2023-07-07 12:10:08
Cycling
When the convicts of the road traveled 482 km in one stage
Exactly 104 years ago, the Tour de France had the riders rolling in one go between Les Sables-d’Olonne and Bayonne. A madness far from the current layouts, which allow the stars to panic the counters.
PostedJuly 7, 2023, 2:10 PM
Honoré Barthélémy and Firmin Lambot in the Tourmalet.
imago images/KHARBINE-TAPABOR
For the past few days, Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar have been knocking out. among the roads of the Grande Boucle. The Dane and the Slovenian are in the process of inventing a real rivalry, which could well become part of the legend of the biggest cycling race in the world. Thursday’s episode, between Tarbes and the heights of Cauterets, added another layer. After 145 km of racing, the rider from the UAE Team Emirates made up some of the time lost the day before between Pau and Laruns, on a route of 163 terminals.
Inevitably, the figures developed by the two young athletes are crazy. And curmudgeons, as well as social media pseudoscientists, will find their performance on the bicycle to be otherworldly, even time-honoured. Inevitably, when one has been removed from the middle by force, one tends to be a little embittered. The bicycle of the 2020s is not the same discipline as the cycling of the nineties and even less of the beginning of the last century.
Other times, other mores, therefore. But it is still appropriate to put back on the front of the stage what was done 104 years ago right on, on the Tour de France. On July 7, 1919, those who were then very rightly called the “convicts of the road” were clearly not doing the same sport as the current rockets of the professional platoons. Because on the menu of the 5th stage of the 13th edition of the Grand Boucle, between Les Sables-d’Olonne and Bayonne, the twenty runners in the running have stuffed themselves with a small flat stage with a whopping 482 kilometers to cover.
We never exceeded 80 meters in altitude, it’s true, but imagine the state of the roads at the end of the First World War. It’s a bit as if, today, you lived in La Plaine, near Geneva, took your eleven-year-old daughter’s bike and, in terms of kilometers, you decided to join Zernez, in the depths of Graubünden. A madness and, inevitably, figures very different from what we can see today.
Because on July 7, 1919, the first to cross the finish line in the Basque city had taken 18 hours, 54 minutes and 7 seconds to cover the 482 terminals on the program. His name was Jean Alavoine, a Frenchman from the Peugeot-Wolber team. He was ahead of his compatriot René Chassot and the Belgian Léon Scieur in the sprint. The legend Eugène Christophe – the first rider in history to wear a yellow jersey which had been invented that year – had retained the overall lead and the peloton had only 17 competitors left the following day, after the retirements of the Pélissier brothers and the retirement of Belgian Urbain Anseeuw. They will only be ten classified at the end, out of 67 starters.
Twenty days later, on arrival from Paris and at the end of a last short stage of 340 terminals between Dunkirk and the Parc des Princes, it was the Belgian Firmin Lambot who won the Grande Boucle. He had traveled the 5560 kilometers of the event in more than 231 hours, with 1h42’54 on Jean Alavoine and 2h26’31 on Eugène Christophe, who had lost everything during the penultimate stage between Metz and Dunkirk (468 km). The “Serrurier de Malakoff” had left an hour and ten minutes on the way, forced to repair the fork of his bicycle.
Eugène Christophe’s mustache seems not very aerodynamic.
image sports photo service
“A monster ovation awaited me at the Parc des Princes. I will never forget him. It was a great comfort to me to note that, if I had lost the first place of the Tour de France and the gain that it would have got me, I kept the esteem and the sympathy of all the French sportsmen, had said the unfortunate. Henri Desgrange, the inventor of the Tour de France, then launched a subscription so that the public moved by the accident of their darling could “compensate for the loss of money resulting from his accident”.
Christophe will return home with 13,500 French francs in his pocket, almost twice as much as the winner Firmin Lambot. Not the same sport, other times, other mores, that you were told. But crowdfunding already existed.
Firmin Lambot received a nice bouquet.
imago images/KHARBINE-TAPABOR
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