Dr Hutch: ‘Henri Desgrange came up with the perfect 21st-century bike race... in 1903’

There is a theory that the Tour de France would be greatly improved by much shorter stages. It would be more exciting to watch. It would prompt more interesting tactics, more open racing and less reliance on the team. That sort of thing.

Michael Hutchinson

Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine

Well, I’m here to tell you this has already happened. It’s happened many times. The Tour de France is a shadow of what it once was. It’s only 60% of the length it was in the 1910s. As if that wasn’t enough, there are now 30% more stages. Or try it this way – the average stage in 1919 was 370 km, and that year’s longest stage was 480 km. The winner of that one took 19 hours to get from Les Sables-d’Olonne to Bayonne.

The original route was just around the edges of France. They went all the way out the peninsula to Brest and back every Tour until 1932, and I’m guessing the bit where you rode 400km along a wind-blasted coast road to Brest, then turned around and rode out on the same wretched road you’d ridden in on must have been a bit of a low point in the lives of everyone involved.

The roads were bad. They were cut up and gravelly, mud baths in the rain, and in the mountains often not much more than animal tracks. You weren’t even allowed to draft other riders, instead you had to ride alone. In fact you had to be completely self-sufficient until 1930, including fixing all your own punctures. Of which there were many – Jean Alavoine got 46 in 1919, at an average of three per stage. And he still finished second on GC. More often than not riders had to find their own hotel at a finish town, because there was no one to do it for them.

So what, in essence, Henri Desgrange came up with in 1903 was the perfect 21st-century bike race. It had all the things currently in vogue – ultra-long distances, bikepacking, gravel and adventuring. It had no transfers as every single stage started exactly where the previous one finished. To add to the environmental credentials, there were no buses, no team cars, no foreign starts, no advertising caravan. Best of all, it was about suffering. Suffering for the riders, suffering for the officials, suffering for all.

I can think of few things I’d like to see more than an original-style Tour de France, Brest and all. No teams, no tactics, no working together, just 200 lone riders doing stages that start at midnight and are still going when it gets dark the following day.

As a fan, think of the pleasure of spending an evening on Alpe d’Huez having a peaceful barbecue and watching riders come past for a mountain finish after 350km, shattered, broken, and hopefully one at a time over a period of about two hours. You can’t tell me that would not be a major improvement on eight hours of German techno followed by a few seconds of bike racers and 100 cars.

Then they’d get to the finish and discover that the fans and press had booked up every hotel in town, and have to sleep in a bivvy bag for five hours till the next stage started.

Clearly it’s not going to work very well on television – but it would be fantastic on social media. You’d be watching the tracker dots crossing the Alps and notice that Geraint Thomas’s had stopped moving. Then you’d check his Instagram and there’d be a picture of him upside down in a tree.

Of course Tadej Pogačar and Demi Vollering would probably still win. But we’d have so much more fun along the way.