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

Even while he was having that misadventure, Steinès knew that the road over the Aubisque was nowhere near as good as the one over the Tourmalet, but he had a plan. Once recovered from his night out on the mountain, Steinès is said to have sent a telegram to Desgrange, which read, ‘No trouble crossing the Tourmalet. Roads satisfactory. No problem for cyclists. Steinès.’

Then he asked Desgrange for 5,000 francs to make some road improvements he’d noted were necessary along the route. In fact he needed most of the money to help pay for a better road over the Aubisque, which was a chewed-up goat track. Steinès had previously agreed a price of 3,000 francs with Blanchet, the superintendent of roads, but he asked Desgrange for more because he knew his boss would try to knock him down. He did. Desgrange offered 3,000 francs, which Steinès accepted. He could pay Blanchet and his stage would go ahead.

With the road improvements agreed, Desgrange announced in L’Auto that a stage of the 1910 Tour de France would cross the Col de Peyresourde, the Col d’Aspin, the Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque. Interest was huge. Blanchet mended the roads and built a new one over the Aubisque, while Steinès kept the secret of his night on the Tourmalet to himself.

Desgrange was still worried. He realised that the riders would be out on those high wild roads for a long time. The Tour was a race for heroes, but they needed some support. To do otherwise would be inhumane, so Desgrange introduced the Voiture Balai, the broom-wagon, a truck that would be the last vehicle on the road, there to sweep up any stragglers. And the practice has stuck. Almost every road race has at least a token broom-wagon, a last vehicle behind the race, which can pick up stragglers who can’t carry on, or who don’t want to.

The Tour de France broom-wagon has a symbolic role today. The last vehicle in the convoy following the race still has a broom strapped to its back doors, but modern Tour racers who drop out of the race, and it’s not something anybody does lightly, are whisked off to the finish in air-conditioned team vehicles. Or in an ambulance if they have sustained injuries.

That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, though; the broom- wagon served its practical purpose well into the Nineties. Photographers and, later, TV cameras would crowd around it to capture the end of a rider’s race, the ritual removal of his numbers by the broom-wagon driver, and the exhausted last step into its dark insides.

Stage ten of the 1910 Tour de France got under way at 3.30 a.m. to avoid riders being out on the mountains after dark, because the big climbs were all in the first half of the stage. It would only just be getting light as the riders tackled the first, the Col de Peyresourde, but even the slowest of them should cross them all by nightfall. Steinès briefed the riders, telling them not to take risks. He also told them that the time limit would be suspended for the day. It had been introduced to keep the race more compact by disqualifying riders who finished outside a certain percentage of the stage winner’s time, the percentage being calculated according to the conditions and terrain of each stage.

As the stage progressed, Octave Lapize and his team-mate Gustave Garrigou steadily drew ahead of the rest, Garrigou winning a special 100-franc prize for riding all the way up the Col du Tourmalet without once getting off to walk. The two were well ahead by the summit. Alphonse Steinès and Victor Breyer, a colleague from the organisation, then went ahead to the next and final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, and waited at the summit. They thought they’d see Lapize and Garrigou still in the lead, but an almost unknown rider, François Lafoucarde, got there first. He was riding very slowly and Breyer asked Lafoucarde what had happened. Where were the others? But he didn’t reply and just plodded past, staring straight ahead.

A quarter of an hour later Lapize emerged. He was exhausted, half stumbling, half pushing his bike. He looked at Steinès and Breyer and is alleged to have spat out the single word ‘Assassins’. Lapize then caught Lafoucarde, went straight past him and won the stage, but Faber did well too. He was the race leader, and had been since stage two. Lapize was second overall, but the stage that suited him far more than Faber only brought him three points closer to the giant rider. Faber finished ten minutes after Lapize, but still came in third. It took Lapize another three stages to dislodge Faber and finally win the Tour in Paris by four points.

The Pyrenees were judged a success, so the following year the Tour visited the high Alps as well. Stage four went from Belfort to Chamonix, right into the heart of the mountains. Next day the riders climbed the Col d’Aravis, the Col du Télégraphe, and then the giant Col du Galibier. When Henri Desgrange encountered the Galibier it was love at first sight. This is what he wrote about his favourite mountain climb in 1934: ‘Oh Laffrey! Oh Bayard! Oh Tourmalet! I would be failing in my duty not to proclaim that next to the Galibier you are pale cheap wine. In front of this giant I can do nothing more than raise my hat and salute.’

From 1911 on, Desgrange waited at the summit every year the race climbed the Galibier to time the riders through. Near the top of the south side there’s a huge memorial to Desgrange, and whenever the Galibier is in the Tour a special ‘Souvenir Desgrange’ prize is given to the first rider to the top.

The riders climbed the Galibier’s north side in 1911, the hardest side. It starts in St Michel-de-Maurienne with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe, a step to the start of the Galibier. Linked like Siamese twins, together they provide 34 kilometres of climbing, with a short 4.7-kilometre descent into the ski town of Valloire in between.

There’s a steep upwards ramp coming out of Valloire, then about 4 kilometres of false flat, giving space to consider the massive change of scenery. This is another world. Gone are the Télégraphe’s lovely tree-lined hairpins, and the pleasant summit café with its twee little garden. This is a huge landscape, a deep U-shaped valley, bare of trees and edged by enormous scree slopes, and snowcapped mountains beyond. The road barely twists, but it slowly racks up in gradient towards what looks like an impenetrable wall.

Even the great Eddy Merckx found this part of Galibier daunting. ‘The long straight section through the valley is difficult to deal with tactically,’ he says. ‘Attacks have to be timed well before it, or after it. Because if you attack on that section it is impossible to get out of sight. You just hang out in front of the chasers, providing a target for them to aim at.’

Further and further up this section there doesn’t seem any way out of the valley. Then, suddenly, at a place called Plan Lachat, the road veers sharp right and the final fierce phase of the Galibier begins. Hairpin follows hairpin for 7 kilometres of 8 per cent climbing. Until 1978 all traffic on the Galibier, including the Tour de France, passed through the oak-doored summit tunnel. But then the tunnel was shut for repair, and an extra piece of road was built over the top, where the old pre-tunnel Galibier pass went, the pass used by muleteers to get from the Maurienne valley to the villages of the Guisanne and Romanche valleys before 1891.

Emile Georget was the first rider to the top of the Galibier in 1911, and he went on to win the stage from Chamonix to Grenoble. But Gustave Garrigou extended his overall advantage on the big climb, widening the gap on his nearest rival, François Faber, from one point to ten. Faber won the next stage to Nice, with Garrigou second, but then dropped to third overall by the end of stage eight. A new challenger emerged, the stage eight winner Paul Duboc. He closed the gap further by winning stage nine as well.

The race was now in Bagnères-de-Luchon, and the next stage was a repeat of the Pyrenean epic of the previous year to Bayonne. Duboc led over the Tourmalet and looked strong, but then the story goes that he accepted a drink from a spectator, and after taking a sip he became ill. He could hardly ride and limped the rest of the way to the finish, where he arrived in twenty-first place, 3 hours and 17 minutes behind second-placed Garrigou. Within hours Garrigou was receiving death threats from Duboc’s fans, and the threats increased as the race approached Duboc’s home region of Normandy. His fans were convinced that Duboc had been poisoned, and that Garrigou was behind it.

Duboc recovered to win stage 11, then Garrigou won stage 13 to Cherbourg. The next stage passed through Rouen, Duboc’s home city, and Garrigou was terrified of being attacked there by Duboc’s fans. He even talked about giving up the Tour de France. Desgrange had to step in. He confronted Garrigou, convinced that in his worried state he wouldn’t dare lie to him, and asked him outright, was he involved in the alleged poisoning of Duboc? Garrigou said no, and Desgrange took him at his word.

Next day Desgrange got a make-up artist to prepare Garrigou. He fitted a false moustache, a big hat, and gave him sun goggles to wear. He was allowed to change his racing colours, and his bike. Garrigou was unrecognisable, but just to ensure his safety in case he was recognised, Desgrange asked the riders to stay together until after Rouen, where a huge angry mob had assembled. Luckily, though, the disguise and bike riders’ solidarity confounded them. The fans couldn’t pick out Garrigou in the middle of the fast-moving bunch, and once safely through Rouen, Garrigou removed his disguise and pedalled on.

Duboc won the stage, then finished second, one place ahead of Garrigou, on the final stage to Paris. But Garrigou won the Tour by 18 points to Duboc, who lost 19 points on the Luchon to Bayonne stage where he fell ill. A lot of bad feeling still went Garrigou’s way, especially from Normandy.

In 1912 the tenth Tour de France saw its first true foreign winner, a Belgian called Odile Defraye. He was sponsored by Alcyon, which was also Garrigou’s sponsor and had signed Paul Duboc for the Tour as well. There were two other Belgians in Alcyon’s 1912 five-man line-up.

A Frenchman, Charles Crupelandt, won the first stage. Crupelandt, incidentally, is the only man from the Roubaix area ever to win Paris–Roubaix. The last stretch of cobblestones in the race, a ceremonial one, is on the Avenue Charles Crupelandt, which was named in his honour. Defraye won the next stage, then took over the race lead after stage three. Octave Lapize and Eugène Christophe of France fought Defraye hard and got closer to him, but Lapize abandoned on stage nine.

Teamwork wasn’t allowed in the early Tours, but collusion between different teams is harder to prove, and reports of the 1912 Tour contain more than a suspicion that the Belgian riders in the race colluded to help their countryman win. If one of Defraye’s rivals attacked, the Belgians would work hard to catch him. Or they would work with Defraye but not with his French rivals. Eventually the Belgian drew 59 points clear of Christophe to win in Paris.

A Belgian victory was a step up in the international reputation of the Tour de France, but it saw the end of a points system to decide the overall classification. A rider could finish an hour in front of the next man on a stage, but still only gain one point in the overall standings, and that wasn’t fair. Defraye was a consistent rider, but not the best in the 1912 Tour in athletic terms. You can’t say for certain, but if the 1912 Tour had been decided on time there’s a strong argument that Defraye wouldn’t have won. Eugène Christophe led the race on time at the start of the final stage, but as he was already 48 points behind Defraye he didn’t follow the Belgian when he moved ahead with a breakaway, and lost his theoretical time lead.

So Desgrange changed the rules. Total time to cover the whole course would decide the 1913 Tour de France, but the change still produced a Belgian winner, when the very popular Eugène Christophe lost tons of time in the Pyrenees, through no fault of his own.

It was the first ever anticlockwise Tour de France, so the Pyrenees were before the Alps. That suited Christophe, because going anticlockwise meant that the key Pyrenean stage, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon, had its big climbs in the second half, and Christophe was an excellent climber. Previously there was plenty of distance between the last climb, Col d’Aubisque, and Bayonne, making it possible for riders to catch an attacking climber on the flat roads between the Aubisque and the finish. Now the Aubisque was the first climb, and it was followed by the brutal sequence of the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde before a short descent to the finish at Bagnères-de-Luchon.

Defraye took the race lead on stage three, with Christophe in second place. As expected, Christophe made an early move on stage six, Bayonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon. Seven riders went with him, but Defraye crashed and ended up so far behind when the Tourmalet was reached that he gave up and dropped out of the race. Christophe led with two Belgians, Philippe Thys and Marcel Buysse, after the Aubisque, which was in a terrible condition following bad weather. Several times they were forced to dismount and push their bikes through ankle-deep mud.

Buysse was quickly dropped on the Tourmalet, where Thys later left Christophe to cross the summit alone. There wasn’t much in it, so Christophe descended as fast as he dared. It must have been terrifying on those old bikes. Mountain descents are so steep that nowadays, riders can reach speeds of 70 to 80 kilometres per hour without trying. Bikes in 1913 were nowhere near as aerodynamic as they are now; neither were their riders and kit. There would have been more friction in a 1913 bike too. But still, they would have descended quickly, and slowing them from any sort of speed with flimsy brakes was no joke. Christophe must have been terrified when 10 kilometres down the east side of the Tourmalet the forks on his bike broke.

He couldn’t swap anything. The only way to continue in the race was to repair the fork. Christophe had learned some blacksmith’s skills when he was younger, but the nearest forge was at the bottom of the climb in the village of Ste Marie-de-Campan. So Christophe picked up his bike and began to jog down the mountain. L’Auto said he ran for 14 kilometres to the village, although that wasn’t held to be anything extraordinary, just typical of the many mishaps that befell riders in early road races. The legend of this stage grew after 1919, when Christophe lost another Tour de France due to a similar incident. And it continued growing because Christophe never did win the Tour de France. He is one of the best riders never to have done so.

Once at the blacksmith’s, Christophe stoked up the forge, took some metal tubing from the smith, and made a new fork blade. It was a difficult job and Christophe needed both hands for the repair, but a forge needs regular blasts of air to keep the fire hot enough to work the metal. Legend has it that Christophe asked the boy who worked in the forge to operate the bellows for him, and doing so was noted by the officials who had stopped to see that he did the repair himself, as the Tour de France rules said he must.

With the repair done, Christophe was ready to complete the stage, but he knew he’d broken race rules by having the blacksmith’s lad help him. He knew the officials who’d watched could penalise him. The story goes that when one of them said he was going out to the village to get some food because he was starving, Christophe growled, ‘Stay there and eat coal. While you are watching me I am your prisoner and you are my jailer.’

Work in the forge took Christophe three hours, after which he set off to climb the Aspin and the Peyresourde, eventually arriving in Luchon 3 hours and 50 minutes behind the stage winner, Philippe Thys. He’d taken nearly 18 hours to complete the 326 kilometres. There’s a plaque commemorating Christophe’s epic day in the village centre of Ste Marie-de-Campin today.

Thys took over the race lead, lost it next day to Marcel Buysse, but took it back after Buysse crashed and had to run to a village to make repairs of his own on stage nine. Then Thys began to pull ahead with consistent rather than flashy riding through the Alps, and won his first Tour de France.

Thys won again the following year in a race that was contested under the gathering threat of the First World War. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on the day the Tour started, and when the race ended on 26 July, Europe was eight days from war. On 3 August the German army invaded Belgium and many of the men who had raced in the Tour were drafted into their national armies. Not all of them survived.

5

Growing the Roots of Tradition

By the second decade of the twentieth century cycling had two of its three Grand Tours, and four of the single-day races known as the monuments. Road racing was taking root. It would have to wait until 1935 for the third Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, but the fifth monument was born in 1913.

The Tour of Flanders, or De Ronde van Vlaanderen in Flemish, was another product of a newspaper trying to establish itself, but with some extra inspiration. The race had, and still has, a lot to do with Flemish regional identity.

Flemish cycling, like Flanders itself, suffered during the early part of the twentieth century. While a few road races had been held in the region towards the end of the previous century, interest was mainly focused on the track. But now, even the velodromes were closing.

There weren’t many Belgian road racing teams, so the best Flemish road racers, like Cyril Van Hauwaert, had to ride for foreign teams to make a reasonable living. Also, there was a growing feeling in Flanders that it was Belgium’s underdog; that the region of Flanders had got the bad end of the deal ever since Belgium was formed in 1830.

Language was a big source of discontent. People from Flanders speak a variation of Dutch we call Flemish but they call Vlaams-Nederlands. It’s an old language with a history and a literature of its own, but in early twentieth-century Flanders, French was the language of officialdom, used for legal documents. It was taught in schools and spoken in the up-market shops of Flanders. French was also used by army officers to give orders, which caused big problems and even deaths during the First World War, so there was even greater discontent in Flanders after it.

But one very good thing happened in 1912, and it has a direct link with why excellence in cycling, and road racing in particular, is part of Flemish heritage and identity today. As we have seen, a Belgian, Odile Defraye, won the 1912 Tour de France, the first truly foreign winner. Defraye was born in Rumbeke, in West Flanders, so he was Flemish to his very core.

Defraye’s victory gave cycling in Flanders a much- needed boost. A boost noted by two directors of the press group Société Belge d’Imprimerie. They were August De Maeght and Leon Van Den Haute, both of them Flemish, and they decided it might be a good time to launch a new Flemish sports newspaper.

It was called Sportwereld, and the first edition was published on 12 September 1912, a few days before the Championship of Flanders, which is one of the oldest road races in the region. It dates back to 1908 and is still held every September in the West Flanders town of Koolskamp. Like Count De Dion before them, De Maeght and Van den Haute wanted an enthusiastic young cyclist to write about the sport for their new publication. They found him in Karel Van Wijnendaele.

Van Wijnendaele was fiercely Flemish, so fierce that when he began writing he changed his Latin-sounding Christian names, Carolus and Ludovicius, to Karel, the Flemish version of Carolus. He also dumped his family name Steyaert in favour of Wijnendaele, the old Flemish spelling of his village, Wijnendaele. Many family names in Flanders were derived from the places people came from. Now nobody could be mistaken that Karel Van Wijnendaele was Karel from the small village in West Flanders called Wijnendaele.

Van Wijnendaele was one of fifteen children. He left school at 14, worked for a baker and then went into service, employed by rich French-speaking families in Brussels and Ostend. He was treated very badly there, and the experience stuck with him for life. But instead of putting up with it, which was what most young Flemish people did in those days, Van Wijnendaele returned home and decided to try his luck as a professional cyclist.

He did okay, he won some money, although nothing big, but while he raced Van Wijnendaele developed a profound understanding of the sport. He really understood cycling, and he understood what it took to make a good bike racer. Years later he wrote, ‘If you grow up with no frills and you know what hunger is, you grow up hard enough to withstand bike racing.’

Van Wijnendaele didn’t have much schooling, but he was intelligent. He could read, so he could find out what he needed to know, and more importantly he could write. He started supplementing his bike-racing income by reporting on races in his region for a local newspaper in Izegem, then became the West Flanders correspondent for a sports newspaper in Antwerp.

By January 1913 Van Wijnendaele was the editor of Sportwereld, and he was working hard with Leon van den Haute at organising the first ever Tour of Flanders. The race would be run ‘only on Flemish soil, and visiting all the Flemish cities’, Van Wijnendaele wrote when he introduced the idea to Sportwereld’s readers. He wanted a Tour of the ‘true’ Flanders, the land at the core of the old County of Flanders, which once extended north into Holland and south into France, but not as far east as Antwerp or Brussels. The core of the County of Flanders is where East and West Flanders are today.

The first Tour of Flanders was held on 25 May 1913. It started in the Korenmarkt (corn market) square in Ghent at 6 a.m. and covered 330 kilometres of cobbled roads, with a few cinder paths thrown in. The course went northeast to Sint Niklaas, then south to Aalst, then to Oudenaarde, then west to Kortrijk, then Veurne where it met the sand dunes of the North Sea coast. There the riders turned right and went along the coast road to Ostend, where they turned inland and headed to the finish in Mariakerke, a separate town in those days but now a suburb of Ghent.

Five riders came to the finish together, where they completed four laps of a big wooden outdoor track. Paul Deman, a West Flandrian, won the sprint ahead of a Frenchman, Joseph Van Daele. Flemish riders occupied the next seven places, and even Van Daele was Flemish in a sense. He was born in Watterlos, which is almost on the Belgian border and now part of the Lille conurbation, but was once a town in the County of Flanders.

The race was a success for Deman, for Sportwereld and Van Wijnendaele, and for Flemish cycling. The field grew from 37 to 47 riders in 1914, but it was still a struggle to put such a big race on. Sportwereld wasn’t yet two years old, and starting any new business eats cash even without the distraction and demands of putting on a big new bike race covering lots of country. An additional problem was the major French teams forbidding their Belgian riders from taking part.

They did so again in 1914, and most of the top Belgians obeyed their teams and stayed away from the Tour of Flanders, but one Flemish rider took no notice of his team. He was Marcel Buysse, Flemish through and through and a supporter of the growing Flemish national movement. He defied his French team, Alcyon, and not only took part but became the second winner of the Tour of Flanders. Buysse never raced for a French team again. When he resumed racing after the First World War, he rode for Bianchi-Pirelli for three years, then did the next four years for his own team, M. Buysse Cycles-Colonial.