Tour des Légendes

For devotees, the Tour de France is no less than a religion. 'The racing cyclists are the celebrants and the journalists the precentors', says the archivist of the French newspaper L'Equipe. Director Erik van Empel started a search for the time when the event mainly took place in the imagination, via oral tradition. He has to go back to the year 1948, the year before television was introduced. Making use of archive footage, interviews with the heroes of yesteryear and images of the modern Tour, Van Empel particularly revives the hell of the thirteenth stage of the 1948 Tour. When riding the same route in the evening twilight, the exhausted numb cyclists are riding along. Briek Schotte, better known as IJzeren Briek and finishing second in 1948, remembers it as if it happened yesterday: Bartali finished Bobet, literally finished him with his breakaways.'