Cyclopedia (47 page)

Leblanc also followed the example of his predecessor Jacques Goddet in his attempts to keep the race “of its time” by including modernistic engineering works such as the
Channel Tunnel, the Pont de Normandie, and Norman Foster's colossal viaduct at Millau. Leblanc also recognized political events such as the anniversary of the Normandy landings, and, more controversially, the European Union in 1992, when the Tour missed the Pyrenées in order to visit every EU country that had a land border with France—Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and Italy—and included stages finishing in both EU capitals, Strasbourg and Brussels.

The early Tours had another effect: they gave the French a sense of the geography of their own country, according to one study (Boeuf and Leonard, 2003): “By the cartography of France that it helped make known, the Tour acted as a teacher in showing a map printed with the contours of the country—which was rare until the Great War—and very quickly popularised the notion of France as more or less hexagonal.” And the Tour has inspired some fine writing, most notably the essays of Antoine Blondin in the 1950s and 1960s and the structuralist Roland Barthes.

The Tour became more tactical after the Second World War. Road surfaces and bike manufacture improved, teams became more sophisticated, and cyclists became fitter. Standards are now so high that the race has become “chess on wheels”: a subtle tactical game where for much of the time not a great deal looks to be happening. FAUSTO COPPI was the first Tour winner to truly structure his team so that they raced solely in his interests and the first to plan his race around certain key stages, which is the strategy of every Tour favorite today.

Nowadays, the race usually follows an implacable physical logic: all the riders weaken gradually, but the strongest deteriorate more slowly. Usually the best man in the field at half-distance will win. The greatest Tours are those where this does not apply. The best examples include 1989's three-way battle between LAURENT FIGNON, GREG LEMOND, and Pedro Delgado that culminated in the closest ever finish; STEPHEN ROCHE's narrow win over Delgado in 1987; or BERNARD HINAULT and Joop Zoetemelk's tense fight in 1979.

Since 1998, the Tour has been afflicted by almost annual
DOPING scandals but cheating has always played a part in the race. Garin was banned for two years for taking a train in 1904 and there have been episodes when favorites have been pushed up mountains, bikes have been sabotaged, waterbottles spiked. But the drugs issue has proved more intractable. In 2005 there were allegations against the seven-times winner LANCE ARMSTRONG, in 2006 the first man to Paris, Floyd Landis, was disqualified, and in 2007 the likely winner, Denmark's Michael Rasmussen, was thrown out of the race.

While other cycle races struggle to get space on the roads and fight for television time, the Tour's biggest problem has been growth, on a massive scale since the mid-1980s. The Tour has always been as much a commercial as a sports event. It never had an era of “pure” amateurism, although atone point cyclists with no commercial backer (
touristes-routiers
) were allowed in the field.

Gradually, too, after the war, the Tour changed from an event intended to increase the circulation of the organizing newspaper to one that paid its own way through sponsorship and television rights. The big changes came in the 1980s after French broadcasting was deregulated, leading to a massive increase in coverage of the Tour as the nationalized stations fought for market share.

The viewing audience increased from 50 million in 1980 to a billion by 1986. The Tour generated 12 million francs of rights in 1990, 85 million in 1998, over a third of the budget. The race's income shot up: according to French author Pierre Ballester, the Tour now has an annual budget of around 100 million euros, of which 45 million comes from television rights (about half of these in France), 47 million in sponsorship, about 4 million from stage towns, and about 1.5 million in marketing spin-offs.

To bring in a new worldwide audience, the race went from being largely French teams and
French riders with a smattering of foreigners, to being largely international with enough Frenchmen to ensure the home crowds kept interested. There were more teams and bigger, multinational sponsors. The Tour went from being watched mainly by local crowds, to being an event fans travel to, perhaps building an entire vacation around watching the race and being bussed in by a travel company.

Such growth is not without danger, and the Tour is now threatened by its own massive scale, what the French term
le gigantisme
. Doping is part of that, as the vast amounts of money on offer mean it's worth a cyclist paying for sophisticated practices, if he feels he can live with the risk to his reputation. There is now so much media coverage of the race that any scandal creates its own momentum, but the size of the race has brought other problems as well.

With 4,000 people and some 1,500 vehicles, the Tour caravan is now so massive that it causes vast traffic jams in stage towns, and it can take hours to get down from mountain top finishes in the Alps and Pyrenées. So many people travel with the race that hotel rooms are solidly booked for 60 miles around many finishes; the huge convoy of race vehicles has caused a series of deaths among spectators, and the event is vulnerable to political protests of any kind. But in 1904 Desgrange lamented that his Tour had been a victim of massive public interest: the race's success has been founded on excess and that will always be the case.

 

Recommended further reading:
The Great Bike Race
, Geoffrey Nicholson, Magnum, 1977;
The Yellow Jersey Companion to the Tour de France
, Les Woodland, Yellow Jersey, 2003;
Le Tour, A History of the Tour de France
, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Simon and Schuster UK, 2007

Initially, cyclists competed on the same asphalt and grass running tracks used for athletics, or on the oval circuits used for horse racing, but the quest for speed and spectacle led to an early generation of banked cycle tracks built in the late 19th century: in the US, most early professional races were contested on tracks, typically wooden, between 200 and 500 yards, with banked turns at either end. It is estimated that by 1895 there were 100 velodromes across the United States, with a “Grand Circuit” drawing together the country's best cyclists between May and November. A. A. ZIMMERMAN and Major TAYLOR were the two biggest stars of the early years.

Paris boasted the Buffalo velodrome, built in 1893 on the site of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show near Porte Maillot and promoted by the owner of the Folies Bergère; it was here that the tradition of ringing the bell on the final lap of a race began. In a brief stint of track mania, velodromes sprang up in many provincial towns, and races such as PARIS–ROUBAIX were organized to promote them. It was in France that the first use of the banking to gain speed was recorded, in a six-man sprint that decided the French one-kilometer title in 1894. Henri Farman, recorded
La Bicyclette
, “left the string and went obliquely across the track to the outside, as if inviting his rivals to go to the front. He had gained a little speed and seeing that the others were almost at a halt, he used the momentum to attack suddenly and using the slope of the track he arrived at the middle of the bend with 20 m lead.”

In Europe there were events such as the Cuca Coca Cup, a 24-hour race behind pacemakers held at London's Herne Hill and the Bol d'Or, held at the Buffalo. In the United States, the early SIX-DAY races earned a fearsome reputation and were to be a mainstay of the calendar until the 1930s. Massive prizes were earned by the biggest stars such
as ALF GOULLET, Frank Kramer, and Reggie MacNamara. In spite of efforts of promoters like John M. Chapman, who set up a franchised circuit in the northeast and ran six-day races in New York, track cycling died a slow death in the United States between World War I and II as the emphasis shifted to baseball and football. The final event was held at Madison Square Gardens in 1939.

Paced riding was initially the norm in record attempts and long-distance track races: riders would shelter themselves behind multicycles with five or six riders, nicknamed “pedaling artillery.” There might be an additional team riding alongside the solo rider to shelter him from sidewinds. Demi-fond, as it was known, became popular in the 1890s, particularly in Germany, where purpose-built tracks were
constructed, and the first world title was won by the Welshman Jimmy Michael in Cologne in 1895.

These were spectacular and dangerous events, and they were succeeded by motorpaced races just after the turn of the century, which were even riskier. The death toll early on was high; if anything broke at speeds between 50 and 60 mph, the rider stood little chance, as in the 1918 accident at the VELODROME D'HIVER (Vel d'Hiv) that killed the French champion Louis Darragon, who broke a pedal while at full speed, hit the balustrade around the track with his head, and died instantly. Today's roadsize motorbike events are a spectacular throwback to this very dodgy past.

As stadium sports gained popularity, track suffered in the early years of the 20th century; the golden era in Europe was between World War I and II, with the arrival of sprinters such as Britain's Bill Bailey, France's Lucien Michard, and Australia's Bob Spears, and later Belgium's Jeff Scherens and Louis “Toto” Gerardin. In Europe, even after World War II, vast crowds would flock to venues such as the Vigorelli velodrome in Milan, the Vel d'Hiv in Paris, and the Palais des Sports in Brussels. The French journalist Pierre Chany described the spectacle in Milan, with scalpers selling tickets for five times their value, crowds six deep on the pavement stopping traffic, and a crowd of 20,000 inside rising as one to applaud their heroes and jeer at the “villains.” An open-sprint competition at the Vel d'Hiv could readily attract 400 starters.