The Tour de France is the most arduous of the world’s sporting events. Riders cover more than 2,000 miles in three weeks at an average speed of around twenty-eight miles per hour. The race can seem more like a test of simple endurance than a display of athletic prowess. The sheer physical effort involved makes it easy to write about its champions in terms of epic poetry.

The race defies ordinary explanation. It is a team sport in which an individual wins. It is an athletic event that actually harms the athletes’ bodies. (Racers cannot consume enough food to replace the 6,000 or so calories burned off by each day’s stage. Most finish the race with less muscle mass than they began with.) The race’s founder, Henri Desgrange, wanted it to be so tough that there would be only a single finisher. He never got his wish, but the sport he set in motion takes such a savage toll on its riders that studies show that the life expectancy of a professional cyclist is barely more than fifty years.

The story of the race is well told in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s recent book Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903–2003.[1] Not a cycling journalist but a writer of excellent histories and superior literary journalism, Wheatcroft tells the tale with ease and charm. He interweaves his straight chronological chapters with seven evocative essays on the regions of France where the race has made its grandest mark. It is a clever gambit. Among other things it allows him to reflect on such larger issues as how the Tour reinforces a certain idea of France, the Tour during the Great War, sponsorship, and the use of pain-killing and performance-enhancing drugs in the event.

Le Tour also offers fetching anecdotes:

His question brought to mind the cruel saying of the great historian Sir Lewis Namier that, since the fifteenth century, no Italian army has ever beaten anything apart from another Italian army. It was Virot who, not long before his death, had given Anquetil a piece of advice: “If you concentrate on making money, you’ll lose races if you concentrate on winning races, you’ll make money.” This was the cycling version of Pushkin’s maxim, “write for pleasure and publish for money.”

Wheatcroft is about as good a writer as cycling can hope to inspire, but I have two reservations about the book. The first could easily be rectified. The book has an unacceptable number of gaffes. Names are misspelled, team members are misidentified, statistics are mixed-up. My other reservation concerns what’s missing. Wheatcroft has left out much of the heroic lore of the Tour. As a fan, I revel in the retelling of famous epic stages. The names of the most difficult climbs have real evocative power: l’Alpe d’Huez, Tourmalet, Galibier, Mont Ventoux, Col d’Izoard, Hautacam, Puy-de-Dôme. The stories of the racers attacking over these fearsome passes is what first hooks us on the Tour.

The race began in 1903 as a stunt to improve the circulation fortunes of an upstart sporting newspaper, L’Auto-Vélo. Desgrange and his young colleague George Lefebvre came up with the idea of a six-day race that would travel all around the hexagon of France (their competitor Le Vélo sponsored the Paris-Brest-Paris one-day race). Sixty riders began the 1,500-mile ordeal, which was won by Maurice Garin—the “Little Chimney Sweep”—after more than ninety-four hours of racing. The stages, though having rest days in between, averaged more than fifteen hours, and the riders raced through the night and all manner of hazardous weather. They needed luck as well as endurance since no aid could be given a rider if he had a mechanical problem on the course.

The race was so popular that, much to their surprise, Desgrange and Lefebvre got to plan a second edition. So began the Tour’s epic period: three decades when the riders were pushed to the physical edge. In 1919 the Tour’s lasting symbol was introduced: the yellow jersey. The race was drawing enthusiastic crowds across France, and Desgrange had the inspiration to put the race leader in a bright yellow jersey (maillot jaune) and make him identifiable to all the fans on the roadside. (It was also a marketing ploy; L’Auto, as it became known, was printed on yellow paper.)

In these years, the race was alternately dominated by Frenchmen and Belgians. This changed with the advent of Antonin Magne (winner 1931 and 1934), the first rider of whom it can be said that, like today’s champions, he won by preparation—he spent his springs training in the high Pyrenées. Magne’s battles with André Leducq (winner 1930 and 1932) and Sylvère Maes (winner 1936 and 1939) through the Thirties were the point at which the Tour became a professional sporting event rather than a display of stamina. Desgrange, after much variation, had settled on national and regional teams to contest the race—he had tried all individuals and teams sponsored by bike manufacturers —and with the advent of regular teams came the team leader. Racers like Magne and Leducq would be paced and aided—with water, food, wheels, tires, etc.—by teammates, whose goal it was to get and keep their man in the lead.

The Tour’s great historian Paul Portier wrote, in Le Tour: Histoire Complète (1950):

Racing by team, co-operation between teammates, self-sacrificial assistance to the leader—whom it became difficult to shake off even after an accident—meant that more and more riders finished in the peloton [the term for the main group of riders in a race]. Stages lasted six hours instead of the fifteen or sixteen of the heroic age. Cyclists no longer rode all night. The Tour was humanized.

It also got shorter. From averaging more than 3,000 miles during the 1920s, it fell to 2,800 during the 1930s. After the war it continued its decline and settled during the 1970s and 1980s to being no more than an average of 2,200 or 2,300 miles.

The Tour was also settling down as to the skills required of a racer: sprinting, climbing, and time-trialing. A good team would be composed of at least one rider who could compete with the top specialists at each discipline. Sprinting was the original skill of cycling, racers hammering the pedals to take glory at the line. It is a less useful skill in the Tour’s standings as the time gaps in a mass sprint are not recorded. Climbing is where racers could gain or lose the minutes, even hours, that would decide a multi-stage race. To this was added, in 1934, the time trial, the so-called “Race of Truth,” where each racer rides a set course alone against only a clock. Magne confirmed his strength by winning the very first time trial, and these stages quickly became the key to winning the Tour. In the last seven decades the Tour has been won by a dominant climber only four or five times; most of the victors have been dominant time trialists.

The Tour’s grand men are its five-time champions: first came Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961–1964), Eddy Merckx (1969–1972, 1974), and Bernard Hinault (1978–1979, 1981–1982, 1985). Their era closed in the mid-1980s with the rise of a more scientific and specialized sport. These were the years somewhat dominated by Greg LeMond—he probably had five victories in him, but a hunting accident robbed him of his best years—the last champion in the mold of Merckx or Hinault, but also the first of the scientific method of Miguel Indurain (1990 –1994). Indurain debuted as a professional cyclist at 195 pounds, but won his first Tour weighing in at 172. A world-class athlete lost 13 percent of his body weight to compete at the highest levels.

Doping has been part of cycling from the beginning—from riders drinking copious amounts of alcohol or calling for La Moutarde (water bottles full of stimulants like cocaine) or La Bomba (amphetamines). Amphetamines dominated in the 1960s and killed Tom Simpson on Mont Ventoux in 1967. He has gone down in cycling history for two quotes: his last words as he lay dying on that bleak Provençal mountain—“Put me back on my bike”—and his summing up of a racer’s attitude to drugs: “If it takes ten to kill you, I’ll take nine.” Jacques Anquetil put in perspective when he said “You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”

Cycling was nearly destroyed in 1999 with the affaire Festina. The omnipresent doping by the riders was suddenly exposed when the Festina team’s soigneur (a masseur and junior doctor for the riders) was caught at the Belgian border with a trunk full of illegal, performance-enhancing drugs. The French police swooped down on various riders at the Tour. The Festina team was sacked from the race and other teams withdrew. Riders struck, stages were cancelled.

What saved the Tour, and cycling, is almost too miraculous to believe: A precociously talented and arrogant young American racer, Lance Armstrong, is felled by testicular cancer. He is told that death is likely and a return to racing impossible. He survives, rebuilds his body through the most intense training imaginable—the man weighs every bit of food he eats, in ounces—and goes on to win five straight Tours (1999–2003). It is as good a story as sport can produce. Armstrong is both a dominating climber and a champion time trialist, a combination seen before only in Merckx.

Armstrong seems clean because of his devotion to training for the Tour. The very fine British racer David Miller tells the story of ringing Armstrong on his cell phone on Christmas Day a few years back. Miller was tipsy in a bar with his mates. His call finds Armstrong riding his bike up a steep mountain. Miller’s friends wonder why he is swearing a blue streak into his phone at a close friend. Miller’s response: “I’ve just lost the Tour de France.” Armstrong’s dominance and his glorious pleasure in just being able to race and win rang down the curtain on the Tour’s first century.

The centennial race in 2003 was itself thrilling to follow. Armstrong joined Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, and Indurain in the five-time-winner’s club, but only after as competitive a Tour as we have seen since the late 1980s. Armstrong was decisively challenged by three riders. Luck also seemed to have returned to the Tour: Armstrong narrowly avoided serious injury after a fall took one of his chief rivals from the Tour, and later survived two odd crashes to win the key stage on Luz-Ardiden. The great German Jan Ullrich finished second again after crashing during the final time-trial, his last chance to overcome Armstrong. It was a marvelous three weeks.

This summer, Armstrong will seek to do what no other champion could do: win number six. His four predecessors were all beaten by younger determined men who had seen that the king had grown weak. Armstrong may have sent that message last July. We shall know in a month.

Notes
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1. Le Tour: a History of the Tour de France, 1903–2003, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft; Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $14 (paper). Go back to the text.