Sports Poets Society

https://www.letour.fr/en/news/2020/1930-the-tour-revolutionizes-3-10/1283535 July 17 th 2020 - 11:00 At the turn of each decade, the Tour de France has gone through organisational changes and backstage struggles that have variously turned out to be decisive or utterly inconsequential. The journey back in time proposed by letour.fr continues in 1930, the year of a major revolution when, Tour boss and editor-in-chief of L'Auto, Henri Desgrange decided riders would compete in national teams and no longer for bicycle manufacturers. To pay for this costly reform, the newspaper also found a new source of income with the creation of the advertising caravan. Tensions between the bicycle brands and the organisers were a common thread that followed and forged the history of the nascent Tour de France and then the interwar period. Henri Desgrange, who was a purist and uncompromising in his conception of sporting competition, despised and fought against any form of agreement ...

https://www.letour.fr/en/news/2020/1920-sportsmen-according-to-desgrange-2-10/1283494 July 8 th 2020 - 14:30 At the turn of each decade, the Tour de France has gone through organisational changes and backstage struggles that have variously turned out to be decisive or utterly inconsequential. The journey back in time proposed by letour.fr continues in 1920, with a look at the strong-minded decisions and writings of Henri Desgrange, the director of the Tour de France and chief editor of the newspaper L’Auto. In keeping with a French nation in admiration of its heroes from the Great War and enthralled by the adventures of the first aviators ready to risk their lives for heroics, the former holder of the hour record, who had become a powerful press figure, can also be considered to have made the Tour rhyme with trial and tribulation… It is a tricky exercise to determine the level of difficulty when designing a race to be demanding, to require its participants to stand out...

https://www.letour.fr/en/news/2020/the-tour-to-the-power-of-10/1283461 July 1 st 2020 At the turn of each decade, the Tour de France has gone through organisational changes and backstage struggles that have variously turned out to be decisive or utterly inconsequential. Our journey back in time begins in 1910 with journalist-organiser Alphonse Steinès, who was tasked with reconnoitring the course before the riders were sent on their first high-mountain challenge, in the Pyrenees. He was the first winner on the Tourmalet! 110 years ago, the organisers of the Tour de France were already looking for new ways of spicing up the race, be it with rule changes or with gruelling new courses. At the office of the newspaper L'Auto, the most audacious and creative of these visionaries was Alphonse Steinès, Henri Desgrange's odd-job man. He was the one who had first come up with the idea of letting the riders cross swords on the highest roads of the Pyrenees, at a time when...