Henri Desgrange - Legacy

Legacy

Henri Desgrange was one of the few people in the world to have invented a sport: bicycle stage racing. Before him there had been cycle races that lasted more than one day but never a race composed of individual races adding up to a total. His achievement is not only to have created the Tour de France but that that achievement has been copied across the world in a multitude of other stage races from a weekend to a month long.

Desgrange grew up in an era when France had suffered humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War and when he believed the French were "tired, without muscle, without character and without willpower." Desgrange believed that sport and exercise would improve the nation physically and morally. It was a belief that he lived out in his own life, timing himself to walk across his bedroom even days before he died.

He believed the Tour de France had to be gruelling, to the extent that the perfect race for him would be one that only one rider could finish, because he needed it to inspire, to extend the limits of human achievement. Many of his rules, which now seem arcane, were to that end. He forbade riders to cooperate with each other, banning tactics now taken for granted, such as sharing the pacemaking. He insisted competitors mend their own bicycles and accept no outside help because independence and self-sufficiency were everything to him. For the same reason, he stood out against variable gears long after they had become common elsewhere.

Desgrange was close to tyrannical in his behaviour, according to the historian and writer Pierre Chany. He brooked no interference in his race, from officialdom let alone individual riders, and imposed penalties arbitrarily. His penalties were at one time so erratic that the entire Belgian team went home in disgust. It is impossible to say whether the Tour and the sport of bicycle stage racing would have been different had they been invented by someone else or had Desgrange handed over control while he was a younger and fitter man. The only thing that is certain is that Desgrange, for all his faults, created not just one of the biggest sporting events in the world but the very version of the sport that made it possible.

It is his unique personality and imprint on the race that has led the leader's yellow jersey to carry his initials, H.D., in the style in which he wrote them.