It is 30 years since I first reported on the Tour de France. That’s quite a span of time so not surprisingly I feel rather aged as we now all wonder whether or not there will be a 2020 Tour.
To gain perspective, if you go back 30 years from that first Tour, you are in an era that seemed seriously distant back then: the 1960 Tour was the first since Fausto Coppi’s death that January, the first Tour for Tom Simpson, and the one where Roger Rivière suffered his career-ending crash on the Col de Perjuret.
Some things would never change throughout the 27 Tours I was to cover subsequently: the drive south to Poitiers for the Futuroscope Grand Départ felt like the start of a road trip which would take us who-knew-where. The hired car became progressively messier and smellier throughout the three and a half weeks with four of us spending several hours each day in it. Once into the set routine of travel to the start – drive – work in the press room – find hotel – the days passed with hypnotic speed.
A hermetic world of its own, divided into hermetic units: the car. We were a diverse bunch in that 405: an intense, creative photographer, Mark Wohlwender, who died tragically young in 2017; an equally intense and driven Fleet Street sports journalist, the Independent’s, Alan Fraser; Geoff Drake, the laid back Californian editor of Bicycling magazine, and myself, reporting for Cycling Weekly, the bible of cycling in Britain. Each of us new to the Tour, with completely different working briefs which had to be reconciled each day, as did our radically different driving styles. It still surprises me that there were so few tense moments. Perhaps I had left my Pet Shop Boys and Ian Dury CDs at home.
The day’s drive was one of the biggest differences. In 1990 the entire caravan drove the stage route between start and finish. It was a dangerous business for spectators, who ran the gauntlet of press and PR cars speeding from A to B. It meant a daily zig-zag through the publicity caravan, which had its compensations. Mars were handing out their newly invented ice cream bars from a vast bus, and were happy to bung a few the way of passing press. There was a daily roadside buffet at the 92nd kilometer organized by the Department des Hauts de Seine – no92 – where you could enjoy badly cooked sparrow gizzard with warm white wine while listening to Raphael Geminiani telling it like it was.
1990 was different in other ways. Those who had been on the Tour in the 1960s – such as the Observer’s Geoff Nicholson, with whom we shared a hotel every night – complained bitterly that the Tour was far far bigger and more anonymous meaning that the journalists had far less contact with riders and directeurs sportifs. But when I retired from traveling on the race in 2017, the utterly depressing contrast with the almost open access we enjoyed in the early 90s was the final nail in the coffin for me.
Back then, 90% of the riders turned up for a coffee or two in the village départ each morning and the English speakers would all congregate at the stand run by Credit Lyonnais where there were non-French newspapers. The only team that hid its riders in a bus was PDM. At the starts and finishes, all the others had to lurk in team cars or small camper vans. These were small enough that at one stage finish, I interviewed Greg LeMond through the window of his team’s camper. There were no press officers or public relations men. And no one had mobile phones. There was no need to bake outside a cordoned off team bus in the hope that a rider might emerge. They were all there, and most liked to talk.
This was all to the good for me, as my brief was to file several extended interviews for the magazine each week. The routine was to find riders at the village, set up meetings for the evening, or talk at length in a team car. Robert Millar was the best: an hour of the best Brit of the day ranting about how unpleasant the Tour had become – so hectic that you wiped out a set of brake blocks every day was the best line – and that marked the beginning of a good working relationship that lasts to this day.
Another high point, in hindsight, was an interview in a baking hot hotel Ibis on the outskirts of Pau, with a young Spaniard who had every right to be considered the moral winner having given up his chances of overall victory to work for his Reynolds team leader Pedro Delgado. Miguel Indurain (for it was he) spoke barely a word of French; I spoke barely a word of Spanish. It didn’t go far beyond platitudes but that was par for most Indurain interviews before and since.
The race was expected to be a repeat of the Fignon-LeMond-Delgado duel of the previous year, but it ended up a bizarre mishmash based around a freak break that escaped on stage one, when Claudio Chiappucci, Steve Bauer, Ronan Pensec and Frans Maassen gained 10min. That escape set the tone until the penultimate day’s time trial when Greg LeMond sealed his third win. As well as some amusing theatre from Chiappucci there were some real racing highlights, certainly compared to the machine-like days of US Postal and Team Sky: Millar destroying himself at l’Alpe dHuez to save Pensec’s yellow jersey; LeMond, Breukink and Delgado putting the boot into Chiappucci en route to Saint Etienne; LeMond unleashed at Luz-Ardiden with Indurain.
By the end, there was the sense of having been on a completely different planet for who knew how long, locked away in a small enclosed world where reality – financial, relationships, current affairs – barely intruded. Once home, there was a feeling that life was beginning anew after a lengthy hiatus. In my head, the start of the new year, which was once located at Christmas, now moved to October, when the next year’s Tour route was announced.
Photo: Back in the days when Tour de France winners didn’t have press officers or agents, Greg LeMond gives a spontaneous interview