The Call of the Road

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.

The field included Carlo Galetti, Luigi Ganna, Giovanni Gerbi, Gustave Garrigou. The race finished on the Corso Cavallotti in San Remo, where Lucien Petit-Breton won by 35 seconds from Garrigou and Gerbi. Only fourteen riders got through to the end, with last man Luigi Rota finishing over three and a half hours behind Petit-Breton.

Through Morgagni and the success of his races, La Gazzetta dello Sport planted its flag firmly on early twentieth-century Italian cycling, but then in 1908 word got round that Corriere della Sera were planning a Tour of Italy, a big stage race like the Tour de France. That could have blown La Gazzetta’s lead in Italian cycling, so Morgagni convinced the paper’s owner, Emilio Costamagna, and its editor, Armando Cougnet, to use the experience and goodwill gained from Milan–San Remo and Giro di Lombardia to organise a Tour of Italy as soon as possible.

On 7 August 1908, La Gazzetta announced that the first Tour of Italy, known nowadays almost universally by its Italian title, Giro d’Italia, would run in 1909. It would start in Milan on 13 May with a 397-kilometre stage to Bologna, and end on 30 May with a 206-kilometre stage from Turin to Milan. There were six stages in between: the shortest being 228 kilometres and the longest 378 kilometres.

The first Giro avoided the high mountains, but still included some stiff climbs, like the ascents to Roccaraso, Rionero-Sannitico and Macerone on stage three between Naples and Chieti. The steep Passo Bracco featured on stage six from Florence to Genoa, and the Colle di Nava was a stiff test on stage seven from Genoa to Turin. As well as top Italian racers, other competitors included the French rider Lucien Petit-Breton and the Belgian Cyriel Van Hauwaert, so the first Giro d’Italia was an international race.

Rome was the southern extent, and the riders covered a total distance of 2,448 kilometres over a period of eighteen days; 127 riders started, but only forty-nine made it to the final finish line. The winner was decided on points awarded according to the finish order of each stage. But the problem with awarding the overall victory on points is that the winner might not have completed the course in the fastest time.

That was certainly the case in 1909. Luigi Ganna won the Giro, but he wasn’t the quickest over its entire route. That was the third-placed rider, Giovanni Rossignoli. If the first Giro had been decided on time, Rossignoli would have won by quite a large margin, and deciding the race on points didn’t prevent cheating. Three riders were disqualified before the start of stage three because there was no record of them passing through all the control points on the previous stage. It was later discovered that they had covered quite a large section of the stage by train.

But, like the early Tours de France, the public weren’t put off by such infractions. They probably added spice and intrigue to the race anyway. And going forwards, spice and intrigue created by all sorts of unfair play, scandals and downright cheating became a big part of road racing. And it still doesn’t put too many off the sport.

The first Giro certainly created lots of interest in Italy. An estimated thirty thousand people watched the finish in Milan, and Ganna was a worthy winner. He’d already won Milan–San Remo that year, and he was fifth in the 1908 Tour de France. His prize money helped him set up a bicycle factory in 1912. He also came up with one of the greatest winner’s quotes of all time. At the finish, when asked how he felt now the race was over, Ganna replied, ‘My backside is on fire.’

Second overall, Carlo Galetti raced on a Rudge-Whitworth bike made in the British Midlands. He won the next two editions of the Giro d’Italia, but after his initial second place Galetti switched to Atala, then the Bianchi team, so raced on their brands when he won. The 1912 Giro d’Italia team race was won by Atala. The last Giro decided on points was won by Carlo Oriana in 1913. Then Alfonso Clazolari won on time in 1914, before the race was halted by the First World War.

It resumed again in 1919 when Costante Giradengo won, and from then until after the Second World War the Giro was dominated by Italians. Other nationalities competed, but they found it hard to race against the Italians, who would unite to see an Italian winner, no matter what part of the country he came from, or what team he rode for.

The Giro was suspended again during most of the Second World War, with no race from 1941 to 1945. Straight after the war Italians continued winning through Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi and Fiorenzo Magni. Coppi’s 1947 win was particularly remarkable since he’d had to build himself back up after being a prisoner of war. It also came at the expense of his arch rival, Gino Bartali.

Coppi and Bartali – they are never introduced the other way around despite Bartali being older and ahead of Coppi in the alphabet – were almost at war themselves at the time. The pious Bartali represented the ideals of old Italy, whereas Coppi was seen as a more modern man. Bartali was the hero of the rural and older Italians. Coppi’s fans were younger city dwellers and business people. Before the start of the 1947 Giro, Bartali declared with typical Italian passion that to win the race, ‘Coppi will have to cross my dead body.’ Italy was a froth of widely differing views and passions by the time Coppi won.

The Italian stranglehold was finally broken in 1950 by a Swiss rider, Hugo Koblet. Nicknamed Le Pédaleur de Charme because of his impeccable riding style and appearance, Koblet kept a comb and a sponge soaked in eau de cologne in his racing jersey, so that he could freshen up towards the end of a race and wouldn’t appear in next day’s newspapers covered in mud and sweat.

But Koblet was more than a cycling dandy, he had immense class, as he proved by winning the 1950 Giro, then the Tour de France in 1951, almost entirely without team support in either race. Koblet later suffered from an illness involving his kidneys, from which he never really recovered. He stopped racing in 1958, and six years later he died in a car crash, which some say was suicide. Koblet was travelling at great speed between Zurich and Esslingen when his Alfa Romeo piled into a tree. The road was straight, weather conditions were good and it was daylight, but witnesses said that the driver made no effort to deviate from his course, or to slow down. He just piled straight into the tree.

With Koblet’s victory the Giro’s profile began to grow internationally. Another Swiss rider, Carlo Clerici, won in 1954, then the Luxembourger Charly Gaul won in 1956. And he did it with his trademark devastation of a Grand Tour in one stage in terrible weather. Gaul was a beautiful climber, called the Angel of the Mountains by the press, but he was also incredibly tough, which made him doubly dangerous when bad weather hit the mountains. Cold didn’t seem to affect him, or maybe he could just suffer and push himself more than others.

The final mountain stage of the 1956 Giro d’Italia was cold and wet, with lying snow banked at the sides of the roads on the mountain passes. Perfect for Gaul. He was lying 24th overall, 16 minutes behind the race leader, but with 242 kilometres and several high passes, he still thought he could win. Gaul attacked halfway through the stage and danced away, impervious to anything but gaining time. The others could do nothing about it, and Gaul wiped out his deficit and then gained enough time to win overall. He couldn’t even walk by the end of the stage, which finished on top of Monte Bondone and took him nine hours to complete. Only forty-nine of the morning’s eighty-nine starters made it to the finish.

By 1957 another star of men’s road racing had emerged, Jacques Anquetil of France. Anquetil won his first Tour de France that year, but he wasn’t good enough yet to take on Charly Gaul at full force in conditions that suited the Luxembourger. Gaul crushed Anquetil and everybody else in one horrible wet stage in the Chartreuse mountains to win the 1958 Tour. Then Gaul repeated his defeat of Anquetil in the 1959 Giro d’Italia.

Anquetil was leading the race by four minutes at the start of the twenty-first stage out of twenty-two, but that stage from Aosta to Courmayeur was 296 kilometres long, and included the Col de Petit St Bernard. When Gaul hit it he went into overdrive, holding close to 30 kilometres per hour for the entire length of the climb. That was Gaul’s climbing strength; he hit a high pace revving a low gear and held it there. Rivals thought they could stay with him, so they followed him, and they could stay at first. However, Gaul always rode half a kilometre per hour faster than his rivals could sustain. They hung on and hung on, in a way goaded by Gaul’s pace to do so, but while he could handle it they were slowly going deeper into the red. By the time they realised what was happening they were so deep they cracked, often losing minutes. It was an infuriating way to lose.

That’s exactly what happened to Jacques Anquetil on the Petit St Bernard in 1959. He followed Gaul, and because Anquetil could suffer like no other he held him until three kilometres from the summit, then he cracked – really cracked. By the summit Anquetil had lost seven minutes to Gaul, and he was ten behind at the finish in Courmayeur in the Val d’Aosta. Gaul had won another Grand Tour in one incredible day.

But that was the end of the Angel’s days of cycling grace. Anquetil won the 1960 Giro d’Italia, the first Frenchman to do so, and then he won the 1961 Tour de France. He won the Tour again in 1962 and 1963, then in 1964 Anquetil won the Giro again, the first part of a Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double that year. That made him the first rider in history to repeat Fausto Coppi’s 1949 and 1952 Giro/Tour doubles, and the first to win five Tours de France.

Anquetil also helped boost the international profile of the Giro d’Italia, and Eddy Merckx took the first of his five Giro victories in 1968. Then a Swede, Gosta Petterson, won in 1971. The Giro d’Italia was a truly international race now, and one that every big star wanted to win. What’s more, doing the double by winning the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same year became a mark of greatness.

Coppi did the double, as did Anquetil and Merckx, then Bernard Hinault; and in time Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani would do it too. But road racing’s triple crown is winning the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the world road race championships all in the same year. Up until the start of 1987 only Eddy Merckx had done that; then came Ireland’s Stephen Roche.

Roche’s career by then could be summed up as periods of bike racing genius interrupted by accidents, injuries and slumps. He fought back from a serious knee problem in 1986, which saw him thinking he would have to give up cycling altogether, but then everything just clicked into place, literally.

Roche was sure he could win the 1987 Giro, but his team-mate, the 1986 winner Roberto Visentini, was in the way. Their Carrera team, which was Italian, had told Roche that Visentini would support Roche in that year’s Tour de France, but Roche knew Visentini had no intentions of even riding the race, so he had no choice but to attack. With Visentini leading, Roche attacked and took the pink jersey from him: a move that left the Irishman isolated within his team and the subject of a hate campaign by the Italian supporters, who wanted their countryman Visentini to win, and saw Roche’s attack as treason.

Roche’s only allies in the race were his Belgian domestique, Eddy Schepers, and the British climbing star Robert Millar, who rode either side of Roche for as long as possible to protect him from the fans. They were his only help in controlling the revenge attacks launched by Visentini and a number of other Italians.

Roche won in Milan, the first English speaker to win the Giro d’Italia, and Robert Millar took the climber’s jersey, as well as second place overall. The first jewel in the triple crown was in place. Then Roche went on to win the Tour de France and the world championships, making 1987 his golden year. Still, thirty years later, only Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche have ever done that.

The 1988 Giro was every bit as dramatic as 1987, and its winner, the American Andy Hampsten, just as ground-breaking. Victory was founded with a display of courage and endurance on a day when it snowed on the Passo di Gavia, one of the legendary climbs of the Giro d’Italia. The stage is still referred to as the day grown men cried.

Hampsten was warned well before the start that terrible conditions awaited the race on the Gavia, and he and his 7-Eleven team prepared accordingly. They all packed bags with warm clothing in them to be handed to them before things got too bad on the climb. But, as he recalls, they didn’t know how bad it would get.

I began to realise what was in store when I descended the Aprica that day. It was pouring with rain and my clothes were soaked. In the valley I changed as much as I could, but I kept my neoprene gloves on, which were keeping my hands warm. There’s no point in swapping wet neoprene gloves for a dry pair. Your body has already warmed the layer of water that neoprene lets in, that’s how it works. If I’d taken them off and let my hands get cold, then I wouldn’t have been able to function at all. The climb was still a dirt road from the side we climbed in 1988, and so was the first bit of the descent. As we reached the first 16 per cent uphill section I attacked. The others knew I was going to do it, but I wanted to go early and demoralise them.

Hampsten has recounted that story so many times, but says it still gives him a little shudder when he does so.

The Dutch rider Eric Breukink was the only one not broken by Hampsten’s attack. He was distanced by the American but chased hard on the descent, catching and passing Hampsten to win the stage. But even the descent was factored in to Hampsten’s plan. ‘I took my time putting on the hat and wet-weather clothes I’d arranged to be handed to me before the top of the climb. I also worked out from the wind direction that things were going to be much worse on the descent, so I saved some energy. Breukink descended quicker than me because he had no rain jacket on, but there was no way I was taking mine off,’ Hampsten says.

He made the right choice. Being conservative not only gave Hampsten the pink jersey, but it preserved his strength to defend it, and so he became the first, and only rider so far from the USA, to win the Giro d’Italia, the number two Grand Tour behind the Tour de France.

4

Racing Into the Sky

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.