Mythologies: Assassins of the Aubisque!

The 1910 Tour de France’s first ascent of the Col d’Aubisque has become a cornerstone of the Tour’s mythic history. The truth behind what really happened that day in July of 1910 is not quite the same as the story we all like to tell today.

L’Auto / BnF

L’Auto / BnF

We begin with what we already know, we begin with what the history books have repeatedly told us happened.

What the Historians Tell Us

A 03:30 hrs⁽¹⁾ in the morning of Thursday, July 21, 1910⁽²⁾, the 59 riders⁽³⁾ still in the eighth edition of the Tour de France⁽⁴⁾ started the race’s tenth stage⁽⁵⁾, 326 kilometres from from Luchon to Bayonne⁽⁶⁾. Between Luchon and Bayonne lay a series of climbs, starting with the Col de Peyresourde and the Col d’Aspin, followed by the Col du Tourmalet and climaxing with the three-in-one ascent of the Col du Soulor, Col de Tortes and the Col d’Aubisque.

It may actually have been two o’clock when the riders left Luchon, not three-thirty.⁽⁷⁾

On the eve of the stage Henri Desgrange took ill⁽⁸⁾ and he cabled for Victor Breyer to come down from Paris⁽⁹⁾ and take over control of the race.⁽¹⁰⁾ Once Breyer arrived in Luchon⁽¹¹⁾ Desgrange slipped out of town and back to Paris⁽¹²⁾, too scared to witness for himself the disaster he feared was about to unfold.⁽¹³⁾ So scared in fact was Desgrange of the prospect of the big mountains decimating the peloton that he issued a decree: even those who finished the stage in the broom wagon would be allowed to start the next day.⁽¹⁴⁾

Some say that Desgrange was so ill with worry that he’d been confined to his bed since before the Tour had even begun.⁽¹⁵⁾

For the riders, the first three of the day’s cols passed without much incident, Octave Lapize and Gustave Garrigou at the front of the race⁽¹⁶⁾, defending champion François Faber well down the running order.⁽¹⁷⁾

At the summit of the Aubisque⁽¹⁸⁾ Alphonse Steinès and Victor Breyer waited for the riders to arrive. Or was it three-quarters of the way up the climb?⁽¹⁹⁾ Or just halfway?⁽²⁰⁾

More than an hour behind schedule⁽²¹⁾ they spied the first rider, the unheralded François Lafourcade⁽²²⁾. Breyer ran alongside him and tried to get a quote from the rider but was met with silence.⁽²³⁾ Or maybe a groan.⁽²⁴⁾

A quarter of an hour passed before the next rider arrived, Lapize.⁽²⁵⁾

Half stumbling, half pushing his bike, he spat out a single word: “Assassins!”⁽²⁶⁾ Or maybe it was “Murderers!”?⁽²⁷⁾

Or maybe it was more than a single word spat out, maybe it was a tirade of words poured out: “Assassins! All of you!”⁽²⁸⁾ Or “You’re assassins! All of you!”⁽²⁹⁾

Or it could have been “You’re murderers!”⁽³⁰⁾ Or “You’re all murderers!”⁽³¹⁾ Or “You’re all assassins!”⁽³²⁾

Or it may have been “You are all assassins. No human being should be put though an ordeal like this. That’s enough for me.”⁽³³⁾

Or possibly it was: “You are assassins, yes, assassins!”⁽³⁴⁾

As he walked on he added more: “Don’t worry, at Eaux-Bonnes I’m going to quit.”⁽³⁵⁾

Or “I’m quitting on the way down the mountain.”⁽³⁶⁾

Alternatively, what Lapize said was in reply to Breyer asking him “Well now Lapize, what is it?”,⁽³⁷⁾ with the answer coming back: “What it is, is that you people are criminals. Do you hear me? You can tell Desgrange for me that this kind of exertion should not be demanded from anyone. I’ve had enough.”⁽³⁸⁾

Or “I’ll tell you what’s up, you’re criminals, you hear? Tell Desgrange that from me. You don’t ask a man to make an effort like this, I’ve had enough.”⁽³⁹⁾

Or his reply to Breyer’s question could have been “You’re murderers! That’s what’s wrong. You’re criminals!”⁽⁴⁰⁾

Or it was “You’re assassins! You’re criminals!”⁽⁴¹⁾

Or, if we’re going to be really precise about these things, the words he actually spoke were « Vous êtes assassins! »⁽⁴²⁾ or even the more grammatically correct « Vous êtes des assassins! »^(43). Or the more emphatic « Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, assassins! »⁽⁴⁴⁾

Some have moved this scene back a mountain, Lapize’s utterance coming as he crossed the Tourmalet⁽⁴⁵⁾, with Lafourcade hot on his heels.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Some have it happening both on the summit of the Tourmalet and part way up the Aubisque.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Others have moved elements of the stage, with the Aubisque and the Tourmalet climbed in that order the stage before the riders tackled the Col du Porte – not to be confused with the mountain the Tour actually tackled, the Col de Port – and the Col de Portet d’Aspet, along with the Peyresourde and the Aspin⁽⁴⁸⁾ Still others have moved the Aubisque to the end of the stage.⁽⁴⁹⁾

While most have Lapize speaking his words to Victor Breyer some have the comment addressed to Alphonse Steinès.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Still others have Henri Desgrange himself on the mountain and Lapize delivering his words directly to him.⁽⁵¹⁾

The mountain climbed, Lapize caught Lafourcade on the descent⁽⁵²⁾ and went straight past him. Lafourcade dropped down the order in such a way that some contend he must have had the assistance of a motor vehicle getting up the Aubisque.⁽⁵³⁾

At the finish in Bayonne, Lapize took the stage⁽⁵⁴⁾, followed across the line by his Alcyon team-mate⁽⁵⁵⁾ Pierino Albini.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Who may actually have been riding for Legnano.⁽⁵⁷⁾ And who may have been Aldo Albini.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Only 10 riders officially completed the stage.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Or was it 41?⁽⁶⁰⁾ Or 46?⁽⁶¹⁾ Thirteen riders abandoned.⁽⁶²⁾

Lapize went on to take the overall victory in the 1910 Tour.⁽⁶³⁾

« Vous êtes des assassins, oui, des assassins ! »

Much of the version of the story we tell today dates to a 1950 But et Club article written by an 80-something Victor Breyer. Before turning to that article, first a little bit about the man himself.

Breyer is one of those figures often on the periphery of stories told and retold in cycling books down through the ages but rarely given the spotlight he deserves. The man was a mover and a shaker, a power player in the sport.

In addition to shaping the sport’s history, he helped to write it: he was a journalist at Le Vélo and later L’Auto and published several books, including the 1899 history of the early years of Bordeaux-Paris, Les Géants de la Route, written along with his colleague and sometime business partner Robert Coquelle.

Jules Beau / BnF

Born in England in 1869 Breyer, along with Coquelle, played a major role in the early globalisation of the sport, enticing American riders to race in France and sending French riders to race in America. His American connections led to him representing the interests of the USA’s National Cycling Association when the UCI was formed in 1900, putting him at the political centre of the sport.

Desgrange put Breyer in charge of the 1905 and 1906 Tours, replacing Géo Lefèvre who had run the first two editions of the race. It was to Breyer Desgrange turned when he took ill during the 1910 Tour.

In 1919 it was Breyer who Desgrange sent to scout the route of Paris-Roubaix and it was Breyer who reported Eugène Christophe’s coining of the phrase now inextricably linked with that race: « L’enfer du Nord », the Hell of the North.

Zulimo Chiesi / BnF

In short: Breyer’s words ought to carry weight.

And so to those words. Or a version of them. A part of Breyer’s 1950 But et Club article on the 1910 Tour was translated and appeared in Owen Mulholland’s Uphill Battle – Cycling’s Great Climbers (2003), from where it has been cut and pasted into many other books in the two decades since.

Mulholland picks up the story three-quarters of the way up the Aubisque, with Breyer – accompanied by Alphonse Steinès – awaiting the arrival of the first riders:

According to my calculations the first riders should come by me in about 15 minutes. The quarter-hour passed, then another, and another, and all this time I was alone in this wondrous mountain landscape under a cloudless blue sky and a burning sun. An absolute silence reigned in this intimidating region so alien to man. An hour passed and the fear of disaster began to gnaw at my guts. It was as though the Tour de France had fallen into a void.

And suddenly I saw him, a rider, but one I didn’t know. His body heaved at the pedals, like some automaton on two wheels. He wasn’t going fast, but he was at least moving. I trotted alongside him and asked, “Who are you? What’s going on? Where are the others?” Bent over his handlebars, his eyes riveted on the road, the man never turned his head nor uttered one sole word. He continued and disappeared around a turn. Steinès had read his race number and consulted the riders’ list. Steinès was dumbfounded. “The man is François Lafourcade, a nobody. He has caught and passed all the ‘cracks’. This is something prodigious, almost unbelievable!”

Still the minutes passed. Another quarter-hour passed before the second rider appeared, whom we immediately recognised as Lapize. Unlike Lafourcade, Lapize was walking, half leaning on, half pushing his machine. But unlike his predecessor Lapize spoke, and in abundance. “You are assassins, yes, assassins!” To discuss matters with a man in this condition would have been cruel and stupid. I walked at his side, attentive to all he said. After more imprecations, he finished by saying, “Don’t worry, at Eaux-Bonnes I’m going to quit.”

It took me some time to recover my composure. Eaux-Bonnes was the control town at the foot of the last descent, from which there were still 150 kilometres yet to go to the stage finish in Bayonne. We got in the car and drove to Eaux-Bonnes. Lafourcade had arrived 17 minutes ahead of Lapize, but he was spent. He rested five minutes and left. The descent into Eaux-Bonnes had given Lapize new courage and he continued.

So there we have it, from the mouth of a man who was there: three-quarters of the way up the Aubisque, Lapize having far more than but a single word to offer, and clearly saying “You are assassins, yes, assassins!” Or, as it would have been in French, « Vous êtes des assassins, oui des assassins ! »

Except…well, it’s not as simple as that. It’s not simple at all.

« Vous êtes des assassins ! »

Let’s begin with what Lapize is alleged to have said: “You are assassins, yes, assassins!” If we go back to the original But et Club article we find that there are issues with Mulholland’s translation, not least the fact that Breyer did not quote Lapize saying “You are assassins, yes, assassins!” Breyer actually quoted Lapize as saying “You are assassins!” The repetition of the charge, which adds an extra punch, was added in the translation.

Victor Breyer / But et Club

The real issue, though, is not with the translation of what Breyer wrote in But et Club in 1950. The real issue is with the article itself.

Let’s start with a simple problem. In the article Breyer says that, Desgrange having taken ill, he was called in to take over the running of the race and arrived in Bagnère-de-Luchon on the morning of the rest day (July 20). Desgrange gave him his instructions and, that afternoon, returned to Paris by train.

The problem with that story is that Breyer was already on the ground in Luchon, had been reporting on the race since it began. On the day the race started, July 3, L’Auto reported that he would be joining Desgrange in the lead car: “Breyer’s mission will be to assist the patron, and to replace him if necessary, in carrying out the functions of the race referee.” Subsequent reports named him as travelling in L’Auto’s car, alongside Desgrange.

As for Desgrange returning to Paris, his illness was reported in L’Auto on July 21, with that report saying Desgrange planned on staying in Luchon for several days before returning to Paris. A later report in L’Auto, written by Breyer himself, says that Desgrange followed at least part of the Luchon-Bayonne stage by car.

Many have taken what Breyer wrote in But et Club in 1950 and spun a story in which Desgrange threw a sickie and legged it back to Paris, so scared was he of the disaster he feared was about to unfold. If the patron was faking it, he took his faking seriously: having written daily articles for L’Auto right up to July 20, the day before he was reported to have taken ill, it was August 1 – the end of the Tour – before Desgrange again put his name to anything in L’Auto.

The funny thing with the claim that Desgrange threw a sickie and legged it, fearing too many riders would be eliminated by the climbs to come, is that it is a story mostly told by the sort of people who love to tell you – without ever producing a source – that Desgrange dreamed of a Tour in which just a single rider made it back to Paris. Steinès was predicting as much as half the peloton would be eliminated on the road to Bayonne, that’s 29 or 30 riders out of the 59 who started the stage. Why would a man who wanted a race so hard it would eliminate all but one rider be afraid of losing half the peloton with just five stages left in the race after it reached Bayonne?

Some of those same people who struggle with joined up thinking also tell us that Desgrange decided that all riders would be allowed start the next stage, even if they reached Bayonne in the voiture balai. That’s easier to explain: Desgrange didn’t. Breyer did. Only what Breyer permitted was that the eliminated riders would be allowed start the next stage half an hour behind the race, shadow riding the route. No longer in the Tour, but allowed to soak up the atmosphere.

L’Auto / BnF

So Breyer’s story of being urgently summoned to Luchon in order to take over from Desgrange, well it’s a little bit self-aggrandising, isn’t it? It’s sort of true – Breyer did take over the running of the race from Desgrange – but it’s fundamentally not true: Breyer had been part of the race caravan since it left Paris, ready to take over from Desgrange should the need arise.

It would seem, then, that Breyer’s memory may have been playing tricks on him in 1950. Or was he playing tricks on his readers, deliberately deceiving them by delivering a good story but one not quite true?

Take Breyer saying that, having parked three-quarters of the way up the Aubisque, he expected the riders to pass in 15 minutes. Those 15 minutes passed, he tells us as he ratchets up the tension, and there was no sign of anyone. Another 15 minutes passed. And another. “An hour passed and the fear of disaster began to gnaw at my guts.” It’s great story-telling, layering on the tension. But there was no delay.

If we go back to the pages of L’Auto in 1910 we can piece together the events of the day and compare them with what had been expected. There we learn that the riders left Luchon on time, at 03:30 hrs in the not-quite-dark summer’s night. After having crossed the Col de Peyresourde, they were due in Arreau – 30 kms into the stage – at 04:50 hrs, just as the dawn would have been fully lighting the sky. There the first riders – Alcyon’s Octave Lapize and Gustave Garrigou – were reported to have arrived just seven minutes behind schedule, at 04:57 hrs.

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

After crossing the Col d’Aspin and then descending to Sainte-Marie-de-Campan before crossing the Col du Tourmalet the riders were due to reach Barèges – 82 kms into the stage – at 07:50 hrs. Lapize and Garrigou led the race through the town at 08:03 hrs, 13 minutes down on the schedule.

Lapize and Garrigou clawed back 10 minutes of that deficit by the time they reached Argelès-Gazost – 109 kms into the stage – at the base of the climb of the Soulor / Tortes / Aubisque: they were expected to have arrived at 08:35 hrs, they actually arrived at 08:38 hrs.

(The 27 kms between Barèges and Argelès is virtually all downhill, dropping from 1,222 metres to 429 metres with only a small section of uphill. To cover that in 35 minutes means Lapize and Garrigou were barrelling along at 50 kph.)

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

Finally, having crossed the Aubisque, the riders were due to reach Eaux-Bonnes – 149 kms into the stage – near the bottom of the descent at 11:00 hrs. Lafourcade went through the town at 11:01, practically bang on schedule.

What happened to the missing hour? Well, like the math puzzle involving the waiter and the missing pound, there was no missing hour. Only, whereas the math puzzle is all about misdirection, the puzzling element of Breyer’s 1950 telling of the story is that it is all invention. And we know it’s invention because Breyer published an earlier version of what happened, in the pages of L’Auto, on July 23, two days after the stage. And it is a markedly different telling of the tale.

« Vous êtes des criminels ! »

Back in 1910, Breyer reported having crossed the Tourmalet where he noted that a three-metre wide road had been cut out of the snow, creating an extraordinary contrast to the torrid heat of the summer’s day and the dazzling July sun lapping the surrounding peaks, still capped with snow.

Descending to Barèges L’Auto’s lead car was passed by riders “squatting on their narrow saddles, their hands glued to their brakes”. Breyer and Steinès having watched Lafourcade and Garrigou cross the col before starting their own descent, L’Auto’s car quickly had 10 riders in front of it, including the defending champion, Alcyon’s François Faber, the Giant of Colombes, a man not built for these mountains.

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

On the descent from Barèges to Argelès, L’Auto’s car once again sped to the front of the race, where Lapize and Garrigou were hard at it, fugitives trying to make good their escape from the scattered peloton pursuing them. Albini caught them on the ascent of the Soulour / Tortes / Aubisque. From an earlier report in L’Auto we know that Albini had passed the control in Argelès, at the base of the climb, seven minutes down on Garrigou and Lapize, at 08:45 hrs. Two minutes behind him was François Lafourcade.

L’Auto / BnF

In Breyers’s own report in L’Auto in 1910, we’re told it was ten o’clock and the sun was beating down when Albini joined up with the two fugitives at the front of the race. Lapize launched an attack. He’d barely gone 500 metres when Albini, spent from his chase, gave up and climbed off his bike.

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

A kilometre further on Garrigou seemed to fall from his machine rather than dismount, next to a spring in which he lay down to rest. Lapize was alone at the front of the race. But even he was forced to dismount. He remained motionless for a few moments, as if he’d resolved to give up and go no further.

L’Auto’s car stopped beside him. « Eh bien, Lapize, qu’y a-t-il ? », Breyer asked. “Well, Lapize, what’s wrong?”

To which Lapize replied with rolled eyes and this:

« Il y a que vous êtes des criminels ! Vous entendez ? Dites-le de ma part à Desgrange ; on ne demande pas à des hommes de faire un effort pareil. J’en ai assez. »

“You are criminals! Do you hear? Tell Desgrange that from me: you don’t ask men to make such an effort. I’ve had enough.”

Breyer reported that he tried to reason with Lapize but – borrowing an analogy from football – at that moment it felt like it was all over:

“We have, for a few minutes, the singular sensation that all this rush of cyclists toward the goal, this feverish battle whose anguish we have been living for hours, is suddenly stopped and that from the foot of this rugged mountain, hidden under clumps of wild flowers, no one will arise from those pursuers just now desperate to rejoin the fugitives.”

The tension was broken by the arrival of one of those pursuers: Lafourcade.

« Oui ! C’est moi ! » he cried out, heralding his arrival: “Yes! It’s me!” Still on his bike, the unheralded isolé made his way past Lapize and, riding “at a regular and powerful pace” reached the summit of the Aubisque 16 minutes ahead of the man who had been at the front of the race since it had left Luchon seven hours earlier.

La Vie au Grand Air / BnF

Unlike the 1950 version of the tale, where an hour passes, Lafourcade passes, another 15 minutes pass and only then does Lapize arrive and deliver his assassins speech, in his 1910 report Breyer had been immediately behind the front of the race, Lapize had stopped and delivered his tirade – with the word criminals instead of assassins – and only then did Lafourcade arrive on the scene.

The 1950 version of the story, from which most get the tale we tell today, may well be more exciting. But it’s a fiction, only loosely based on fact.

Criminals of the Soulor?

As for quite where on the climb all this happened, that isn’t clear from the report that appeared in L’Auto in 1910. If it was as Breyer claimed 10:00 hrs, that’s an hour and a half of climbing since leaving Argelès. If you figure 20 minutes for the 14 kilometre descent from the top of the Aubisque to Eaux-Bonnes, then this happened about three-quarters of an hour before the top of the climb. So Breyer’s claim in his 1950 But et Club article that all this happened three-quarters of the way up the Aubisque might be close to reality, if we figure it as being about an hour-and-a-half into a two-and-a-quarter-hour climb.

Glenn Van Der Knijff / Getty Images

But remember this: three-quarters of the way up the Soulor / Tortes / Aubisque places the action near the top of the Col du Soulor. On an important technicality – especially if you’re watching the mountain being climbed from Laruns – not on Col d’Aubisque itself.

The Col du Soulor exists as a climb in itself, it is not simply a waypoint en route to the Col d’Aubisque. To rob it of this, perhaps its most famous moment in the Tour’s history, seems unfair. Almost as unfair as the claims made by some that the Soulor did not feature in the Tour until 1912, its history airbrushed based on ignorance and incomplete information.

In short: Lapize didn’t say “assassins!” and he didn’t not say it on the Aubisque.

Except that Lapize did say « assassin ».

« Desgrange est un assassin. »

Benjo Maso, in Sweat of the Gods, a book about the Tour’s mythic history, paraphrased a Dutch journalist who said that the chief model for every sports writer ought be Homer: a poet who knew how to turn a fight between two bands of robbers over a slut into an immortal epic. Sometimes I think he should have said Akira Kurosawa, a man who famously told one story from multiple points of view. Everybody has a different take when it comes to the Tour’s tall tales. Quite who maps to which character in this version of Rashomon you can decide for yourself, but let’s for the moment cast Breyer as both bandit and wife. Lapize would have to be the samurai, which leaves only the woodcutter’s role to be filled. Enter, stage left, Alphonse Steinès.

Steinès, I think, has become a man ill-served by history, made to look like a knave and a fool by those who have turned his night on the Tourmalet into an epic misadventure, inventing along the way a telegram that was never sent. Their crimes have been placed on his shoulders when, as we have previously seen, his own account of what occurred carries few of the faults to be found in modern tellings of his tale.

Whatever we might think of him today, Steinès’s journalistic peers had a lot of respect for him and thought him an honest and fair reporter. Maybe we too should trust him. For in a brief report filed the day after the stage over the Aubisque – a day ahead of the first version of the story told by Breyer – we find Steinès grabbing a quote from Lapize at the end of the stage, in Bayonne. A very brief quote.

« Desgrange est un assassin » was all Steinès reported Lapize as having said. Desgrange is a murderer.

L’Auto / BnF

So there you have it, three versions of the story, three quotes given in three places:

“Desgrange is a murderer,” given in Bayonne at the end of the stage and put in print the day after the stage;

“You are criminals!”, given at an unidentified location that was probably near the top of the Soulor and put in print two days after the stage; and

“You are assassins!”, given three-quarters of the way up the Aubisque and put in print 40 years after the event.

To which we can add the a fourth quote, conjured into being 90 years after the fact by an imaginative translator but still placed part way up he climb, not at its summit: “You are assassins, yes, assassins!”

Guess what? It gets a bit more complicated yet.

« Vous êtes des bandits ! »

A year on from the events on the Aubisque in 1910, what Daniel Friebe has dubbed gradient inflation had taken hold in the Tour, with riders in the 1911 race sent over the Col du Galibier in the Dauphiné Alps, a climb that reached nearly 500 metres higher than the Tourmalet, clocking in at 2,642 metres. And its ascent too came with a killer quote, albeit one that history has chosen to mostly ignore. Here’s a report from L’Auto, penned by Steinès:

Garrigou, who last year was the worthy adversary of Faber and Lapize, today had an expression similar to that of Lapize when he called us assassins on the ascent of the Col d’Aubisque.

To our question:

“How did you find the route and what do you say of the Galibier?”

He had this laconic answer, but more eloquent than any speech:

“You are bandits!”

L’Auto / BnF

On the one had, it begins to look like the start of a series of crime novels: Criminals! Assassins! Bandits! What’s next, Desperadoes? Of more import though is that Steinès has changed the past, the quote he solicited in Bayonne replacing Breyer’s quote on the mountain itself.

Did Steinès rewrite the past? Or – perhaps – did he correct it? Steinès was there, alongside Breyer, so maybe Breyer got it wrong and maybe Lapize really did say assassins on the Aubisque.

Or maybe it wasn’t an error and Breyer did as countless journalists have done and cleaned the quote up for Lapize, having him level a lesser charge, criminals. With Adolphe Hélière having drowned a week earlier while the race was enjoying a rest day in Nice, perhaps Breyer thought calling the Tour’s organisers murderers was a bit too close to the bone.

That Steinès had no such qualms about using the word assassins the day before, however, may suggest that such an interpretation of events is unduly kind. But in its favour is that, at the race’s end, when he looked back over the course of the Tour, Lapize again turned to murder when it came to the Luchon-Bayonne stage, calling it an assassination.

L’Auto / BnF

Then again, maybe Lapize did really say criminals the first time but, having had a hundred and more kilometres between the top of the Aubisque and the end of the stage in which to think about it, decided murder was more appropriate and stuck with that through to the end of the race. And everyone’s just agreed with him and rewritten the past in favour of a better version.

We can go on, speculating, trying to reconcile the differences in all the versions of this story. But the sad reality is that, when it comes to words spoken, journalists are not always trustworthy sources. Especially when it comes to sport.

Le pire est né

The worst is born. That’s how some think of the Tour’s first foray into the Pyrénées, a gentle play on words with echoes of the way in which we claim that Tourmalet means a wrong turn (when its more likely etymology lies in a distant mountain). The Pyrénées were not, of course, the worst the Tour could throw at its competitors but insofar as the race’s entry into the Pyrénées signalled the real beginning of the Tour’s quest for ever higher, ever steeper terrain then yes, the 1910 race represents a dividing line in the history of the Tour.

It also represents a dividing line in the Tour’s mythic history, with the truth sacrificed on an epic scale for a better truth, facts forgotten in favour of fables. The 1910 Tour took things to a new level, with nearly all the stories we tell about the race and the events before the race exaggerated and embellished to a point where they bear but a passing resemblance to what actually happened.

Benjo Maso, in Sweat of the Gods, quotes a Dutch journalist’s account of the Luchon-Bayonne stage, written in 1973 by Jean Belissen:

“In that year 1910, the most heart-rending scenes were played out in the Pyrenees. In that wilderness of stones and snow, where it was bitterly cold and large hail stones sometime lashed the arms and legs of the riders, labourers had dug a narrow path between high snowbanks. More than once, exhausted and half-frozen riders were carried shivering into mountain huts … A dog-tired rider shouted to Henri Desgranges that he was a murderer.

You know that the author of that report is a bit of a prat by their insistence on calling Desgrange Desgranges. More importantly you can also recognise elements from other stories: the exhausted and half frozen riders, for instance, could be ripped from reports of 1910’s snow-blighted edition of Milan-Sanremo. Far from enduring inclement weather, the Tour’s riders actually risked sunstroke as they crossed the Pyrénées, as most of the photographs from the day indicate and many of the reports – even Breyer’s 1950 nonsense – state. But still the weather is turned, foul weather makes for a better story than fair.

Agence Rol / BnF

A better story is what it’s all about. We’ve cherry-picked facts here and there and turned them into something else. A telegraph message sent by a hotelier in Barèges has been rewritten and attributed to Alphonse Steinès. Steinès’s night on the Tourmalet has been stretched into the following morning. A single comment he made about bears has been turned into whole editorials written by Desgrange himself warning riders to be wary of ursine predators along the race route. That Charles Ravaud and Georges Abran only warned the riders to be wary of cattle and the like roaming the roads just isn’t dramatic enough.

A diatribe launched by Lapize as he paused on his way to the summit of the Col d’Aubisque has been turned into a single word, spat out: Assassins! Where Lapize’s words were spoken has been lost and relocated to the summit itself of the mountain, with some even moving the mountain to the end of the stage. Because that is more dramatic than having it happen barely halfway through the stage.

We’re not ignorant of these inventions. We know from the diversity of accounts that something in the story we’re told is wrong, we instinctively know that when we read half a dozen different versions of the same telegram, or a dozen different versions of the words spoken by Lapize, that people are just making things up as they go along. But we go along with. Because we like the drama.

If drama is all we want, then fine, let’s go for drama, let’s do as the likes of Christian Laborde have done and call our accounts fiction. But as long as we want to claim a factual basis for the stories we tell, as long as we want to claim that the stories we tell really happened, we have a duty to get the facts right.

With it becoming increasingly easier to get the facts right – or, at the very least, to see how what we thought of as facts are actually fictions – we have a duty to stop simply repeating the myths of the past and to start writing history anew. To place stories where they actually happened, to report words as they were actually spoken.

And when we don’t really know what was said or where things really happened, is it really too much to ask that we just admit that, that we acknowledge that not everything from the past is actually knowable?