The Colours of Our Memories by Michel Pastoureau

Author:Michel Pastoureau [Pastoureau, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509533954
Published: 2018-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE TOUR DE L’OUEST (THE WESTERN CYCLING TOUR )

I did not catch a glimpse of the Tour de France until quite late on, when I was about 20, in the late 1960s. It was in the north of the Mayenne region, in the depths of deepest France, amid one of the fairest countrysides ever seen. However, my memory of this occasion is neither very emotional nor very distinct – just an impression of a confused range of colours and a cacophony of sound that was hard to bear: the racing cyclists flashed past me at a crazy speed – impossible to pick out any particular jersey or to identify any of the cyclists – and the insistent din of the publicity cavalcade bordered on the intolerable. The wait had been long and pleasure was altogether absent. Some of the cyclist dreams of my childhood died at the edge of that country road, the departmental 121.

On the other hand, I cherish far more agreeable recollections of the late, lamented Tour de l’Ouest, an end-of-season competition that took in Brittany, the Vendée, Maine and Western Normandy and that was discontinued in 1960. It was not limited to the top professionals. Amateurs and semi-professionals could take part – often more imaginative and fearless competitors than those who took part in the Tour de France. Frequent attempts were made to lead the pack, and in each leg of the race the situation underwent many reversals of fortune. The Ouest-France newspaper published a detailed account of the race on the following day and provided exhaustive lists of the positions of the cyclists. I was just 10 years old and I perused them with delight. It was those interminable lists, printed on the mediocre paper of a local daily, that early in my life fostered my taste for lists and the structures of listing – a taste that endures to this day.

The earliest results that I remember date from 1957. The malicious quirks of sport and name-giving had ruled that in that year, for just a few days, the two competitors placed at the top of the list were called Bihouée and Bihannic, both Breton names, with an unforgettable ring to them. In the following year, I actually set eyes on those two competitors on their bikes, at Lambelle, in a post-Tour (de l’Ouest) rally: Edouard Bihouée wore a green-and-white jersey, Arthur Bihannic a red-and-white one.

My memory of cycling competitions in the late 1950s is constructed around champions and jerseys. The latter displayed bold colours and carried virtually no advertisements: only the team name – often linked, with a dash, to the names of the principal team sponsors – appeared, and did so in a relatively discreet fashion. The various jerseys were easy to recognize and had, for children in particular, classificatory values that today’s jerseys, confused, gaudy and spattered with advertisements as they are, no longer possess. How can professional sportsmen agree to such humiliation, disguising themselves as many-coloured ham-actors and posing as live advertisements

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