Cyclist
Pro race history: André Mahé and Serse Coppi share Paris-Roubaix victory in 1949
Just imagine for a moment that it’s 17th April 1949 and you are a 29-year-old professional cyclist riding for Stella-Dunlop with a handful of decent results over a five-year career. Today you are in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, the city where you were born. You are standing astride your bike among 215 other riders, ready for the 47th edition of the most revered one-day race in the calendar: Paris-Roubaix.
The flag drops. Ahead lies 244km of rough, cobblestoned roads then a sprint on the Roubaix velodrome to the finish line. At least the weather is kind – ‘a beautiful spring morning’ is how Le Miroir des Sports will later describe it – and you are feeling good. A fortnight ago you took fifth at the Critérium National, and while you aren’t among the favourites here – Rik Van Steenbergen, Fausto Coppi, Louison Bobet, Fiorenzo Magni and Émile Idée – you finished ninth last year. You are André Mahé, and you know how to ride the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix.
You ride well. The kilometres tick by and you watch the escapes go, unconcerned and playing the long game. You know that the worst of the cobbles are at Wattignies, 22km before the finish, and it is here that you make your effort. Out front are two riders – Jesus Moujica and Florent Mathieu – who are working together and stretching out a decent lead. Still, you reel them in and with 5km to go you’ve bridged the gap along with Frans Leenen. You’re now leading the race with Moujica, Mathieu and Leenen. No one else is in sight. The winner will come from this final selection.
So you dig into your reserves and go again. A photographer pulls alongside and snaps an image that will grace the front pages in the days to come – one that shows you out of the saddle, hunched over your handlebars, leg muscles straining. Behind, your rivals panic as they try to react. Mathieu falls, leaving you with just two on your wheel as you approach the velodrome. It’s pandemonium and there are cars everywhere. You try to remain focussed – you know there’s a sprint to come and that Moujica is probably the fastest of the group. How can you play this to come out on top? Then a gendarme appears right in front of you, his left arm out, instructing you to turn to your right. You follow his direction.
A result, an appeal and a long wait
Two days later a small map published on the front page of L’Équipe neatly summarised the drama that played out from the moment that Mahé, Moujica and Leenen turned right. Unfortunately for them the gendarme’s direction had been intended for the following cars, not the riders themselves. Instead of turning right into the velodrome and onto the track, the leaders found themselves on a road that took them around the back of the stands among the press cars and motorbikes.
‘Belgian journalist Albert De Wetter, who had just leapt off a press motorbike, grasped what was happening before the riders,’ Peter Cossins writes in The Monuments. ‘He waved Mahé and Leenen up the stairs to the press gallery, from where they were able to clamber down through the crowd and onto the track.’ Indeed, L’Équipe’s map shows the path the riders took around the edge of the velodrome, through the press entrance and tribunes to emerge on to the track on the opposite side to where they should have entered and 20m or so after the finish line. In all that mayhem Moujica had fallen and broken a pedal and so it was left to Mahé and Leenen to contest the win. They raced back past the entrance they should have taken and headed towards the line with Mahé crossing first to claim by far the biggest win of his career.
The chasing bunch made a far less dramatic entrance, with the sprint won by Serse Coppi, Fausto’s brother and Bianchi teammate. When Coppi learned of Mahé’s circuitous route he lodged an appeal, asserting that Mahé and Leenen hadn’t followed the regulated race route. The appeal was accepted, Mahé and Leenen disqualified, and Coppi awarded the win.
Two days later Le Miroir des Sports ran short interviews with both men. ‘You all know what happened to me,’ Mahé said. ‘You all know I deserve to see my name appear on the palmarès of Paris-Roubaix. I had received the bouquet and taken my lap of honour… Was it my fault if an official misdirected us, when Moujica, Leenen and I were 400m ahead? Was it my fault if I found myself behind the velodrome?’ L’Équipe calculated that Mahé and co had ridden 220m further than the other riders.
For his part, Serse Coppi declared he couldn’t believe he had won a race of such prestige. ‘Being declared the winner after [an appeal] bothers me, that’s for sure, but it’s only the result that counts,’ Coppi said. ‘What upsets me more is not having taken the lap of honour with the bouquet.’
Mahé subsequently lodged his own appeal and days later was reinstated by the French Cycling Federation. That led to an appeal by the Italian federation, and in August the result was annulled with the declaration that there would be no winner. This didn’t leave anyone happy, least of all Fausto Coppi, who made thinly veiled threats that if something wasn’t done to reinstate his brother there would be a good chance he wouldn’t race Paris-Roubaix the following year. And so, in November, the UCI announced they had reviewed events and determined the race to be a dead heat, with Mahé and Serse Coppi declared joint winners. The stuff of dreams for the journeyman Coppi, but for Mahé the win was forever tainted.
‘Even the French federation interrogated me. I felt like a condemned man,’ he told author Les Woodland years later. ‘They seemed to take the view that I had cheated somehow. I ended up having to justify myself even though all I’d done was follow the way I’d been directed.’
Giles Belbin is the author of Tour de France Champions: An A To Z (thehistorypress.co.uk)
• This article originally appeared in issue 151 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
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