On Saturday morning, hardcore fans of Thibaut Pinot assembled in the Vosges for their idol’s final mountain stage of his final Tour. One group of ultras posted a list of dos and don’ts on social media. Don’t use smoke bombs. Don’t run alongside the riders. Brandish signs at the side of the road rather than in it, so they don’t get in the way of the cyclists. No insults or shouts. Pick up your litter.
The list had extra relevance in a week when the fans’ behaviour on the roadside at the Tour, and their interaction with the Tour caravan and the riders, made headlines. The previous Saturday, two motorbikes were banned for a day after they were unable to get through the fans on the Col de Joux Plane, the blockage causing Tadej Pogacar to stall as he attacked Jonas Vingegaard. The following day, a fan with a mobile phone caused a mass pile-up in the Alps. On Wednesday another motorbike was penalised after blocking the race on the Col de la Loze, holding up Pinot and his mate David Gaudu to their understandable disgust. After another incident on the climb, the Basque Pello Bilbao received a formal warning for punching a fan who had encroached on his personal space.
The notion that these events might be some sort of novelty caused by a new generation of uninformed fans inspired by Netflix is for the birds. That was the suggestion this week, but memories are short. There is a long, inglorious history at the Tour of fans being in places they shouldn’t be and doing things that they wouldn’t do at home. Unfortunately, there is also a slightly less extended history of the Tour’s organisers being behind the curve when it comes to controlling – in as much as they can – the number of vehicles involved in the race and how they are managed.
Crashes caused by spectators trying to take photos are nothing new, sadly, although in the past they used actual cameras rather than mobile phones. It was 1994 when, most shockingly, a gendarme trying to catch a picture of the sprint finish caused a massive pile-up shortly before the line at Armentières, one of the worst in Tour history. In 1999, a spectator with a camera at l’Alpe d’Huez failed to realise that Giuseppe Guerini was about to hit him; the low-speed impact caused little harm, mercifully, and the Italian went on to claim the stage.
The Alpe, last visited by the Tour in 2022, is where much of the madness has occurred in the past. In 2004, I wrote of the time trial up the Alpe: “It is frequently said that the Tour’s own worst enemy is its sheer size, and yesterday that was the case. In the first four or five kilometres, where the bulk of the fans were gathered, they were so numerous, waving so many flags, and so reluctant to get out of the way that the riders could not see where they were going even though each was accompanied by a police motorbike. The mountains always bring out the idiot fringe … Yesterday the amateur snappers … stood three deep, viewfinders trained on the rider, unaware that he was a yard or two away.”
When a body was discovered down the mountainside after the Tour’s visit in 2004, the writer Tim Moore said: “A squalid, manic and sometimes lethal shambles, and that’s just the way they like it. It’s the Glastonbury festival for cycling fans.” It was something of a tradition among drunk fans at the Alpe’s Dutch corner to throw beer at advance Tour vehicles, but beer was only the half of it. In 2013 at the Mont Saint-Michel time trial, Mark Cavendish complained of having urine thrown at him, while in 2015 Chris Froome made a similar complaint, and teammates claimed they had been spat at and punched as they rode through the mountains.
In 2006 a fan waving a giant cardboard hand of the type thrown out in their thousands by the publicity caravan managed to scrape it down Thor Hushovd’s arm in the finish sprint at Strasbourg, leaving him looking “as if he had been knifed in a bar room brawl”, to quote the Guardian’s report. Meanwhile, 2021 was notorious for the “Omi-Opi” episode when a placard in honour of a fan’s grandparents caused a mass pile-up, putting four riders out of the stage on day one in Brittany. It was 2016 when the sheer volume of fans on Mont Ventoux caused a blockage among the race motorbikes, leading to a crash among the leaders that left Froome with a broken bike; he ended up running up the mountain.
Mutterings about “gigantisme” began in the late 1980s, and complaints that the Tour has grown so large that it is harmful to the way the race is run have been made regularly since. At times, the organisers are in a position to take draconian measures to exclude fans and race vehicles, as was seen this year at the Puy de Dôme, and in 2016 on the Lacets de Montvernier. The Tour had a different look and a different feel in 2020, when fans were banned from the roadside during Covid-19. It was probably safer, definitely less crazy.
Photograph: Shutterstock
There will be no repetition of that, although the organisers said this past week they will take steps to reduce the number of vehicles permitted on the steeper, narrower climbs that are an increasingly significant element in the Tour route. There will be more warnings to fans to behave, but such warnings are nothing new.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Tour has always lived with – and thrived off – the fact that it is a free-to-view, open-access spectacle; fundamental change cannot happen because that is one of the race’s foundations. As in the past, the rules will be tweaked, baby steps will be taken, there will be more barriers, fewer vehicles at certain points. But the tensions will still be there, as they have been for the last 120 years.
• This article was amended on 23 July 2023. A previous version said that a 1999 collision between Giuseppe Guerini and a camera-toting spectator “deprived the Italian of a likely stage win”. In fact, Guerini did go on to win that stage.
