Eugène Christophe (born Malakoff, Paris, France, 22 January 1885, died Paris, 1 February 1970 in) was a French road bicycle racer and pioneer ofcyclo-cross. He was a professional from 1904 until 1926. In 1919 he became the first rider to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour de France .
Eugène Christophe rode 11 Tours de France and finished eight. He never won but he became famous for having to weld together his bicycle while leading. It was one of a series of events that coloured his racing career.
Christophe rode for Peugeot and his team attacked from the start to demoralise the rival Alcyon riders and, in particular, Defraye. It worked. Defraye was 11 minutes behind at Oloron-Ste-Marie, 14 in Eaux-Bonnes, 60 at Argelès. He dropped out at Barèges, at the foot of the Tourmalet, the highest pass in the Pyrenees. Christophe dropped all the field except another Belgian, Philippe Thys, who followed at a few hundred metres. Thys was of no danger, however, because he had lost too much time earlier. The two were five minutes ahead of the rest.
In 1913 Christophe was well placed to win when a mechanical failure cost him the race. He rode the first part, from Paris to Cherbourg and then down the coast to the Pyrenees cautiously. He was in second place when the race stopped in Bayonne on the night before the first day in the mountains, when the course a succession of cols: the Oschquis, Aubisque, Soulor, Gourette, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. The field set off at 3am with Christophe 4m 5s behind Odile Defraye, of Belgium.Christophe stopped at the top of the mountain, reversed his back wheel to pick a higher gear
Christophe said:
- I plunged full speed towards the valley. According to Henri Desgrange's calculation, I was then heading the general classification with a lead of 18 minutes. So, I was going full speed. All of a sudden, about ten kilometres from Ste-Marie-de-Campan down in the valley, I feel that something is wrong with my handlebars. I cannot steer my bike any more. I pull on my brakes and I stop. I see my forks are broken. Well, I tell you now that my forks were broken but I wouldn't say it at the time because it was bad publicity for my sponsor.
- And there I was left alone on the road. When I say the road, I should say the path. All the riders I had dropped during the climb soon caught me up. I was weeping with anger. I remember I heard my friend Petit-Breton shouting as he saw me, 'Ah, Cri-Cri, poor old lad.' I was getting angry. As I walked down, I was looking for a short cut. I thought maybe one of those pack trails would lead me straight to Ste-Marie-de-Campan. But I was weeping so badly that I couldn't see anything. With my bike on my shoulder, I walked for more than ten kilometres. On arriving in the village at Ste-Marie-de-Campan, I met a young girl who led me to the blacksmith on the other side of the village. His name was Monsieur Lecomte.
It took two hours to reach the forge. Lecomte offered to weld the broken forks back together but a race official and managers of rival teams would not allow it. A rider, said the rules, was responsible for his own repairs and outside assistance was prohibited. Christophe set about the repair as Lecomte told him what to do. It took three hours and the race judge penalised him 10 minutes - reduced later to three - because Christophe had allowed a seven-year old boy, Corni, to pump the bellows for him. Filling his pockets with bread, Christophe set off over two more mountains and eventually finished the tour in seventh place. The building on the site of the forge has a plaque commemorating the episode.
The forks which cost Christophe the race were taken away by Peugeot. He didn't see them again until a dying man bequeathed them to him more than 30 years later. Some reports say that Christophe broke his forks because he ran into a car on the descent. The historian and author, Bill McGann, says:
- I have found no mention of a car in Christophe's own retelling of the story. Broken forks were not unusual. I am sure that the poor state of 1913 metallurgy and bad mountain roads caused the disaster. My own theory, based on little information, is that the car story is probably a piece of Peugeot disinformation. It must have been awful for Peugeot to have their famous rider celebrated for having broken a fork. A car crash makes this all easy to explain. The final nail in the coffin of the story is that Christophe said 'I wouldn't have told you then because it was bad publicity for my firm.' If it had been a car crash, there would have been no bad publicity because no one expects a bike to withstand a car crash.
