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VINTAGE

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Copyright © Peter Cossins, 2017

Cover: newspaper article and photograph showing the first Tour de France, 1903 © Presse Sports/Offside

Peter Cossins has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Yellow Jersey Press in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Descriptions of Marseille–Paris and each of the six stages of the 1903 Tour de France are based on details, comments and quotes reported in contemporary newspapers and magazines.

INTRODUCTION

VILLENEUVE–SAINT-GEORGES, 1 JULY 1903

The keen and the curious begin to congregate from midday. By one o’clock, when the riders start to emerge from the roadside barn that has been set aside as their dressing room, allowing them some privacy as they change and have a final massage, the heat is oppressive, almost unbearable. There’s hardly a breath of wind. Dust billowing up from the construction work on the Paris–Corbeil railway line hangs in the still air.

The race organisers had been praying for a good crowd, certainly more than the few hundred who are milling about in and around the Auberge du Réveil-Matin. That’s more than enough to keep the proprietor, Monsieur Renard, and his staff far busier than they would normally be on a Wednesday lunchtime, but it hardly bodes well for the inaugural Tour de France. Henri Desgrange and his editorial team have been building the new race up for weeks in the pages of L’Auto, and necessarily so. If it doesn’t succeed, there won’t be a second, and L’Auto won’t survive for much longer either.

The race officials have set up the control point for the start inside the cafe. Riders must register here over the next 90 minutes in order to compete. The first to sign in is 20-year-old Parisian Henri Ellinamour, who is handed a green armband bearing the number 64 by official starter Alphonse Steinès. He is closely followed by another rider from the capital, Léon Pernette, who walks away with his armband and square of red cloth with the number 44, which he secures to the top tube and seat tube of his bike with rubber straps.

As more riders arrive, the smell of embrocation becomes impossible to ignore. After signing in, they carry out their final preparations for the start, pressing spare parts into the square leather bags hanging from their handlebars, wrapping replacement tubes and tyres around their shoulders, always keeping their machines within eyesight to prevent sabotage, which is not unknown. This done, most flop down on their backs to rest. Two gendarmes survey them from their horses. They are almost redundant as the spectators who have been tempted out by ‘the greatest race the world has ever seen’ are hardly in a frenzy as they take shelter from the sun in the shade offered by the twin line of poplars lining the Avenue de Paris as it heads away from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges towards Montgeron.

Many of those gathered beneath the trees are amateur cyclists who have turned up on their bikes with the intention of following the professionals for as long as possible. Among them is a young man who has been making a name for himself in amateur races around Paris. Eugène Christophe is currently an apprentice locksmith on the Rue Chaton, but will go on to have a very illustrious future on the bike and will eventually be remembered for repairing his forks in a forge at the foot of the Col du Tourmalet in the 1913 Tour and, in 1919, for being the first rider ever to wear the race’s yellow jersey.

In his diary later that evening, Christophe will write dismissively: ‘The greatest bike race the world has ever seen? It was more like a fourth-category race. There was hardly anyone there. Where were all the cars? It looked more like the start of an amateur race to me. These guys may be among the biggest names we know but they looked like riders who had won their first inter-club race …’

CHAPTER 1

‘THE GREATEST CYCLING RACE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD’

A meeting between two friends in a cell at the Prison de la Santé in Paris’s 14th arrondissement provided the surprising impetus for the foundation of the Tour de France. It took place in June 1899, a few days after the city witnessed a series of events that had almost cost the nation’s president his life, had threatened the survival of the Third Republic, and provoked headlines across the world.

The man brought up from one of La Santé’s 500 cells was a most unlikely prisoner. Jules Félix Philippe Albert de Dion de Wandonne was better known as Count de Dion, a French noble and co-founder in 1883 of the De Dion-Bouton automobile company that had become the world’s biggest manufacturer by the end of the nineteenth century, producing the sum total of 400 cars a year. A tall, solidly built and very imposing figure with a thick moustache waxed to perfect horizontal tips, de Dion was serving a 15-day sentence for attempting to assault the president of the French Republic, Émile Loubet, during a demonstration at the Auteuil racecourse in Paris.

The count’s visitor was journalist Pierre Giffard, a columnist on the best-selling Le Petit Journal newspaper and editor of Le Vélo, the leading sports title of the era. Giffard, who favoured an upward tweak on his equally luxuriant moustache, wanted to explain why he had written an opinion piece condemning de Dion’s behaviour for Le Petit Journal and subsequently rerun it within the green-coloured pages of his own paper.

Brought together by their love of automobiles, these two prominent men were very vocal proponents of radically opposed camps on the main political issue of the moment, the Dreyfus Affair. This stemmed from the conviction in 1894 of French artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus on a charge of treason after military secrets had been passed to the German embassy in Paris. Although evidence of the Jewish officer’s innocence subsequently came to light, high-ranking officers suppressed it, leading to widespread accusations of anti-Semitism, as well as demands for a retrial and Dreyfus’s release.

The accession of Dreyfusard Loubet to the presidency in February 1899 following the death of Félix Faure proved the turning point in the affair. The new president instigated a review of the case, which led to Dreyfus’s release from the notorious Devil’s Island penal colony after four years of hard labour. But his actions also infuriated de Dion and the ardent nationalists in the self-styled League of Patriots who believed that the army must be backed in every eventuality and that France was under threat from people they regarded as subversives. Loubet’s appearance at the Auteuil racecourse provided them with a chance to voice their dismay.

Initially vocal, the protest quickly took on a more threatening edge. The Associated Press described how Baron Christiani ‘raised his cane to strike the president with all his might. The blow was averted by General Balloud, and the cane, descending on M. Loubet’s hat, crushed it down, forcing it over his face like a candle extinguisher.’

After half a dozen gendarmes had rescued Christiani from a severe roughing up at the fists of irate Loubet supporters ‘with blood spurting from his nose’, de Dion barrelled in, swinging his cane, its jewel-encrusted end breaking off after making contact with another officer’s head. ‘He was promptly arrested, but his arrest was an excuse to his friends to cry, “Resign”, “Down with traitors, Jews and Dreyfusards”,’ AP reported, adding that Loubet was ‘pale and greatly cut up, but firm’, and that several ladies in his party had fainted.

De Dion was happy to receive his friend in La Santé even though their political differences had been so clearly underlined. ‘He was a journalist of talent with whom I was on very good terms, because we were both fervent defenders of the automobile’, he said of Giffard. ‘During his visit he explained his opinion to me and told me that when it came to automobiles he would remain my friend and ally, but that in politics I would find in him a committed rival.’

Freed from La Santé, de Dion soon demonstrated that he shared Giffard’s double-edged approach to their friendship. In March 1900, Giffard stood for election for the parliamentary seat of Yvetot and was tipped for a clear win. Yet in the run-up to the vote, Count de Dion had copies of Giffard’s La Fin du Cheval – The End of the Horse – distributed throughout the constituency. In it, Giffard had written about his discovery of the bicycle, how it had changed his life for the better and how, crucially in this instance, it would replace the horse in rural areas. This message did not sit well in an agricultural constituency set in the heart of rural Normandy. ‘It had a magical effect and, on the day of the vote, a certain majority was transformed into a resounding defeat,’ de Dion crowed gleefully.

But the defeated man had his revenge. ‘Giffard couldn’t forgive me and decided he would no longer mention my name in his paper and banned absolutely any kind of publicity for the De Dion-Bouton brand, which bore the brunt of the grudge that he felt towards me,’ Count de Dion said. ‘Due to the fact that Le Vélo had a large readership, the decision was bound to have a severe impact on the De Dion-Bouton company. It was as a result of this concern that I decided to establish a newspaper to rival Le Vélo.’

That newspaper was L’Auto-Vélo, and this account fits the standard narrative of its founding, which stresses the political conflict arising from the furore over Dreyfus and the anti-Semitism so evident in that affair. However, as de Dion suggested, while political issues were key to the founding of L’Auto-Vélo, and, in turn, the Tour de France, commercial factors were also highly significant, arguably even more so.

In that period before the mass production of motor vehicles, manufacturers like De Dion-Bouton depended absolutely on sales to those with the money and time to indulge what was still a very exclusive and expensive passion for motoring. One of the best ways to reach out to them, although its title may suggest otherwise, was through Le Vélo’s pages. Branded as ‘the daily journal for all sports’, it had, since its foundation in 1892, focused heavily on motorsport and the latest developments in vehicle production, building up a circulation of 80,000. De Dion needed to reach these readers, and he wasn’t the only one.

Several other key players in the nascent automobile industry, notably Adolphe Clément, Louis Renault and Édouard and André Michelin, felt that Le Vélo’s coverage was becoming skewed towards the rival automobile company headed by Alexandre Darracq, who had started out producing bicycles under the Gladiator name in the early 1890s. Darracq both financed Le Vélo and spent considerable amounts promoting his vehicles in its pages to its wealthy readers. Consequently, as Darracq’s share of the burgeoning car market blossomed, it was inevitable that his rivals would establish a title through which they could talk up their own vehicles.

They sought out a man they felt could turn a new title into Le Vélo’s principal rival, and didn’t have to look far to find him. Henri Desgrange had already worked in Clément’s publicity department. He had subsequently established a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking businessman in France’s thriving cycling industry.

One of twin boys born in 1865 to wood company owner and architect Jacques Desgrange and Marie Hortense Beaurens, Desgrange was working as a notary’s clerk in Paris when he witnessed cycle racing for the first time. In 1891, he was among the crowd that watched the finale of the first edition of Bordeaux–Paris, won by Englishman George Pilkington Mills. Inspired by the intrepidness of the riders who had covered the 600 kilometres in little more than 24 hours, Desgrange bought a bike and started training on the roads between Versailles and Paris. ‘I couldn’t go to Versailles without thinking that Mills, the giant of Bordeaux–Paris, had passed the same way as me,’ he wrote.

By 1893, Desgrange was well known on the Paris cycling scene. A regular contributor to a number of cycling periodicals, he set the first UCI-recognised mark for the World Hour Record that same year, completing 35.325km on the Buffalo track, so called because it was located at the place where William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody’s Western show had set up camp when it had performed in Paris.

Sitting upright on a bike that weighed between 12–13kg and was fitted with spongey tyres that were a mighty 45mm wide and not fully inflated, Desgrange’s effort looks rather feeble when compared to the 54.526km achieved by Sir Bradley Wiggins at the London Olympic Velodrome in June 2015. But it was groundbreaking at the time as the Frenchman was an amateur and consequently prohibited from riding with pace-makers, as professional racers almost always did in that era.

Desgrange went on to set a number of other distance records on the track over the next two seasons, but gained a greater reputation as a coach and race organiser. In 1894, he wrote a training guide, La Tête et Les Jambes (The Head and the Legs), directing copious and often very severe advice towards his 15-year-old self. He also served as director of the riders’ union, was a member of the French cycling federation’s (UVF) sporting commission and had overseen the running of two Paris velodromes, a third in Bordeaux and advised on the construction of a fourth in Madrid. He was also one of the main contributors to the magazine Le Véloce Sport de Bicyclette, wrote occasionally for Giffard’s Le Vélo and had produced a cycling-related novel.

In 1897, with velodromes springing up all over France as entrepreneurs realised the financial possibilities of providing a programme of races to paying audiences that were often many thousands strong, Desgrange and business partner Victor Goddet financed and directed the construction of the Parc des Princes track, a groundbreaking venue thanks to its 666.66-metre ring of cement that was twice as long as most tracks. Dismissed by Le Vélo as too big and too far from the centre of Paris, the Parc was a great success, attracting huge crowds to watch the best riders of the era. Very much a man of the belle époque, that period between the Franco–Prussian War and the Great War which was characterised by peace and optimism that boosted economic, technological and cultural innovation, particularly among the moneyed classes, Desgrange sensed opportunities at every turn in cycling and sought them out.

On a clear April morning in 1900, Desgrange and Goddet made their way to Count de Dion’s offices on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, often described as ‘L’Avenue du Cycle’ because of the number of bike shops along the grand tree-lined spoke that runs down from the hub of Étoile with the Arc de Triomphe at its centre. De Dion presented them with a simple proposal: would they consider establishing and managing a title to rival Le Vélo? Desgrange was tempted but uncertain. While keen to avenge that paper’s dismissal of the Parc des Princes, which had been compounded by Giffard’s refusal to take ads promoting the Parc’s events, he knew that accepting the offer could imperil their track’s future. Desgrange and Goddet slept on the proposition. The next morning, they accepted it.

The new associates then turned to deciding a name for the new title, settling on L’Auto-Vélo (Cars and Bikes). It was the ideal choice given the commercial interests of the new title’s backers, but it would come at a cost. Initially, this was relatively insignificant. During his forensic research for the biography Desgrange Intime, French writer Jacques Lablaine discovered that Count de Dion had spent 1,000 francs acquiring the weekly satirical and illustrated magazine L’Auto-Vélo, which had been established in 1897, but subsequently published only intermittently. His intention was clear. He wanted his new title to trade on the name of Giffard’s well-established paper. But would the law allow this?

The bullish and arrogant de Dion assumed so, as no one had challenged the use of the name L’Auto-Vélo during its three years of existence. In judicial theory, this meant that no one now could. In this assumption, though, Count de Dion and L’Auto-Vélo’s other backers were mistaken.fn1

Thirty-nine shareholders bought the 400 shares in the relaunched version of L’Auto-Vélo, including aristocrats such as Baronet Sir David Salomons, whose father had founded what is now Natwest bank, and prominent industrialists like Renault, the Michelin brothers, Clément and, of course, Count de Dion, who purchased 192. It was an impressively influential line-up, but if de Dion had any thoughts of using the new title’s pages to push any kind of extra-sporting agenda – and it is believed that he wanted to include a political pamphlet within the first issue – Desgrange crushed these immediately. In the opening column on the first page of the inaugural edition of 16 October 1900, the penultimate paragraph stated, ‘there will never be, in L’Auto-Vélo, any question of politics … you can count on L’Auto-Vélo never talking about this with you.’ Desgrange remained as good as his word until the imminent outbreak of the Great War induced an anti-German tirade in 1914.

His more immediate concern was attracting readers to the new title. One of his first moves was to exploit a split between Hippolyte-Auguste Marinoni, the editor of Le Petit Journal, and Pierre Giffard to take over control of the second edition of the decennial race, Paris–Brest–Paris, which had been established by Le Petit Journal at Giffard’s instigation in 1891. The first edition had caused a sensation, turning winner Charles Terront into France’s first sporting star. The second running in 1901 proved no less impressive, pitching Lucien Lesna, Terront’s successor as the nation’s cycling icon and winner of Paris–Roubaix just a few weeks earlier, against Maurice Garin, already a two-time winner of that same event, which had quickly become one of the racing season’s most prized titles.

Lesna reached the halfway point of the 1,200-kilometre race with a two-hour lead on his rivals. At Rennes, with the course three-quarters completed, Lesna paused for what he hoped would be a revitalising bath and meal. However, it had the reverse effect. Sapped by fatigue and a strong headwind, he fell victim to la fringale, that moment that almost every cyclist has experienced when the body’s resources are all but exhausted and legs don’t respond to the mind’s urging to continue. With Paris almost in view, Garin overhauled the favourite, who failed to finish as the younger man soloed to glory.

Sales of L’Auto-Vélo soared for several days leading up to, during and just beyond Paris–Brest–Paris, but quickly tailed off to 30,000 a day once again, which was less than half of Le Vélo’s total. This presented Desgrange and his backers with a dilemma that remains to a degree in the modern era: how could they make events that were free-to-view financially viable? Their initial answer was to establish another race in the same ridiculously optimistic scale as Paris–Brest–Paris.

Without Marseille–Paris there might never have been a Tour de France. Run in May 1902, it was the first road event both invented and organised by Desgrange, and proved a huge popular success. Crucially, though, it planted the idea for an even grander event in the mind of L’Auto-Vélo’s cycling correspondent, Géo Lefèvre.

One of several editorial staff Desgrange had poached from Le Vélo, Lefèvre had first-hand experience of the extent of the antipathy between his new and his former boss. After receiving a job offer from Desgrange, he went to inform Giffard he was leaving. ‘I felt I had to let my boss, the irascible Pierre Giffard, know about this offer I’d had from a rival, but as soon as I mentioned Desgrange’s name Giffard wouldn’t listen to me for a second longer and literally threw me out on to the pavement of Rue Meyerbeer where Vélo had its offices,’ he recalled.

Desgrange, Lefèvre discovered, was ‘a man as hard as my first boss’, but the pair quickly established a tight bond. ‘He was a hard man but in the good sense of the word, that’s to say hard at work, both on himself and on others. Beneath his very tough exterior, he was a lovely chap, who, when you got to know him, had a good sense of humour and, in business, was liable to show emotion … but after he’d won the battle,’ Lefèvre explained of his journalistic mentor.

Confident Marseille–Paris would replicate the sporting and financial success that L’Auto-Vélo had enjoyed the previous year with Paris–Brest–Paris, the paper announced a 6,000-franc prize for the winner, clearly intent on tempting the sport’s leading performers to participate and in doing so turn their backs on Giffard’s Bordeaux–Paris, which was scheduled to take place just two weeks later. This objective was achieved when Lesna and Garin registered to compete, setting up the delicious prospect of a revenge match between the major protagonists in Paris–Brest–Paris.

Marseille–Paris promised to create more of a stir than the established event, and not only because the route linked two of France’s three biggest cities via the third, Lyon. Like many other parts of southern France, Marseille rarely featured as a venue for major sporting events. As a result, the local press and population greeted the new race with considerable fervour. In his evocative book on the event, L’incroyable épopée de Marseille–Paris 1902, Didier Rapaud reveals that this enthusiasm was much needed as sales of L’Auto-Vélo had dropped to between 18,000–22,000 copies a day by May 1902, a quarter of Le Vélo’s total. In order to reverse this decline, Desgrange and Goddet decided to print six special issues in addition to their daily, hoping that these would add tens of thousands of readers.

Less importantly for L’Auto-Vélo’s future, but of much greater significance for the sport’s, Desgrange and his organising team also opted to open the race up to touristes-routiers riders as well as the headlining coureurs de vitesse (speed racers) such as Lesna and Garin. The latter always competed with entraîneurs, usually very gifted racers in their own right who worked in rotation as pace-makers for the star man with the backing of a major manufacturer or supplier.

Unable to call on support of this kind, the touristes-routiers had little hope of competing for the biggest prizes or even demonstrating their own potential as racers. Consequently, the introduction of a separate category for these solo performers, which included a 1,000-franc prize for the first touriste-routier to finish – the equivalent of almost six months’ salary for the average working man in France – provided them with unprecedented motivation.

As riders began to sign in for the start in Marseille, news emerged that Garin would not be starting as a consequence of a chest infection picked up while undertaking a reconnaissance of the race route. This left pre-race favourite Lesna without a serious rival for the title and imperilled L’Auto-Vélo’s sales objectives. Desgrange, though, responded quickly, adjusting his paper’s editorial emphasis from the duel between two huge rivals to a focus on the sheer scale of the test that Lesna and the other participants were up against. Although, at 938 kilometres, Marseille–Paris was almost 300 kilometres shorter than Paris–Brest–Paris, its hillier route, rougher roads and the likelihood that the field would be racing for the opening quarter of the race into the teeth of a strongly gusting mistral made it an extremely daunting prospect for those set to take part.

‘It is demonstrably clear that battles such as these are epic and the men involved in them are heroes just like those who were once acclaimed and crowned with laurels in Greece,’ wrote Lefèvre, who was charged with directing and covering the new race while Desgrange remained in Paris to oversee production of the organising paper’s extra editions. While undoubtedly over the top, Lefèvre’s words appear less so given what lay in store for the five dozen or so racers who lined up in Marseille …

AVENUE DE LA CANEBIÈRE, MARSEILLE, 17 MAY 1902

Opened just a few months before and bearing the name of its proprietor, the Café Riche on the corner of Cours Belsunce and the majestic La Canebière is the extremely sumptuous setting for the control point at the start. Open between nine on that Saturday evening and one on the Sunday morning, this temple of luxury that has quickly become a favourite haunt of Marseille’s bourgeoisie, who gather there to talk business and gossip over a coffee, lemonade or absinthe, is already packed when Italy’s Giuseppe Ghezzi, a touriste-routier, arrives and becomes the first rider to sign in.

Soon after, Lucien Lesna makes an unexpectedly early appearance, adds his signature to Georges Abran’s start sheet, then just as quickly disappears, returning to his hotel to get a couple of hours’ sleep prior to the start in the early hours. No sooner has the Swiss-born, French naturalised rider departed than rumours of the non-participation of his main rival, Maurice Garin, are confirmed by the organisers. The buzz of excitement within the Café Riche turns to clamour. ‘Can it be true? Will there be no rematch between Lesna and Garin? Can anything beyond bad luck prevent Lesna winning in Paris?’

It’s a blow to the new race, and a heavy one, but as quickly as it comes it is forgotten. The Marseillais have waited too long to witness such a momentous sporting event to allow the absence of one rider to diminish their enthusiasm, even if he is one of the favourites. Captivated by what Midi Sportif has described as ‘this gigantic exploit’ in which the participants will ‘defy death a hundred times’, excited spectators converge on their city’s most renowned thoroughfare, allaying the organisers’ fears that Garin’s absence might prove fatal to their race’s success.

Riders continue to appear, each of them trailed by a throng of fans. By 11 o’clock, as the bands of the 159th infantry regiment and the 9th Hussars offer a totally unexpected musical interlude, the Canebière is jam-packed. It is nothing less than a Bastille Day in May, the carnival atmosphere completed by a parade of Marseille’s 17 cycling clubs.

At one in the morning, Abran calls together the 58 riders who have signed in from the 104 who had registered and, with a wave, signals for them to proceed at a slow pace through Marseille’s heaving streets towards the suburb of Saint-Antoine, where the official start will take place.

At three precisely, Abran first raises and then drops his arm, and Lesna and the other coureurs de vitesse flee into the darkness with their pace-makers, the setting moon providing illumination for less than an hour of their trek northwards. Five minutes later, the touristes-routiers, spare tubes wrapped around their shoulders, some equipped with the latest innovation for a cyclist wanting to maintain his speed in the form of a rubber tube that can be fitted to allow urination on the move, follow into the blackness.

Barely eight kilometres have passed when a crash almost ends Lesna’s hopes. Already leading the field with his crack team of four pace-makers, the race favourite hears warning cries from the riders he’s slipstreaming, but can’t see or avoid a heap of rocks piled up at the roadside to be used on works for the Marseille to Aix-en-Provence tram line. Despite somersaulting two metres through the air, he is fortunate to escape with minor cuts and grazes and is quickly under way again, having abandoned his broken bike and jumped on one offered by one of his pace-makers. The delay enables Jean Fischer to take the lead.

Frenchman Fischer is first through the flying control point at Aix-en-Provence, shouting his name at the officials as he powers by. Lesna is next through the control, a minute later. Another minute passes before Belgium’s René Kuhling and Italy’s Rodolfo Muller fly by, followed soon after by Constant Huret and another Belgian, Marcel Kerff, who is not aware that his brother Charles has sustained fatal injuries in a crash.

Having, like Lesna, hit a pile of rocks at the roadside, the younger of the brothers has not been anywhere near as fortunate as the race favourite. Rather than sailing over the unlit obstacle, he has ploughed straight into it, the impact causing the metal water bottle attached to his chest to stave in his ribs and breastbone.

Picked up by a Monsieur Ricard, an Algerian motorist who happens to be passing the scene of the incident, the stricken Belgian is transported to the hospital in Aix. ‘He had barely passed through the door of this establishment when a weak breath came from Kerff’s lips. It was his last breath, the giant of the road had just passed away,’ reports Le Midi Sportif, while his brother races on towards Paris completely unaware of his sibling’s fate.

Fischer’s spell in the lead is short-lived, although he doesn’t immediately realise it. The darkness is so complete when Lesna and his line of pace-makers slip by a few kilometres north of Aix that his rival is unaware that he has been overtaken. With 900 kilometres remaining, Lesna will spend every one of them with just his entraîneurs for company.

When Lesna leaves Valence chomping on a chicken thigh and with more a quarter of the route covered, his lead over Fischer has stretched to 40 minutes. Le Vélo correspondent Robert Coquelle, who has ridden with Lesna’s little band for a few kilometres, pauses to send a telegraph to his office in Paris. ‘As I sat down to dine, it struck me he’d just ridden Paris–Roubaix; Bordeaux–Paris now lay ahead,’ he writes.

At Dijon, 300 kilometres later, Lesna’s advantage has stretched to almost two hours. Here, the weather suddenly and unexpectedly worsens, an occasional drop of rain turning into a freezing deluge that transforms the surface of the earthen country roads into sludgy gloop that has the riders skating around, barely able to gain any traction. Fischer is among many who succumb in the incessant downpour, a crash leaving him with injuries that force him to abandon and provide Lesna with a three-hour lead on the second-placed rider, the blond and very suave Italian Rodolfo Muller.

Muddied and sodden, Lesna’s speed drops from 30km/h to less than 20. ‘At each control point I changed my jersey, my culottes, my stockings … I was no longer wearing anything that belonged to me. I ended up buying two pairs of gloves, four or five pairs of stockings, socks to put over my gloves. I got through several shirts, cut down long trousers to make culottes … I continued on, feeling the copies of L’Auto-Vélo that I’d put down the front of my shirt being transformed bit by bit into a liquid paste,’ he will tell L’Auto-Vélo, unwittingly revealing that using a copy of the organising paper to keep the cold off your chest is already a custom among riders.

As the rain continues to teem down, Lesna’s competitive spirit is close to breaking. The only thing keeping him going is the encouragement he is receiving from his back-up team and the support he is getting from fans at the roadside and accompanying him on bikes. In the final few dozen kilometres to the finish in Paris at Ville d’Avray, the road is lined almost continually with fans who, despite the driving rain, have come out to see this incredible athlete.

Between two and three thousand cyclists are following him as members of the Garde Républicaine open a passage for him through a huge throng of spectators at the finish. Victory secured, he continues on to the Parc des Princes to complete two laps of honour in front of several thousand more ecstatic fans.

Lesna has completed what he describes as by far the toughest race he has ever tackled in a little under 39 hours, with Muller a full seven hours behind him in second. Third home is touriste-routier victor Gustave Pasquier, having covered the course unassisted in 48 hours and 35 minutes. Rather fittingly, the first rider to sign in at Café Riche is the 32nd and last man home, Italian Giuseppe Ghezzi, reaching Paris 87 hours after departing Marseille.

It would be easy to dismiss Géo Lefèvre’s reports of thousands of spectators cramming the roadsides and waving handkerchiefs from upper storey windows as hyperbole from the man who had effectively run the event, were it not for the evidence of Marseille–Paris hysteria provided by L’Auto-Vélo’s sales. On 15 May, three days before the race started, it sold 115,200 copies, that figure climbing rapidly over successive days to reach 310,429 copies on 20 May, the issue reporting on Lesna’s victory. In all, L’Auto-Vélo sold 1,462,279 copies over the week, plus another 700,000 of its six special issues, giving a total sale of 2,117,711 for a paper that would usually sell around 150,000 over that same period. The event also generated substantial revenue for the organising newspaper in the form of ‘success’ ads paid for by jubilant manufacturers.

Bearing in mind these figures and the huge enthusiasm that Marseille–Paris had generated on almost every part of its 938-kilometre route, the oft-cited depiction of Géo Lefèvre coming up with the idea for a Tour de France completely out of the blue and then tentatively suggesting his scheme to Henri Desgrange over a business lunch is largely fiction. In the wake of Paris–Brest–Paris and particularly Marseille–Paris, both men and, undoubtedly, L’Auto-Vélo finance director Victor Goddet, would have been completely aware of the impact high-profile road races could have on issue sales and revenue generation. What they lacked was a format for an event that would sustain sales over a longer period.

Three months later, L’Auto-Vélo’s hierarchy received further confirmation of the lift a big cycle race could have on sales when the paper organised its own version of Bordeaux–Paris just weeks after Le Vélo’s well-established edition of that event. As derivative and cheeky as the use of L’Auto-Vélo for their paper’s title, the new race achieved what Giffard’s equivalent failed to by attracting Lesna and Garin to the start. Equipped with seven and eight pace-makers, respectively, their duel failed to live up to expectations as Lesna suffered a series of punctures and two bad crashes, which helped Garin to claim victory over his rival by an hour.

Lesna, incidentally, finished the race embittered, complaining that the many punctures he and his entraîneurs had suffered were the result of foul play. He alleged that nails and carpet tacks had been scattered on the course in front of them. Although he didn’t name Garin or any member of his rival’s support team, the implication was clear.

When the frenzy of excitement and sales generated by Marseille–Paris fizzled out, L’Auto-Vélo’s circulation dropped back to around 30,000, still less than half of Le Vélo’s total. Consequently, as the 1902 racing season drew to a close, it seemed that, despite the boosts provided by Paris–Brest–Paris, Marseille–Paris and Bordeaux–Paris, Giffard had triumphed in his battle with L’Auto-Vélo, particularly as his paper’s case against their rival on a charge of passing off had been vindicated by a Parisian commercial court, pending an appeal by Count de Dion. The result of this was due in January 1903.

Desgrange’s plan to run a second edition of his two new events wasn’t the answer to his paper’s circulation deficit, as he plainly realised. He needed something much more radical, something to ‘shut that the mouth of that asshole Giffard’, as Pierre Chany quotes him as telling his closest confidants on his staff during a meeting in his second-floor office at 10 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre midway through the morning of 20 November.

There are plenty of accounts of this meeting, few of which agree precisely on what was said and by whom. It is not unusual for French sportswriters to invent dialogue to fit a historical scene, and this particularly celebrated instance appears to have been a victim of both this and delayed recollection of what happened by those present. What most accounts do agree on is the identity of some of those in Desgrange’s office, who included cycling correspondent Géo Lefèvre and his colleague Georges Prade, who covered motorsport.

Chany records Lefèvre as saying: ‘Let’s organise a race lasting several days, longer than those that exist already. Something like the six-days on the track, but on the road. Major towns in the provinces are desperate to see bike racers, they will sign up to the idea.’

A person whom Chany refers to as ‘a hitherto silent witness’ and is perhaps Prade cuts in, saying: ‘If I understand you properly, Géo, you’re talking about setting the riders the task of completing a tour of France.’

‘Why not, my dear fellow?’ Lefèvre responds.

In a slightly different account based on his recollection of the meeting in Ceux que j’ai rencontrés, which was written more than a decade later, Lefèvre relates how Desgrange asked him and Prade to join him for an early lunch in the nearby Brasserie Zimmer – later to become the Café de Madrid, where a plaque commemorates this gathering. Lefèvre admits in his memoir that he was close to panic as the trio made the short walk to the Zimmer as he had no clear idea of what he was going to say. In the end, he confesses, all he could come up with was a list of cities starting with Paris and circling around the country to reach the capital again.

‘Why not have a Tour de France? It could have stages interspersed with rest days,’ Lefèvre tentatively suggested.

Lefèvre’s memoir recalls Desgrange being shocked by the idea and asking his correspondent if he’d gone mad. ‘Do you want to kill the Garins and Lesnas of the era?’ Desgrange added testily.

All accounts agree that Desgrange, Lefèvre and Prade returned from their lunch at the Zimmer and went straight to Goddet’s first-floor office to seek his opinion. Many propose a rather theatrical scenario of this gathering where, rather than answer the question of whether they should organise the Tour or not, Goddet went to his safe, opened the door and simply gestured to its near emptiness, effectively saying we’ve got nothing to lose.

A conversation Desgrange had with a fellow journalist at the 1921 Tour supports the unavoidable impression that a good deal of this story has been embellished over subsequent decades. Speaking to Sud-Ouest’s Léo Delberge during the Tour’s stopover in Bayonne, Desgrange admitted that, ‘the idea to organise the great cycling race that we know came from the record set by Théodore Joyeux, who lived at Castillonnès.’ In 1895, Joyeux, a barber and part-time racer from Tonneins in south-west France, completed a 5,500-kilometre tour of the country.

Joyeux was no mug on a bike. He had finished ninth in the inaugural Paris–Brest–Paris won by Charles Terront and was a regular participant in other long-distance road events. For his tour of France, he received 2,200 francs from La Métropole to ride their revolutionary Acatène bike, which featured a drivetrain comprising a rack and pinion rod connecting the pedals to the rear wheel. He completed the epic test, carried out almost inevitably in appalling weather, in 19 days, averaging almost 300 kilometres per day.

An official history of the Tour published in 1908 provides further evidence of Desgrange’s awareness and even obsession with Joyeux’s exploit, recounting how he spent long hours plotting the rider’s route on a huge map of France to the bewilderment of his colleagues. In addition, a monument erected in Tonneins in 2008 to commemorate Joyeux’s extraordinary feat bears a plaque with a quote from Desgrange that states: ‘It was Joyeux’s exploit that provided me with the inspiration to create the 1903 Tour de France.’

While the most popular account of the moment that inspired the Tour now appears to lack substance, there is no absolutely no question regarding Desgrange’s expectations about the court case his paper was embroiled in with Le Vélo. From the moment that the commercial court had issued its judgement on the case in January 1902, declaring that the former would have to change its name and pay fines amounting to 11,000 francs, Desgrange had been sure that an appeal would fail. He had voiced this opinion in a meeting of all of his paper’s principal shareholders, where the confrontational Count de Dion had been equally adamant that he would not accept the court’s decision and would appeal.

Indeed, so convinced was Desgrange of the futility of this appeal that on the day after the court’s judgement, he registered a new title for a paper in order to prevent anyone else securing it first. Rather than switching to L’Auto-Cycle, his initial preference, he’d opted for the simpler title of L’Auto. It’s not clear why he decided to drop the reference to cycling, although the court case may well have made him reluctant to choose any title with a cycling reference, fearing a further legal action by Le Vélo.

What is also beyond dispute is that Desgrange and Lefèvre spent a great deal of time shaping plans for their new race in between their Zimmer lunch on 20 November 1902 and the supreme court’s verdict of 2 January 1903. When this came, the court ruled, as Desgrange had long suspected, that L’Auto-Vélo was legally obliged to remove the word ‘vélo’ from its title. Exactly two weeks later, the first edition of L’Auto appeared on the news-stands. Identical in every way apart from its title to L’Auto-Vélo, its staff and backers clearly hoped the change wouldn’t affect the size of its readership.

Confirmation of the change meant that Desgrange could finally start to announce the new title’s racing calendar for the coming season. Consequently, the very next day, 17 January 1903, L’Auto hinted at ‘a great road cycling race that will be of such interest that we will make special mention of it in the days ahead’.

Two days later, the first column on the opening page of L’Auto provided the first details of the new race. Under the headline ‘Le Tour de France’, the first time that name had appeared anywhere, the sub-head announced: ‘The greatest cycling race in the entire world. A race lasting more than a month. Paris–Lyon–Marseille–Toulouse–Bordeaux–Nantes–Paris, 20,000 francs in prizes. Start: 1 June. Finish: 5 July at the Parc des Princes.’

Further down in the small and very dense text that was typical of newspapers in that era, L’Auto revealed that a general classification would be established based on cumulative time recorded on each stage, that riders would be able to change their bikes if they were damaged, that the winner would receive 3,000 francs and, perhaps picking up on the success of the touristes-routiers in Marseille–Paris, the use of pace-makers would only be allowed on the final stage.

But could Desgrange and his staff turn this groundbreaking proposal into reality?

CHAPTER 2

‘THE PHANTOM RACE’ TAKES SHAPE

Now long established as one of the great events on the sporting calendar, the Tour de France was born in a period of rapid industrial, social and economic change, comparable to the dotcom revolution that would reshape the industrialised world a hundred years later at the turn of the millennium. The belle époque was a golden age of progress and prosperity that featured the invention of the telephone, telegraph and cinema. Electric lights illuminated city streets. Trains were making travel easier and bringing far-flung destinations within reach of Europe’s major cities, most famously Constantinople with the establishment of the Orient Express. Motorised vehicles were becoming more commonplace, and bicycles substantially more so.

Driven by the thirst for knowledge, innovation and adventure, there were advances on all sides. As L’Auto’s staff set to work on organising the Tour, the Wright Brothers were making final preparations for the first powered flight, the Ford Motor Company was working on its first vehicle, the Model A, and the Trans-Siberian Railway was nearing completion. The start of Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s three-year voyage to negotiate the North-West Passage highlighted the enthusiasm for polar exploration, which L’Auto underlined with a report on a rich American couple, the Goldens, setting out on an expedition to drive from northern Canada to the North Pole in a heavily adapted car, hoping to make the return trip in ten hours. Although no update of their attempt appeared in Henri Desgrange’s paper, their quest highlighted the sense of intrepidness, invention and often plain lunacy that marked that era.

At the centre of all this optimism and progress was Paris. Revitalised during the Third Republic that had been established during the course of France’s demoralising defeat in the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–71, the French capital’s status as ‘the city of lights’ and as one of the world’s great centres had been cemented by its hosting of the World Fair in 1889, which saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower as the entrance to the exhibition area.

Described by Italian writer Paolo Facchinetti as ‘the epicentre of an earthquake of upheaval that also transformed into a philosophy for life’, Paris was a magnet for entrepreneurs and artists from all over the world. It was, according to Facchinetti, ‘studded with concert-cafes, music halls, a kind of free zone where anything was possible and everything was permitted … to go to a boxing match between a kangaroo and a man or a show featuring a Burman family who were covered with hair or the incredible Joseph Pujol, “Le Pétomane”,’ a flatulist who appeared at hugely popular venues such as the Moulin Rouge and the Folies-Bergère with an act in which he sucked air into his rectum and blew a candle out from several yards away, and farted the tune of La Marseillaise or O Sole Mio.

Within this context, the Tour, which was both groundbreaking and exceptional, was very much in line with the zeitgeist for extraordinary innovation. Although initially viewed as rather madcap even by some of those most closely associated with it, the Tour was broadly welcomed in the French press, Le Journal hailing the ‘colossal cycling event that is going to be organised by our colleagues at L’Auto’, while Le Figaro described it as ‘a monstrous race … that is guaranteed to cause a sensation due to its enormity’.

Only Le Vélo remained silent, a fact that didn’t escape Géo Lefèvre’s attention. Two days on from the announcement in L’Auto, he pointed out: ‘The only paper that’s now called Le Vélo won’t deign to devote a single line – yes, you understand me perfectly – not a single line to this bicycle race, the most sensational organised since the invention of cycle sport.’ This did, finally, prompt Le Vélo into producing an 11-word story on the new event.

Yet Le Vélo’s mulish disregard for the Tour was never likely to have much of an impact on press and popular interest in the new race. It took shape at a time when an increasingly literate population with more spending power and free time was eager for new experiences, and cycling had already proved well capable of fulfilling this desire for entertainment and adventure.

Ever since Englishman James Moore won the first significant place-to-place cycle race on 7 November 1869 between Paris and Rouen, cycling had been a focus for the French public’s search for competitive and leisure diversion. Riding a velocipede built by the Michaux company that was equipped with a larger, pedal-driven front wheel, Moore completed the 123-kilometre course in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Among the 32 finishers behind Paris-based Moore were two women. The first of them, placed 29th, was using a pseudonym, Miss America, which betrayed not only a sense of humour but also awareness of the often hostile attitude towards the growing push for female emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century.