 |
| Maurice Garin |
The First Tour by Isabel Best is a short and rather shoddy account of the first ever Tour de France, staged over six gargantuan stages in 1903. The competitors covered an unimaginable 3000 kilometres in those six instalments on fixed gear bikes and were responsible for their own repairs - no support cars or domestiques. The winner (by what remains a record margin of two hours and fifty minutes) was Maurice Garin. Notwithstanding the infelicities of the text, this booklet does just about manage to do justice to the super-human efforts of Garin and his competitors.
Henri Desgrange called him The Bulldog, but Garin, a chain smoker, was also known as 'Le Petit Ramoneur' - the little chimney sweep - owing to his job prior to turning pro. He was one of nine children born in a French-speaking village on the Italian side of the Alps. Legend has it that his parents swapped him for a large round of cheese when he was 14, possibly in order to smuggle him into France. Ten years later he set up a bike shop in Roubaix with two brothers, one of whom supported him at the 1904 Tour. Garin was tough enough to survive the harsh realities of early cycle sport. As an amateur in 1893, he grabbed another rider's spare bike when he punctured in Namur-Dinant-Givet, riding on to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment