When Europe and the Tour emerged from the trenches of World War I, the common goal was reconstruction on a ruined landscape. Everything was more difficult than before. Also cycling. The Grande Boucle of 1919 covered 5,500 kilometers in 15 stages, compared to just over 3,000 that are now spread over 21 days. And from that edition until 1924 there was an invariable stage, the longest in history: 482 kilometers between Les Sables d’Olonne and Baiona. Almost 20 hours on the pedals.
Albert London was then a prestigious journalist. He died in 1932 in a strange shipwreck. The burning of that ship, they say, was the work of the Indochinese mafia, annoyed by some information from the reporter. Before, that chronicler had covered the 1924 Tour for the newspaper Le Petit Parisien. He witnessed the marathon stage. I have seen fakirs spit molten lead. They are normal people. The real nuts are some enlightened people who left Paris on June 22 to eat dust. I know them well; I am part of them,” he wrote. His is a definition that remains: “The forced of the road.”
And one of the first complaints about doping also belongs to him. Albert Londres was there when Henri Pélissier left the race exhausted and fed up with the poor conditions in which they were racing. “We are not dogs,” he cried, while recounting his pharmacological tricks: “This is cocaine for the eyes, this is chloroform for the gums. Let’s go with dynamite! You still haven’t seen us in the bathroom at the finish line. Pay for the show. Without the mud we are white as shrouds, diarrhea empties us. We lose consciousness in the water.”
The Pélissier brothers, who had come from sweeping the 1923 Tour, were, to say the least, peculiar. Everything about them was exaggerated. They got used to working early. At the age of ten, Henri got up at four to attend to the cows in the family business. Later, with his brother Francis, he distributed the milk. If they made it on time, they ate soup; if they were late, his father beat them to death. Francis was a hero in World War I. Henri, who won the 1923 Tour, was a whirlwind in peacetime. On the road he clashed with the director of the Tour, the almighty Desgrange, and at home he martyred his two wives. The first one committed suicide and, with that same gun, the second one killed Henri. That was in 1935.
Apparently, Pélissier exaggerated something in that conversation with Albert Londres, although it is true that stages like that of 482 kilometers put them to the limit of resistance. It was such a long day that instead of leaving at dawn they did it earlier, the night before. The public liked that, so they could attend all the preparations before dinner. The cyclists didn’t sit so well. They spent the night in the race and did not reach the finish line until sunset the next day. And all because in that post-war France there was a lack of resources and the Tour had to cross the country from north to south in just three stages. For this reason, the 482 kilometers between Les Sables d’Olonne and Baiona were mandatory for six editions.
The squad complains
The protests of the runners were on the rise. The Tour director was always in favor of toughness, but he found that days of so much encouragement were tedious in the end. In 1919, the victory in that marathon went to Jean Alavoine, a star. Then prestigious riders such as Firmin Lambot and Philippe Thys prevailed, although in 1924 an unknown Belgian, Omer Huyse, won the stage due to the laziness of the peloton, which took more than twenty hours to complete the itinerary, at a speed of 24 km/h half.
Albert London was in that edition. His chronicles created a school despite encountering such an endless and boring day. He was a good observer: “A jogger is stopped on the road; he does not repair his bicycle, but his face. He pokes out his glass eye to remove the dust. It is about Barthélemy». Good cycling stories have always gone beyond the results of the races.
Desgrange assumed that marathons killed the show. It was the end of the stage between Les Sables d’Olonne and Baiona. In that journey, he included an intermediate day with a goal in Bordeaux. Little by little, the Tour was reducing the size of its routes. In 1926 the figure of 400 kilometers was exceeded for the last time. Ten years later, only very occasionally were there routes of 300 kilometres. In 1969, the Dutchman Herman van Springel, a Bordeaux-Paris specialist (600 km), won the 329-kilometre stage between Clermont-Ferrand and Montargis. In the last two decades, the limit has been set at 250 kilometers, little more than half of that journey over potholes and iron bicycles between Les Sables d’Olonne and Baiona that crushed the asses and legs of ‘the convicts of the route’.