Climbers: How the Kings of the Mountains conquered cycling

by Peter Cossins

‘On days like that when you’re at your very best in the mountains, you get the impression that you’re no longer within your own body, that somehow you’re watching yourself perform.

The sceptics were quickly won round, Petit-Breton among them. ‘Never has it been so well demonstrated how limitless human strength is. What a marvellous mechanism this human machine is, leaving all of man’s creations far behind it in terms of suppleness and quality’, he wrote in La Vie au Grand Air.

Oh Sappey! Oh Laffrey! Oh Col Bayard! Oh Tourmalet! It would be negligent of me if I didn’t proclaim that compared to the Galibier you are but pale and vulgar babies; faced with this giant we can do no more than tip our hats and bow!

ants on the move; it was in fact our men nibbling away at the monster employing their pedals as teeth . . . It was freezing cold up at the summit, and when Georget passed, having placed his victor’s foot on the head of the monster, he passed close to us, dirty, his moustache full of snot and food that he’d eaten at the last control point and his jersey smeared with the grime from the last stream that he’d had to ford his way through, he directed at us the barbed but august comment, ‘I bet that’s surprised you!’

While a little irritating when viewed from the Anglo-Saxon journalistic perspective, where an emphasis has always been placed on accuracy, these discrepancies for the sake of colour and drama were and still are an accepted element of the lead story on the previous day’s racing in what was L’Auto and is now L’Équipe.

Rather than reporting the who, what, when and why, their goal has been to transport their readers into the race, to praise, to chastise and to mythologize, and nowhere has this been more evident than in the mountains and the feats of Émile Georget, Gustave Garrigou and the ‘fleshless men’, as they’ve been described by writer and former L’Équipe correspondent Philippe Bordas, who have followed them.

There was little thought of pacing themselves for particular stages, of perhaps saving their resources for the mountains. Why do so when you might be affected by some vagary of the road, usually a mechanical setback? It was better to race flat out from the off and take advantage of your rivals’ travails, building up a cushion for those moments when you’d need to rely on your gains, as Scieur did that day in the Pyrenees.

rather than two dozen beautifully indexed gears, racers competing on either side of the Great War were generally limited to two, using a smaller one when climbing, then taking out and flipping the rear wheel to engage a bigger gear when on descents and the flat. Loosening the nuts to make this change could be a lengthy process in cold and wet conditions when a rider had spent two hours climbing a long pass and was at the point of exhaustion.

They epitomized this new breed, described by writer Philippe Bordas as the first ‘cyclists who climbed like chamois’. They were, he added quite unforgettably, ‘Hermits fed on grasshoppers. On twigs.’