The Pyrenees have been the setting for many of the Tour de France’s most legendary tales: Lapize on the Aubisque, Merckx attacking on the Tourmalet en route to Mourenx, Ocaña crashing in a storm on the Col de Menté, Indurain cracking on Hautacam, Froome visibly holding himself back for the sake of Wiggins on the climb to Peyragudes. The mountains themselves come with a legendary origin myth.
All of us know the story of how the Tour de France first came to tackle the Pyrenees in 1910.
How Alphonse Steinès badgered Henri Desgrange to include the high mountain passes of France’s southern border. How Desgrange finally relented and sent Steinès south to scout a route for the Tour to follow. How Steinès had a nightmare experience on the Col du Tourmalet but still cabled his boss that all was well and the mountain was perfectly passable. And how Desgrange then announced the addition of the Pyrenees to the Tour’s itinerary and how two dozen riders immediately abandoned the race, before it had even begun, fearing they would be eaten alive by the savage bears that inhabited the mountains of the region, mountains the locals dubbed the Circle of Death.
It’s a fabulous story, one of the best we tell about the Tour’s early years. But like so much of the Tour’s mythic history, little if any of it happened the way we say it did.
The idea of taking the Tour into the Pyrenees had first been publicly mooted by Henri Desgrange during the 1909 Tour. The race had just passed its halfway point and the outcome was already a foregone conclusion: a runaway victory for François Faber. Looking for a way to make a more exciting race, Desgrange wrote in L’Auto that “next year we have to go to Tunisia and Algeria, and to tackle the Pyrenees head-on as we tackle the Alps.”
Tackling the Pyrenees was the brainchild of Alphonse Steinès, whose responsibilities included drawing up the route of the race each year. The 36-year-old Luxembourger had in previous years succeeded in convincing Desgrange to take on the Ballon d’Alsace in the Vosges (1905), to tackle the Col Bayard in the Dauphiné Alps (1906), and to climb the Col de Porte in the Chartreuse Massif (1907).
Two months after the end of the 1909 Tour, the route of the 1910 race was announced in the pages of L’Auto. “The Tour de France will enter the Pyrenees, which it has only been touching the edge of,” the…
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