Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  After all, climbing mountains was not what the 2CV was meant to do. The car was the product of Citroën’s search to provide ‘an umbrella on four wheels’ for France’s large, poor rural population in the 1930s, and the initial brief stipulated the resultant car must be driveable in clogs, and be able to take four farmers and 50 kilograms of goods to market at 50 kilometres per hour. Most famously, it had to be able to drive a tray of eggs across a ploughed field without them breaking. Its development was hampered by the Second World War, and when the production model finally appeared in 1948, although it was something of a marvel of engineering it wasn’t anywhere near the forefront of technology. Almost 70 years later, it had slipped even further behind the times.

  The one that we were hiring was the ‘Fourgonnette’ variation, the little delivery van version of the familiar classic. It had a standard front half, but the back seats and curved rear had been hacksawed off and replaced with a raised ceiling and boxy load-carrying compartment that looked like a small shed (and anyone who has ridden in the French countryside can testify that thousands of Fourgonnette rear ends did indeed end their days as sheep shelters, chicken coops and the like), which may as well have been made of corrugated tin foil, for all the rigidity and protection it afforded. It was one of the last off the production line in the late 1970s, we were proudly told, but even this late model had four drum brakes rather than discs. (Drum brakes have enough stopping power for a tandem, but not much else.) Passenger ventilation consisted of two metal flaps under the windscreen that you could open or close, depending on how much wind you wanted around your armpits, and door windows that folded upwards along a horizontal axis and attached with a fiddly little catch to the door frame – an arrangement that seemed designed both to whack you painfully, were you to chance your arm for a little forearm tanning session, and to smash the glass when it inevitably jolted loose and fell. Door handles were little straps, and the front seats a metal-framed bench sofa with a few springs sticking out to snare unwary undercarriages. It had square headlights, not round ones, and in colour was somewhere between Dijon mustard and crème anglaise.

  It was perfect.

  After breezily signing a few waivers, we waved goodbye and nonchalantly sped off before the owner changed his mind. Or rather, with a bit of gearbox crunching we managed to point our Fourgonnette down the hill towards Nice’s cauldron of traffic and roll away. It took a bit of getting used to. Every gear change was like plunging a bent umbrella pole into a bucket full of rusty washers and rummaging around to find the precise point that didn’t cause the small engine to howl like a scalded donkey. Every roundabout presented the potential for capsize as the vanette tipped and listed on its suspension; every junction an opportunity to test your body weight against the brakes, which seemed completely ineffective unless you braced your hip against the seat frame, lifted yourself up bodily and stood fully on the pedal. Menaced by larger and faster cars, yet without the ability to cleave to the side of the road as you would on a bike, it was far more terrifying along a dual carriageway than cycling the same road. Gradually, we left the chaos behind and were soon km/h-ing up the river gorge road towards the tiny village of Saint Dalmas de Selvage, nestled under the Cime de la Bonette’s peak.

  Our plan, like our motivations, was not 100 per cent clear. Suffice to say, however, that our first point of call was a bistro, where we would meet the bike riders and photographer for lunch.

  Beyond that, I hadn’t really thought. It seemed highly unlikely that the 2CV would make it up to the top, but I was looking forward to giving it a pop. And it was, I reflected, as we navigated the sliver of road squeezed between rock wall and mountain stream, the ideal moment to put a bit of Tour lore to a hands-on, Blue Peter-style test. For it was this diminutive French car that supposedly was used to test the difficulty of Tour climbs. Look on the route sheet for any given day, and unless the race has taken a trip to Holland there will be categorised climbs on the agenda, each one counting towards the King of the Mountains competition. Fourth category climbs are – the story goes – so called because they are scalable by a 2CV in fourth gear. If you’ve ever driven a 2CV in fourth gear you will understand perfectly that this means they are the easiest possible hills for Tour riders. Third category climbs could be climbed in third gear; second category in second gear and so on. And the biggest hills, the hors catégorie (beyond categorisation)? Tour de France founder Henri Desgrange had to drive up them in reverse. Could this underpowered icon actually have dictated the climb categories? We were going to find out …

  But first a historical diversion. Because, if this chapter is designed to clear up a few misconceptions about the mountains and the Tour, then the first thing we need to admit is that it actually wasn’t the legendarily fearsome figure of Henri Desgrange we have to thank for the introduction of the high mountains to the race. Instead, it was a combination of Desgrange’s anxiety, boredom and sadism and the promptings of a little man called Alphonse Steinès that was responsible. Steinès, one of the forgotten men of the early Tour de France, was born Johann Stenges in Luxembourg, but like Desgrange, who was slightly his elder, he was a central figure in Paris, the crucible of French cycling, in the 1890s and 1900s. Steinès had worked with Pierre Giffard, the founder of the Bordeaux–Paris and Paris–Brest–Paris races, and had played a part in organising the first Paris–Roubaix, before Desgrange asked him to help shape the Tour de France route after the 1904 race.

  The Tour had had a tough year in 1904. Its second edition had been run over exactly the same course as the first, but it had been spoiled by several of the competitors, including the previous winner, Maurice Garin, cheating by taking the train. The top four finishers were subsequently disqualified, and the scandal badly hit the race’s reputation. One of the measures taken to restore trust was that stages would henceforth only take place in the daytime, to minimise the opportunities for cheating in the dark. But this change was also in part intended to improve the spectacle and make the race more exciting. This was where Steinès came in – because Henri Desgrange, for all his vision and drive, was conservative and cautious. The great man has a deserved reputation of being a despot, but at crucial moments his nerve failed him. He did not, for example, attend the Grand Départ of the first Tour de France out of fear, we can only assume, of it flopping.

  It took someone like Steinès to push him – and the race – out of his comfort zone. Steinès was one of the most knowledgeable men in France about the state of its roads. He had long been in charge of the ‘Sports Societies’ column in L’Auto, which meant keeping in touch with cycling clubs across the country, and regularly criss-crossed France to meet the paper’s regional correspondents. Not only that: in 1903 he had worked with a motorcar manufacturer called Martini, testing its new hydraulic brakes on every single passable road col in the Alps – 48 in all – and it was probably this that helped convince him that the high mountains were not only feasible by bicycle, but would also add a unique allure to the race.

  The first part of the project was to convince Desgrange to change the route at all. Courageous in itself in that it must have involved significant dissent – in so many words suggesting, well, isn’t doing the same route year in, year out, a little, erm, boring?

  ‘With obstinate perseverance,’ he said in an interview much, much later, ‘I convinced the boss, Henri Desgrange, that a Tour de France should follow the coasts and climb mountains on the roads closest to the borders.’

  A tour of France that actually went around France: revolutionary. Thus, where the 1903 and 1904 editions ate up France in six great long stages, the 1905 race skipped around in 11. It visited Caen on the Normandy coast for the first time, and took in Les Landes, the windswept sandy pine forests south of Bordeaux which, being totally flat, need not concern us here. It also paid its first visit to the Ballon d’Alsace, a 12-kilometre climb to 1,178 metres, which fulfilled all Steinès’s requirements: it was right on the border with Germany (France’s loss of the Alsace-Lorrain
e region in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was a sore point to say the least); and it was a real mountain that would inject the race with some pizzazz. To say that this was the first mountain pass the Tour ever climbed would be lying: the Col de la République, near Lyon, probably claims that honorific. At 1,161 metres, that col is barely lower than the Ballon, and was on the parcours from the very beginning. But although it is high it is not quite a proper climb, and the earlier point about branding still obtains: Desgrange probably saw he had missed a trick with the Col de la République – had not fully comprehended at the time what would constitute drama and hype in his new race – and now he was going to brand the hell out of the Ballon. His paper was going to make a right old fuss about this being the ultimate test of a cyclist’s prowess.

  The Ballon was, as we shall soon see, a success. A later stage took in the Col Bayard and the Côte de Laffrey (1,246 metres and 910 metres respectively), two climbs in the foothills of the Alps, which led to letters to the paper praising the strength of the men, who had ridden from Grenoble to Gap in four hours – a journey that would have taken a carriage with six horses (and four extra reinforcements on the hills) twelve. But, to cut a long story short, they were all relatively easily passed. So much for the ultimate test. More was needed.

  The final impetus to push the race into the high mountains came, probably, from a certain François Faber. Nicknamed the ‘Giant of Colombes’, he was not so much tall as prodigiously strong, strong enough to nullify any excitement in the 1909 Tour. A strapping brute of a rider, he simply rode away from the peloton on several stages, and soloed for up to 200 kilometres at a time in race-winning breaks. This kind of blanket domination was not, from the newspaperman’s point of view, edifying. Dull racing and zero competition did not sell papers. The Col Bayard and the Côte de Laffrey, obstacles once hyped as terrifying and fearsome, were not enough to slow Faber down, but for all his strength, he was heavy – posterity puts him at around 88 kilos. So, in the autumn of 1909, Desgrange let himself be convinced that the race should head into the high mountains of the Pyrenees. The itinerary was announced in January 1910 to little fanfare in L’Auto, with two stages, Perpignan–Luchon and Luchon–Bayonne, replacing the traditional Narbonne–Toulouse single stage. Then, towards the end of the month, a notice naming the principal towns each stage passed through. No commentary, no explanations, no details of the cols to be traversed. Even so, fans and locals joined the dots, and put two and two together to make oh-my-God-are-they-mad?! Outraged letters started flooding in.

  ‘You’re taking the racers where there are no roads,’ said one correspondent. ‘The routes you’ve chosen are cut off by snow, ravines and waterfalls,’ said another.

  Were they? Truth be told, nobody at L’Auto knew. Looking at all the evidence of how events unfolded, it seems that Steinès actually did not travel the Pyrenean course at all before the route was declared. He had taken it on faith that there was a decent road where there was a squiggly line drawn on his map. But in his zeal he had made a mistake, and consequently, it seemed, Desgrange had overcommitted.

  Even in the early 1900s there were minimum standards for roads, and in France there was a nascent national road network. The trouble was, these routes thermales (so called because they linked the spa towns of Eaux Bonnes, Argelès Gazost, Luz Saint Sauveur and others) that crossed the now-famous cols of the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet, Aubisque and Osquich were not classified as part of it. The Tourmalet was, it was generally agreed, more or less OK in a car, but the Aubisque was nothing but a loggers’ track (according to one of the letter writers), wide enough only to be used by oxen bringing timber down from the forests to the sawmills in the valleys. Their loads either took the form of large ‘packets’, or whole trunks dragged behind them, which scored deep, long grooves into the path’s surface. ‘There were holes there you could bury a man in,’ Steinès later said.

  And getting a car over the cols was one thing, but it was also beside the point. What about a bike? It wasn’t completely unheard of. A publicity picture from 1899 for the Savoie region tourist board shows three riders – including one woman, which seems remarkably progressive for the time – merrily scaling the Col du Galibier, one of the Alps’s biggest climbs. However, these cyclotouristes were taking advantage of an ingenious service: they were being towed, all three, by a mule. There had also been cycle races staged locally up the Tourmalet since at least 1902, when the Touring Club de France put on a 215-kilometre race that scaled the mountain twice. But was it was possible to ride the Tourmalet during the Tour de France, and to ride it with so many other terrible ascents all in a row? Desgrange was prone to hyperbole, and would never use one doom-laden adjective where three would do, but even he sounded sincere when he wondered if the high mountains were an obstacle too far: ‘I lived through the most intense emotions of my sporting career in front of these men’s effort on this abominable climb with its horrifying gradients … in front of their moans of anguish, in front of the collapse of certain men, at the end of their powers, at the side of the road,’ he wrote. ‘I felt, I must admit, that all these men had pushed far beyond their limits. I felt true remorse and was afraid, very afraid, of having gone too far.’

  And that was only a smaller col, the Alpine Col de Porte, the year before. His worries over the Tourmalet – even now known as the Tour’s jewel in the Pyrenees, and an absolute bastard to climb from either side due to the unrelenting gradient – were real.

  After that January announcement and the resulting furore, whenever the Pyrenees stages were mentioned, the paper’s tone was defensive. But they weren’t mentioned all that much. The publicity machine was very different in those days, and Desgrange on the whole stuck to endless explanations of the rules and regulations – the editorial equivalent, perhaps, of closing his eyes and sticking his fingers in his ears and hoping the problem would resolve itself on its own.

  It didn’t, and the situation came to a head in late May. With the race only two months away, two of Desgrange’s men, a journalist, Charles Ravaud, and another who is only ever referred to as ‘the Inspector General Abran’, drove down to give these two monster stages a go. They seemed to manage the entire route of the first stage, including the fearsome Portet d’Aspet, in their Imperia car with its Dunlop tyres (they made sure to advertise what they were driving), and Ravaud mentioned that on the Portet d’Aspet he wouldn’t be surprised if, come July, many drivers had to reverse up its fearsome bends.

  However, on the second stage their success was limited: their path up the Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque was blocked by snow.

  The eagle eyed of you reading this may, by this point in the stacked switchbacks of this story, feel you have spotted some holes in the 2CV-categorisation theory. And there are fatal flaws – although maybe not the obvious ones. It is clear from the numerous references to cars reversing up the mountain tracks that drivers in the early days did find it difficult, and that car gears may really have been a useful metric of how fearsome a climb was. But the Inspector General Abran drove an Imperia, Desgrange preferred a Hotchkiss, and it was a Mercedes and a Dietrich that also got into trouble. In 1910 the 2CV was only a twinkle in its maker’s eye. Yet that does not disqualify it: the Grand Prix de la Montagne, the official name for the Tour’s climbing classification, only began in the 1930s, and it was only upon the race’s resumption in 1947 that the mountains were divided into categories. However, this is still a year before the advent of the 2CV, and at first there were only two categories, which rather puts a dampener on any gear-related conjecture. More categories were added over the years, but they have never been totally consistent and there is no overriding objective logic to them: they have always been subjective and mutable. What may be a second-category climb in one Tour may end up a first category in another, for reasons of its placement in the stage or simply at the whims of the race director.

  So, viewed one way, our experiment was a success: the 2CV theory was discredited even before we turned the key i
n the ignition; viewed in another light, one might say that our careful and highly rigorous investigation was based on a false premise and therefore useless. I hold my hands up and admit it: I’m no scientist. But I’ll leave us trundling up the mountain for now and get back to 1910, where the Tour de France remained in a fix.

  After the failure of Ravaud and the mysterious inspector general, Desgrange was furious: furious that the world’s greatest race had been put in jeopardy and that, after going out on a limb against his better judgement, it was possible that he personally might become a laughing stock. Both parties report ‘stormy conversations’, with the result that Steinès was dispatched with his bicycle in early or mid-June – barely a month before the race – to recce the proposed route properly. ‘I was determined to make it through, whatever the cost,’ he wrote later. ‘But I almost paid for this foolishness with my life.’