguel Indurain’s reign when he dominated him on an Alpine stage in 1996. I would rather not call him a great man of the Tour de France. The same applies to Marco Pantani. In 1998, a year in which he had already won the Giro d’Italia, Pantani flew up the roads of the Alps and the Pyrenees to become only the third man (after Fausto Coppi and Stephen Roche) to win both the Italian and French tours in the space of only a few months.

1998 was the year of the Festina drugs scandal, when it became clear that EPO was used throughout the peloton. Whatever the illegal fuel that helped him ride, Pantani was a climber in the grand tradition. After one day in the mountains he sprinted to the heights of Les Deux Alpes nine minutes clear of his nearest rival. He was never again to ride so well.

Like most long-time lovers of the Tour, I mull over the years in which la grande boucle was won by a specialised climber.

Now follows a list that gives a different slant to the history of the post-war Tour. On page 66 I gave a list of the multiple winners, cyclists with three or more wins. Here are the Tour winners excluding the multiple victors.

1947 Jean Robic, France

1948 Gino Bartali, Italy

1949 Fausto Coppi, Italy

1950 Ferdi Kubler, Switzerland

1951 Hugo Koblet, Switzerland

1952 Fausto Coppi, Italy

1956 Roger Walkowiak, France

1958 Charly Gaul, Luxembourg

1959 Federico Bahamontes, Spain

1960 Gastone Nencini, Italy

1965 Felice Gimondi, Italy

1966 Lucien Aimar, France

1967 Roger Pingeon, France

1968 Jan Janssen, Netherlands

1973 Luis Ocaña, Spain

1975 Bernard Thévenet, France

1976 Lucien van Impe, Belgium

1977 Bernard Thévenet, France

1980 Joop Zoetemelk, Netherlands

1983 Laurent Fignon, France

1984 Laurent Fignon, France

1987 Stephen Roche, Ireland

1988 Pedro Delgado, Spain

1996 Bjarne Riis, Denmark

1997 Jan Ullrich, Germany

1998 Marco Pantani, Italy

Let readers imagine that we are in a cafe, bar or buvette in rural France. It is the late morning of a warm day in mid-July. The television is switched on and it is following the Tour de France from, shall we say, Figeac to Superbesse, a distance of 221 kilometres. The village is quiet and so is the cafe. Fewer than a dozen customers, all male, are sitting with their morning drinks, wine mostly, maybe a Suze, in my case a Ricard, ‘un peu de soleil dans une bouteille’, as its inventor, the Marseillais genius Paul Ricard, liked to say.

We have newspapers which give reports of yesterday’s events on the road and a page of the Tour’s General Classification, from the maillot jaune to the lanterne rouge. There are flies on the ceiling. The television grinds on. Nothing much happening in this early part of a transitional stage. Some of the men smoke Gauloises, others Caporals. I am making marks in biro against the Classement général. In an hour or so lunch will be offered, probably hors-d’oeuvre, chicken, fruit, cheese. From my place at a formica table I can see the village priest walking up and down the street. What big black boots in this summer weather. Time for another Ricard. Some children run in and out of the cafe. The television says that there has been a breakaway, not an energetic one, and after 80 kilometres of racing the peloton has come together. The TV commentator talks of the old days.

‘Messieurs!’ I might cry to other men in the bar. ‘I am myself a former racing cyclist, from Birmingham near Wolverhampton, of little merit, it is true, but I am a true lover of the vélo. I have with me a list of all the winners in the Tour de France in the last fifty years which excludes every rider who has won the Tour more than three times. Tell me, my friends, tell me this, were not those Tours more interesting, more émouvant, than those in which we saw the repeated triumphs of the greatest champions in the race which has occupied us for all of our lives?’

Try this conversation in a provincial French cafe before lunch and you will still be in fierce or genial debate all afternoon, and until the dinner plates are cleared. This is the way that the Tour is – or used to be – discussed. I wish I had spent more time in such cafes. Perhaps it is not too late. A few months ago I had a café-cognac sur le zinc in a Parisian bar before the next day’s Paris – Roubaix, and the drink was with my son. So there may be a future for us all – though I can never rid myself of hankering for the old days of English poetry about club runs, which I shall now describe.

VIII

The first British cyclist to ride the Tour de France was Charlie Holland, a hero from Birmingham. A member of the Midland C & AC, he spent most of his life as a newsagent but had a short professional career before the war. In 1937 (the year Roger Lapébie won) he survived the Tour until its eleventh stage. He could have gone further, but was eliminated as a result of one of Henri Desgrange’s most absurd regulations. The father of the Tour had decreed that riders could not carry more than two spare tubulars. Holland suffered from punctures during the stage between Perpignan and Luchon, so was ruined.

It had been a brave contribution to the Tour. Charlie Holland had never even seen a bigger mountain than Snaefell on the Isle of Man, so the Galibier – the fearsome, snow-capped col that rises above Briançon, the highest town in Europe – was a challenge beyond his experience or imagination. That year the riders had to struggle through thick mud from melted Alpine snow. On his dogged way to the summit of the Galibier Charlie passed Maurice Archambaud, sobbing by the wayside, unable to continue. And Archambaud was a champion, the holder (like Desgrange before him) of the hour record sur piste, an experienced man of the Tour who was willed on by thousands of French fans. Holland had no one at all to support him. As far as the bosses of British cycling were concerned, he might have been riding on the moon.

Charlie Holland’s pioneering ride in 1937 was a high point in British cycling. High, and also remote. Eighteen years would pass before, in 1955, there was again a British presence in the Tour de France. To this day (2003) only fifty-one British cyclists have ridden the Tour and only twenty-one of them have completed the race. This is a modest number. But let us be grateful to the BLRC. If it were not for the League there would have been even fewer British riders on the continent. All of the earlier British riders in the Tour were brought up in the BLRC. Tom Simpson – the dead king of British cycling – was an utterly characteristic Leaguer whose early career was formed by BLRC attitudes.

Why have there not been more British cyclists in the Tour de France? Dozens of our boys had legs for the job. Alas, they were not encouraged by our official bodies. The professional class was weak and big cycle companies like Hercules and Raleigh retreated from sponsorship. We were all absorbed in the domestic sport of time dialling. And always in the background was the innate pastoralism of our cycling culture. This attachment to rural rambles and the gentle pleasures of the countryside is most obviously seen, I think, in cycling poetry.

The Britons who raced on the continent are a different breed from those who wrote poetry after riding their bikes in the English countryside, but there is some common ground. The racing men and the poets understand each other, for they come from the same background in British cycling club life.

Poetry!? By racing cyclists!? Yes, though mainly by recreational cyclists. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, have become poets with no other reason for writing poetry, or writing at all, than their devotion to the bicycle. On my shelves is a collection of their verses. It is a small anthology in proportion to the huge total number of cycling poems written since the 1890s. The tradition continues and flourishes, not quite in secret but in privacy, for the poems are published in club magazines and nowhere else.

The themes of cycling poetry are quietly stated and the verse is not obscure. Cycling poets write in conventional ways. They describe the weather and the alternation of the seasons, matters that everyone can understand. Time dialling is a common subject. Our poets are also inclined to discuss age and death, for the further ends of life are a cycling preoccupation. Yet they don’t treat death as a drama. Oddly enough, I have never come across a poem about the death of Tom Simpson. Perhaps they don’t get published. I wouldn’t be surprised if Simpson poems exist or once existed. They would be sealed in a feeding bottle and then buried under the stones at the horrible monument on Mont Ventoux. People take anything to this shrine.

Passionate love poetry is rare. Cyclists do of course write about attractive women. The most favoured women are barmaids. Next most popular are the owners of traditional cafes and teashops. In third place, some way behind, are other cyclists. Here is the author of ‘Lines written after a chance encounter with a charming member of the Merseyside Ladies’ Cycling Association’:

A presence brought enchantment to the ride

A presence, riding with me, by my side …

There are also many poems which address a favourite bicycle as though it were a good old wife:

We’ve had some pretty good times together

Awandering up and down the hills and dales …

Other categories of cycling verse include the very important rolling-road poems, with their tales of memorable rides:

At the witching hour one winter’s night, snow thick upon the ground

Some Clarion lads from Manchester left Handforth homeward bound …

And there are many good-cheer poems:

There’s an inn down in Surrey that’s known far and wide

For the welcome extended to all those who ride …

At one time it was also common for clubs to sing as they went along the road together. The club run, especially after it turned for the homeward ride, but before the final ‘blind’, became a wheeled choir. If the run was well attended there had to be a choirmaster in the middle of the bunch to coordinate the tempo and remind clubmates of the words of songs. The effect was probably ragged, but a singing club run must have been an impressive thing, astonishing to a bystander.

Some songs – I write of days long gone by – were from the music hall or were well-known ditties such as

Summer rain brings the roses again

After the clouds roll by …

Less often, clubs sang the classics of choral music. Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ was a favourite, though no one knew the German words and there has never been a translation into English. Ignorance of the words of songs led cyclists towards mockery. ‘The Soldiers’ Chorus’, for instance, was sung as ‘Beer, boys, and bugger the Band of Hope’, probably as the Sunday club run passed some nonconformist chapel.

Some clubs had their own poet who wrote songs and coached other members. The Catford CC was one of them. This song comes from the Catford:

We’re boys of every sort, in all the branches of the sport,

The road and track boys, the lady-back boys,

Our object is good sportsmanship, our racing is good fun,

Our motto is Good Fellowship, for each and ev’ry one …

A ‘lady-back boy’ is the owner of a tandem who has a girlfriend. This Catford song probably has an early date, since the singing club runs were most popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The last report I have of a club wheeling through the lanes in song (a CTC section: it would be, wouldn’t it?) comes from the mid-1950s. I never myself experienced a singing club run though I know some people, rather older than me, who recall the phenomenon. One of them points out that only cyclists would have joined in such a practice. ‘Other people aren’t crazy enough.’

The songs, recitations and poems began with the first Clarion ‘smokers’ and the birth of club magazines. Some of them relate to a minor development in English literature. In the 1890s there was a vogue for rolling-road poems from the pens of such official writers as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and John Masefield. They made an addition to English nature poetry simply by writing so much about roads. Many of their sentiments were transferred to verses by cyclists. The same official writers often give us descriptions of gypsies. And, sure enough, a preoccupation with the wandering people of the countryside also has a place in the literature of cycling. For what is a cyclist, if he is not a postman who dreams of becoming a gypsy?

The Romany is weather-beaten, misunderstood, ungovernable and free. So he entered the lore of cycling as soon as the sport became truly popular and became an alternative way of life for the low paid. Many of the clubs founded in those days – plenty of them still in existence – have the words ‘nomads’, ‘wanderers’ or ‘vagabonds’ in their names. It had been easy for the young spirits who founded such clubs to make an association with the gypsy. Cyclists went their own way through the lanes or across the heath, as the wind or fancy took them. They carried few possessions, wore bright clothing, were refused entry to the more genteel pubs, tinkered with their mounts at the side of the road, took their meals behind hedges and slept in haystacks.

I am old enough to remember the haystacks and still think it was a good way to spend Saturday night. Today, veteran cyclists bore their sons and teenage clubmates with tales of rough nights when they burrowed into barns and ricks, fearful of the farmer even after the pint or two they had probably drunk. How scratchy the haystacks were, how rural they smelt, how a lad longed for a lass to be with him in his hayhole!

Haystacks were useful to us for quite practical reasons. They provided cost-free lodgings close to the start of time-trial courses. You could spend Saturday night in a haystack and be there and ready to race on Sunday morning. Many time triallists camped before an event, but there was more than a touch of respectability about their Bukta or Blacks-of-Greenock tents, their shaven faces and wifely wives. A racing man from a haystack was a more dangerous sort of cyclist.

Haystack nights disappeared in the 1960s, when people had more money and looked for a different style. The old prestige accorded to haystackers came from their vagabond or wild-man demeanour. Cycling lore contains many stories about strangers who appear in the night or who join the road from a woodland path. A lone cyclist enters a remote country pub. He asks for a pint and an empty smaller glass, then produces half a dozen duck eggs from a brown paper bag. The mysterious wheelman pours a little beer from his pint into the smaller glass, cracks an egg into it and drinks the mixture. He does this five more times. Then he finishes his beer and leaves the hostelry, away on his bike to who knows where.

All stories signify something beyond themselves. What does this story mean? Perhaps the cyclist is really a fox. Are there parallels in the folk legends of, for instance, Belgium, a country of beer, cycling, early dark nights and short distances between country and town?

Another cycling legend – one that does have equivalents in British folklore – concerns the old-timer. In song and story he is not awheel but is encountered at the side of a road. He wears unfashionable clothes, carefully washed and stitched where necessary. He is not the sort of person who takes his rest in a haystack. He might be a ghost. The old-timer’s bike is ancient. Some of its accessories, in this story usually the mudguards, are held to the frame by twisted pieces of wire. But the transmission – chainset, chain and back sprocket, the heart of a bicycle – is expertly and beautifully maintained. The old-timer has climbed off to eat his sandwiches or to smoke a pipe. Other cyclists riding the same road instinctively brake and stop to say a word in fellowship or homage. He replies only with the words ‘It’s a grand life’. Just as no one has seen him ride, nobody knows where he comes from. But some versions of this myth give the old-timer a Black Country accent.

Is it merely coincidence that the photographs of Reg Harris, advertising his Raleigh bicycle, used to put the world champion in this old-timer pose, on a grassy verge by an English hedge, with pipe in hand, smiling in kindly fashion?

One final country legend. Almost as memorable as the old-timer is the icon of the peripatetic poet. He is on his bike in the countryside, sometimes glimpsed by other cyclists, shepherds and thoughtful rural folk. On occasion he is lying on the verge of the road, apparently asleep. What does this mean?

The cycling figure is surely formed from two more familiar icons. The first is the scholar-gypsy, who, as we know, flits from river to inn to hilly path. The second is the wandering minstrel. Why do minstrels wander? Any bright young Birmingham Marxist of the 1950s will immediately put his hand up with the answer. It is because they have been expelled, by capitalism, from their true home in the feudal hall, and so must endlessly travel, with no warm place to lay their heads and few people to hear their melancholy song. Sir Walter Scott will tell you the same story. And, as the cycling poet recounts,