The BLRC also developed a British professional or semi-professional class. Apart from Ovaltine and BSA, the sponsors of the new professionals were usually small bike firms – i.e. shops that also made frames – or importers of Italian accessories. I like to remember the pioneering racing men who wore the colours of such marques and lament that, today, we don’t have the events that made them famous. Here are some of them, in no particular order – for who can impose order on the League?
Dave Orford (Belper), Ovaltine/Langsett Cycles, Ist BLRC Junior Road Race Championship, 1948, Ist Circuit des Grimpeurs, 1955; Bev Wood (Preston), Viking Cycles, Ist London – Dover, 1950; Ken Russell (Bradford), Ellis Briggs Cycles, Ist Tour of Britain, 1952; Peter Proctor (Skipton), BSA Cycles, King of the Mountains, Tour of Britain, 1952; Alec Taylor (Marlborough), Gnutti Accessories, 2nd Tour of Britain, 1951; Les Wade (London), Frejus Cycles, Ist Nottingham – Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Skegness, 1950; John Perks (Birmingham), Falcon Cycles, Ist Tour of Wessex three-day, 1954; John Bennett (Derby), Mottram Cycles, Ist Battle of Britain Road Race, 1954, Ist Birmingham Road Race, 1959; Phil Ingram (London), Dayton Cycles, 2nd London BLRC Time Trial Championship, 1944.
All the British riders who were good enough to ride the Tour de France in the years after 1955 came from a BLRC background. Let’s remember one person who didn’t ride the Tour but was present at its worst moment, Tommy Simpson’s death in 1967. This was the British team’s mechanic, Harry Hall (Manchester), Harry Hall Cycles, Ist Three Shires Road Race, 1952, Veteran World Road Champion, 1989. He tended to Simpson on the Ventoux mountain before the stricken rider died and heard his friend’s last words. ‘The straps, Harry! The straps!’
Just a boy and a teenager in the 1950s, I had no part to play in the BLRC disputes, though it was easy to know which side to join. Up the League! Veteran cyclists still greet each other with the slogan and use other phrases we learnt many years ago. We shout ‘Ally ally ally’ as encouragement in races – and not everyone realises that this old League chant is an innocent corruption of the French Allez!
I am a child of the League and of communism, a powerful and ineradicable mixture. The League formed my adolescence, while I had been drinking the red milk of communism since birth. My real first name is Timoshenko, after the renowned marshal of the Red Army. I doubt whether my parents’ politics inclined me towards the League, which attracted everyone who wished to flex the muscles of youth. But its internationalism and pariah reputation suited a person with my background.
I first visited France in 1948, when my communist father drove his small family to the Midi in my maternal grandfather’s Bentley. Little boy though I was, I could master books like a journalist. A box at the back of the car held my reading matter. There were books about Robin Hood, Geoffrey Trease’s Bows against the Barons (1934) and such Soviet works as Timur and his Comrades, a children’s story about a young member of the Komsomol and his work in building a new socialist state (a book which I secretly dismissed in about twenty minutes). On the journey I was content to look at France through the windows of the Bentley: long avenues of trees, rivers, castles, vineyards, towns which seemed partly to have fallen down. My diary is in existence, but memory serves better to recall the wine I tasted, the strange, wonderful food eaten out of doors at twilight. The weather was hot. What was that noise of crickets? Then it became cold and windy, and my father drove to high Alpine villages whose people were goitred. Their swollen faces were brown with filth, they dressed in rags and lived in taudis, hovels, with their animals.
A few years later, when I became a cyclist, thoughts of that 1948 expedition increased my wish to understand the Tour de France. Cycling is not merely about physical pleasure. It is also about knowledge and living memory: the memories we can share with those who are still alive.
The Tour is now a hundred years old. Every year it is an epic; and every year there are stages of the race that are epics in themselves, containing dozens of human stories of heroism, toil and suffering. The Tour is both theatre and poetry. It reflects all the history of France, and indeed Europe, in the last century. The ideal historian of the Tour would also know about social geography, international relations and folk religion; together with the nature of immigration, the use of drugs, television, money, political power and advertising. This historian should also be a linguist, French, and a racing cyclist with a feeling for the tragedy of the twentieth century.
Such a writer has never been born, so we must look elsewhere. No need to waste time with, for instance, the vile scribes of Les Temps modernes, except to say that French intellectuals have missed a wonderful subject that lay right before their eyes. Personally I prefer French journalists. They have more relish for life than academics. The vast majority of people who have added to our knowledge of the Tour have been from the press; but, alas, their accounts and interviews are mainly hidden in the archives of newspaper libraries. Many general books recount the history of the Tour, generally beginning with its origins in the press.
The Tour de France was founded in 1903 by Henri Desgrange, a racing cyclist (the first recordman de l’heure, with 35.325 kms) who was also a journalist. Desgrange had the idea of a very long race as a publicity vehicle for his paper L’Auto. It was in rivalry with Le Vélo, which organised the two longest cycling events of the time, Bordeaux – Paris and Paris – Brest – Paris. A race all the way around France, Desgrange thought, would give L’Auto an advantage over the other publication. The pattern of the Tour was established very early in its life. First, it was to be a circuit of the country. Second, there were to be long stages between different towns and cities. Third, the difficulty of the Tour would be augmented by climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees. Mountain stages were an essential part of the race from 1910. The winner of the Tour – the person who rode back to Paris with the shortest aggregate time in a race that lasted for three weeks or more – would need to be a climber.
The development of the Tour de France was interrupted by the two world wars but enjoyed a ‘renaissance period’ between 1947 and 1953, the year of its golden jubilee. It is difficult to say when the ‘modern’ Tour de France began. Was it formed by commerce, or by publicity, or by globalisation, mondialisation? Did it begin with the rise of trade teams rather than regional or national teams, after 1961? Or with television coverage, which began in 1955 and was first transmitted en direct in 1957, and with the help of helicopters after 1975? Or with the failure of French cyclists in their own national event, for a Frenchman has not won since Bernard Hinault in 1985?
On another view, the ‘modern period’ belongs to riders who have won the Tour three times or more. There had been multiple winners before Hitler’s war, notably the Belgian Sylvère Maes (in 1936 and 1939), but the tendency to win again and again began in 1953. Here is a list of the dominating multiple winners:
Louison Bobet, 1953, 1954, 1955.
Jacques Anquetil, 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964.
Eddy Merckx, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974.
Bernard Hinault, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985.
Greg Lemond, 1986, 1989, 1990.
Miguel Indurain, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995.
Lance Armstrong, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.
These seven men have achieved thirty-one victories between them.
In the years when the multiple champions did not take the Tour there were some equally memorable victors. On rare occasions they won because their team leader had crashed or had been taken ill. In 1966, for instance, Jacques Anquetil – suffering from bronchitis and, at the age of thirty-two, exhausted by a career that had begun in his teens – climbed off when there were only six stages left before Paris, having first ensured that the Tour would be gained by a modest teammate. Lucien Aimar saw his opportunity and took it, riding into the Parc des Princes in yellow, but without a single stage win to his credit.
Let no one imagine