“Stage 17 – Wednesday 22 July [2009]: Bourg-Saint-Maurice–Le Grand Bornand, 169.5km
Today was what’s known in cycling terms as the ‘Queen Stage’ of the Tour de France. I don’t know where the term originated, but it’s usually given to the hardest day of the race and, with one second-category climb and four first category mountains to be covered on the 170km through the Alps, today was never going to be easy.”
~ Nico Roche, Inside the Tour de France
When did bike races get queen stages? And why are they queen stages in some countries but king stages in others? What even is a queen stage?
The Queen and Me
The very first cycling book I read was The Great Bike Race, a book about the 1976 Tour de France written by the Observer’s then sports editor, Geoffrey Nicholson. A friend I rode with had found a copy in a second-hand bookshop in Dublin and we devoured it, even though it was already a generation out of date by the time we came to it. Other kids my age, they were sharing copies of Goodbye to the Hill – this is Ireland, we’re literary and even our porn comes in book form – but there we were, noses deep in The Great Bike Race. What can I say, I had a depraved childhood.
Flicking through The Great Bike Race again – I have to flick carefully, half the pages are falling out and it’s in danger of turning into a version of BS Johnson’s book-in-a-box, The Unfortunates – there is a curious absence: there is no queen stage in Nicholson’s account of the 1976 Tour.
Nicholson’s front-of-book glossary – the book was published in the 1970s and the English then hadn’t a clue what even a maillot jaune was (“Yellow jersey worn by the race leader; the term applied to the leader himself. It was introduced in 1919 so that the crowds could identify their hero more easily. It is worth £120 a day to the wearer on stages 1 to 14, £50 a day thereafter.”) – had entries for various kinds of étapes (étape, demi-étape, tiers d’étape) but no étape reine.
That seemed odd, given the ubiquity of the phrase today. So I turned to Sam Abt, the dean of American…
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