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For Hank
Prologue
Buffalo Vélodrome, Paris, 1 September 1928.
The evening air was cool and still. Groups of cyclists milled nervously in the centre of the velodrome. Some distracted themselves by fussing over their bicycles, adjusting tyre pressures or tweaking a seating position. Some discussed tactics, pacing strategies and food. Some talked about the prize money. All inspected the track, a banked concrete oval, about 500 metres per lap. By the end, their bodies would know every furrow of its rough, uneven surface.
No-one was getting any sleep this night.
The men were about to start one of the toughest events on the world cycling calendar, the Bol d’Or, the Golden Bowl, a non-stop twenty-four-hour endurance race designed to break the physical and mental resolve of all but the strongest.1
Among the assembled riders was a young Australian road cycling champion, Hubert Opperman. Months earlier, he had completed the gruelling Tour de France, the toughest event of his career, but he still hesitated at the prospect of twenty-four hours of near continuous pedalling. The start drew nearer. He worried about the last time he had raced such a distance in Victoria, when he faltered in the closing hours. He thought about the European titans who had won this great event before, not to mention the experienced road veterans who stood before him. Were their minds also flooded with doubt?
While the race was a solo event, each competitor would be paced by teammates riding tandems or triplets. Fresh pacemakers could be exchanged at any time, but the laps would only be counted on the position of the solo competitor. At 11pm, the starting gun sounded and twelve contenders took off behind their pacers. Confusion reigned. Teams found their rhythm, jostled for position or attacked, hoping to put some early laps into their rivals.
In the ‘mad melee’ Opperman hit a back wheel. In the struggle to remain upright he wrenched the handlebars loose from the forks.2 With handlebars swinging wildly in the corners he kept pedalling as best he could. He hoped that the pace might slacken just enough for him to change bikes without falling too far behind. It did not. His pacemakers looked behind, unable to understand why their man could no longer follow their accelerations. Then, an hour later, Opperman felt the power leave his rear wheel. Looking down between his legs he saw the chain dangling from the cogs. He rolled off the track into the centre of the velodrome. Opperman’s manager, Bruce Small, stood by with his spare machine. Before handing it over, Small noticed the handlebars were also loose and quickly tightened them. Three laps down. The pacemakers urged their rider on. ‘Allez, Oppy!’ ‘Come on!’ Opperman stood on pedals to bring more energy to the wheel, when he suddenly slumped forward. Another chain had broken and now hung uselessly from the chain wheel. Chain breaks were not uncommon, but two breaks in such quick succession were almost unheard of.
Now with two chainless bikes, Small frantically tried to borrow one from a rival team. They refused, as sanctions applied to teams who were considered to have colluded. Opperman scrambled for a machine, any machine. He jumped on a nearby roadster, a heavy touring bike with mudguards, a lamp and, worst of all, a low gearing ratio that limited the top speed. For every six laps taken by the field, Opperman could only manage five. By now the news had spread through the crowd that the Australian’s bikes had been sabotaged. Someone had loosened the steering tubes and filed chains until they were so thin that they would snap when extra force was applied to the pedals. The crowd had found its hero and began pouring a storm of hatred over the perpetrators. They cheered for Oppy to take his revenge.
‘Allez, allez, allez, Opperman!’
By the time Small had repaired the track machine Opperman was seventeen laps behind. He pleaded with his pacers to raise the speed to make up the deficit. ‘C’est impossible,’ they moaned. On each lap, Opperman yelled to his manager to find some more willing pacers. Small found some among the teams who had already abandoned the race. With a deal struck quickly, the new riders joined the chase. Opperman began clawing back the lost laps. After ten hours of racing, he was just four laps behind the leaders. By now Opperman’s bladder demanded attention. Having worked so hard to regain position he refused to leave the track. ‘Doucement, doucement!’ he shouted to his pacemakers. They were perplexed at the sudden request to ease up. The crowd erupted when they saw a stream of golden urine flying from Opperman’s rear wheel and into the faces of his pursuers.3
Strategies for bladder relief have always been important in bicycle racing. An experienced French rider once advised Opperman to always be the last to take a toilet break. In this way, he could gain a few laps before having to stop himself. Ever the opportunist, Small suggested that Opperman adopt his road practice of not stopping at all. This feat was made more difficult because unlike on a road bike, which could be fitted with a freewheel hub that allowed the bike to roll without the cranks and pedals moving forward, a track bike has a fixed wheel. When the wheel turns, so do the pedals and of course, the rider’s legs. Oppy had taken Small’s advice to heart and in the days before the race practiced his technique on a fixed wheel machine on some quiet roads around Paris.
The now relieved Opperman returned to his task. After twelve hours he fell into a ‘slough of monotony’ looking for any distraction from the infernal turning to the left. Small worked from the sidelines ordering riders to different positions, putting the smallest riders to the front and the larger to the rear to maximise the aerodynamic benefits. Opperman’s grit had won the crowd’s heart. ‘Allez, allez, allez, Oppy’, they chanted. By midday the remaining riders began to tire. Four cyclists had dropped out, including the much-feared Achille Souchard, the French national road cycling champion and Olympic gold medallist. Opperman ordered a savage acceleration to further demoralise the remaining riders. At the fourteen-hour mark, he had covered 400 kilometres with his nearest rival over thirty laps behind. The best of Europe had fallen away. Winning seemed a formality.
‘Allez, allez, allez, Opperman’, they sang.
He would tell the story of the Bol d’Or for the rest of his life. It never failed to move him. ‘To be at last in front of a Continental classic, to know that a dream was almost true,’ he recalled, ‘to hear this musical roar’ was ‘to be transported to the heights of pedalling inspiration.’4
Opperman had ridden at over forty kilometres per hour for twenty-four hours. He had covered 950 kilometres and was over 100 laps ahead of his nearest rivals. In the end, it was a clinical demolition of the opposition, including French hard-man and last year’s winner, Honoré Barthélémy, who had been forced to abandon the race.
Opperman desperately looked forward to ‘bouquets and bed’, but Small sensed another opportunity. Oppy’s speed and his ability to ride without rest had put him on schedule to beat the 1000-kilometre record. Opperman refused to continue. Small explained to the exhausted rider that he would feel no more or less tired tomorrow if he continued to ride. Not for the last time, Opperman gave in to his astute manager’s irrefutable logic. Small had already arranged another squad of pacemakers to help him cover the required distance. Opperman dutifully strapped his feet to his pedals and rode for another hour and nineteen minutes, all to the rapturous applause and chanting of the crowd. Just after midnight on Monday, a great mass of spectators surged onto the street and Opperman was carried, shoulder high, from the track.5
Race fixing, collusion and other forms of skulduggery marred professional cycling in the early twentieth century. Those who tampered with Opperman’s machines were never discovered. Although such actions were unsporting and dishonourable, the saboteurs were right to fear the ‘little Australian’ in their midst. The French sports newspaper L’ Auto – never shy of hyperbole – declared Opperman the greatest all-round cyclist in the world and his victory as the most thrilling performance the French public had witnessed for many years.6 But his ride at the Buffalo Vélodrome confirmed what the sporting press had suspected throughout that year’s Tour de France: that Opperman was a spectacularly gifted cyclist who combined great speed with prodigious stamina. Some likened Oppy’s capacity to Léon Georget – known