Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races. Ellis Bacon
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The 1907 Tour started on a sombre note as the 1906 champion, gifted 27-year-old climber René Pottier, had committed suicide in January.
The fifth edition’s opening stage followed the route of the famous cobbled Classic, Paris-Roubaix, which had run since 1896, and although 1906 Tour runner-up – and now race favourite – Georges Passerieu had won the 1907 edition of the one-day race, it was 1905 Tour champ Louis Trousselier who took the victory in Roubaix in July.
The race followed a very similar route around the edge of France to that of 1906, again taking in the city of Metz, then still in Germany, and adding a second foreign sojourn by briefly drifting onto Swiss soil on stage 4 from Belfort to Lyon. The total number of stages ramped up to fourteen, and the race included its highest mountain pass yet by adding the 1326–m (4350–ft) Col de Porte, in the Chartreuse mountains of southeast France, to the route of stage 5 from Lyon to Grenoble.
There was a South American flavour added to the mix, too, in that Lucien Petit-Breton – a Frenchman born in Brittany who had moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a child with his family, only returning to France in 1902 to enlist in the French army – was a very real contender for overall victory, having finished fifth overall at the 1905 Tour and fourth in 1906. Winning the very first edition of the Italian one-day Classic, Milan-San Remo, earlier in the 1907 season hadn’t done his prospects much harm, either.
Petit-Breton – real name Lucien Mazan – had adopted the pseudonym while bike racing in Argentina, a moniker presumably given to him by Buenos Aires locals, to hide the fact that he raced from is disapproving father.
After taking control of the race on stage 10 to Bordeaux, the little Breton held on to the lead the rest of the way to the finish in Paris.
Overall winner Lucien Petit-Breton leads the stage between Toulouse and Bayonne
The Tour takes on the Ballon d’Alsace, in the Vosges mountains of eastern France, in 1908. The Ballon, the first ever genuine mountain climb in the Tour, first featured in the 1905 race, five years before the first appearance of the Pyrenees, and six years before the Alps.
“It’s time to hand over the mantle. Next year’s Tour is for Faber.”
1908 Tour champion Lucien Petit-Breton following his second consecutive overall victory, suggesting that Luxembourg’s François Faber, his Peugeot team-mate, is the rightful heir to the Tour crown
| Start: Paris, France, on 13 JulyFinish: Paris, France, on 9 August | |
| Total distance: 4488 km (2789 miles)Longest stage: 415 km (258 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col de Porte: 1326 m (4350 ft) Mountain stages: 4 | |
| Starters: 114Finishers: 36 | |
| Winning time: 36 pointsAverage speed: 28.740 kph (17.858 mph) | |
| 1. Lucien Petit-Breton (Fra) 36 points2. François Faber (Lux) 68 points 3. Georges Passerieu (Fra) 75 points |
Lucien Petit-Breton arrived at the 1908 edition of the Tour in rude form, having already won that year’s Paris-Brussels – a one-day race still in existence, now held in September, but then held in April.
The 1908 Tour followed the exact route of the previous edition, both starting on Paris’s Ile de la Jatte and finishing at the Parc des Princes. The only real change was the number of starters – up to 114 from 93 the year before – and Petit-Breton’s absolute dominance of the race this time, becoming the first rider to win two Tours (winner of the inaugural Tour, Maurice Garin, having been disqualified after cheating to win the 1904 edition).
Although London-born Georges Passerieu – second at the 1906 Tour to the late René Pottier – put up a good fight, winning stages 1, 5 and 13, and standing out as the only rider capable of getting over the Col de Porte and ‘Pottier’s mountain’, the Ballon d’Alsace, without walking, his Peugeot-Wolber ‘team-mates’ (riders often simply shared the same sponsors rather than necessarily working as a team), Petit-Breton and François Faber, dominated the race with five and four stage victories apiece, respectively.
René Pottier’s younger brother, André, helped to keep the family name alive by leading the race over the Col Bayard and Côte de Laffrey, but simply wasn’t in the same league as his more famous sibling, and could only finish seventeenth overall in Paris.
François Faber struggles over the summit of the Ballon d’Alsace
| Start: Paris, France, on 5 JulyFinish: Paris, France, on 1 August | |
| Total distance: 4488 km (2789 miles)Longest stage: 415 km (258 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col de Porte: 1326 m (4350 ft) Mountain stages: 4 | |
| Starters: 150Finishers: 55 | |
| Winning time: 37 pointsAverage speed: 28.658 kph (17.807 mph) | |
| 1. François Faber (Lux) 37 points2. Gustave Garrigou (Fra) 57 points 3. Jean Alavoine (Fra) 66 points |
True to his word, 1907 and 1908 winner Lucien Petit-Breton retired from racing and followed the 1909 Tour as a journalist, leaving the door open for his former team-mate, François Faber, to take the race.
At 6 ft 2 in and weighing 91 kg, ‘The Giant of Colombes’ must have taken advantage of his bulk to help keep him warm in a race run in freezing conditions, and thought to still be the coldest weather ever encountered by the Tour.
Faber, to all extents and purposes a Frenchman but officially