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Alllez! Poulidor and the ETAPE 2004

22.5km east of Limoges, start for this year’s Etape du Tour, lies the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, birthplace of a Tour legend: Raymond Poulidor. He still lives there. His parents were métayeurs (share-croppers); the family moved from tied house to tied house and lived in extreme poverty. As soon as he was strong enough, Raymond pitched in to help them work on the land.

The route of the Etape, through Corrèze into Cantal, is the land which formed Poulidor, the winding valleys and the Plateau de Millevaches over which he trained and hardened himself for life as a pro bike racer. The Cantal, as ever ill-served by roads, remains one of the poorest, most remote regions in France, hewn out of crystalline schists, granite and recent volcanic rock, it occupies a sparsely populated upland in the north-west corner of the Massif Central. The climate tends to be cold and damp; agriculture is thin; the local inhabitants inclined to be scrawny. The local dialect, one of the purest forms of the ancient Languedoc, turns Saint-Flour, your destination, into ‘Shan Floor’.

Like many peasant boys, Poulidor grew up with the unique romance of the Tour de France, the Grande Boucle that brings the riders of distant fame into the remotest corners of France, through the tiny villages of the rural outback as well as into the grand towns. That romance planted a dream in the Limousin farmboy: to ride in the great race that touched all France. Poulidor was 15 when the Tour first came to Limoges but he was already riding a bike – his only mode of transport – down cart tracks, as well as racing, for a ham, a large cheese…

He started serious training, but, like the recently deceased great Belgian rider Briek Schotte, at night: the only time he could spare after the dawn to dusk hours of work. He later said, as a pro, that no suffering he endured in the saddle ever got close to the bone-deep, gruelling fatigue of that protracted labour in the fields. Think yourselves lucky. But, his training by the light of the moon with only wild boar, deer and rabbits for company, gave him hope of escape from drudgery in the Cantal; he was soon riding criteriums as an amateur and…in 1962, he rode his first Tour and came third to the first man to take five victories: Jacques Anquetil. The dream had come real.

The Tour has visited Limoges many times and Saint-Flour just once, but the race has never covered the ground you will be riding on the Etape. So this stage is reconnecting deeply with the roots of the Tour, global as it has become: one of the world’s biggest sporting phenomena delivering its panache and flourish, the spectacle of its epic endeavour into the rustic backwater of the Cantal.

Every rider who rides the stage will be making Tour history, and making it in the fashion of Desgrange’s vision for the race: to break ground, to push the limits ever wider, to criss-cross the whole country. Whole communities will gather, in force, at the side of the road to cheer you on. Among the knobbly-kneed kids shouting ‘Vas-y Poupou, allez allez allez’ may well be another French hope for the future, another kid with a passionate dream of le Tour.

None of the Etape climbs has ever featured in the Tour. The landscape may lack the assault of grandeur delivered by Alps and Pyrenees - it is more amenable, on a more human scale. But it is just as much part of la belle France…like the man Poulidor himself.

p<. Graeme Fife is author of: Tour de France: the history, the legend, the riders

and: Inside the Peloton, riding, winning and losing the Tour de France