Ned Boulting can’t get to where he wants to go
A reflective Ned communes with Eugene Christophe on a mystery train
“It was Christophe whose bad luck gave rise to the greatest tale of the sheer unfairness of racing the Tour...”
Not so long ago, I embarked on an Interrail trip from Amsterdam via Paris, Munich and Zagreb to Split without my Interrail tickets, which proved irksome. This was just the latest episode in a prolonged sequence of expensive moments of incompetence that had begun three or four years ago when I misbooked both the outward bound and the return flights to Istanbul.
My latest variation came in December, when, trying to get from London to Amsterdam, I found myself stranded in Paris’s Gare du Nord with no chance of getting on the fully booked Amsterdam trains and no hotel room in Paris. I knew I had to go somewhere. It was just a question of where.
Gazing up in panic at the list of departures, I hit upon the name Valenciennes, almost entirely because of its association with the Tour de France. I’m susceptible to this kind of influence.
Minutes later, I had bought a ticket to Valenciennes and booked a hotel room at the Grand Hotel for not much money, accompanied by strong doubts as to exactly how grand it would be. I had a vague memory of it being a workmanlike town, hard up against the Belgian-Flemish border. It boasted an ornate
Flanders-style town hall typical of that region and of a style of bourgeois architecture. Valenciennes it was.
The humble town has celebrated the passage of some notable champions. In his second winning Tour, in 1970, Eddy Merckx wore yellow in and out of Valenciennes, watching his compatriot Roger de Vlaeminck take victory on a cobbled stage that had started in Amiens and finished in the Nugesser velodrome, like a mini Paris-Roubaix. The following morning, the race rolled out of Valenciennes with Merckx still in yellow. He took that stage win, just to make a point to de Vlaeminck.
In 1984, the day after the Renault Elf team of Marc Madiot and Laurent Fignon had dominated the Louvroil to Valenciennes team time trial, Adri van der Poel, father of the phenomenon Mattieu, emulated Merckx by wearing yellow out of Valenciennes en route for Béthune; his only ever day spent in the leader’s jersey at the Tour de France.
Ten years later, the town bore witness to one of the biggest ever crashes in a bunch sprint, which ended up with Laurent Jalabert leaving some of his teeth and most of the skin from his face on the road as a reminder of his unhappy few hours in Valenciennes.
The saddest misfortune of them all belongs to Eugene Christophe. It was Christophe whose bad luck gave rise to the greatest tale of the sheer unfairness of racing the Tour when he was penalised by the race officials in 1913 for having received the help of a blacksmith’s apprentice who kept the bellows working on the furnace as Christophe set about mending his own forks after he’d been knocked off his bike by a race vehicle.
But that famously unjust incident has always overshadowed the coda to the tale. In 1919 on a rampaging solo breakaway, on a section of cobbles, his forks broke again; this time in the pouring rain, in Valenciennes. Unlike in 1913 the repairs were legal, but cost him two hours, and the race lead. He never did win the Tour. The race director, Henri Desgrange rubbed his hands with glee, writing, “The sky is gloomy and washed out. Huge, grubby clouds extend to the horizon. It is as if nature itself were grieving. In the outskirts of Valenciennes, Eugene Christophe stands on the pavement. He pushes in front of him, the saddle towards the earth, his bicycle: the fork is broken. It seems to me a mighty lyre whose broken strings sing his final misery.”
Poor old Christophe. There could be no more fitting patron saint for my travelling misadventure, I thought, than the ill-fated Christophe. He, like I, was destined never quite to arrive at his destination without something going badly wrong.