Although the Tour sometimes visits Brittany, it doesn’t do so every year, which is sad but maybe nowadays inevitable. The difficulties of boxing the whole hexagone have been amplified by the commercial pressures to stop at seaside resorts and ski stations that have done little to deserve the honour except pay for it, and in 1976 the Tour came no nearer the historic duchy than a first stage from St-Jean-de-Mont on the Vendée coast to Angers, up the Loire valley from Nantes. The following year the cyclists rode deeper into Breton country, with a stage from Lorient to Rennes; and Brest, the other great harbour of Brittany, has been visited frequently over the years. Sad to say, neither port had much of its former glories left after the war. Lorient was a purpose-built city and a company town named after its line of business, founded by Colbert in 1666 as a port for the East India trade, and Brest is one of the home ports of la royale, as the French navy still calls itself, but Brest and Lorient were so badly smashed up that they had effectively to be rebuilt after 1945.
Both Nantes and Rennes were luckier, at least in the past century. The historic capital of the duchy, Rennes was largely destroyed by fire in 1720, and although a number of earlier buildings survived, their chief effect is to offset the classical hauteur of the late eighteenth-century cathedral. The seventeenth-century Parlement was the most important older building to survive the fire, only to be burned out in another calamitous fire in 1994, which may have been caused by, and at any rate followed, a demonstration by Breton fishermen demanding larger subsidies, one of the less happy examples of the French taste for direct action. Strictly speaking, Nantes isn’t on Breton soil, but the dukes of Brittany used it as a capital, and Duke François II built the fifteenth-century castle where Henry IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granting religious toleration (not for very long as it turned out).
In any case true Brittany lies further west even than Rennes. One reason Brittany should be part of the itinerary is that it has been the nursery of so many great riders, right up to the greatest of them all who erupted on to the stage with Bernard Hinault’s devastating debut in 1978. Another reason is that this is one of the loveliest corners of France, though perhaps the most melancholy, because of a turbulent history, and until recently because of isolation and sheer poverty. It has been said that the Bretons haven’t matched other Celtic people, Welsh or still more Irish, in literary prolificacy and brilliance, though this comparison is misleading. Ireland was a poor country, but with a richer colony; most great ‘Irish literature’ has been in English, and many great Irish writers have stemmed from the Protestant Saxon colony who knew nothing of Gaelic language or letters. Brittany was simply poor and backward, or regarded as such in the eyes and ears of Parisians, or indeed Nantais, for whom Breton was as much a barbarous dialect as Irish in the eyes and ears of Londoners, or indeed Dubliners, and we have seen that the Jacobin republican tradition was even more ruthlessly unsympathetic to backward ‘jargons’ than Whiggery or Utilitarianism in the British Isles, in the Celtic fringes of which the language revival came significantly earlier than in Brittany.
As with the tension between Welsh-speaking West Wales and the Anglophone east, there was a rivalry amounting to hostility between Lower and Upper Brittany, the Celtic west that spoke Breton, sister-tongue to Welsh, and the eastern part that spoke French (or a form of it), with even greater animosity further east. Only thirty years before the Tour began, a group of Breton pilgrims visiting Mont-St-Michel in Normandy was physically attacked by the locals outraged by this primitive incursion. And such writers of eminence as were born in Brittany had little cultural connection with the province. Chateaubriand may have been born at St-Malo, the splendid island port seven times visited by the Tour, and lived on his nearby country estate at Combourg, but he was scarcely more Breton than Swift was Irish; nor, though he was born further to the west on the coast at Treguier, was Ernest Renan, author of a once-famous sceptical life of Christ, and author also of the penetrating definition that to be a nationalist requires ignorance of your history and hatred of your neighbours.
Surprisingly few books have even had Breton backgrounds. Pierre Loti came from the Charente, but set his morose seafaring novel Pêcheur d’Islande, remembered ungratefully by a generation of French A-level candidates in the early 1960s, in Paimpol close to Treguier, on a coast scattered with crosses mourning lost sailors including those, as in the title, who fished off Iceland. Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest, which gives new meaning to ‘Hello, sailor’, is set in that port, and describes it rather beautifully amid the lengthier descriptions of unsafe sex, but is scarcely a contribution to folkloric Breton writing. The most notable recent literary distinction of Rennes wasn’t French at all: after Milan Kundera had been driven out of Prague in 1975, he spent some years teaching at the university there, where he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Wisest of all was the greatest of French novelists. In 1875, 107 years before Vershuere won the only stage that has ever finished at Concarneau, Flaubert spent several weeks there. While his friend the naturalist Georges Pouchet, with whom he was staying, dissected the ‘fruits of the sea’, Flaubert consumed them. He wrote letters, he took dips in the briny, and he ate lobsters, as the sensible visitor still does. Today there are fine restaurants in Brittany, and there are expensive restaurants, and there are some which are both, like Patrick Jeffroy’s at Carantac or the Moulin de Rosmadec at Pont-Aven, which achieve astonishing things with crustaceans. But the best thing to do in Brittany is to go to any one of dozens of good little places along the coast that serve wondrous platters of fruits de mer, a dozen different kinds of shellfish, and whatever such other bounty of the seas as has survived over-fishing and tanker spillage.
Sitting in imagination, as it were, over such a plate with a glass of muscadet, this is a good point at which to look back at the Tour de France in its modern maturity. As it happens, we have a particularly vivid snapshot of the race at that time in Geoffrey Nicholson’s The Great Bike Race, still one of the best books about the Tour. Nicholson was a Welshman, educated at Swansea University in his home town. There he met his wife Mavis when they were both taught by Kingsley Amis, who dedicated his novel Take a Girl Like You to them. With such an auspicious literary inauguration, Nicholson had something to live up to, and he did. Over the years he wrote for several papers, but his true home was the first, the Observer, from the 1950s to the 1970s. It was then enjoying a golden age under David Astor’s editorship-proprietorship, not least in the sports pages, which were consciously intended to be as well written as the political or literary pages.
Good sports writing has a distinguished lineage, from Hazlitt on prizefighting onwards. Ring Lardner and Ernest Hemingway gave it their own stamp in America, and many other writers have been fascinated by sport, quite apart from the two great literary goalies Camus and Nabokov. If Samuel Beckett is the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to have appeared in Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanac (he played for Trinity College, Dublin) then V. S. Naipaul is at least one other Nobel laureate who has written about the game, which has inspired its own corpus of poetry from Lionel Thompson to Harold Pinter. Since literature begins with the – ideally lucid and lively – narrative of an event, sport ought to be attractive to imaginative writers as well as journalists: a match, a race or a fight is pre-eminently a story waiting to be told.
When Nicholson began writing about bike racing in 1959, he was struck by this very narrative aspect. Even a quite ordinary and long-since-forgotten stage of the long-since-defunct Milk-for-Stamina Tour of Britain (its name not chosen by anyone with a keenly developed sense of the ridiculous), which he had been sent to cover, had all the elements that make road racing attractive:
. . . the adventure and suspense of the long escape, the surprising speed – over 20 miles an hour along twisted roads that rose from sea level . . . and continually dipped and rose again. The change of scenery. The unpredictable factors, not just of wind and rain . . . The tactical variety: the riders didn’t just put their heads down and their bottoms up and pelt from A to B, they attacked and chased, flagged and rallied, formed instant alliances for immediate ends, and broke them without another single thought.
And even more compelling was the dramatic quality of the sport. A race is ‘a rounded, self-contained story with complex relationships, sudden shifts of action, identifiable heroes, a beginning, a middle and an end’, and a stage in a six-day or three-week race was ‘another chapter in a picaresque novel which each day introduced new characters in a different setting’. Other sports – different species of football maybe, baseball certainly, cricket above all – offer the chronicler a dramatic narrative that he can unfold, and have all attracted writers of high quality, as bike racing had found in Blondin. It was then awaiting, in English, its Hazlitt or Lardner, and in Nicholson it found him. Even then he found difficulty in getting newspapers to let him write about cycling as fully and vividly as it deserved. He covered the Tour of Britain for The Times, but was asked to file only on alternate days; after he had reported one extraordinary day on the Black Mountain, with crashes and escapes, punctures and recoveries, the paper headlined his story ‘Cyclists Traverse Welsh Valleys’.
When he came to cover the Tour de France, he discovered, as others have, its misères as well as grandeurs, all the difficulties and disappointments involved. The reporter from a Lyons paper in whose car he had hired a seat would drive to a quiet spot to type the morning interviews and, at the first sign of the approaching riders, would drive on to the finish where Nicholson was allowed to see the final sprints: ‘The whole experience was like seeing the Second Coming from the top of a passing bus.’
All the same, he was captivated by the colour and majesty of the Tour. By the 1970s it was without question the greatest sports event on earth. Its only rivals were the Olympics and the World Cup, in some ways bigger but each quadrennial, and each peripatetic from one country to another. Yearly and in one place, the Tour is in a class of its own, not least in scale, of time and distance. Every Tour between 1906 and 1970 was not less than 4000 kilometres long, reaching the terrifying 5745 of 1926, before dropping back. By the 1970s the rules of the UCI – the International Cycling Union or Union Cycliste Internationale, invariably initialized from the French version – held that the race could have no more than twenty-two stages, a maximum of 269 kilometres each, but it no longer came anywhere near the 5720 kilometres that would theoretically have permitted. In 1976 it was 4017, and the 1980s saw the parcours shrinking right down to 3285 km in 1989; no race has reached 4000 km since 4231 in 1987, and the following year saw a sharp truncation to 3286, which was, with the next year almost identical, the shortest since 1905; the centennial Tour of 2003 was a modest 3350, only three-fifths the length of Buysse’s great race seventy-seven years earlier. There is no ideal length for the Tour, and it would be cruel and unusual punishment to expect riders now to emulate their forebears of 1926, with an average of 337 kilometres a day. All the same, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, when the daily average is, as in 2003, only 167 kilometres, the race has lost something of that epic quality Barthes descried.
In 1976 the 130 riders who began the Tour were accompanied by around 1800 camp followers, officials, technicians, press, publicists, moving like a small army (again, Barthes’s own comparison) across the country and filling all hotel beds every night in each stage town and for about forty kilometres around. The mobile force itself was dwarfed by the numbers who served it on its journey, not least by around 26,000 policemen – local agents, national gendarmerie, and France’s magnificent riot police, as Auberon Waugh used to call the Compagnie Républicaine de la Sécurité – who clear the way. For several hours each day, several hundreds of kilometres of French roads are closed to the public, and only those whose cars sport official stickers rear and aft are waved through, past the 15 million or so spectators who are said to watch the race in the flesh.
That’s the figure that has been given for thirty or forty years. It is pretty much a ‘guesstimate’, and computing the numbers of any large crowd is as hazardous in France as anywhere else, but the number has been repeated so often as to have taken on a factual life of its own, and is plausible enough. A majority of French people never see the Tour, many are quite indifferent to it, and a fair number greatly resent it. It certainly disrupts normal life wherever it goes, and almost inevitably its commercialization became a focus of radical student protest. A sarcastic broadsheet handed out at Lacanau-Océan in 1976 said that, thanks to the Tour, the French cycle industry was selling 2.5 million bikes a year: ‘Bravo! Sport is neutral and disinterested.’ The heavy irony was misplaced. Of course sport wasn’t disinterested, and couldn’t be. The Tour has been concerned with money since the beginning. But it is true that its commercial aspects were complex, and sometimes dubious.
The bike-manufacturing industry had had an obvious and not necessarily unhealthy relationship with the race. Nor was it inherently corrupting for commercial sponsors unconnected with cycling to back Tour teams, whether an Italian sausage company like Molteni, to whom Merckx transferred his affections, or at least his services, in 1971, winning in their colours in three of the next four years, or a ballpoint-maker like Bic for whom Ocaña won in 1973. In fact, accusations of profiteering are perhaps the least fair of any made against the organizers of the Tour. It isn’t a charity, and the various forms of sponsorship or inducement are needed to break even. In the mid-1970s the annual budget was around 8 to 8.5 million francs (£800,000–850,000) and when Félix Lévitan said that ‘we try to balance expenses and receipts, without always managing to do so,’ there was no reason to doubt him.
Given the principle that towns pay for the privilege of being a ville-étape, it wasn’t improper that Angers should have bought its 1967 Départ, although the Plymouth stage in 1974 was another matter. So was the increasing tendency for mountain stages to finish in ski resorts which had paid to secure the Arrivée. As Nicholson said, ‘The only way to a ski resort is up,’ but his view that the demands of commerce more or less coincided with those of sport – ‘since a summit finish effectively divides the flock of valley sheep from the individual mountain goats’ – needs to be qualified: these high finishes put the descender’s art at a discount.
By now those bike racing specialisms, which barely existed in the first years of the Tour, had sorted themselves out, and some were better loved than others. The old orchestral jingle, ‘Brass for drinkers, woodwind for thinkers, strings for stinkers,’ applied to cycling mutatis mutandis. If not necessarily drinkers (although some of them certainly were), the climbers were the tough guys of the race. That does not mean that they were big or burly. Often they were slight and spare, with Julio Jimenez, King of the Mountains in 1965–7, a notable example. In Nicholson’s words, ‘he was also balding, grey-faced and never looked particularly well, but in the first steep slopes would prance away as though he had springs in his calves.’ Jimenez’s native Spain had an extraordinary record, especially in the third quarter of the century, winning the King of the Mountains prize thirteen out of the twenty-two years from 1953 to 1974, but the Belgian record has also been remarkable, while from 1994 to 2004, thanks to Richard Virenque and Laurent Jalabert, the red-peas jersey has tended to be French cycling’s one consolation.
Like clarinettists and flutists, time-triallists are the thinking men, with the most precise sense of their and their rivals’ abilities, as well as that clock in the head that tells every contre la montre expert exactly how fast he is going and how he needs to pace the rest of the stage. And sprinters are stinkers, at least in the eyes of many fans, and a good many other riders, because their craft so often seems parasitic. By nature they have to conserve their energy for the hot-spot sprints and for the finishes; another way of putting it is that others do the work while these wheel-suckers, slip-streamers, jackals or opportunists – some of the epithets traditionally hurled at them – live off the energy of their rivals.
Such parasites (if they are that) were well rewarded for their work: the green points jersey was by now the most valuable after only the winner’s yellow jersey. In 1976 the Tour winner received 100,000 francs (£10,000), with £2500 to the second, £1550 to the third and so on down to the thirty-fifth with a modest £65. The green jersey holder won £100 a day during the course of the race, and £1200 at the end, while the red peas winner – as he had just become – collected £900. Nicholson was one of several commentators who found the maillot blanc à pois rouges something of an embarrassment, a temporary stunt which he predicted would probably be dropped, but the polka-dot jersey is with us still.
All of these came on top of the daily prizes, £310 for a stage winner, with those who followed him home collecting something all the way down to thirtieth. There were losers as well as winners: the daily computations included a cut, in golfing terms: riders who had failed to complete a stage within a certain percentage of the winner’s time were eliminated, although the Tour continued Desgrange’s own tradition of arbitrary justice, the prince dispensing punishments and pardons, and passionate pleas for clemency married to plausible excuses sometimes won a reprieve.
Even those were only some of the bonuses and primes awarded. The green jersey was calculated by points, 25 to the winner of a stage, 20 for second, 16 for third, down to 1 point for the fifteenth finisher. Fewer such finishing points were awarded on mountain stages, since the green jersey was intended to reward sprinters, who also collected daily primes of £40, £20 and £10 for the hot-spot sprints, besides which were the informal primes of £20 or £10 offered by towns and villages. Tour etiquette, sometimes but not always observed, says that a local rider should be allowed to go ahead and pick up these, and the accompanying cheers from his friends and neighbours.
Finally came the team prizes, one worth £8450 awarded on time, won by KAS in 1976, and another worth £4000 awarded on points. Those were by way of consolations. It was a curiosity of road racing as an individual sport which was also a team sport that the team for which the yellow-jersey winner rode so rarely won the team prize: in the eight years following the return of commercially sponsored teams, this happened only twice, with Merckx and Faema in 1969 and Ocaña and Bic in 1973. Given the choice of riding in a team that won the classement par équipes or a team whose leader won the Tour, any domestique would always choose the yellow jersey, since not only the réclame but the rewards – the winner’s purse divided among his colleagues, the sponsorships and invitations – are greater.
And it was by this time that Tour racing, and Merckx in particular, had developed team tactics to a degree where this was held to be spoiling the sport by stifling competition. Rather than merely rely on a multifariously gifted team’s support, as Magne certainly had with the French team in the early 1930s and Coppi with the Italian twenty years later, Merckx seemed to have assembled a team whose only real purpose was to help him win. Maybe the criticism was just; maybe what had happened was inevitable; maybe it was the pattern of the future.