1924 Tour de France

Lore & Background

The 1920s Tour de France was a different beast from the modern spectacle. Stages routinely exceeded four hundred kilometres, riders carried their own tools, and the peloton was a small, tightly-knit group of professionals and semi-pros from France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland. There were no team radios, no drafting strategies refined by data, and no neutral support cars lining the road. What there was, in abundance, was suffering.

Lucien Buysse embodied the Belgian school of cycling that dominated the early Tour. Tall, powerful, and possessed of a climbing ability that let him attack in the high mountains when the French riders were already fading, Buysse represented the type of rider the Tour was built to reward. His 1924 victory was not a sprinter's fluke but a statement of sustained, week-long superiority across the Alps and Pyrenees.

The era also carried the weight of post-war reconstruction. The Tour had been suspended during the First World War, and the 1919 resumption had been a thin, desperate affair. By 1924, the race had reasserted its identity as a cultural institution of France, drawing crowds to mountain towns and making the yellow jersey—introduced in 1919—a symbol of national pride and sporting excellence.

In Their Own Story

The dawn mist still clung to the cobbled road outside the small Pyrenean village when Buysse rolled in on the back of a long stage, his legs pumping in a rhythm that had become second nature over three weeks. He dismounted, leaned his heavy steel-framed bike against the wall, and simply stood there, breathing. Around him, the crowd—farmers, shopkeepers, children with red faces—chanted a name that was not his. He smiled, wiped sweat from his brow with a rag, and walked toward the water station. The mountains had spoken, and for once, they had spoken in Flemish.

Reader's Guide

The 1924 Tour de France was unforgettable for the sheer, unrelenting physicality it demanded. In an era before modern training, nutrition, and equipment, the race was a three-week gauntlet of stages that could exceed four hundred kilometres, threading through flat plains, rolling countryside, and the punishing walls of the Alps and Pyrenees. Riders carried their own spares, patched their own tires, and ate what the roadside offered.

The general classification battle was defined by the mountain stages, where the field thinned and the true climbers separated themselves from the rest. Lucien Buysse, the Belgian giant, used his superior climbing power to carve out decisive gaps on the high-altitude ascents. Where the French and Italian riders faded in the thin air, Buysse kept his cadence, his shoulders steady, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. Stage after stage, the gaps in the classification widened in his favour.

The drama of the 1924 edition lay not in a single explosive attack but in the cumulative toll of the race. By the final weeks, the peloton was a shadow of its opening size. Mechanical failures, crashes on descents, and simple exhaustion eliminated riders week by week. Buysse's victory was the reward for a rider who had simply refused to stop, stage after stage, in a race that tested the very limits of human endurance in an age before the modern sport existed.

Did You Know?

• The 1924 Tour de France was organized by L'Auto, the same Parisian newspaper that had created the race in 1903, making it a family affair of journalism and sport.
• Lucien Buysse's victory added to Belgium's early dominance of the Tour, as Belgian riders were among the most successful in the race's first two decades.
• The Tour was suspended entirely during World War I (1915–1918), so the 1924 edition was part of a post-war revival that re-established the race as France's premier sporting event.
• Riders in this era competed on heavy steel-framed bicycles with drop handlebars, carrying their own tools and spares, with no team support cars lining the route.