Scratching at the surface now...
...and I'm trying hard to work it out.
I spoke to Ned Boulting recently for a new podcast I’ve been doing called Cycling Books. I talk to people who have written a cycling book about their cycling book, that’s it.
Ned had written a book about 1923 a couple of years ago so I spoke to him about that. He came across a reel of film 150 seconds long which contained footage of the 1923 Tour de France and he set about finding out absolutely everything he could about absolutely everything in the film.
I love that.
It encapsulates so much about why I love cycling. If you take any rider in any race or any result or any DNF and you start digging, you’ll find something. And those somethings will lead to other things and it will never end. There must be one of those really long German words or one of those really short Japanese words that encapsulates the urge to know everything about a particular topic coupled with the acceptance and resignation of knowing that you never will.
That’s cycling.
The main character in Ned’s book is a largely forgotten rider named Théophile Beeckman. I looked up Beeckman’s results on the internet and I noticed that he had finished 4th, 5th and 6th overall at the Tour de France. This is the type of thing that usually piques my interest and provokes me to scratch under the surface of the seemingly mundane.
“That’s a peculiar set of results” I thought. “And although impressive, quite unfortunate too. I wonder has anyone else done that”
I wonder has anyone else done that.
That’s generally how my brain works. As it turns out, six other riders have managed to finish 4th, 5th and 6th at the Tour de France.
Mikel Landa
Luc Leblanc
Lucien van Impe
Edward Vissers
Hector Tiberghien
Emile Georget
Van Impe and Georget are the only ones who eventually stopped mincing about below the podium and managed to haul themselves on to it. Van Impe is the only rider who has managed to finish 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th on G.C. at the Tour de France. I know a lot about Van Impe and I’d already heard of Georget. I picked one of the names I’d never heard of and started scratching - Hector Tiberghien.
Tiberghien was a Belgian, born near the French border quite close to Roubaix. He was a contemporary of Beeckman and was part of that same 1923 Tour de France. He may in fact have been on Ned’s reel of film and been one of the riders who proved impossible to identify. He finished 4th in that Tour having finished 6th and 5th in the preceding two years. He finished in the top 10 of the Tour de France either side of the First World War, which is quite something.
The best win of his career was the 1919 Paris-Tours (although Wikipedia will wrongly tell you he won it in 1923). This was the 14th edition of that race. And when I started scratching through the archives it turns out that Hector Tiberghien had something unusual in common with the winner of the 104th edition of that race - they’d both gone missing in mysterious circumstances roughly 15 years after they had won it, only to show up a few days later.
This is what a cursory scratch has thrown up of what goes on under the surface. I didn’t scratch that deep. For instance, I presume Tiberghien fought in the First World War. I presume there were people who were very sad when he died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 17th August 1951.
I also presume that if someone with the time and patience and a few buckets of curiosity, were to sit down to write a 300-page book on the life of Hector Tiberghien and see where the writing brings them, that they absolutely could.
That’s why cycling is so brilliant.