Butcher, Blacksmith, Acrobat, Sweep

Zusatztext

<p>The first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating. Its riders included characters like Maurice Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman, said to have been swapped for a round of cheese by his parents in order to smuggle him into France to clean chimneys as a teenager, Hippolyte Aucouturier with his trademark handlebar moustache, and amateurs like Jean Dargassies, a blacksmith who had never raced before.</p><p>Would this ramshackle pack of cyclists draw crowds to throng France's rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes? Surprisingly it did, and, all thanks to a marketing ruse dreamed up to revive struggling newspaper<i>L'Auto</i>, cycling would never be the same again. Peter Cossins takes us through the inaugural Tour de France, painting a nuanced portrait of France in the early 1900s, to see where the greatest sporting event of all began.</p>

Autorenportrait

First drawn into the sport while a student in Spain in the mid-1980s, Peter Cossins has been writing about cycling since 1993, contributing principally to<i>Cycling Weekly</i>,<i>Cycle Sport</i>and<i>Procycling</i>.<i>The Monuments</i>, his history of cycling's five greatest one-day Classic races, was published in 2014, followed in 2015 by<i>Alpe dHuez</i>, an appraisal of cyclings greatest climb. He lives in the Ariège in the heart of the French Pyrenees.

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