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 14.04.2014

Paris-Roubaix winner (1985 and 1991)
later became directeur sportif at FDJ
(image credit: Julius Kusuma CC BY-SA 3.0) 

Paris-Roubaix was held on this day in 1985, 1991, 1996 and 2002. Curiously, 1985 and 1991 were won by Marc Madiot and 1996 and 2002 by Johan Museeuw. Francesco Moser was a favourite in 1985 and, had he won, would have been the second man to achieve four wins (the first - and to date, only - being Roger De Vlaeminck in 1977) as well as having become the second man to win in three consecutive years as he had been in 1980; but he crashed in a pothole among the cobbles, his support crew taking so long to reach him that he lost all hopes of victory. Madiot then joined an eight-man break some 15km from the finish before out-sprinting them, entering the velodrome alone to win by 1'57". In 1991, he won by 1'07".

After the 1985 race, Dutchman Theo de Rooij spoke to reporters. "It's bollocks, this race," he told them. "You're working like an animal, you don't have time to piss, you wet your pants. You're riding in mud like this, you're slipping ... it’s a pile of shit!" One of the reporters asked rhetorically if he would be entering again. De Rooij looked at him for a moment, then replied: "Sure. It's the most most beautiful race in the world." That year, the 1.9km Vertain to Saint-Martin-sur-Écaillon cobbles were used for the first time.

Johan Museeuw
(public domain image)

1996, the year Museeuw won the first of his three victories, saw the first use of the 2.5km Quérénaing to Maing cobbled section, which has been a feature of every Paris-Roubaix since. It was also the first year that the newly-laid Espace Charles Crupelandt - a 300m length of cobbles leading to the velodrome and named after the 1914 winner, who would recieve an unfair lifetime ban and die blind with both legs amputated - was used, having been created to commemorate the centenary of the race. The cobbles are interspersed with inscribed stones detailing all the winner of the first hundred years, which had to the section becoming known locally as the Chemin des Géants, the Road of Giants.


2002 brought Museeuw's third and final victory (he's won in 2000, too). The weather that year was band with heavy rain and strong wind, but Museeuw found reserves of strength when his opponents had been ground down; attacking the peloton with 40km still to go and crossing the finish line with an advantage of more than three minutes. For the first time that year, an extra 0.5km was added to the Templeuve - Le Moulin de Vertain cobbles and would become known as Templeuve - Le Moulin de Vertain Pt. 2, making the section 0.7km in total. The first 0.2km had been in use since 1992, the final 0.5km being discovered completely buried at about the same point. It was dug out by Les Amis de Paris–Roubaix - an organisation fans dedicated to finding new cobbled sections and maintaining them in a usuable state - to mark the one hundredth edition of the race.

Rik van Steenbergen

The Ronde van Vlaanderen has also been held on this date, in 1935 and 1946. The 1935 edition was won by Louis Duerloo who collected a newly-increased prize of 2,500 francs - the total prize fund having been upped to 12,500 francs to reflect the growing popularity of the event which, two years later, would attract half a million spectators.

In 1946, victory went to Rik van Steenbergen who had become the youngest man to ever win this race two years previously. It became apparent early in the race that van Steenbergen was going to win - as soon as the riders set off, it was obvious to all that not only was he on perfect form, he was having the sort of day that all cyclists dream about in which his body worked in perfect unison with his machine. He remembered years later that it had been the best ride of his life: "I could do whatever I liked, ride better than anyone. In the end I was with Briek Schotte and Enkel Thiétard. They were happy just to follow me. We made an agreement. I said that they could stay with me until we got to Kwatrecht. I wouldn't drop them provided they'd do their best to work with me. They were happy with that. They didn't have a choice. Under the bridge at Kwatrecht I just got rid of them."

La Flèche Wallonne has fallen on this date, too - the 47th edition in 1983, the 57th in 1993 and the 63rd in 1999. 1983 brought a second win for The Badger Bernard Hinault, the same year that he won his second Vuelta a Espana. The race began at Charleroi and ended at Huy, as it has done every year since 1998, and covered 248km. In 1993 it ran 206km from Spa to Huy and was won by Maurizio Fondriest who would also win Milan-San Remo and a second World Championship that year. In 1999, it started in Charleroi and ended in Huy for a second year and covered 200km, won by Michele Bartoli who would win three of the five Monuments during his career.

1999 also saw the second edition of La Flèche Wallonne Féminine, held on the same date as the men's race but on a shorter course. The winner was Hanka Kupfernagel, and for the first time the race became part of the UCI Women's Road World Cup.

The UCI

The Union Cycliste Internationale, known (and not necessarily loved) by cyclists worldwide as the UCI, came into being in Paris on this day in 1900, with the intention of creating a new international governing body in opposition of the British-controlled International Cycling Association after a heated row over whether Great Britain should be permitted one team at the World Championships rather than four to represent England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The ICA had existed since 1892 but, with France, Italy, the USA, Switzerland and Belgium all opting for UCI membership, it was quickly superceded. Britain was barred from membership until 1903, by which time the organisation had completely replaced its predecessor.

The UCI controlled cycling as a single entity until 1965 when, pressured by the International Olympic Committee, it split into three branches - the Fédération Internationale Amateur de Cyclisme (FIAC) in Rome,  the Fédération Internationale de Cyclisme Professionnel (FICP) in Luxembourg and the UCI (now based in Geneva) acting as a central authority. As Eastern Bloc cyclists were almost invariably amateur at the time, in effect the FIAC became almost a separate organisation devoted to developing the sport beyond the Iron Curtain and grew to be far larger than the FICP with some 127 federations under its aegis. FIAC riders rarely competed with FICP riders, despite the best Eastern Bloc amateurs being esaily the equal of Western professionals; as would prove to be the case following Perestroika when East European and ex-Soviet cyclists were freed to seek professional contracts and made a massive impact on the European racing scene. In 1992, the two subsidiary bodies were reabsorbed into the UCI as it relocated to Aigle, also in Switzerland, where it is still based.

Emile De Beukelaer, first president
of the UCI

The organisation has had ten presidents during its history, all men. The first, serving between 1900 and 1922,  was Emile De Beukelaer, who had been one of Belgium's most successful cyclists during the 1880s and attended the formation of the UCI as the representative for the Ligue Velocipédique Belge Belgian federation. The second, Frenchman Léon Breton, served from 1922 to 1936, the third was the Swiss Max Burgi between 1936 and 1939.

The position was then taken by Alban Collignon, another Belgian,  between 1939 and 1947, followed by Frenchman Achille Joinard who came close to losing his position in 1955 when he was accused of having personally received five million francs in return for ensuring the World Championships would be held in France rather than in Italy. Joinard was largely responsible for the popularisation of the Peace Race, an event that took place in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War and which he termed "the Tour de France of the East." It was also Joinard who coined the term "la bicyclette est la fille de Bretagne" - "the bicycle is the daughter of Brittany" - to reflect the enormous love the Bretons still hold for the sport.

His replacement was Adriano Rodoni, the first Italian to serve, who held the position between 1958 and 1981 - Rodoni too courted controversy in 1964 when he prevented the Italian cyclist Giovanni Pettenella from having to undergo an anti-doping test ordered by the IOC at the 1964 Olympics. The Spaniard Luis Puig took over from 1981 to 1990 who, unusually, had not been a professional cyclist himself; becoming a cycling coach after an athletic career in baseball, swimming and hockey.

Hein Verbruggen
(image credit: SpeakLouder)

Puig's replacement was Hein Verbruggen, whose background offered a sign of the times - never an athelete, 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 - by then 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 in the case is considered by most to be indication that nothing dishonest had taken place; though McQuaid is on record as stating that in his opinion Verbruggen's decision to accept the payments was a mistake.

Pat McQuaid took over when Verbruggen retired in 2005 and held the position until 2013. He, his father, his two brothers, one cousin, one uncle have all been professional cyclists. His career was not without controversy as he and Sean Kelly broke the boycott on athletes competing in apartheid-era South Africa. After retiring from racing, McQuaid worked as a teacher before becoming director of the Irish National Team from 1983 to 1986 and then president from 1996 to 1999. In between, he served as director of a number of major races including the Tours of China and Langkawi and afterwards served as chairman of the UCI's road racing commission. Compared to that of his predecessor, McQuaid's presidency was relatively free of controversy, though he has come under increasing attack for his attitude towards women's cycling which many athletes (male and female), managers and fans believe he doesn't take as seriously as the sport deserves; especially since the 2011 World Championships when he said that in his opinion, women's racing is insufficiently developed for athletes to deserve a guaranteed minimum wage (as their male counterparts get) nor equal prize money to that on offer in men's races.

Brian Cookson

McQuaid's successor is Brian Cookson, previously the president of British Cycling. Cookson made two points central to his election campaign - clarity and women's cycling. Among his first actions were dropping the UCI's defamation case against the journalist Paul Kimmage, which related to accusations Kimmage had made in L'Equipe and the Sunday Times and which dated back to Verbruggen's presidency, and the appointment of the Union's first female vice-president, Tracey Gaudry in addition to starting a women's cycling committee that is looking at ways to develop and promote the sport. In general, his tenure so far has been met with approval.


Russell Williams, who was born in London on this day in 1961, won the British Junior Road Race Championship in 1978 and added a number of track titles before retiring from competition in 1999. Today, he is better known a a cycling commentator on the British Eurosport television channel.

On this day in 1931, the first edition of the British Highway Code was published and went on sale at one old penny (1d) - equivalent to less than one half of a modern penny (1p). The Code, then as now, outlined the rules of the road for drivers, motorcyclists, those in control of animals and cyclists.

Francesco de Bonis, born in Isola del Liri on this day in 1982, won the GP Folignano and Trofeo Internazionale Bastianelli in 2007, then Stage 4 and the overall Mountains Classification at the Tour de Romandie one year later. In 2010, the UCI announced that it had discovered discrepancies in the tests recorded on his biological passport and requested that his National Federation ban him from competition for two years - the ban was subsequently put into place and began on the 27th of May that year.

British rider Ian Wilkinson, who was born in Barnoldswick on this day in 1979, won the National Under-23 Mountain Bike Championship in 2000 and the National MTB Marathon at Elite level in 2008. He also competes in cyclo cross, track and road racing and has achieved good results in all three disciplines.

Roger Rammer was born in Vienna on this day in 1890 and took part in the Olympics of 1912. He rode in the Team Trial event, where the Austrians came 7th, and in the Individual Time Trial where he was 23rd. Like many cyclists, Rammer disappeared after his time in the spotlight came to an end and it's not known what he did for the rest of his life nor when and where he died.

Martín Emilio Rodríguez

Martín Emilio Rodríguez, born in Medellín on this day in 1942, is one of the most successful Colombian cyclists of all time. Nicknamed Cochise, after his Apache chief hero, he entered the Vuelta a Colombia for the first time in 1961 and won it two years later - as he would again in 1965, 1966 and 1967. He also won the National Championship in 1965 and the 4km Pursuit at the 1962 Central American Games, 1965 Bolivarian Games, the 1966 and 1967 American Games and 1967 PanAmerican Games and set an unofficial Hour Record in 1970 before going on to compete in 1975 Tour de France, which he finished in 27th place.

Rodriguez teamed up with Felice Gimondi during the early 1970s and they won the Baracchi Trophy and  Verona Grand Prix together in 1973. After his Tour de France, he retired from professional racing but won a stage at the 1980 Vuelta a Colombia as an amateur. He maintained close links with cycling in retirement and is  currently employed by the UCI Continental team Gobernacion De Antioquia-Indeportes Antioquia.

Other births: Jeffrey Spencer (USA, 1951); Juraj Miklušica (Czechoslovakia, 1938); Ulises Váldez (Cuba, 1948); Robert Raymond (Belgium, 1930); Pierre Gouws (Zimbabwe, 1960); Geoff Kabush (Canada, 1977); Francesco Zucchetti (Italy, 1902, died 1980); Vilho Oskari Tilkanen (Finland, 1885, died 1945); Steven Maaranen (USA, 1947); Oleksandr Honchenkov (Ukraine, 1970).

Daily Cycling Facts 21.06.2013

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 athelete 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).

Die UCI spricht

That is an order. We WILL be happy; otherwise there will be repercussions.

Armitstead on the issues facing women's cycling

Lizzie Armitstead

In an interview with Cycling News, Olympic silver medalist Lizzie Armitstead has hit out at "sexism and inequality" in cycling. That inequality exists is beyond doubt - it's common knowledge that many women even at the top level receive no salary at all while their male counterparts are paid a guaranteed minimum wage and the prizes awarded to race winners in women's cycling are, quite frankly, laughable compared to those in the majority of men's races. Many people will say that Armitstead is wrong in linking this to sexism and insist it's due to the harsh realities faced by the sport resulting from the simple fact that there is far less money in women's cycling. However, what the article doesn't make immediately clear is that she isn't saying that race organisers and UCI officials are overtly sexist (some of them may well be sexist, of course, but few of them would allow themselves to be seen as such) - she's saying that women's cycling's problems stem from a more deeply-rooted sexism, a belief in society that athletic competition between females can never be as exciting as athletic competition between men, and that the resulting smaller audience is why women's cycling doesn't get the attention it deserves. This  is a point of view that may not necessarily be correct; but it's a valid one shared by many and the UCI, as the body responsible for developing competitive cycling, has a duty to explore it.

Armitstead believes that one possible solution would be "forcing ProTour teams to have a women's team." That is certainly an option, and seems a good one at first - many people also support the idea of forcing race organisers to hold women's races alongside their men's events. But would it work? Would teams devote the time, money and media to their female riders as they do to their men?

When whether Team Sky should sponsor a women's team, Armitstead hits the nail on the head - "I think Team Sky is missing an opportunity," she says. That is the real answer: persuading, rather than forcing, teams that it is in their interest to have a women's team. That way, they'll give them the backing they deserve. Force them to run women's teams and they'll do so resentfully, fielding athletes who have been given the cheapest minimum of coaching, riding bikes that are only a fraction of the value and quality that the men on the team ride. Result: in the eyes of the public, who in many cases will not understand the underlying issues, female cyclists appear less talented and less competitive than the men. Sky have had plenty of opportunity to put together a women's team and have a budget more than high enough to run several; it seems clear, therefore, that they have no interest in doing so (note that they do sponsor female track cyclists - who enjoy a higher public profile than female road cyclists).

So, how can they be persuaded that women's teams will bring them more glory and, crucially, more sponsors? The riders themselves are already doing all they can - they ride to their limits, even if they've had to work a forty-hour week in order to be able to afford to be at the races in which they compete, and they raise the issues facing their sport whenever they can, just as Armitstead is doing. There are a few team officials and managers doing a superb job too - Stefan Wyman, owner of Britain's Matrix-Prendas, is a glowing example and has recently written a series of informative articles on the subject (the latest of which can be found here); so to is Karl Lima, manager of the Hitec Products-Mistral Home - both have fought for many years to get a fair deal for the athletes on their own teams and in women's cycling in general. Rabobank is another admirable case and provides excellent support for its highly successful women's team.

"The race with the Dutch girl and the English girl" -
Armitstead and Vos follow Olga Zabelinskaya

It seems, then, that it's up to fans. We can do a very great deal to save and improve the sport we love, especially right now - it's notable that people who have previously had no interest in cycling at all suddenly know the names Marianne Vos and Lizzie Armitstead because of the Women's Road Race at the Olympics (or at the very least are talking about "the race with the Dutch girl and the English girl" - hey, it's a start). We can help to make sure they keep talking about it - all we need to do is tell anyone who will listen why women's cycling is as great and as fascinating a sport as it is, write blogs about it, Tweet anything we find about it, share our knowledge and enthusiasm, go to races and encourage others to do so too. That way, we pass on the love to new fans and increase the audience, which in turn makes women's cycling far more tempting to potential sponsors - and it's their money that will persuade the teams and race organisers to make space for the women.

Daily Cycling Facts 21.06.12

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. Poulidor had seen the future and knew that even if he escaped their 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 them to cope with the demands of his job, too) 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 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'Equip, 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 athelete 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 in the case is considered by most to be indication that nothing dishonest had taken place; though McQuaid is on record as stating that in his opinion Verbruggen's decision to accept the payments was a mistake.


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 births: 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).