There are higher, steeper and longer mountain passes at the Tour de France, but nothing draws the crowds quite like Alpe d'Huez. On Thursday, the peloton returns to the Alpe for the first time in three years - a lengthy wait given that the ascent has featured as a summit finish no fewer than 29 times in the past 43 editions of the Tour. It has been the defining mountain of the modern Tour.
For more than half a century, after all, La Grande Boucle was an event more imagined than watched. In the absence of television coverage, it was left to newspapers and radio to bring the race to the people. The few eyewitnesses who followed in cars and on motorbikes could embellish as they saw fit. The line between fact and folklore was blurred quickly and indelibly.
The bridge between those sepia-tinted days and the modern era came on July 4, 1952, when the Tour held its first summit finish on the slopes of Alpe d'Huez. Fittingly, the winner was Fausto Coppi, who built his legend in the golden age but whose influence would resonate for generations to come.
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The Tour had always been a business, but this particular day saw Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan explore the potential of new revenue streams. A consortium of hoteliers had paid for the Tour to visit the ski resort, while another novelty came in the form of the motorbike-borne cameras on hand to film Coppi as he feathered clear of Jean Robic, winner of the first post-war Tour.
Coppi, as was his wont, was ahead of his time. Though summit finishes would feature fitfully in the Tours of the 1950s and 1960s (including the very next day at Sestriere), it was only in the 1970s - when television definitively outmuscled radio and print as the race's primary medium - that the mountaintop finale became a true staple.
Alpe d'Huez returned as a finish in 1976 and then featured in 16 of the next 20 Tours, becoming the defining emblem of the new, made-for-television Tour. Or as the former Équipe writer Jacques Augendre, veteran of 55 Tours, put it, Alpe became "the col of modernity."
The stage
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