‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing,’ when the guns fell silent, Siegfried Sassoon wrote, but that was sadly far from the truth. Europe was prostrate and despairing, in mourning for its millions of young men, so weakened nervously as well as physically that a Spanish flu virus could sweep through the continent just as the war had ended and kill another 20 million. And few countries were as sombre as France, much of whose land was devastated, whose coffers had been emptied, and a million and a half of whose men had been killed.
As soon as the war ended, Paris seemed a city of light again, its cultural life flowering once more with amazing vigour, in art, music and letters. Gide and Proust – whose À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur was published in 1919 – had been joined by the young Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau, and a new school of composers had sprung up, graced above all by Poulenc. Before long, English and American lotus-eaters would find in Paris the moveable feast of hedonistic frolicking recorded for posterity by Hemingway.
And yet the mood of Paris, and of France as a whole, was very far from the gaiety of Le Diable au corps, Le Boeuf sur le toit, ‘Les Six’ and The Sun Also Rises. Or maybe that manic celebration spoke for itself about the horror and despair it tried to conceal. Every street in every city, every town and village in the country, still counted its dead. Across Europe war memorials were built, deeply revealing of different national moods. In defeated but defiant Germany, the memorials were exalted and aggressive, with strident martial figures angrily looking to the future, and by implication looking for revenge, often above the chilling words ‘Not one too many died for the Fatherland’. In England memorials were startling in their realism, every boot, buckle and helmet captured as if the memory must never be lost. And in France the overwhelming mood is one of sorrow, a desolate Marianne grieving for her lost sons. A most moving example of that exalted grief, and an extraordinary piece of folk art, is found in the church at Valloire nestling in the shadow of the Col du Galibier; I visited the church just after the Tour had crossed the great pass. Next to the altar is a painting in truly naive style, showing the battlefield of Verdun where a dying soldier receives the last rites from his chaplain while the Blessed Virgin looks down. In one other little town near Anjou, grief is mixed with anger on a memorial whose inscription – ‘À nos chers enfants. Maudite soit la guerre’ (To our dear sons. Accursed be war) – caused bitter controversy, and might even help to explain what happened in 1940. France was far from a happy country when the guns fell silent.
For Henri Desgrange, this was his greatest challenge, and it proved his finest hour. Conditions were severe throughout France, but in the north and east they were desperate, hundreds of square miles of broken landscape where the front lines had been, thousands of miles of roads in barely passable condition, tens of thousands of cars and motorbikes still under military requisition, many hotels still occupied by the army, not to speak of the millions of poilus who, as 1919 began, had not yet been demobilized. During a war when armies had raised bicycle battalions and used cyclists as messengers, racing bikes had scarcely been the manufacturers’ first priority. There was a shortage of bikes, and an even more acute shortage of tyres. It could not have been a less propitious time to begin the great contest again, let alone make important changes, but that is what Desgrange now did.
We have seen how much he had always disliked the influence of the bike-makers and the operation of the team system, and now he took the new beginning of the Tour as an opportunity to suppress those teams, and what proved to be a final and forlorn attempt to make the Tour an individual competition. Cyclists would compete as single riders, categorized A or B, and they would compete strictly on their own account: no cyclist could help another. Feeding would now be provided by the race officials rather than laid on by teams or foraged for by the riders.
And during the course of the 1919 Tour there was to be one other innovation, a stroke of genius that gave a phrase to the language. Newspapers, mostly but not only sporting papers, were often printed on coloured newsprint: the Sporting Times, with its mixture of racing news, reactionary opinions and dirty jokes, was known in every club and mess in the British Empire as ‘the Pink Un’. The Auto was the yellow un, and its colour would soon be famous far away from France.
At 4 p.m. on 28 June 1919 a huge crowd at Versailles greeted the news that Germany had accepted, without much choice, the terms imposed by the peace conference that had been convened in Paris for months past; a treaty intended to bring eternal peace to Europe. Just eleven hours later, at 3 a.m. on 29 June, and a few miles away at the Parc des Princes, the field of sixty-nine riders, forty-four classified in category A, departed on the thirteenth Tour de France. The field had been severely depleted by the toll of war and by the five-year interruption in cycling. Many old names had departed, and there were as yet few new names to make up: Robert Jacquinot was one, and Francis Pélissier another, making his pro debut to join his brother Henri with striking fraternal success.
After Henri had won the second stage to Cherbourg, Francis won the third stage, to Brest, with the elder holding the GC lead ahead of Christophe. But Desgrange’s idea that combinations and tactical alliances could be removed from the Tour was always an impossibility. The peloton now ganged up on the brothers, and when Henri and Francis tried to get back at the field, it was they who were officially rebuked for collusion; when the third stage reached Les Sables d’Olonne, the brothers abandoned in protest, impulsively and sourly: ‘Tout le monde est contre nous.’
The race was the longest to date, 5560 kilometres, with one enormous 482-kilometre stage from Les Sables to Bayonne; what with that and the state of the roads, the field was rapidly reduced. After the Pyrenees, where Honoré Barthélémy gave a fine climbing performance, there were only sixteen riders left, two of them, Jules Nempon and Aloi’s Verstraeten, in the new category B, and Verstraeten was disqualified before Montpellier for grabbing a lift. Other casualties included Emile Masson, winner of the Tour of Belgium, who pulled out after a fall. Barthélémy was brilliant again in the Alps, winning the stages to Grenoble and Geneva, although there was also a fine display in both mountain ranges by Luigi Lucotti, an Italian rider almost unknown in his own country let alone in France.
When the remaining riders left Metz on the antepenultimate stage, he was twenty-eight minutes behind Christophe in the GC; that is to say behind the man now wearing the maillot jaune. As Desgrange liked to tell it, this hadn’t been planned before the race but had come to him as an inspiration while it was being run. On any given day, one rider held the lead in the race, although he was not always, or even often, to be seen at the head of proceedings as the field rode by. If he could be marked out so that no spectator could fail to see him, it would add to the thrill of the race. It would add a new lustre to the leader himself. And it would be a brilliant promotional coup for the paper.
Desgrange telegraphed to Paris to ask for jerseys to be run up in the Auto’s distinctive yellow. The race had reached Grenoble, whose civic virtue and spirit of equality Michelet extolled: ‘Bonaparte knew Grenoble well when he selected it for his first stage on his return from Elba: he sought to restore the empire through the republic.’ Maybe Desgrange knew Grenoble well when he chose to award the first yellow jersey there to Christophe, a man who had ridden his first Tour in 1906 and who had been so unlucky in 1913. If only the jersey had brought him better luck now. On that stage from Metz to Dunkirk he crashed and once again broke his front fork. This time a workshop was nearer to hand, but he still had to carry out his own repairs, and lost more than an hour.
But he had a unique place in the history of the Tour, and Desgrange had pulled off a coup on a scale he could not possibly have envisaged. Very soon the maillot jaune had entered the language, or languages: yellow jersey, maglia gialla, gelbes Trikot. Other jerseys adorned the race. Former French national champions were allowed their purple jersey with tricoloured sash during the Tour, and World Champions their rainbow jersey, although not always to general gratification: later on, a cycling superstition developed that a rainbow jersey in a team brought bad luck, like a woman in a boat.
In the fullness of time the Tour added other jerseys of its own, green for the leader on points, ‘red peas’ for the meilleur grimpeur or King of the Mountains, white for best younger rider. And at the end of every stage today there is a faintly comical ritual when the day’s leader in each category steps up to the rostrum to be kissed by a couple of pretty girls, to receive a bunch of flowers, and to don his garment. Somewhat absurdly, this ‘jersey’ is now purely for show rather than to be worn, not a pulled-over-the-head jersey as was the original maillot jaune Christophe wore, not a light yellow blouse zipped up the front which the GC leader actually wears now on the road, but a symbolic vestment, opening at the back like a straitjacket for ease in slipping on and, once the ceremony is over, off again. Later the other great three-week races would follow suit, with the maglia rosa or pink jersey for the leader in the Giro d’Italia, and the gold jersey in the Vuelta a España. But none of the others has ever achieved the special réclame of the one introduced in 1919. Today, when a publishing imprint specializes in sports books, it naturally calls itself the Yellow Jersey Press; when a great historian like Richard Cobb collected his essays under the title Tour de France, a critic praising him could instinctively say that ‘in his own field there’s no doubt who wears the maillot jaune’. It remains the greatest of all cycling trophies, maybe the greatest of all sporting prizes.
For all of his being the first man in the jersey, a succession of punctures for Christophe on the last stage to the Parc meant that he finished third, behind Jean Alavoine in second and a distinctly lucky Firmin Lambot as winner, an able and thoughtful rider, if one more admired than loved. He continued the Belgian dominance, and the years to come showed that he wasn’t an unworthy winner. But Christophe remained, at least until the advent of Poulidor forty years later, the saddest of all Tour riders, the unluckiest, the best cyclist who never won.
By the following year, the best place that French riders could manage was eighth, with Jean Alavoine, Henri Pélissier and Christophe all falling by the wayside, and 1920 saw Belgian dominance become complete supremacy. Belgians won twelve of the fifteen stages, and the first seven places on the podium. In New York Carpentier beat the American boxer Lewinsky (no kin of ‘that woman’ whose exploits electrified the world seventy-eight years later, so far as can be established); in the Antwerp Olympics Suzanne Lenglen won a tennis gold medal; and in Dublin the French rugby XV beat Ireland 15–7 to win its first ever away match. These were consolation prizes of a sort for a France whose cyclists certainly needed consoling, undone as they were by every kind of woe, self-inflicted or otherwise.
First of their big names out of the race was Alavoine, who suffered no fewer than ten punctures on the first day. Christophe was laid low, like Petit-Breton before him, by kidney trouble, Bellenger collapsed after drinking icy water in the Pyrenees. It was there that the Belgians took control of the race, after Pélissier had won two western stages, to Brest and Les Sables. But he was penalized in a curious incident, accused of having thrown an inner tube on to the road, and left the race in fury. Unforgiving as ever, Desgrange said that Pélissier ‘does not know how to suffer, and he will never win the Tour’. Not for the first time, the patron’s words would return to haunt him.
After three Belgian riders, Firmin Lambot, Philippe Thys and Jean Rossius, had dominated in the Pyrenees, the Belgians remained in control through the Midi and over the Alps. If nothing else, Barthélémy showed that he certainly knew how to suffer. On the Perpignan–Aix-en-Provence stage he had a gruesome fall, broke his shoulder and dislocated his wrist. In later years he would never have been allowed to continue, but in those tougher days he was back in the saddle and finished eighth overall, the best of the French. It was still a Belgian triumph, with Thys becoming the first rider to win the Tour three times, 57'21" ahead of Hector Heusghem and then their compatriots, Lambot, Léon Scieur and Masson. But it was Barthélémy who was carried shoulder-high by the patriotic throng in the Parc des Princes on 25 July.
Another sport, English Thoroughbred racing, is rich in worldly-wise maxims – ‘Always trust the handicapper on top of the ground’, ‘Back a two-year-old until it’s beaten and then back the horse that beat it’ – which look clever when they come true, and are forgotten when not. ‘Fourth in the Guineas, first in the Derby’ is another old saw that occasionally looks good; and in the 1921 Tour de France, ‘Fourth last year, first this’ proved the way to bet. The pattern of the race was much as in the preceding years, anticlockwise through Normandy, Brittany and Gascony to the mountains, although stopping at the great Mediterranean naval port of Toulon for the first time since 1905.
Once again the Belgians were in charge from the beginning, with Mottiat taking the first stage to Le Havre. After the French rider Romain Bellenger won into Cherbourg, Léon Scieur, who had been fourth a year earlier, took the yellow jersey, and held it for the rest of the race. Scieur reinforced his position in a duel with Lucotti over the Aubisque, but fared less well on the next Pyrenean stage to Luchon, suffering a bad fall and barely holding the lead from poor Barthélémy, who had done his best to recover from a calamitous first day when he had punctured eleven times. The whole race was cursed by silex, flints that saw twenty riders get through eighty tyres on the second day. Some Tour officials blamed the quality of tyres, but the quality of the roads, still in the shadow of war, is as likely to have been the cause.
This was the year when Alphonse Baugé, head of La Sportive, the consortium for which Scieur rode, named the great mountain climbs ‘les Juges de la Paix’, after the magistrates who sternly adjudicate in French commercial cases; and the judges of peace were not merciful in this race. Both ranges were ridden in intense heat, which slowed the field over the Alpine stages. Goethals won a sprint finish into Geneva, after Barthélémy had led narrowly over the Galibier. Asked whether Bayonne–Luchon or Grenoble–Geneva was the tougher stage, he said that, although the Galibier wasn’t child’s play, it seemed easy compared with the five successive southern passes ridden under a scorching sun: ‘C’est indigeste’ – it’s hard to stomach.
The stage to Strasbourg was won by Henri Pélissier with Heusghem on his wheel and the others forty-two minutes behind. Desgrange now announced one more arbitrary innovation: to try and enliven the pace, lower-placed riders would leave two hours ahead of the leaders. With this change in place the last two stages were won by Goethals again, but Scieur finished the Tour a handy 18'36" ahead of Heusghem.
The winner was a 32-year-old protégé of Lambot, and like him came from Florennes. An agricultural labourer who had never ridden a bike until he was twenty-two, Scieur had turned professional just before the war, and taken fourteenth place in the 1914 Tour. Garlanded with flowers, he accepted his victory with becoming modesty: ‘In Florennes, you know, it’ll be quite something that Léon has won the Tour de France.’
In Paris it was quite something that French riders had had one more disappointing Tour. The angry Pélissier brothers were in excellent form away from the great race, Francis winning the French championship, Henri beating Francis in the Paris–Roubaix, while Christophe won the Bordeaux–Paris. But none of them made any showing in the Tour, and the best French performance came from Barthélémy in third with all his indigestion. National failure inflamed Desgrange, who lambasted the riders for having feebly surrendered to Scieur.
And still the French couldn’t get back onto the winner’s podium in 1922. This was despite a fine performance by Jean Alavoine, who finished runner-up thirteen years after his third place in 1909, and a touch of heroism from Christophe, now aged almost forty, who won the yellow jersey into Les Sables d’Olonne and held the lead over the Pyrenees. But again fortune didn’t favour the brave. In the mountains, Honoré Barthélémy had a terrifying fall, arse-over-tip off a small bridge to drop twenty feet into the icy stream below, but he managed to continue as far as Briançon before abandoning. There were several impressive breakaways, from Jacquinot on the first stage and from Alavoine thirteen minutes clear over the Aspin.
In an extravagant contrast to the previous year’s heatwave, the Tourmalet was still snowbound and had to be bypassed. There were two ‘stage hat-tricks’: Alavoine won three on the trot to Bayonne, Lucon and Perpignan, and Thys won into Toulon, Nice and Briançon. The last town was being visited for the first time, in place of Grenoble, and at the end of a stage which included the new – and, according to the riders, monstrous – Col d’Izoard. In all, Thys won five stages, but he was plagued by acute toothache and finished the race well down the field. Scieur had abandoned early with a broken fork, the very misfortune that had befallen Christophe twice before. ‘Jamais deux sans trois,’ the saying goes, and this time Christophe was on the Galibier when his fork broke, and he came down the great pass on foot. Mishaps of one sort or another continued, with Alavoine puncturing six times on the stage to Metz. As Portier said of this race, ‘On conjugua, à tous les temps, le verbe crever’ – the verb ‘puncture’ had to be continually used in all its forms – and one more crash removed Barthélémy.
By Strasbourg the yellow jersey had passed from Jacquinot, Christophe and Alavoine to Hector Heusghem, runner-up for the last two years, who now thought he had victory in his sights. But he damaged his bike in a tumble and borrowed another without obtaining official confirmation that his was unusable. For this technical infringement he was docked an hour, and it cost him the race: his compatriot Lambot reached Paris to win his second Tour, a back-to-back victory for Florennes, and the seventh win in succession for Belgium, which provoked bleats of ‘we was robbed’ in the French press. It was true that Jean Alavoine seemed desperately unlucky: he had forty-six punctures in all and his chain came loose fifteen times. But the roads were the same for all, and, if nothing else, the Tour taught the nursery lesson that life isn’t fair. It was also true that Lambot had achieved the apparently tricky feat of winning the Tour without winning a single stage, just as it’s possible to win without ever wearing the yellow jersey until the final podium.
Though that might seem obscure, the mathematical principle is simple enough. In a three-week road race, twenty different stages might in theory be won by twenty different riders, with a rider called Dupont second at a minute in each, in which case Dupont will certainly be the overall winner on accumulated time. Or Dupont might, again in theory, work his way up the GC to win on the last stage without having worn the jersey. Or he might take the GC lead and the jersey and then lose the lead, or hold it to the end, in either case without winning another stage. Or he might win the race without either wearing the yellow jersey or winning a stage. To be sure, the scoring and regulations for the Tour are of terrifying complexity, but the possibilities here outlined are not arcane in themselves, not even President Bush’s ‘fuzzy math’, just straightforward arithmetic that stems from the nature of the race.
Less than two weeks after the 1922 Tour ended, Italy erupted. The previous autumn the sometime left-wing socialist Benito Mussolini had proclaimed himself Duce or Leader of the newly formed Fascists, and saviour of his country from Bolshevism. By August he seemed to make good his claim when a Communist-led strike in Milan was ferociously broken by Fascists, who then in October set off to march on Rome. It looked a piece of opera buffa at first, but there was nothing comical in the outcome when Mussolini took supreme power, to the delight of many Italians, and the horror of many others. The latter included a young artisan, a carpenter or bricklayer or horse-dealer – he was vague about his background – and part-time cyclist called Ottavio Bottecchia.
For two years the Pélissier brothers had ridden in many races wearing jerseys of French champions, but they hadn’t ridden in the Tour since Desgrange had dismissed Henri as a man who would never win the race because he didn’t know how to suffer. But they were both back in the starting line-up of 139 riders in 1923, and Desgrange was about to be made to look silly as well as insulting. While the field was once again thinned by punctures, Jacquinot won the first stage to Le Havre, and the next was won by Bottecchia, of whom few fans had then heard but who was to be the revelation of this Tour, and the first Italian to win the yellow jersey. He autographed his maillot jaune and loyally gave it to Henri Pélissier, his Automoto team leader, and the gesture seemed to do the trick: Pélissier won the next stage to Brest.
Alavoine dominated the Pyrenean stages, though as much through luck as skill. The unfortunate Jacquinot rode brilliantly over the Tourmalet to take a ten-minute lead at the summit and then increased his lead up the Peyresourde in fierce sun, until he suddenly swayed on his bike and keeled over into a ditch where he groaned, ‘I’m dying . . . I’ve had it.’ Alavoine shouted sympathetic words as he passed, and Jacquinot called back, ‘Gars Jean, je te salue!’ (roughly speaking, ‘Come on, Jean, my son’), but Alavoine took advantage to win the stage, with Henri Pélissier far behind and fuming after he had been knocked down by a car.
Luck deserted Alavoine in the Alps, when he had a bad crash descending the Izoard. Told by the doctors to abandon, he said bitterly and understandably that fate was against him: ‘I’ll never win a Tour, never. It’s all over.’ It was on this stage that Henri Pélissier seized the advantage, distancing Bottecchia by half an hour, and then won the next stage also, crossing the Galibier and the Allos ahead of his brother who loyally supported him throughout. Henri hung on to the lead until Paris, where an ecstatic crowd greeted the first Frenchman to win in twelve years.
There were others who could be accounted winners. Conveniently forgetting what he had said before about Pélissier, Desgrange was at his fruitiest in greeting him: the stage win to Briançon had been achieved with ‘the beautiful regularity and classicism of the works of Racine’. The patron could afford to be gracious. More confident than ever, and carrying a new daily column on the Tour, ‘Avec eux sur la grande-route’ by the future stage director Henri Decoin, the Auto saw its circulation shoot up to 600,000, and on Monday 23 July 1923, the day after the Tour ended, sales broke through the million mark. After twenty years, the Tour had wholly justified its original raison d’être as a money-making device for the paper, and although Desgrange liked to speak grandiosely of the honour of the Tour, he might in honesty have quoted the regular and classical Racine: ‘Sans argent l’honneur n’est qu’une maladie.’
Riders had been divided into First and Second classes from 1920; in 1923 a new class of touristes-routiers had been introduced, independent riders outside the team organization, some of them real freelancers, semi-pros who turned up in Paris on the off-chance of competing. In that year also a new bonus system modified the scoring, with an additional two minutes for the winner of each stage, increased to three minutes in 1925. These innovations helped to change the character of the Tour, along with one other more important change in 1923, by which riders could now replace damaged parts of a bike rather than carry out repairs single-handed as before, like Christophe in his forge.
All of these details paled by comparison with the arrival of a truly great cyclist. After winning the Tour Pélissier had said simply of the runner-up, ‘Bottecchia will succeed me.’ He did so a year later, in quite dramatic style, and in circumstances Pélissier most definitely did not envisage. Bottecchia won the first stage of the 1924 Tour from Paris to Le Havre, and the last stage back to Paris from Dunkirk four weeks later. Far more to the point, he wore the yellow jersey throughout the race, from the first evening in Le Havre. This start-to-finish feat would be matched by Nicolas Frantz in 1928 and Romain Maes in 1935, but never since then.
At Coutances, on the third stage from Cherbourg to Brest, the Pélissier brothers abandoned melodramatically along with their team-mate Maurice Ville, with Henri only three minutes behind Bottecchia. The occasion was trivial or even ludicrous, on all sides. For the long night-time stages Desgrange issued each rider with two official jerseys. After the sun rose and began to warm him, Henri Pélissier took off one jersey and threw it aside. This was seen by people following in the ‘caravan’, who reported Pélissier to the commissaires; an official took the opportunity when he finished to lift his jersey and check whether he was wearing another; Pélissier was enraged and demanded an apology. Failing to receive it, he rode as far as Coutances where he, his brother and Ville ostentatiously dismounted and sat at a café and watched the rest of the field go by.
Although that jersey question seems footling by today’s standards, some of Henri Pélissier’s other foibles weren’t so trivial, and anticipated later tendencies all too exactly. He was, it was recorded, a veritable mobile pharmacy – far from the last time that phrase would be heard on the Tour – who carried in his jersey pocket aspirin for his migraine, chloroform for his knees, and a bottle of cocaine ‘for his eyes’. The fact was that many if not most of the riders were by now using stimulants of one sort or another. Various narcotics that would later be seen as evil poison were not then even illegal. And if Pélissier took cocaine, for his eyes or otherwise, he had at least that in common with both Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud.
His departure was nevertheless a setback Desgrange could have done without. The Auto accused the trio of deserting the Tour ‘on an incomprehensible whim’, though it also – under the headline ‘C’est embêtant’ – extended an open invitation to Pélissier to give his side of the story. He did just that, but not to Desgrange. The muck-raking journalist Albert Londres was writing for the Petit Parisien and befriended the trio, whose version he luridly reported, with Henri saying ‘I’m called Pélissier, not Azor’ (the name commonly given by French families to pet dogs). Londres compared the Tour to the last story he had covered, the penal colony on Devil’s Island where Dreyfus had once been sent: the riders were the ‘forçats de la route’, convicts of the road.
After all these alarums and excursions, the rest of the race was almost an anticlimax. Bottecchia crushed the field in the Pyrenees, crossing the Aubisque almost five minutes ahead of Frantz, and then took the Tourmalet and Aspin. Frantz turned the tables in the Alps, winning stages to Gex and Strasbourg after conquering the Col de Vars and the Col d’Izoard, but it wasn’t enough to stop Bottecchia, who had a comfortable lead of more than half an hour over Frantz when they reached Paris. Some of the gilt was taken off Bottecchia’s victory by the aggregate time: at an average speed of 22.89 k.p.h. (14.85 m.p.h.) it was the slowest Tour ever run.
And it was overshadowed also when the Olympic Games opened in Paris ten days after the Tour finished. This was the ‘Chariots of Fire’ Olympics, in which Eric Liddell switched from the 100 metres to 400 metres to avoid competing on a Sunday, Harold Abrahams won the 100 metres, and both were eclipsed by Paavo Nurmi, the ‘Flying Finn’, who won five gold medals, all despite the intense heat (the 40-kilometre cross-country was run in a temperature of more than 40°C, nearly 110°F, and half the field failed to finish).
If it had been an unsatisfactory Tour, Bottecchia proved all the same a great and ultimately tragic champion. French fans and journalists had been sniffy about this obscure but self-confident Italian, who had asked for trouble when he said that ‘You don’t have to be any good’ to win bike races. He had showed them better. There was one footnote to the 1924 Tour that seemed trivial at the time and might have been entirely forgotten. Bottecchia had been stalked, in later parlance, by a female fan who was evidently obsessed by him. Whether or not he was really serious, he seemed to show some interest in her; whether seriously or not, Henri Pélissier said that he feared for Bottecchia’s life, if the business came to bother his jealous wife. There was more to it than a potential spot of adultery. Bottecchia was known to be a socialist and an opponent of Mussolini. On several occasions during this Tour he had found his bike with the tyres flat, and he had found a threatening note one day denouncing him as an ‘anti-Fascist’. He may have shrugged it off, but it was a sinister omen.