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Chris Boardman
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2 July 1994. Prologue: Lille
7.2km. Flat
‘At the 1994 Tour, everybody went for a three-week race,’ says Chris Boardman. ‘I went for seven minutes.’
Chris Boardman was, and remains, unique. In the history of the Tour de France, at least since the prologue time trial was introduced in 1967, he is the only rider ever to go there specifically, and exclusively, targeting the hors d’œuvre to the race, the prologue.
Like some other hors d’œuvre, the prologue time trial is an acquired taste. ‘As pageantry goes in so beautiful a sport, ho hum,’ was the verdict of the American journalist Samuel Abt. ‘No long lines of riders flashing by, no desperate early breakaways, no sprinters tearing for the finish line, no climbers struggling to drop one another as the road rises.’
It isn’t even a proper stage – that is the whole point. The prologue was conceived as a way of adding an extra day to the Tour without falling foul of the regulations governing how many days the riders were allowed to race. And the motivation for its inclusion was financial. Don’t hold that against it, however, because in this it is no different to the race itself, set up to market the newspaper L’Auto. The Tour has always been nakedly commercial. But the commercial imperative intensified after 1962, when Félix Lévitan was appointed co-director, alongside Jacques Goddet. Goddet and Lévitan, both journalists, remained in charge until 1987, with Goddet looking after the sporting side, Lévitan responsible for the money. After Goddet and Lévitan, there were two short-term replacements, Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, a cognac salesman, and Jean-Pierre Courcol, a former professional tennis player. Each lasted only one Tour before, in 1989, it passed once more into the safe hands of another journalist (and former professional rider), Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in turn handed it on to another ex-journalist, Christian Prudhomme, in 2005. In 110 years, the Tour de France has had only seven directors. And five of them have been journalists by profession.