Over its first century, one of the themes of the Tour’s story has been the regular flowering of Belgian cycling: before and after the Great War, in the late 1930s, and then the total dominance of Merckx in the early 1970s. By an improbable coincidence, the Tours of 1935 and 1936 were won by Belgian namesakes but no kin – Romain Maes and Sylvère Maes merely and coincidentally shared a common Flemish name – but it was the first of these who achieved the more memorable feat. Romain won the yellow jersey on the first stage from Paris to Lille on 4 July, and he was still wearing it as they returned to Paris and the Parc des Princes on 28 July. It was the third time that this feat had been accomplished, and the last. It may now be one of those sporting records, like Ted Williams’s .406 in 1941, Jim Laker’s nineteen wickets at Old Trafford in 1956, or Lester Piggott’s nine wins in the Derby, that are almost certainly never to be matched. But there was a sombre note, and Maes’s feat took place in a race marred by tragedy.
On a Tour that followed almost the same course as the preceding year’s, although now with six half-stage time trials, Maes’s romantic exploit began when he escaped in the unromantic mining town of Bruay on that first stage to Lille, and reached the line at the Croié-Laroch racecourse all alone, nineteen minutes ahead of poor Vietto who had made a sorry start. A further toll was taken on the next stage to Charleville where bad roads wrought havoc on the peloton; Archambaud punctured half a dozen times and Martano was eliminated. By Belfort, Maes held a six-minute lead over Magne. The first time trial, from Geneva to Evian, was ostensibly won by Di Paco, but only by means of grabbing a lift on to a car, for which he was penalized and lucky not to be disqualified.
The race began in earnest in the Alps. Vietto came into his own over the Col d’Aravis, easily beating Maes. A reporter who consolingly told Maes that he would have ridden a fine race even if he lost the yellow jersey the next day was told, ‘Who said that I’m going to lose the yellow jersey?’ and he didn’t lose it. The Alpine stages were notable for a grimmer reason. A series of collisions between riders and vehicles had begun on an earlier stage, and a publicity car had already become entangled with the peloton before Magne ran into the back of a car that had braked suddenly. He fell, nastily impaling his left calf on a pedal. Although Leducq stopped to try to help him, it was soon clear that the Tour was over for him.
But it was on the next stage that disaster came, and on the descent from the Galibier where the Spanish rider Francesco Cepeda had a horrible fall, dying from his injuries. He was the first fatality claimed by the Tour, to be followed by Simpson in 1967 and Casartelli in 1995. ‘One is too many’ is easily said, and true enough, but if anything it may seem surprising that no more than three riders have been killed in a hundred years. To watch riders in a bunch sprint finish, or swerving on wet pavés, or negotiating narrow pass roads, or descending from a great col at hair-raising speed, is to witness what by any standards is a dangerous sport. The cyclists who ride in the Tour are brave men.
Although Vietto won the stage from Gap to Digne, he wasn’t riding as well as the previous year, and it was Vervaecke and Benoit-Faure who slugged it out over Vars and Allos. Romain Maes was still in the lead by Nice, but with no more than thirty-five seconds over Camusso, the Belgians’ great foe, with Speicher five minutes behind, and Romain won the next stage to Cannes ahead of his namesake Sylvère Maes. On the next stage from Cannes to Marseilles there was another nasty accident, mercifully not fatal. Jules Merviel made an escape, while the field stopped at a water fountain to drink and douse themselves. ‘Julou’ was almost twenty minutes ahead at Cogolin, but nearing Hyères he was overcome by dizziness in the intense heat, ran into a stationary car, and collapsed with blood pouring out of his left eye. He was lucky to be taken in time to hospital at Hyères, and luckier that he had sustained only a fractured collar bone and partial damage to his eye. In those unhappy circumstances Charles Pélissier and Honoré Granier reached Marseilles first. Nor did the casualty list end there: Lapébie had a torn muscle and abandoned, as did Di Paco.
A diminished and sombre field rode on to the Pyrenees, where Speicher broke down, though he still managed to take sixth place in the Tour. Poor Vietto never got back into the race, despite attacking gamely on the Perpignan–Luchon stage, and the Italians were in disarray, with Camusso suffering a fall and most of his team also abandoning, to leave three Belgians in the lead, Romain Maes, Félicien Vervaecke and Sylvère Maes.
On the next stage the heat was still overpowering but made slightly more bearable by a quantity of bottles of beer lining the road, so that the riders, in the freer and easier conditions of the age, were able to stop for a ‘thirst truce’. Or so they thought: the beer was in fact a ruse arranged by Julien Moineau to distract his rivals, and he reached Bordeaux fifteen minutes ahead of the field, chortling at his wheeze. Even so, he made little impression on the general classification. The Belgians only consolidated their position in a series of time trials, and by the end took four of the first five places. Romain Maes won the last stage from Caen to Paris to win the Tour from Morelli, followed by Vervaecke.
Any lingering idea that sport could exist above politics was ended in 1936. On the day before the Tour ended the Berlin Olympics began, to become an awesome display of sport as theatre as politics, recorded for posterity by the slickly repellent film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and with an orgy of Nazi flag-waving, gratifyingly spoiled for exponents of ‘racial science’ by the brilliant victories of the black American Jesse Owens in the 100 and 200 metres and long jump.
Political events were ominous enough. In March Hitler defied Europe by reoccupying the Rhineland, then Mussolini’s armies stamped out the last resistance in Abyssinia in April. And in July, while the Tour cyclists descended from the Alps, and shortly after the ‘Republican Olympics’ were due to be held in Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War began, a war that among less trivial consequences would halt the Vuelta a España. Just as the European Left had persuaded itself that an anti-Fascist Popular Front was a noble cause uniting all decent men and women, Stalin complicated matters in August by staging the first Moscow Trial, when sixteen of his colleagues where shot after confessing to imaginary crimes. The times were not dull.
France was caught up in the turmoil. As the year opened, Pierre Laval was prime minister, but he resigned in late January, another step on the path that would take this former Communist towards the Vichy government, energetic support for Hitler’s New Order, and execution as a traitor. Just a month before the Tour began, Léon Blum became prime minister at the head of a left-wing coalition determined to give the workers a shorter working week and paid holidays. In the midst of this fervent atmosphere the 1936 race really did deserve to be called the Popular Front Tour.
As if to emphasize this age of anxiety, the Italian cyclists were absent, it was said, ‘pour raisons politiques’, but there were teams from France, Belgium and Germany, as well as smaller national teams of four or five riders from Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria and, for the first time, Romania and Yugoslavia. A Swiss rider wore the yellow jersey, again for the first time, when Paul Egli won the initial stage from Paris to Lille. If that suggested that the smaller teams would play a large part, it was illusory. The absence of the Italians meant that the race – over much the course of the previous year, from Paris to the Nord, to Alsace, over the Alps and through Provence to the Pyrenees and home by the west coast and Normandy – would be dominated by the Belgians led by Romain Maes and the French led by Magne. Sixty team riders were augmented by thirty touristes-routiers, who included Vietto. After Egli’s brief moment of glory, Archambaud took the overall lead, lost it to Arsène Mersch of Luxembourg, and took it back over the Ballon d’Alsace into Belfort. Despite a bruising fall, he kept the lead between Evian and Aix-les-Bains, on which stage poor Vietto abandoned. It was a miserable summer, and most stages were ridden through the rain, until the Galibier, which was bathed in sunshine, though covered in snow. The Spaniards Ezquerra and Julian Berrendero dominated the climbs, but the stage was nevertheless won by the Dutch sprinter Theo Middelkamp.
For some years the Tour hadn’t visited Briançon, and renewed acquaintance proved unlucky for Archambaud. He was taken ill with a vomiting attack, and his overall lead passed to Sylvère Maes, who never thereafter relinquished it. Magne fought out a duel with Maes on the next stage to Digne, but the Belgian won with a ferocious climbing performance on the Izoard.
They crossed the Col de Vars, past its quaint refuge, really a barracks built during the reign of the absurd Napoleon III, with those same two Spaniards leading from Sylvère Maes and Magne, before Maes punctured on the descent. There was then a bizarre incident at St-André-des-Alpes when the local postman threw a beer bottle at a rider, who failed to catch it. The bottle shattered in front of Magne’s bike, and he lost minutes to the resulting puncture. Maes increased his lead when his Belgians won the team time trial from Nîmes to Montpellier. Not that the teams were entirely unchallenged: another freelance, Sauveur Ducazeaux from Bayonne, won the first stage in the Pyrenees from Perpignan to Luchon with an escape before the Portet d’Aspet. Mersch joined him, and they came back to the field, but escaped again rather undeservedly when not only the peloton but the officials were held up by a train at the Pont-de-Cazeaux level crossing.
While it rides along ‘Les jolies routes de France et de Navarre’, as the song has it, the Tour passes scores of level crossings every year. Whereas the roads it uses are ruthlessly cleared for many hours by the gendarmerie, the trains continue to run, sometimes holding up the field, or groups of riders, or a single man; and the race regulations covering how passages à niveau can affect the race are of a Cartesian intellectual rigour – ‘When a rider(s) with less than a 30-second advantage is (are) held up at a railroad crossing the fact that the barrier is down is considered a mere race incident’ – which it may require an education at the École Normale fully to elucidate.
Bad weather still dogged the Tour. On the crucial stage over the high Pyrenean passes, thick fog meant that the field could only see a few yards ahead, to be followed by driving rain. Magne had been waiting for this day to mount an attack, but he punctured again, found himself cut off from his team and gloomily watched others pass him, led by Maes who won the stage into Pau and sealed Magne’s fate for the year. It was 27 July, Sylvère Maes’s twenty-seventh birthday: as he said himself, a very happy one. Mersch led the last day into the Parc des Princes, but the overall lead was still comfortably held by Maes, who won from Magne and Vervaecke, with the touriste-routier Léon Level, who had been second to Maes on the Luchon–Pau stage, a very creditable tenth. Less creditable was the performance of the French team, so triumphant for the past three years, but now placed behind Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg. There was modest compensation for France and Archambaud the following year when he beat the world hour record by covering 45.767 kilometres; and there was another French star in the ascendant: Roger Lapébie won the Paris–Nice race and the Critérium National. But his truly heroic performance came in the grande boucle, regrettably overshadowing another country’s participation.
Although England had some claim to be the home of the bicycle, and although cycling has been a hugely popular sport among the British, it has rarely been one in which they have excelled at the highest level. Even now not many British riders have ridden in the Tour compared with French, Italians or Belgians. None had taken part in the race until 1937. That was the year when a new king was crowned in Westminster Abbey (and the coronation was the new-born BBC television service’s first outside broadcast), with the shy and awkward George VI providentially succeeding his glamorous but shallow brother Edward who had abdicated the previous December, and whose presence on the throne would have been disastrous when war came; the year Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as prime minister; the year George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier.
And it was the year Charley Holland and Bill Burl entered the Tour de France as the first British riders, in a three-man team with the French-Canadian Pierre Gachon. It was not an auspicious debut, and their participation had little impact on the great field in a race that was both unusually dramatic and historic. Gachon was eliminated by time on the first stage, Burl abandoned on the second after crashing twice, and Holland was relegated to last place after the stage over the Ballon d’Alsace for holding on to a car.
More important than any national participation, this was the first year when the dérailleur gear was generally used by Tour cyclists. Although the appearance of handlebars has varied, and of wheels, as has the materials from which frames are made, both strengthening and lightening bikes, the brilliant simplicity and effectiveness of the original diamond-shaped design means that it has changed very little in basic appearance in more than a hundred years. During the whole time the Tour has been run there has been in fact only one truly radical change, and that is the gear. The coming of the derailleur (to anglicize it) was akin to the change from hand-set type to machine composition, or from piston-prop aircraft to jets. And as with other technical revolutions, it was strongly resisted: many of the bike companies claimed that the new gear was too expensive and troublesome.
It was surely ingenious. Until then, gear ratios on a bike could be changed by turning the rear wheel round, as Tour riders did when beginning a climb, or with a simple three-speed hub gear on a city push-bike. The derailleur was operated by a switch on the frame of the bike beneath the handlebar (much later the switch was moved on to the handlebar), operating a wire which moved an articulated arm holding the chain by the rear wheel. As its name suggests, this gear derails the chain to move it from one cogwheel to another. Now riders could choose from four or five gears, later doubled by the simple expedient of having two sets of cogged wheels at the pedal end of the chain. Oddly enough, this revolutionary innovation appeared at first to make little difference, at least as measured in basic statistics: the winner of the 1936 Tour covered its 4442 kilometres at an average of 31.108 k.p.h., the winner next year covered 4415 km at 31.565 k.p.h. But cycling was transformed all the same.
France was not quite transformed. A great International Exposition held in Paris in 1937 gave a misleading appearance to a country that was in reality in woeful economic difficulties, and politically still very tense. The Popular Front government came and went, leaving behind one other legacy for which hundreds of millions of travellers would be grateful, the creation of the SNCF. The nationally owned railway network covered a total of 42,500 kilometres at the time of its formation. Sixty-five years later a correspondent covering the Tour, especially if he came from England with its third-world railways, could only be awe-struck by a country where trains still cover most of the country with comfort and punctuality and stunning speed. After the first rest day in the 2002 Tour, it was possible to catch up with the race by taking a train from Paris to Bordeaux, a distance of 580 kilometres, in 3 hours 40 minutes, leaving and arriving on the second. An equivalent (or rather, at 350 miles, a shorter journey) from London to Berwick-on-Tweed takes just under five hours, if you’re lucky. They order some things better in France, from railways to movies: 1937 was also the year of La Grande Illusion, the first part of Jean Renoir’s incomparably moving ‘War and Peace’, followed two years later by La Règle du Jeu.
The rules of the game for the 1937 Tour saw ninety-eight cyclists grouped in national teams, as well as individuals who would ‘for the first time be treated and cared for like the aces’. In the early stages the lead changed hands, with Majerus, Archambaud, Kint and Bautz – Luxembourger, Frenchman, Belgian and German – successively wearing the yellow jersey, until it was taken by a 22-year-old Italian. Gino Bartali had already twice won the Giro, but this year had been told by Mussolini to skip the Italian race in favour of the Tour for reasons of national prestige. He rode brilliantly over the Galibier, reaching Grenoble eight and sixteen minutes ahead of Sylvère Maes and Lapébie.
Here the drama began to unfold. First, Archambaud collided with an official car, wrecking one of his wheels. He took over Le Grèves’s bike, which was too big for him, but crashed again and abandoned, followed by Speicher after another tumble. Then disaster struck Bartali as he descended from the Col du Laffrey, accompanied by Jules Rossi, his team-mate. Crossing a bridge, Rossi suddenly fell, forcing Bartali into the parapet, and over into the icy stream beneath.
In the local doggerel, ‘Parlement, Mistral et Durance sont les trois fléaux de Provence’, and this tributary of the Durance was quite enough of a scourge for Bartali. Helped by Camusso, he heroically rejoined the race even though his bloody and muddy body was almost seized up with cold. Amazingly enough he still held the yellow jersey at Briançon. A famously pious Catholic, Bartali claimed to be sustained by his faith and by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, but even she couldn’t make up for the effects of his terrifying accident. Although Bartali reached Marseilles, it was clearer to the Italian cycling authorities than to him that he couldn’t go further, and he was ordered to abandon.
That Toulon–Marseilles stage was a team time trial, won by the Belgians, who were plunged into a violent row when the race director arbitrarily decided to change the rules in favour of single riders against teams, ostensibly ‘to equalize chances’. A nasty situation grew nastier in the Pyrenees when Lapébie’s handlebars broke after they had been sabotaged; the Belgians accused Lapébie of taking unauthorized food for his brother Guy; and then Lapébie was given an illicit push, ‘despite his vehement protests’, and was penalized ninety seconds. On the next stage it was Maes who punctured, was helped illegally by his team-mates and by two individual countrymen, Gustaaf Deloor and Adolf Braeckeveldt, and was penalized in turn. Much worse, an angry mob in Bordeaux, enraged by the treatment of their local hero Lapébie, attacked the Belgians, throwing pepper in their faces. Just before the next stage began, the Belgians announced that they were withdrawing in protest and would not take part in the Tour in future, with one of the team saying sarcastically that they didn’t want to be lynched in Paris.
As it all too often does, violence worked: Lapébie was able to win the stages into La Rochelle and La Roche sur Yon, before winning the Tour seven minutes ahead of Vicini, with the Swiss rider Leo Amberg in third. Displaying singularly little magnanimity in victory, Lapébie poured scorn on the Belgians: ‘I was the fastest. Sylvère Maes knew he was beaten.’ Orwell may not have been entirely right when he said that, far from a mark of human brotherhood, sport is ‘an unfailing source of ill-will’ between peoples; but there are times when he doesn’t seem to have been so far wrong.
Despite their threats, the Belgian ‘black squadron’ (from the colour of its team jerseys rather than its mood) did return in 1938, and despite his disaster, Bartali was back stronger than ever, amid a deeply ominous national and international scene. In January, after the resignation of the French premier Chautemps, Blum first tried and then failed to form another government, then briefly succeeded, his four weeks in office coinciding with an event that shook Europe. In the 1930 and 1931 Tours there had been German teams; in 1932 this became ‘Deutschland–Oesterreich’, adumbrating in cycling terms the Anschluss, Hitler’s absorption of Austria in March 1938.
Although it would be far-fetched to suppose that there were any conscious political forces affecting the Tour, this mood of heightened nationalism was echoed in the new rules: no more individual riders, only national teams. France was in fact represented by not one but three teams, the first squad, captained by Magne, and two supplementary teams, the Pernod Cadets captained by Leducq, and the Bleuets. The bonifications were simplified and reduced, a minute’s bonus only for a stage winner, and the Briançon–Aix-les-Bains stage included for the first time the Col d’Iseran, with the race run anticlockwise for the first time since 1932.
And so, as the field rode through Normandy, Brittany and Guyenne, the yellow jersey changed hands from Oberbeck to Majerus to Leducq, an unexpected leader when they reached the Pyrenees, but with no more than twelve minutes in hand over Sylvère Maes, who was forty-second in the GC. The only incidents by then were sundry misfortunes. Paul Maye, a French sprinting champion, had had a bad fall even before the Tour began. He managed to finish the first stage to Caen with an agonizing broken shoulder-bone before abandoning. Vietto seemed out of sorts even before he collided with a motor-coach on the second stage; the Toulouse rider Sylvain Marcillou came a cropper at St-Georges-de-Didonne and cracked his head against the edge of an old well, was helped back into the saddle by Jaminet, and rode on until the blood blinded him and his team had to leave him by the roadside. He nevertheless forced himself to continue to the finish, arriving half an hour behind the field at Bordeaux, where he collapsed. It was a moving episode, and yet almost absurd. The story of the Tour is quite often one of heroic but fruitless sacrifice.
Towards the end of the Pau–Luchon stage, Bartali attacked. He was already one of the great climbers of the age, though with a completely distinctive technique. Instead of a steady incremental advance uphill, he stuck to the other climbers’ wheels until they approached the summit, then attacked and broke away from the field with something as close to a sprint as the gradient permitted. Then on the descent from the Col d’Aspin he skidded on a tricky corner and broke a wheel. But he repaired and recovered and began to tighten his grip with every mountain stage, where the new system of bonus points for climbers worked very much to his benefit. Leducq had lost his appetite or his aptitude for climbing and finished badly in the mountains. As for the victor of five years earlier, Speicher was caught cadging a tow from a car and was ignominiously disqualified.
The next stage in driving rain from Luchon to Perpignan was won by Jean Fréchaut, usually reckoned a sprinter; Félicien Vervaecke won the Narbonne–Béziers time trial; and Magne showed that he wasn’t finished, by winning the stage to Montpellier, though not with much help. The French team was fractious and jealous, not even sure whether to follow Magne, Jean-Pierre Goasmat or Victor Cosson, the last of whom was the leading French rider when the Tour reached the Alps, in third place, 8'45" behind Vervaecke and Bartali.
Even then there was a lull before Bartali launched the attack everyone had been expecting, between Digne and Briançon, crossing the line on his own 5'18" ahead of his team-mate Vicini, followed by Mathis Clemens. Now Bartali had the yellow jersey, and he meant to keep it, despite a fierce attack by the Belgians after the Galibier and over the 2769-metre Col d’Iseran. On the descent to Bourg-Madame the whole Italian team managed to puncture except for Bartali on whom fortune was smiling and who was left racing with Belgians and Frenchmen. But they couldn’t hold him, there or all the way to Paris. On the last stage Magne and Leducq escaped together. The two near twins, who had both ridden the Tour for the first time in 1927, who had both finished in nine races and who had won it twice each, entranced the crowd from Vallangoujard to the Parc des Princes. The officials hesitated before awarding the stage to them both ‘ex aequo’. It was a sentimental occasion, the more so in hindsight since neither man was to ride in the race again. But no amount of sentiment could stop Bartali, who won the Tour by eighteen minutes from Vervaecke, with Cosson in third place.
This was the first Italian victory since Bottecchia’s second Tour thirteen years earlier, only the third in all. It sent Italy into raptures and was inevitably milked for political purposes. A fund was set up for Bartali, to which Mussolini was ostentatiously the first subscriber. When Italian fans had crossed the border for the Briançon stage and begun to mob Bartali, an Italian cycling official shouted, ‘Don’t touch him. He’s a god!’ He wasn’t, in fact, for all that the grudging chauvinist Desgrange had said the year before that ‘I have never seen anything as wonderful as Bartali on the Ballon d’Alsace.’ He was indeed a wonderful rider, as well as one of the more attractive Tour winners, a simple Tuscan, a generous man who, in Italian races, had been known to let another rider win ahead of him when the man’s promessa sposa was waiting at the line. His sense of duty and piety was what everyone wrote and writes about Bartali: he made the pilgrimage to Lourdes, he ate with a statuette of the Madonna on the table, he thanked her for his successes. Maybe what’s significant here is that his behaviour was thought noteworthy. The very fact that open devotion seemed quaint or amusing in a man from the homeland of Catholic Europe may have adumbrated the implosion of the Catholic Church a generation or two later, not least in Italy. At any rate, Bartali’s piety would add a piquant element to one of the great duels in the story of the Tour, with his impious young countryman Fausto Coppi.
By the following summer the most politically ignorant cycling fan could not be unaware of the direction in which Europe was heading, and the 1939 Tour was a shadow of itself. A field of 79 riders began the race, not in itself a huge reduction from the 100 of 1930, but for raisons politiques both obvious and ominous, there were no German or Italian riders, and no Spaniards either in the harsh aftermath of the Civil War that had just ended. One French rider entered for the race was André Bramard. He was even allocated 69 as his dossard number, but by July he had been issued another number by the army, was already in uniform, and couldn’t take part.
Partly in order to give a depleted race some fresh flavour, there was a second ‘B’ team from Belgium, along with teams of eight each from Switzerland and Luxembourg, and four regional French squads. The provinces of France thus had home teams to cheer, Ouest fans when the race went from Lorient to Nantes, Sud-Ouest from Bordeaux to Toulouse, Sud-Est from Montpellier up into the Alps. In this respect the new formula proved a considerable success. As if pre-ordained, the stages through Brittany were dominated by Breton riders: Jean Fontenay took the yellow jersey, Eloi Tassin won Vire–Brest, Pierre Cloarec won Brest–Lorient. But the year was more notable for Vietto’s comeback after years in the doldrums following his fine races in 1934 and 1935. Riding for the South-East team, he overcame the jinx that had seemed to dog him in the earlier stages of the race, and had won the yellow jersey by the Pyrenees.
They were crossed in appalling weather, violent storms and heavy rain, with Vietto attacking on the Tourmalet and then battling with Maes on the descent through thick fog. Maes pulled away on the Col d’Aspin, but Vietto fought back and still led the GC into Toulouse, and then through his home town of Cannes to an ecstatic welcome. And yet he was only 1'49" ahead of Sylvère Maes when they reached the line at Monaco, with no more than twelve minutes over Vlaemynck, Vissers and Archambaud.
Instead of torrential rain they now raced through scorching Alpine sun. The Belgians struck, with Maes dropping Vietto and increasing his lead approaching the Col d’Izoard. And Vietto was stricken. All racing cyclists dread pole-axing défaillance, or what English riders call ‘the bonk’: not the mellow tiredness that a game of tennis, golf or rugby can bring, nor yet the deep fatigue that any professional athlete sometimes knows, but a terrifying, paralysing collapse, when the blood sugar is exhausted from the rider’s metabolism and he can find neither energy nor will to use his muscles at all. Vietto was bonked. He recovered, and managed to reach the summit, but was now a hopeless 17'25" behind Maes, who took the stage into Briançon and the yellow jersey. It was a heart-breaking day for Vietto. His decline was only confirmed on the stage over the Col d’Iseran, which – ‘par un sorte de sadisme’, as one reporter put it – had been made a time trial. Maes rode the sadistic thirteen kilometres in 47'39?, more than eight minutes faster than Vietto in twenty-first place.
Although Archambaud again showed the qualities that made him the one-hour record holder by winning the Neuens–Dijon time trial, covering the 59 kilometres at a nippy 42 k.p.h., and another title-holder, the previous year’s road racing champion Marcel Kint, won the last stage into the Parc, Maes won the Tour more than half an hour ahead of Vietto.
A few months later ‘Il faut en finir’ was the slogan repetitiously drummed into the French: we must finish the war that had by then begun, as indeed France did finish it the following summer, though not in the way the sloganeers had hoped. ‘Il faut en finir’ might have been Sylvère Maes’s maxim, as he drove himself to the end of a gruelling race, an ordeal he didn’t pretend to have enjoyed: ‘The contest was too hard. I shan’t take part again.’
But far more poignant was Vietto’s fate. ‘Dramatic irony’ in its strict sense means that the audience knows something the protagonist doesn’t. In Greek drama the storylines were familiar to every Athenian from childhood, and only the characters on stage were unaware of what was coming. All of history must in that sense have an ironic quality, since we can only view it with hindsight and the knowledge of what came next. In Paris on 30 July that year, Vietto thought that he had ridden a superb race, as he had, and that he had been vanquished as much by illness as by his opponent, which was also true. He would still only be twenty-six the next summer. If ever he was going to win the great race, it would be the Tour de France of 1940.