Daily Cycling Facts 21.06.2014

The Tour de France has started on this date twice, first in 1925 and then again in 1966. The 1925 edition consisted of 18 stages, at that time the most ever, but the overall distance was increased by only 5km to 5,430km - still much longer than today's Tours, but a significant decrease in the average stage length which would lead to a much longer race and a reduction to 17 stages the following year. It also marked the return of sponsored trade teams with respectable budgets for the first time since the First World War. Rules were changed, too - there was no longer a time bonus for the winner of each stage and any rider deemed to have said or done anything likely to damage the Tour's image was to be banned the following the year, this having been inspired by comments Henri Pélissier made to the journalist Albert Londres after a row with organisers. 130 men started, split between two groups - 39 rode with trade teams, the rest were independent touriste-routiers who paid their own way during the race (some slept in hotels and ate in restaurants, others slept in hedges and ate anything they could catch, beg or steal). There was a great deal of variation in team size with the largest, J.B. Louvet-Pouchois, consisting of eight riders including Eugène Christophe, Albert Dejonghe and Hector Heusghem; the J.Alavoine-Dunlop "team" began the race with just one rider, Jean Alavoine.

Bottecchia was, shall we say, not the finest example of
Italian manhood to have ever swung a leg over a bike.
However, the maillot jaune has magical powers over the
female tifosi and they swarmed across the border to throw
roses in his path - extra police had to be drafted in to Evian
to keep them under control. Frantz too received massive
support after three special trains were organised to bring his
fans from Luxembourg to the race

Ottavio Bottecchia had won with comparative ease in 1924, despite being knocked off his bike by a dog, once Pélissier stormed off home in the wake of an argument involving jerseys - only Nicolas Frantz presented any sort of challenge, but too late in the race to deprive him of victory. He was a favourite this year too but he knew that he was in for a tougher race because of Adelin Benoit, a 25-year-old Belgian who had won the National Championship for independent riders two years previously and had been adding good results ever since. Pélissier was back too, but he was 36 and would abandon with knee problems, never to return to the Tour. The Italian got off to a good start by winning the first stage and had the maillot jaune for two days, but then Benoit's second place 5'38" behind Louis Mottiat on Stage 3 allowed him to take it away. Frantz won the next two stages but was unable to take the lead, then Benoit had a puncture in Stage 6, Automoto-Hutchinson attacked and got Bottecchia to the line first. He won Stage 7 too, briefly winning the jersey back, but when the race reached the mountains Benoit won Stage 8 and once again took the lead. However, he had been lucky; mountains were not his speciality and when Frantz won Stage 9 the jersey was returned to Bottecchia who, with the assistance of Lucien Buysse, kept it.

Buysse was rewarded by being allowed to win Stages 11 and 12 (he'd also been promised half the money Bottecchia earned in the race), though in the latter both men missed a control post (riders were required to sign a log, proving they'd stuck to the parcours and not taken any shortcuts) and were penalised ten minutes. Nevertheless, at the end of the stage Bottecchia had a 27' advantage over nearest rival Frantz, and when the Luxembourger lost a further 37' due to a puncture on Stage 14 his race was over. Bottecchia won in 219h10'18", Buysse was 54'20" slower for second place. Bottechia also won the meilleur grimpeur, an award given by L'Auto to the rider judged to have performed best in the mountains before the introduction of the King of the Mountains competition in 1933, but it would be his last Tour victory - he returned in 1926 but abandoned in the Pyrenees; then in 1927 he was found lying unconscious by the side of a road not far from his home in Peonis and died eleven days later.

In 1966, the Tour covered 4,303km over 22 stages - much longer than modern editions, but considerably shorter than 1925 (in 1925, the average stage length was 301.6km, in 1966 195.6km. Many people make the mistake of believing that this is an indication that the riders in the early 20th Century were a much tougher breed than post-Second World War, but they forget that average speeds - 24.775kph in 1925, 36.76kph in 1966 - have risen dramatically. Also, in 1925 the riders had a rest day almost every other day; in 1966 they had only two).

Poulidor, the man who saw the future

The riders, well-used to bad weather, harsh mountains and the occasional corrupt official and/or belligerent fan, faced a new ordeal - for the very first time in 1966, they had to submit to drugs tests. Rumours spread before the first test was carried out and, unhappy about it, all the riders except for one made themselves scarce after Stage 8 when the testers were supposed to arrive. The one rider who remained was Raymond Poulidor, who despite connections to Bernard Sainz (the notorious "Dr. Mabuse") never tested positive during his career. Perhaps a little wiser than most, Poulidor knew that this was the future of cycling the future and that even if he escaped the testers' clutches this time they'd be back, many times. As a result, he holds the honour of becoming their first subject, and his memory of the occasion reveals how amateurish the procedure was at the time:

"I was strolling down the corridor in ordinary clothes when I came across two guys in plain clothes. They showed me their cards and said to me ...
"You're riding the Tour?" - "I said: 'Yes'."
"You're a rider?" - "I said: 'Yes'."
"OK, come with us."
I swear it happened just like that. They made me go into a room, I pissed into some bottles and they closed them without sealing them. Then they took my name, my date of birth, without asking for anything to check my identity. I could have been anyone, and they could have done anything they liked with the bottles."

The testers managed to catch a few other riders, some of whom refused to provide samples; next day, riders staged a protest by getting off their bikes and shouting abuse - mostly general abuse directed at anybody who would listen, but much of it directed at Tour doctor Pierre Dumas (whom, they claimed, should be tested for wine and aspirin in case he was using those drugs to cope with the demands of his job) and some directly targeting Poulidor for submitting himself to the test. "After that, they did me no favours in the peloton," he later remembered.

Rudi Altig won the first stage in much the same way that he won so many of his track victories,  getting his head down and hammering away at the pedals until it was time to stop and get back off the bike again, and the small lead he gained proved unexpectedly sufficient to keep him in the maillot jaune for ten stages; at which point the race reached the Pyrenees. Meanwhile, Jacques Anquetil was steadily improving his time, hotly pursued as ever by Poulidor who was even more furious than usual with his great rival in the wake of a Stage 2 crash, which Anquetil - who looked like a gentleman, but wasn't one - used as an opportunity to attack. Poulidor made it back to the main group but was understandably not at all happy, Anquetil called him a cry-baby and said he needed to "learn how to stay upright on his bike."

Jan Janssen, Lucien Aimar and a small group they'd recruited to help took a serious bite out of Anquetil's time during Stage 10 from Bayonne to Pau, while Tommaso de Pratook the stage win and earned his one and only day in yellow. Guido Marcello Mugnaini, who had come fourth overall the year before, won the next day but without taking the leadership, allowing Jean-Claude Lebaube his own single day in yellow; then Altig took Stage 12. By this time, the small lead he had in the first few stages had long been eroded away and so as the race left the mountains for two stages and a time trial on the flatlands, the lead passed into the hands of his countryman Karl-Heinz Kunde who kept it for five stages.

In Stage 16, Julio Jiménez (who had won the King of the Mountains at the Tour and Vuelta in 1965) got away from the peloton, forcing Janssen, Poulidor, Anquetil, Aimar and others to chase. They couldn't catch him and he won the stage but without enough time to get the maillot jaune, which went to Janssen. The next day, a group of riders tried the same trick and managed to build up a sizable lead on the two early descents so that Janssen, Anquetil and Aimar once again had to expend energy by chasing them down. Then Poulidor escaped too, and Anquetil - used to always beating the Eternal Second but weakened by bronchitis brought on by bad weather in earlier stages - was having none of that, so he chased. Poulidor was never as good as his rival he retained his form for far longer, despite only being two years younger; Anquetil exhausted himself and abandoned the next day, never to return to the Tour. The break was caught but Aimer discovered he had the strength to keep going, taking Janssen by surprise and finishing with the lead - Janssen tried to get it back in Stage 18, but Aimar and matched him move-for-move; he won back some time, but to no avail and Aimar won the race (and some years later, he became an excellent example of why a retired professional cyclist has to stop eating like a pre-retirement professional cyclist). Janssen's time was good enough for second place, however, an he became the first Dutch rider to achieve a podium place in the General Classification. Two years later, he won outright.


Jacques Goddet

The memorial to Jacques Goddet, high up on
Tourmalet

Jacques Goddet, the second director of the Tour de France after a prostate operation and illness left Henri Desgrange too sick to continue (he would die four years after Goddet took over), died on this day in 2000. Goddet is credited with modernising and developing the race from its quaint beginnings to the world's largest sporting event (one of his first changes was to permit the use of derailleur gears which became standard on all bikes two years later after the Tour was won for the first time on a bike fitted with one), but even a brief history of the man cannot be complete without a look at his wartime activities. While he permitted the L'Auto presses to be used to produce pro-Resistance materal and pamphlets, his anti-Nazi credentials come under serious doubt: firstly, he seems to have personally supported Philippe Pétain who would become Chief Marshall of Vichy France (and who was sentenced to death after the war for treason and collaborating with the Nazis, though the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment on account of age) and produced some 1,200 articles in support of him.

Of course, Goddet may have been effectively signing his own death warrant had he have refused permission for this to happen; it has also been argued that a controlling interest in L'Auto's shares was owned by a consortium of German businessmen, in which case Goddet would have had very little say in the paper's editorial direction and might not in fact have personally supported Pétain at all. Far more damning meanwhile is the fact that before the war he had hired out his Vélodrome d'Hiver to be used for fascist meetings and then, when France was occupied, permitted it to be used by the Nazis for the temporary imprisonment of 13,000 French Jews who remained there in horrible conditions before being transferred to concentration camps - only 300 of them survived the war. It is possible that his hand was forced by those German businessmen, of course. It's also possible that he was not a Nazi sympathiser but was an antisemite; the two do not necessarily go hand-in-hand (there have been many left-wing antisemites in history and it works both ways - Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jewish lives, but he was a supporter of other Nazi policies and joined the party of his own free will).  After the war, L'Auto (which, incidentally, had been established as an anti-Drefus paper after the Army captain - who was Jewish - had been falsely convicted of trumped-up charges fueled at least partly by the rampant antisemitism of the times) was forced to close for continuing to publish during the Occupation, as were many other newspapers and magazines. Goddet responded by creating L'Equipe, the paper that is still printed today and is one of the first points of call for Tour-related news, but due to his association with L'Auto could not be listed as being a part of it even though he had an office at the paper's headquarters until the final years of his life.


Mark Bell

Mark Bell, 1960-2009

Mark Bell was born in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, on this day in 1960. His talent was plain to see from a very young age - when he was just ten years old he finished a 10 mile (16.1km) cyclo cross race in 33 minutes, wearing his football strip and school shoes. By 14, he was representing the North of England in the English Schools Cycling Association three-day event, competing against an international field.

Bell's amateur career was nothing short of spectacular, with some 200 victories. In 1979, he joined the Athletic Club de Boulogne-Billancourt and rode alongside Robert Millar, Scotland's greatest ever cyclist. He began to show talent on the road at about the same time and in 1981 became National Road Champion and won two stages in the Milk Race, as the Tour of Britain was then known. He became the first foreign winner in the history of the Étoile de Sud in 1983 and then a year later rode in the Olympics - that race, however, proved to be a disaster. He had been told that the course was flat, whereas in reality in included one very challenging hill and for all his talents, Bell was most definitely not a climber. He abandoned the race.

Having turned professional in 1985 to join the Falcon team, he came third in the National Road Race competition. He joined Team Raleigh the following season and won it; his superb sprinting ability showing itself when, as race official and future British Cycling president Brian Cookson remembers, "he simply rode away from some of the greatest names in the sport." He also came second in the Tom Simpson memorial that year, then joined Emmelle-MBK before retiring at the end of the 1988 season.

Life after retirement was not at all kind to Bell. He suffered from poor health and became an alcoholic, which made some of his medical issues worse. In 2008, he said that he "was on top of" his alcoholism, meaning that he had made an effort to bring it under control and, at the time, was managing to do so, like all alcoholics never knowing whether this the end of the war or just another battle. He also revealed that he was suffering from damage caused by deep vein thrombosis in his left leg and required a shoulder joint replacement due to osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone marrow. Sadly, his body gave out before he did and he died on the 30th of January 2009, aged 48.

Toni Merkens
Toni Merkens, born in Cologne in this day in 1912, began his career in cycling as an apprentice to Fritz Köthke who, at that time, was one of Germany's top frame builders. By his early 20s he had begun to make an impact on racing, especially on the track, and became National Amateur Sprint Champion in 1933, 1934 and 1935. He won a gold medal for the 1,000m Sprint at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in extremely dubious circumstances - he had clearly been seen to grab the Dutch rider Arie van Vliet's clothing, pulling him back and forcing him into second place; but the German judges ignored it. It was only when the Dutch team launched an official complaint' leaving them no choice but to act, that they penalised him 100 Reichmarks.

Before the war, Merkens was a popular rider in England.
He's seen here at Herne Hill in 1936, in third place behind
Dennis Horne (1) and Jack Sibbit (2). The identity of the
German in fourth place is unnown

As soon as the Games came to an end, Merkens turned professional; then won the Track Stayers National Championship in 1940 and the Sprint title a year later. The Nazis had originally kept German athletes out of the war, especially successful blond ones such as Merkens who were valuable as the posterboys of master race propaganda, but by 1942 they were facing a shortage of new recruits; Merkens was drafter into the Army and sent to fight the Russians on the Eastern Front. On the 20th of June 1944 - two years after his draft, one day before his 32nd birthday - he was struck by a piece of shrapnel from an exploding shell and died shortly afterwards.

Merkens' own political beliefs seem to be unknown and we can no more condemn him for being a Nazi than we can say for certain that he wasn't one - his apparent willingness to assist in the great Fascist propaganda exercise that the 1936 Games became suggests he may have had leanings that way, but at that time the German public had yet to discover just how evil the regime was. Secondly, many cyclists with no political leanings at all opposed the Nazis because they banned the six-day races that provided much of a track rider's income; and we should also ask why someone with such obvious symbolic value as Merkens was sent to the dreaded Eastern Front which saw some of the worst fighting and conditions of the war. Nevertheless, we can be glad that he was one of only a very few cyclists to have competed in a jersey emblazoned with a swastika.

Hein Verbruggen

Hein Verbruggen, looking - as he quite often
did - rather like a schoolboy who can't quite
believe he's got away with his latest mischief

Born in Helmond, Netherlands on this day in 1941, Hein Verbruggen's rise through the cycling world was a sign of the times - never an athlete himself, his career had been in business management before an interest in cycling led to the presidency of the Dutch Federation, then to the UCI.

In 2008, investigative journalists from the BBC uncovered documents apparently showing that under Verbruggen, the UCI had received payments equal to approximately US$5 million from Japanese race organisers, which the broadcaster claimed was a bribe or reward for backing the inclusion of keirin in the Olympics. Verbruggen continues to deny the claims, and the UCI ignored the BBC's requests for an explanation. In 2010, Floyd Landis - then undergoing a doping investigation - claimed that Verbruggen had  accepted a bribe worth US$100,000 from Lance Armstrong to submerge a failed anti-doping test said to have occurred in 2002, also saying that there would be no documentary evidence of the payment. However, the UCI - now under Verbruggen's successor Pat McQuaid - was able to produce documents showing that they had in fact received two payments, one to the tune of US$25,000 from Armstrong personally which was used to develop new anti-doping controls for junior races and one of US$100,000 paid by Armstrong's management company that had been used to purchase a Sysmex blood testing machine. That the UCI was so open in admitting that it had in fact received the payment Landis alleged, provided evidence proving it had and then also proved a second payment that had not been previously been mentioned was seen by some to be indication that nothing dishonest had taken place, even though McQuaid is on record as stating that in his opinion Verbruggen's decision to accept the payments was a mistake, but others wondered if it might have been a risky double-bluff. Verbruggen, the mysterious payments and the UCI in general are once again under the spotlight now that the lid has been lifted on the increasingly murky goings-on that took place during the era of Lance - with McQuaid's tenure drawing to a close and candidates for the presidency promising a new era of openness, we may finally be about to find out the full details of what really took place.


Simon Richardson, born in Bristol on this day in 1983, came second at the National Under-23 Cyclo Cross Championship in 2004 and won the 2005 National Cross-Country Mountain Bike Championship before switching to road racing. In 2009 he won Rás Tailteann and in 2012 he was fourth at the tough Lincoln International GP.

José Maria Yermo, who would become famous simply as Yermo, was born in Guecho, Spain on this day in 1903. He originally competed in athletics and set new National records for the long jump and triple jump, then turned to soccer and played for the national team five times. After that, he became a cyclist and represented Spain at the World Championships and the 1928 Olympics.

John Kenneth Middleton, born in Coventry on this day in 1906, competed in the same Olympics as Yermo and won a silver medal as part of the second-placed team in the Team Road Race. He died on the 24th of January, 1991.

Other cyclists born on this day: Per Christiansson (Sweden, 1961); Rolf Morgan Hansen (Norway, 1961); Yermo (Spain, 1903, died 1960); Valdemar Nielsen (Denmark, 1879, died 1954); Zbigniew Woźnicki (Poland, 1958, died 2008); Tadashi Ogasawara (Japan, 1955); Bruno Götze (Germany, 1882, died 1913); Ilmari Voudelin (Finland, 1896, died 1946); John Middleton (Great Britain, 1906, died 1991); Luigi Consonni (Italy, 1905, died 1992); Fernand Gandaho (Benin, 1968); Juan Sánchez (Spain, 1938).

Daily Cycling Facts 20.06.2014

Stage 10, 1926 - Bottecchia, who will not finish the stage,
struggles through difficult conditions on Izoard

On this day in 1926, 126 riders set off from Evian on the first stage of the 20th Tour de France. For the second time in its history, the race didn't start in Paris, and it had been reduced to 17 stages from 18 in 1925 - however, it was most definitely not easier. For a start, riders would face the Alps twice, on the way out and the way back in and again, and Henri Desgrange (who believed that the ideal Tour would be one in which only one rider finished) hadn't cut a stage for their benefit - he did it to increase the average stage length. What's more, the parcours followed the nations borders more closely than ever before or since; making this the longest Tour in history at 5,745km (for comparison, the 2012 edition was 3,497km).

Automoto's Ottavio Bottecchia was most fans' favourite as he'd won in 1924 and 1925, but many others fancied Alcyon's Adelin Benoit who had surprised everyone with a stage win and five days in the maillot jaune in 1925. A classic battle was expected, but as tends to be the way in the Tour de France it turned out far better than anyone had hoped. Right from the first stage unexpected things happened, beginning with a perfect solo break by Jules Buysse (brother of Marcel, who won six stages in 1913, and Lucien, who had finished in second place overall in 1925) that saw him win the stage with an advantage of thirteen minutes. Stage 2 ended with a bunch sprint won by little-known Belgian rider Aimé Dossche, who had picked up his first professional contract with Automoto at the the start of the year but seems to have switched to Christophe (which, like Automoto, was co-sponsored by Hutchinson at that time) before the Tour; so the GC remained virtually unchanged. Then in Stage 3 Gustaaf van Slembrouck managed to grab a lead that kept him in the maillot jaune for six days.

During Stage 3, Lucien Buysse received news that his infant daughter had died but, after thinking things over, decided to honour his family's request that he continue and try to win a stage that could be dedicated to the memory. Stage 4 was perhaps too soon and went to Félix Sellier instead; Stage 5 to Adelin Benoit. Another little-known Belgian named Joseph van Daam won Stage 6 after judges declared that Sellier had broken race regulations (van Daam would win two more later on, so he was much more famous when the race ended), then Nicolas Frantz won Stage 7; since Frantz had finished fourth in 1925 and showed enormous promise, instantly made him a favourite too (he's have to wait another year for the first of his two overall victories, however). Van Daam won Stage 8, this time on his own merit, then Frantz took Stage 9. The race had truly begun now, with a new challenger making things difficult for Bottecchia and Benoit.

One of the Tour's more inexplicably iconic images: a cow watches Jules Buysse

Desgrange, ever since he'd been convinced that it was possible to ride the high mountains and that the riders wouldn't be eaten by bears (something that, perhaps unfortunately in the eyes of some fans, has yet to happen in the Tour) and that in fact the public enjoyed the race more when it was an heroic spectacle, was always on the look-out for ways to make his race more difficult. Stage 10, however, went far beyond anything from previous years - and, say the ever-dwindling number of people who were there to see it, since. In terms of distance, it wasn't the longest stage that year - ten stages were longer, the longest 433km - but its 326km took the riders over some of the toughest roads in France, and they set out at midnight to be in with a chance of finishing by the following afternoon. Matters were not improved by a storm on the Col d'Aspin, but the Buysse brothers were made of stern stuff: while the rest of the peloton survived, they attacked hard and Lucien won after riding for seventeen hours. He had taken the maillot jaune, but better still he could dedicate the hardest stage in the history of the Tour to the memory of his daughter.

By 18:00, only ten men had arrived at the finish line and Desgrange was becoming concerned, perhaps worried that bears did have a taste for cyclists after all. He sent race organisers out in cars to search of the missing men and before long some had been located, in various states of exhaustion, strung out along the route. A full 24 hours after the stage had begun, 47 of the 76 starters had crossed the line, at which point it was decided that all riders would be permitted an extra 40% of the winning time (6 hours and 48 minutes) in which to finish as the standard cut-off time in which all riders must finish in order to escape disqualification would leave a field so depleted it would reduce competition and make for a boring race. The remaining 22 were disqualified. Incredibly, despite the harsh stage, only one rider abandoned: Bottecchia. The stage had been so difficult that judges had turned a blind eye when some of the riders had arrived at the end of the stage by bus and when a member of the public confessed that he had carried some riders to the finish line in his car but insisted they'd been in such a poor state he had done so through altruism rather than being offered money, officials declined to disqualify the riders - and paid the man for helping them.

Buysse leads over the Tourmalet, Stage 11

When Buysse won Stage 11 two days later, he gained a lead of more than an hour over his nearest rival. From now on, he was able to stay tucked safely away in the peloton, conserving his energy and simply making sure that he finished (which didn't prevent him winning the meilleur grimpeur, a prize for the best climber from the days before the King of the Mountains competition). Frantz won two more stages once the race returned to the flatlands, but he didn't have a hope of getting anywhere near the leader now and had to be content with second place. As they crossed the finish line in Paris behind stage winner Dossche, the gap between them was 1h22'25" (Buysse's overall time was 238h44'25" - around two-and-three-quarter times as long as Cadel Evan's 2011 winning time); a far greater memorial to his daughter than a stage win.

Another rider who experienced extraordinarily bad luck in 1926 was the Marcel Bidot, riding his first Tour that year. Misfortune first struck him on the second stage, between Mulhausen and Metz, when the axle of his pedal sheared through. It was, of course, forbidden for a rider to receive any sort of help in those days and a rider was expected to finish on the bike he'd started on unless a race official declared the machine to be ruined - since Bidot's bike still worked, he was not given permission to continue on a replacement. For a while, he tried to ride on, but soon realised he was losing so much time due to only being able to pedal through half of each revolution of the cranks that he'd soon be out of contention. He managed to bodge a repair using a leather toe strap to hold the pedal in place, but it soon fell off again. Eventually, an official showed some mercy and allowed the rider to borrow a bike offered by a spectator, but for some reason of his own demanded that Bidot's wheels be fitted to the spectator's bike. The new machine was much to small, but at least Bidot could continue; he arrived at the finish completely exhausted but still in the race.

Derailleur gears had been around for some years by 1926, but were considered too unreliable to be used in a professional race (and were banned in the Tour because Desgrange believed they'd make things too easy for the riders); instead, bikes had rear wheels fitted with two cogs - a smaller one on one side and a larger one for climbing on the other, allowing gear changes to be carried out by unbolting the wheel, flipping it over and then bolting it back in place, with horizontal drop-outs allowing chain slack to be taken up. Later in the race, on Tourmalet in Stage 10, Bidot's 25-tooth climbing freewheel disintegrated. Once again, he was not permitted a replacement bike; he climbed the 1,489m Col d'Aspin and the 1,569m Col du Peyresourde with the 22-tooth freewheel he'd intended to use on the flat sections and descents. With his 43-tooth chainring, it would have been agonising even without the atrocious weather. As we've seen, only 47 riders had finished the stage by midnight. When the weather got even worse, with the wind turning gale-force and the freezing rain pelting down, Bidot considered abandoning the race; but he did not. He reached the finish line one-and-a-half hours after stage winner Buysse. Henri Desgrange, either unaware of the ordeal Bidot had endured or, as was sometimes the case with him, out of simple dislike for the rider, rounded on him: "Bidot does not know how to suffer," he thundered in his L'Auto editorial the next day. "He will not finish the Tour!"

Remarkably, Bidot didn't tell him where to stick his race and continued - not just riding the race, but trying to ensure he still received a respectable time by using clever tactics. That irritated Desgrange, who felt that a race should be won by heroic, Corinthian athleticism rather than by being clever; once again, he attacked the rider in his newspaper, claiming that Bidot was making the Tour boring by marking all the attacks, controlling the pace at the front of the pack and generally doing everything that a modern-day rider hoping to win a Tour would do. "Bidot can ride any race he chooses next year between the 19th of June and the 19th of July - except the Tour de France," he wrote.

Bidot would face even more bad luck - on the Izoard, in the unearthly Casse Deserte, a sharp shard of stone pierced his tyre. It goes without saying that, either because the Fates were treating him cruelly or because Desgrange was and had made sure the rider wasn't going to get away with anything - there was an official on hand to make sure he didn't have any help in repairing it. The weather, again, was atrocious; Bidot's hands were so numb with the cold that he tried to use his teeth to peel the tubular tyre away from the rim. The Alcyon team car drove by and its driver, a man named Meunier, tried to surreptitiously toss Bidot a penknife, but the official spotted it: "I forbid you to pick it up," he ordered. Finally, he managed to prise the tyre off the rim using a wingnut, which were used to fasten the rear wheel in place to make gear changes easier, but he'd again lost significant time.

In the end, through a combination of what was, despite Desgrange's mistaken belief, an enormous capacity for suffering and more intelligent racing, Bidot finished tenth overall, 2 hours, 53 minutes and 54 seconds behind Buysse - an incredible achievement considering all he'd been through. It is one of the most remarkable tales of perseverance, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness, both the good and bad types, in the history of the Tour.

Fortunately, Desgrange did eventually relent and allowed Bidot to enter the race again - in 1928 he won Stage 5 and was eight overall; in 1929, when he was National Road Race Champion, he won Stage 12 and was sixteenth overall. His prize money, totaling nearly 52,000 francs, was enough to buy a comfortable home, and he lived to be 92 years old.

For the first time, not one single stage had been won by a Frenchman (this wouldn't happen again until 1999). Desgrange, who wanted the race to be a spectacle of every-man-for-himself heroism, was not happy with several teams, accusing them as he had Bidot of using tactics in an effort to survive the superhuman distances, and as a result, all but three of the flat stages in 1927 were run as team time trials. Buysse said that he would win again in 1927, but Automoto experienced financial difficulties and, as his best years were gone by the time they could afford to send a team back to the Tour, 1926 was his only victory. Bottecchia decided to retire following his problems on Stage 10. One year later he was dead, possibly due to murder at the hands of Italian Fascists.


Fabian Wegmann

Fabian Wegmann

Fabian Wegmann, born in Münster on this day in 1980, turned professional with Gerolsteiner in 2002 and remained with them until the end of 2008 (older brother Christian, once a professional rider himself, joined the team's management in 2006). In 2009 he followed general manager Christian Henn to Milram, staying there for two seasons until he received an invite to join the new Leopard Trek in 2011. However, as Leopard Trek was based around climbers Andy and Frank Schleck and RadioShack had climbers of its own, Wegmann was judged surplus to requirements when the teams merged at the end of the year and was not one of the riders who made the jump; later being picked up by Garmin-Barracuda. He remained with the team when it became Garmin-Sharp for 2013 and, early in the season of that year, took 12th place at the Amstel Gold Race.

A climber of considerable repute, Wegmann does better in races that favour the grimpeurs. He won the King of the Mountains at the 2004 Giro d'Italia, the 2005 GP San Francisco with its two 18% climbs and the GP Miguel Indurain in 2006 and 2008. He won the National Championships in 2007, 2008 and 2012.


Considering their geographic position between cycling-mad Italy and Eastern Europe - who, while not quite as passionate as the tifosi, do enjoy a bike race - the Greeks are strangely under-represented in the annals of cycling history. One name that does show up is that of Zafeiris Volikakis, who was born in Volos on this day in 1990. While he has been successful primarily in track competitions at home, he also won a silver medal in the Team Sprint at the 2006 European Junior Championships and a bronze at the Worlds the same year, also placing 17th in the Keirin at the 2010 Worlds (his team were 13th in the Sprint) and third for the Keirin at the Moscou track meet in 2011 (his older brother Christos was first).

Belgian cyclo cross rider Dieter Vanthourenhout was born in Brugge on this day in 1985 and won the National Debutants Championship in 2001, then the Juniors a year later. In 2006, he was third at the Under-23 Nationals and has added podium finishes in several races since.

Other cyclists born on this day: Rita Razmaitė (Lithuania, 1967); William Morton (Canada, 1880); Hailu Fana (Ethiopia, 1967); Eduardo Cuevas (Chile, 1951); Eduardo Trillini (Argentina, 1958); Ilias Kelesidis (Greece, 1953, died 2007); Adrian Timmis (Great Britain, 1964 ); Noël de la Cruz (Cuba, 1968); Zsigmond Sarkadi Nagy (Hungary, 1955); Antón Villatoro (Guatemala, 1970); Émile Demangel (France, 1882).

Daily Cycling Facts 19.06.2014

Michele Gordini

On this day in 1927, 142 riders set out from Paris to begin the first stage of the Tour de France. Ahead of them were 24 stages and 5,340km, and only 39 of those riders would reach Paris almost a month later. One of them was Nicolas Frantz, who won for the first time (despite his Alcyon team suffering such a high number of punctures in the first stage that it looked suspiciously like sabotage) after he launched a series of successful attacks in the mountains. He won the first mountain stage, Stage 11 from Bayonne-Luchon, but only through the misfortune of another: a cheeky individual rider named Michele Gordini (who had ridden at various times in the preceding years for Bianchi, Ganna and Atala) managed to secretly escape from the peloton and, by time they noticed he'd gone, gain a 45' advantage which put him into the lead. He'd almost certainly have won the stage had he not have suffered mechanical problems; the pack caught him and Frantz won (it's also possible he wouldn't have won overall had favourite Lucien Buysse been there, but Buysse's Automoto team was experiencing financial difficulties and by the time he made it back onto the start line in 1929 his best years were over).

Race organisers decided that the 1926 edition had been boring because 10 of the 17 stages had finished in bunch sprints, so in 1927 sixteen flat stages (all but three of the total) were run as "team start" stages in which teams set off at fifteen-minute intervals and competed against the clock - a format not dissimilar to the team time trials of today (in 1926, not one single stage had been won by a Frenchman - this new concept may also have been designed to favour them). It didn't work especially well so, after giving it another go in 1928, the race returned to normal.

The race wasn't a total loss for Gordini as L'Auto awarded him the meilleur grimpeur prize, the precursor to the King of the Mountains, largely on account of his secret solo break on Stage 11.

Moser (nearest the camera) and Roy Schuiten,
Trofeo Baracchi 1972

Francesco Moser
Born in Palù di Giovo, Trentino on this day in 1951, Francesco Moser earner his nickname - The Sheriff - on account of the way he kept control of the peloton, the apparently effortless way he kept on turning the cranks for mile after mile intimidating his opponents all the way to the mountains where, like all big and muscular riders, his physique held him back and the wiry little grimpeurs left him standing. In a sprint, he was an enormously powerful opponent; which led to his three National and one World Champion titles in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Nevertheless, he was capable of winning enough flat Grand Tour stages to take overall Points competitions, as was the case at the Giro d'Italia in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1982 and he won the prologue and Stage 7 at the 1977 Tour de France, which kept him in the maillot jaune for six days. In 1971 he won the Baby Giro outright and in 1984 the General Classification at the professional Giro, though it's widely suspected that organisers intentionally planned out a much flatter route to favour him over the Frenchman Laurent Fignon. That wasn't the only controversy that year: the stage up the Passo dello Stelvio, where Fignon would certainly have beaten Moser was cancelled, the official reason being snow. However, fans took photographs at the top to prove that the roads were clear and the route perfectly ridable. On the Selva di Val Gardena Fignon got away in a break that was both large and successful enough to have been allocated a support vehicle of its own, but no vehicle was made available - the same thing happened at a later point when Fignon had a mechanical problem. Thirdly, while the tifosi have long been known for their willingness to give preferred riders a handy push uphill, many found the organisers' tendency to be looking the other way that year to be suspicious. Before long, people were so suspicious that they even claimed the TV helicopters were being deliberately positioned to provide Moser with a tailwind. (Felice Gimondi, meanwhile, says that none of the above is true and that Fignon lost the Giro due to three errors: setting too high a pace on Block Haus and exhausting himself on Stage 5, beginning his sprint from 800m the next day and thus putting himself into the convenient position of lead-out man for Moser, then trying to follow Roberto Visentini up a climb to the end of Stage 13 in too high a gear. "These," Gimondi insisted, "are not errors of a Giro champion, they are errors of a youth.")

Moser was the man who finally laid to rest the old stereotype that Italians couldn't perform well in the Northen Classics (though a look at the results over the years proves that, like most stereotypes based on nationality, it never was true) and said that Paris-Roubaix was his favourite race - after coming second in 1974 and 1976, he became the second man in history to win three consecutive editions between 1978 and 1980. In addition, he won the Giro di Lombardia in 1975 and 1978 and Milan-San Remo in 1984; making him the joint fifth most successful Monuments rider of all time. He also won Paris-Tours in 1974, Züri-Metzgete and the Flèche Wallonne in 1977 and Gent-Wevelgem in 1979.

Moser sets a new Hour Record, 23.01.1984

His nephew Leonardo was a professional from 2005 to 2009 and his son Ignazio got his first professional contract in 2012 with Trevigiani Dynamon Bottoli, too) and he came from a cycling family: his three older brothers were also professional riders (Aldo between 1954 and 1974, Enzo between 1962 and 1967 and Diego between 1970 and 1973, which shaped his determination and competitiveness during childhood, also his willingness to experiment with doping in adulthood - and Moser, with the help of a certain Dr. Francesco Conconi who would later achieve worldwide notoriety, took doping to a whole new level. Dr. Conconi, head of the University of Ferrara's Biomedical Institute, was charged with the development of new anti-doping measures but spent much of his time devising ways in which new drugs and methods could be used to get around the rules and was probably the first man to introduce cycling to EPO. He wasn't the first to introduce blood transfusions - Gastone Nencini is the first cyclist we know to have used the technique because he horrified the Tour de France doctor Pierre Dumas with a self-administered transfusion in his hotel room at the race in 1960, but it had been used by Scandinavian runners since the 1930s and as such had probably been used by cyclists too - but he was the first to apply scientific principles aimed at making the technique as effective as possible, and he used to to "prepare" Moser for his attempt on the Hour Record in 1984. It worked: more than eleven years after Eddy Merckx had been the first man to crack 49km (49.431km), on the 19th of January in 1984 Moser set the bar at 50.808km. Four days later, he upped it to 51.151km. While "preparation" undoubtedly gave Moser an unfair advantage over riders who didn't cheat in their own attempts (indeed, it's commonly joked that "he didn't even sweat" when setting the record), it should be remembered that blood transfusion carried out in order to increase athletic performance was not at that time banned under the rules of competition, and because Conconi applied medical principles in addition to scientific ones he made it possible for the technique to be administered much more safely than the rather haphazards used by Nencini and others, possibly saving lives in the process. His work with Moser also contributed towards the development of his Conconi Test, a procedure which measures maximum aerobic and anaerobic threshold heart rates at different loads and allows training to be shaped to an individual athlete far more effectively. Now known more commonly as the ramp test, it remains in widespread use.

On the 15th of January in 1994, Moser, aged 43, set a new Veteran's Hour Record at 51.840km - 0.689m greater than his 1984 record.

Bert Grabsch 2009

Bert Grabsch
Bert Grabsch, born in Wittenberg on this day in 1975, first turned professional with Agro-Adler Brandenburg in 1997 and won silver at the German National Time Trial Championships. Despite that early TT success, he spent the next ten seasons concentrating on mass-start races (including a Giro, three Vueltas and three Tours), enjoying some notable success in criteriums and one-day races but never coming within the top 80 overall at the Grand Tours and little better at the other multi-day events.

Why that should be is a bit of a mystery - the only stages he ever did at all well in were time trial stages, yet despite his obvious potential to bring glory to the teams he represented until 2007, they kept using him as a domestic. He had signed to T-Mobile for the season and, when he won the Stage 8 TT at the Vuelta, his talent was finally noticed and the team's directeur sportifs gave him opportunity to develop it - that same year, he won the National TT Championships. The next year, he won the Nationals and the World Championship, then a third Nationals in 2009 and a fourth in 2011. He continued with his domestique duties for the team - which had transmogrified into HTC-Highroad until the end of 2011, when the team shut down due to problems finding new sponsors and, strangely, now that he was being allowed to win the races he was good at his performance right across the board improved too. As a result, he experienced little difficulty in finding a place with Omega Pharma-QuickStep for 2012 and, that year, he was second in the National Time Trial Championships.

Grabsch called time on his career at the close of 2013, his 15th professional year. His older brother Ralf was a professional between 1996 and 2008.


Arthur Markham

Arthur Markham, with what probably wasn't a very
typical bike even in 1868

Arthur Markham, born in either October, November or December 1845 in St. Marylebone, London, won Britain's first organised bike race which took place on the 1st of June 1868 at the Welsh Harp Reservoir in North West London (correctly the Brent Reservoir), one day after the world's first bike race (or at least, the first we really know anything about; click the link for more information) had been held in the Parc St. Cloud, Paris. He was awarded a silver cup supplied by the landlord of the Old Welsh Harp Hotel that gave the reservoir its name and used his prize money to travel by coach to Bath four weeks later, where he won another race (and saved a man from drowning). Coincidentally, the winner of the race at Parc St. Cloud, James Moore, is believed to be buried next to the reservoir.

Markham owned a bike shop in Station Approach, Shepherd's Bush and another at 345 Edgeware Road, both in London, and he listed his occupation as "engineer" on the 1881 Census. His sister Helen was employed at the shops, she gave her occupation as "bicycle maker." He died on this day in 1917.

The race was the beginning of a long association between cycling and the park surrounding the reservoir, which as a result became home to one of Britain's first cycle race tracks. Today, it's overgrown and almost forgotten, though it can just be made out from the air at the northern end of the reservoir, and cycling is banned almost everywhere within the park.

Jacques Dupont, born on this day in 1928, won the 1955 Paris-Tours at a reported average speed of 43.666kph (considering that the race was 253km long and he did it on a bike much heavier than the ones used in professional cycling today, it begins to look rather as though he either a; went at phenomenal speeds on some sections, b; had - as his speed suggests - made a deal with the devil or c; cheated. Note that Tom Boonen's average speed over the course of the 257.5km 2012 Paris-Roubaix was 43.476kph). Whatever the truth may be, he won Henri Desgrange's Ruban Jaune (yellow for precisely the same reason as the maillot jaune) awarded to the rider who achieved the fastest average speed during a one-day race of 200km or more. At the London Olympics of 1948, Dupont won a gold medal for the 1000m Time Trial and a bronze for the Team Road Race.

Laura Bissell, born in Hitchen, UK on this day in 1983, won four bronze medals in the Under-16 categories at the National Track Championships in 1999 and gold for the National 10-Mile Time Trial Championship a year later. She represented her country numerous times in international competition but rarely enjyed the success that she did in domestic racing. Laura was the older sister of Peter Bissell, a promising road and track rider who died aged 21 after suffering a fit.


Sacha Modolo, born on this day in 1987, finished the 2010 Milan-San Rem in fourth place behind Óscar Freire, Tom Boonen and Alessandro Petacchi and ahead of (among others) Daniele Bennati, Thor Hushovd and Philippe Gilbert. He won Stage 6 at the Tour of Turkey in 2012, biting his thumb as he crossed the line in the traditional gesture that dedicates a stage win to a pregnant wife or girlfriend.

Other cyclists born on this day: Nathalie Schneitter (Switzerland, 1986); Arthur Candy (New Zealand, 1934); Ernesto Contreras (Argentina, 1937); Paul Slane (Ireland, 1970); Harry Passmore (South Africa, 1884, died 1955); Lưu Quan (South Vietnam, 1925); Ng Joo Pong (Malaysia, 1946).

Daily Cycling Facts 18.06.2014

Nicole Brändli-Sedoun

Born on this day in 1979, Nicole Brändli (as she's more commonly known) won the Giro Donne in 2001, 2003 and 2005 (as well as coming second in 2006 and 2007 and third in 2008) - which makes her Switzerland's most successful Grand Tour rider after Tony Rominger, who won three editions of the Vuelta a Espana and one Giro d'Italia.

Brändli first came to note when she won the silver medal in the Individual Time Trial at the Junior National Championships in 1996, then in 1997 she won silver for the Junior Road Race. In 1999, having gained her first professional contract courtesy of the Italian Acca Due O team, she was third at the Under-23 European Road Race Championship and second at both the European U-23 Time Trial Championship and the Elite National Road Race. The following year she became National Time Trial Champion at Elite level and represented her country at the Olympics, though she won no medals there, and in 2001 she won the Trofeo Alfredo Binda, the Giro della Toscana, the Elite National Road Race Championship and became European U-23 Time Trial Champion in addition to winning her first Giro Donne.

2002 was another good year with overall victory at the Vuelta Castilla y Leon, a stage win at the Tour de France Feminine and a second National Road Race title - a third came in 2003, along with the Gracia Orlova and her second Giro Donne. She won another Gracia Orlova and the GP Carnevale d'Europa the next year, then her third Giro Donne in 2005, then the GP Ouest France and a second Giro della Toscana in 2006. 2007's victories were limited to stage wins at the Giro Donne (Stage 5) and Trophée d'Or Féminin (Stage 2). In 2008 she once again rode at the Olympics, coming 18th in the Road Race, also winning the Giro del Lago Maggiore-GP Knorr , GP Brissago and the Leo Wirth Strassenrennen, then called it a day after achieving just one victory (the GP Raiffeisen) in 2009.


André Leducq

André Leducq

André Leducq, who died on this day in 1980, amassed considerable success during his youth - he came 3rd in the National Amateur Championships when he was just 19 and won the event the following year - which set him on a path that would lead to him becoming one of the most popular riders in cycling history, both at home and in England.

Leducq's Tour de France record of 25 stage wins held for a quarter of a century until it was finally broken by Eddy Merckx. He rode his first Tour in 1927 and won Stages 6, 23 and 24, coming 4th overall, then came 2nd in 1928 after winning Stages 2, 10, 11 and 16, having already won Paris-Roubaix that year. In 1929, he won Stages 2, 11, 17, 18 and 21 and wore the yellow jersey for one day (this being the famous incident when he, Victor Fontan and Nicolas Frantz had the same time following eventual winner Maurice Dewaele's loss of the race leadership due to a series of punctures, thus becoming the only time that three riders all wore yellow - an event that is extremely unlikely to happen again, since times can now be measured to thousandths of a second if need be) but this time dropped to 11th overall.

His second Tour victory came the following year when he took Stages 5 and 16 and wore the yellow jersey for 13 days, making him the first rider to win a Tour ridden by National rather than trade teams. In 1931, he won Stage 20 and was 10th overall but won the General Classification at Paris-Tours, then won a second Tour in 1932 along with Stages 3, 11, 13, 15, 20 and 21, spending 19 days in yellow. That was the last of his top 5 finishes - in 1933 he was 31st overall with wins for Stages 13 and 14, then he was 17th the next year when he won the Stage 18b time trial and in 1938 he shared victory for Stage 21 with Antonin Magne and came 30th overall. (For much more on Leducq, why he was popular with the English and his incredible good fortune whilst facing almost certain execution at the hands of the Nazis, click here.)

Geoff Wiles

Geoff Wiles, born in Strood, Kent on this day in 1944, was the son of cycling parents who would take him and his sister on long distance rides in sidecars fitted to their bikes. Before too long, the bug bit and he joined the Youth Hostels Association in order to meet other young cyclists. When he was fifteen he entered his first 10-mile time trial, riding a heavy and antiquated fixed gear bike - his time, 26'47", is still a respectable time for an amateur aboard any bike today. A few years later on, when he'd left school and was working at an oil refinery on Kent's Isle of Sheppey, he made friends with a colleague who rode with the Medway Road Club. He joined up and at the age of 18 came third in his first race, then a year later won the Vectis three-day on the Isle of Wight.

Aged 22, Wiles was selected to compete with the South of England team in the 1966 Tour of Britain, at that time known as the Milk Race, and he won Stage 6. The next year, he took part in the famous Peace Race through East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia with a team sponsored by the Clive Stuart bike maker, then moved on to the Holdsworth-Campagnolo team in 1971 and won the National Madison Championship with Dave Nie. Geoff won numerous criteriums in the following years before becoming National Roasd Race Champion in 1976.

In 1977, Holdsworth went to the Vuelta a Espana, the Ronde van Vlaanderen, the Amstel Gold Race and Paris-Roubaix. They were, like almost all British riders of those times with the exception of Tom Simpson, hopelessly outclassed by the French and Belgian riders but appear to enjoyed the experience. At Paris-Roubaix they finished well behind the leaders and main field, arriving at the velodrome to find that as the first twenty riders had already got there the gates had been closed and nobody else was allowed in. Having ridden it for themselves, they knew that the legendary Hell of the North is in an entirely different category to all other racers and that completing the parcours is every bit as impressive as winning; they were, therefore, determined to get to the very end. "So we bunked over the wall and did our lap," Geoff said. "We could then say we'd completed the course, even though we were not included on the official list of finishers."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s when BMX first began to appear in Britain, many cyclists hated it with a passion and thought that if they became popular they'd kill off "proper" cycling for good. Wiles was a far wiser man; he realised that any kind of cycling should be encouraged and also knew that BMX would attract youngsters who might otherwise never have developed an interest in cycling at all, became a very vocal advocate for the new sport, wrote books and magazine articles and was perhaps the person who did most to popularise it in Britain. In 2012, when Wiles was 67, he took part in the Alf Buttler Peace Race Tribute Ride during which he and Alf's son Alan retraced the 2,414km and thirteen stages taken by the inaugural 1955 race.


Freddy Excelino González Martínez, more commonly known as Fredy González, won the King of the Mountains at the Giro d'Italia in 2001 and 2003. He was born in La Ceja, Colombia on this day in 1975.

Other cyclists born on this day: Anthony Biddle (Australia, 1975); László Orczán (Hungary, 1912, died 1992); Arnolds Ūdris (Latvia, 1968); Georgius Damen (Netherlands, 1887, died 1954); Stephen Farrell (Great Britain, 1965); Teun Mulder (Netherlands, 1981); Rudolf Rasmussen (Denmark, 1918, died 1993 ); Vasily Fedin (USSR, 1926, died 2005); Lau Veldt (Netherlands, 1953); Hansrüdi Märki (Switzerland, 1960); Christian Andersen (Denmark, 1967); Teófilo Toda (Peru, 1935); Maxwell Cheeseman (Trinidad and Tobago, 1962); Fernando Louro (Brazil, 1962); Margaret Bean (Guam, 1953).

Daily Cycling Facts 17.06.2014

Mangled bikes at the 1928 Tour

On this day in 1928, the Tour de France set off on the 207km Stage 1 route from Paris to Caen - the earliest date the race has ever started. 162 riders were at the start line that morning, more than at any previous edition. It covered 5,476km around the perimeter of the country and there were 22 stages: five mountain stages, two flat stages and all the rest were team time trials in which the teams set off at intervals, the man with the fastest to the finish line being declared the winner.

It was a year of firsts: the first Australian team (headed by the legendary Hubert Opperman, who finished in 18th place) and the first time regional teams took part (there were eight trade teams, nine regional teams and the independent riders); as well as of firsts-and-lasts: a new rule was introduced that allowed teams to replace exhausted riders with fresh ones (the idea was to give weaker teams a better chance, but stronger and richer teams could introduce better riders so it in fact favoured them), a single team - Alcyon - took all three steps on the podium at the end of the race and Nicolas Frantz, who won for a second time despite near disaster (see below), became the only man to wear the maillot jaune throughout the entire race (in 1924 and 1935, the race leader had won the maillot jaune in Stage 1 and kept it to the end, but when Frantz won he wore it right from the start line. Maurice Garin would have done the same in 1904, but the maillot jaune hadn't yet been introduced into the race).

Second place André Leducq drinks to Nicolas Frantz, who
beat him by 50'07".

Frantz's race could very easily have ended in Stage 19 when his frame snapped as he rode over a level crossing. Alcyon were afraid of the bad publicity and ordered him to get a new machine from an Alcyon shop, but Frantz and the manager said that doing so would take too long and potentially lose the race. Exactly what happened next is not known - some people say that, while the manager and Alcyon representatives argued, Frantz saw a woman in the crowd with a bike and asked if he could borrow it while others say they went to the nearest bike shop and bought the only bike in stock - either way, he ended up riding  100km on a women's bike that was much too small for him and lost 28 minutes. Fortunately, he'd had an advantage of 75 minutes when the accident happened and so the maillot jaune remained his.

L'Auto awarded an unofficial meilleur grimpeur to Victor Fontan, the beginnings of the King of the Mountains competition that became an integral part of the Tour from 1933 onwards. There was also a  Trofee l'Equipe for trade and regional teams, different to the Teams classification that would be introduced in 1930, won by Alcyon and the Champagne regional riders.

Eddy Merckx

Merck in 1974

There are two main periods in cycling's time line - the years before 1968, when cyclists dreamed of being called the best to have ever lived and the years that came after 1974 when they wanted to be compared to The Cannibal, the man now officially known as Edouard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx, who was born on this day in 1945.

Lance Armstrong may have topped Merckx's five Tour de France victories with his own seven (he was later stripped of all of them when USADA found him guilty of doping as part of what many call the biggest fraud in the history of sport), but Armstrong concentrated almost entirely on the Tour and won little else. Merckx, in comparison, also won five Giri d'Italia and a Vuelta a Espana - eleven Grand Tours, the most ever won by an individual rider. What's more, Armstrong never achieved a victory that even compared to Merckx's greatest triumphs: at the Giro in 1968 and then again at the Tour in 1969 - when he wanted to teach his rivals a lesson after he'd been thrown out of that year's Giro for failing a drugs test in highly dubious circumstances (according to legend, the doctor who performed the test told Merckx "I know you're innocent, but the test is positive." A story appeared some time later claiming that the doctor, far from being a decent man who would have upheld  Merckx's honour had he have been able to do so, had taken a sizable bribe from Felice Gimondi, who went on to win the race) - he won the General Classification, the Points competition and the King of the Mountains, something that had never been done before and has not been repeated. Cycling's ultimate prize - victory in all three Grand Tours in a single season - was beyond even him (and is therefore considered impossible by many), but he won the Triple Crown (Giro, Tour, World Championships) in 1974, the first man and still one of only two to do so.  He won two Grand Tours in a single year three times with the Tour and Giro in 1970 and 1972 and the Giro and the Vuelta in 1973, a record shared with Bernard Hinault's Tour and Vuelta in 1978 and Tour and Giro in 1982 and 1985, and he holds the record for the most stage wins at the Tour (34) and highest total number of days in the maillot jaune (96). He shares the record for the most stages won in a single Tour (8) with Charles Pélissier, who did it in 1930, and Freddy Maertens who did it in 1976 - however, Merckx did it twice, in 1970 and again in 1974.

For a few years in the early 1970s,
Merckx was literally unstoppable. No
other rider could even get close.

His domination of the other races was no less complete: he won four Tours of Sardinia, three Paris-Nice, two Rondes van België, and one Critérium du Dauphiné, Tour de Suisse, Midi Libre and Tour de Romandie. His 28 Classics victories are a record, as are his seven wins in one Classic alone (Milan-San Remo). He also holds the record for the most Liège-Bastogne-Liège wins (3). All in all, Merckx won 525 races over his fourteen years as a professional rider and many more whilst a junior, then as an amateur. In 1971, he won 45% of the races he entered.

Merckx, like Louis Trousellier, is the complete antithesis to the "poor boy from a broken home" stereotype. His middle-class parents owned a prosperous grocery shop in one of the more upmarket  towns surrounding Brussels and he says that neither he nor his brother and sister went without anything he needed during childhood. Nor does he claim that the will to become a better man than an abusive father is what drove him to success; rather, he thanks his father for instilling him with the hard work ethic that he credits as the reason for his achievements. L'Equipe made much of this in 2000 when they said "Eddy Merckx was a spoiled child of the post-war generation. Very spoiled, in fact. To see that, you have only to look at photos of his youth: Eddy dressed as a page boy, as an injured soldier (his sister played the role of nurse), as a cowboy, the Merckx family on winter sports holidays, Eddy and his father's Plymouth car. So many memories of a happy childhood far, very far, from those of a van Looy or a Coppi. He was often reproached for it, but was it his fault if God gave him so much?" Of course, the French are angry that no French rider has won a Tour since Hinault in 1985 and of course they're angry that Belgians have dominated "France's sport" for more than a century; but to make such a thinly-veiled accusation of spoiled arrogance 23 years after his final victory is perhaps taking things a little far. In fact, the similarities between Merckx and the great French hero Hinault are marked: both men saw racing in a curiously machine-like, black-and-white way, believing - perhaps correctly - that if one did not intend to win every race one entered, one may as well not enter races. Neither man was arrogant; if you really are the best in the world at what you do, saying so is a statement of fact rather than an arrogant boast.

18th of May 1978 - Merckx announces
his immediate retirement

He fell in love with cycling while he was still small and hero-worshipped Stan Ockers who twice won the Points competition at the Tour and died in an accident at the Antwerp track when Merckx was 11, and his parents bought him a second-hand racing bike when he was eight. On the 16th of July in 1961, not long after his 16th birthday, he entered his first race at Laeken (that very same day, 315km away, Jacques Anquetil won his second Tour); on the 1st of October in the same year, he won his first. It's tempting to imagine that across Europe cycling's establishment stopped what they were doing and looked fearfully at the sky, sensing that something of momentous importance had just started to happen; but in reality neither seemed an important event as far as the world was concerned, few people other than local fans could ever claim to have been there to see it and once the race was over only few more people knew the name Merckx than before. Ten years later, he was the most famous athlete in the world - even people with no interest, even people in America and other nations traditionally uninterested in cycling, knew The Cannibal. His fame was worldwide, surpassing that even of today's top soccer players and boxers, acclaim far and away beyond that enjoyed by any cyclist before or since outside France and Belgium.

The rest is legend.

Adri van de Poel

Adri van der Poel

Born in Bergen Op Zoom, Netherlands on this day in 1959, Adri van de Poel was a professional between 1981 and 2000; he began his career with the Belgian DAF Trucks-Cote d'Or-Gazelle and ended it with Rabobank. He announced the beginning of his professional career in fine style by winning Stage 3 and second place overall at Paris-Nice, Stage 1 at the Critérium du Dauphiné and a host of criterium victories during that first year, also winning a bronze medal at the National Championships. In 1982 he won more criteriums and entered his first Tour de France; second place on Stage 21, ninth place on Stage 18 and top 20 on four other stages races being very good results for a rider making his Tour debut, even if he was 102nd overall at the end.

In 1983, van der Poel was caught out by an anti-doping test that revealed strychnine in his system. Though extremely toxic, strychnine in small doses acts as a stimulant and was commonly used as such in the early days of cycling - notably by riders associated with the notorious manager/soigneur Choppy Warburton; due to its toxicity it's also used in pest control so, when he claimed that he must have unwittingly consumed the offending substance in the pigeon pie served by his father-in-law the previous Sunday and the Dutch Federation could find no reason to dispute the claim, he escaped sanction. Thirty years later, his explanation still holds water, so it's probably safe to assume he was telling the truth. He also finished another Tour de France that year and this time came in the top ten on nine stages, taking 37th place overall.

Left to right Adrie van der Poel, Joop Zoetemelk, Phil Anderson, Jan Raas

At the end of the 1983 season he was third in the Giro di Lombardia and in 1984 he finished Stage 4 at the Tour in third before abandoning after Stage 13. In 1985 he won Scheldeprijs and Paris-Brussels, in 1986 the Ronde van Vlaanderen and third place at Paris-Roubaix; then his first Tour stage came a year later when he was the fastest man to complete Stage 9's 260km between Orléans and Renazé, the year also brought him the National Road Race Championship. In 1988, he won Liège-Bastogne-Liège and another stage at the Tour, Stage 16 from Luz Ardiden to Pau, but it wasn't the most impressive victory of all time as it was only 38km long (Stage 17 - often termed Stage 16b - took place on the same day and was 198km). In 1990 he won the Amstel Gold Race; but from then onwards, in spite of the great promise he'd once shown, he ceased to be a contender for respectable Tour results and never won another stage.

Van der Poel was a very talented road cyclist by anyone's standards, but he was much better at cyclo cross and won the National Championship in 1987, 1989-1992, 1995 and 1999 and the World Championship in 1996, along with many victories in smaller events. That these are concentrated in the second half of his career suggests a likely reason that he never lived up to that early road promise - he just decided that he preferred 'cross. He is married to Raymond Poulidor's daughter.

Steve Peat

Steve Peat, the most successful downhill mountain biker
in the history of the sport

Born in Chapeltown, South Yorkshire on this day in 1974, Steve Peat started his professional mountain career in a relatively undistinguished manner with the British Saracen team, enjoying little success before moving on to Team MBUK - an organisation sponsored by the Mountain Biking UK magazine that did a great deal to popularise all forms on the sport in Britain from 1988 onwards. In 1997, he joined the GT team and began earning podium places in Europe and the USA, then in 1998 he won the Snoqualmie round of the UCI Downhill MTB Word Cup. 1999 saw him win the National Championhips for the first time, and in 2000 he took it again. 2001 brought two rounds of the World Cup, 2002 the overall World Cup in 2002 and a third National title. British fans began to hope they had a future world champion.

In 2003 Peaty (as he was now universally known, original nickname "Sheffield Steel" having been found not to the liking of fans) became National Champion for the fourth time, taking back the title from Rob Warner, and received an invite to return to a British team in the form of Orange, sponored by the Yorkshire bike manufacturer of the same name. This offered two advantages - a team organised specifically with the the intention of pushing him towards victory at the World Championships and secondly the Orange Patriot, at that time perhaps the most effective downhill bike in the world. Aboard one during his two years with the team, Peat won two rounds of the World Cup and the series overall, the European Championships and then in 2005 a fifth British title and another two World Cup rounds (including the British round at Fort William, to enormous joy from home fans).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why downhill MTBs look
as beefy as they do. Peaty at Fort William

The rigours and extreme speeds involved in downhill racing have driven innovation among the bike manufacturers ever since Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher and their Californian hippy friends invented the sport, and it's probably a safe bet to say that the incredible long-travel suspension bikes built by Santa Cruz had as much to do with Peat's decision to leave his British team and sign up to them for 2006 as the pay cheques on offer - he's ridden for them every since. That year, he won the World Cup again and the the Lisboa Downtown, a downhill race that takes place on the cobbled streets and steps of Lisbon in Portugal and which leaves anybody who has ever filled out a risk assessment form full of admiration for the organisers. He won it again in 2007, then again in 2008 when he also took back the National Championship. Finally, in Setember 2009, he won the title he'd chased for so long - the World Championships. Four months previously, when he beat Gee Atherton to win Round 3 of the World Cup, he  had become officially the most successful downhill mountain biker the world has ever seen.

Sven Nys

Sven Nys

There must be something special about the 17th of June - not only were the world's most successful road racer (Merckx) and downhill mountain biker (Peat) born on this day, the world's most successful cyclo cross rider was too: Sven Nys came into the world in Bonheiden, near Antwerp, on this day in 1976.

Nys began competing in BMX when he was eight years old and won eight National titles. In most countries, riders in their teens tend to switch from BMX to mountain biking or road racing, but in Belgium it's just as likely to be cyclo cross - as was the case with Nys, and he was immediately successful in that discipline too with a win at the Brabant Provincial Junior Championship and second place at the National Junior Champs in 1994. The next year, he won the Junior Nationals, then moved into the Amateurs category for 1996 and won again at Brabant. 1997 was his breakthrough year with another victory at Brabant and numerous other races, which earned him a place with Rabobank for 1998.

At Middelkerke in 2007

Rabobank would be his home for the next eleven seasons and, with them, he won the Under-23 World Championship in 1998 with eleven other victories; the Superprestige and nineteen other victories in 1999; a second Superprestige, the World Cup, the National Championship and nine other victories in 2000; fourteen races in 2001; another Superprestige, a second World Cup and eleven other races in 2002; a fourth Superprestige, a second National Championship and thirteen other races in 2003; 21 races (including a derny race) in 2004; a third National Championship, the World Championship, Superprestige, the GVA Trofee (and thus became the first rider to achieve cyclo cross' Gran Slam) and twenty-seven races (including the National Cross-Country MTB Championship) in 2005;  Superprestige, the GVA Trofee and twenty-seven races  in 2006 and Superprestige, the GVA Trofee and thirty other races (including another National XC MTB title) in 2007. Halfway through 2008 he changed to Landbouwkrediet team and won the National CX Championship, Superprestige, the GVA Trofee and fifteen other races (including another derny race) that year; then the National Championship and fifteen other races in 2009; the National Championship, GVA Trofee and sixteen other races in 2010; Superprestige and thirteen other races in 2011 and, to date, the National Championship, Superprestige and four other races in 2012 as the 2011/2012 season drew to a close.

When Nys won his second 'cross World Championships in 2013, he declared his career to be "complete" and sparked rumours that he might be considering retirement. However, he is still racing today and has added another National Championship and more overall victories in the Superprestige and BBank Trophy since.


Henri Lemoine, who was born in Massy, France on this day in 1909, turned professional in 1930 and retired in 1957 after 28 seasons - one of the longest careers in cycling. For a while, he worked with Charles Mochet, one of the first manuacturers of recumbent bikes, and helped Mochet in his efforts to popularise them

Other cyclists born on this day: Jan Maas (Netherlands, 1900, died 1977); Henry Ohayon (born Morocco 1934, competed for Israel); Olga Sacasa (Nicaragua, 1961); Donny Robinson (USA, 1983); Jim Fisher (Canada, 1975); Tracey Watson-Gaudry (Australia, 1969); Jan Veselý (Czechoslovakia, 1923, died 2003); Wendell Rollins (USA, 1917, died 1990); Uwe Preißler (East Germany, 1967); Lyudmila Gorozhanskaya (Belarus, 1970); Jean-Louis Baugnies (Belgium, 1957); Peter Hric (Slovakia, 1965); Urho Sirén (Finland, 1932).