By the 1920s sport had become more than ever a ruling passion in advanced or capitalist countries, so much so that some malcontents saw it as the new opiate of the people. For one British Communist, Jack Cohen, sport was ‘one of the strongest ideological weapons of the bourgeoisie’, for another, Palme Dutt, it was ‘dope to distract the workers from the struggle’; and they might just have had a point. Certainly the people were distracted. In America this was the decade of Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player there had ever been and maybe there ever would be, while in England it saw the last flowering of Jack Hobbs: in the summer of 1925 he scored a record 14 centuries in a season and surpassed Grace’s 126 in all. Stern moralists continued to frown at professionalism and lament the way its standards could corrupt amateur sport, as seemed to happen that January, when for the first time ever a player – the New Zealand captain Cyril Brownlie – was sent off for foul play in a rugby international. Amateurism still had its heroes and heroines, some risible, like the Oxford crew who sank in the 1925 Boat Race; some exalted, like the now aged Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who finally retired this year as chairman of the International Olympic Committee; and some glamorous, like the two French players who won the singles titles at Wimbledon, René Lacoste (of alligator-embroidered sportswear ill-fame) and Suzanne Lenglen.
For France the tennis players’ victories were a much-needed balm, since French cyclists would remain conspicuous by their absence from the winner’s podium in the Tour for the rest of the decade, during which lustrum the race was won by an Italian, by two Belgians, and twice by a Luxembourger. In 1925 not only did Bottecchia win his back-to-back victory, there were, as the year before, no French names in the first five. Bottecchia only narrowly failed to repeat his feat of wearing the yellow jersey from start to finish after winning it on the first stage to Le Havre. He yielded the lead to the Belgian Adelin Benoit in Brest after the third stage, won it back in Bayonne, yielded it again for a day but then took the lead in the next gruelling stage to Perpignan, ridden in driving rain.
If French riders were to come back, it would have to be the Pélissier brothers, riding for Automoto–Hutchinson, but they both abandoned, Henri following a crash, Francis after he had unsuccessfully chased Bottecchia over the Aubisque, and their team-mate Thys left the race as well. More frightful weather made the Nice–Briançon stage tougher than ever, but even though his compatriot Bartolomeo Aimo won the stage and took ten minutes off him, Bottecchia was still in control, and remained so to the Parc des Princes, where there was a dramatic sprint finish in which Romain Bellenger was squeezed out by two Italians, Aimo, who came third, and Bottecchia, who won the Tour by fifty-four minutes from Buysse. Those last moments summed up a race in which Bellenger had been the only Frenchman to win a stage.
That year’s Tour had seen a modification of the parcours (the race distance), with shorter stages and more of them, eighteen in all; the 1926 race had one stage fewer, but it was the longest ever run in the history of the Tour at an enormous 5745 kilometres. For the first time it began outside Paris, leaving Evian at 2 a.m. on 20 July. Desgrange hoped this would enliven the race after what had been seen as a disappointing running in 1925, but his disputatious manner helped to ensure that a number of stars were absent, including the three Pélissier brothers – Charles, the youngest, had now joined Henri and Francis on the circuit – who were still sore over their endless disputes with the patron. Other brothers were present, Jules and Lucien Buysse, as well as some surprising entrants who included the first Japanese rider ever to take part in the Tour. Sadly Kisso Kawamuro got no further than the first stage, which was won by Jules Buysse, twenty-five minutes ahead of Lucien.
It was Lucien who would prevail at the end, having taken the Tour by the throat in the Pyrenees. Once again, conditions in the southern mountains were appalling, knocking one rider after another out of a race in which only 41 out of 126 starters would finish; Bottecchia and Benoit were among those who departed. The stage over the Aubisque, Tourmalet and Aspin was ridden in torrents of icy rain which made much of the road almost impassable. But Lucien was Baudelaire’s ‘roi d’un pays pluvieux’. He reached the summit of the Aubisque 1'43" ahead of two Belgians, Omer Huyse and Léon Parmentier. The weather overcame Tailleu, who succumbed to an attack of cholic while Buysse crossed the climb eleven minutes ahead of Aimo, increased the lead to twenty-two minutes by the Peyresourde, and then, in an icy deluge but still king of a rainy country, arrived at Luchon 25'28" ahead of Aimo. The rain had completely disrupted the race timetable, with poor Gustaaf Van Slembroeck, who had begun the stage wearing the yellow jersey, losing almost an hour and a half, and others hours further behind, almost all the riders arriving one by one, miserably strung out by the elements, some not even making it by bike but brought in morose and bedraggled by car.
That grim and dramatic stage effectively decided the race. Lucien went on to win into Perpignan from brother Jules, Frantz won two stages to Toulon and Nice but then fell ill and couldn’t keep up, and Lucien Buysse was 1h2'25" ahead of Frantz at the finish. Buysse had ridden a methodical and brave race, and had demonstrated the way the Tour would very often from now on be won, the method Lance Armstrong still used three-quarters of a century later, by maintaining a steady pace on the road stages and then striking in the mountains, with such ferocity that, thirty years later, Tour writers could still acclaim Buysse as the best climber Belgium ever produced: which is to say before Eddy Merckx.
The failure of the regular attempts to suppress teams and prohibit collaboration between riders illustrates Horace’s saying ‘Naturam expellas Furca, tamen usque recurret’, that you can drive Nature out with a pitchfork but it always comes back. With all racing sports, from athletics to horse racing to cycling, collaboration between those taking part may not be precisely natural, but it is certainly fruitful. The instinct towards collaboration stems from a simple and unavoidable fact: if three riders of equal ability take part in a race, two of them working as partners will beat the third. The question then arises how far this co-operation should be recognized as legitimate.
Sometimes collaboration is plainly illegitimate, when reduced to ignoble absurdity. When the Ferrari driver Rubens Barrichello pulled over on the final lap of the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix to allow his team-mate Michael Schumacher to win, it made the sport look contemptible in the eyes of every fan alive. In other cases the distinctions are nicer. The Rules of Racing say that every horse shall be run on its merits, meaning that it should run to win if it possibly can. In practice it’s acknowledged that some horses have no chance, and the owner of one horse will often run another as a pacemaker. If everyone knows that this is happening, the results can be reputable, and riveting. In the enthralling King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in 1975, Bustino had not one pacemaker but two in his attempt to crack Grundy’s stamina. The stewards knew this, and so did the other trainers, and the bookmakers, and the punters, and everyone was happy. Racegoers may be less happy when, as sometimes happens, the pacemaker wins at long odds, ahead of its stablemate, the short-priced favourite. In France, this is taken account of by the stipulation that horses in the same owner’s colours or from the same stable are coupled in the betting, so that both have to be backed together.
Then again, when a race meeting like the Shergar Cup at Ascot in 2002 was specifically organized as a competition between teams, British Isles jockeys against the Rest of the World, and then actually ridden as one, with jockeys collaborating, it caused protests not only from the stewards, with one saying that the jockeys had to ride within the Rules of Racing, but from at least one trainer. The comparison with cycling was fascinating. In a two-mile race, Kieren Fallon kicked on his horse Jasmick to force the pace against the other team, and then, having cracked the opposition, let his own team-mates through to win. Jasmick’s trainer was Hugh Morrison, who didn’t see the funny side of things. ‘My horse has been used as a pawn,’ he complained. ‘They’ve created a team game and Kieren has played it.’ Fallon himself said drily that, ‘They told me that it was an individual team thing. I know I’m from the west of Ireland but someone is going to have to explain that to me.’ Morrison’s puzzlement was understandable – he wasn’t used to seeing in a horse race tactics identical to those used in the Tour, with one rider sacrificing himself for the team – while Fallon’s Irishism, ‘an individual team thing’, admirably described the Tour.
Collaboration in other sports has been outlawed. One day in May 1954, at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, the 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3'59.4", beating Gunder Haegg’s existing record by two seconds but, far more to the point, breaking the magical four minutes for the first time ever. It was a wonderful day, still remembered by anyone who was a small boy at the time, but there was nothing spontaneous about it. The historic run had been meticulously planned; Bannister didn’t have competitors trying to beat him, he had colleagues trying to help him, with Chris Chataway and Christopher Brasher setting the pace. At the time, pre-planned running of a series of laps by different pacemakers, in order to ‘tow’ a selected runner to a record time, raised some eyebrows in the athletics world, but today it is all part of the entertainment in the track-and-field ‘circus’.
Some form of co-operation tends to take place in cycling even when there are no recognized teams. Although riders in the earliest Tours were identified by the make of bikes they rode – Garin winning the first Tour for La Française, Henri Cornet the second for JC, then Peugeot taking four and Alcyon the next four – they weren’t grouped in teams until the seventh Tour, and from 1909 to 1914 the leading cyclists rode for bicycle manufacturers’ teams. We have seen that, after the Tour returned in 1919, Desgrange hoped to suppress teams, but they were allowed again from 1925, with Bottecchia, Thys, the Buysse brothers and the Pélissier brothers riding for Automoto–Hutchinson, others for J.-B. Louvet–Pouchois, or Alcyon–Dunlop, Meteore–Wolber, and with Jean Alavoine quaintly comprising the one-man team Alavoine–Dunlop. In 1928 regional teams were added to the commercial groups, though not to much effect: the first three that year, Frantz, Leducq and Dewaele, were all riding for Alcyon–Dunlop, and the first two dozen at the finish were all from company teams, with Paul Filliat of Sud-Est the best of the regionals at twenty-fifth, before Desgrange suppressed teams once more, for another year, but as it turned out for the last time. From 1930 the leading riders rode for national teams, later supplemented by regional teams, through to 1962 when commercially sponsored teams returned, and, after another short interlude of national teams in 1967–8, are with us still.
Under whatever guise, teamwork is rooted in the efficacy of pacing. In the early days of bike racing, riders were artificially paced by other cyclists who were not taking part as competitors, and then by cars or motorbikes; later in the twentieth century, ‘Derny-paced’ bike races enjoyed some popularity, with the cyclists following a little moped-like machine, a cross between bicycle and motorbike, a form of competition which had shocking results on one occasion involving Eddy Merckx. In team racing the pacing is both continuous and subtler. It can be seen in pure form in team time trials, of which there is now one in each Tour, when the lead endlessly rotates between riders, each setting the pace for no more than twenty seconds at a time. On road stages, the same thing happens in less structured form, with riders leading on behalf of their team, one rider pacing others, and domestiques serving their leaders like worker bees serving the queen. They literally wait on him, fetching and carrying bidons of water, they faithfully stay with him if he punctures to relay him back to the peloton, they accompany him if he attacks, and, if a rival rider attacks, they set off and stick to his wheel: all in the service of the team and its leader.
Just how much of a co-operative team sport cycling had become, the next Tour would show. In 1926 Buysse had been riding for Automoto; in 1927 Nicolas Frantz was riding for Alcyon, much the most powerful team, and he duly won. For all his mixed feelings about manufacturers, Desgrange now encouraged the development of their teams with an innovation that was soon regarded as the worst mistake he ever made. There were twenty-four stages to be ridden in twenty-nine days, of which sixteen were split stages, run as team time trials with separate departure times at quarter-hour intervals. The avowed object was partly to put an end to the way that the race was decided – as so conspicuously the year before – in the mountains, and partly ‘pour lutter’, as it was bluntly put by one journalist, ‘contre l’indolence des coureurs’. There was, it was widely agreed, a problem of idle riders resting on their pedals; the new arrangement of the Tour was meant to make them do some work. At the same time, Desgrange returned to tradition in the form of a departure from Paris, now at a civilized hour, 7 a.m. rather than 2 a.m. the year before. Only 37 of the 142 starters who left for Dieppe on 19 June were groupés in teams, the rest riding as individual touristes-routiers.
But the line-up did not include Ottavio Bottecchia. On 14 June, five days before the Tour began, he had been found beside an Italian country road where he had been cycling, covered in blood and his head and body battered, groaning, ‘Malore, malore’ – it hurts. Since his bike was undamaged, it didn’t require Holmes or Poirot to see that he had been attacked. But by whom? The question became far more pressing soon after when Bottecchia was taken from the scene of the crime to a church and given the last rites before dying of his injuries; though not so pressing that it was ever answered.
He is the only Tour winner ever to have been murdered, a crime that remains unsolved to this day. Had he been set upon by peasants he had somehow angered – because he was stealing their grapes, in one not very probable story – or by common bandits? Or had he been deliberately whacked, in the later language of the American mob? Some years after his death an Italian hoodlum was stabbed in a fight on the New York waterfront, and is said to have confessed with his dying words that he had murdered Bottecchia as a contract killing for a gangster called Beto Olinas, but no one of such name has ever been traced. Those who remembered Pélissier’s words about the stalker may have thought of a crime passionel, though given the circumstances of his death it seemed far-fetched to imagine any woman scorned or husband cheated tracking him down on that country road.
That left politics. Bottecchia was a known socialist and opponent of the Fascist government. Although a veritable gentleman compared with his contemporaries Stalin and Hitler, Mussolini wasn’t above whacking opponents himself. After Mussolini had apparently won the 1924 election in a landslide, the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti made himself a marked man by denouncing the election as a fraud, and in 1926 he was killed by a Fascist gang. A story went round that Bottecchia had likewise been liquidated as a troublemaker: the priest who was with him at his death expressed his view, very many years later, in 1973, that it had been a political murder. Against that, any demagogue of the age like Mussolini would most likely have wanted to protect a national sporting hero who, while he may have been a political dissident, was still conferring lustre on the name of Italy. At all events, after more than seventy-five years, we still don’t know who killed the great Ottavio Bottecchia, and most likely we never shall.
When the Tour began in this shadow, it was the teams who set the pace as intended, with the Dilecta team winning the first stage and Francis Pélissier taking the yellow jersey, but like many other riders he disliked the brutal pace now dictated by the flat-out time trials, or what he called ‘go the whole way’ racing, and he abandoned on the sixth stage. The lead was taken by Ferdinand Le Drogo in his native Brittany, before the Belgian Hector Martin, riding for J.-B. Louvet, took the yellow jersey from Vannes to Bayonne, leading by twenty-three minutes. Now Alcyon was about to show its strength, and to show why it had hired Frantz.
Once again the field reached the Pyrenees in wintry rain, and the riders, though grateful for a respite from the hated time trials, didn’t face the mountains with any enthusiasm, either. Albert Londres’s phrase ‘convicts of the road’ sounds melodramatic. No one was forced to become a Tour rider as poor wretches were sent to Devil’s Island. But it should be remembered that, for many professional sportsmen, their trade has always been just that: a way of making a living, and often a harsh and comfortless one. Even county cricket, major-league baseball or professional soccer can seem a hard life, offering until recently, and for some even now, few lavish rewards and much drudgery. This is something well captured by the cricketer Simon Hughes in his book A Lot of Hard Yakka, and even better by the footballer Eamon Dunphy in his brilliant memoir Only a Game?
For little boys, and even for adult fans, racing cyclists may be heroes, but their own life rarely strikes them as heroic. Suffering from all sorts of ailments brought on by riding a bike, covering great grim distances across the plains, and even grimmer climbs up mountains that would have been thought literally impassable when the Tour began, riding sometimes in unbearable heat, sometimes in horrible cold and rain, they lead a life which, as Samuel Johnson might have said, has more to endure than to enjoy.
To make it worse, as they slogged up the first Pyrenean climb, the peloton heard that the Italian Michele Gordini had made an astonishing escape and was forty-five minutes ahead. He didn’t stay there for long. He led over the Aubisque, but soon after was found beside the road disconsolately repairing his chain, and Frantz took the lead ahead of Pé Verhaegen and the little French rider Benoit Faure, ‘The Mouse’. Frantz increased his lead over the Tourmalet and Aspin, to win at Luchon by 11'40" and take the yellow jersey from Martin, whom he now led by a crushing two hours.
The excitements of the race were from then on provided by two French debutants, André Leducq and Antonin Magne. A quite short stage from Marseilles to Toulon was won by Magne, acclaimed by some reporters as a new Petit-Breton, before Frantz came into his own once again in the Alps. He escaped over the Col de Vars and the Izoard with the Belgian Julien Vervaecke, whom he allowed to win the stage: Frantz said that he didn’t want to risk falling on the descent, and he was anyway far ahead in the GC. One consequence of the development of more sophisticated tactics was that, as long as a rider knew where he stood, he could afford to let others who offered no larger threat make long escapes or even win stages.
Those tactics still needed to be employed with care. On the Briançon–Evian stage, the Swiss touriste-routier Charles Martinet made a long escape across the Galibier, to lead by eighteen minutes at one point, before he was caught by Verhaegen, who won the stage twenty-two minutes ahead of a very tired Frantz. But Frantz won the stage to Metz and finished the Tour almost an hour and a half ahead of Dewaele in second. Although it was the second victory for Luxembourg, and another ‘home defeat’, there was a sense of French optimism. Behind Belgians in second and third came three Frenchmen, Leducq, Benoit and Magne.
All the same, France would have to wait. Frantz not only went on to win a back-to-back victory in 1928, he did something that had never been done before and has never been done since. Bottecchia in 1924 and Maes in 1935 led the whole length of the Tour by winning the lead on the first day and never losing it. But only Frantz has ever literally worn the yellow jersey throughout, since he came to the Départ at Le Vesinet on 17 June wearing the jersey as the previous year’s winner, held the GC lead by winning the first stage to Caen, and never surrendered it before the Parc des Princes on 15 July.
He was much helped by his team-mates: Alcyon took the first five places, and this race dramatically confirmed the dominance of the team system. The 162 starters were categorized in a more complicated way than ever, 86 of them in teams, but the remaining touriste-routiers also divided into regional teams and individuals. Among the smaller groups was a four-man Australian team sponsored by Ravat–Wonder and led by Hubert Opperman. He had been sent to Europe under the aegis of Dunlop, and shown good form earlier in the year. But ‘Oppy’ and the Aussies made only a modest impact on the Tour: at the halfway point of one stage they actually led from Alcyon, but they couldn’t match the hardened, ten-man European team. Although Opperman may have been parti pris, he was speaking for many others when he denounced the team time-trial system as ‘a crime which should never have been perpetrated on the roads of France’.
For all such strictures, Desgrange ‘persevered in error’, as Portier magisterially put it, when everyone else thought that the time-trial stages with separate departures were a demonstrable mistake. That was the way the race was run, whether they liked it or not, and it only helped the ‘bleu ciel’ of Alcyon and thus Frantz. They showed their superiority from the first ‘clm’ – contre la montre, against the watch, as the French more nicely call time trials – despite Luducq, who finished ten minutes behind after puncturing. Eight stages through Normandy, Brittany and the west brought them to Gascony, where a local hero emerged. Victor Fontan was a 36-year-old Béarnais, said to look like a smuggler, who had been racing since he was fifteen. He had won the Toulouse–Bordeaux race as long ago as 1913 and the Tour du Sud-Ouest in 1922, was highly regarded by those who knew him but had never taken part in a race outside his own part of the country before. He now won the stage to Bordeaux, and left the town on the next stage surrounded by a huge and elated crowd, before he excelled in the Pyrenees.
On the Hendaye–Luchon stage Camille Van de Casteele made a long escape, leading at the Aubisque by twenty-seven minutes, but lost his lead on the Tourmalet where Fontan took over. He reached Luchon seven minutes ahead of Frantz, but it was Frantz who was still leading the GC by forty-one minutes. Others had their day, notably the two Magne brothers: Antonin won the great Alpine stage from Nice to Grenoble and the penultimate stage to Dieppe, while Evian–Pontarlier was won by Paul, but Frantz kept his lead. He had a sticky moment 53 kilometres out of Metz on the road to Charleville when his fork broke on a level crossing, but he acquired another machine – a ladies’ model – at a bike shop. Under the latest version of the constantly changing rules, such a replacement was allowed as it would not have been in other years, and Frantz was helped back into the race by three domestiques, so that he only lost twenty-eight minutes from his lead, and iced the cake by winning the last stage to the Parc.
It was a famous victory, but an ambiguous one. Very likely the best man had won, but he had without doubt been hugely helped by riding with the strongest team. It was now almost impossible for a strong rider to win with a weak team, as poor Fontan empirically demonstrated. He had ridden superbly in the mountains, only to see his lowly team give away hours in the time trials, and one reporter wondered out loud whether, if Fontan had ridden for Alcyon and Frantz for the Pyreneans, it might not have been Fontan who had won the Tour.
At any rate, everyone but Desgrange was agreed that the formula of team time trials and split stages was the worst ever devised for the Tour de France. And even the patron himself, stubborn as he was, and for all that he hated to be told what to do, recognized the military maxim: never reinforce defeat. Although the previous team system remained in force in 1929, the time trials were scrapped. Even then, Desgrange characteristically felt obliged to add a minatory note that he would reintroduce them if the average speed fell below 30 k.p.h.
Whatever the sequence of cause and effect, the contrast with Frantz’s yellow-all-the-way the previous year could not have been more striking. No fewer than sixteen different riders won stages in 1929, with only two men winning more than one, two for Frantz, four for Leducq. And the lead changed hands repeatedly, with the one curiosity that at Brest three riders were on equal time and Frantz, Fontan and Leducq all wore yellow jerseys. The shake-up came in the Pyrenees. Poor Fontan was a few miles out of Luchon when his front fork broke. He borrowed a spectator’s bike, rode to the next village with his own bike on his back, and effected the repairs, but he had lost too much time to stay in contention; his spirit as well his machine broken, he abandoned in tears.
That stage to Perpignan was won by Jef Demuysère, where the lead was taken by Dewaele, but the pace slowed across the Midi, and Desgrange enforced his threat by introducing a time trial to Cannes as a punitive measure. Dewaele had a hard time over the Alps, and at Grenoble he talked of abandoning, but he stuck it out. Evian–Belfort was a triumph for the debutant Charles Pélissier, youngest of the brothers, who won the stage by 14'30" to finish his first Tour in twenty-fifth, but, after Desgrange had imposed further punishment drills, the second of which time trials was won by Dewaele and Alcyon, and although Frantz took the last stage to Paris, it was Dewaele who stood on the winner’s podium on 28 July.
If he thought that his triumph would be an occasion of universal rejoicing, he was soon disabused. The choleric Desgrange surpassed himself in denouncing this ‘victoire d’un moribond’, and went away to brood about the hated Alcyon team. It was a mark of the surly chauvinism of the patron and his paper that the Auto headlined the result ‘LE 23 TOUR DE FRANCE CYCLISTE’, only mentioning the winner’s name in smaller type, and gave equal billing on the front page to the victory of France over the United States in the Davis Cup. It was indeed a wonderful French tennis team, the ‘Four Musketeers’, Borotra, Brugnon, Cochet and Lacoste, but the Tour was the paper’s very own baby.
Just over thirteen weeks later, on 24 October 1929, the Twenties ended dramatically. That was ‘Black Thursday’, the day the New York stock market collapsed. Its effects would soon reach Europe, ushering in the great depression with many catastrophic social and political consequences. For France especially there was a clear caesura here: the decade from 1919 to 1929 was unmistakably post-war; from 1929 to 1939, just as unmistakably pre-war. The next ten runnings of the Tour would take place in the shadow of unemployment, hunger and approaching war.