Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races. Ellis Bacon
Évian, France, on 20 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 18 July
Radical changes the year previously turned yet more radical as the Tour started outside Paris for the first time. Évian, a town that had featured in the race for the first time only the year before – and best known today for its bottled water – was truly put on the map thanks to being used for the race’s Grand Départ. The race returned to its Paris start in 1927, however, where it remained until 1951, and a start in Metz. Only then did the race start in a different town or city each year, until 2003 when, for one year only, it started again in Paris, on the site of the Au Réveil Matin café, where it had started in 1903, to celebrate 100 years of the race. In a sad footnote, the building was gutted by fire in late 2003, barely two months after the Tour start.
At 5745 km (3570 miles), the 1926 edition was, and remains, the longest-ever Tour de France, although Desgrange dropped the total number of stages down to seventeen from eighteen the year before. He preferred longer, more epic stages, and judged the distances of the 1925 stages to be too short.
Thirty-three-year-old Belgian Lucien Buysse, second to Bottecchia in 1925, won overall in 1926, despite receiving the shocking news on stage 3 that his daughter had died. He only continued in the race after being encouraged to do so by his family.
His younger brother, 24-year-old Jules, had won the opening stage between Évian and Mulhouse by a massive 13-minute margin, and held yellow until stage 3. They became – and remain – the only brothers to wear the yellow jersey in the same edition of the race.
The Tour’s globalisation continued, too, when Kisso Kawamura became the first Japanese rider to take part – although he abandoned during the first stage.
Lucien Buysse powers to victory despite personal tragedy
| Start: Paris, France, on 19 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 17 July | |
| Total distance: 5320 km (3306 miles)Longest stage: 360 km (224 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col du Galibier: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 6 | |
| Starters: 142Finishers: 39 | |
| Winning time: 198 h 16’ 42”Average speed: 27.244 kph (16.928 mph) | |
| 1. Nicolas Frantz (Lux)2. Maurice De Waele (Bel) at 1 h 48’ 21” 3. Julien Vervaecke (Bel) at 2 h 25’ 06” |
Francis Pélissier’s older brother, Henri, had done little to impress Tour organiser Henri Desgrange over the years. The two were almost permanently at loggerheads over how tough the race was – Henri the rider believing that it was too hard; organiser Henri always on the hunt for something to make it even harder. Even Henri’s 1923 victory displeased the race founder: it meant he had to put Pélissier on the cover of his newspaper.
One can only imagine, then, Desgrange’s feelings when Francis Pélissier became the first rider to quit the Tour while clad in the by-now hallowed yellow jersey. He was simply unable to match the speed set by his Dilecta-Wolber team-mates on stage 6 – one of the race’s many team time trials – and waved them onwards once it all became too much. It was in fact a good call: his team-mate, Ferdinand Le Drogo, took yellow in Brest that evening, although, by the end of the ninth stage, the whole eight-man team had quit the race.
It’s a dubious ‘honour’ for the young Pélissier to hold. Only fifteen riders have ever abandoned while in the yellow tunic, Britain’s Chris Boardman being another, in 1998, with the latest being Michael Rasmussen at the 2007 Tour, thrown out by his Rabobank team for having lied on his UCI ‘whereabouts’ form about where dope testers would be able to find him. He told them Mexico; he was training in Italy.
Nicolas Frantz became the second rider from Luxembourg to win the race, following in the tyre tracks of 1909 champion François Faber.
Dinan, Vannes, Pontarlier and Charleville were used as stage starts/finishes for the first time in a race made up of a massive twenty-four stages, with sixteen of those run as team time trials, in which teams started at 15-minute intervals, confusing the spectators immensely. Sponsored teams – usually headlined by bicycle manufacturers – had only just begun to reappear following a number of financially difficult post-war years for the major bike brands, such as Alcyon, Dilecta and JB Louvet.
André Leducq (left) and Tour champion Nicolas Frantz (right)
| Start: Paris, France, on 17 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 15 July | |
| Total distance: 5475 km (3402 miles)Longest stage: 387 km (241 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col du Galibier: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 6 | |
| Starters: 162Finishers: 41 | |
| Winning time: 192 h 48’ 58”Average speed: 28.400 kph (17.646 mph) | |
| 1. Nicolas Frantz (Lux)2. André Leducq (Fra) at 50’ 07” 3. Maurice De Waele (Bel) at 56’ 16” |
Nicolas Frantz’s convincing 1927 Tour win was repeated in 1928, and this time he became only the second rider to hold the yellow jersey all the way from start to finish. Ottavio Bottecchia had been the first to perform the feat, in 1924, but that was ‘only’ over fifteen stages. Luxembourger Frantz defended it over twenty-two stages.
It was touch and go as late as stage 19 between Metz and Charleville, however, when a mechanical problem