CQ22-Digital

Le Véloce-sport had its offices at 3 Rue du Château-Trompette, a side street
just off the Place des Quinconces, a magisterially open space and one of
the largest public squares in Europe – just right for the start of a massdepart
cycle race. It was here that any aspiring cyclo-touriste
could purchase a copy of Voyage de Bordeaux à Paris par trois
vélocipédistes for the sum of 2F 30. This luxury edition –
200 pages and 2 illustrations – detailed the picaresque
adventures of Messrs George Thomas, president of
the Union Vélocipédique de France and chevalier
de la Légion d’honneur, Oscar Maillotte of the
Véloce Club Bordelaise and Maurice Martin of
Le Véloce-sport as they bowled through the
bucolic countryside towards the fleshpots of
the capital. Think Three Men on a Bike with
potholes, gîtes and pedals.
Maurice Martin, poet, writer and a longtime
member of the V.C.B. virtually
invented the idea of cyclo-touring and
promoted it enthusiastically through the
pages of Le Véloce-sport. But the magazine
had another mission – to challenge the
hegemony of the Parisian cycling press as
arbiters of all things vélocipédique. When
George Thomas took over as president of
the UVF in 1890, Le Véloce-sport became
the de facto house magazine.
Whether the exploits of Thomas, Maillotte
and Martin were the inspiration for three
pistards of the VCB – Fernand Panajou,
Théophile Lévelley and Pierre Rousset – to
create Bordeaux-Paris isn’t entirely clear, but
the synchronicity is neat enough. They said they
wanted to ‘strike the imagination’ of the rider by
arguably creating the world’s first Classic. For Le Vélocesport,
scooping Le Petit Journal and Pierre Giffard’s Paris-
Brest-Paris spectacular must have been sweet.
No such problems for the Le Véloce-sport event which, the
magazine was quick to claim, had even won the approbation of those
who were constitutionally opposed to bicycle racing in Bordeaux. By
1893 the list of prizes up for grabs included a watercolour offered by the
90