The Tour de France is surely the World’s best-known and most
celebrated cycle race. It takes 23 days to stage, with the competitors, who
come from many countries, completing a series of grueling stages that take them
all round France and usually across borders to visit neighbouring countries en
route.
Most people are not aware that the race began as a
competition between two daily sporting newspapers, and was linked to the
notorious Dreyfus case and the death of one of France’s most famous writers.
Alfred Dreyfus was a captain in the French army who was
tried and convicted of spying for Germany in 1894. The problem was that Dreyfus
was completely innocent. The evidence against him was weak in the extreme, but
he was not only a native of Alsace – which was then part of Germany – but he
was also Jewish. It did not take much for an anti-Semitic and anti-German
military court to find Dreyfus guilty and pack him off to the penal colony of Devil’s
Island.
Many people in France were far from satisfied that justice
had been done, and one of these was the writer Emile Zola, who in 1898 wrote a
piece that condemned the French establishment over the Dreyfus case. This was
splashed across the front page of L’Aurore newspaper under the heading
“J`Accuse” (I accuse).
This made Zola extremely unpopular with the anti-Dreyfus
faction in France, and Zola was forced to flee to London until the situation
calmed down.
Zola was still a marked man in the eyes of some extreme
anti-Semites, and his support for Dreyfus – who in 1899 had been allowed to
return to France but without a full pardon – was not forgotten.
In 1902 Emile Zola died as the result of what appeared to be
a tragic accident, when he and his wife were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes
after lighting a fire in their Paris apartment. It was not until 1928 that it
emerged that their chimney had been blocked deliberately by a right-wing
fanatic and that Zola’s death (his wife survived) had been murder.
However, this was far from clear at the time, especially as
tests carried out the day after Zola’s death showed that there was nothing
wrong with the chimney. Of course there wasn’t – the killer had by then removed
the obstruction.
The fact that there was still a huge amount of controversy
in France about the whole Dreyfus affair led to accusations flying in all
directions. In particular, two sporting daily newspapers, Le Velo and L’Auto,
took opposite sides on the question of whether Emile Zola’s death was related
to the Dreyfus case. The arguments went on right through the winter of 1902-3,
but eventually tempers died down and the two newspapers decided to settle their
differences in a way that might have been expected of publications devoted
mainly to sport – a bicycle race!
And so the first Tour de France took place in July 1903 and
it has been run ever since, apart from during the two World Wars. The event
soon caught the attention of the French public and sales of L’Auto (the
original main sponsor) went through the roof.
A particular feature of the Tour de France is the wearing of
coloured jerseys by certain competitors. A yellow jersey is worn by the overall
leader. The colour is no accident, being a recognition of the fact that L’Auto
was printed on yellow paper. In the early days the rider with the lowest standing
wore a green jersey, although from 1953 this became a mark of pride rather than
shame, because it is worn by the leader of the various sprint stages on the
Tour. Green was the colour of paper used by Le Velo!
© John Welford
No comments:
Post a Comment