21 Cycling Climbs Part Two - Flipbook - Page 42
Col du Tourmalet
Body text.
Stage 10 of the 1910 edition of the Tour de
France took on the Tourmalet. The first high
mountain pass to be included.
It’s been going up it ever since, sometimes
twice, it is the most visited of all the mountain
passes the Tour visits.
This has much to do with its location right in
the middle of the Pyrenees. In fact, it’s quite
difficult not to go up the Tourmalet, as there
isn’t any way around it.
The team that had formed around Henri
Desgrange at the newspaper L’Auto in
the formative years of the Tour de France
included the journalist Alphonse Steinés.
Steinés knew that the continued success of
the tour required ever more tales of bravery,
super-human efforts and death-defying
deeds in the face of overwhelming odds.
Steinés had persistently tried to persuade his
editor to go deeper into the mountains.
In search of a landscape and terrain difficult
enough to require a super-human effort, just
to finish the day’s stage.
He found what he was looking for on the
Tourmalet.
These early signs of sadomasochistic
tendencies in cycling route planning
continue to this day.
Steinés understood how tales of human
endurance served up to a public hungry for
heroes at their comfortable breakfast tables,
could be used to build the reputations of
champions and the Tour.
Tabloid journalism was alive and well in 1910.
That’s not to say cyclists were somehow
victims in all of this. Show me a mountain,
and I’ll show you any number of riders willing
to race up it just for the hell of it.
It’s what we do, it’s who we are.
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