The one and a half century long history of road cycling races witnessed plenty of changes in material circumstances and lifestyle. Being a sport event organized at the places of the everday life, road cycling has also a unique connection to the world outside the competitions.
The smoking cyclists
Smoking is unhealthy and uncool, right? It’s a good trend to ban it at public places. However, what is history, what happened in the past, couldn’t and shouldn’t be changed. We shouldn’t deny, that photos from the 1920s are existing of cyclists having fun while smoking.
( To learn more about the protagonist of the picture just click the link above.)
Beer drinking cyclists
Also, alkohol isn’t cool either.
But we should never forget, that for thousand and thousand years, people trusted more alkoholic beverages, than pure water due to the fear, they might catch something serious disase from the latter.
(Tour de France 1921)
On the other hand, riders during the early period of cycling races, especially, when they were independent and/or amateur participants, they usually had to organize for themselves, where and how and what kind of food and drink they get during a stage.
Having a meal alone in a café
Taking a look a this cyclist eating alone in a café might make you feel sad for him. Like he would be lost, far behind the peloton, and now he must eat to have enough energy to catch up with them.
Don’t be sad.
As I mentioned above, it was the normal way to get food during a race.
Also, this picture was taken on the 5th stage of Tour de France 1922. Robert Jacquinot just lost his leading position on the previous stage after wearing the yellow jersey for three days.
Untarmacked roads
The 20th stage of 1926, which included the mighty four of Tourmalet, Aspin, Aubisque and Peyresourde, is considered the hardest Tour de France stage ever. It wasn’t just long (326 km) and hard, but the bad weather worsened the situation even more.
Lucien Buysse was the winner of the stage, also the general classification of the race that year.
Riding on a wet, cold and windy day in the Pyrenees is hard enough even nowadays, when it’s much more easier to neutralise the race and gather the cyclists in their ultramodern team buses together, if it’s necessary.
But in 1926, on untarmacked roads…
(Read more on the hardest Tour de France stage ever >>)
Entertaining differently
Although road cycling had its professional riders since the beginning, the whole system of road cycling races wasn’t organized that way how nowadays.
There were riders in the peloton, mostly the independents, who sometimes had different priorities, than getting the best result as possible.
For example, Jules Deloffre just loved to present acrobatic performances in front of the audience after a long cycling race.
Learn more about the acrobat cyclist>>