 | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Eugène Christophe |
| Nickname | Cri-cri Le vieux Gaulois (The oldGaul) Le serrurier de Malakoff (TheMalakoff locksmith) |
| Born | (1885-01-22)22 January 1885 Paris, France |
| Died | 1 February 1970(1970-02-01) (aged 85) Paris, France |
| Team information | |
| Discipline | Road and cyclo-cross |
| Role | Rider |
| Professional teams | |
| 1904–1905 | no information |
| 1906 | Labor |
| 1907–1911 | Alcyon |
| 1912 | 3 teams |
| 1913–1914 | Peugeot–Wolber |
| 1914–1918 | No information |
| 1919–1921 | La Sportive |
| 1922 | Automoto-Wolber-Russell |
| 1923–1924 | Christophe–Hutchinson |
| 1925 | JB Louvet |
| 1926 | Christophe–Hutchinson /Peugeot–Dunlop |
| Major wins | |
| |
Eugène Christophe (22 January 1885 – 1 February 1970) was a Frenchroad bicycle racer and pioneer ofcyclo-cross. He was a professional from 1904 until 1926. In 1919 he became the first rider to wear theyellow jersey of theTour 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.
Eugène Christophe rode his first race when he was 18 and his last when he was 41 in 1926. He worked as alocksmith until racing took over his life.
The 1906 Tour de France was Christophe's first. He finished in ninth place behindRené Pottier.
In the1912 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 winnerOdile Defraye.
Christophe won three consecutive stages using this method (including the Tour's longest successful solo break of 315 km toGrenoble). 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.
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In1913 Christophe was well placed to win when a mechanical failure cost him the race. He rode the first part, from Paris toCherbourg and then down the coast to thePyrenees cautiously.[1] He was in second place when the race stopped inBayonne 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 behindOdile Defraye, of Belgium.
Christophe rode forPeugeot and his team attacked from the start to demoralise the rivalAlcyon riders and, in particular, Defraye. It worked. Defraye was 11 minutes behind at Oloron-Ste-Marie, 14 inEaux-Bonnes, 60 atArgelès. He dropped out atBarèges, 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 gear[2]
Christophe said:
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.[1] Filling his pockets with bread, Christophe set off over two more mountains and eventually finished the tour in seventh place.[6] 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.[7] Some reports say that Christophe broke his forks because he ran into a car on the descent. The historian and author, Bill McGann, says:
Christophe became a soldier when France declared war in 1914. He served with a cycling battalion.
In1919 Christophe became the first man to wear theyellow jersey of race leader, though he was destined not to win the race overall. Christophe was riding with a greyLa Sportive jersey when, while leading, Desgrange gave him the first yellow jersey.[9] Christophe said:
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 fromMetz toDunkirk, he was leading by 30 minutes. His fork broke again, this time on the cobbles ofValenciennes 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 behindJean Alavoine. His story captured the public imagination and he was awarded the same prize money as winnerFirmin Lambot. His prize – 13,310 francs – came from a subscription opened byL'Auto, the paper which organised the race. Donations ranged from three francs to 500 given byHenri de Rothschild. It took 20 lists in the paper to name every donor.[13]
Christophe kept the repaired forks in the basement of his home.[1]
Placed in the top three and still in with a chance of overall victory, another brokenfork on the descent of theGalibier in theAlps forced Christophe to once more walk out of the mountain on foot.
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.[1]
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.[14]
The plaque on the wall read:
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.[1]
The square at Ste-Marie-de-Campan, and a make of toe-clips, are named after him.
Christophe is most famous for the broken forks of the Tour de France, but his suffering was far greater in the1910 edition of Milan–San Remo which was run in dreadful weather with glacial temperatures. There were 71 riders at the start; only four finished inSan Remo. Christophe recounted:
Christophe looked at the man and saidcasa [house]. He took him into the house, undressed him and wrapped him in a blanket. Christophe did physical exercises to get his blood restarted. Then van Hauwaert and Paul came in. "They were so frozen that they put their hands into the flames. Ernest Paul had lost a shoe without noticing", Christophe said.
It took a month in hospital for Christophe to recover from frostbite to his hands and the damage the cold had done to his body. It was another two years before he got back to his original health. Only three riders finished and the result is still uncertain because some reports say van Hauwaert came fourth and others that he was disqualified for hanging on to a car.
Christophe was nationalcyclo-cross champion from 1909 to 1914, then again in 1921.[17]
Christophe was a short and methodical man who raced with a 20 franc coin, a 10 franc coin, a chain link and a spoke key in a chamois bag hung round his neck. The journalistJock Wadley, who visited him at Malakoff, said: "M. Christophe had a tidy mind. That is why his workshop is tidy, with every tool clean and in its place. His home is equally in order. I had merely to mention some subject and he would go to a drawer, take out an envelope or a file, marked 'Tour 1912' or 'Paris–Roubaix 1920' or 'cross-cyclo pédèstre '. Every photograph had a neatly written caption on the back."[7]
His race diary dated from the start of the 1920s. A neat, small hand described every race, stage by stage, his impressions, results and expenses.[18] Christophe said that every night in the race hotel he laid out his kit like a fireman, "so that the moment I was called in the morning I didn't waste time looking for my clothes and equipment. Shoes, jersey, goggles, shorts and the rest of it were laid out neatly."[7]
Wadley added:
Eugène Christophe died in the Hôpital Broussais in Paris. He lived inMalakoff, near Paris, all his life. He was a member of the L'Étoile Sportive de Malakoff cycling club from his first races until his death.Jacques Anquetil awarded him the Tour de France medal at the end of the 1965 race. Christophe was 81.[19]
Christophe never won the Tour, but his stories have become part of the race's mythology. Christophe (likeRené Vietto andRaymond Poulidor after him) is celebrated as an eternal second, more famous for his near-misses than his more successful rivals.
National CX ChampionshipsNational CX ChampionshipsNational CX ChampionshipsNational CX Championships
after Stages 3–5National CX ChampionshipsNational CX ChampionshipsNational CX Championships
