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Spokesperson (3) |
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Lunching on Wheels ? Two members of our club are considering later this year riding a twelve hour time trial for the first time. Apart from the need to be fit and have unusual stamina, there are also the more personal requirements which have to be allowed for. Consider the matter of food and drink over twelve hours of extreme exertion. There is a necessary requirement for a considerable amount of easily digestible food, not to mention liquid at the rate of around a pint an hour depending on the weather and temperature on the day. Spare a thought then for the riders in the early editions of the Tour de France. The first event was of 2428 kilometres - and in only six stages! That is over 400 kilometres (250 miles) per stage and the winner's average speed in that 1903 event was just over 25 kph. (16 miles an hour) so the riders were on the road for over sixteen hours on each stage. It is even more remarkable when you also remember that they often started the stage in the depths of the night so that they arrived at their destination at a 'civilized' hour -civilized, that is, for the spectators at the finish. Little was known about scientific nutrition and these hardy cyclists often bought or scrounged what they could locally as they went along, since there were no support motor vehicles in those early days to keep them provisioned. It was not uncommon for riders simply to stop at roadside cafes and restaurants when they wanted to eat or drink and there are tales of mud-covered cyclists descending like locusts on small bistros and stripping the place of everything that was edible or drinkable. In the archives of the Societe du Tour de France there are invoices submitted by cafe owners for meals taken 'on the run' by passing competitors who would then glibly tell the proprietor to send the bill to the organizing magazine, L 'Equipe. It is not recorded whether they actually got paid or, if so, by whom. What has also come down to us from that distant time of unmade roads, and single gear machines is a wealth of early sepia photographs of haggard, mud-encrusted riders sitting at cafe tables to take a hurried breakfast before they continued on their way. At a time when few people traveled any distance from where they were born or lived, these exotic cyclists came as if from another planet, particularly to the more remote parts of rural France. Apart from the strange 'otherness' of the riders themselves, what is also most noticeable in these photographs is the poverty and primitive surroundings of these simple establishments. Little more than a brick or stone floored bare room with scrubbed wooden tables and benches and almost none of the trappings or fittings which we would now expect to find in any cafe or roadside bar. I have a photo taken in the early 1920s of the Parisian rider Jacquinot, caked with dirt and with his spare 'tubs' still wrapped around his shoulders, guzzling a bowl of soup at a bistro table while a pretty peasant waitress looks on in wonder at this hero from so far away. The sports artist Rene Pellarin (Pellos) perfectly captured these scenes in one of his superb illustrations made in 1959 for a history of the Tour de France with riders from different teams all stopping for breakfast at a village cafe some time in the first decade of the twentieth century. In another photograph from this period, two Swiss riders are seen seated on the steps of a bar at Da1stein in the Moselle drinking litre mugs of beer with their bikes propped up alongside them, so covered in mud that you cannot read the race number plates under the top tubes.
As the Tour progressed and grew in importance, wayside feeding stations were arranged where riders would still stop to collect and even to consume their supplies. There are picnic scenes of riders pitching into substantial meals (everything stopped for Ie dejeuner) and taking on board supplies of wine or beer to refresh themselves further along the road. In 1924 the brothers Pelissier (brother Henri was the winner in 1923), called a halt to their efforts at a roadside restaurant in Coutances on the Cherbourg peninsula and, over the breakfast coffee cups, 'spilled the beans' to one of the major sports reporters of the time, Albert Londres, who wrote a damning article on the conditions (and the pay) of what he memorably described as the 'slaves of the road'. His article caused a sensation and went some way to ensuring that more of the profits made from running the Tour filtered down the cyclists who rode it. Since those days, much more has been learnt of the physical needs of the long distance competitor. Certainly you would not get very far today if you attempted to ride on a good French lunch and a bottle of wine with it, although there is a case only a few years ago when a tricycle competitor in the British national twelve hour insisted on stopping for a full 'sit-down' lunch pre-booked at a roadside pub and then narrowly missed breaking the tricycle record. When this was pointed out to him, he replied, 'but otherwise I would have missed my lunch and that would have been even worse!' I am sure that Mike and Dianne will equip themselves with exactly the right supplies for their efforts in their first twelve hour - the usual dried fruits, honey sandwiches, nutri-bars and sports drinks and mineral water. I cannot imagine that they would be tempted by the delights of the morning stop for croissants and cafe au lait and I certainly could not bring myself to recommend to them a lunchtime menu of cassoulet or daube a l'avignonnaise or the bottle of cotes du Rhone to go with it as suitable sustenance for today's long distance cyclist. |
