The Grand Tour
Douglas Johnson
LE TOUR: A HISTORY OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Simon & Schuster, £16.99, pp. 378, ISBN 0743231104 Most French newspapers have a section entitled 'Culture'. A separate section appears under the heading 'Sports'. But they all make the same mistake. When they feature articles about the greatest of all bicycle races, the Tour de France, they always put it in the sports section. But the Tour de France is part of French culture,
To follow the Tour is to be immersed in France. Whether one is bumping along the cobbled streets of a small town, relaxing in a gentle ride amongst fields and forests, breathing the sea air of Brittany, plunging into the Massif Central, struggling amongst the mountains of Provence, admiring the Mediterranean sky or dreaming of the distant Champs-Elysées, always this is a celebration. It echoes royal 'progresses' across France; it recalls the Tour de France par Deux Enfants in which two boys make their way round the haagone and which the schoolchildren of the Third Republic were required to read; in 1906 the Tour went into the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been annexed by the Germans after the war of 1870, and for the first time there appeared posters and manifestos that were written in French only; in 1947 the race echoed the war that had ended two years before, notably stopping at Saint-Brieuc and at Caen; in 1989 the race concluded with the 27 kilometres that separates Versailles from Paris, thereby celebrating the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
The first Tour de France took place in 1903. This year's race will mark its 100th anniversary. Geoffrey Wheatcroft has therefore written its history. But being well aware of the national and cultural contexts of the subject, he has not written an account of the 89 runnings of the race (although in the concluding 50 pages of his book he has published 'some Tour facts', including details of the course, the winners and the name of the last-placed who is known as the tanterne rouge'). He has filled his pages with many references to English sport, unexpected but appropriate quotations from such people as P. G. Wodehouse and A. J. P. Taylor, and chapters that are devoted to particular regions, such as Picardy, Brittany and Normandy. The whole makes a fascinating book. Cycle racing was France's special contribution to world sport, the first road race being Paris to Rouen in 1869. The Tour de France was invented when the antiDreyfusard newspaper ['Auto sought to scoop its rivals in 1903 with a venture that would bring it publicity and support (and some historians have commented that anything connected to the Dreyfus Affair is bound to persist). Those taking part were offered large sums of money, so there was no shortage of competitors. At the time the public became all the more attached to the race as they themselves practised cycling. By 1914 there were some three and a half million bicycles in France. Wheatcroft tells us that in the second half of the century that the Tour has been running the winner has often gone on to win a succession of victories. Thus Louison Bobet won the hat-trick of consecutive victories from 1953, Jacques Anquetil won four from 1961 (having already won that of 1957). the Belgian Eddie Nlerckx won four from 1969 and a fifth in 1979, and these records were subsequently to be matched by Bernard Hinault and the Spaniard Miguel Indurain. In 2002 the American Lance Armstrong won his fourth successive victory and will be competing this July. It can be argued that this consistency shown by certain postwar champions, revealing a greater specialisation, removes one of the attractions of the Tour, i.e. the difficulty of picking the winner. Thus, when he is writing about the 1933 race, Wheatcroft says that while it was likely that a French rider would win, it was not preordained which of the team it would be. He describes how the leadership (represented by the yellow jersey) passed from rider to rider, and how the race was won by Speicher, who had only been admitted to the team as a substitute and who had profited from new technology, as he was riding a bike that had for the first time a rear brake that enabled him to speed downhill.
But even in the period when the winner seemed to be preordained there could be surprises. In 1975 Merckx, who had won five Tours and who had been the subject of a film praising his exceptional powers, was expected to win yet again. But when he was in the lead he was punched in the kidneys by a spectator; the next day he was involved in a bad collision. His strength seemed to have vanished. But he refused to abandon the race and eventually came second to Bernard Thevenet.
Dark clouds hang over the Tour; Wheatcroft writes about the scandals of drug-taking, and since he has written his book Belgian scientists have warned that cycle riding can have the most unfortunate physical effects. But he believes that those who have ridden in the past and those who ride in the present are heroes. The Tour, he says, is one of France's greatest gifts to the world. Although I must protest that Wheatcroft has described the only rider whom I have known, Edouard Fachleitner from Manosque, who came second in 1947, as being from Luxembourg, I agree with him. Vive le Tour!
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