The 1919 Tour de France, the first since 1914 after a four-year hiatus during WWI, had a host of noteworthy elements, not the least of which was the introduction of the Yellow Jersey after stage ten of the fifteen stage race so the fans could spot the race leader as the riders sped past. It had the fewest finishers of any Tour (a mere eleven, reduced to ten due to a belated disqualification), the slowest average speed (24.056 km per hour), the longest stage ever (482 kilometers) and the heartbreak of Eugene Christophe being denied victory for the second time due to a broken fork, as well as a return of this popular event.
As with any of the more than one hundred editions of the race, the first of which was in 1903, it’s drama and many side stories would make for a fine book. The young American journalist Adin Dorkin recognized that when he ventured to France to research a novel about a soldier walking across France after WWI witnessing all the devastation. He wished to include events the character might have witnessed and discovered the Tour de France could have been one of them. He mentions in a YouTube interview that he didn’t know much about the Tour or how long it had been going on, so went to Wikipedia to learn more. When he discovered the magnitude of the race he shelved his plan of writing a novel and shifted it to an account of the 1919 Tour still allowing him to write of the after effects of the war, his true interest.
His lack of knowledge of racing and his inclination to be a novelist dominate the book—“Sprinting Through No Man’s Land.” His florid writing won the favor of reviewers, at least of the non-cycling press. That and the promotion by his publisher Amazon turned the book into a best-seller when it was released in July of 2021 during The Tour. With Amazon making it easily available as an e-book, it received nearly three hundred reviews from readers at Good Reads, mostly favorable from those who weren’t put off by his superficial racing acumen, some who actually mistook the book for a novel.
The very title exposes its author as a dilettante of the sport. The sixty-seven men who set out on the race around the perimeter of France were hardly “sprinting” over those three thousand miles nor was it through a “no man’s land.” No Tour is a sprint and this less so than any with an average speed of barely fifteen miles per hour over the rough roads of the time. There are occasional sprints at the end of a stage for a few hundred meters at most, but these riders were so spread out there were few sprints on any of its fifteen stages. He loosely uses the word “sprint” throughout his book, writing that riders were sprinting up mountains and even down them. He refers to sprinting as “an intellectual exercise.” More balderdash, as it is instinctual fearlessness.
His research included driving and walking portions of the route, not biking it, which would have given him some insight into the act of cycling. Instead, he relies on his imagination to describe what it is to race a bike. In trying to convey the experience and the mindset of the riders he resorts to the most banal of descriptions, writing such nonsense as a rider “paid close attention to the ground underneath his wheels.”
Twice within thirty pages he uses the word “torque” to describe the effort a rider transmitted into his bike, a word I’ve never come across in thousands and thousands of pages written by authorities of cycling. He regularly writes that the riders were pushing hard or bearing down on their pedals. That goes without saying, except that he could find nothing better to say of their efforts. His inclination to be descriptive borders on the ridiculous and laughable, painfully so at times. At one point he claims the riders were putting so much effort into trying to ride fast it was as if they were “trying to pry apart the earth underneath.”
He describes riders drafting as “siphoning” the “excess energy” of another rider, as if they were draining his efforts and that he was stronger than others. His propensity to write colorfully is a continual insult to the intelligence of those versed in the sport. As the riders approached the first set of mountains he wrote, “The Pyrennes would sprout in front of their tires; first unnoticeable, then unavoidable and unceasing.” It was almost as if the book had been written in another language and this was a shoddy translation.
His research gave him such a familiarity with the racers that persevered, twenty-six dropped out after the first stage and only eighteen of the sixty-seven who started were left after stage four and reduced to eleven after stage nine with six stages remaining, he began to refer to them by first name only. It was most disconcerting to have the legendary Eugene Christophe, the first wearer of the Yellow Jersey, and whose grave I searched out in Malakoff, a suburb of Paris, http://georgethecyclist.blogspot.com/2021/07/some-sites-of-cycling-relevance-in-paris.html reduced to a first name. Henri Desgrange, the larger-than-life founder and director of The Tour, was spared such an indignity, partially because the race included a Henri (Pelissier) for a spell, a longtime thorn in the side of Desgrange and future winner of The Tour.
The book is further undermined by five chapters totally unrelated to the race, two about African Americans and two on women, as if he anticipated some edict, such as the NFL’s Rooney rule, that all books had to include so many pages on these groups. One of the chapters on Blacks was about an American troop solely consisting of them based in the north of France that might have seen The Tour pass if they were still there.
He also makes the egregious error of stating a blacksmith assisted Christophe in the repair of his fork in the 1913 Tour and was penalized ten minutes for the infraction of accepting help, when it was a young boy who lent a hand with the use of a bellows, causing the ten-minute penalty, later reduced to three minutes. This is one of the most storied events in Tour history. A plaque resides on the building where it took place at the foot of the Tourmalet and was re-enacted fifty years later with Christophe and the aged boy.
He refers to the story as Christophe broke his fork once again in the 1919 race on the penultimate stage when he was in first place by thirty minutes and destined to make up for his ill fortune in 1913 when he was also leading the race when tragedy struck. His loss of time caused him to finish third, allowing the Belgian Firmin Lambot to win.
Christophe was such a fan favorite that thousands of French sent a few francs to the newspaper sponsoring the race to give to Christophe, amounting to more than the winner’s stake. The newspaper published the names of all the contributors, twenty pages worth. I once saw a copy in an exhibit celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the Yellow Jersey at a Sports Museum outside Nice. http://georgethecyclist.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-centennial-of-yellow-jersey.html To emphasize Christophe’s setback he masquerades as an omniscient narrator claiming that Christophe “found himself in tears at countless points” on the final stage, a gross exaggeration of someone who would have accepted his fate.
The book is sprinkled with many slights. He refers to the Paris-Brest-Paris race as a “one-day cycling event.” The winning time of this 750 mile race, which was founded twelve years before The Tour and continues to this day, was 71 hours and 22 minutes in its inaugural in 1891. It wasn’t until 1951 that the time fell under 48 hours. The latest winning time was only four hours faster. How could he not know that it would take considerably longer than a day to ride from Paris to the northwest corner of the country and then back? This comes on page twelve, a fair warning of reader-beware.
He departs from the usual use of the word “grade” for the slant of a climb with the clumsy description of the Tourmalet—“the ground shifted between ten and sixteen degrees.” He wrote that only the most dedicated of fans gathered on the mountains, when in fact they attract any and all fans, always their highest concentration. He diminishes the last two stages of the race, referring to them as “rides.” Nor does he pay proper respect to the climbs referring to the Galibier and Tourmalet and Aubisque without “the” or “Col de” preceding them as is customary. No one versed in cycling would have written the sentence, “As Tourmalet had been for the Pyrenees, Galibier was for the Alps.” Curiously, the Galibier is in the index as “Col du Galibier,” while the Aubisque is simply “Aubisque” and the Tourmalet is ignored.
It was no wonder that this book had escaped my notice until recently when a friend mentioned it, as the cycling press has ignored it. I rushed to the Chicago Public Library to get my hands on it with great anticipation. It may be the most disappointing book I’ve ever read considering my eagerness to relive this seminal Tour. Read it at your own peril.
