Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France - Softcover

Paris, 1903

During his sad last years of exile, Oscar Wilde was staying in Paris when he dined with the symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck and 'his wonderful mistress', Georgette Leblanc. The author of Pelléas et Mélisande, somewhat implausibly dubbed 'the Belgian Shakespeare' by Octave Mirbeau, lived with Leblanc, the great soprano of the Opéra Comique and creator of several of Massenet's roles, at their 'lovely little house' near the Bois de Boulogne, and had abandoned writing, or so Wilde told a friend. 'He only thinks of making life sane and healthy, and freeing the soul from the trammels of culture. Art seems to him now a malady...He rests his hope of humanity on the Bicycle.'

Whatever touch of irony there may have been on Wilde's part, or Maeterlinck's, this would not have been the most foolish of hopes in July 1898. In the past few years the machine and the phenomenon called the bicycle had begun a social revolution that would do far more for humanity than many other more exalted inventions. It was also the fulfilment of a centuries-old dream. Although the bicycle's origins are not quite lost in the mists of time, they go back much further than the nineteenth century. From the moment the simple fulcrum was discovered, men knew that energy could be transmuted, by magic as it must seem to any tribesman encountering a wheel for the first time. Earlier in that century, one extraordinary breakthrough had seen steam power harnessed to iron vehicles mounted on rails, but long before that the ingenious had dreamed of some mechanical substitute for the horse, a mechanism that could allow a man to travel faster and further with no more -- or even with less -- expenditure of energy than in walking.

Although the drawing of something looking like a bicycle attributed to Leonardo da Vinci is almost certainly an ingenious fake, more or less serious experiments continued over the following centuries. In London in 1769, as Boswell records, the astronomer and 'self-taught philosopher' James Ferguson told Dr Johnson of his 'new-invented machine which went without horses'. Then in Paris in 1790, at a time when the city was an asparagus-bed of strange notions and projects, a M. de Sivrac rode out in a wooden horse mounted on four wheels. It became known as the célérifère, and then the vélocifère, and it was used for races of a sort round the Champs-Élysées, adumbrating the great final sprint now seen there every July. Vélocifère became velocipede, or 'fast foot', in 1818, when Baron Karl von Drais of Karlsruhe unveiled in Paris his improved version that could be steered round bends. This 'Draisienne' soon spread to London, as Keats reported: 'The nothing of the day is a machine called the Velocipede. It is a wheel-carriage to ride cock horse upon, sitting astride and pushing it along with the toes...They will go seven miles an hour'; but alas, 'a handsome gelding will come to eight guineas', an impossible price for such a toy. Many years later, in 1987, the riders in the greatest of all bicycle races would ride out of Karlsruhe in tribute to the baron.

Despite its cost, the new toy crossed the Atlantic: Oliver Wendell Holmes recalled how, well before the Civil War, 'Some of the Harvard College students who boarded in my neighbourhood had these machines they called velocipedes, on which they used to waddle along like so many ducks.' In the 1840s Kirkpatrick Macmillan, a blacksmith, staked arguably a better claim to be the grandfather of the bicycle when he produced a form of hobby horse with pedals that for the first time took the rider's feet clear of the ground and were linked by rods to the back wheel. And at the Great Exhibition of 1851 there were three velocipedes on show, one designed by William Sawyer. He made a later model to present to the Prince of Wales (it is not known whether Sawyer's machine was ever actually ridden by the prince, a man designed neither by physique nor temperament for doing so), which was then put on sale in 1860 for the enormous sum of £17 2s. 6d., many months' pay for a labourer.

In France meantime, at their workshop near the Champs-Élysées, Pierre Michaux and his sons had adapted the old Draisienne with a crank to power the front wheel. This was introduced in turn at the Paris Exposition of 1867, one of the great events of the Second Empire in what proved to be its last years. And the 'bicircle' or 'veloce' was soon the rage, Michaux producing 400 a year, despite its expense, its impracticability, and its considerable discomfort. A year after the Exposition a revue opened called Paris-Vélocipède, Daumier drew a cartoon light-heartedly showing the figure of Death astride the new contraption and, in Vienna, Josef Strauss wrote a 'Velocipede Polka'. One, albeit unutilitarian, use was shown by the great stunt-man Blondin when he rode a velocipede on a high wire across Niagara. Although his agility and balance were unusual, for most people it was still difficult to ride one of these machines over any distance, with its pedals mounted on the hub of the front wheel. The nickname 'boneshaker' spoke for itself, and not everyone was enamoured of the novelty. One French paper, the Gaulois, thought that 'velocipedists are imbeciles on wheels'. In return, a velocipedic magazine pointed out that the two-wheeler compared favourably with the horse, as it 'does not cart loads of hay, and does not wax fat and kick. It is easy to handle. It never rears up. It won't bite.'

And yet even enthusiasts ruefully admitted that riding the machines of the period was exhausting and often painful, and that 'a railway bridge or a very slight rise in the ground brought us to a standstill'. The English Mechanic thought that it was a sport only for those 'possessed of legs of iron and thighs of brass', and warned that riding 'to any great extent, results in depression, in exhaustion and in wear and tear'. Another false turn in the search for a less depressing or exhausting machine came with the 'ordinary', or penny-farthing, which had a front wheel several times larger than the rear and, although surprisingly fast, was extremely ungainly and perilous, and one more came with the safer but slower tricycle.

Both boneshaker and ordinary could at any rate be raced. The social history of the nineteenth century saw few more important developments than the advent of competitive sports, or more accurately 'games'. The word 'sport' had always meant in England -- which was very much where this change originated -- country pursuits, hunting, shooting, fishing, coursing, archery; games meant teams competing on a field of play with a ball. Cricket had emerged from rural chaos and corruption in the eighteenth century, football had been played immemorially in English villages, in some towns at Shrovetide, and at public schools following their own arcane codes (still played today at Winchester, Harrow, and -- in two versions -- Eton), which made a common national game difficult. One school gave its name to the game from which two different forms of Rugby football as well as American football all now descend. And on an historic day in 1863, at a pub in London, sportsmen from Oxford and Cambridge, and from different schools, met to lay down a common code for Association Football, sometimes known by the dire Oxonian diminutive 'soccer' but most often and in most countries simply as 'football' or some version of that name. As A. J. P. Taylor truly said, this 'game of eleven men against eleven' first codified there that day was one of his country's greatest gifts to mankind: 'By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished.'

Five years later just outside Paris came a scarcely less historic moment, when competitive cycling began. On 31 May 1868, a 1200-metre race was run from the fountains to the entrance of the park of St-Cloud. It was won by an 18-year-old English expatriate called James Moore, who confirmed this victory on 7 November by winning the first road race in France, from Paris to Rouen over 135 kilometres against a large local field; sadly, not an augury of much future English success on the roads of France. The 10 hours 25 minutes it took Moore included a good deal of time spent walking his bicycle up the steeper hills. Since none of them is particularly steep in that part of France, it was clear that racing over real mountains was some way in the future. Indeed, although French roads may well have been the best in Europe, Moore's average speed of less than 13 k.p.h. spoke for itself about the conditions for road racing there, let alone in other countries, and also about the quality of the machine he was riding, still some way short of technical excellence. Although the Pickwick Bicycling Club was founded in London in 1870, the first such in England, followed by seven more within another four years, and although the Hon. Mr Keith-Falconer beat a professional at Cambridge over a two-mile race in June 1882, it wasn't surprising that bicycle racing in this incunabular period was mostly confined to tracks.

Certainly that was so in the United States. The first bike race there seems to have been in Boston on 24 May 1878, which is to say two years after professional baseball had begun and thirteen years before basketball was invented. Almost all early American racing was on tracks, and largely took the form of paced races, with some riders setting a fast early speed and then dropping away. By the 1890s there were about 100 dirt, cement, or wooden tracks around the country, mainly in big cities. More than 600 professionals travelled on this national circuit, which ranged from Boston to San Francisco, with competitions in such cities as St Louis, Salt Lake City, Denver and Los Angeles. The sport received an enormous boost on 30 June 1899, when one of these riders, Charles M. Murphy, rode on a wooden track behind a Long Island Rail Road train and covered a mile in 57.8 seconds, to become inevitably Mile-a-Min...