Something of a Tour de force

Nick Morrison looks at how a newspaper circulation war gave brith eot he most famous chcle race in the wrld

WHAT links Pierre de Coubertain, Jules Rimet and Henri Desgrange? First two are easy enough, founders of the modern Olympics and the World Cup, respectively, but what about Desgrange? Clue: he used to edit a newspaper. Still struggling? Another clue: he came up with a sporting event to boost his paper's circulation. Still not there? Last clue: his circulation idea celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Ah, the Tour de France, bien sur.

It's a quirk of history that the world's three biggest sporting occasions were dreamed up by Frenchmen, but while the first two owed at least some debt to using sport to bring nations together, the Tour de France was very definitely a commercial affair.

Desgrange was editor of sports daily L'Auto, locked in a bitter circulation war with Le Velo. To try and attract readers, both papers organised sporting competitions and, in an attempt at one-upmanship, in 1903 Desgrange came up with the wheeze of running a cycle race in stages, to keep interest going over several weeks. This six-stage, three-week race, which took in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris, was so successful in bringing in readers, Le Velo went out of business and a sporting phenomenon was born.

For Desgrange it was money, but for the French public, who took the race to their hearts from the start, its appeal was on a very different level. A race which took three weeks to complete, and which involved riding through the night, would produce a superhuman winner, one who deserved to be a national hero. Desgrange himself said the ideal race would be where there was only one finisher. At a time when French self-confidence was still shaken by a disastrous war with Prussia 30 years previously, and the loss of two important provinces, heroes were very much in demand.

'France needed sporting heroes behind which the country could unite, whose virility and prowess would imply that the French could beat the Germans," says Hugh Dauncey, a lecturer in French studies at Newcastle University, who is co-editor, along with colleague Geoff Hare, of a book to mark the Tour's 100th birthday.

While the search for a hero made the Tour an attractive prospect, some of its popularity was due to rather more mundane reasons: it was free to watch, and it went to the people - some only had to stand on their doorsteps to watch the race go by.

The route changes every year, taking in new towns and villages, as well as those not visited for some time. Towns vie for the privilege of hosting a stage - both for the prestige and the TV coverage, and for the economic benefits of catering for around 2,000 people, in the form of cyclists, support teams, race officials and the media.

With its cocktail of sprints and mountain climbs, the Tour aims to produce an all-round hero, while giving specialists a chance to have their day.

But the enormous popularity of the Tour in France has been slow to filter across the Channel. The first mention in a British newspaper was in The Times of 1954, which carried a three-line report of the result. It was not until 1958 that newspapers began to cover the race in any sort of detail. British competitors have been similarly slow to emerge. The first British entrant was in 1937 and it was 1955 when a British team first took part. There has still been no British winner, although Ireland boasts a champion in Stephen Roche in 1987.

Partly, says Hugh, this is because cycling has always been more popular simply as a way of getting about in France than in Britain, where early industrialisation meant trams and trains were more common than across the water. Also, the British tradition of competitive cycling has been very much oriented towards time trials instead of road racing. Tied into this is the British love of fair play, and suspicion of anything which has a scent of not being quite above board.

"British cyclists were more interested in being able to measure their time," says Geoff. "There was this idea that it was easier to cheat in the Tour de France, and in a massed road race in general."

Hugh adds: "In time trials you are on your own, and you are first because of your equipment or because you are better or you have trained harder. In road racing, you can scupper people's wheels, push people into the ditch, put tacks down behind you to give people punctures, you poison people's waterbottles, you get people to give you lead weights at the top of hills so you go down quicker, you take a short-cut, you take a train. The British saw all that as continental trickery."

These suspicions have not always been without foundation. Almost from the beginning the Tour has been dogged by accusations of cheating - or gaining an unfair advantage. The first six riders home in the 1904 race were all disqualified, for reasons ranging from throwing tacks in the road to taking a train. Then there was the rider from St Etienne, who enlisted his supporters to attack other riders with cudgels when they rode through the town. At one point, riders thought they ought to be carrying guns to protect themselves.

Of course, the scourge of the modern Tour is drugs, and ironically it was a British rider who brought the issue to public attention.

Tom Simpson was the great British hope of the 1960s, the first Briton to wear the yellow jersey as race leader, in 1962, and winner of the 1965 World Road Race Championship, but in the 1967 Tour, just a few hundred feet from the summit of Mont Ventoux in the Alps, he swayed and fell from his bike. He was airlifted to hospital but later died, and a post-mortem showed he died from heart failure aggravated by alcohol and drugs.

But while it is easy to be horrified at the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the attitude of the riders themselves seems to be more ambivalent. In 1998 riders staged a sit-down protest at what they saw as heavy-handed tactics by the organisers in carrying out random drug tests and searches.

"There is a view taking drugs isn't cheating. The riders' view might be that everybody takes drugs, because that is the only way you get anywhere in professional cycling," says Hugh. "They're not doing it dangerously, because it is supervised by the team doctor."

One telling statistic is that about 30 per cent of professional riders on the continent have been diagnosed with asthma, allowing them to take medicines which improve their oxygen intake. It may be that exposure to all that dust and pollution makes cyclists prone to asthma, or it may be that team doctors are aware of the riders' needs.

"There is a great tradition of the Tour as a complex and exceedingly demanding competition, in which people are required to do extraordinary things," says Hugh. "In a competition where people are required to do superhuman things, some of them may be tempted to do superhuman things to succeed."

* The Tour de France, 1903-2002: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values (Frank Cass), edited by Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare, will be published next week.