Eugène Christophe (22 January 1885 – 1 February 1970) was a French road bicycle racer and pioneer of cyclo-cross. He was a professional from 1904 until 1926. In 1919 he became the first rider to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour de France.
Eugène Christophe rode 11 Tours de France and finished eight. He never won but he became famous for having to weld together his bicycle while leading. It was one of a series of events that coloured his racing career.
Origins Eugène Christophe rode his first race when he was 18 and his last when he was 41 in 1926. He worked as a locksmith until racing took over his life.
Tour de France
The 1906 race
The 1906 Tour de France was Christophe's first. He finished in ninth place behind René Pottier.
The 1912 race
In the 1912 Tour de France Christophe was denied victory by the system of awarding victory to the winner on points. Throughout the race he was the strongest rider, but the Belgians rode together to win sprints to amass points. Only when Christophe could drop the peloton did he finish ahead of eventual winner Odile Defraye.
Christophe won three consecutive stages using this method (including the Tour's longest successful solo break of 315 km to Grenoble). Had the race been decided on time, the result would have been closer – Christophe would have led until the final stage, when he sat up in disgust allowing a group to ride away. As a result, the 1913 race reverted to a time-based classification.
1913 and the Tourmalet incident
In 1913 Christophe was well placed to win when a mechanical failure cost him the race. He rode the first part, from Paris to Cherbourg and then down the coast to the Pyrenees cautiously.Sporting Cyclist, UK, May 1967, p19 He was in second place when the race stopped in Bayonne on the night before the first day in the mountains, when the course featured a succession of cols: the Osquich, Aubisque, Soulor, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. The field set off at 3am with Christophe 4m 5s behind Odile Defraye, of Belgium.
Christophe rode for Peugeot and his team attacked from the start to demoralise the rival Alcyon riders and, in particular, Defraye. It worked. Defraye was 11 minutes behind at Oloron-Ste-Marie, 14 in Eaux-Bonnes, 60 at Argelès. He dropped out at Barèges, at the foot of the Tourmalet, the highest pass in the Pyrenees. Christophe dropped all the field except another Belgian, Philippe Thys, who followed at a few hundred metres. Thys was of no danger, however, because he had lost too much time earlier. The two were five minutes ahead of the rest.
Christophe stopped at the top of the mountain, reversed his back wheel to pick a higher gearDerailleur gears were banned in the Tour de France for nearly another 20 years; riders had different-sized cogs on each side of the back wheel.
Christophe said:
I plunged full speed towards the valley. According to Henri Desgrange's calculation,Desgrange was organiser of the Tour de France I was then heading the general classification with a lead of 18 minutes. So, I was going full speed. All of a sudden, about ten kilometres from Ste-Marie-de-Campan down in the valley, I feel that something is wrong with my handlebars. I cannot steer my bike any more. I pull on my brakes and I stop. I see my forks are broken. Well, I tell you now that my forks were broken but I wouldn't say it at the time because it was bad publicity for my sponsor.
And there I was left alone on the road. When I say the road, I should say the path. All the riders I had dropped during the climb soon caught me up. I was weeping with anger. I remember I heard my friend Petit-Breton shouting as he saw me, 'Ah, Cri-Cri, poor old lad.'Cri-Cri was Christophe's nickname. It followed the tradition of doubling the first syllable of a name. It is a children's word for a bird and the name became popular when Christophe wore the first yellow jersey, which he and spectators thought made him look like a canary. Christophe was also known as Le Vieux Gallois for the moustache he often had, which made him resemble an Old Gaul, an early resident of France. I was getting angry. As I walked down, I was looking for a short cut. I thought maybe one of those pack trails would lead me straight to Ste-Marie-de-Campan. But I was weeping so badly that I couldn't see anything. With my bike on my shoulder, I walked for more than ten kilometres. On arriving in the village at Ste-Marie-de-Campan, I met a young girl who led me to the blacksmith on the other side of the village. His name was Monsieur Lecomte.McCullagh, James, ed (1976), American Bicycle Racing, Rodale, USA, , p134
It took two hours to reach the forge. Lecomte offered to weld the broken forks back together but a race official and managers of rival teams would not allow it. A rider, said the rules, was responsible for his own repairs and outside assistance was prohibited. Christophe set about the repair as Lecomte told him what to do. It took three hours and the race judge penalised him 10 minutes – reduced later to three – because Christophe had allowed a seven-year-old boy, Corni, to pump the bellows for him. Filling his pockets with bread, Christophe set off over two more mountains and eventually finished the tour in seventh place. The building on the site of the forge has a plaque commemorating the episode.
The forks which cost Christophe the race were taken away by Peugeot. He didn't see them again until a dying man bequeathed them to him more than 30 years later.Sporting Cyclist, UK, May 1959 Some reports say that Christophe broke his forks because he ran into a car on the descent. The historian and author, Bill McGann, says:
I have found no mention of a car in Christophe's own retelling of the story. Broken forks were not unusual. I am sure that the poor state of 1913 metallurgy and bad mountain roads caused the disaster. My own theory, based on little information, is that the car story is probably a piece of Peugeot disinformation. It must have been awful for Peugeot to have their famous rider celebrated for having broken a fork. A car crash makes this all easy to explain. The final nail in the coffin of the story is that Christophe said 'I wouldn't have told you then because it was bad publicity for my firm.' If it had been a car crash, there would have been no bad publicity because no one expects a bike to withstand a car crash.McGann, Bill and Carol (2006), The Story of the Tour de France, Dogear, USA, , p42
First world war Christophe became a soldier when France declared war in 1914. He served with a cycling battalion.
1919 race and the yellow jersey
In 1919 Christophe became the first man to wear the yellow jersey of race leader, though he was destined not to win the race overall. Christophe was riding with a grey La Sportive jersey when, while leading, Desgrange gave him the first yellow jersey. Christophe said:
So soon after the war, the cycle industry was not yet in action again, and the only marque supplying material was La SportiveA combined team of available riders, its costs shared by the trade to keep alive interest in cycling. and there was little difference between any of the jerseys they supplied. One day – it was on the 482km stage from Les Sables d'Olonne to BayonneThe longest stage the Tour has ever had; it was so long that the race went so slowly that Desgrange abandoned his theory that long distances revealed true champions. – Monsieur Baugé, an official,Alphonse Baugé, charismatic team manager remarked to Henri Desgrange that it was difficult enough for him to pick out the various riders and the public must find it impossible. Couldn't the race leader wear a special jersey?
However, Christophe was not at first pleased to wear the yellow jersey as he complained that the spectators laughed and told him that he looked like a canary.
By the start of the penultimate stage from Metz to Dunkirk, he was leading by 30 minutes. His fork broke again, this time on the cobbles of Valenciennes and, although being within a kilometre of the nearest forge, he lost more than two and a half hours and the race while he made repairs. On the final stage he had a run of punctures and dropped from second to third overall behind Jean Alavoine. His story captured the public imagination and he was awarded the same prize money as winner Firmin Lambot. His prize – 13,310 francs – came from a subscription opened by L'Auto, the paper which organised the race. Donations ranged from three francs to 500 given by Henri de Rothschild. It took 20 lists in the paper to name every donor.Woodland, Les (2007), The Yellow Jersey Guide to the Tour de France, Yellow Jersey, UK, , p89
Christophe kept the repaired forks in the basement of his home.
1922 race and another broken fork
Placed in the top three and still in with a chance of overall victory, another broken fork on the descent of the Galibier in the Alps forced Christophe to once more walk out of the mountain on foot.
The 1925 race
The 1925 Tour was Christophe's last. He was 40 and finished 18th, 19 years after first riding the race. The anecdote of the race was that the Belgian, Émile Masson, was so tired from long and repeated days of racing that he asked Christophe to punch him in the face to wake him up.
Commemoration The French cycling federation in 1951 placed a plaque on the wall of the building that stands now where the forge once stood at Ste-Marie-de-Campan. Christophe, then 66, re-enacted the day that cost him the Tour de France. He carried his bike on his shoulder, the front wheel in his hand, to the forge. There, wearing race clothes, he played out the way he had repaired his forks. With him were the judge who supervised him that day, and Corni, who as an 11-year-old had helped pump the fire. They were joined by Mme Despiau, the first woman Christope met on entering the village.Sporting Cyclist, UK, undated cutting
The plaque on the wall read:
Here, in 1913, Eugène Christophe, French racing cyclist, first in the general classification of the Tour de France, victim of a mechanical accident on the Tourmalet, repaired the fork of his bicycle at the forge. Having covered numerous kilometres by foot, in the mountains, and having lost numerous hours, Eugène Cristophe didn't abandon the race that he should have won, showing a sublime example of willpower. Gift of the Fédération Française de Cyclisme "under the patronage of L'Équipe.
Christophe's name was spelled the second time, as shown, with a missing H. The plaque stayed there until 2003, when it was replaced to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tour.
In 1965, Radio Luxembourg held a party to mark Christophe's 80th birthday. The station announced that he was cycling to the station from Malakoff and, jokingly, said anyone seeing a tiny old man riding a heavy bike through Paris should give him a wave: it would be Eugène Christophe. By the time Christophe reached the studio, he was in a cortège of 100 cycling fans, among them the former world champion, Georges Speicher.
The square at Ste-Marie-de-Campan, and a make of toe-clips, are named after him.
1910 Milan–San Remo Christophe is most famous for the broken forks of the Tour de France, but his suffering was far greater in the 1910 edition of Milan–San Remo which was run in dreadful weather with glacial temperatures. There were 71 riders at the start; only four finished in San Remo. Christophe recounted:
The weather had been good at the start of the week but it turned really bad and Alphonse Baugé [the manager] told us that we'd be going over the Turchino even though the road was bad and covered with snow. François Faber and Louis Trousselier cheered us up by saying 'What does it matter if we've got Lapize and Christophe the two cyclo-cross champions with us?'