Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races. Ellis Bacon
to be a dominating show of riding from the Belgian.
Sure enough, Thys had built up a 35-minute lead over Henri Pélissier, a 25-year-old Frenchman riding his first Tour de France, by the time the race exited the Pyrenees. Pélissier pushed the race leader hard in the Alps, but had only been able to reduce his deficit by a few minutes going into the fourteenth and penultimate stage between Longwy and Dunkirk.
Thys, however, was docked 30 minutes for an illegal wheel change on the stage, and Pélissier trailed Thys by just 1 minute 50 seconds when they reached the finish in the Parc des Princes in Paris the next day, having won three stages along the way.
The 1914 Tour also saw the first participation by an Australian rider, with two of them – Don Kirkham and Iddo ‘Snowy’ Munro – lining up together for the off in Paris at the end of June.
Both made it all the way around and back to Paris, in seventeenth and twentieth place, respectively, but another foreign rider, poor Ali Neffati – a Tunisian riding his second Tour who had garnered a number of fans for choosing to wear a fez while he rode – was less fortunate, hit by one of the organisation’s cars on stage 6, and forced to abandon for the second year in a row.
Two days after the race finished in Paris, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand a month earlier, on the day the Tour had started. The First World War would put paid to the Tour de France for the next five years.
Debutant Henri Pèlissier races from Grenoble to Geneva
“No rider deserves it more than he does.”
Henri Desgrange on Eugène Christophe’s credentials for being the first rider ever to wear the Tour’s yellow jersey
| Start: Paris, France, on 29 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 27 July | |
| Total distance: 5560 km (3455 miles)Longest stage: 482 km (300 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col d’Izoard: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 6 | |
| Starters: 67Finishers: 10 | |
| Winning time: 231 h 07’ 15”Average speed: 24.056 kph (14.948 mph) | |
| 1. Firmin Lambot (Bel)2. Jean Alavoine (Fra) at 1 h 42’ 54” 3. Eugène Christophe (Fra) at 2 h 26’ 31” |
The Tour resurfaced with a cold, wet and just downright miserable schlep of a 1919 edition through a war-ravaged France. Three past winners – Lucien Petit-Breton, François Faber and Octave Lapize – had been killed during the First World War, and many of the riders arrived at the race weary and out of shape, which was said to have contributed to what was, and remains, the Tour’s slowest ever average speed: 24.056 kph (14.948 mph).
It won’t have helped, either, that the organisers saw fit to include the race’s longest-ever stage: a 482-km (300-mile) route between Les Sables-d’Olonne and Bayonne. It was a stage the race would then use every year until 1924; it was common in the early years of the Tour to repeat stages year after year, but today, with competition between towns to host stages fierce, the race follows a different route every year.
French darling Eugène Christophe was back in 1919, as was defending champion Philippe Thys, winner in 1913 and 1914. Thys, however, soon abandoned, ill, on stage 1; he’d be back the following year. Christophe, though, took over the race lead from compatriot Henri Pélissier after stage 4.
After six stages at the head of the race, Christophe was awarded a yellow jersey by race organiser Henri Desgrange at the café L’Ascenseur in Grenoble, at the start of stage 11 on 19 July. The choice of colour to identify the race leader was in order to further publicise Desgrange’s newspaper, L’Auto, which was printed on yellow paper.
Christophe held the maillot jaune for another four stages before bad luck hit. Ironically, just as they had done in 1913 on the Tourmalet, Christophe’s forks broke while riding the cobbles between Metz and Dunkirk on stage 14, forcing him to fix them and cede the race lead – and the jersey – to Belgium’s Firmin Lambot, who wore it, and defended it, on the next day’s final stage to Paris.
Firmin Lambot is congratulated after claiming the yellow jersey in Dunkirk
| Start: Paris, France, on 27 JuneFinish: Paris, France, on 25 July | |
| Total distance: 5503 km (3420 miles)Longest stage: 482 km (300 miles) | |
| Highest point:Col du Galibier: 2556 m (8386 ft) Mountain stages: 5 | |
| Starters: 113Finishers: 22 | |
| Winning time: 228 h 36’ 13”Average speed: 24.072 kph (14.958 mph) | |
| 1. Philippe Thys (Bel)2. Hector Heusghem (Bel) at 57’ 21” 3. Firmin Lambot (Bel) at 1 h 39’ 35” |
Following the war, 1913 and 1914 Tour champ Philippe Thys had arrived at the 1919 race out of shape and in ill health, quitting on the first stage. He arrived at the 1920 Tour in June a changed man, and proceeded to dish out a hammering to his rivals, taking the yellow jersey on stage 2 and never relinquishing it, with the added bonus of no fewer than four stage victories along the way.
In Paris, Henri Desgrange’s face must have been a picture as three Belgians stood atop his podium in the Parc des Princes.
That made it three Tour victories for Thys – the ‘winningest’ rider in the race’s history so far. The poor performances of the French riders – Honoré Barthélémy was the best placed of them down in eighth – angered Desgrange, who took out his fury on Henri Pélissier, who in turn had quit the race in a huff. Even golden-boy Eugène Christophe couldn’t help Desgrange out with any fan-friendly heroics: the unlucky Frenchman’s forks may have stayed in one piece on this occasion, but his body didn’t, and he was forced to retire on the seventh stage with backache.
It had arguably been an easier Tour than many of the previous editions, with only five mountain stages against the usual six or seven, and the flatter stages seemed to play into the hands of the Belgians. Despite that, and despite Desgrange’s desire to see ‘his’ French riders in the thick of the action, the following two Tours followed much the same format.