No more Alpe d'Huez

It must have been nice being a cycling journalist back in the day. They could just make stuff up. And they did.

Octave Lapize didn’t call anyone a bunch of assassins or criminals. We are meant to believe that Lapize came crawling to a stop during the stage in 1910 and on a route of 326 kilometres, he just so happened to stop in front of the only journalist around and then spat his vitriol at Henri Desgrange while the journalist scribbled it all down.

It’s one of the most repeated stories in cycling history and it is, in all probability, a load of bollocks.

I do wonder sometimes what else is just nonsense. On a much milder level, I am guilty myself of repeating something that I had always thought Christian Prudhomme had said. Around the time that he took over the reins of the Tour de France, I was sure he said something along the lines of wanting to have a Tour with no high mountains. That he wanted three weeks full of rouleur-y medium mountains stages. That this would encapsulate the essence of bike racing. That riders would then need to show they can win with the têtes as well as simply the jambes.

I’ve repeated this Prudhommeism many times on podcasts over the years. I’m sure I can hear in my minds ear Lionel Birnie also mentioning it more than once on The Cycling Podcast.

I have looked for evidence of this quote now and I can’t find it. I don’t think it’s a case of the internet just turning to shit and everything disappearing in a sea of broken links and 404s. I’ve tried looking back through magazines of the time. I thought I knew precisely where I had read it. I thought it was in the official Tour de France guide for the 2008 race.

It was never quite clear when Prudhomme properly took over from Jean-Marie Leblanc as the Tour de France guy. It seemed like a years long process but I believe 2008 was the year when Prudhomme actually got his mitts on the route itself. For instance, he cast aside the prologue time trial for the first time in 41 years.

There is an interview with Christian Prudhomme in that guide, but he doesn’t say anything regarding wanting a Tour with no high mountains. This is all he really says about the high mountains:

…which is kind of the opposite - taking the Tour to the highest possible place.

There is a more recent interview with him on Cycling News about the 2019 route where he said:

"Our desire is not to make things harder but more varied," Prudhomme said. "There will be less hors catégorie cols than in previous years but there will be more second category climbs. There will be more medium mountains, where the race is harder to control, and we take full responsibility for that decision.

Which is kind of, but not quite, what I always thought he’d said. But was more than a decade after I thought he’d said it anyway.

Whether he did or didn’t say that, he should do it. Now.

The Vuelta is about to be Poggified, Pogginised, Pogged. We’ve had to sit and watch Pog winning race after race after race. So I’m sorry but you’re also going to have to read through me repeating my position on Pog one more time:

There are two distinct aspects to the experience of Tadej Pogacar doing what he’s doing to the sport of professional cycling. There is the achievement itself. I can appreciate the greatness of what he is doing. I love that stuff. This is a large part of where my interest in cycling stems from - stats, facts, trivia, the first person in xx years to do yyyy. It’s what I’m all about. But this comes after the fact. After he has done it, I like to look back on what he has done and marvel.

The other aspect is watching the race unfold. And if you’ve set aside a nice 90 minutes for yourself on a free Saturday afternoon to watch the last 50 or 60 kilometres of a bike race, and you sit down on the couch to settle in, and you switch on and see that Pog is already a minute and a half clear solo. That’s shit. I’ll go out and cut the grass instead.

Of course there are exceptions to this. The Alpe d’Huez stage win was riveting. Milan-Sanremo was even more so. But more often than not, when Pog decides with 60km to go that he wants to win, the jeopardy is gone, the uncertainty no longer exists and the thrill of a racing finale has been robbed from us.

I made a spreadsheet.