It was a moment as farcical as it was romantic, and one which will no doubt live to define the 2016 Tour de France; a Tour which has been plagued with concerns over rider safety, with talking heads criticising the insufficient barriers and lack of appropriate officiating.

But truth be told, if the scarce separation between rider and supporter is the biggest concern for the competitors of the modern day Tour de France, they’ve got it light. Back in the early days of the Tour, a sideliner hunting a signature would have been a breath of fresh air; a welcome break to the mileage – and if you did go down, you would’ve been waiting a while on that team car.

“Take away every luxury of the modern rider, everything they have by right, and you have the reality of the past…”

“Take away every luxury of the modern rider, everything they have by right, and you have the reality of the past,” says David Coventry, author of The Invisible Mile, a newly released novel about the first English-speaking team to enter the Tour de France, way back in 1928.

Coventry writes of the nights spent on the saddle, of the pills and the alcohol, of the camaraderie, of the rivalries and of the feeling of pushing on after a colleague has been struck down knowing that there’s every chance it could be you next.

Coventry continued: “The best way of summing it up is the attitude of the race’s overlord, Henri Desgrange [who first started the Tour in 1903]. His ideal race was one in which the last rider left in the race would be the only rider worthy of the yellow shirt.

“He wanted the riders to suffer. He wanted the race to be inhuman. And so it was. There were boils, dysentery, flu, car crashes – as in cars crashing into them and motorcycles doing the same – sprained ankles, infected sores, snow, poor food, dehydration, mountain stages starting at midnight, constant punctures, dust, bugs, the gravel roads, cobblestones and mud.

“Oh, and the bad singing – apparently the team loved to sing, and I can only imagine it being shocking.

“To compare the eras would be to name every aspect and discuss them individually for a night or two, and then move on to the next. The race is the same in name only now. Which isn’t to say today’s race isn’t incredible. It is incredible, but it’s vastly different.”

Back in 1928, the Tour de France was a literal tour of France. The route followed the borders of the country almost exactly.

“The race is the same in name only now. Which isn’t to say today’s race isn’t incredible. It’s just vastly different…”

The race was competed in a team time trial format, and teams were allowed to replace exhausted or injured cyclists with new cyclists, a rule introduced to give weaker teams a fairer chance.

“The team wouldn’t [have ridden anything like the Tour before]. At least not like what they experienced in the mountains. They were doing pretty well in the race before they hit the Pyrenees.

“Opperman and Watson held their own going up. They didn’t have the technique for navigating such plummets going downhill though and crashed over and over again. The tactics and riding techniques were much more advanced in Europe at the time. A different culture of competitiveness meant a different way of attack and holding back. They were on a steep learning curve.”

The French didn’t give them much of a chance either. Hubert Opperman may be a legend in the world of road cycling now, and was even well known on his arrival, but he gained much of his credit over in France in that 1928 Tour and the summer of racing that followed.

The Australasian team originally turned up with bikes that were mocked and without much respect to their name, though they did grab a few French hearts as the novelty act from abroad, and as former soldiers who had fought in France during the war.

“The last rider left in the race would be the only rider worthy of the yellow shirt…”

“Nobody took them terribly seriously, but they were eventually taken to the heart of the French people,” the author continued.

We won’t go as far as to spoil for the reader how the gallant efforts of the Australians and New Zealanders panned out in the long run on the 1928 Tour de France.

Though a quick read of Wikipedia will confirm a few facts for you if you are desperate for immediate answers, we’d recommend grabbing a copy of Coventry’s novel and immersing yourself in the madness.

It’s a story of endurance; riding head first into trouble and defying the odds; of superhuman grit, and often blind, aching determination. The novel may be largely fictitious, but if the gruelling pain sequences seem startlingly candid, it’s because they came from a similar place of pain.

“I relied on my imagination for the most part, and let this be informed by a dozen or so histories of the Tour. The book is 100% fiction built around a framework of facts, and it was a lot of fun until I got sick writing the thing.

“I came down with ME, which had a great effect on the book. My knowledge of exhaustion and pain comes directly from that. It is pretty real. It remains pretty real.

“Then I essentially became an actor whilst writing. I was a rider and I was covered in dirt and scabs, stunk of urine, booze and mud and rode in the pain of exhaustion and half broken limbs.”

If Coventry suffered while writing, it shows in the strength of the text; in the inner doubts and struggles of the protagonist, outstandingly developed and shrewdly deployed as a vessel from which to frame the savage challenges of the race.

The novel brings the reader to an era where the Tour de France was more about survival than stage wins, when it was rampant with corruption and unpredictability often coloured a shade darker than even the mountains they rode through by night.

It would be an ignorant voice who would deride the modern Tour as even comparatively simple – as Coventry says, the two editions of the race share little more than a name – but one thing is for sure, the 1928 edition certainly puts into perspective some of the commonly talked about points of the present day.

We don’t know about you, but we’d take a broken bike and a run through the heated Mont Ventoux crowd any day over a night-time climb up the cliffs of the Pyrenees on a fixed-gear bike with wooden rims.

Read the rest of our July ‘Superhuman Issue‘ on Mpora here

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