The Tour de France is full of stories. Every day we highlight a historical moment that can be linked to the upcoming stage. Today stage 3: the first yellow jersey wearer, who was laughed at and grew into the biggest unlucky person in the Tour.
“Good heavens, that seems like a good idea to me. What color should it be then?”, asks Tour boss Henri Desgrange in 1919 after the proposal by former Peugeot team boss Alphonse Baugé to give the race leader a striking jersey. “I don’t know”, Baugé replies. “But in your position I would take the color of the paper of your newspaper.”
That’s how the jersey becomes mustard yellow, just like the color of Desgrange’s newspaper L’Auto. Eugène Christophe is the first wearer of the jersey in the twelfth stage, but he is not exactly happy with it. The Frenchman complains that the public laughs at him and makes canary noises as he passes. His nickname ‘Cri-Cri’, a bird sound, does not help in that regard.
Christophe rides reluctantly in yellow for three days, but loses the jersey in the penultimate stage to Dunkirk. On the bumpy cobblestone roads near Valenciennes, his front fork breaks, forcing him to walk to a bicycle factory. The repair costs him almost three hours. As a result, he loses the yellow jersey to the Belgian Firmin Lambot.
It is not the first time that Christophe has been on the road for hours due to material failure. In 1913, both his front and rear forks break on the Tourmalet. Isolated from the outside world, he walks 14 kilometers to the village of Saint-Marie-de-Campan. There the Frenchman finds a blacksmith, but according to the regulations he must repair his bicycle himself. It takes him three hours and he gets three penalty minutes because the blacksmith’s boy operated the bellows.
As a result of all the bad luck, Christophe gets the nickname ‘eternal unlucky person’. The French people had so much pity for him in 1919 that they held a national fundraising campaign. In this way he pockets more money than winner Lambot. It does not lead to more happiness, because in 1922, as a contender, he breaks his front fork for the third time. ‘Cri-Cri’ would never win the Tour.