The participants were less than enthusiastic by the end of the stage; most of them had to walk with their bikes over the treacherous mountain passes. Many of the riders were a little peeved and decided to hurl a few choice words at Steines and other officials upon arrival at the finish line. Not that the abuse put them off; the Alps were included in the race the following year and the place of the mountains in the mythology of the Tour de France was secured.
Maurice Garin, winner: 1903
It’s difficult to say what Maurice Garin is more famous for: winning the first Tour de France, or being disqualified from the second. First over the line in both races, the scandal Garin caused by cheating his way to victory in 1904 elicited as many column inches as his historic victory the year before.
Italian by birth, Garin moved to France with his family as a youngster and worked in a bike shop in Roubaix and as a chimney sweep, his diminutive 160-cm frame great for cleaning out sooty chutes. It was also the perfect size for an endurance cyclist, and when the nineteen-day, 2428-km inaugural Tour de France was announced in 1903, Garin fancied his chances. He set out his stall not only by winning the monstrous first stage — a 467-km jaunt from Paris to Lyon — but also doing it faster than the train.
‘Garin and Pagie, whom I’d seen eating quickly at Moulins before disappearing into the night, beat me to Lyon,’ wrote L’Auto’s Géo Lefèvre. ‘They were on simple bicycles; I was on an express train.’ Garin had no real rival in the first Tour (after the brilliantly named Hippolyte Aucouturier had to abandon), and he entered Paris as the winner by nearly three hours — albeit in a car, due to fears that the adoring crowd in the Parc des Princes would harm him. His prize money was the equivalent of many years’ wages for a manual worker.
Whether it was the lure of more cash or just the depressing thought of having to slog out another 2500 km on a solid steel bike, the defending champ was not so honest in his second Tour. Garin, and the three riders who finished behind him, were all disqualified after it was discovered they had held on to cars, accepted lifts and taken a train — even though Garin had proven he was faster than a locomotive the year before. In fact the entire race was a farce, as angry mobs needed to be repelled with gunshots, riders fought spectators who sabotaged the roads and the wrong riders were credited with stage wins. Twelve of the twenty-seven riders who finished were disqualified.
The organisers knew something wasn’t quite right about the winning group as soon as they crossed the finish line, but preferred to announce the suspensions and the new winner — whom they also suspected of cheating — several months later. One journalist wrote, ‘If they’d taken the decision at the finish there’d have been a riot, and officials would have been lynched.’
Garin was suspended for two years, but he denied any wrongdoing; he rode only one more professional race, Paris–Brest–Paris, in 1911. He worked in the petrol station he bought with his Tour winnings until he died in 1957, still wearing the enormous handlebar moustache he sported when he made cycling history in 1903. His grave lies in relative anonymity in a cemetery outside Lens, with no memorial to mark his historic achievement. In the past as now, it appears the Tour prefers to erase all memory of its most high-profile cheats.
Philippe Thys, winner: 1913, 1914, 1920
Thys made history by becoming the first man to win three titles, but it’s the legendary tales that accompany each of his victories that see the Belgian rider enter Tour de France folklore. The winner of an X-Factor-style competition that earned him a professional contract in 1911, Thys was the rider who directly benefited from the infamous broken fork suffered by Eugène Christophe on stage 6 of the 1913 Tour. The two were wheel-to-wheel over the Col du Tourmalet when Christophe’s bike was damaged in a crash, and as the Frenchman was busy repairing his bike in a local blacksmith’s, Thys rode off to his first Tour victory. (This is not where Thys and Christophe’s story ends, either. Although Christophe is credited with being the first to wear the yellow jersey in 1919, Thys made a claim in his later years that Henri Desgrange had asked him to wear a yellow shirt as race leader in a pre–First World War race. While there was little reason for the Belgian to lie, the specifics were a bit hazy and no corroborating evidence could be found.)
In 1914 Thys won his first stage as defending champion on the same day Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, an event that set the wheels in motion for the outbreak of the First World War. As Europe was awash with talk of war, Thys had problems of his own: a broken wheel during the penultimate stage threatened his chances of defending the title. Figuring fixing the wheel himself would take longer than the time penalty incurred for accepting outside help, he asked a bike-store owner to give him a new one. Thys was docked thirty minutes, putting him just two minutes in front of Frenchman Henri Pélissier. However, on the final stage from Dunkirk to Paris, local hero Pélissier was prevented from mounting a winning attack by hordes of people eager to congratulate the ‘winner’ with a pat on the back, clogging up the route. Pélissier won the stage but Thys followed closely behind and won his second tour by 1:50.
None other than Tour organiser Henri Desgrange inspired Thys’s historic third win. After returning to the race in 1919 sluggish and out of shape — in other words, fat and unmotivated — Desgrange taunted him for becoming too comfortable with his newfound lifestyle: ‘You have become un petit bourgeois who’s lost his love for his bike and wasted a huge talent.’ Stung by the criticism, Thys went on a training regime not seen again until Rocky went old-school in the Russian hinterland in preparation for the Ivan Drago fight. The Belgian lost several kilos before the 1920 Tour (even cutting his hair to be more streamlined) and, after taking the lead at the end of the second stage, he rode in yellow all the way to Paris, winning by a stunning fifty-seven minutes.
Ottavio Bottecchia, winner: 1924, 1925
A two-time winner of the Tour, Italian Ottavio Bottecchia didn’t lack for excitement in his life: he dodged bullets as he learnt to ride a bike and had a short but spectacular riding career, followed by a mysterious death that remains unsolved to this day.
Bottecchia first began cycling in the army during the First World War and, when an officer saw him cycling up mountain passes with a rifle on his back, he mentioned that the youngster might try his hand at racing when the war was over. It seemed a great way to escape the poverty of his life and, although he’d made some money from some early wins in his career, when he turned up for his first Tour he still looked a little impoverished: jug ears, skinny legs and scruffy clothes that hung off him, prompting Henri Desgrange to nickname him ‘Papillon’, or ‘Butterfly’.
During his first Tour in 1923 he became the first Italian to wear the yellow jersey as he helped teammate Henri Pélissier to overall victory. After the race the winner said, ‘Bottecchia will be my successor’, and he wasn’t wrong. Bottecchia won the first stage of 1924, from Paris to Le Havre, and didn’t give up yellow for the rest of the race, becoming the first rider in history to wear the maillot jaune from start to finish.
If Bottecchia made it look easy while riding a bike — ‘In this form, Bottecchia is head and shoulders above the rest of us,’ said Pélissier — his personal life provided all the drama. Spotted reading socialist literature and urging fellow Italians to resist the overtures of Mussolini’s Fascists, he played a dangerous game as ‘Il Duce’ rose to power. And he knew it, choosing to wear a violet jersey instead of the leader’s yellow when the Tour passed through Italy in 1924 so he was less recognisable to any angry mobs. Rumour has it he also received death threats during the race. Tour chief Desgrange still managed to find fault in Bottecchia’s riding style, stating that if he found it so easy, why not ride more spectacularly and win by bigger margins? Whether the Italian took the grumpy git’s words to heart or not, he took the Tour in ’25 with far more panache, with four stages and a healthy fifty-four-minute advantage. The 192
6 Tour was a different story though, as Bottecchia abandoned on stage 10, weeping in agony as he coughed up blood. Little did he know it was his last Tour, an ignominious end to such a promising career.
On 3 June 1927, after heading out for a morning training ride, Bottecchia was found unconscious at the side of a road outside Peonis, his collarbone broken and skull cracked. He died in hospital twelve days later. The circumstances were rather suspicious: the Italian’s bike was found undamaged further along the road, which was flat, safe and well known to him. The official inquiry said he had suffered sunstroke and lost control of his bike, but he was well acclimatised to riding in searing heat for hours on end.
Conspiracy theories emerged, with many believing pro-Mussolini loyalists killed him. Then two deathbed conspiracies emerged: one from a Mafia-connected heavy in New York who said he was contracted by a ‘godfather’ to carry out a hit, the other from a local farmer who said he threw a rock at Bottecchia when he discovered him eating his grapes. Both stories had very large holes in them, and the true nature of the Italian’s death remains shrouded in mystery.
Bottecchia was one of the first modern riders of the Tour, knowing when and where to push himself during a race and utilising teammates as domestiques to secure his wins. Much like two other great Italian riders, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, who lost their best riding years to the Second World War, we can only speculate as to how many more Tour victories Bottecchia could have won had he not been cut down in his prime.
Gino Bartali, winner: 1938, 1948
Gino Bartali rode every race secure in the knowledge that God was on his side — not that he needed the help. A deeply religious man (he was on speaking terms with the Pope and had his shirt blessed by a priest before every race), he inherited the mantle of greatest Italian rider from Ottavio Bottecchia by winning two Giros d’Italia and a Tour de France before he was twenty-five, and surely would have added more to that total had the war not broken out. One of the greatest climbers of his age, he had the look of a slugger thanks to a broken nose sustained during a crash early in his career, and the way he danced up the mountains evoked images of a prize fighter floating around the ring.
Bartali won two Tours, one on either side of the war, and the decade between them is still the biggest gap any winner has had between victories. He won as favourite in 1938 with a brilliant performance — especially in the mountains — that can be neatly summed up by an Italian general who was standing outside Gino’s hotel one day on crowd control: ‘Don’t touch him — he’s a god.’
His 1948 win was the more famous of his two victories, however, with intervention from both church and the state leading to his triumph. After a plea from Italy’s president to save the country from spiralling into civil war by winning the Tour, Bartali took mass at Lourdes and then attacked in the mountains, making up a twenty-minute deficit over three stages to take victory.
Throughout his career, Bartali found himself in the good graces of two very powerful men: Henri Desgrange and Pope Pius XII. When Bartali came to see Desgrange before pulling out of the ’37 Tour, the Frenchman said, ‘You are the first rider to come to see me before dropping out. You’re a good man, Gino. We’ll see each other again next year and you will win.’ The next year, when Bartali did indeed come back and win, Desgrange said, ‘I have never seen anything as wonderful as Bartali on the Ballon d’Alsace.’
Pope Pius XII was also a fan, holding him up as an example of a true Catholic hero during troubled times, and when Bartali reached Lourdes in 1948 with an epic task ahead of him, he sent a telegram to the Pope asking for a benediction before taking mass. (Some might say he won the Tour after taking communion in the holy town, but seeing as Gino compelled every rider in the peloton to join him that day, it seems unlikely God was playing favourites.)
Bartali and countryman Fausto Coppi endured a heated rivalry over their careers and it’s impossible to speak of one without mention of the other. After a young Coppi beat the man he was drafted in to support in the 1940 Giro d’Italia, the two embarked on a decade-long war of mistrust, animosity and jealousy. The two refused to ride with or for each other on many occasions, and their contrasting personalities divided Italy down religious, social and political lines. They finally teamed up in the 1949 Tour, Coppi gifting Bartali a stage win on his thirty-fifth birthday — but it was only in retirement that the two finally called a truce.
Nicknamed ‘Gino the Pious’, Bartali was hardly a warm or popular figure in the peloton, but his popularity in Italy was unparalleled. Already known for his support of humanitarian causes, when reports emerged after his death that he had helped smuggle documents for Italian Jews in his bike frame while taking ‘training rides’, it only added to his legend.
Louison Bobet, winner: 1953, 1954, 1955
Becoming the first rider to win three Tours in a row is an achievement in itself, but doing so in the ‘Golden Age’ of cycling, the era of Coppi, Kübler and Koblet, speaks volumes of Louison Bobet’s talent. The Frenchman had no weakness as a rider — he was strong in the mountains, a solid time trialist, and he possessed a great kick in the flat — and was considered the best French rider of his generation. But in the six years after his 1947 debut he hadn’t made a mark on the Tour, and the French press began to suggest he might always be a bridesmaid.
In 1953 defending champion (and Bobet’s good friend) Fausto Coppi didn’t ride the Tour, but it was on the mountain where the Italian made his name in 1949 — Col d’Izoard — that Bobet too entered Tour history. Trailing compatriot Jean Malléjac in the GC, Bobet followed Spanish rider Jesús Loroño over Col de Vars and, pulling away on the descent, attacked the Izoard alone. Bobet’s soaring ascent of the mountain led Coppi, who was at the top waiting to see his pal, to simply say: ‘That was beautiful.’ The Frenchman won the stage by five minutes and went on to win his first Tour — the fiftieth anniversary race — by more than fourteen minutes.
The following year Bobet was in the form of his career and in a long, arduous Tour he rode the perfect race, waiting to take yellow in the Massif Central and then pouncing on the Izoard, again on his own, to take an unassailable advantage. The image of Bobet climbing the iconic Col d’Izoard in yellow is one the French hold dear even today, and a win on the Izoard’s famed slopes is seen as the ultimate achievement for a home-grown rider.
The 1955 race saw Bobet complete the hat-trick but, rather than on the Izoard, it was on another mountain that he sealed the deal. On the imposing Mont Ventoux he was the last man standing in a ride of attrition in searing conditions, which wrought havoc on those riders who had used a little ‘pick-me-up’ on the day. Although he won the stage and maintained a minute lead, Louison was a dead man walking and he feared that his rivals would attack him and take yellow from him the next day. Luckily for Bobet, his adversaries were as knackered as he was and the attacks he feared never materialised; he won his third Tour and became a national hero in the process.
Federico Bahamontes, winner: 1959
Nicknamed the ‘Eagle of Toledo’ for his ability to soar in the mountains, Federico Bahamontes was one of the best climbers the Tour has ever seen. He won six King of the Mountains and the overall title in 1959, although he might have won a lot more had he not been such a piss-poor descender. Legend has it he was scarred both mentally and physically when he became intimate with a cactus on a crash in Spain, and from that moment on he hated going down alone. In fact he was such a scaredy-cat that in the 1954 Tour, when he reached the top of the Col du Galibier alone, he famously stopped to eat an ice-cream as he waited for the peloton to catch him up. In a less comedic incident, in 1956 he threw his bike into a ravine rather than descend the Col de Luitel on his lonesome.
If you think his behaviour indicated someone slightly unhinged, you’re not far wrong. As well as indulging in a bit of bike-chucking, he once took off his shoes so he could not be talked into c
ontinuing during one particularly difficult stage. He wasn’t one for tactics either, preferring to attack when he felt like it — ‘[He] never had a strategy in the mountains. He just didn’t want anyone on his wheel,’ said his manager — while, somewhat more honestly, his great rival Jesús Loroño said: ‘He’s a very good climber but he’s completely mad.’ His riding style only enforced the stereotype of a berserker, all twitchy motions with a deadpan stare. There was a nervousness about him; as one writer put it, he seemed just as likely to abandon a stage as he was to win it.
But boy, could the man climb. His unorthodox style was precisely what made him so hard to challenge. Rivals didn’t have a clue when and where he might attack, and his fidgety pedalling style made it difficult for pursuers to match his rhythm. Much like John McEnroe’s temper or Eric Cantona’s penchant for karate kicking fans, his eccentricities made him all the more enjoyable to watch, as you never quite knew what would happen next.
He found joy in the mountains (despite what his facial expressions said) and it seemed at times he was more content to win the polka-dot jersey than he was to challenge for the General Classification. Overall victory came in 1959, although there was controversy in the win. Rivalries within the French team ran deep that year, so much so that Jacques Anquetil and Roger Rivière rode themselves into the ground attacking each other. When they realised neither would triumph, they conspired to stop compatriot Henry Anglade from winning by helping the Spaniard.
The Tour de France Page 8