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 start in Bagnères-de-Luchon, at the foot of the Peyresourde, and cross all those climbs but then continue on through the foothills and the flats to Bayonne, a total distance of 326 kilometres.
Undeterred by the stories he heard, Steinès hired a local guide who agreed to help him, and set off from Bagnères-de-Luchon early one morning in his car. They crossed the Col de Peyresourde and the Aspin without too much trouble, but the Tourmalet nearly killed Steinès. They slipped and slid up the first six kilometres of the pass, then the car got stuck in a snowdrift and the guide, who was driving, wanted to turn back. It was six o’clock, getting dark and it was a long way to the summit. It was even further down the other side to Barèges, the next place of habitation. The guide told Steinès about the local bear population, before leaving him to his own devices.
True Pyrenean bears are thought to have died out now, but in the Seventies the population was augmented by Slovenian bears of the same breed, and about twenty of these Slovenian-Pyrenean hybrid bears exist today. But there were quite a few of the original bears at the turn of the twentieth century. They were a common sheep killer, and a possible threat to anyone wandering alone who might disturb one and be perceived as a threat.
With night falling around him, Steinès abandoned his car, but luckily he soon met a local shepherd, who led him on foot to the top of the pass. But then the shepherd had to turn for home, and we are talking big distances: the two main places of habitation on either side of the Tourmalet, Ste Marie-de-Campan and Barèges, are 36 kilometres apart. So at the summit the shepherd pointed Steinès in the direction of Barèges at the foot of the Tourmalet’s west side, and told him to walk next to the Bastan stream. That would have taken him where he needed to go, where he had told people he would be arriving that day. Unfortunately Steinès lost his way, stumbled and was swept off course by a small avalanche. He was discovered hours later, half-dead, by locals who started a search party when he failed to arrive in Barèges.
Even while he was having that misadventure, Steinès knew that the road over the Aubisque was nowhere near as good as the one over the Tourmalet, but he had a plan. Once recovered from his night out on the mountain, Steinès is said to have sent a telegram to Desgrange, which read, ‘No trouble crossing the Tourmalet. Roads satisfactory. No problem for cyclists. Steinès.’
Then he asked Desgrange for 5,000 francs to make some road improvements he’d noted were necessary along the route. In fact he needed most of the money to help pay for a better road over the Aubisque, which was a chewed-up goat track. Steinès had previously agreed a price of 3,000 francs with Blanchet, the superintendent of roads, but he asked Desgrange for more because he knew his boss would try to knock him down. He did. Desgrange offered 3,000 francs, which Steinès accepted. He could pay Blanchet and his stage would go ahead.
With the road improvements agreed, Desgrange announced in L’Auto that a stage of the 1910 Tour de France would cross the Col de Peyresourde, the Col d’Aspin, the Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque. Interest was huge. Blanchet mended the roads and built a new one over the Aubisque, while Steinès kept the secret of his night on the Tourmalet to himself.
Desgrange was still worried. He realised that the riders would be out on those high wild roads for a long time. The Tour was a race for heroes, but they needed some support. To do otherwise would be inhumane, so Desgrange introduced the Voiture Balai, the broom-wagon, a truck that would be the last vehicle on the road, there to sweep up any stragglers. And the practice has stuck. Almost every road race has at least a token broom-wagon, a last vehicle behind the race, which can pick up stragglers who can’t carry on, or who don’t want to.
The Tour de France broom-wagon has a symbolic role today. The last vehicle in the convoy following the race still has a broom strapped to its back doors, but modern Tour racers who drop out of the race, and it’s not something anybody does lightly, are whisked off to the finish in air-conditioned team vehicles. Or in an ambulance if they have sustained injuries.
That’s a fairly recent phenomenon, though; the broom-wagon served its practical purpose well into the Nineties. Photographers and, later, TV cameras would crowd around it to capture the end of a rider’s race, the ritual removal of his numbers by the broom-wagon driver, and the exhausted last step into its dark insides.
Stage ten of the 1910 Tour de France got under way at 3.30 a.m. to avoid riders being out on the mountains after dark, because the big climbs were all in the first half of the stage. It would only just be getting light as the riders tackled the first, the Col de Peyresourde, but even the slowest of them should cross them all by nightfall. Steinès briefed the riders, telling them not to take risks. He also told them that the time limit would be suspended for the day. It had been introduced to keep the race more compact by disqualifying riders who finished outside a certain percentage of the stage winner’s time, the percentage being calculated according to the conditions and terrain of each stage.
As the stage progressed, Octave Lapize and his team-mate Gustave Garrigou steadily drew ahead of the rest, Garrigou winning a special 100-franc prize for riding all the way up the Col du Tourmalet without once getting off to walk. The two were well ahead by the summit. Alphonse Steinès and Victor Breyer, a colleague from the organisation, then went ahead to the next and final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, and waited at the summit. They thought they’d see Lapize and Garrigou still in the lead, but an almost unknown rider, François Lafoucarde, got there first. He was riding very slowly and Breyer asked Lafoucarde what had happened. Where were the others? But he didn’t reply and just plodded past, staring straight ahead.
A quarter of an hour later Lapize emerged. He was exhausted, half stumbling, half pushing his bike. He looked at Steinès and Breyer and is alleged to have spat out the single word ‘Assassins’. Lapize then caught Lafoucarde, went straight past him and won the stage, but Faber did well too. He was the race leader, and had been since stage two. Lapize was second overall, but the stage that suited him far more than Faber only brought him three points closer to the giant rider. Faber finished ten minutes after Lapize, but still came in third. It took Lapize another three stages to dislodge Faber and finally win the Tour in Paris by four points.
The Pyrenees were judged a success, so the following year the Tour visited the high Alps as well. Stage four went from Belfort to Chamonix, right into the heart of the mountains. Next day the riders climbed the Col d’Aravis, the Col du Télégraphe, and then the giant Col du Galibier. When Henri Desgrange encountered the Galibier it was love at first sight. This is what he wrote about his favourite mountain climb in 1934: ‘Oh Laffrey! Oh Bayard! Oh Tourmalet! I would be failing in my duty not to proclaim that next to the Galibier you are pale cheap wine. In front of this giant I can do nothing more than raise my hat and salute.’
From 1911 on, Desgrange waited at the summit every year the race climbed the Galibier to time the riders through. Near the top of the south side there’s a huge memorial to Desgrange, and whenever the Galibier is in the Tour a special ‘Souvenir Desgrange’ prize is given to the first rider to the top.
The riders climbed the Galibier’s north side in 1911, the hardest side. It starts in St Michel-de-Maurienne with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe, a step to the start of the Galibier. Linked like Siamese twins, together they provide 34 kilometres of climbing, with a short 4.7-kilometre descent into the ski town of Valloire in between.
There’s a steep upwards ramp coming out of Valloire, then about 4 kilometres of false flat, giving space to consider the massive change of scenery. This is another world. Gone are the Télégraphe’s lovely tree-lined hairpins, and the pleasant summit café with its twee little garden. This is a huge landscape, a deep U-shaped valley, bare of trees and edged by enormous scree slopes, and snowcapped mountains beyond. The road barely twists, but it slowly racks up in gradient towards what looks like an impenetrable wall.
Even the great Eddy Merckx