A lap of France, a Tour de France, already existed, and it was part of life in the centre of the country. It was a rite of passage for apprentices. The tradition began in Provence and Languedoc, where boys who wanted to learn a trade went between towns around the edges of the Massif Central. Each boy was sponsored by the trade guild he wanted to join. In each town they learned different aspects of that trade, and were looked after by women called guild mothers – not always very well. It was a rough life.
There were other precedents. For example, there’d already been a motor-racing Tour de France in 1899, but Desgrange still wasn’t sure. It couldn’t be done in one go with the clock running and the riders resting only when they had to, as they did in the six-day track races or Paris–Brest–Paris. The race would have to be broken into stages. Desgrange appears to have only made up his mind when L’Auto’s company accountant, Victor Goddet, got behind the prospect. If the guy who controlled the money thought the Tour de France made sense, then maybe it did. So in late January 1903 Desgrange wrote in L’Auto, ‘We intend to run the greatest cycling trial in the entire world. A race more than a month long; from Paris to Lyon, then to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris.’
Desgrange wanted a big spectacle, a route right around the outside of France. He said the race would be broken into different legs, or stages, and run over five weeks from the end of May until 5 July. Spacing the race out like that would give ample time to recover between each leg, and maybe Desgrange thought it would maintain interest for longer, but it was too long a period for any but the top professionals to commit to. It was also probably too long to hold the public’s interest. Above all, Desgrange needed his spectacle to have mass appeal, so he needed lots of racers to provide the stories to report on. To attract more entrants he cut the duration, but not the distance, to just under three weeks.
He also put the dates back, so the Tour de France ran at the same time as what would become a growing feature of French life, the country’s annual two-week holiday. That was a great decision, and would be one of the reasons for the Tour’s success. It came to mean summer in France, the holidays and happy memories, and that helped the race grow.
The first Tour de France was 2,428 kilometres long, split into six stages, with between two and four days separating each one. The shortest stage was 268 kilometres and the longest 471 kilometres. The long gaps between stages helped stragglers finish and still get some rest. And, going against the trend of other road races of the day, no competitors, professional or amateur, were allowed to have pacers. They had to make their own way around the route with no outside help.
Seventy-nine entered, a mix of professionals and weekend warriors, and sixty of them took the start outside the Réveil-Matin café in Montgeron at three o’clock in the afternoon of 1 July 1903. The café is still there, on the Rue Jean-Jaurès, and a little plaque outside records the event. The favourites for victory were Maurice Garin and Hyppolite Aucouturier. Garin had won the 1897 and 1898 Paris–Roubaix, and the second edition of Paris–Brest–Paris in 1901, which was the biggest road race in the world before the Tour de France. Garin had also won Bordeaux–Paris in 1902, while the younger man, Aucouturier, was the rising star, having won Paris–Roubaix earlier in 1903.
On the morning of the first stage Henri Desgrange wrote in his editorial: ‘With the broad and powerful swing of the hand which Zola in La Terre [The Earth] gave to his ploughman, L’Auto, newspaper of ideas and action, is going to fling across France today those reckless and uncouth sowers of energy who are the great professional riders of the road.’ Desgrange continued writing like that for the rest of his life.
Garin won the first stage, riding 467 kilometres from Paris to Lyons in 17 hours 45 minutes and 13 seconds, at an average speed of 26 kilometres per hour. Emile Pagie was just under a minute behind him, and the rest were spread out behind the first two. The last rider, Eugène Brange, took more than 38 hours to reach Lyons. Twenty-three riders didn’t get there, including Aucouturier, who dropped out with stomach cramps. He was allowed to contest the next stage, which he won, although he was removed from the overall standings.
Although the 1905 Tour de France is often referred to as the first to venture into the mountains, when it went to the Vosges and climbed over the Ballon d’Alsace, there were low mountain passes in the first Tour de France in 1903. There was one on the first stage. Not far from Lyons the riders scaled the 712-metre (2,335-ft) Col des Echarmeaux. Then on the next stage, from Lyons to Marseilles, there was a longer and slightly higher climb, the Col de la République, just south of St Etienne. Aucouturier broke away on its slopes with Léon Georget to win the 374-kilometre stage to Marseilles, while Garin stayed close enough to preserve his lead.
Garin won two more stages to round off the first Tour de France, winning 6,000 gold francs, the equivalent to nine years’ earnings for a miner from Lens in the north of France, where Garin lived. The French tax rate in 1903 was less than 10 per cent. So the Tour de France set Maurice Garin up quite nicely, and it did wonders for the sales of L’Auto.
Before the race the newspaper’s circulation was around 25,000 copies per day, but it grew to 65,000 copies during the Tour. Ten years later L’Auto’s average daily circulation was 120,000 copies, which rose to a quarter of a million per day when the Tour de France was on. Apart from the Sun and Daily Mail, no mainstream British newspaper gets anywhere near those figures today. Newspapers were very big business at the turn of the twentieth century. For most people they were the only way to find out what was going on, not just in the world but in their own countries, and even in their own regions.
It had been a big adventure, both for the riders and for the organisers. On each stage after the starters were flagged away, Fernand Mercier of L’Auto set off in his car to drive to the finish, where he would liaise with the paper’s local correspondent to look after and arrange accommodation for the riders who made it through, and who wanted to continue. There were also control stops along the way that Mercier had to check, where riders submitted their official race cards for the obligatory stamp to ensure they covered the whole route. Unfortunately they didn’t all cover it by bike, as the following year’s Tour would show.
Géo Lefèvre had dual responsibilities. He had to help at the finish of each stage, but he also had to report on the race. The story goes that Lefèvre did this by joining the competitors at the start of each stage with his bike, then riding with them a bit to get on-the-spot reports from the top men. After talking to the leaders he slowly dropped through the field, doing interviews as he went, until he arrived at the first major town with a train service that could take him to the finish. This enabled him to jump ahead of the race and help Mercier at the end.
Riders started some stages in separate groups, and with the race decided on time it wasn’t always the first across the line who won the stage. Joseph Fischer was caught being paced by a motor vehicle on the first stage and a penalty was added to his time. There was also a bit of conflict on the fifth stage when Garin and Fernand Augerau came to blows, but all in all Desgrange was happy with the race. It was a success. There would be another Tour de France in 1904.
The route was the same as in 1903, but this time people outside the race got physically involved to help their local heroes. Hyppolite Aucouturier was the first to be affected. Even in the earliest races competitors understood the advantage of slipstreaming and riding in a group to share the pace setting, but there were big variations in their levels of fitness, experience and ambition, as well as variations in the bikes they raced on. Thanks to that and the awful road conditions, the fields thinned out quickly.
So, on stage one in 1904 a group of fans waited just south of Paris. The road was lonely, so there were few witnesses around, and the fans let the first few riders through, but then, just before Aucouturier arrived, they spread carpet tacks across the road. Of course he punctured, but he fitted a new tyre and carried on, only to ride into another patch of tacks and pick up another puncture. Aucouturier ended the stage two and a half hours behind the winner, Maurice Garin, not that Garin had