The Tour de France

by Paul Hansford

  But if you’re aiming for the very top, to win the general classification of the Tour de France, then there are certain aspects of the team set-up that need to be addressed — because although the race can’t be won until the end of July, it can certainly be lost in the months leading up to it.

  Pick the right team leader

  Not all riders are built to win a three-week, 3000-km Grand Tour. In fact, given the physical and mental strain it takes to just compete in the race at the front of the pack, there’s usually only a handful of riders who have a realistic chance of winning the Tour de France each year. Having the right team leader is crucial to success; they set the tone from the very first day of training camp and need to have the right blend of leadership skills, personality and ‘I’m the man’ ego to compel a group of grown men to forgo all personal ambitions and help them ride to victory. The mental side needs to be as sharp as the physical for a team leader, as the goldfish bowl of the Tour can crack the best of men. There’s no doubt a finely tuned mind is just as important as a finely tuned body in the Tour de France.

  Employ the right domestique help

  Henri Desgrange first used the term ‘domestique’ — or ‘servant’ — as an insult aimed at French rider Maurice Brocco in 1911. With his own ambitions to win scuppered, Brocco offered his services to other riders in return for payment. Desgrange wanted to chuck him out of the race but didn’t have enough proof, instead writing in L’Auto: ‘He is unworthy. He is no more than a domestique [servant].’ But no rider wins a race without the help of their teammates, and having a group of domestiques who can control the peloton and protect their leader is paramount to Tour success. It’s common knowledge that riding behind another cyclist saves energy (up to 40 per cent) and by pacing a star rider, protecting them from the wind and ensuring they are fed and hydrated, the loyal domestique plays a crucial role over the arduous three weeks. It takes a special rider to be a domestique, not only to give up any personal ambition, but also to maintain a high level of physical effort, concentration and vigilance during each stage. Every attack by an opponent must be observed and assessed, and if deemed a threat, hunted down until they are neutralised; one slip in concentration can lead to the end of their leader’s Tour chances.

  Finetune in the ‘mini Tours’

  Pre-Tour races such as Paris–Nice, Tour de Romandie and Critérium du Dauphiné are prestigious events in their own right, but many teams compete in them to finetune team selection, tactics and fitness ahead of the Tour. In his autobiography, Bradley Wiggins referred to them as ‘mini Tours’ and notes that they gave him and his team a great springboard to success in 2012. Held over one week, they offer all the benefits of taking part in a top-quality stage race without the grind of a three-week Grand Tour. The races provide practice for everyone involved in a team. Riders can work on riding at threshold and measuring themselves against the opposition, team managers can work on tactics and assess riders, and backroom staff can finetune the logistical side of things so there are no hiccups come Tour time. While the events are more than just practice — each race has a rich history and victory can be the highlight of a rider’s season — if your ambition is to win the Tour, a good performance in one of these stage races is the perfect foundation.

  Look for marginal gains

  ‘Marginal gains’ is a phrase popularly attributed to Team Sky chief David Brailsford, but its roots within sport can be traced back to theories used by the Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane, who used newfangled statistical analysis to gain a personnel edge over baseball rivals in the Major Leagues in the early 2000s. Although cycling is much more than just scouting for talent, Brailsford’s techniques of searching high and low for small advantages that collectively lead to a big advantage is now being adopted in the sport, albeit slowly. Some aspects are no-brainers (as well as being nothing new), like working in a wind tunnel to finetune riding position, or being vigilant over nutrition and hydration. Other angles, such as working with a psychologist or ensuring the team sleeps on the same mattresses and sheets every night, might not lead to faster times but can result in a calmer, more relaxed rider. Teams are even filming crucial parts of stages — including tricky corners, descents and places to attack — well in advance to help their riders visualise when and where their plans should be implemented.

  Ride all year round

  Old-school training regimes would incorporate a good chunk of time off the bike, giving the rider’s body a chance to fully recover from the rigours of a long season. Many pros pull the plug soon after the World Championships at the end of September and then don’t get back on the bike until the new year. However, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that in the new climate of racing, maintaining a level of bike fitness is essential year round. Team training camps are becoming more and more prevalent at the end of the season, and in the new year they are held in warm climates as far afield as Mallorca and the Canary Islands. It’s here the base work is done, the thousands upon thousands of climbing metres ridden at threshold so that, when the Tour comes around, there’s enough in the legs and lungs to see a rider through the most difficult stages. In an era when riders are no longer relying on doping to give them an edge (we hope), the extra work on the bike is what separates the men from the boys in July.

  How to watch the Tour de France

  Let’s face it. There’s no substitute to actually heading over to the Tour de France, donning a lycra outfit and running alongside the riders while screaming like a banshee before finally falling ass-over-tit into a ditch. It’s what being a cycling spectator is all about.

  But for most of us the dream of waking up in a French police cell with a hangover and the gravel from a mountain you can’t pronounce tattooed into your thighs is just that: a dream. We have to content ourselves with watching the race on TV, which isn’t such a bad thing. Rather than seeing the blur of the peloton whistling by for all of three seconds, you get to witness the entire race, with all the drama that entails.

  The TV option is not for the faint-hearted though, as some stages last up to six hours and there’s only so many times you can squint your eyes to make out the picture as the satellite feed pixelates at a crucial moment. And then there’s the same three adverts on repeat for the duration of the stage, which gradually seep into your consciousness until you finally crack and book a holiday from the Malaysian Tourism Board, buy a pair of $500 cycling shoes and hire a lawyer for a work accident you’ve yet to have.

  Just as there is a diversity of riders on the Tour, there are many different kinds of Tour de France viewers too. Check out the list below to see which kind you are and which rider you are most like while watching the Tour.

  Which rider are you?

  You watch the Tour de France with a group of mates who are constantly attending to your every need: getting you food and drink, fluffing up your pillows, warming your slippers, opening your beers for you, etc. With your mates doing all the hard yakka, you’re fresh to watch the Tour within your limits and get excited only when you need to.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Bradley Wiggins, a rider who definitely got by with a little help from his pals in 2012.

  You watch the Tour de France with a group of mates, one of whom is always asking you to get him food and drink, fluff up his pillows, warm his slippers, open his beers for him, etc. As the race progresses, you realise there’s nothing special about this mate and that you want to have a beer of your own. You head to the kitchen and leave him to fend for himself, until one of your pals calls you to say you better get your butt back into the living room, pronto.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Chris Froome, Bradley Wiggins’s not-so-loyal Team Sky domestique, who got the hump with Wiggo going slow and left him on the mountainside. Needless to say, the team car radioed for him to return to his leader and never do it again.

  As the race gets to the final 20 km, the remote control on the sofa between you and a friend is accidentally sat on and the channel is turned over.
With neither of you willing to admit to being the culprit, both of you stubbornly watch Murder, She Wrote rather than admit you were the one at fault.

  If you were riders you’d be: Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. The two-time Tour-winning duo despised each other so much that in one race for Italy they got off their bikes and stopped racing, rather than help the other win.

  You are watching the Tour on TV when your mate suddenly jumps up in excitement and just misses landing on your dog. You say to him, ‘If you tread on my dog, I’ll cut your head off.’

  If you were a rider you would be: Cadel Evans, who said exactly that to a journo who nearly trod on his pooch in a post-race media scrum.

  You watch the Tour with a mate and convince him to bring the beer and chips on a promise that you’ll buy the next time. When the time comes, though, you don’t, claiming the only way your pal will truly enjoy the beer and chips is if he buys them himself.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Bernard Hinault. The Frenchman let Greg LeMond help him win the 1985 Tour, but then went back on a promise to guide the American to victory the following year, saying his attacks were there to ensure LeMond was a worthy winner.

  During a sprint stage, you’re calm and collected until the final kilometre, when you jump to your feet in excitement and fall over the coffee table/living room lamp/small child, missing out on the finish.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Tyler Farrar, a sprinter whose natural tendency to fall over gives him intimate knowledge of what tarmac rubbing against his butt at 50 kph feels like.

  You say you’re a dedicated fan and show good commitment early doors, only for your enthusiasm to wane as the Tour goes into the mountains in the second week and you head off to Spain on holiday.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Mario Cipollini, the Italian sprinter who used to contest — and win — the first week’s flat stages, only to throw in the towel when the mountains arrived.

  You have a few too many ‘liquid refreshments’ during the start of the stage and nod off. Waking up in a daze and not knowing where you are, you run out the front door, shouting, ‘I’ve got to pick up the kids from school’ even though it’s the weekend and you don’t have children.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Abdel-Kader Zaaf, who had a few too many ‘doping refreshments’ in the 1950 Tour and collapsed on the way up a mountain. It is said that he was revived by red wine — and promptly cycled the wrong way down the road.

  Aware of what it takes to call yourself an elite Tour de France watcher, you drink vast quantities of coffee and pop No-Doz pills like they’re M&M’s in order to see every moment of a Tour. But when your partner asks if you’ve been taking anything to stay awake, you categorically deny it and claim she’s on a witch-hunt for the French media. She threatens to throw out all your Tour DVDs if you don’t come clean.

  If you were a rider you’d be: Lance Armstrong, another rider who needed a little stimulation to reach the elite Tour level.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tour de France Hall of Fame:

  The legends and the heartbreaks

  The most absorbing stories of the Tour tend to focus on the two extremes of sporting achievement: the tales of heroism, courage and suffering that created the legendary figures of the race, and the crushing disappointments of those who witnessed their dreams slip from their grasp.

  What makes the Tour such a unique sporting endeavour, though, is that its winners and losers are often treated with equal reverence. The glorious failings of Eugène Christophe and René Vietto are as well known — if not more celebrated — than the endeavours of the riders who beat them. The fact that a man such as Raymond Poulidor, who never wore the yellow jersey, let alone won the race, is more popular than five-time winner Jacques Anquetil says all you need to know about the mystique of the Tour.

  So by all means savour the achievements of the men who have entered the pantheon of Tour history, but don’t feel sorry for those who didn’t make it; their memories burn just as brightly.

  The Legends

  ‘Legend’ is probably the most over-used word in all of sports. The label is thrown around in the sporting lexicon so much these days that it’s hard to tell for certain if an individual is deserving of the accolade or is just a victim of someone’s lazy vocabulary. Score a goal, you’re a legend; take a few wickets, you’re a legend; get photographed rolling out of a nightclub at 2 am with a model on your arm, you’re a legend. (OK, that last one does make you a legend of sorts …)

  In the Tour de France, now that Lance has been jettisoned from the conversation, the majority of legends can be defined by one thing: five Tour victories. Only Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain have achieved this incredible feat — and for that they deserve to be on the Mount Rushmore of cycling, looking down on the rest of us from their place on high.

  But when it comes to defining greatness there’s always an exception to the rule — and in the Tour’s case it’s Fausto Coppi. Although the Italian won only two Tours in his career, he was a transcendent cyclist, a god on wheels who would dominate races from start to finish. He was the first superstar of cycling, just as likely to make headlines on the front pages as the back, and undoubtedly would have added to his Tour tally if not for the Second World War.

  And where would any discussion of Tour legends be without the man who made it all possible, the ‘Father of the Tour’ Henri Desgrange? His methods may have bordered on madness and he may not have been the most benevolent of overseers, but without his vision, persistence and drive, the Tour de France may not have made it past a decade, let alone have celebrated its century.

  Henri Desgrange

  Henri Desgrange is popularly known as the ‘Father of the Tour’ and, although he technically didn’t come up with the idea, it was under his thirty-three-year stewardship that the Tour de France evolved into one of the most spectacular and popular sporting events in the world.

  The story on how the Tour began has been covered in detail in chapter 1, but for those of you flicking through or who dozed off early doors, here’s the short version: the Tour de France is a bike race that started when an anti-Semitic count established a newspaper called ‘The Car’ to cover cycling and get one over on an ex-colleague. ‘The Car’ editor Henri Desgrange then stole the idea of the Tour from a lowly employee but left the decision on whether to start the event to an accountant. Hardly the stuff of legends, eh?

  Despite championing the Tour from the pages of L’Auto in the lead-up, Desgrange hedged his bets in the early years of the race; he was conspicuous in his absence from the start of the first race on 1 July 1903, not wanting to be associated too closely if things went pear-shaped. He needn’t have worried; after a wobbly second Tour that was ravaged by cheating the race grew in popularity and, more importantly, sales of the newspaper reporting it exploded. From printing just more than 14 million papers in 1903, L’Auto produced 44 million in 1913 and, in 1922, they were printing more than 600,000 copies a day during the Tour.

  While Desgrange grew to love the race — surely as much for increasing his paper’s circulation as for the competition itself — he clearly disliked its riders. The early routes were brutal, and for most riders it was an achievement just to finish; stages were regularly more than 300 km long, with the 1919 Les Sables-d’Olonne to Bayonne the longest ever at 482 km. Desgrange wanted to see the riders suffer — there was not a hint of irony when he said he wanted a Tour so hard that only one man survived the ordeal — and his decision to send the race into the high mountains prompted eventual winner Octave Lapize to brand organisers ‘assassins’ when he reached the top of the Aubisque in 1910.

  Desgrange did not care for reputations either, dismissing riders no matter how well-respected they were. In 1923, he said of popular French rider Henri Pélissier: ‘This Pélissier does not know how to suffer. He will never win the Tour de France.’ (The Fr
enchman gave ‘The Father of the Tour’ a two-fingered salute in 1925 by doing just that.)

  Desgrange also liked to test his riders with constant rule changes. Just a few of the draconian regulations brought in by the race’s ‘benevolent father’ included the banning of teamwork and derailleur gears, limits on where and when food could be eaten, and the assertion that any breakdown in mechanics had to be fixed by the riders themselves with no outside help.

  As the race organiser, chief rule maker and leading chronicler of the Tour, Desgrange’s influence was ubiquitous during its early years. He ran the Tour from its birth in 1903 until ill health forced him off the road in 1936, and he died in his home in Beauvallon four years later.

  From a contemporary viewpoint, it would be easy to judge Desgrange as a man who used other people’s ideas and money to build his empire and that, as organiser of the Tour, he ruled as a dictator who cared little for the men who were an integral part of the event. While there is truth in all those statements, there is no doubting that he was also a visionary. An event of such magnitude had never been attempted before and Desgrange was essentially flying blind, his constant tinkering with the rules merely attempts to find the best format for the race. Equally, his jibes at racers (while obviously cruel and demeaning at times) were designed to push them on to greater heights, which they often did.

  Ultimately, Desgrange was driven by a very simple notion of competition: that of testing the very limits of a man’s capacity to endure through an almost impossible sporting pursuit. By creating the Tour de France, he certainly achieved that aim.