Lucas Buthion is a project manager in the public service and specialist in European issues.
It was almost 6 a.m. on April 4, 1920, when the pink Rose of Suresnes sounded in front of the cheering crowd of onlookers, the signal for the start of this 21st edition of Paris-Roubaix: 93 couriers (imposing peloton for the ‘era), on 136 registered, decided to brave the bad weather announced in this Easter weekend to try to hang on their prize list the first “monument” of the season.
The top names of the day are obviously not named Arnaud Démare, Greg Van Avermaet, Peter Sagan, Sep Vanmarcke, Niki Terpstra, Mathieu van der Poel or John Degenkolb. The stars then, today forgotten, are rather the brothers Henri and Francis Pelissier, Eugène Christophe, Ernesto Azzini, Marcel Buysse, Costante Girardengo, Gaetano Belloni, Jean Rossius or Henri Suter. In countries ravaged for four years by the fighting of the “der des ders”, the followers expect a peaceful pass of arms between French, Belgian and Italian athletes.
Correspondents dispatched to follow the event report that the riders are unrecognizable.
Among this gotha, the Belgian Paul Deman, 31, has solid references: winner of the first Tour of Flanders in 1913, he also won the famous Bordeaux-Paris race (591km) in May 1914. But the war went through there . Durably weakened by an epigastric hernia during the conflict, he no longer appeared, when cycling competitions resumed in 1919, among the outsiders of his sport. It doesn’t matter for the Flemish: bite the bullet, he learned to do so during hostilities, to save his life: while neutral Belgium was invaded in 1914 by Germany, Deman joined the intelligence network of the Belgian resistance ( the White Lady”). His mission: to go back and forth to the Netherlands (by bike, needless to say) to get messages across, housed in a gold molar that he made specially. In order to minimize the risks, he has always completed his fourteen missions in bad weather.
Paul Deman had been tried by a German military court to be shot expeditiously on November 11, 1918.
Also, the rain that falls on the giants of the road at dawn on April 4, 1920, it does not scare him. Paul Deman clings, anonymous, in the lead pack of about thirty competitors who head for the Oise. From Pontoise, after only 30km of racing, the correspondents dispatched to follow the race report that the riders are unrecognizable, as they are covered by a “shell of mud”. They will be several truckers, including favorites, having to give up, desperately chattering their teeth off their jaws, literally overcome by the piercing cold. Beauvais, Breteuil, Amiens, Doullens, the kilometers are linked, the punctures, the chain breaks too – the complicated weather relentless on mechanics already tested by often impracticable roads. Between hellish starts, descents of hills with an open grave, racing incidents and human failures, the peloton breaks up then re-forms – to irretrievably lose units: from around twenty men, the group of favorites thus reduces to eight elements in Arras. There are only four left in Lens, who take turns attacking the formidable cobblestones of the north. Paul Deman is among them.
Does he then remember this November 10, 1918? When, after being arrested, is he summarily tried by a German military court to be expeditiously shot the next day, November 11? Can he think of that feeling that invades him when his cell was opened on this day of armistice, not by a German but by a British officer? Does he think of this ultimate fate, which led the English to maintain his death sentence, considering him a double agent, before a telegram from the Belgian government saved him in extremis from the firing squad?
After 263km and 10h47 of journey, it is Paul Deman who enters the first on the track of the Stade Roubaisien.
The fact remains that at 2km from the finish, folded on his machine, all his members exhausted by the strenuous effort of the hours spent, more truly lucid, he still manages to mobilize his last ounces of energy for a final burst : he places an attack, which is decisive… 50m, 100m, Deman manages to break away… After 263km and 10h47 of journey, it is he who enters the first on the track of the Stade Roubaisien, triumphantly greeted by an immense crowd , to cross the finish line as the winner.
Only one year after its rebirth on the ashes still glowing from the great war, Paris-Roubaix thus passed the “cap of its majority” (21 years), haloed, according to the reporters of L’Auto, a “Big, very big success on the whole route, from start to finish”. A century later, let us therefore bet that this popular success will once again quickly halo the race, once the current state of health war is definitely behind us.
– .
