Description
Henri Desgrange
In the early 1890s, a young Victor Goddet was working at the Vélodrome de l’Est, Paris. Every day a twenty-something rider arrived and every day Goddet studiously checked his pass. One day the rider queried this charade, stating Goddet knew very well he was a member.
‘Certainly,’ Goddet replied, ‘but I’m responsible for checking the riders, making sure they have their cards. Excuse me for doing my job.’
The rider went on his way, impressed by Goddet’s diligence. And that is how Henri Desgrange, future founder of the Tour de France, met Victor Goddet, the man he would later trust to hold the Tour’s purse strings.
Desgrange was born in Paris on 31st January 1865. He gained his baccalaureate, then studied law and found work with legal firm Depaux-Dumesnil. But the law was not for him – legend has it that the final straw came when he was told not to ride to work with bare calves. Instead, Desgrange threw himself into cycling, setting numerous benchmarks including the first official un-paced Hour record in 1893, covering 35.325km in the Vélodrome Buffalo.
By the mid-1890s Desgrange had moved into journalism and cycling administration. He wrote the training manual La Tête et les Jambes and became director of various velodromes including the Parc des Princes and the Vélodrome d’Hiver. In 1900 Desgrange was appointed to run the new sports paper L’Auto-Vélo.
‘Mr Henri Desgrange will be the pilot who will steer the ship,’ the paper announced on its inaugural front page. ‘There is nowhere he has not left the memory of his astonishing aptitude for work, an iron will and unequalled perseverance.’
Desgrange launched the Tour de France in 1903 in a bid to boost sales of his paper, now renamed L’Auto. The race would transform its fortunes as Desgrange’s hyperbolic prose turned riders into virtual deities, as this example from 1926 recalling a day of terrible weather in the Pyrenees shows.
How can we not return to the poignant experience of yesterday, under the raging elements? When we saw that enormous road-block-busting beast that is Lucien Buysse, when we saw him capsized on the road, his eyes rolled back, such disgust for his machine… when we saw Dejonghe overcome by faintness… with the despair of a shipwrecked man, finish an hour and ten after the brute who had just seized the yellow jersey which had enchanted his nights for a year.’
Desgrange was famously dictatorial, falling out with riders over his race’s rules. Henri Pélissier, winner in 1923, twice abandoned in protest.
‘This Pélissier does not know how to suffer,’ was Desgrange’s simple take.
He also rejected technology, claiming it was better to triumph by the strength of your muscles over the ‘artifice of a derailleur’. But it was Desgrange’s exacting and fierce attention to detail that established the Tour as cycling’s grandest event and by far his greatest achievement. On Desgrange’s death in 1940 the secretary general of the Tour, Lucien Cazalis, took to the pages of L’Auto.
‘The Tour de France was for Henri Desgrange an immense gold chain inset with diamonds,’ Cazalis wrote, ‘each link of which he set with the precision of a goldsmith.’
**********************
Victor Goddet
Victor Goddet (1868 – 1926) was a French sports journalist and business manager whose financial acumen was crucial to the birth of the Tour de France. In 1900, he joined with Henri Desgrange to found the new sports daily L’Auto Vélo, later L’Auto, serving as its accountant and finance director as the paper sought to challenge their rival paper, Le Vélo. When journalist Géo Lefèvre proposed a national stage race in November 1902, Desgrange took the idea to Goddet, who controlled the newspaper’s purse strings; Goddet approved the project and authorised the substantial prize fund, a decision described at the time as opening the company safe so the race could go ahead. L’Auto organised the first Tour de France in 1903, Victor Goddet, as co-founder and financial director of the paper, is credited with being one of the key figures behind the creation of the legendary race. He also owned the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris with Desgrange, another major venue in early French cycling, and was the father of Jacques and Maurice Goddet, both of whom later played important roles in L’Auto and in running the Tour.
***************************
Eugène Dhers
Eugène Dhers was a French professional road cyclist active from 1910 through 1927. He was born on 26 January 1891 in Gennevilliers, a suburb of Paris, and died on 11 December 1980 at the age of eighty nine. ProCyclingStats records his height as 1.67 meters and his weight as about 72 kilograms, which fits the profile of a compact all round stage racer of his era.
Dhers turned professional in the years just before the First World War. In 1912 he rode for the Automoto Persan team, then in 1914 and again in 1919 he was part of the J B Louvet team. He later rode for La Sportive in 1920 and 1921, for Armor Dunlop in 1923, and for Météore Wolber in 1926. He built a reputation as a consistent and hard working rider who was strong over long distances and on rough roads rather than as a pure sprinter or climber. Contemporary palmarès lists show that he was already competitive in major races as a young rider, placing seventh in Paris Tours in 1910 and taking third in Milano Modena in 1911.
His only recorded professional victory came in 1911 at Paris Amboise, but Dhers was frequently near the front in the big classics. He finished tenth in Paris Roubaix in 1911, fifteenth in the Giro di Lombardia that same year, and later placed seventh in Paris Roubaix in 1924. He also scored podium or top ten results in other important events, including second place overall in the Critérium des Aiglons in 1921, eighth in Paris Brussels in 1922, and second in the Tour du Calvados in 1925.
Dhers is best known for his long relationship with the Tour de France. Between 1912 and 1927 he started the race eleven times. Official results list him twenty-fourth overall in 1912, eleventh in 1920, twelfth in 1921, ninth in 1923, twenty-third in both 1924 and 1925, and twenty-ninth in 1926, with several editions ended by withdrawal in between. In the 1921 Tour, he raced in the second class category, finished twelfth overall, and according to contemporary general classification tables, he ended the race nine hours, forty-four minutes, and thirty-six seconds behind the winner, Léon Scieur. Two years later, he achieved his best Tour de France result, ninth overall in 1923, behind eventual winner Henri Pélissier.
After his racing career, he remained connected to cycling technology. A surviving French derailleur patent in his name, documented by the Disraeli Gears archive, shows that he designed a rear shifting mechanism, evidence that his experience on the road informed later mechanical ideas.
****************************
This item is one of a kind; please look carefully at the photos to determine the condition.
Recent Comments