Circuit des Champs de Bataille
The Circuit des Champs de Bataille ( Tour of the Battlefields ) was a one-time stage race that took place from April 28 to May 11, 1919 in northern France , Belgium and Luxembourg .
The race was organized by the newspaper Le Petit Journal with the aim of reviving cycling after the First World War , to honor the war dead and to advertise. It was advertised on January 15, 1919, just under two months after the armistice on November 11, 1918: towns and villages were still in ruins and the Spanish flu was spreading rapidly.
Le Petit Journal offered prize money of 8,500 francs - as much as four years' income for a worker - to make the race attractive to well-known drivers. The race consisted of seven stages, the first of which started in Strasbourg and the last ended there - as an indication that the Alsatian city was now part of France again. The race led through Luxembourg , Brussels , Amiens , Paris , Bar-le-Duc and Belfort , among others . The entire race lasted almost 2000 kilometers, the individual stages were around 300 kilometers long, with a day of rest between the stages.
Initially, 140 drivers registered to take part, but many of them did not start because they were not trained enough or they did not have the right equipment. In the end, 87 riders started, including such prominent athletes as Oscar Egg , Jean Alavoine , Ali Neffati from Tunisia (who wore a fez during the race ) and Paul Duboc as well as future stars, including Jules Vanhevel , Lucien Buysse and Albert Dejonghe . The winner of the race was Belgian Charles Deruyter with a margin of two hours and 25 minutes. It was reported that because of the cold he finished the second stage in a long women's fur coat given to him by a spectator, and that after the third stage he was so frozen that he could not write his name on the checklist.
According to the historian Christopher Thompson, of the 87 riders who started, only 13 crossed the finish line, which is why he speaks of the “toughest race in cycling history”. Many towns and villages through which the race passed were destroyed by the war. Le Petit Journal also reported "terrible weather, broken roads, cold wind and freezing conditions". The drivers were only informed about the approximate route, so that they had to look for signs to the next town in the rubble landscape. In addition, the drivers suffered from a poor supply of provisions and the tires were of poor quality. Some local newspapers had warned of the bad roads. The organizers of the race argued that these conditions would give the race more prestige , pointing to the military cyclists in the war who would have had to master these roads under rifle fire .
Newspapers such as Le Petit Journal and L'Auto celebrated the participants in the race as “heroic survivors” who symbolized the national rebirth: around 67 cyclists had died during the war. The organizers hailed the race as a "victory ... for the French breed". Vélo-Sport praised the Belgian participants, three of whom took first places, as “giants of courage and will” who gave the public “lessons in vitality”.
A one-day race of the same name was organized the following year . The Frenchman Henri Pélissier won .
literature
- Frank Becuwe: Omloop van de Slagvelden: 1919, de meest heroìsche wielerwedstrijd ooit . Davidsfonds Uitgeverij, Leuven, ISBN 978-90-6306-654-3 (Dutch).
Web links
- Circuit des Champs de Bataille in the Radsportseiten.net database
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Tom Isitt: Circuit des Champs de Bataille. (No longer available online.) Rouleur, July 9, 2014, archived from the original on November 17, 2015 ; Retrieved May 25, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Christopher S. Thompson: Tour de France. University of California Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-93486-3 , p. 52 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)
- ↑ a b c d Tom Isitt last: Saddles, Somme and snow: a tale of the toughest cycle race ever. The Guardian , April 8, 2014, accessed May 25, 2017 .
- ↑ Stijn Knuts / Pascal Delheye: Sports, Work and the Professional Cyclist in Belgium, 1907-40 . In: History Workshop Journal . tape 79 , no. 1 , 2015, p. 154-176 .
