"How good is that?!"

A delightful interview with Jens Voigt, via the Twitter feed of the equally delightful There Are No Fours.

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Albert Londres and the Tour de France: "Your wife is your bicycle"

Being the second of two excerpts from Albert Londres' reporting on the 1924 Tour de France. The first is here. Once more, the translations are by Graeme Fife, and his footnotes are included where appropriate.

---

Toulon, July 7, 1924

As soon as they got off their bikes, the 'Marshall' resumed his role. The Marshall is Alphonse Baugé. He is commander-in-chief of all racing cyclists — those who race in the Tour de France, the Six Days, the Classic races and on the road track. He is, I believe, the only man alive today capable of working a miracle. He'd have a young boy riding a bike without saddle or handlebars. One day, Alphonse Baugé will be canonised.

He wears a dark-blue uniform, cut like pyjamas, with red wool piping round the jacket. You can't mistake him; he's got a dentrifice Mistinguett smile. He follows the race in a closed car, and it's not only his car that's closed, it's his mouth, too. At every start, the secretary general of the race sews his lips together with brass wire. The other day, out of pity, I thought I'd push a straw into the corner of his mouth to give him some air. He refused. He's a stickler for the rules. At the end of the stage, the secretary general takes a pair of scissors from his pocket and cuts the wire. Alphonse Baugé takes three deep breaths, declares that his heart is still beating, pauses to take stock, then goes off to the riders' hotel.

In Brest, I'd hardly crossed the threshold of the Tour de France dining room when I heard "So, you say it makes no difference to you whether you sing at the Opéra or the Batignolles?"¹ Baugé was talking to Curtel. Curtel wanted to abandon the race, complaining that he'd ridden 1,200km and only earned 650 francs. "In Marseille," he said, "I got 500F for 300km."²

"Well no, you're not a great artist; you're happy to be a provincial baritone playing in knockabout comedy."

"What?" replied Curtel. "I'd rather get 100F at the Batignolles than 5F at the Opera."

"Have you no self-respect? Haven't you even got that?" He put his hand over his heart. "Don't you maybe think how proud your old parents are?"

"Hang on," said Curtel, "my parents aren't that old."

"You don't want to know, you've closed your mind. Listen, I'll give you an example. You know Kubelik, the great violinist? Right. You think Kubelik would drop the violin because he'd only earned 650F? No. Kubelik is an artist.³ So then. You too, you're an artist of the pedals. For the first time you have the honour of riding the Tour de France, this beacon flame of cycle racing, and for some story about 650F you'd let that go?"

"If I kill myself for 650F, what am I going to live on afterwards?"

"Stop. You're no better than a hack, a dumb labourer, a boot-shine boy, a dish washer-upper. You understand nothing about the beauty of the handlebars. Suit yourself. You disgust me."

We arrived in Bayonne. The assault on the Pyrenees started the next day. Five or six riders were faltering with nerves. In comes Baugé to the hotel foyer to see what's going on. "You're going to abandon, you with your system for the Pyrenees?"

"What? I haven't got a system for the Pyrenees."

"Of course you have a system for the Pyrenees: you're going to quit when the whole world is waiting for you on the cols?"

"Oh no Monsieur Baugé, no one's waiting for me at the cols."

"I tell you the whole world's waiting for you; you know that as well as I do. Your old Pyrenean grandmother will be handing you flowers on the summit of the Tourmalet tomorrow."

"I don't give a f... for flowers, M. Baugé. I tell you, I've got no tendons left."

"It's not a question of tendons."

"What am I supposed to push with, then?"

"Go and find your masseur. He'll give you tendons. Listen son, have you got no heart?"

"Yes, but I don't have any tendons."

"Don't think about that. Think about your success, about your name in the big Paris papers. Think about the hero's welcome they'll give you at the station when you get home if you finish the Tour."

"For heaven's sake, M. Baugé, I keep telling you..."

"Yes, yes, you tell me you've got no tendons. Understood. Very well. So, be an undertaker, not a racing cyclist, you understand me? Goodbye."

Next time, it was Luchon. When the guys arrived they were as cold as a decomposing corpse. They went off for a bath. They came back for dinner. "You think this is any kind of profession?" they were saying. Baugé put his head round the door. "It's not a profession, it's a mission."

"Our mission," said Collé, "is to be with our wives, not to work till we drop."

"Your wife," replied Baugé, "is your bicycle."⁴ Tiberghien, in his silk-collared beige pyjamas, assured him that the bicycle had nothing to do with women. Baugé was already off again: "Of course it's a profession, and what a beautiful profession. Does it really mean nothing to you to hear all of France shouting 'Alavoine! Thys! Sellier! Mottiat! Bellenger! Jacquinot! etc.' for an entire month?"

"When you're vomiting your guts up, that's not because you're getting stronger."

"Listen: take Bottecchia. Do you think that if Rockefeller had offered him 50 large notes on the top of the Tourmalet he'd have quit? No. Because Bottecchia has an ideal."

"Yes: to buy a plot of land back home in Italy, build himself a house — him being a bricklayer — and plant his spaghetti."

"No, no," said Baugé.

"Oh, but yes," said Bottecchia.

By Perpignan, of 46 aces, only 20 were left. Sellier and Jacquinot had abandoned in Bourg-Madame; they were suffering too much.

"I understand that, my boys," said Baugé, "but you know, don't you, no rider ever becomes great without great hardship."

Between Perpignan and Toulon, two routiers went under the wheels of a car and were left unconscious on the road: Ugaglia first, then Huot. Their fellow-riders weren't amused.

"My friends," said Baugé, "I've taken falls too. I've gone under the wheels of a car. I was brought up in the business. I know what it's like. There are crosses to bear in our profession, like any other. You know what I'd do if I were you? I'd read Duhamel's Life of the Martyrs; it will put heart into you for tomorrow's stage. Take it from me."

"Can you get it in Toulon?"

"You can get it anywhere."

"Great. We'll go and buy a copy."

*

Notes

¹ Théâtre Les Batignolles: popular and music hall, in the heartland of Paris cabaret, near Pigalle and the Moulin Rouge, and not so far from the Opéra, at the other end of the cultural scale. There was also a velodrome on the Boulevard des Batignolles where, in the early days, men (who paid 12F) and women (15F) could learn how to ride a bicycle.

² Approx. gauge of money equivalents: Le Petit Parisien cost 15F; racing bike, 350F; suit, 95F; trousers, 25F; house in Paris, 25,000F; in suburbs, 15,000F; bottle of white wine, 1.90F; wages of a skilled tradesman, c. 30-40F per day; of a factory girl, 1.40 per hour. Team domestiques earned c. 1,500F per month and might get a purse of 10,000F for the Tour.

³ Henri Desgrange actually called the aces "the first violins". Londres has picked up on this.

⁴ Desgrange was adamant about sex and bicycles: they did not mix. A committed racing cyclist should not divert any of his energies into bedtime romping. And, since sex was natural, healthy and necessary to any red-blooded male, self-denial of sex during the racing season was the surest proof of real willpower. They could always make up for lost time during the winter. Read more...

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Albert Londres and the Tour de France: Convicts of the road

Several posts ago, I mentioned Albert Londres (above) and his writings on the 1924 Tour de France. Londres was a renowned French investigative journalist, best known for his 1923 stories on the infamous bagne (penal colony) at Îles du Salut, off the coast of French Guyana, to which Alfred Dreyfus had been banished a generation before. In his career, he also exposed the horrors of asylums, forced labour camps in North Africa and colonial exploitation in West Africa.

In 1924, this novice to cycling decided to follow the Tour de France, which he would dub "Le Tour de Souffrance" — the Tour of Suffering. He filed eleven stories from the race for Le Petit Parisien newspaper. I'll be posting a couple of these stories, the first of which is below. (The second is here.) The translation is by Graeme Fife and comes from a booklet given away free with the August 1999 issue of Cycle Sport magazine. Fife's footnotes are included where appropriate.

Some exposition: Henri Pélissier was the defending champion. "Desgrange" is Henri Desgrange, the founder and patron of the Tour. He was almost gleefully sadistic about the arduousness of his race; according to him, "The ideal Tour was a Tour which only one rider would have the necessary power and endeavour to complete". He once advised a rider: "Suffering is the full unfurling of the will". Pélissier did not subscribe to Desgrange's philosophy and often let it be known, much to Desgrange's displeasure: he called Pélissier "a pigheaded, arrogant champion".

Anyway: onwards.

---

Coutances, June 27, 1924

This morning, we set out before the peloton...

We reached Granville as the bells chimed 6.00am. Suddenly, some riders came through. As soon as they appeared, the crowd, sure that they recognised them, shouted "Henri! Francis!" Henri and Francis were not in the bunch. Everybody waited. Both categories of riders went by — first-category professionals and the 'shadow men'. The shadow men are the touriste-routiers, a bunch of gutsy guys, independents not under contract to the wealthy bike manufacturers. They have a hard life but they've got plenty of fight in them. Neither Henri nor Francis appear. The news came through: the Pélissier brothers had abandoned. We climbed into the Renault and, without a thought for the tyres, drove back up to Cherbourg. The Pélissiers are well worth a set of tyres.

Coutances: a mob of boys chattering about the scoop.

"Have you seen the Pélissiers?"

"I even touched them," says one of the grubby little urchins.

"Do you know where they are?"

"In the Café de la Gare. Everybody's there."

Everyone was there. I had to push through to get into the bistro. The crowd stood in silence, just staring, open-mouthed, towards the back of the room where three jerseys were installed in front of three bowls of chocolate. It was Henri, Francis and the third was none other than the second, I mean Ville, who came second at Le Havre and Cherbourg. "You have a brainstorm?" I asked.

"No," said Henri, "only we're not dogs."

"What happened?"

"It was over a trifle, rather it was over a jersey. This morning in Cherbourg, a commissaire came up to me and, without saying a word, pulled up my jersey. He was checking I hadn't got two jerseys on. What would you say if I just pulled up your waistcoat to see if you really were wearing a white shirt? I don't like their manners, that's all."

"Why was he bothered about you wearing two jerseys?"

"I could be wearing 15, but I can't leave with two and arrive with one."

"Why?"

"It's the rules. We not only have to ride like animals, we either freeze or suffocate. It's all part of the sport, apparently. Anyway, I went and found Desgrange. 'I'm not allowed to ditch my jerseys on the road, is that it?'

"'No. You must not throw away any material belonging to the organisation.'

"'It doesn't belong to the organisation, it belongs to me.'

"'I'm not discussing it in the street.'

"'If you won't discuss it in the street, I'm going back to bed.'

"'We'll sort it out in Brest.'

"'It will be completely sorted out in Brest because I'll have quit.' And I quit."

"And your brother?"

"My brother's my brother, yes, Francis?" And they kissed over their chocolate.

"Francis was already on the road with the bunch. I caught him up and said 'Francis, I'm chucking'."

"It was like fresh butter on hot toast," said Francis. "Just this morning I'd got a stomach ache. I didn't feel at all good."

"And you, Ville?"

"Me?" replied Ville, laughing like a baby. "They found me in bad trouble at the side of the road. Both my knees were seized up, dead."

The Pélissiers not only have legs, they have a head. And in that head they've got judgement.¹

"You have no conception what this Tour de France is," said Henri. "It's a Calvary. Worse: the road to the Cross has only 14 stations; ours has 15.² We suffer from start to finish. You want to know how we keep going? Here..." He pulled out a phial from his bag. "That's cocaine for the eyes. This is chloroform for the gums."

"This," said Ville, emptying his musette, "is liniment to put some warmth in our knees."

"And the pills? You want to see the pills? Take a look, here are the pills." Each one of them pulled out 3 boxes.

"Fact is," said Francis, "we keep going on dynamite."

Henri continued: "You haven't seen us in the bath after the finish. Buy a ticket for the show. When we've got the mud off, we're white as a funeral shroud, drained empty by diarrhoea; we pass out in the water. At night, in the bedroom, we can't sleep, we twitch and dance and jig about like St. Vitus. Look at our shoelaces, they're made of leather. Well, they sometimes give out, they break, and that's cured hide. Just think what's happening to our skin."

"There's less flesh on our bodies than you'd see on a skeleton," said Francis.

"And our toenails," said Henri. "I've lost six out of ten, they get worn away bit by bit every stage." [From being cramped into the soft cycling shoes, rather like dancing pumps, under constant pressure against the toe-clips.]

"They grow back for next year," said his brother. The brothers kissed once more over the chocolate.

"So, that's it. And you've seen nothing yet; you wait till the Pyrenees, that's 'hard labour' [he uses English].³ We put up with all that, but we wouldn't make a mule do what we have to do. We're not work-shy, but in God's name we won't be kicked around. Physical punishment we can take, but we won't tolerate abuse. My name's Pélissier, not Fido. If I put a newspaper over my stomach⁴ and set out with it, I have to come in with it. If I throw it away — penalty. When we're dying of thirst, before we put our bidon under the running water, we have to make sure there isn't somebody 50 metres away working the pump, otherwise — penalty. You need a drink, you do your own pumping. The day will come when they'll put lead in our pockets because someone reckons that God made men too light. It's all going down the chute — soon there'll only be tramps left, no more artists. The sport has gone haywire, out of control."

"Yes," said Ville, "mad, haywire."

A young boy came up. "What do you want, lad?"

"Er, well, Monsieur Pélissier, seeing as how you don't want to any more, who's going to win now?"⁵

*

Notes

¹ Desgrange said that to win the Tour a rider needs tête et jambes (head and legs, ie. racing nous as well as physical strength).

² The French commentators still use Calvaire (Calvary), evoking Christ's stations of the cross on the way to his crucifixion, to describe a passage of extreme suffering endured by a rider, usually during a mountain stage. And at the turn of the century, the surrealist writer Alfred Jarry — a fanatical cyclist who rode his bike round and round his tiny apartment — caused a stir with a magazine article entitled 'The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race'.

³ This is the origin of the notorious phrase used by Londres: forçats de la route. Forçat means 'convict condemned to hard labour', as in the penal colonies, the subject of Londres' book Au Bagne; la route means 'the road'. Desgrange had used the same phrase some years earlier but, in his perverse way, as a compliment for the suffering he inflicted and the powers of endurance he demanded of 'his' riders. He said that the ideal Tour de France would be a race which only one rider managed to complete. What riled HD about Londres applying the words to the riders — especially the "cosseted" (HD's word) Pélissiers — was the innuendo. To make comparison between the privation suffered by criminals and the noble ordeal of the Tour de France was, in his view, despicable.

⁴ Modern sweat-resistant fabrics make the practice less common, but you'll still see riders grabbing newspapers from bystanders at the tops of cols to shove up their jerseys as insulation against the cold on a fast descent.

⁵ Henri Pélissier had quit once before, in 1920, when he was penalised for throwing away one of his spare tyres. HD had said then that "This Pélissier knows nothing about suffering; he will never win the Tour". He was wrong. The ablest of the three brothers, Henri won in 1923, after a bad start. Trounced in the Pyrenees by Robert Jacquinot, his riding in the Alps was majestic. After his victory, HD was comparing his artistry to that of Monet and Debussy — never one to stint on praise or censure, Desgrange. He actually tailored the 1932 Tour to suit the youngest Pélissier, Charles, whom he favoured and thought unlucky not to have won. Poor climbing had reduced his chance so HD introduces time bonuses; Pélissier was a consistent stage winner. However, Charles Pélissier withdrew and never did win. Read more...

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OPINION: Cycling dopes could learn from the beautiful game

So, another July, another set of drug scandals at the Tour de France. Every year we hear the same old news about a rider implausibly accelerating away on a Category 1 climb and winning the stage, only to find out a week later that it was driven by a little more than grit and determination. Tour de France? Tour de Farce, more like!

Thank God for football. While the upcoming Olympics will no doubt flounder in a sea of positive tests, football continues to prove itself to be the true Beautiful Game, as Pele once called it. The great thing about football is that there is no pill you can take that will make you play like Maradona. There is no injection that will give you the ability to do seventeen consecutive stepovers, or get confused by your team's zonal marking at set pieces.

Cycling has been riddled with doping for generations. To be a professional cyclist is to automatically be indoctrinated in the pernicious ways of the covert laboratories that corrupt sport with their evil substances.

Football has no such culture. When was the last time you heard of a footballer failing a drugs test? Granted, they are not tested anyway near as regularly or thoroughly as cyclists, but that is because there is no need to - there are no drugs in our game. How do we know? Well answer me this - when was the last time you heard of a footballer failing a drugs test?

No, footballers don't need illicit chemicals to help them through a season of 50-plus high-intensity matches, plus major internationals every other summer. They get by on guts, heart, pancreas, appendix and other internal organs. They get by on pride and devotion to their fans, as seen every time they kiss the badge on scoring. The strongest thing these lads ingest is Lucozade Sport, which replenishes lost fluids and electrolytes 33% more effectively than water.

I for one will not be watching this glorified contest between the clients of criminal pharmacologists. Roll on the new footie season, where the participants will run 12km per game on nothing but spirit and passion.

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