Cossins - The first tour de france: sixty cyclists and nineteen days of daring on the road to paris

The keen and the curious begin to congregate from midday. By one oclock, when the riders start to emerge from the roadside barn that has been set aside as their dressing room, allowing them some privacy as they change and have a final massage, the heat is oppressive, almost unbearable. Theres hardly a breath of wind. Dust billowing up from the construction work on the ParisCorbeil railway line hangs in the still air.

The race organisers had been praying for a good crowd, certainly more than the few hundred who are milling about in and around the Auberge du Rveil-Matin. Thats more than enough to keep the proprietor, Monsieur Renard, and his staff far busier than they would normally be on a Wednesday lunchtime, but it hardly bodes well for the inaugural Tour de France. Henri Desgrange and his editorial team have been building the new race up for weeks in the pages of LAuto, and necessarily so. If it doesnt succeed, there wont be a second, and LAuto wont survive for much longer either.

The race officials have set up the control point for the start inside the cafe. Riders must register here over the next 90 minutes in order to compete. The first to sign in is 20-year-old Parisian Henri Ellinamour, who is handed a green armband bearing the number 64 by official starter Alphonse Steins. He is closely followed by another rider from the capital, Lon Pernette, who walks away with his armband and square of red cloth with the number 44, which he secures to the top tube and seat tube of his bike with rubber straps.

As more riders arrive, the smell of embrocation becomes impossible to ignore. After signing in, they carry out their final preparations for the start, pressing spare parts into the square leather bags hanging from their handlebars, wrapping replacement tubes and tyres around their shoulders, always keeping their machines within eyesight to prevent sabotage, which is not unknown. This done, most flop down on their backs to rest. Two gendarmes survey them from their horses. They are almost redundant as the spectators who have been tempted out by the greatest race the world has ever seen are hardly in a frenzy as they take shelter from the sun in the shade offered by the twin line of poplars lining the Avenue de Paris as it heads away from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges towards Montgeron.

Many of those gathered beneath the trees are amateur cyclists who have turned up on their bikes with the intention of following the professionals for as long as possible. Among them is a young man who has been making a name for himself in amateur races around Paris. Eugne Christophe is currently an apprentice locksmith on the Rue Chaton, but will go on to have a very illustrious future on the bike and will eventually be remembered for repairing his forks in a forge at the foot of the Col du Tourmalet in the 1913 Tour and, in 1919, for being the first rider ever to wear the races yellow jersey.

In his diary later that evening, Christophe will write dismissively: The greatest bike race the world has ever seen? It was more like a fourth-category race. There was hardly anyone there. Where were all the cars? It looked more like the start of an amateur race to me. These guys may be among the biggest names we know but they looked like riders who had won their first inter-club race