LITMIR.BIZ

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      Étape is the result of a simple idea: to tell the stories of selected stages of the Tour de France through the recollections of the protagonists. I wanted to capture and convey the mystery, beauty and madness of the great race. But new interviews were key; I didn’t want to recycle already published and in some cases familiar stories. And so I sought out the heroes and villains, the stars, journeymen and one-hit wonders. I spoke to two five-time Tour winners, a three-time winner, a one-time winner, and a former seven-time winner.

      On the following pages are the fruits of this labour: a collection of notable stages, some great, some obscure. They encompass extraordinary feats and diabolical deeds, heroism and deceit, farce and tragedy. Each chapter stands alone but they are interconnected since, inevitably, there are characters who reappear. One, Bernard Hinault, even manages to have a crucial influence on a stage, and a Tour, in which he wasn’t riding.

      The featured stages are personal favourites, drawn mainly from the Tours I have watched since my first glimpse on television in 1984. But I couldn’t resist others that piqued my interest: a trilogy of remarkable stages involving Eddy Merckx and Luis Ocaña in 1971; a curious win by José Luis Viejo in 1976, which I had read about in an out-of-print cycling book; any one of the sixteen stages won by one of the sport’s most endearing figures, Freddy Maertens, in the course of his bizarre career.

      There were mysteries to investigate and myths to debunk – the feud between two team directors that distorted the outcome of a stage in 1992; a rest day disqualification in 1991; the untold stories of the gruppetto; and some classics: l’Alpe d’Huez in 1984, Paris in 1989, Sestriere in 1992, Les Deux Alpes in 1998.

      There are a number of premature deaths – Ocaña, Marco Pantani, Jose María Jiménez, Laurent Fignon – but only one occurred during the Tour. That was Fabio Casartelli in 1995 and I can vividly remember the room and sofa where I sat, and how I felt, when television pictures showed him curled up on the road, a pool of blood forming by his head. One chapter focuses on an emotionally charged stage three days later, won by Casartelli’s team-mate, a young American called Lance Armstrong.

      The older Armstrong reappears in a later chapter, from 2003: a stage and a Tour that now have an asterisk against them and a line through the winner’s name. Despite his disgrace, I wanted to include Armstrong, partly because he is difficult to ignore, partly because nobody could argue that some of his Tours (the stage I chose in particular) were not dramatic. I didn’t know if he’d agree to an interview, but when I explained the project by email he responded within minutes: ‘You bet.’ Then I wasn’t sure what he wanted out of it, other than to talk about the 2003 stage to Luz Ardiden as though it was still in the record books; as though it still mattered. ‘Those Tours happened,’ he said, ‘despite what a bunch of dickheads say.’ Of course, you might disagree ...

      Mention of Armstrong raises the spectre of doping, which, as Armstrong himself is quick to point out, he did not invent, even if he has done more damage to the sport’s reputation than any other rider. But doping, cheating, skulduggery: for better or worse, all are woven deeply into the fabric of the Tour.

      I thought of doping in cycling as I read the American writer Roger Kahn’s book, The Boys of Summer, in which he recalls his early days as a cub reporter in New York. His first job was to cover high school sports at a time when the coaches were striking over pay. Consequently, there was little sport. ‘But if this mess doesn’t get settled, what will there be to write about?’ he asked his editor.

      ‘As you say, the mess.’

      Perhaps in recent years ‘the mess’ of doping has overshadowed the sport to an unhealthy degree. Of course it is an important, dare I say interesting, subject. But there is so much more: the deeply fascinating – often fascinatingly deep – people who make up the peloton; the complexity of road racing, with its teamwork and tactics; the courage and skill of a stage winner, whether a journeyman like Joël Pelier, a winner in 1989 (and now a sculptor), or Mark Cavendish, arguably the greatest sprinter of all time. I hope that the following tales illustrate all of this, and do convey at least some of the mystery, the beauty and the madness.

      Chris Boardman

      2 July 1994. Prologue: Lille

      7.2km. Flat

      ‘At the 1994 Tour, everybody went for a three-week race,’ says Chris Boardman. ‘I went for seven minutes.’

      Chris Boardman was, and remains, unique. In the history of the Tour de France, at least since the prologue time trial was introduced in 1967, he is the only rider ever to go there specifically, and exclusively, targeting the hors d’œuvre to the race, the prologue.

      Like some other hors d’œuvre, the prologue time trial is an acquired taste. ‘As pageantry goes in so beautiful a sport, ho hum,’ was the verdict of the American journalist Samuel Abt. ‘No long lines of riders flashing by, no desperate early breakaways, no sprinters tearing for the finish line, no climbers struggling to drop one another as the road rises.’

      It isn’t even a proper stage – that is the whole point. The prologue was conceived as a way of adding an extra day to the Tour without falling foul of the regulations governing how many days the riders were allowed to race. And the motivation for its inclusion was financial. Don’t hold that against it, however, because in this it is no different to the race itself, set up to market the newspaper L’Auto. The Tour has always been nakedly commercial. But the commercial imperative intensified after 1962, when Félix Lévitan was appointed co-director, alongside Jacques Goddet. Goddet and Lévitan, both journalists, remained in charge until 1987, with Goddet looking after the sporting side, Lévitan responsible for the money. After Goddet and Lévitan, there were two short-term replacements, Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, a cognac salesman, and Jean-Pierre Courcol, a former professional tennis player. Each lasted only one Tour before, in 1989, it passed once more into the safe hands of another journalist (and former professional rider), Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in turn handed it on to another ex-journalist, Christian Prudhomme, in 2005. In 110 years, the Tour de France has had only seven directors. And five of them have been journalists by profession.

      The latest incumbent, Prudhomme, is no great fan of the prologue. For the first time since 1967, he opted not to include one in 2008 – then did the same in 2011, 2013 and 2014. It isn’t just a question of taste: this is also commercial. Prudhomme (formerly a television journalist) points to statistics that show the television audience is at its lowest when the Tour opens with a prologue time trial. It might be better for those who are there to watch – with the action spread over many hours, and the chance to see the riders individually and up close – but there is another and increasingly important audience to think of: TV. Like Sam Abt, and arguably most others, they prefer the spectacle of a road race.

      Lévitan’s motivation for adding the prologue was to increase the Tour’s earning potential. Back then, the main source of income was the money paid by cities and towns along the route. They paid to host a start, even more to host a finish, and so Lévitan began to add what he called split-stages: more than one stage in a day. On occasion, he even managed to squeeze three stages into one day. The riders hated it.

      The prologue time trial was a marginally more popular innovation than split-stages, and it was Lévitan’s way around the rule, from cycling’s world governing body the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), that stated a race could not last more than twenty-two days. Just as an hors d’œuvre is not considered a proper course in a meal, the prologue, which must be less than 8km, does not count as a proper stage. Thus it exploited a loophole in the UCI rules. And yet the first prologue,

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