According to James Moore’s son, also called James, who was speaking to Sporting Cyclist magazine in 1968 on the occasion of the centenary of the historic Parc St Cloud race, before the inaugural Paris–Rouen his father announced: ‘Unless I arrive first, they will find me lying beside the road.’ Gritty, determined words that set the mood and mind-set for road racing that still dominates the sport.
The riders set off for Rouen at 7.25 a.m., and at 6.10 p.m. the same day Moore crossed a finish line drawn by members of the Rouen cycling club at the gates to their city. A fine drizzle fell all day, and it was dark when Moore finished. The first prize was 1,000 gold francs and a Michaux bicycle, the race having been organised by the Michaux brand owners, the Olivier brothers Aimé, René and Marius.
Roads outside cities were appalling in those days. They were either made of bone-jarring hard-packed clay or stones, or were muddy tracks with puddle-filled ruts and holes. They were very muddy that November day between Paris and Rouen, and the mud sucked at the riders’ heavy bikes. Even Moore walked up the hills, and he finished 15 minutes ahead of the next man. The female competitor, made mysterious by her pseudonym of Miss America, finished 12 hours after the winner, but she wasn’t last. That honour fell jointly to E. Fortin and Prosper Martin, who crossed the line together 14 hours and 15 minutes after Moore.
Moore was to all intents a professional cyclist by 1869. His success in the Parc St Cloud race was followed by more victories on cinder cycle tracks, which was where cycle racing grew quickest at first. At the St Cloud event Moore raced on a standard Michaux vélocipède, with its front wheel slightly bigger than the rear, but by the time he won Paris–Rouen he was riding a prototype bike made under the direction of a Parisian manufacturer, Jules Suriray.
It was far lighter than Moore’s original bike, had ball bearings to reduce friction in its hubs, and was custom- built in the workshop of Sainte-Pélagie prison in Paris. Suriray invented ball bearings, but needed the forced labour of prison inmates to make and polish the numbers of steel balls he needed. Moore’s bike also had Clément Ader patented rubber tyres. Plus its front wheel measured 48.25 inches in diameter, while the rear was just 15.75 inches. It was one of the first ‘penny-farthing’ bikes, which were called ‘ordinaries’ or ‘high-wheelers’ back then.
There was a boom in all French manufacturing during the late 1860s, but it was stopped dead by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and bicycle development switched to the UK. With the French bicycle industry stymied, investment flowed into what at first was just a few British bicycle companies, and they became very strong. New companies formed, and older manufacturers started including bikes in their product range. Some even changed their names, like the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, which became Coventry Machinists so it could manufacture bikes.
The French were still leaders in bike design, but the English bought patents on nearly everything they invented. For example, a major step forward affecting racing was made by Jules Truffault, who reduced the weight of bikes he made from 25 kilograms down to 15 by using a cheap consignment of steel scabbards (sword holders) that he had obtained. By adapting the scabbards Truffault manufactured hollow forks and wheel rims, but the British bike industry bought the patent on his idea, used it to manufacture their own bikes, and paid him a small royalty for each one sold.
But getting back to racing, even though Paris–Rouen sparked some interest in France, and later on in surrounding countries, track cycling was the focus in Britain. Tracks attracted big crowds, and the first race billed as the world cycling championship was held on 6 April 1874, over one mile on a cinder track in Wolverhampton. James Moore won the race from John Keen in a time of 3 minutes and 7 seconds, setting a new world record for the distance.
Across the Channel confusion reigned for several years after the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871. There were a few short road races in 1870, mostly in Paris and Toulouse. Leon Tarzi and Jean-Marie Léotard won them, and they would win more, but the longest race in France in this period was only 63 kilometres, and most were around the 30-kilometre mark. Not nearly long enough for road racing to capture people’s interest and imaginations. Long place-to-place races would do that, something people could compare with their own journeys by train or by carriage.
The first road race in Italy was held in 1870: a time trial between Florence and Pistoia. It was won by an American, Rynner Van Heste. The first Italian bunched road race appears to have been in Milan in January 1871. It was just 11 kilometres long and won by Giuseppe Pasta. The next bunched race in Italy was a place-to-place race, 46 kilometres from Milan to Novara, held in December the same year. The winner was Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi. However, it’s always possible that there were others that preceded these races.
Documentary evidence of road racing is thin after that. There could have been races in Italy during the next couple of years, but the next race about which there is certainty was the Milan–Piacenza race in 1873. It was 63 kilometres long and the winner, Valsecchi again, did the distance in 3 hours and 44 minutes. There were at least two more races in Italy that year, one in Florence and the other from Milan to Cremona. There’s also evidence of a road race in Bagnères-de-Luchon, France.
After that the numbers of road races rose slowly until 1876 when Europe, and in particular France, was more settled. That was the year when road racing started to gain more interest, maybe because the races were a lot longer than they had been. Angers–Tours–Angers, for example, was 222 kilometres long. It was won by M. Tissier, who beat a top track racer Camille Thibault using a light bike of Truffualt’s design, to win in 11 hours and 25 minutes.
Another longer road race, one that still exists today, was born in 1876, this time in Italy. It went from Milan to Turin and was won by Paolo Magretti, who went on to be an eminent entomologist, discovering a number of new species of African Hymenoptera. Magretti was the best of just ten initial competitors, and the race wasn’t run again until 1894. After that, editions were intermittent until 1913, when Henri Pelissier of France won. Apart from times of political upheaval, war, lack of sponsorship and on one occasion a flood, Milan–Turin has run fairly consistently ever since.
All the bikes used in races so far were penny-farthings, but racing on these was quite dangerous, given the road conditions. On a smooth track a penny-farthing is stable and not too bad to ride, but out on a road it’s a different story. Hit a pothole with that big front wheel, or apply the brake a bit sharply, and you could be pitched straight over the handlebars. It was so common that the term ‘taking a header’ was coined to describe it.
But then came the safety bicycle. Safety bicycles had two wheels of equal size, a fraction smaller in diameter than most road bike wheels are today, and the rider sat nicely balanced between them. Safety bicycles were much easier to ride and handle than penny-farthings, so they were safer, hence the name, but the safety bicycle’s appeal for racers was that they had gearing through a roller chain.
The safety bicycle was partly invented by an Englishman, John Kemp Starley. In the 1870s he was working for his uncle, James Starley, whose bike manufacturing business made one of the best penny-farthings there was, the Ariel. But Starley junior saw the big flaw in high-wheeled bikes, namely their danger and the fact that they were tricky to get on and off and to handle, and thought there had to be a better, more stable; way to go cycling.
In 1876 John Lawson designed a bike with equal-sized wheels, where treadles transferred the rider’s leg power to the rear wheel, but treadles are complicated and heavy. Starley thought that Lawson was on the right track, but treadles were the wrong way to drive the rear wheel, so along with fellow enthusiast William Sutton they came up with the ‘Safety Bicycle’, with the drive coming from pedals on cranks turning a chain-wheel, or chainring as it’s more commonly known today. The chain-wheel was connected by a roller chain to a sprocket on the bike’s rear wheel, and the chain-wheel was bigger than the sprocket, so every pedal revolution meant several revolutions of the rear wheel. That is basic gearing, and it meant that for the first time a bike’s potential speed was determined solely by the power