The Dutch rider Eric Breukink was the only one not broken by Hampsten’s attack. He was distanced by the American but chased hard on the descent, catching and passing Hampsten to win the stage. But even the descent was factored in to Hampsten’s plan. ‘I took my time putting on the hat and wet-weather clothes I’d arranged to be handed to me before the top of the climb. I also worked out from the wind direction that things were going to be much worse on the descent, so I saved some energy. Breukink descended quicker than me because he had no rain jacket on, but there was no way I was taking mine off,’ Hampsten says.
He made the right choice. Being conservative not only gave Hampsten the pink jersey, but it preserved his strength to defend it, and so he became the first, and only rider so far from the USA, to win the Giro d’Italia, the number two Grand Tour behind the Tour de France.
The year of the first Giro d’Italia saw the Tour de France take a big jump of its own. The start list grew from 109 riders in 1908 to 195 in 1909. The majority were French, but the numbers of Swiss, Italian, German and Belgian entrants all increased. Under pressure from team sponsors, all of them bike manufacturers because interests from outside cycling weren’t allowed to sponsor riders, Desgrange allowed them to list their men together. They weren’t teams as such, because riders weren’t permitted to support each other or engage in any kind of teamwork we would recognise today.
There were twelve pro ‘squads’, ranging from Legnano and Alcyon, with six sponsored riders each, to Le Globe with one. There were also 154 ‘Isolés’ – independent riders from France, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, who looked after themselves, booking their own hotels, and so on, for the entire race.
The first stage produced the first ever Belgian Tour de France stage winner. His name was Cyrille Van Hauwaert and he was the first Lion of Flanders, a title bike fans in the Flanders region of Belgium bestow on the very best of their riders. However, back in 1909 they were given a much less flattering name by French fans and the press. It was a name that stuck for a good few years after that as well. Riders like Van Hauwaert were called flahutes, the word given to long cloth bags in which labourers carried the food they ate at work. The bags were secured on their backs by two shoulder loops, a bit like a rucksack. Many Belgian labourers were employed on a day-to-day basis, and they rode old bikes or tramped around Flanders and northern France looking for their next job, with just a baguette and maybe a bottle of cold coffee in their flahute bags to sustain them. They were a tough breed.
Van Hauwaert was among the first of a long line of cycling champions from Flanders, a small region with a huge impact on road racing. He grew up in Moorslede in West Flanders, the son of a brick-maker, and like so many Flemish kids he came to cycling by chance. An old bike, which he found in a farmyard, gave Van Hauwaert the freedom to explore, and later to race. He became a tough competitor, but he had the soul of a poet as well. So many cyclists have – inside Kevlar body armour maybe, but it’s there nonetheless.
Van Hauwaert wrote an autobiography after he stopped racing, and this passage from it will resonate with anybody who as a kid discovered the joy and freedom of exploring the countryside by bike. He recalls setting off one day in his mid-teens to visit the nearby town of Turnhout. But once there Van Hauwaert saw it was the same distance again to Bruges, so he pressed on. Then, after enjoying beautiful Bruges, a city sometimes called the Venice of the north because of its extensive canal network, he carried on west into an area he didn’t know. He describes what he saw like this:
The road climbed, and on top of a small hill I saw ahead of me the vast green plain of the sea, which merges far in the distance into the blurred line of the horizon. Neighbours told me about the sea when they returned from excursions to it by rail, but I was so proud that my little bike had carried me to see this magical sight.
Van Hauwaert didn’t win the 1909 Tour. Instead it was won by the heaviest man ever to win a Tour de France. Road racers, even big road racers, aren’t big by general standards: 82, maybe 85 kilograms are what the heaviest Tour de France riders weigh. And those are the bigger sprinters and time triallists, or some big strong team workers. François Faber was massive by comparison, weighing 92 kilograms.
His mother was French and his father came from Luxembourg, so although he was born in France and regarded himself as French, Faber held dual French-Luxembourger nationality, so was technically the first foreign winner of the Tour de France. He is listed in the Tour’s Encyclopédie, the official book of Tour de France results, as being from Luxembourg.
The Vosges were included in the 1909 race, as were the edges of the Alps, which Faber could handle, although others handled these climbs better. What played into his hands was the weather. It was very bad; cold and wet through the entire race. Those conditions generally favour big riders over smaller ones. The bigger a person is for a given height, the less surface area of skin they have in proportion to body volume, which helps them preserve body heat. Faber, whose nickname was the Giant of Colombes and who had worked as a furniture remover and a docker before becoming a pro cyclist, won three out of the 14 stages.
It was a fine achievement, but 1909 was the end for big riders like François Faber, as far as winning the Tour de France was concerned. Next year the race went into the mountains, big mountains with passes of over 2,000 metres. The Tour de France began to take the shape it has today.
Alphonse Steinès had heard of the majesty of the Pyrenees, of names like Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. He’d seen their pale grey, snowcapped silhouettes shimmering distantly in the sun when the Tour passed through the southwest. He’d read about the Pyrenees too. Maybe he’d also heard that some intrepid touring cyclists had ridden, or more likely pushed, their way over some of the highest Pyrenean passes, as the London Bicycle Club had done in 1879.
But still, only locals really knew the Pyrenees, a place where wild and mysterious legends grew. The passes were far in excess of anything tackled in competition. Steinès wanted to send the Tour over those passes, so he brought the subject up with his boss, and quickly found out that Desgrange knew little more about the Pyrenees than the same distant profile Steinès had seen.
So Desgrange let Steinès write something in L’Auto about the possibility of racing in the Pyrenees, just to see if any readers responded with informed opinions. They did; people who knew the mountains said that sending racing cyclists over their high passes was crazy. The mountain roads were blocked with snow for most of the year, and when it melted they were revealed to be little more than cattle and sheep tracks.
But Desgrange was more intrigued than put off. He told Steinès to go to the Pyrenees and check out a route – and what an assignment that turned out to be. Steinès drove his car from Paris to Pau, one of the gateway towns to the Pyrenees, and when he told some locals why he was there they laughed. They told Steinès about a Mercedes racing car someone had tried to test by driving it over the Col du Tourmalet, one of the high Pyrenean passes, and one that Steinès wanted to include in his Tour de France stage. Not far up the climb the Mercedes was flipped over by the rough surface.
Locals told Steinès that they were used to outsiders coming to pit their strength against the mountains, but the mountains always won. So Steinès went elsewhere for guidance. He spoke to the superintendent of roads for the region, a man called Blanchet, only to find that he also thought the idea of sending cyclists over the high passes was mad.
Steinès wanted to follow an already defined way, a trail known to drovers, transporters of goods and itinerant workers. The way is the D616 and D918 today and crosses the Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubisque. The stage Steinès wanted would