CQ27_FINAL_SPREADS (1)

FROM PARIS TO THE
BLUE WAVES OF THE
MEDITERRANEAN,
FROM MARSEILLE TO
BORDEAUX, PASSING
A woman is about as much use
to a male cyclist as a pair of dirty
ALONG THE ROSEATE
AND
socks
DREAMING
or a woodburning stove
ROADS
in
summer.
SLEEPING UNDER THE
SUN, ACROSS THE
CALM OF THE FIELDS
OF THE VENDÉE, FOL-
LOWING THE LOIRE,
WHICH FLOWS ON STILL
AND SILENT, OUR MEN
ARE GOING TO RACE
MADLY, UNFLAGGINGLY.
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was heard around the cycling
world.
The head and the legs: the
birth of the Desgrange
mythology
Priced at 3 francs 50 centimes,
Desgrange’s seminal training
manual appeared in 1894 and
stayed in print until 1930.
Pitched as the advice of an
older Desgrange to a fifteenyear-old
wannabe cyclist – a
portrait of the artist as a young
and hungry pedaleur – it distils
all the misogyny and malecentred
anthropolatry already
at play in Desgrange’s nascent
mythology. So, we have the
assertions that an intelligent
man will always beat a brute,
and that you should always
choose a stupid woman to
attend to your hygienic needs,
and Lord knows there are plenty
to choose from. After all, as he
most famously asserts, a woman
is about as much use to a male
cyclist as a pair of dirty socks or
a woodburning stove in summer.
The methods that Desgrange
outlines – the rinsing of the
mouth with vinegar to endure
hours of thirst, holding the
bladder to avoid the need to
urinate, the exhortation that
there be no weakness, no gifts
in a rider’s approach – seem at
once outlandish and startlingly
contemporary. With its emphasis
on intelligence and strength,
cunning and invincibility, the
head and the legs in harmony,
Desgrange lays out the blueprint
for the Tour de France, years
before Géo Lefèvre will sit down
with him at Baudelaire’s table in
the Brasserie Zimmer on the day
of Emile Zola’s funeral and say,
“What if . . . ?”
Written between the demise of
his own cycling career and the
advent of the Tour de France,
La Tête et les Jambes belongs
to an era when the bicycle is
still the preserve of the modern
bourgeois man, before it filters
through to the working class
and becomes a tool of mass
transport rather than a pseudointellectual
pursuit in the early
1900s. Christopher Thompson,
the great social historian of the
Tour, argues that Desgrange’s
writing was a way to elaborate
his own social philosophy of
sport, and then implement it
through the race itself.
In a series of letters in his
training manual-cum-epistolatory
novel, Desgrange links the male
body and ideas of masculinity,
hygiene, modernisation and
patriotism into a blueprint for
becoming “a fighter and a great
cyclist.” Only by making manly
resolutions might young Henri
one day be capable of winning a
race like, say, a tour of France.
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