On painting faces from the 1903 Tour de France, and why the dead make the most honest subjects.
Every person in this photograph is gone. Most have been gone for a lifetime.
The image was taken in 1903. The men in it were covered in road dust and mud. Some had been awake for the better part of two days. Their clothes were wool. Their bikes weighed close to what a small child weighs today. They had no team cars, no radio earpieces, no nutrition science. They had their legs, their will, and whatever food they could carry or beg from a roadside café between Paris and Lyon and Marseille and back again — a loop of six stages covering more than 2,400 kilometres through the roads of an early-century France that was only beginning to understand what the bicycle could mean.
They were not, for the most part, professional athletes. They were people who loved to ride. Carpenters. Road menders. Farm labourers. Men who understood physical suffering in the way that people who work with their hands understand it — not as an obstacle to performance, but as the price of a day honestly spent. The race simply gave that suffering a destination.
| 60Riders started | 21Riders finished | 6Stages | 2,428Kilometres |
Sixty people started the first Tour de France on the first of July, 1903. Twenty-one finished. That is not a dropout rate — it is a reckoning. The stages ran through the night. A rider who punctured had to source rubber and fix the tube himself, by the light of an oil lamp, on the side of a road in the dark. A rider who broke a wheel had to find a new one or quit. There were reports of deliberate sabotage: nails scattered on the road, riders physically threatened by supporters of their rivals. The men who finished were not simply fast. They were stubborn beyond what most of us will ever be asked to be.
| Stage | Route | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| I | Montgeron (Paris) → Lyon | 467 km |
| II | Lyon → Marseille | 374 km |
| III | Marseille → Toulouse | 423 km |
| IV | Toulouse → Bordeaux | 268 km |
| V | Bordeaux → Nantes | 425 km |
| VI | Nantes → Paris | 471 km |
Maurice Garin — Winner
Born in the Aosta Valley of northern Italy in 1871, Garin came to France as a child and worked as a chimney sweep before the bicycle changed the direction of his life. He was known as Le petit ramoneur — the little chimney sweep. He won the first Tour de France in a total time of 94 hours and 33 minutes. He was 32 years old. He would live to 85, long enough to see the race he won become the most celebrated annual sporting event on earth.
Lucien Pothier — 2nd Place
Pothier was a road mender from Normandy — a man who built the very surfaces he would later race across. He finished more than two hours behind Garin, which in the context of a 94-hour race is a margin that tells you more about the difficulty of the course than the gap between the men. He was 20 years old.
Hippolyte Aucouturier — Stage Winner, “Le Terrible”
Known as Le Terrible, Aucouturier was one of the most physically imposing riders in the field. He abandoned the general classification but won two individual stages — including the brutal run from Marseille to Toulouse, 423 kilometres ridden in a single effort. He was the kind of rider who made up for strategic losses with sheer physical force, and in the early years of the Tour, force was often enough.
Fernand Augereau — 3rd Place
Augereau finished third overall, a Parisian who represented the urban working-class character of early French cycling. He crossed the finish line having completed all six stages, part of the small group of 21 who answered the question of whether a race of this scale was even survivable.
What strikes me about this photograph — and why I keep returning to it as a reference — is not the suffering, though it is visible in every face and posture. It is the absolute absence of self-consciousness about legacy. These men were not posing for history. They were not aware that 120 years later someone would be trying to put oil paint to their likeness. They were just stopping to catch their breath beside a support car on a road in France, the same way anyone stops to catch their breath after something difficult.
They were cutting their own path. The tradition of the Tour de France — the yellow jersey, the mountain stages, the pelotons, the hundred-year mythology of the race — none of it existed yet. They were building it with their wheels and didn’t know it. That is the condition of anyone who does something truly new: you don’t get to see what you started.
To paint these faces now is to participate in a kind of memorial. Every one of them has passed. Most passed long before I was born. When I try to capture the dirt on a jersey, the set of a jaw, the particular exhaustion in a pair of eyes that has not slept — I am not painting a photograph. I am trying to hold something back from disappearing entirely. I am trying to say: this person was here, and they did something extraordinary, and they deserve more than a footnote.
I do not know if I am equal to that. But I think the effort of trying honestly is the only respect worth offering.
The 1903 Tour de France was organised by Henri Desgrange of L’Auto newspaper and departed from Montgeron, south of Paris, on 1 July 1903. The six stages covered Paris–Lyon, Lyon–Marseille, Marseille–Toulouse, Toulouse–Bordeaux, Bordeaux–Nantes, and Nantes–Paris. Maurice Garin’s winning time was 94 hours, 33 minutes. Of 60 starters, 21 riders completed the full race.
