When the first edition of this book appeared in the late spring of 2003, just ahead of the centennial Tour de France, I wrote in an exalted spirit, while I explained how the book had come to be written. Now that a new edition is published for the one hundredth Tour (the centennial was the ninetieth running of the race, which for obvious reasons did not take place in 1915–18 or 1940–46), I can repeat the explanation, but the exaltation must be severely qualified.
Ten years ago, I described the thrill of standing on a blindingly cloudless day in July at the crest of Col du Galibier, more than 2500 metres (or 8200 feet) above sea level; in a postcard home, I asked my young son if he knew how much higher that is than the highest peak in the British Isles (it’s more than 1000 metres, or nearly 4000 feet, taller than Ben Nevis). After driving up to the pass – second gear all the way, except when occasionally changing down to first – I made my way breathlessly on foot to my vantage point, and an astonishing sight from one of the greatest natural amphitheatres on earth.
Perched a little precariously on a mixture of tussock and rock, I looked several miles down the road, which ascends through a long series of hairpins, and trained my field glasses at the furthest point. A distant speck of colour appeared, then grew a little larger before taking shape as a man on a bike, agonizingly making his way uphill, accompanied by a crescendo of cheering from the crowds lining the road and followed by a steady, strung-out line of riders, before the first riders reached the summit and one by one descended the other side at scary speed. In more senses than one, that had been for me the high point of the 2002 Tour de France. As I wrote ten years ago, I felt that it was a privilege as well as a pleasure to be on the road, and working on a history of the Tour.
Since then everything has changed, more dramatically and shockingly than any of us could have imagined. Ten years ago, I acclaimed the sheer awesome grandeur of this most extraordinary of all sporting contests, and ended with a flourish, saying that not for nothing did the Tour end in ‘the Elysian Fields’, so that when the heroes of the race reached the Champs-Élysées, they were greeted by the shades of Ajax and Achilles. This is one of a number of passages I wrote about the Tour that I cannot now reread without a grimace, or a shudder, along with a glowing profile of Lance Armstrong for the Financial Times in 2003, when I was covering the race for that paper. By the time a second edition of the book was published in 2007 to mark the Grand Départ in London, my tone had darkened. We had learned much more about doping, and the previous year, for the first time in the history of the race, the man who had stood in the yellow jersey on the winner’s podium was subsequently disqualified.
And now? In 2012, the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, an English rider won the Tour de France for the first time ever, before going on to win one more gold medal in the London Olympics, and a very popular victory it was for Bradley Wiggins, a thoroughly winning personality in more senses than one. It should have been a time of unalloyed delight. But this was also the year when Armstrong, who had not only been the first rider ever to win the Tour seven times but seemed to have done so in heroic circumstances, was finally, utterly and abjectly disgraced.
He had been using performance-enhancing drugs throughout most if not all of his career, certainly in all the years he finished first in the Tour, and he had directed a peculiarly ruthless conspiracy. ‘It was not enough that his teammates give maximum effort on the bike,’ said the report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency. ‘He also required that they adhere to the doping program outlined for them or be replaced. He was not just a part of the doping culture on his team, he enforced and reinforced it.’ A frightening picture emerged not only of a shameful crime, but of a supposedly noble champion who was in reality a cheat, a liar, a bully, and altogether a thoroughly nasty piece of work.
All this is related later, but a few words are necessary by way of penitence. Although an amateur and intruder in the press room, I knew enough to be aware of all the rumours about doping cyclists, Armstrong among them, and tried to give the reader some idea of this. In any case, I was relating the story of a sport in which, from the beginning, cyclists had fought against exhaustion with alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines. But I didn’t write that Armstrong was a doper and a liar, and if I had, my newspapers and publisher would not have published it. There was no doubt a conspiracy of silence, above all inside the peloton with its code of omertà, but reporters such as David Walsh, who sniffed out the truth, fell foul of the wretched English libel laws. It is altogether an awful story.
To return to what I wrote ten years ago and explain how I came to be writing the book. A ‘general-purposes journalist’ (as I was once all too accurately described in the Journals of the novelist Anthony Powell), I had quite often written about sport, but no book on a sporting subject, until Andrew Gordon of Simon & Schuster in London told Gill Coleridge, my agent then, to both of whom I remain indebted, that he wanted a history of the Tour de France for its centenary in July 2003. Let me repeat my gratitude to Andrew, and his successor Ian Marshall as well as Abigail Bergstrom at S & S, and to Gill and her colleague Cara Jones. The Tour might not seem to have much in common with my previous books, on the South African mine-owners and the story of Zionism (although, as it happens, the entry ‘Dreyfus Affair’ appears in the index of all three books), but it was an enthralling subject.
Doing justice to the Tour presented me with some difficulties, and my attempts to resolve them made the book both degressive and digressive. My first task was to give some account of the ninety-nine runnings of a bike race, but if I had devoted equal space to them all, the book would have become unmanageably long and unmistakably tedious. It’s far from the case that one Tour is much like another. Some have been frankly dull, bloodless victories decided in the first week, while others have been unbearably exciting. There are episodes of high drama which need to be related in full, from Christophe’s heroic recovery after breaking down to Coppi’s great escape over the mountains, from the coude à coude duel between Anquetil and Poulidor up the Puy de Dôme to LeMond snatching an eight-second victory from Fignon. The only thing to be done was to let each race tell its story at appropriate length or brevity.
And the book is also digressive: narrative chapters are broken up by interludes called ‘Repos’ (the name of a rest day in the Tour), in which I have strolled around the provinces of France, touching on their various aspects, topographical, literary and not least culinary, taking in un peu d’histoire, giving a little advice to other travellers about what to see and where to eat – as it were from Michelet to Michelin, two of my own guides – and then dilating on themes which caught my fancy, from the waning of dialect to popular song, while trying to set the Tour in its national and cultural contexts.
Although an ardent lifelong sports enthusiast (nowadays a notably inactive one, offering no competition to those admirable writers who have themselves pedalled up the Izoard or the Aubisque), I came a little late to the Tour. When I was a young schoolboy in the late 1950s, my heroes were Graveney and Benaud, Sharp and Kyle, Wright and Puskas, Hawthorn and Fangio, and I didn’t as yet share some of my friends’ fanatical absorption in cycling. But I knew who Anquetil and Bahamontes were, and I had some inkling of the fascination of the race, which grew on me over the years.
Even then, I had never suivi le Tour until 2002 when I was asked to cover the race for the Daily Mail. I am most grateful to Colin Gibson, who was then that paper’s sports editor, for this wonderful assignment, and to his assistant Helen Bonner for all her help, as well as to Tim Jotischky, Colin’s successor, for whom I covered the Tour in 2004 and 2005. I describe later the placards being held aloft on Mont Ventoux in July 2002, one of which read ‘Phil Liggett I want your job’. I don’t myself, in fact, but by way of covering the race somewhat as an amateur I have come greatly to admire the authority of the professionals, notably William Fotheringham and Richard Williams of the Guardian, David Walsh of the Sunday Times and Juliet Macur of the New York Times, not to say everyone at Cycling Weekly and L’Équipe. Just why the standard of sports journalism, and not least cycling journalism, is so high is an interesting question. Is it because in those pages, more than in the political or financial pages of a newspaper, a writer can assume the reader’s complete attention, and treat him as an equal?
Having said that, I should add that, among other useful advice, men more learned than I warned me to be careful what sources I used, since many books on cycling were unreliable, and certain writers (who shall here be nameless) were notoriously inaccurate. As it happened, I had already made this discovery myself the hard way; I discuss in ‘Some Tour Books’, the problems of compiling an accurate account when even official documents, let alone popular books, are erroneous or contradictory. All this is by way of anticipatory apology. What Philip Larkin observed in another context – ‘They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you’ – seems to be true of writing about the Tour, and I dare say that includes me. I can only plead that I have done my best, and add that I shall be most grateful for any corrections to errors I have repeated, or made up all on my own.
In my first paragraph above, heights were given in feet, for the last time. For the sake of brevity and simplicity the metric form only is used, kilometres for stages and metres for mountain climbs, which is bound to make anyone of my generation feel his age. On the other hand, and in defiance of a concerted pedantic movement to use local versions, I have kept the traditional English forms of place names, and there’s no reason why people in Rheims, Lyons or Marseilles should be any more offended by those names than we are by the French saying ‘Londres’ and ‘Edimbourg’.
My personal debts of gratitude are numerous. In Dublin, my colleague and friend Eamon Dunphy put me in touch with his countryman David Walsh, who marked my card and gave me good advice, apart from rightly telling me that the Tour was not only one of the greatest sporting occasions anywhere, but the best organized of them all, and I must also thank the Tour’s excellent press office. More help was provided by other friends and colleagues. Stan Hey and Bob Low lent books and Graeme Fife lent the delightful CD Le Vélo en Chansons, as well as the transcript of his Radio 3 talk on music and cycling, while subsequently correcting a number of errors; Rick MacArthur in New York and my father in Lot-et-Garonne sent newspaper cuttings; two of my Oxford tutors from long ago, Sir Raymond Carr and Eric Christiansen, respectively helped me with Spanish sporting history, and commented on part of the script with customary lucidity and acidity; and two very old friends, Dr Jeffrey Tobias and Dr Elisabeth Whipp, gave me the benefit of their medical learning. I am grateful to John English for his attentive and thoughtful copy-editing, to Patricia Hymans for preparing the index, to Alison Rushgrove for typing out ‘Some Tour Facts’, and to Edwina Barstow for her help with the picture research. And I owe a special debt to my bon copain Robert Harris. He encouraged me to write the book, he cheered me up with sardonic e-mails about the passing scene, and although he was hard at work on his own splendid novels, he found time to act as my soigneur on many a day’s défaillance (see ‘Some Tour Words’) with much-needed reviving lunches at the George and Dragon in Rowde or the outside chance in Manton.
My dear mother-in-law Polly Muir took only a modest interest in cycling, but she was half French, and was constantly helpful while I was writing this book, explaining obscure phrases in her maternal language and finding obscure books. Not least, she lent me her flat in Corsica, where I wrote a substantial portion of the book, and my thanks are due also to Jo-Jo Martini and my other friends in the Pasturella bar in Monticello. This book was originally dedicated to Polly; I now sadly rededicate it to her memory. It’s always tempting to quote ‘without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time’, a joke P. G. Wodehouse should have copyrighted; let me say instead that, if it hadn’t been for my wife and children, Sally, Abigail and Gabriel, this book might have perhaps been written a little sooner, but I would have gone mad much faster.
Perhaps I might be permitted what may seem a sweeping or sentimental generalization, from the perspective of a political and literary journalist who is also a member of the MCC, a recovering Arsenal fan, and a somewhat tepid supporter of Bath rugby club. Political reporting may not be as ruthlessly competitive as some think, nor literary London quite the snakepit George Orwell believed, but it would be fair to say that one does not always encounter helping hands on every side. That has been true also when I have dipped into other sporting subjects. Almost my first publication in a grown-up paper was an article for the New Statesman nearly forty years ago about the financial structure of cricket. I recall ringing an editor of Wisden and shyly asking for some advice, only to be told that he indeed knew all the information I sought, but could think of no reason to share it with me.
By striking contrast, while I worked on this book I met with nothing but friendliness and helpfulness. Whenever I rang the offices of Cycling Weekly, who had no idea who I was, or when I first contacted Richard Allchin, who had then never heard of me but has since given me invaluable advice, I was offered ungrudging assistance. And so it goes throughout the sport, which has a comradely ethos all of its own, just possibly because cycling remains a true sport of the people, untouched by what Proust called the lâcheté des gens du monde.
That is not, of course and alas, the whole story, and we have seen this wonderful race, this splendid sport, even the noble bicycle itself, all debased and sullied. When Jean-François Lamour was French sports minister at the time of Armstrong’s last ‘victory’, he said that the doping culture was so deeply rooted in cycling that it would take a generation to uproot it. His words did not then seem far-fetched or unduly gloomy, and might appear to have been confirmed by events since. And yet, without being tritely optimistic, the one good thing to have come out of this awful story is that it might just be the extreme shock treatment cycling has needed; it’s far too soon to say that the age of doping is over, but there is now some objective evidence that, having come clean with all the revelations, the sport is becoming cleaner in the true sense.
Ten years ago, I ended this Preface by saluting the amiability and decency of so many cyclists, which I do again, and expressing my love of France, which I do again and again. I had the amusing experience of being denounced by name in a Wall Street Journal editorial, which was disappointed by someone it had thought a ‘Eurosceptic’. If that word means misgivings about what the European Union sometimes does in practice, then it fits many of us. If it means an innate antipathy towards what Donald Rumsfeld sneered at as ‘Old Europe’, then I am the least sceptical of Old Europeans. Covering the Tour for several years now has only increased my love of France: its ravishing landscapes, its splendid cities, its charming villages, its wonderful roads and railways, its glorious restaurants and vineyards and, actually, its rather likeable populace.
To repeat those words gives me an opportunity for what is not (I pray) merely fond or foolish hope for the future of the Tour. Before now France herself has fallen low and has risen again, even if it takes a man as remarkable as Charles de Gaulle. Now the hour requires people of his spirit who can renew the sport and its greatest race, inspired by ‘une certaine idée de la France’, and a certain idea of the Tour de France.
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Bath
May 2013