Even after peace returned at last to Europe, two years were needed before a liberated but physically shattered and emotionally confused France could stage the full-scale Tour again. Running the race would have been impossible in 1945, and even in 1946 would have looked an indecent luxury in a country still destitute and hungry, although also strangely beautiful away from the scarred battlefields. Compared with many of the great cities of Europe, Paris itself was pretty well untouched, apart from some bombing of factories on the outskirts. The learnedly passionate Richard Cobb, Oxford professor, ardent francophile and great historian of France, had come to know and adore Paris before the war, went back to spend the post-war decade there, and was overcome with pleasure when an eminent French scholar told him that he spoke French comme un titi parisien, like a Paris cockney. Cobb had first returned to Paris in late 1944 in the unconvincing guise of a British army corporal, and he used to say that the city was never lovelier than that autumn, freed from the Germans but also from two of his greatest dislikes: there was barely any motor traffic, because there was no petrol, and there were no dogs, ‘because they’d all been eaten’.
Before long Paris was once again an exhilarating ville lumière, now the city of existentialism and modern jazz, Suzy Delair in Quai des Orfèvres, Juliette Greco, Jean-Paul Sartre and his as-yet-friendly rival Albert Camus (a former footballer rather than cyclist, a goalkeeper like Nabokov), whose haunting La Peste was published in 1947. Holding the Tour was controversial enough in this year, in a country threatened by political instability, beset by strikes – Tour business that year had to be conducted by telegram during a national postal strike – and still hungry, with continued food rationing. Acting on the principle that people should have circuses even if they couldn’t have bread, the government nevertheless agreed that the race should be staged, and, as a relaxation to prevailing austerity, even arranged to make provisions available for the riders: a ton of meat, eighty kilos of sugar, and several hundred bananas, a luxury which for most Europeans had for years past been as exotic as caviar. The Tour was organized jointly by the newly named rather than new-born the Équipe, by the Parisien Libéré, and by the Parc des Princes. As in the last two pre-war years, the race was open to national and regional teams, placed for the first time under the authority of technical directors.
For Desgrange’s successor Jacques Goddet, the resumption of the Tour was ‘an act of faith’. Before the war he had been editor of the Auto and very much Desgrange’s protégé. He now paid an act of homage to the patron: the initials ‘HD’ were embroidered on the shoulders of the yellow jersey, where they remained until years later when they were removed to make room for yet more advertising logos. The new boss inherited some of the old man’s foibles, not least the taste for grandiloquent editorial prose. Goddet once wrote of a rider ‘accepting gallantly the delay forced on him by the celestial handicapper’, and he marked the resumption of the race in tones worthy of his predecessor: ‘We are living through a cruel time in the life of society in which, if we fail to resist it, selfishness will become the dominant passion. We will fight in the name of solidarity against such a threat. “Team” [i.e., the paper’s new name, the Équipe] – the very word exercises a noble influence on the health of our group – an influence that was exerting itself during a time of rage and hope when our collective will was placed in the service of the Resistance.’ In itself this is a fine example of the way French history was being rewritten, with an invented tradition of universal defiance.
Over the years, Goddet became as much of a larger-than-life figure as Desgrange, and promoted himself quite as consciously. During the Tour he took to dressing like a white hunter, at least when the weather permitted, khaki shirt and shorts and solar topee, in which get-up he would stand in his car imagining himself as a commander of some Free French unit chasing the Afrika Korps across the desert. He said himself that he had donned this apparel by chance, but kept it permanently when it proved popular. ‘It was certainly cooler and it added colour to the race.’ To adapt F. R. Leavis’s phrase, the Tour was an episode in the history of cycling, and of publicity.
In the patron’s high-flown manner, Goddet said that the reborn race would send ‘a message of joy and confidence . . . across all the radiant landscape . . . a heroic adventure from which hatred is absent’. In truth, most stages of the 1947 race echoed the great conflict that had ended two years before. The first three days from Paris to Lille, Brussels and Luxembourg followed the path of the Allied armies in late 1944. Then, after their long loop round the country, the riders returned to Paris by way of an antepenultimate stage into St-Brieuc, where the American army under General Patton had broken out from Normandy, and a penultimate stage into Caen, where the British army under General Montgomery had fought their grim slogging match: a town still crushed flat amid a landscape still trashed and poisoned.
The wartime hiatus inevitably meant a lost generation, as it did in all sports, or at least a generation whose careers were gravely disrupted. The Yorkshire and England batsman Len Hutton sustained an injury (albeit in an army gym rather than on the battlefield) followed by an operation that left him with one arm shorter than the other. But for that, and the missing years, he used to say, ‘I could have been as great as Bradman.’ And when Ted Williams returned to the Red Sox from the United States Army Air Force he was never quite the man of his annus mirabilis in 1941. As if to emphasize that hiatus, only ten of the 100 riders in the 1947 Tour had ridden before the war, the brisquards or old soldiers. Supreme among them was René Vietto, hero to the crowd of 300,000 that cheered away the riders from the Arc de Triomphe as they were sent off by Marcel Cerdan. Hoping that experience would compensate for ageing muscles, Vietto attempted to dominate the race from the beginning. On the second day he took the yellow jersey into Brussels with an individual 130-kilometre escape, and was 1'22" ahead of Roncini when they reached the Alps.
But there were new stars waiting in the wings. The West of France team was led by the brilliant young Breton cyclo-cross champion Jean Robic. According to a hallowed story, he had told his young bride before the race, ‘I’ve no dowry, but I’ll offer you the first prize of the Tour.’ Robic won from Lyons to Grenoble, but Vietto struck back on the Briançon–Digne stage, helped by his faithful young team-mate Apo Lazaridès who took on Robic in the Alpine passes. Robic was riding fiercely over the Galibier when he punctured, and was still behind the leaders as they reached his native Brittany after Vietto had regained the yellow jersey into Digne.
So many people desperately wanted Vietto to win after his pre-war disappointments, and he was still wearing the yellow jersey when a brutal 138-kilometre time trial began from Vannes to St-Brieuc. It was won by Raymond Impanis of Belgium, but with Robic second and edging ominously close to the lead. The penultimate stage to Caen was won by the Parisian Maurice Diot, riding for the Île de France team, and won very bravely, since boils had erupted all over his body, even his hands, which had to be lanced before he could grasp the handlebars through bandages. On the last day the Italians thought the Tour was theirs. Their team was leading, and Brambilla and Roncini were in first and second, with Robic third at 2'58", more than three minutes ahead of Vietto. Robic hadn’t yet worn the yellow jersey, but he now gave a magnificent performance. One group escaped before, at about halfway, on the Bon Secours climb, Robic attacked, accompanied by Edouard Fachleitner of Luxembourg. Briek Schotte, Bernard Gauthier and Jean Diederich reached the Parc first, but were followed soon after by Fachleitner and a French trio of Lucien Teisseire, Edouard Muller and Jean Robic, who took the Tour by 3'58" from Fachleitner, with Vietto fifth at 15'23". Italy won the team prize and Brambilla was best climber, but Robic’s victory was a much-needed fillip for French spirits.
Few years in the twentieth century were as dramatic and pregnant with significance for the future as 1948, whose repercussions the world was still grappling with more than half a century later. Outside Europe, it saw the establishment of the state of Israel and the accession of the Nationalist apartheid regime in South Africa. Within, it was the year when the Cold War sank to freezing point, with the Communist putsch in Prague, the Berlin blockade and airlift, and a crucial election in Italy. More than a third of the Italian people were voting for the Communist Party, and it looked as though the Communists might actually and unwontedly take over a European country at the ballot box. The Italian CP was supported by the Soviet Union’s huge intelligence and propaganda service, its Christian Democrat opponents by the State Department and the CIA. This battle wasn’t only political but cultural, and even sporting. In the 1930s the famous classical sculpture called Discobolus or the Discus Thrower, revered by Hitler as an expression of the athletic ideal, had been legitimately acquired from Italy by a German buyer. Now in 1948, on American instructions, it was returned to Italy with little pretence of legality, all to flatter the Italians on behalf of the anti-Communist cause. Not perhaps because of that, the Christian Democrats won the election in April, but the situation in Italy remained very tense.
Nor did the Tour escape from politics. Ten years after he had become only the second Italian to win the Tour, Bartali was now the capo, the undisputed master. In 1940 he had ridden in the Giro as the star of the Legnano team in which the 20-year-old Fausto Coppi rode as a domestique, brilliantly precocious after turning pro in his teens. In an echo of the very first Tour, Bartali had a nasty crash after colliding with a dog. The resulting knee injury ended his chances in the race, and Coppi was told by the team boss to go for it, which he duly did, taking the maglia rosa – the pink jersey, the Giro’s maillot jaune – and winning the race. In Italy you either loved or hated Coppi for the way he had snatched victory in this manner, a debate that ended only when Mussolini’s boastful but parasitic entry into the war gave the country something else to think about.
The Tour introduced several changes for the 1948 race. The first prize had been increased from 500,000 francs to 600,000, although for foreign competitors that would have been more impressive if the franc hadn’t been devalued in January from 480 to the pound sterling to 864 (from 1152 to the dollar to 3312). Mountain climbs were now categorized A or B, and they included three new passes, Turini, Forclaz in Switzerland and Vue des Alps. The race visited several other places for the first time, Trouville, Dinard, Biarritz, Lourdes, as well as taking three hops across the frontier, to San Remo in Italy, Lausanne in Switzerland and Liège in Belgium. And a ruthless new rule said that the lanterne rouge, the last rider in each day’s GC, would be eliminated.
That last didn’t affect Gino Bartali, but the prize money very much did, and the story of the race was his superb comeback, in more than one sense. It was remarkable enough that he had returned at all after the long hiatus of the war at an age when many riders had retired – he turned thirty-four during this race – or that he won the first stage, from Paris to Trouville; it was less surprising that he then subsided. France had her own rising star, the 23-year-old Louison Bobet, who won the Bordeaux–Biarritz stage, but even though Bartali won the next two Pyrenean stages, he seemed a very forlorn hope at twenty minutes down when the Tour reached Cannes.
Just across the border, Italy edged towards disaster in the aftermath of the election, with the attempted assassination of Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist Party leader, and talk of incipient civil war. The day after the shooting of Togliatti, Bartali took a telephone call in Cannes. It was from Alcide de Gaspari, the Christian Democrat leader, a founding father of what would become the European Union, and one of the great Italians of his age. This was by no means the first time that sport had been invoked for patriotic purposes, or that politicians had intervened in sporting contests. After the ‘Bodyline’ crisis during the Test series in 1933 had severely blighted relations between England and Australia, the Dominions Secretary in London, J. H. Thomas, insisted that Harold Larwood, the principal offending bowler, should be dropped from the team; or, as A. J. P. Taylor put it, this was ‘the only occasion on which a cabinet minister has chosen a cricket eleven, even negatively’.
For de Gaspari, the purpose wasn’t to salve relations between countries but to give a boost to national pride: it would be of huge benefit to Italy, to Christian civilization, and in particular to the Democristiani, he told Bartali, if he could just win one more stage. Bartali replied, ‘I’ll do better than that, I’ll win the Tour.’ The next day he rode one of the heroic stages in Tour history, ten hours through the Alps over the passes of Allos, Vars and Izoard, to reach Briançon more than six minutes ahead of Schotte. Bartali was still a minute down on Bobet, but he won the next two stages, taking seven in all out of twenty-one, and rode into the Parc on 25 July to win his second Tour de France, and much the more remarkable of the two.
As he entered the Parc, Bartali was also riding towards another sign of the post-war times, something never before seen on the Tour: a television camera. This invention had been conceived decades earlier, born in England shortly before the war closed down transmission, had now left its infancy, and was beginning to sweep America. It would take over France and the rest of Europe more slowly, but one day would transform life there, for better or worse, and transform sport as much as anything. The Tour de France had always been a curious spectator sport. Millions of people would, and still do, wait all day to see the riders approach, go by, and vanish, all in a matter of seconds. The only way to follow the progress of a race had been, at first, to read the papers the next morning, and then, to listen to radio commentaries. Today we can watch the continuous television coverage for which cycling is perhaps more apt than any other sport. Apart from steeplechasing and snooker there’s nothing quite so telegenic as the Tour, with the coverage of peloton, of Alpine climbs, of bunch sprint finishes, of team time trials: all beginning that day in Paris in 1948.
This was the year of Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), that touching masterpiece of Italian neo-realist cinema; another Italian had just as movingly stolen the great bike race. By winning two Tours a decade apart, Bartali achieved a feat no one had ever accomplished before and no one is ever likely to repeat. Bobet in the end could only manage fourth place, behind Schotte and Roger Lapébie, but he was the revelation and the rider who had caught every eye, including the eye of Alfredo Binda, technical manager of the Italian team. With no great loyalty to his own champion, Binda said that, ‘If I’d managed Bobet, he would have won the Tour.’
He did win, but not for some years yet. Bartali’s challenger in 1949 was another Italian. Even if Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi weren’t conscious figureheads, the two great Italian cyclists personified their culturally and ideologically riven country. Bartali was handsome and wholesome, a good scout and straight arrow, a devout and dutiful Catholic. Coppi was sinister in the literal – of the Left – and maybe the looser senses, a self-proclaimed radical and atheist whose liaison with another man’s wife caused a national scandal. In training methods also, one was a traditionalist and one a progressive iconoclast.
That iconoclast was a butcher’s son from Piedmont, who fell in love with cycling as a boy. Young ‘Faustino’ told his uncle, a merchant seaman, also a Fausto, how much he longed for a Legnano, the bike of his dreams. He even said that to get it he would give years from his life, a light-hearted but unhappily prophetic turn of phrase. From far away in Ceylon the uncle sent 400 lire, asking the family to make it up and ‘buy Faustino the bike he deserves. Who knows, one day he might become a real racing cyclist.’ Both wishes were granted, nephew’s and uncle’s. By the age of eighteen Coppi had won his first race as an amateur, the Castello d’Orba, and the next year he collected a hatful of prizes. In 1940 he won the Pursuit Championship of Italy – a form of track racing he would make a particular province of his – and that Giro which split the nation, before another clutch of victories in 1941 and 1942.
If all those races might seem to suggest a rather frivolous attitude to the war Italy had entered in the summer of 1940, reality wasn’t far away. There was no Giro in 1941, and the following year Coppi was called up into the army. ‘Fausto’ means lucky, and it may have been good fortune in disguise when Coppi was shipped to north Africa shortly before the Axis forces there capitulated in 1943: he was soon taken prisoner and spent the war safely in British hands, driving a lorry rather than riding a bike. He liked to tease his fellow prisoners by saying with a straight face that Churchill had contacted him from London: ‘Once the war is over he wants me to take over the job of restructuring English cycling.’ In the event there was another job for Coppi when the war ended. He was repatriated to Italy early in 1945, and then, after a spell as batman to an RAF officer near Naples, was allowed to depart. He found a bike and rode it home to the north through a war-battered landscape. Despite all his alarms and excursions, he returned to competitive racing that July, winning a race in Milan, and then married Bruna, the sweetheart who had been waiting for him. All was set for the second act of a great career.
In that year’s Giro, which Bartali won, Coppi crashed, but in the Milan–San Remo race he made a daring 147-kilometre escape to win by fifteen minutes, with Bartali battling for third place, and the rivalry that had begun in 1940 was now more bitter than ever. The writer Curzio Malaparte, who had seen a thing or two in the Balkans and Russia during the war, described the difference between them: ‘Bartali is for the orthodox, his talent is spiritual, the saints look after him; Coppi has no protection up there. Bartali has blood in his veins, Coppi has petrol.’ In another of the Tour’s unhelpful sobriquets, Pierre Chany called Coppi ‘The Heron’, and he was certainly a slight figure, five-foot-ten and ten stones, an unimposing body on spindly legs. But Chany saw how this delicate creature could perch seemingly weightless on his bike, ‘untroubled by the dead weight and useless muscles which make others seem like mules crawling to the mountain passes’.
If they were rivals, Bartali and Coppi were also team-mates. Two tough and canny technical directors faced each other, Georges Caviller newly appointed as head of the French team and Alfredo Binda, of the Squadra. Coppi had just won the Giro from Bartali, as well as the Milan–San Remo for the third time and a fourth consecutive Tour of Lombardy. Relations between them needed to be cemented, which Binda duly did with the ‘Pact of Chiavari’ only two weeks before the Tour began. At least, it was a pact for armed neutrality. Shortly before, in the winter of 1946–7, England cricketers had toured Australia, strained by what was said to be a frosty relationship between Walter Hammond and Len Hutton, captain and opening batsman. Many years later a journalistic acquaintance asked Hutton if this had been true. ‘Not at all, not at all, perfectly cordial. The first morning of the tour I said to him, “Good morning, Walter,” and he said, “Good morning, Len.” D’you know, for the rest of the tour we never exchanged another word, and our relations were perfectly cordial.’ Hutton’s dry Yorkshire wit might have applied to the perfectly cordial relations between Bartali and Coppi in 1949.
Sport everywhere enjoyed a golden age in that post-war lustrum, with great crowds at baseball games in New York and Chicago or at soccer matches in Italy and Brazil. British sport flourished as rarely before and almost never since. In 1946 some 300,000 watched the Grand National at Aintree (on a Friday), while 143,470 watched Rangers play Hibs in the 1948 Scottish Cup semi-final at Hampden Park, and Sheffield Wednesday thought nothing of playing League matches in front of 80,000 at Hillsborough. Bike road racing was no exception, busting out all over France. A new race was born in 1948, the Grand Prix du Midi Libre, named after the Montpellier newspaper that sponsored it, and destined to become a hardy annual which many riders used each May to tune up for the Tour until a cold economic wind snuffed the race out in 2002.
A few more novelties marked this year’s Tour, which controversially crossed the frontier into Spain at San Sebastien, at a time when Franco was still much of a pariah, as well as into Italy to Aosta. The cols were now graded into three categories, and they included four new climbs, Montgenèvre, Mont-Cenis, and the two St-Bernard passes, great and small. In his calculating and canny way, Coppi had deliberately missed the first two post-war Tours, and hadn’t planned to ride until 1950. But he made his debut after all in 1949, and he triumphed. The race went from Paris to Brussels and then back westwards through Normandy and Brittany and down to the Spanish frontier, with the yellow jersey changing continually, to Marcel Dussault, Roger Lambrecht, Norbert Callens and then ‘The Parakeet’, the little Parisian Jacques Marinelli, despite a bad fall early on.
Cool as ever, Coppi won the two time trials, and then annihilated the field in the Alpine passes, not so much climbing the Vars, Izoard and Galibier, it was said, as flying over them. He left Bartali for dead below the Izoard to win the stage by twenty minutes and then raced over the Galibier, past a memorial to Desgrange that had just been unveiled there in the presence of André Leducq. Coppi crossed the line at the Parc a comfortable 10'55" ahead of Bartali, with the young Frenchman Jacques Marinelli, the year’s revelation, in third. In a newspaper column describing his victory, Coppi was at his most laconic. It was perfectly easy, he said: ‘We all have two legs.’
Very likely he would have taken the 1950 Tour as well had he not broken his pelvis in the Giro, enforcing his absence. Every year some notability, savant or charlatan, was chosen to start the race. This year it was Orson Welles, more revered in France at the time than in his own country. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ Citizen Kane sarcastically told a reporter, but what appeared in the papers this summer was all too true. It caught the eye of Evelyn Waugh. ‘I read with interest’, he told his ardently francophile friend Nancy Mitford, ‘how the politest people in the world treated the Italian cyclists.’
What had happened was worthy of his derision. Through the north and west towards the Pyrenees, the race was comparatively uneventful. But on the Col d’Aspin the crowd grew out of control and rabbled the riders. When Bartali and Robic fell in the mêlée, the French mob, some of them drunk, set upon Bartali and beat him up. Even though he managed to get back on his bike and win the stage, while his team-mate Fiorenzo Magni took the yellow jersey, the whole Italian team withdrew in protest. Ferdi Kubler of Switzerland took the lead by embarrassing default. In the circumstances it seemed impolitic to cross into Italy as planned, and so a stage which was meant to go to San Remo went no further than Menton on the border. Bobet won the stage into Briançon, and the next day he attacked by way of skipping the feeding station at Pont-de-Claix. But the race was now Kubler’s, with Bobet in third behind Constant Ockers of Belgium.
There was another Swiss success the next year, but not from Ferdi Kubler. He and Hugo Koblet were competitors as well as team-mates and compatriots, like Bartali and Coppi; all unlike the two Italians, the two Swiss were great friends and helped each other whenever they could, although that could not include the 1951 Tour in which Kubler didn’t take part. Coppi was in the field when the race started at Metz on 4 July but was out of sorts in every way. Following his previous injury, he had fractured a clavicle early in the season, and, worse still, had lost his brother Serse, also a cyclist, who died after fracturing his skull in a race not long before the Tour began.
They were racing round a new map: not only was Paris not reached until the fourth day, not only were Ghent, Le Tréport, and Avignon all visited for the first time, but the Tour left the periphery of the hexagone to plunge into the very heart of France, darting to Limoges and then east to the Massif Central and Clermont-Ferrand, returning to the south-west by way of Brive, Agen and Dax, all new étapes. There was also an important modification of the scoring, with new bonuses for the first three finishers on each stage.
Auspiciously enough, the first stage was won by a Swiss rider, Giovanni Rossi, before the Luxembourger Jean Diederich escaped on the next stage from Rheims to Ghent over the grim cobbled climb of the Mur de Grammont. A couple of stages were taken by riders with the Ouest-Sud-Ouest regional team, before the Ghent–Le Tréport stage was marked by a ludicrous incident. Abdel-Kader Zaaf of Algeria, one of eight riders in a team from French North Africa, suddenly made an individual escape and found himself well ahead of the field. It was a scorchingly hot day, and when he tried to quench his thirst with a bidon of wine he was carrying, the drink knocked him out, and he was found unconscious in a grass patch beside the road. He later recovered and rejoined the peloton, though only to end the Tour as lanterne rouge.
On the Paris–Caen stage there was a more successful escape. The leading riders were fooling about, with no one setting a serious pace, when two Italian domestiques, Angelo Colinelli and Serafino Biagoni, broke away. Colinelli flagged, but Biagoni stayed in front not only to win the stage by ten minutes but to take the yellow jersey. It was suspected that the star riders had been dawdling in preparation for the time trial, and it was indeed the stars who excelled in it. Bobet appeared to win, but there had been a timing error and he was demoted behind Koblet, who was beginning to look very good, with poor Coppi languishing. Thanks to the new race route the first mountains this year were the Massif Central. Geminiani won the stage from Limoges to Clermont-Ferrand, his home town, after crushing climbs over La Moreno and La Ceysatt, taking him to third in the GC. But on the next stage it was Koblet who made a superb 135-kilometre escape. Wim Van Est won the stage to Dax to become the first Dutchman to wear the yellow jersey, but his luck deserted him in the Pyrenees where he crashed twice, fell into a ravine on the Aubisque, and abandoned.
After Diederich led over the Tourmalet, Coppi came back to lead over the Aspin and Peyresourde, but he was only narrowly ahead of Koblet who sprinted into Luchon to win the stage, take the yellow jersey and, as it proved, win the Tour. Coppi was still in contention, but was taken ill on the Carcassonne–Montpellier stage and, although his team loyally kept him going, Koblet only increased his lead. Although he held it through Avignon, Marseilles and to Gap, the starring role was played by the mighty Mont Ventoux, which was being climbed for the first time, and to whose story we will return.
But it was then that one of the heroic exploits of Tour history was witnessed, on the Gap–Briançon high passes. Coppi escaped on the Col de Vars, taking the Est-Sud-Est regional Roger Buchonnet with him, and rode with matchless skill and courage to lead by forty seconds at the summit, with Koblet more than eight minutes away. Koblet fought back grimly to cross the Izoard only three minutes behind, but Coppi held on to win the stage. He had left it too late for the race, even though that wonderful display had taken him from seventeenth to tenth in the GC. Others were still worse off: Marinelli abandoned after severe injuries in a fall on the Col de Vars, and Bobet was laid low with food poisoning.
The last climbing stage was won by the Spaniard Vittorio Ruiz, before Koblet won the subsequent time trial, not very far from his home town of Geneva. But although there was an échappée fleuve or group breakaway of ten lesser riders on the penultimate stage, Koblet finished the race first by a comfortable twenty-two minutes from Geminiani. It was a very popular win. Koblet had enjoyed one technical edge, though not his alone: along with Bartali, Coppi and four others, he had a bike fitted with the new Campagnolo derailleur available that year, using handlebar controls, heavy to today’s eye but decidedly better than any existing gears. But he also had the advantage of his own courage and skill, not to mention a very pleasing manner. One reporter saw the race won by ‘the domination, the personality and the elegance of Koblet’, while the singer Jacques Grello, writing for the Équipe, called the winner ‘the pedaller of charm’. His charm captivated an 18-year-old trainee metal-worker and amateur cyclist from Rouen, who had watched the stage from Paris to Caen, won by Biagoni with Koblet in fourth, and had been fascinated by the Swiss rider, a man he dreamed of emulating. He was called Jacques Anquetil.
After six years of peace, France was stable, and increasingly prosperous. The Fourth Republic may have seemed politically erratic, with its multiplicity of parties and its notoriously shortlived governments, but the future was bright compared with the dark past. Just how dark their recent history had been, the French had been reminded six days before the 1951 Tour reached the Parc des Princes, by the death of Marshal Pétain. A burden of memory had been lifted.