Sur le Tour de France

It was at the request and under the direction of Pierre Salviac that a book entitled Joies de la bicyclette appeared in 1977. A former senior reporter, Salviac had just been hired by Antenne 2 as a sports journalist for the young program “Stade 2”, where he covered cycling in particular. It was in this context that Éditions Hachette, wishing to expand their “Joies de…” series, approached him. Salviac then commissioned several texts from the leading specialists of the day (Jean-Paul Ollivier, Dominique Grimault, the historian Raymond Huttier), a preface from Robert Chapatte, and, as the main text, a contribution from Antoine Blondin, who delivered a remarkable condensed history of the Tour.

The text was published separately two years later, becoming Blondin’s first “sporting” work in book form: the author of Un singe en hiver had followed twenty-eight editions of the Tour. Aside from growing weary of the guinea fowl served every evening at dinner (“if this bird is going to ride the Tour with us, give it a race number!”), the columnist glorifies a “surface event that plunges its roots into great depths” and, likening the Tour to “the Iliad and the Odyssey”, deifies its heroes, from Coppi to Gimondi, Anquetil to Merckx, celebrating their victories on the field of battle and applauding the “rural festivities” the caravan inspires in every town it passes. He invokes Saint-Exupéry and Victor Hugo, even the Comtesse de Noailles: “What matters is not to be wise, but to go to meet the gods.” As Jérôme Garcin recalled on the occasion of the book’s 2016 reissue, “Blondin, a master of the playful pun and the wandering digression, liked to say he had more than one Tour up his sleeve. Empty it, and there’s happiness. In velo veritas” (Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 June 2016). Blondin would go on to publish Le Tour de France en quatre et vingt jours in 1984, before his L’Équipe columns were collected in L’Ironie du sport in 1988.

A very fine copy, a literary tribute from Blondin, a devoted listener and reader of Max-Pol Fouchet’s literary publications and broadcasts.