The Call of the Road: The History of Cycle Road Racing

A road race is many things. It includes many aspects of life, but magnified; a maelstrom of ambitions, plans, desire, cooperation and treachery. A road race ebbs and flows through the countryside like a living thing, a kaleidoscope of colour, a visceral mass of muscle and machine, a chess game played on wheels. And it doesn’t matter what level: whether it’s the Tour de France or evening league, road races share the same basic qualities. Only speed, distance, stakes and the sophistication of the game are different.

Road races are battles, pure battles where social norms are replaced by personal or cohort needs. Basic needs like food and drink to re-fuel and shelter to save energy, and higher needs like peer approval, money, victory and admiration. It’s rare to experience physical battles in everyday life, and on that level the fight to succeed brings out something primitive, making road racing wonderful to experience and wonderful to watch.

But the best professionals raise road racing to an art; the art of warfare maybe, the art of a hunter perhaps, but still art and glorious to behold and appreciate. Especially since road racing is not played out in stadiums or on pitches, but on incredible natural canvases. Some are stark, set on the cobblestone roads and brutish hills of northern Europe. Others are stunning, like races in the great mountain ranges of Italy, France and Spain. But all are beautiful in their unique way.

There are single-day road races and stage races. Some single-day races have more history or more notable terrain, and they are called the classics. Of the classics five are the biggest and the best, and they are known as the ‘monuments’ of cycling. Stage races are at least two or three days long, most are around one week, but the biggest stage races last for three weeks. They are the Grand Tours: the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta a España, and the biggest and oldest of them all, the Tour de France.

The Tour de France is not just the biggest bike race in the world, it’s the biggest annual sports event in the world, only ever surpassed by football’s World Cup and the Olympic Games. Figures from 2011 show that the Tour de France, or simply the Tour as it’s referred to in cycling, was covered by seventy radio stations, four thousand newspapers and press agencies, and seventy websites, who between them sent 2,300 journalists from thirty-five countries to the race. The Tour de France website, www.letour.fr had 14 million unique visitors that year. Over 100 TV channels broadcast the race to 190 countries in 2011, sixty of them receiving live pictures. And that’s just the media coverage, which has grown since 2011; the Tour de France has a truly worldwide audience today.

The number of roadside spectators is harder to gauge, but the Tour organisers Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) reckon that a staggering 12 to 15 million people watch the race pass by at some point each year. And that’s one of the big attractions of road racing: it goes to the places where people live, it comes down their roads and past their houses. Still, many spectators want to see the race on a famous mountain climb, and they must either walk or bike there on the day of the stage, or they must drive there two or three days beforehand to get any chance of finding a place to park. Many camp on the mountainside, turning their visit into a holiday.