For all the greatly increased popular success which the Tour enjoyed in the 1920s, Desgrange remained as farouche and dissatisfied as ever. He was dismayed by the long line of French failure in the great French race, angered by the continuing grip of commerce in general, vexed by the dominance of Alcyon in particular. It seemed to him that his brainchild had been kidnapped. And so he resolved to break the trade teams at a stroke. The 1930 Tour, he announced, would be contested by national teams – eight riders each from France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Germany – as well as sixty touristes-routiers grouped in regional teams. This was linked to two further innovations, the use by all riders of ‘anonymous’ or standard bikes, provided by the Tour and painted the Auto’s own yellow, and the arrival of the caravane publicitaire to provide an alternative source of finance. The caravan is now such a feature of the Tour that it’s hard to imagine France in July without that great parade, floats, cars and vans topped like heraldic helmets with the manufacturers’ emblems for instant coffee, processed cheese, chocolates, Crédit Lyonnais in yellow, PMU in green, which precedes the riders by an hour or so. For ‘La Vache qui Rit’, Graf, Delft biscottes, Esders, Noveltex, the caravan trumpeted their wares around the corners of the hexagone; for Desgrange, it answered his central financial problem.
‘Anonymous’ bikes seemed a logical change, although as it proved not a permanent one. Sport remains contradictory when it comes to equipment. Whereas no one serving at Roland-Garros, pitching at the Yankee Stadium or bowling at Lord’s uses balls of his own choice, but takes what he’s given, players at St Andrews and Augusta do use their own golf balls. This has plausibly been called an absurd anomaly: quite apart from the way high-tech balls, as well as clubs, are making a nonsense of the sport, by allowing all the best golfers, and not only major winners, to drive much further and reach the green much more easily than intended when the courses were built, it must be wrong that different balls should give different chances. Golf would be a better game if every player in a major tournament took a dozen balls from an identical batch at the first tee.
This analogy both does and doesn’t apply with bike racing. At Longchamps or Newmarket, the horse is the competitor, not the jockey, whose neutrality is emphasized by the way that all weights are equalized, even if every racegoer knows that a brilliant jockey can be worth several pounds in a hard finish. At Silverstone or Indianapolis both driver and car are competitors. A great driver may be able to win with one team or another, but the technical competition between manufacturers to improve their machines is an essential or even the principal part of the sport. The Tour is a race between bicyclists, not bicycles. And yet improvements in bike technology have been regularly spurred on by the sport, albeit with little enthusiasm from those who run it and who have often, over a hundred years, given the impression that they would like cyclists still to be riding the machines of 1903.
At any rate, and whatever his motives, the immediate outcome of his latest change was gratifying for Desgrange. The 1930 Tour was dominated by the French team, with five of its eight riders in the top ten finishers, including the first Frenchman to win the race since 1923; and it was indeed a triumph for national team spirit. After stages in Normandy and Brittany won by Charles Pélissier, André Leducq won the stage to Les Sables, took the yellow jersey into Luchon, and held it for twelve more stages into Paris, supported all the way by his team-mates. It was sweet revenge: Leducq was a very able rider who had already enjoyed eight stage wins and had come fourth in 1927 and second in 1928. But, so far from being supported by the trade teams he had been riding for, he had served as an underling riding to orders and had never yet had the opportunity to achieve his potential.
Even now he needed luck as well as his courage and strikingly equable temperament, which saw him through one of the heroic rivalries of Tour history. He was an adequate climber but a much better descender, with a mastery of that blend of delicate balance and steel nerve needed to gain time turning and leaning at high speed downhill. This he was doing down from the Galibier on the long Alpine stage from Grenoble to Evian, still ninety seconds off the lead, when he took a terrible tumble, arse-over-tip twice, breaking a pedal and cutting himself badly on the gravel. Tough as he was, Leducq wanted to abandon, but his comrades Charles Pélissier, Antonin Magne and Marcel Bidot urged him back into the saddle even though he had lost fifteen minutes.
Having won the previous stage, Learco Guerra now led an escape to make up as much time as possible over Leducq, and could never have been caught on a present-day Tour, with stages as much as 150 kilometres shorter. It was the remaining 65 kilometres out of a 331-kilometre stage which gave the Frenchmen their chance. In an extraordinary performance, they gradually caught up with the leaders and raced for the finish in a thirty-man sprint amid screaming crowds, won by a bloody, bold and resolute Leducq from Pélissier in astonishing fashion. ‘Dédé’, one reporter wrote of Leducq, was ‘gueule d’amour, muscle d’acier’, a lover’s smile and steel muscles.
After that the Tour was almost all theirs. The Belgian Frans Bonduel won the next stage from Evian to Belfort, but the brave roadman-sprinter Pélissier won the last four stages in a row, while Leducq never lost his yellow jersey, with Guerra taking second place at the finish. The French had won the first team prize, which meant 51,900 francs. It was scarcely more a triumph for Leducq than for his team-mate: Pélissier had been in the first three for a truly remarkable eighteen of the twenty-one stages, and the last four stages which he won on the trot gave him eight in all, a record since equalled only by Eddy Merckx in 1970 and 1974 and Freddy Maertens in 1976, and never yet surpassed. As a result he picked up even more lucrative contracts than Leducq himself. Other nations enjoyed their cycling successes that year, with Alfredo Binda winning his second rainbow jersey as road World Champion in Liège, to follow his first in 1927, but the Tour was a French triumph. ‘Football’s coming home,’ the English players sang in 1996; in 1930, cycling had come home – and it remained there for five years, with French riders winning every Tour from 1930 to 1934.
But this period was distinguished by more than just a national resurgence. The whole character of the race was changing. As Portier put it in his history of the first half-century of the Tour: ‘The physiognomy of the contest was modified. Racing by team, co-operation between team-mates, self-sacrificial assistance to the leader – whom it became difficult to shake off even after an accident – meant that more and more riders finished in the peloton. Stages lasted six hours instead of the fifteen or sixteen of the heroic age. Cyclists no longer rode all night. The Tour was humanized.’
And Desgrange’s self-interested humanizing of the Tour paid dividends. The Auto’s circulation rose by half, from half a million to three-quarters. The Tour was now a central part of French life, and so was the paper.
By the following summer, sporting France needed something to cheer it up. Over the winter the great scandal had erupted that saw France brutally ejected from international rugby and the championship in which she had been the fifth nation, the only one outside the British Isles. There may have been an element of nationalism and class resentment in this. The English public-school men who ran rugby in London and tried to guard its absolute amateur purity had always had mixed feelings about Welsh miners, or for that matter Gascons and Basques from the south-west – which was and is the home of the French game. Those rough farmers and artisans, very much not public-school men, were never quite above suspicion, and when clear evidence emerged that some of les rugbymen had been accepting discreet payment, France was kicked out of the competition with alacrity, not to return until after the war.
And so another French triumph in the Tour was healing balm, when Antonin Magne, third behind Leducq the previous year, won the 1931 Tour for France, a feat ‘Tonin’ accomplished despite taking no more than one individual stage. Honour if not prize money was divided between him and two routiers-sprinters, Charles Pélissier and Raffaele di Paco, who jousted from Vannes to Montpellier to Grenoble and Paris, taking five stages each. Neither made it into the top ten in the final classification, but if the ‘points’ or sprinters’ green jersey had yet existed, one of them would surely have won it.
Along with that humanization of which Portier spoke, the general standard of the riders was rapidly improving, and also levelling: hence the way most of the field rode together, and hence also the much shorter intervals between finishers. In 1920 Thys in first place had finished ten hours ahead of Vandaele in tenth; in 1933 Speicher and Stoepel in the same positions were separated by no more than forty-six minutes. But this generally improving standard produced its own problems. The best riders were more and more of a muchness, who were hard to split at a finish. When the 1931 Tour riders reached the Pyrenees, an almost indistinguishable group of ten finished in a bunch, with barely a minute between them and Vervaecke in nineteenth place. The race began in earnest only on the ninth stage. Leducq, Camusso and Benoit-Faure battled up the Col d’Aubisque, along with a gaggle of gifted younger climbers, Alfons Schepers and Julien Vervaecke from Belgium and the Italian Antonio Pesenti.
But the man who struck was Magne. Born in 1904, twelve days before Leducq, stubborn, level-headed, unflappable, hard as nails, Magne may have been the first truly professional rider to win the Tour by means of dedication and training rather than courage and flair. Thirty years later he was Poulidor’s directeur sportif, and reproached that great if fallible sportsman for his indiscipline in training, telling him that the work of preparing for the Tour and riding in it is as intricate as a spider’s web. Every May Magne used to take himself to the Pyrenees, to acclimatize himself to racing at altitude and to practise up and down the gradients.
In July 1931 it showed. He climbed the mist-shrouded Tourmalet grimly and calmly, and then left the field for dead on the descent, reaching Luchon five minutes ahead of Pesenti, who was winning his spurs on the Tour, and who was in turn three minutes ahead of Demuysère. Magne took the yellow jersey, and held it to the end, demonstrating his own adage that ‘Wearing the yellow jersey doubles your strength.’
All the same he needed more than his own strength. On the stage from Nice to Gap Magne had problems with his chain, and Demuysère and Pesenti pulled far ahead while the peloton caught up with Magne. Then Pélissier heroically performed single-handed for Magne what the whole French team had done for Leducq. He slipped free from the peloton, taking with him Magne and also Di Paco, though the latter with mixed feelings as they were bitter enemies. By the finishing line in Gap, Demuysère was barely two minutes ahead of these three musketeers.
A grim stage over the Galibier was ridden through rain and mud and harsh unseasonal cold, and then the ding-dong sprinting duel between Pélissier and Di Paco resumed. Pélissier won a sprint in the Charleville velodrome on the antepenultimate stage, but only by outmanoeuvring his rival so ruthlessly that the stage was awarded to Di Paco by the officials after Italian protests. One last road stage across the stones of the Nord, still in foul weather, was won by the tough Frenchman Gaston Rebry: points that helped towards his national team’s victory in the Tour, but couldn’t stop Magne winning. He and Pélissier were carried shoulder high by the crowd, all of them soaked through by the rain. In case Magne didn’t know what to do with his prize money, Leducq told him laconically that ‘You’ll be able to buy some fine big-dugged cows.’
Although the green jersey was not inaugurated for another nineteen years, the 1932 Tour saw an innovation that was a precursor of it – the award of time bonuses. If a stage winner won by more than three minutes, he picked up an additional three minutes, and the first three received an additional four. This system, had it been in force two years earlier, would have taken an hour off Pélissier’s aggregated time. The object of the exercise was once more to combat indolence, to shake up the pack and ‘urge the riders to fight hard’, a phrase that might sound brutal but addressed a persistent truth. There is an ever-present temptation for cyclists in a long, exhausting race, if they aren’t going to win anything, to go through the motions, pedalling steadily without pushing themselves to the utmost. By way of unintended consequence, the change encouraged a new breed of points specialists, sprinters who could put in a fierce finish.
Like the preceding five, this Tour took an anticlockwise route with a first stage from Paris to Caen, although with a distinct change: several stages in the north and west were dropped, and the race reached the Pyrenees in no more than four long stages as well as two much-needed rest days. As a whole it was notably shorter than the year before, twenty-one stages instead of twenty-four, 4479 kilometres, down from 5091, although the longest individual stage was a gruelling 382 kilometres from Nantes to Bordeaux, substantially further than the previous year’s longest.
As it proved, it was on that third stage that Leducq took the yellow jersey from the German Kurt Stoepel when he pipped Raffaele di Paco at the line, and held on to it for the next eighteen days. They weren’t plain sailing, for all that. The field left Luchon in a storm which an old hand thought presaged ‘a nightmare day’, and they made their way painfully up what seemed a more than usually flinty and pot-holed road to the Col d’Aubisque, with the little Spanish rider Trueba (inevitably ‘The Flea’) in the lead. By the end of the day Pesenti had won the stage, though there were other fine performances, uphill from Maurice Archambaud, showing his quality as a climber, and downhill from Georges Speicher, who showed his own strength as a descendeur extraordinaire by moving from fifty-first place atop the Tourmalet to twelfth at Luchon. Leaving the Pyrenees Leducq had three minutes over Stoepel, nine over Pesenti and eleven over Benoit-Faure.
And then Leducq and Archambaud gave another demonstration of teamwork when Leducq punctured on the stage to Perpignan but Archambaud stuck by and helped him back to the peloton and eventually to second place for the day, behind the Belgian Frans Bonduel, who had problems of his own. That year’s Belgian team looked formidable on paper, but, in striking contrast with French co-operation, was riven by dissension. Jean Aerts, the team leader, accused his colleagues of leaving him in the lurch, and one meeting in the team hotel almost ended in physical violence.
On the stage from Cannes to Nice it was the turn of the Italians, who came into their own with a team performance that would eventually put Camusso in third place on the podium. But Leducq held his place throughout the Alps, crossing the Galibier in snow, where he won the approval of a discreet spectator, none other than Henri Pélissier. ‘Celui-là, c’est un costaud,’ he said of Leducq: that’s one tough guy. By what was becoming well-nigh a Tour tradition, Leducq beat Di Paco into Charleville but was declassed. From there to Malo, Demuysère and Rebry reprised their duel of the preceding year, Rebry finishing more than fifteen minutes ahead of the field, but with little effect on the GC. Leducq took the last two stages, having anyway cleverly used the new points system to make the lead he had established in the Pyrenees unassailable, and ‘the joyful Dédé’ reached Paris as one of the most popular champions ever to win.
That race prompted one French writer to eulogize the joy of this most beautiful of international sporting contests, but before the next running of the Tour joy and beauty were perceptibly put in the shade by political events. In January 1933 Germany had a new leader, and the European stage darkened. It wasn’t until the Berlin Olympics three years later that Hitler showed his full, masterly understanding of the new uses of sport for political purposes, but any idea that sport transcended national rivalries was already less realistic than ever, and the French team at the very least knew that they were in some degree riding for national glory. That was made easier by their quality: by 1933 France had a stellar équipe, one of those glorious conjunctions of great athletes in one team that now and again grace one sport or another; as it might be, the late 1930s Yankees of DiMaggio and Gehrig, the late 1940s Middlesex of Compton and Edrich, or the late 1950s Real Madrid of Puskas and Di Stefano. Under André Leducq the team comprised Antonin Magne, Charles Pélissier, Georges Speicher, Roger Lapebie, Maurice Archambaud, René le Grèves and Léon le Calvez. The Italians were captained by Guerra, who would finish second, the Belgians by Aerts, who came ninth. Both Guerra and his team-mate Binda had been reckoned favourites by some, but no team proved a match for the French, and it was always likely that a French rider would win.
What was not pre-ordained, however, was which of the team it would be. Archambaud won the first stage and held the yellow jersey to Digne in the Provençal Alps, at the end of the ninth stage. Archambaud was tiny for a cyclist, and in those more robust days, before correctness and ‘sensitivity’, his press nickname was ‘Le Nabot’, the dwarf. Whatever his size he was strong enough to win over the pavé from Paris to Lille, heading a group of Belgians into Marcq-en-Bareuil racecourse and leaving Magne in fortieth place, sixteen minutes off the pace. Just to confirm how unsettled the form was, the great Di Paco finished the second stage into Charleville as lanterne rouge, and Benoit-Faure was eliminated. On the next stage, to Metz, Charles Pélissier had a bad crash, and finished the stage with his right arm dripping blood, to be eliminated also.
This was the year which saw a new prize, the Grand Prix de la Montagne, awarded to the meilleur grimpeur – best climber or King of the Mountains – on a comparatively simple formula of points measured by performance on climbs, although ‘comparatively’ is, as it were, a comparative word where anything to do with the regulations of the Tour is concerned. As the years went by the scoring was refined and climbs were graded by difficulty, from 1 to 4 and, above 1 (like Premier Grand Cru claret), the hors catégorie climbs. Category 4 means gentle hills in Normandy or Lorraine which any weekend cyclist could potter over; ‘outside category’ means awesome Alpine passes like the Galibier, which are frightening even to look at. As the rules in 2002 stipulated, scores ranged from 1 point for the third rider over a category 4 climb to 10 for the fourth over a category 2, to 40 points for the first over an hors catégorie.
In that first year the mountains leadership was seized on the Ballon d’Alsace by Trueba, who confirmed his place as best climber on the Galibier, although that stage into Grenoble was won by Guerra, now second overall to Archambaud. The next stage to Gap had been reconnoitred by Magne on behalf of the French team. Duly aware how tough the later part of the course was, he launched an attack after only twenty kilometres: Georges Speicher won the stage and moved into fourth place. The whole stage was so brutal that Machuery, the timekeeper, allowed additional time, but ten riders were eliminated even so. Poor Archambaud rode to the limits of his endurance, and although Leducq and Lapébie helped him on the Col de Vars, he reached the summit completely exhausted, and his yellow jersey was taken over by the Belgian Georges Lemaire.
The mountain stages Grenoble–Gap and Gap–Digne were won by the 26-year-old Speicher, an enthusiastic swimmer who had never ridden a bike until he was seventeen, had only turned pro the previous season, and was only in the French team as a substitute. He turned into a fine rider, and in particular a brilliant descender, though technology as well as courage and skill played a crucial part: he was riding a bike that for the first time had a brake clamping the rim of the rear wheel. A front brake alone, even – or especially – when assisted by the rider’s foot applied to the wheel, had been unsatisfactory on all stages, tending to make the bike rear up, but was particularly perilous downhill. As Speicher showed, the descents could now be handled much more adroitly, and hence that much faster.
It was Speicher’s skill downhill that won him the next stage into Marseilles. Although tensions inside the French camp were reported, Archambaud stiffened his upper lip to say the next day, ‘Speicher or me, it’s all the same’ – a contrast to the Belgian team with its continued internal squabbling.
Through the Pyrenees Trueba again dominated the climbs, while Speicher nearly lost his yellow jersey, left behind up the Tourmalet by Guerra and Martano. But he too showed great skill as dégringoleur or downhill artist, catching the two Italians to take second place. Speicher then held the overall lead through Gascony, Brittany, Normandy and at last into the motor-racing course at Montlhery. He had won three of the year’s twenty-three stages, in itself less impressive than Jean Aerts’s six, including three consecutively from Bordeaux to Rennes, and Guerra’s five, including the last stage.
By now Europe was shivering with political fevers, and few countries were spared. Although the Third Republic didn’t experience revolution, or totalitarianism, or the small-scale civil war Austria endured in July 1934 when Dollfuss was assassinated in an attempted putsch by the National Socialists, that year saw violence in France also. In October, three months after the Tour had ridden into Marseilles, King Alexander of Yugoslavia landed there to be greeted by the French foreign minister Louis Barthou, and as the pair drove from the harbour they were assassinated by a Croat nationalist. And the year had begun with the explosive Stavisky scandal, with the suicide of the fraudster Alexander Stavisky and the resignation of a government minister who was implicated in his swindles, and then in February there was a one-day general strike, violent clashes in Paris between Right and Left and widespread rioting.
Sport was not excluded from the effects of politics, quite apart from the irrelevant but teasing coincidence that, on the very day Stavisky was found dying in his chalet in Chamonix, a boy called Jacques Anquetil was born in Rouen. In the month before the Tour the new football World Cup was staged for a second time, in Italy. It had been created four years earlier to link the two great centres of soccer at the time, Europe and Latin America. That first competition in Uruguay had been something of a hollow victory for the host nation, as England and Scotland were in dispute with the world governing body and most other European countries had boycotted the competition for reasons of their own, with only France, Belgium, Yugoslavia and Romania sending teams to Montevideo. In 1934 the host nation again won – and Mussolini turned the World Cup into a propaganda circus, with the Italian players giving the Fascist salute before beating the Czechs in the final.
By that standard the Tour, which began in Paris on 3 July, was a more elevating occasion. French supremacy was confirmed, with a French rider beating an Italian once more, but there was no orgy of nationalistic triumphalism. And the French really did dominate, winning nineteen of the twenty-three stages, five won by Roger Lapébie, holding the yellow jersey from start to finish, and taking three out of the first five places.
In addition to the national teams, twenty individual riders were invited by the race organizers; the system of time bonuses was modified; and scoring for the Mountains prize in its second year was refined by grading the great climbs over the Ballon d’Alsace, Galibier, Vars, Allos, Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque. There was also a contre la montre individuel or time trial over eighty kilometres from La Roche sur Yon to Nantes, a discipline that would become a specialism.
In the brilliant French team there were two new names, the national champion Raymond Louviot, ‘Laripette’, and the cannois René Vietto, only twenty but already with a reputation as a climber, and destined to be the year’s true hero. Both were urged on by Leducq, who was now following the race by car. The early stages were eventful, with plenty of crashes on the northern pavé, and Archambaud abruptly abandoning after he fell badly crossing tram lines just after leaving Belfort, to break his collar bone. Even then – and even when Charles Pélissier, their best sprinter, abandoned – the French were in complete control, taking the first six stages, before Vietto came into his own across the Alps, winning from Aix-les-Bains to Grenoble. He was made to fight all the way up the Galibier by the brilliant little Spanish rider Federico Ezquerra, but he tore away downhill and had three minutes in hand over Martano and Magne at the line. Over the Vars and Allos, and then again on the Gap–Digne stage, Vietto leapt further up the GC from sixteenth place to sixth, before winning the stage from Nice despite a fierce attack by Martano. He rode into his home town of Cannes to an ecstatic reception from a huge crowd, cheering even as it was brutally driven back by police truncheons.
By the Pyrenees Magne was still in the yellow jersey, but he kept it only through Vietto’s self-sacrifice, which entered the heroic annals of the Tour. Descending from the Hospatilet, Magne fell badly. Vietto was not far behind. Told that Magne had broken his wheel, he immediately took a wheel off his own bike to give it to Magne, and then waited in tears for the car balai, the broomstick van.
The next day Vietto led over the Col de Port and then lost the lead. Magne was back in the peloton, wondering how far his chances had been damaged, when Vietto joined him again as fidus Achates, and they caught Martano together. On top of that, Martano drank bad milk on the evening before the stage from Luçon to Tarbes, and spent most of the night in the latrine. Magne won the stage from Trueba, twenty-two minutes ahead of Martano. Then a last mountain stage saw a huge crowd at the Tourmalet to cheer on Vietto at the head of the field. He crossed the Aubisque, and then reached Pau, ahead of Lapébie and Martano.
Leaving the Pyrenees Magne had the race at his mercy, but he recalled the year when Leducq was almost caught on the line, and said, in what would become ritual fashion for the leader, still echoed by Lance Armstrong sixty-eight years later, that ‘the Tour is never finished until the last turn of the pedal’. In the event Magne only emphasized his dominance in the time trial in Brittany ahead of Lapébie and held the overall lead to the end, when Leducq heavy-handedly told him that he could now afford half a dozen of his big-uddered cows. Magne himself was less whimsical in explaining his success in unexceptionable terms. ‘You need to be able to stay the trip, economize your strength,’ he said, ‘and be as strong at the end of the race as at the beginning.’ Some of his glory was shared with others. The last stage into the Parc des Princes was won by Sylvère Maes, and his compatriot Félicien Vervaecke took fourth place overall, the more impressive since both of them were competing as individual riders. Vervaecke was rewarded by inclusion in the Belgian national team for the following year.
And there was Vietto, who became the first of what remain, remarkably enough, only four Frenchmen to have won the Mountains prize in more than sixty Tours, to be followed by Louison Bobet, Raphael Geminiani and Richard Virenque. The prize later became something of a prerogative of men either from hilly Spain, led by Federico Bahamontes, maybe the greatest climber of all, and, less explicably, from the lowlands of Belgium. A Belgian would take the Mountains prize in 1935, while two others, and an Italian, would bring to an end those years of ceaseless French triumph.