Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races. Ellis Bacon
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Название: Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races
Автор: Ellis Bacon
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007585427
isbn:
However, what happened to Christophe on stage 6, on the road between Bayonne and Luchon, soon put the kibosh on that theory. While descending the Col du Tourmalet, Christophe’s forks snapped, requiring him to run the rest of the way down the mountain to the town at the bottom – Ste-Marie-de-Campan – where he found a blacksmith willing to allow him to use his tools to effect a repair. However, the fact that the blacksmith’s assistant operated the bellows to help Christophe contravened race rules that stipulated that a rider couldn’t receive any outside assistance.
The Frenchman was handed a time penalty, and Belgian rider Philippe Thys went on to win the race by just eight-and-a-half minutes over Frenchman Gustave Garrigou, meaning that, for the second year in a row, there was a foreign winner, which wouldn’t have pleased an organiser trying to promote a French newspaper to a French public.
In fact, Belgian riders would win the race seven times in a row before a French rider would win his home race again.
Anyone who thinks that today’s maladie of there having been no French winner since 1985 need only look to the past to see that everything goes in cycles.
Eugène Christophe’s repairs are in vain as he is subsequently penalised for accepting outside assistance
| Start: Paris, France, on 28 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 26 July | |
| Total distance: 5391 km (3350 miles)Longest stage: 470 km (292 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col du Galibier: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 7 | |
| Starters: 145Finishers: 54 | |
| Winning time: 200 h 28’ 48”Average speed: 27.028 kph (16.795 mph) | |
| 1. Philippe Thys (Bel)2. Henri Pélissier (Fra) at 1’ 50” 3. Jean Alavoine (Fra) at 36’ 53” |
After 1913’s relatively close finish to the race, reigning champion Philippe Thys started the 1914 Tour in earnest, winning the sprint from an eleven-man lead group on stage 1,and then never letting go of the lead again. It looked as though it was going to be a dominating show of riding from the Belgian.
Sure enough, Thys had built up a 35-minute lead over Henri Pélissier, a 25-year-old Frenchman riding his first Tour de France, by the time the race exited the Pyrenees. Pélissier pushed the race leader hard in the Alps, but had only been able to reduce his deficit by a few minutes going into the fourteenth and penultimate stage between Longwy and Dunkirk.
Thys, however, was docked 30 minutes for an illegal wheel change on the stage, and Pélissier trailed Thys by just 1 minute 50 seconds when they reached the finish in the Parc des Princes in Paris the next day, having won three stages along the way.
The 1914 Tour also saw the first participation by an Australian rider, with two of them – Don Kirkham and Iddo ‘Snowy’ Munro – lining up together for the off in Paris at the end of June.
Both made it all the way around and back to Paris, in seventeenth and twentieth place, respectively, but another foreign rider, poor Ali Neffati – a Tunisian riding his second Tour who had garnered a number of fans for choosing to wear a fez while he rode – was less fortunate, hit by one of the organisation’s cars on stage 6, and forced to abandon for the second year in a row.
Two days after the race finished in Paris, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a month earlier, on the day the Tour had started. The First World War would put paid to the Tour de France for the next five years.
Debutant Henri Pèlissier races from Grenoble to Geneva
“No rider deserves it more than he does.”
Henri Desgrange on Eugène Christophe’s credentials for being the first rider ever to wear the Tour’s yellow jersey
| Start: Paris, France, on 29 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 27 July | |
| Total distance: 5560 km (3455 miles)Longest stage: 482 km (300 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col d’Izoard: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 6 | |
| Starters: 67Finishers: 10 | |
| Winning time: 231 h 07’ 15”Average speed: 24.056 kph (14.948 mph) | |
| 1. Firmin Lambot (Bel)2. Jean Alavoine (Fra) at 1 h 42’ 54” 3. Eugène Christophe (Fra) at 2 h 26’ 31” |
The Tour resurfaced with a cold, wet and just downright miserable schlep of a 1919 edition through a war-ravaged France. Three past winners – Lucien Petit-Breton, François Faber and Octave Lapize – had been killed during the First World War, and many of the riders arrived at the race weary and out of shape, which was said to have contributed to what was, and remains, the Tour’s slowest ever average speed: 24.056 kph (14.948 mph).
It won’t have helped, either, that the organisers saw fit to include the race’s longest-ever stage: a 482-km (300-mile) route between Les Sables-d’Olonne and Bayonne. It was a stage the race would then use every year until 1924; it was common in the early years of the Tour to repeat stages year after year, but today, with competition between towns to host stages fierce, the race follows a different route every year.
French darling Eugène Christophe was back in 1919, as was defending champion Philippe Thys, winner in 1913 and 1914. Thys, however, soon abandoned, ill, on stage 1; he’d be back the following year. Christophe, though, took over the race lead from compatriot Henri Pélissier after stage 4.
After six stages at the head of the race, Christophe was awarded a yellow jersey by race organiser Henri Desgrange at the café L’Ascenseur in Grenoble, at the start of stage 11 СКАЧАТЬ