78 Icons: polka-dot jersey
The climber’s dream jersey has been a feature of the Tour de France peloton for over 40 years
There are many elements of a bike race that capture the imagination: the power of a city-centre bunch sprint, the sheer force of will of a long distance breakaway, the poetry of a time trial rider at one with their machine. But surely nothing quickens the heart quite as much as the sight of a climber, alone, dancing their way up a Tour de France mountain pass.
For it is in the mountains where Tour legend is crafted and where Tour history is made. The stories written in the rarefied air of the Alps and the Pyrenees are the ones that best survive the test of time.
It took the Tour organisation until the 1930s to realise that an award for the Tour’s premier climber was a prize worth giving. Since the Tour’s early years newspaper L’auto had been nominating its own best climber, but it wasn’t until 1933 that the Tour’s organisers created the first official Grand Prix de la Montagne. It was won by Vicente Trueba, nicknamed the Flea of Torrelavega.
Joining the dots
The famous maillot blanc à pois rouges first appeared in 1975 when the sponsor of the mountain classification, Chocolat Poulain, requested that a new, distinctive jersey be designed so that the leader would stand out in the peloton.
It has often been written that the jersey was designed to reflect the sponsor’s packaging, but in his book, Maillot à Pois, Pierre Carrey writes that the design came from Félix Lévitan, at the time the co-director of the race. Lévitan had once written an article in tribute to the track racer Henri Lemoine who raced from the late 1920s until the 1950s. Dubbed the P’tit pois, Lemoine wore a jersey decorated with, you guessed it, polka dots. Over 20 years after Lemoine finally retired, Lévitan chose to base the design of his new prize on the jersey of the P’tit pois.
And so the Tour’s polka-dot jersey was born. Lucien Van Impe, six-time winner of the King of the Mountains between 1971 and 1983, was the first to wear it into Paris.
Today, with the mountains playing such a key role in deciding who wins yellow, whether the race’s best climber and the wearer of the polka-dot jersey is one and the same is debatable, particularly when an early escape on a mountain stage to mop up mountain points before the big-guns start blazing on a summit finish is now a tried and tested tactic. That aside, the polka-dot jersey soaring in solitude over a steep mountain pass surely remains one of the sport’s most stirring sights.