Derby on Wheels

Heads low and rumps high, 100 cyclists threaded their way through the narrow passage that police maintained for them. Paris' Avenue des Champs Elysees was so jammed that it looked like Liberation Day. The first postwar revival of the Tour de France was under way. The 26-day-long, 2,900-mile bike race--a kind of Bunion Derby on wheels--is France's most avidly followed sporting event.

All along the route (see map), townsfolk dropped whatever they were doing to watch the tour go by. Fans encouraged and refreshed their favorites in the customary manner: by dumping buckets of water on their heads. In efficient Belgium, fire hoses were used. As the tour approached a town, police immobilized all traffic in the vicinity. Factories shut down. In Strasbourg, the Communist Par ty temporarily suspended its congress. Something like ten million people along the route saw the race.

The contestants spent most of each day riding in a good-natured cluster, taking turns sheltering each other from the wind, saving their strength for a late-afternoon sprint. The tour was broken into 21 laps, with overnight and one-day stops between (the cyclist with least total elapsed time is the winner). At frequent intervals, some of them sucked up wine by rubber hose from tankards on their handlebars. Ahead of the racers moved a cavalcade of commercials on wheels; behind came les suiveurs--masseurs, newspapermen, photographers. In some bombed towns, they had to be billeted in prisons and brothels.

Most of the way through Belgium and down to the Riviera, then through the Basque country and up to Brittany, the leader was Frenchman Rene Vietto, the favorite. But on the tough St. Brieuc-Caen lap, a countryside which U.S. troops also found tough going three years ago, Vietto tired. Almost half of the entrants had dropped out. Up moved Italian Pierre Brambilla and Breton Jean Robic.

On a steep hill outside Rouen, 80 miles from the finish, Robic pumped his way ahead. A few hours later, he zoomed victoriously across the finish line in Paris' Pare des Princes, raising both hands over his head in a risky gesture to the glory of France. Then he rushed into the arms of his pretty brunette wife, whom he had married three days before the race began. His time: 148 hours, 11 minutes, 25 seconds. His prize: 500,000 francs ($4,197.50) and a probable three or four million francs more in future exhibitions and endorsements.

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