Tour de France 1903: how a newspaper on the brink of bankruptcy invented a MONUMENT

To understand the Tour, you first have to understand a looming bankruptcy. L’Auto-Vélo first appeared on 16 October 1900. It was not an idealists’ venture but an industrialists’ operation: a group of businessmen led by the Count de Dion launched the title to take on Le Vélo and its editor Pierre Giffard, whose Dreyfusard positions they disapproved of. At its head was a former racer turned press boss, Henri Desgrange, who had once held world track records.

The problem was that Le Vélo was crushing the market. Giffard’s paper printed some 80,000 copies a day; Desgrange’s topped out at a little over 20,000. And in January 1903 a court drove the point home: found guilty of using a title too close to that of its rival, L’Auto-Vélo was ordered to drop the word “Vélo”. On 16 January 1903 it became simply L’Auto. A paper that was losing money had, into the bargain, just lost part of its name.

It was in this climate that a now-famous lunch is said to have taken place in late 1902. According to the recollections of the man himself, Desgrange invited the head of his cycling desk, Géo Lefèvre, to a brasserie on the boulevard Montmartre that day. The boss was looking for the idea that would topple Le Vélo. Lefèvre, twenty-five years old, threw it out almost without believing in it: why not a tour of France, a race in several stages broken up by rest days? Desgrange waved the suggestion away at first. Then he thought again. Before deciding anything, he did what a press boss on the ropes does: he talked it over with his financial director, Victor Goddet. It was Goddet’s agreement, as much as any sporting enthusiasm, that gave the green light.

The idea was mad only in appearance. At the time, the bicycle was a mass passion. The “bike fever” of the 1890s had made the machine an object of consumption, of freedom and of dreams — the same craze that, in the same period, was transforming women’s lives. And that passion sold. France’s big sports dailies had grasped a simple rule before anyone else: to sell newsprint, you have to manufacture the event you are then going to cover. Le Vélo under Giffard knew it well, having launched races that became legendary, such as Paris–Roubaix.

Desgrange’s logic was therefore purely commercial. He was not trying to write the history of sport; he was trying to manufacture a serial long enough, spectacular enough and national enough that readers would buy L’Auto every morning for weeks on end. A race crossing the entire country would keep the public hooked stage after stage — and force Le Vélo to chase after it. The Tour, before it was a race, was a weapon in a war between two newsrooms.

On 19 January 1903, L’Auto announced the plan to its readers. On paper, the project was dizzying: a loop of several thousand kilometres, in stages of several hundred kilometres, ridden partly at night. Nothing like it existed. The first calendar set out five weeks of racing, from 1^st June to 5 July, with an entry fee of twenty francs.

And there the dream came close to collapsing before it even existed. A week before the planned start, only fifteen riders had signed up. Fifteen. The professionals baulked at distances they judged inhuman, with no guarantee of making a living from them.

That Wednesday, at 15:16, the start was given not in Paris but at Montgeron, south of the capital, outside an inn with a fitting name: “Au Réveil-Matin”, the alarm clock. The riders had filed one by one into the café’s main room to sign the entry sheet and collect their number. Some sixty of them set off — the vast majority French, with a handful of Belgians and Swiss, two Germans and one Italian. None was backed by a team in the modern sense: each rode for himself.

The programme still makes the head spin today. Six stages, 2,428 kilometres in all, an average of more than four hundred kilometres per stage — against less than two hundred for a stage of the modern Tour. Paris–Lyon, the first of them, was 467 kilometres on its own. Because the distances were enormous, almost every stage set off before dawn; the last one even started at nine the previous evening.

The favourite was Maurice Garin, nicknamed “the little chimney sweep” after his former trade. He won the first stage and never let go of the lead. Winner of the last two stages as well, he covered the 2,428 kilometres in 94h 33min 14s, with almost three hours in hand — 2h 59min 31s exactly — over his closest pursuer. It remains, to this day, the biggest winning margin in the history of the Tour. Of the sixty or so starters, only twenty-one reached the finish having completed all six stages.

What mattered most, from Desgrange’s point of view, was the sales figures. The print run of L’Auto, around 25,000 copies before the race, climbed to 65,000; a special edition printed after the finish reached 130,000. The commercial gamble had paid off beyond all hope. The paper had its serial; it now had its readership.

Success called for a sequel. It almost killed the Tour in its cradle. The second edition, from 2 to 24 July 1904, followed the same route — and descended into chaos. Carried away by what was at stake, riders cheated shamelessly: some were accused of taking the train or of being towed by a car. On the roads, spectators scattered nails and broken glass. Near Saint-Étienne, supporters of a local rider set up an ambush to block his rivals; the organisers had to fire shots into the air to clear the way. Maurice Garin himself was assaulted and finished a stage holding his handlebars with one hand.

Garin crossed the line first all the same, and was initially proclaimed the winner. But the Union vélocipédique de France, the country’s cycling federation, received complaints and opened an inquiry. Its verdict came months later, in December 1904: the first four in the standings — Maurice Garin, Lucien Pothier, César Garin and Hippolyte Aucouturier — along with every stage winner were disqualified, twelve riders in all. Garin was suspended for two years. It was finally Henri Cornet, fifth on the road and nineteen years old, who inherited the victory four months after the finish: he remains the youngest winner in the history of the Tour.

Desgrange, sickened, believed his creation was dead. And yet the Tour survived. The boss of L’Auto changed his mind once again: for 1905 the rules were rewritten — the classification on time was dropped in favour of a points system, less open to cheating — and the Grande Boucle set off again. The race that was supposed to die of its own success had in fact just found its shape.

What followed was a victory by knockout. Strangled by the competition, Le Vélo under Giffard ceased publication on 20 November 1904. The small paper that had been losing money had won the war — and the Tour, born as an instrument of that war, would outlive it by a century.

The model, too, took root: a media outlet that owns and organises the spectacle it reports on. L’Auto would become L’Équipe; the company that organises the Tour today descends in a direct line from Desgrange’s newsroom. What remains is the founding paradox: this monument of sport, this theatre of feats and tears, was not conceived as a feat. It was dreamt up to plug a deficit, adjusted like a price list and launched like a poker bluff. The legend, here, began with a balance sheet.