On Tour

Le Tour is the biggest event in France. A sporting public still raw from the disappointment of defeat by Portugal in Euro 2016 gathered in huge numbers to cheer the riders on. On Mt Ventoux, the enthusiasm of those crowds caused a crash that will go down in Tour folklore, as Sky's Chris Froome decided against waiting for a spare bike to be delivered and started running up the infamous slope.
Chaos and controversy have never been far away from this famous race. The winner of the inaugural Tour in 1903, Maurice Garin, was subsequently banned for two years for cheating in the 1904 Tour, effectively ending his career. The circumstances surrounding Garin's ban are still shrouded in mystery, with the Tour de France archives lost after the Nazi invasion of 1940.
Known as "The Little Chimney Sweep", Garin was born in the shadow of Mont Blanc in the Aosta valley in Italy. His family illegally crossed the Alps to France to look for work in the North, and there was a story of little Maurice being smuggled in by a local trafficker/guide in return for some local cheese. After working as a chimney sweep in Reims, Maurice Garin moved to Lens and opened a bike shop.He only returned once to his birthplace in Italy to see the 1934 Tour pass through his home town. It is perhaps interesting in a modern context to remember that he would always see himself as a Frenchman. A properly controlled border would have seen his family staying south of Mont Blanc, and Garin riding for Italy. Much more likely, his impoverished family would never have got within touching distance of a bike.

That Inaugural Tour of 1903 included a mammoth 471km stage from Nantes back to Paris, where Garin was crowned as the victor by a winning margin that still stands as a record - 2hrs 59minutes and 31 seconds. It makes Chris Froome's 2016 winning margin of 4 minutes and 5 seconds look a little less comfortable than it appeared to be. Whatever Garin (and several others) did to justify a ban a year later, there were no doubts raised as to his supremacy in 1903. The Little Chimney Sweep had swept all before him.

This year I took the opportunity to see the Tour as it played out its dramatic final scenes in the mountains around Mont Blanc. The whole event is pure theatre, from the moment you settle into your chosen viewing point to the last view of the exhaust pipes of the team cars. An hour or so before the riders are due to pass, a carnival of all shapes and sizes rolls by, firing various freebies at the crowd from sponsors - dishwasher samples, Madeleines, baseball caps and sausages. Then there is a distant thumping of the hoardings, away round the bend from your chosen stretch of road, and a rider appears, hunched over his handlebars, on a desperate quest for glory. The fizz of tyres on Tarmac, flashes of lycra'd colour, and a great rush of air that follows the back of the peloton as it pursues the leader.


This sequence is repeated over three weeks every summer. Sometimes you're lucky enough to see it live, but TV coverage makes it almost impossible to miss it. For the French, in a world stripped of certainties, it is a constant image in their sporting and cultural year. Reading about an aged Catholic priest having his throat cut at the altar of a church in a sleepy French village will only make them tighten their grip on such certainties. A man at the wheel of a lorry, drunk on the propaganda of a death cult, will not stop their Bastille Day.

2016 has raised questions about the UK's certainties. Are we "European" any more?
An early test - and perhaps an insight into what it means to "Brexit"- came with the huge queues at the Border Control gates at Dover. Brits, of course, are known for their patience in line. It is a national pastime to rival the Tour.The writer George Mikes once noted that "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one". But 10 hours in a car with screaming children will have stretched the mental resources of the hardiest Brit. There would have been no point suggesting to those folks that the French, faced with the atrocity at Nice, were simply "Taking Back Control" of their borders.

Brexit raises many many issues for those of us who are dependent on travelling to the EU without undue hassle. Tourism between France and the U.K. is important for both economies. It was noticeable in recent days that there were large numbers of UK fans watching the Tour, encouraged by the success of Messrs Wiggins and Froome. Both countries would be the poorer if Brexit meant us retreating across the Channel.

For Single Step Tours, it is in the main UK visitors who travel to France and Belgium to see the WW1 battlefields. Brexit will not stop people wanting to make those pilgrimages. For me, however, there is a sense that the game has changed. When we stop in a vast space such as the Tyne Cot Cemetery on the Passchendaele Ridge outside Ypres, surveying 13,000 headstones, I am invariably asked "Can this happen again?"
My automatic reply before June 23rd ?
"No - because we're Europeans now"
So much better as an answer than a vague shrug of the shoulders and "I don't know".

The Iron Harvest

The so called "iron harvest" continues to amaze and appal in equal measure. The visitor to the Western Front has enough on his or her plate just getting their heads around the body count without contemplating the idea that this dreadful war might still be taking victims today.
A battlefield trip to the Somme with journalists from papers such as the Telegraph and Mirror led to a chance meeting with farmer Claude Samain, whose fields regularly yield piles of rusting munitions a hundred years on. In 1916, his fields were crisscrossed by a maze of communication trenches, filled with the flower of North country menfolk. Lads from Leeds and boys from Barnsley would have awaited their fate out on Claude's land. The ill fated Accrington Pals too. These were Kitchener's volunteers, who joined up in the breathless excitement of the late summer of 1914. They had trained hard, and were desperate to impress. This was their town's chance to make a mark. The Accrington Pals would become famous for the role they would play in the great breakthrough, they hoped. Tragically, they have become synonymous with the blood letting of July 1st, 1916. Accrington is forever associated with a strangely named football team and the fact that out of 700 men who went over the top on that sunny morning, 585 of them were dead or wounded just minutes later. They were, as a witness said, "mown down like meadow grass".
Claude's land is peaceful now. He showed us rusted heaps of metal, plied up against the brick wall of a barn. The weight and sharp edges of the shrapnel makes you shudder - what these red hot pieces of flying metal could do to a human body doesn't bear thinking about for too long. Venomous coils of barbed wire, spent cartridges, shell fuzes and bent rifle barrels had all been collected by Claude over the past few months. And around the corner, the dangerous stuff. Unexploded shells, some no doubt containing poison gas, stood to attention in neat rows waiting for the army truck to arrive. There didn't appear to be any rush.
Claude and his fellow farmers can be forgiven for being a little blasé about it all. He recalled his time as a child in these fields, exploring a nearby copse which had been used a medical post. He would chase around, hunting amongst the shredded pieces of tarpaulin for treasures in a place where  wounded men, some screaming, some at the very point of death, would have been carried in by sweating stretcher bearers. Suffering on an unimaginable scale has always formed the backdrop to his life in this quiet, rural corner of France.

 

STA Neil - kia July 1st 1916

Leeds Pals