One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Tim Hilton

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СКАЧАТЬ disputes, though it was easy to know which side to join. Up the League! Veteran cyclists still greet each other with the slogan and use other phrases we learnt many years ago. We shout ‘Ally ally ally’ as encouragement in races – and not everyone realises that this old League chant is an innocent corruption of the French Allez!

      I am a child of the League and of communism, a powerful and ineradicable mixture. The League formed my adolescence, while I had been drinking the red milk of communism since birth. My real first name is Timoshenko, after the renowned marshal of the Red Army. I doubt whether my parents’ politics inclined me towards the League, which attracted everyone who wished to flex the muscles of youth. But its internationalism and pariah reputation suited a person with my background.

      I first visited France in 1948, when my communist father drove his small family to the Midi in my maternal grandfather’s Bentley. Little boy though I was, I could master books like a journalist. A box at the back of the car held my reading matter. There were books about Robin Hood, Geoffrey Trease’s Bows against the Barons (1934) and such Soviet works as Timur and his Comrades, a children’s story about a young member of the Komsomol and his work in building a new socialist state (a book which I secretly dismissed in about twenty minutes). On the journey I was content to look at France through the windows of the Bentley: long avenues of trees, rivers, castles, vineyards, towns which seemed partly to have fallen down. My diary is in existence, but memory serves better to recall the wine I tasted, the strange, wonderful food eaten out of doors at twilight. The weather was hot. What was that noise of crickets? Then it became cold and windy, and my father drove to high Alpine villages whose people were goitred. Their swollen faces were brown with filth, they dressed in rags and lived in taudis, hovels, with their animals.

      A few years later, when I became a cyclist, thoughts of that 1948 expedition increased my wish to understand the Tour de France. Cycling is not merely about physical pleasure. It is also about knowledge and living memory: the memories we can share with those who are still alive.

      The Tour is now a hundred years old. Every year it is an epic; and every year there are stages of the race that are epics in themselves, containing dozens of human stories of heroism, toil and suffering. The Tour is both theatre and poetry. It reflects all the history of France, and indeed Europe, in the last century. The ideal historian of the Tour would also know about social geography, international relations and folk religion; together with the nature of immigration, the use of drugs, television, money, political power and advertising. This historian should also be a linguist, French, and a racing cyclist with a feeling for the tragedy of the twentieth century.

      Such a writer has never been born, so we must look elsewhere. No need to waste time with, for instance, the vile scribes of Les Temps modernes, except to say that French intellectuals have missed a wonderful subject that lay right before their eyes. Personally I prefer French journalists. They have more relish for life than academics. The vast majority of people who have added to our knowledge of the Tour have been from the press; but, alas, their accounts and interviews are mainly hidden in the archives of newspaper libraries. Many general books recount the history of the Tour, generally beginning with its origins in the press.

      The Tour de France was founded in 1903 by Henri Desgrange, a racing cyclist (the first recordman de l’heure, with 35.325 kms) who was also a journalist. Desgrange had the idea of a very long race as a publicity vehicle for his paper L’Auto. It was in rivalry with Le Vélo, which organised the two longest cycling events of the time, Bordeaux – Paris and Paris – Brest – Paris. A race all the way around France, Desgrange thought, would give L’Auto an advantage over the other publication. The pattern of the Tour was established very early in its life. First, it was to be a circuit of the country. Second, there were to be long stages between different towns and cities. Third, the difficulty of the Tour would be augmented by climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees. Mountain stages were an essential part of the race from 1910. The winner of the Tour – the person who rode back to Paris with the shortest aggregate time in a race that lasted for three weeks or more – would need to be a climber.

      The development of the Tour de France was interrupted by the two world wars but enjoyed a ‘renaissance period’ between 1947 and 1953, the year of its golden jubilee. It is difficult to say when the ‘modern’ Tour de France began. Was it formed by commerce, or by publicity, or by globalisation, mondialisation? Did it begin with the rise of trade teams rather than regional or national teams, after 1961? Or with television coverage, which began in 1955 and was first transmitted en direct in 1957, and with the help of helicopters after 1975? Or with the failure of French cyclists in their own national event, for a Frenchman has not won since Bernard Hinault in 1985?

      On another view, the ‘modern period’ belongs to riders who have won the Tour three times or more. There had been multiple winners before Hitler’s war, notably the Belgian Sylvère Maes (in 1936 and 1939), but the tendency to win again and again began in 1953. Here is a list of the dominating multiple winners:

      Louison Bobet, 1953, 1954, 1955.

      Jacques Anquetil, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964.

      Eddy Merckx, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974.

      Bernard Hinault, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985.

      Greg Lemond, 1986, 1989, 1990.

      Miguel Indurain, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995.

      Lance Armstrong, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.

      These seven men have achieved thirty-one victories between them.

      In the years when the multiple champions did not take the Tour there were some equally memorable victors. On rare occasions they won because their team leader had crashed or had been taken ill. In 1966, for instance, Jacques Anquetil – suffering from bronchitis and, at the age of thirty-two, exhausted by a career that had begun in his teens – climbed off when there were only six stages left before Paris, having first ensured that the Tour would be gained by a modest teammate. Lucien Aimar saw his opportunity and took it, riding into the Parc des Princes in yellow, but without a single stage win to his credit.

      Let no one imagine that Aimar was a cyclist of the second rank. It is true that he regarded Anquetil as a revered elder brother. Although they shared rooms for five years Aimar always addressed his team leader as vous. But Aimar was a vital presence and a potential winner in any race. In 1968 he won a stunning victory in the French national championship, beating Roger Pingeon, who had outdistanced him in that year’s Tour de France. Pingeon, like Aimar, could have won the Tour more than once. Both men had their victories and failures in the political team tactics of the Tour in the 1960s. Pingeon was the more calculating of the two. Aimar often said that he had the relaxed attitude of his homeland, the Cote d’azur, while Pingeon was reserved (he would not share a room with anyone) and a perfectionist. After 1968 his career and his spirits were destroyed by the rise of Eddy Merckx.

      The most surprising winner of the Tour has been Roger Walkowiak, a miner’s son from the Polish enclave in Alsace. He rode the 1956 Tour as an unnoticed member of the Nord-Est-Centre regional team. When he finished in yellow there were no extended plaudits, though the Tour had been run at a record overall speed of 36.268 kph. Walkowiak gave his winnings to his old dad, raced intermittently for three more seasons and then went back home to a job in a factory. It is said that ‘Walko’ was a stupid man who lacked the will to dominate. In 1956 he was certainly directed by his team manager to get into the right breaks and then to take it easy. Would it have been better if he had gone for senseless adventures off the front of the bunch, and then lost the race?

      Another unexpected winner was Joop Zoetemelk, who wore the yellow jersey on the Champs-Elysées in 1980. As a competitor, he was the superior of Aimar or Walkowiak. The reasons why people were surprised that he won were, first, because СКАЧАТЬ