Shorter stages be damned. What the Tour needs is more suffering
There is a theory – we’ll be hearing about it in the next few weeks I’d imagine – that the Tour de France would be greatly improved by much shorter stages. It would be more exciting to watch. It would prompt more interesting tactics, more open racing and less reliance on the team. That sort of thing.
Well, I’m here to tell you this has already happened. It’s happened many times. The Tour de France is a shadow of what it once was. It’s only 60% of the length it was in the 1910s. As if that wasn’t enough, there are now 30% more stages. Or try it this way – the average stage in 1919 was 370 km, and that year’s longest stage was 480 km. The winner of that one took 19 hours to get from Les Sables-d’Olonne to Bayonne.
The original route was just around the edges of France. They went all the way out the peninsula to Brest and back every Tour until 1932, and I’m guessing the bit where you rode 400km along a wind-blasted coast road to Brest, then turned around and rode out on the same wretched road you’d ridden in on must have been a bit of a low point in the lives of everyone involved.
The roads were bad. They were cut up and gravelly, mud baths in the rain, and in the mountains often not much more than animal tracks. You weren’t even allowed to draft other riders, instead you had to ride alone. In fact you had to be completely self-sufficient until 1930, including fixing all your own punctures. Of which there were many – Jean Alavoine got 46 in 1919, at an average of three per stage. And he still finished second on GC. More often than not riders had to find their own hotel at a finish town, because there was no one to do it for them.
