Modern Day Cycling Sporting Heroes

Modern Day Cycling Sporting Heroes

I have written before about the "modern-day sporting heroes", so I thought it was worth pulling it together as a blog post.

Having successfully established the Tour de France in 1903 and introduced mountain stages in 1920, Henri Desgrange and his team continued to look for ways to innovate and promote what had become a big hit with the increased readership of the L’Auto newspaper. To do this, they needed more than just reporting who won and who lost. They needed characters and personalities with backstories of triumphs and failures. Most of all, they needed heroes - heroes sell newspapers. 

Enter the photographers. These are the days when "A picture is worth a thousand words" Before TV and mainstream media, pictures were gold dust. No stone was left unturned to get dramatic pictures onto the front page of the first editions.

The Casse Déserte is one of the most iconic roads in the world of cycling. It can be found on the southern ascent towards the top of the Col d’Izoard. Following a series of steep uphill sections interspersed with tight hairpins, you enter a prehistoric landscape of crumbling rock, unstable, life-threatening terrain, and severe heat. The mountain looks like it has been split down the middle with a great axe. Its innards spilling out like an open wound. The perfect backdrop for our heroes and their heroic struggle.

Unlike many remote mountain climbs, the Col d'Izoard is accessible, in this case, from the nearby town of Briançon. In the early days of the Tour de France, this meant being able to roll out of your hotel bed, head up the mountain, and set up ready to photograph our heroes emerging as if from the bowels of the prehistoric earth. Covered in the dust conveniently kicked up by the tour's entourage, their spare tyres strapped across both shoulders like machine-gun belts, struggling upwards to glory and hopefully a hot bath.

Fausto Coppo, Gino Bartali, Louison Bobet, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Thévenet, Eddy Merckx. Familiar household names whose reputations were made on the slopes of the Casse Déserte. The roads got better, the crowds grew bigger, television hit the screens, and photography went colour. The equipment improved, as did the times, but the Col d’Izoard remains a formidable climb with the backdrop to match.

The Modern-Day Sporting Hero

©davidt 2025