Col D'Aubisque - Tour de France

Tour De France

The Col d'Aubisque appeared in the Tour de France in 1910, crossed by François Lafourcade. It has appeared frequently since then, more than once every two years. It was included at the insistence of Alphone Steinès, a colleague of Henri Desgrange at the Tour de France. Steinès visited the man responsible for local roads, the ingénieur des ponts-et-chaussées, who said: "Take the riders up the Aubisque? You're completely crazy in Paris." Steinès agreed that the Tour would pay 5,000 francs to clear the pass. Desgrange knocked the price down to 2,000.

In 1951, Wim van Est was in the yellow jersey – the first Dutchman to wear it and chasing the leaders towards the Soulor when he slipped on gravel and fell into a ravine. He said:

That first bend was wet, slippery from the snow. And there were sharp stones on the road that the cars had kicked up, and my front wheel hit them and I went over. Well, there was a drop of 20m. They've built a barrier there now but then there was nothing to stop you going over. I fell 20 metres, rolling and rolling and rolling. My feet had come out of the straps, my bike had disappeared, and there was a little flat area, the only one that's there, no bigger than the seat of a chair, and I landed on my backside. A metre left or right and I'd have dropped on to solid stone, six or seven hundred metres down. My ankles were all hurt, my elbows were kaput. I was all bruised and shaken up and I didn't know where I was, but nothing was broken.

The team's manager, Kees Pellenaars, took a tow rope from the Dutch team's car. It was too short to reach van Est and so to it he tied 40 racing tyres. It was like that that he was pulled out. Van Est said: "It was all the tyres that Pellenaars had for the team. By the time they'd tugged me up, they were all stretched and they wouldn't stay on the wheels any more! Forty tyres! I wanted to get back on my bike and start racing again. But I couldn't. Pellenaars stopped the whole team."

Van Est told journalists: "I had the feeling that I was taking that bend badly but I so much wanted to keep the yellow jersey, so I went flat out and off I flew. A monument spot 50 years later, on July 17, 2001, says: "Here on 17 July 1951 the cyclist Wim van Est fell 70 metres. He survived but lost the yellow jersey." A newspaper advertisement in Holland showed van Est displaying the watch that he'd worn, with the legend: "My heart stopped, but not my Pontiac."