For 11 months of the year, the best jobs at The Daily Telegraph are indisputably wine correspondent, restaurant critic and travel writer, and not always in that order. For the month of July every year, the position of cycling correspondent suddenly becomes the most coveted. That’s the month of the Tour de France – that gastronomic, grape-fuelled adventure through the wonderful French countryside, with a bit of sport thrown in for good measure – when the role of cycling correspondent blends all three elements. No wonder the post was held for nearly half a century by just two men; once secured, you would be a fool to give it up lightly.
Just tracing the route for the following year’s race when it is announced each autumn is enough to make you take the red Michelin guide down from the shelf and plan your next vacation. The mind wanders to scenes of endless fields of sunflowers, quaint little villages, chateaux on the hillside, and a slower pace of life. Now you are drifting through the wine regions of Bordeaux and the Bourgogne, Champagne and Chablis, the Loire and the wine lakes of Languedoc-Roussillon, the Rhône and Savoy: take your pick from rosé, sparkling, blanc or rouge, Premier Cru or cheap plonk. Then there is the food: the fresh seafood on the coasts, the assorted breads and cheeses, the pâtés, the terrines, the obscene but delicious things the French do to ducks and geese, the rich sauces, the regional specialities, the tartes, the gateaux – l’addition, garçon, s’il vous plait! You are almost there, the mouth watering in anticipation.
Through the middle of this idyll bursts the Tour de France, the biggest annual sporting event in the world, if you accept the self-publicity. It is an Olympic Games on two wheels, combining the climbers, the descenders, the sprinters, the time-triallists, the middle-of-the-roaders, in a mad, mad marathon race for the finishing line on the Champs-Elysées. More than that, as more than one Telegraph writer has noted over the years, it is a way of life for the French of all generations, of all classes; the excuse to go en fête.
It took the British a long time to cotton on to what was going on across the Channel. Telegraph readers, though, were made aware of the race from day one, back in 1903, thanks to a paragraph at the very end of the weekly Paris Day by Day despatch, sent ‘by special wire’ from ‘Our Own Correspondent’. Under the mystifying headline ‘A Mad Hippopotamus’, our sadly anonymous correspondent reported that the annual review of troops at Longchamp was being postponed a few weeks so the King of Italy could watch it during a state visit. But, the writer consoled, the Parisians would not have to wait long, and in the meantime ‘they can keep up the July fête with the customary liveliness’. There will be, the columnist said, ‘dancing in the streets, illuminations, and fireworks’. It was almost a template for the Tour de France. The Tour itself, the writer concluded before a wheel had turned, sounded like a tremendous race. Before long the parties would be for Le Tour, and soon everyone would forget Italy ever had a king.
There were sporadic mentions of the race in the Telegraph in the next few years, reproduced further on in these pages, either in the Parisian diary or in a Saturday column entitled ‘Motoring and Cycling’, which highlighted news of events forthcoming or past. It was a sign of the times that within a few years the column had spread its wings, so to speak, scrubbed ‘and Cycling’, and become almost a full broadsheet page of ‘Motoring and Aviation’.
If a keen follower of the sport wished to keep abreast of the new-fangled Tour, or the other massed-start road races that differentiated ‘Continental’ cycling from the domestic track and time-trial variety, he would not find it in the parochial British press of the time, not even the slightly less jingoistic Telegraph. Indeed, J.B. Wadley, the first reporter to be bylined from the Tour, though not until the early Sixties, used to subscribe as a young man to the French sports paper that founded and sponsored the race, L’Auto. His newsagent in Colchester, Essex, apparently thought it slightly bizarre and extravagant that anyone would pay 1½d a day for a journal in a foreign language about a lot of cyclists with funny names pedalling around France. After all, the first British riders – Charles Holland and Bill Burl – did not compete in the race until 1937, neither finishing it, and it was not until the mid-Fifties that Brian Robinson followed in their tyre tracks. Indeed, it would be the man from Mirfield, in Yorkshire, who became the first Briton to win a stage, in 1958.
However, it was the emergence of Tom Simpson, in the wake of Robinson’s success, that finally inspired the Telegraph to stop taking occasional Reuters or Associated Press wire reports on the Tour, rewriting them with a ‘local’ angle, and send their own man to France. The previously mentioned John Borland Wadley, better known as ‘Jock’, had continued his deep interest in overseas cycling into adulthood, working for and founding several specialist magazines, and it was he who was first employed as a freelance by the Telegraph to cover the 1964 race, though he was certainly the ‘Special Correspondent’ two years earlier. J.B. was still sending back reports, aged 65, in 1980, less than a year before he died.
So what did the readers of The Daily Telegraph and its competitors miss in the 50 editions of the Tour de France run between 1903 and 1964? They certainly missed the most colourful period in the event’s history: tales abound of mystery, intrigue, cheating, Herculean feats and larger-than-life characters. The fact that there was not a television camera, hand-held by a motorcycle pillion rider, inches from the face of the man in the yellow jersey, arguably helps embroider some of the story-telling. That and the fact that, for at least the first two Tours, much of it happened in the dark because night-riding was a feature of the stages.
Maurice Garin, the first winner, is characterised in shorthand form as a chain-smoking chimney sweep, which makes him sound like a French Alf Tupper, who brushed the soot off his clothes, climbed on his pushbike and pedalled 2,500 kilometres around the countryside fuelled only by a flagon of wine and a packet of Gauloises. In fact, Garin was the Lance Armstrong of his day, around the turn of the last century, the winner of just about every race that mattered. He found the inaugural route ‘grey and monotonous’ and said he ‘suffered on the road, I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was sleepy, I cried between Lyon and Marseille’. From the start, he said, he felt ‘like a bull pierced by banderillas, who pulls the banderillas with him, never able to rid himself of them’.
The second race was even worse. Supporters of rival competitors felled trees to block the road and beat up riders, including Garin. ‘I’ll win the Tour de France provided I’m not murdered before we get to Paris,’ he said. There were frequent reports of tacks being strewn on the route to cause punctures, allegations of cheating by ‘taking a tow’ from motorcycles or jumping on trains and claims of riders being poisoned. One rider even brandished a revolver at an accuser. Garin duly arrived ahead of the rest in Paris but, along with the next three behind him, was disqualified after being accused of receiving illegal assistance.
Henri Desgrange, the Tour’s founding father and director, was an autocratic dictator and made few friends among the competitors. He had a long-running feud with Henri Pélissier, the winner in 1923, most notably about the conditions endured by the riders. ‘You have no idea what the Tour de France is,’ Pélissier told a journalist after he had abandoned the race in 1924. ‘It’s a Calvary. And what’s more, the way to the cross only had 14 stations – we’ve got 15… They wouldn’t treat mules the way we’re treated.’ He then revealed, with tongue gently in cheek, what the riders needed to take with them just to get by: cocaine ‘for our eyes’, chloroform ‘for our gums’, horse liniment ‘to keep our knees warm’ and three boxes of assorted though unspecified pills. ‘In short, we run on dynamite.’ When Desgrange introduced the first serious climb into the Tour in 1910, the Col du Tourmalet in the central Pyrenees, the first rider over the top of what was little more than a goat track was Octave Lapize. He was pushing his bike, and as he passed Desgrange at the check-point, he spat: ‘Assassins!’ Nonetheless Lapize won the race, and has a statue on the summit recalling his place in history.
The Tourmalet was also the backdrop to a scene that illustrates just how tight a rein Desgrange and his team of scrutineers kept on the race. Eugene Christophe, the outstanding favourite to win in 1913 after finishing runner-up the year before, found his front forks had snapped on the descent, but managed to grind to a juddering halt. In between bouts of weeping, he put the bike over his shoulder and stumbled for two hours to the nearest village, Ste-Marie-de-Campan, ten kilometres away. Once there, he sought out the forge and, being a skilled mechanic, set about repairing the damage himself. Which was just as well as the strict rules of the Tour forbade riders receiving assistance. However, with the bike frame in one hand, and a hammer in the other, he had to accept the help of a seven-year-old boy called Corni to work the bellows that fanned the fire. For that, the jobsworth working for Desgrange penalised him ten minutes. Added to the overall delay, Christophe’s lead and his chances of winning the Tour had disappeared. Until the arrival five decades later of Raymond Poulidor, the eternal bridesmaid (he finished second three times, and third in five others), Christophe was probably the unluckiest rider on the Tour. Lightning struck him not once, not twice, but thrice: his forks also snapped on the cobbled streets of Valenciennes, close to Belgium, in 1919, and again on the descent from the Galibier in the Alps in 1922. On all three occasions he was in contention for a title he was destined never to win.
More fortunate was François Faber, of Luxembourg, who, in the middle of winning a remarkable five stages on the trot in 1909, suffered a broken chain one kilometre from the finish in Lyon, and pushed the bike all the way to the finish. He still won that day’s racing, and ultimately the Tour, having led from the second stage. But six years later he died in the Battle of Artois at Carency, near Arras. Some say he was shot by a sniper as he jumped for joy after receiving a telegram announcing the birth of a daughter; more credible, though, are reports he was shot while carrying an injured colleague back from no man’s land. Hugo Koblet also died an unexplained death, though six years after he had retired from the sport, killed when his car spun off the road into a tree in perfect driving conditions. Some suspected suicide. Koblet, a handsome young man given the nickname Pédaleur de Charme, stunned everyone when he won the Tour in 1951 ahead of legendary riders like Fausto Coppi, Louison Bobet and Gino Bartali. No one should have been surprised after his performance in the stage from Brive into Agen, though. At first the peloton (the main group) thought it was an opportunist break – Koblet was trying out his legs – and let him go. But as the gap increased from one minute to two, two to three and four, they realised their mistake. Koblet crossed the line in splendid isolation, stopped his watch, and famously took out a comb and fixed his hair while waiting for the next man. The wait lasted 2 m 35 s, by which time his hair was perfect.
The death of Tom Simpson resonates throughout the pages of this book, in both the build-up to the fateful day on Mont Ventoux in 1967 and the shock waves that continue to this day. It was not, however, the first death in full-on competition. That befell the Spaniard Francisco Cepeda during the 1935 Tour when he plunged into a ravine, as he hurtled down the Col du Galibier, and fractured his skull.
Twenty years earlier, the opportunities for the unfortunate Eugene Christophe to gain that elusive win were limited further because of the four races lost to the First World War (coincidentally, the 1914 Tour started on the day Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, but continued uninterrupted). The same was true for Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, whose careers were interrupted by the Second World War. Indeed, Bartali’s two Tour wins, in 1938 and 1948, represent the largest gap between one success and the next. Many believe Coppi, despite the presence of Bartali, would have won more than his two Tours of 1949 (when nearly 30) and 1952. In the latter, Jacques Goddet, Desgrange’s successor as race director, had to increase the prizes lower down the order to keep the other riders interested because Coppi was so dominant.
Coppi was one of cycling’s most colourful characters: he conducted an affair with a married woman that shocked Italian society right up to the Pope, was a prisoner of war, and died, aged 40, after contracting malaria on a hunting trip in what is now Burkina Faso. Though earlier riders had used drugs to help them overcome the rigours of the Tour – strychnine and heroin were early favourites – Coppi is often recognised as having introduced the ‘modern’ evil to the sport. Bartali always had his suspicions. Indeed, in a television interview after he retired, Coppi was asked outright if he had used amphetamines. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘whenever it was necessary.’ And when was it necessary, the interviewer asked. ‘Almost all the time,’ he said.
When Henri Desgrange and Geo Lefevre adjourned to continue their conversation about the possibilities of putting on a round-France cycle race to boost the circulation of L’Auto, back in 1902, they headed out for lunch at the Taverne Zimmer on the Boulevard de Montmartre in Paris. The restaurant is now an outlet of the international franchise TGI Friday’s. It would be no surprise, though, if the building had the green cross of a chemist’s shop outside, or had become the headquarters of a multinational pharmaceutical group. The Tour de France has been riddled with drugs almost from day one.
It did not help that Desgrange thought the perfect Tour would involve only one man surviving. He wanted his winner to be not just the best cyclist, but a superhuman athlete as well. The route was drawn to that end. Unfortunately the man who can sprint like a cheetah, climb like a monkey and keep going, day after day, on minimal sustenance like a camel has yet to be born. Though Henri Pélissier was half-joking when he listed the essentials in a Tour rider’s tool-box, it did not take his contemporaries long to recognise that they required a little extra ‘help’ to get through the world’s greatest endurance race. Not that the Tour itself ushered in the use of illegal or dangerous drugs: there were instances of doping in the late 19th century. Nitroglycerine, which was used to revive patients after heart attacks, and which helped riders with their breathing, was an early stimulant. The original Tour riders would consume large quantities of alcohol and some took cocaine. Amphetamines, prescribed to American GIs in the Second World War to fight fatigue, took over in the second half of the 20th century as the drug of preference. No rider, said Jacques Anquetil, the great French champion of the Sixties, ‘could manage simply on mineral water’. Then Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux, a heady cocktail of amphetamines, heat and exhaustion proving fatal, and that should have meant closure for doping at the Tour de France. It didn’t; Tom Simpson died in vain.
The pages of this book are pock-marked with more and more instances of drug usage, and attendant suspicious minds, denials, always denials, police raids, suspensions and court cases, punctuated by only the odd confession. If Simpson and 1967 failed to spell the end for the dopers and their suppliers, the Tour should surely have pulled out of the trough represented by the ‘Tour of Shame’ in 1998. Paul Hayward’s long essay at the height of l’affaire Festina reads like a cross between the plot for a cheap thriller and a thesis by a medical student. Quite how the race reached Paris remains a mystery; how the sport had been allowed to plumb such depths is another unanswered question. Yet despite all the hand-wringing and soul-searching, the message doesn’t seem to have got through to the men at the sharp end: the riders, team sponsors, managers and soigneurs, the travelling masseurs. If the cheating wasn’t bad enough, the damage done to the athlete himself certainly is. Amphetamines had given way to anabolic steroids, which could bring on acne and premature baldness and significantly alter body weight, but also lead to impotence and heart and liver problems. Even worse was to follow: an injection of EPO, or erythropoietin, like amphetamines, delays the onset of fatigue. By stimulating red blood cell production, it means that more oxygen can be delivered to the muscles and the body can keep going, beyond its normal limits. On the downside, as one former rider put it, it can turn blood ‘to strawberry jam’, clog up the arteries and have lethal consequences. Indeed, the cemeteries of Belgium and Holland are packed with young cyclists who suffered heart attacks after taking the in-vogue designer drug.
The trouble is, no one seems to be looking and listening. It is bad enough that the majority of our heroes from the past, be they Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Marco Pantani or even David Millar, took performance-enhancing drugs. But there can be no excuse for the present-day cheats. No excuse for Floyd Landis testing positive for testosterone on the very stage in which he made his surge for victory in 2006, disqualified within days of standing atop the podium. No excuse for the entire Cofidis and Astana teams needing to be kicked off the Tour in 2007, or Michael Rasmussen having to be removed by his own Radobank team, while wearing the yellow jersey, for lying about where he was when the random dope testers called. No excuse for Alberto Contador, who was eventually found guilty of taking clenbuterol (he had initially blamed contaminated meat) and stripped of his 2010 Tour win. And there can be no excuses offered up for Lance Armstrong, who managed to keep a straight face while all the time using drugs to assist him win the Tour a record seven times between 1999 and 2005. It is unutterably sad that someone who inspired millions with his fight against cancer should cheat so brazenly in the pursuit of glory. That he managed to mask that usage in test after test after test emphasises the difficulties in trying to turn cycling into a ‘clean’ sport we can all believe in.
At one point, an exasperated Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union, asked: ‘When are these idiots going to learn that it’s over?’ When, indeed.
The dismantling of the Armstrong legend began in the late summer of 2012, so soon after cycling had invaded the consciousness of the greater British public. The 99th running of the Tour was dubbed La Promenade des Anglais as Bradley Wiggins became the first Briton to win the race, and Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish and David Millar swept up stage wins. Then Wiggins added an Olympic gold medal as Great Britain’s two-wheelers dominated the London Games. It is to be fervently hoped that this heralds the arrival of a ‘clean’ era for the sport.
While the advent of Tom Simpson precipitated the interest of The Daily Telegraph in the Tour de France, and J.B. Wadley was handed the opportunity to reach a wider audience than he could with his cycling journals, it was Channel 4’s sponsorship of the newspaper’s race coverage in 1989 that was the catalyst to elevate it to another level. Suddenly more space was afforded the Tour, and features and specially commissioned articles, including several from Jacques Goddet, the veteran race director, started to appear. For most subsequent years, Phil Liggett, who took over from Wadley in 1981, was accompanied for at least part of each year’s race by a succession of feature or colour writers. Michael Calvin, Ian Ridley, Paul Hayward, Sarah Edworthy, Martin Johnson, Andrew Baker and Brendan Gallagher have all done a tour of duty or two, and helped enhance the coverage in their own inestimable ways. In addition, the Telegraph has been able to attract top-class articles from specialists such as Samuel Abt and William Fotheringham, riders such as Chris Boardman, David Millar and Allan Peiper, and James Cracknell, who was prepared to swap a rowing boat for a bike and ride up the infamous Col du Galibier in an attempt to show just how tough it was.
However, perhaps the most heroic attempt to illustrate for the layman the difficulty of becoming a Tour de France rider came when Brendan Gallagher was given the dubious privilege of riding a leg of the 2004 Tour on the invitational L’Etape du Tour for amateur riders, which takes place on the Tour’s rest day. Modesty forbids disclosing the identity of the person who commissioned the quest, but the telephone exchange described by Gallagher in the first of a series of articles setting out his preparations, and included in these pages, is vaguely familiar. Cycling experts wrote in and said Gallagher, an overweight, fortysomething, rugby-following lump, was mad to attempt it. In the end, he didn’t: he succumbed to injury – Gallagher (groin) – and reluctantly had to fall on his pen, but not before making a decent stab at trying to reach the start line.
This book is not only a tribute to the men who pedalled to fame and fortune on France’s roads; it is testimony to the fine writers the Telegraph has employed over the years, particularly under the stewardship of long-time sports editor David Welch. The Tour has come alive through these writers’ words, all produced under the pressure of an imminent deadline. The best job in the world, though? Like any job, the reality can be a little different – but we can dream.
You’ve seen the newspaper, now read the book.
Like any rider in the Tour de France, the editor of a book like this requires a good team around him. Consequently, thanks must go to Keith Perry, one of my former sports editors at the Telegraph, for coming up with the idea in the first place; to Caroline Buckland, Head of Books and Entertainment, for commissioning it; to the always helpful Gavin Fuller and his team in the Telegraph library for facilitating the research; to Graham Coster, Sam Harrison, Dan Steward and Barbara Phelan, my editors at Aurum, for keeping the show on the road; to my trusted former colleague Andrew Baker for his excellent advice; to my wife Jane for her support, particularly in helping to input acres of copy, of which this is only a fraction; to the writers, the men and woman with the best jobs in the world, who saw it and described it so evocatively; and, not least, to the many members of what we now call the ‘production team’, a veritable peloton, who performed the original editing, and wrote the headlines, when the copy landed via copytaker or laptop in the bowels of Fleet Street, South Quay, Canary Wharf or Victoria. Without these unsung domestiques the man in the yellow jersey would never have reached the finishing line.
Martin Smith
March 2009 & November 2012