The Paris–Roubaix Classic. 273 kilometres of torment across the bone-crunching pavé of northern France.
In 1976 the avant-garde Danish film director, Jørgen Leth, embarked on an ambitious project to capture the spirit of this spectacular and cruel one-day race. The resulting film, A Sunday in Hell, has become the most admired cycling documentary of all time, and its revolutionary camera and sound techniques have forever changed the way the sport is viewed on screen.
The film centres around legends including Eddy Merckx, Roger De Vlaeminck, Freddy Maertens and Francesco Moser, capturing not just their experiences from the saddle, but also the mood of a nation and its relationship with the most punishing of the Spring Classics.
Sunday in Hell looks at the men, the method and the places behind the film. It observes the creativity of Leth and his collaborators, explores the lives of riders such as unlikely winner Marc Demeyer and revisits locations which have changed little to this day.
William Fotheringham is the number-one bestselling author of Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike. He writes for the Guardian and Observer on cycling and rugby and is the critically lauded author of Fallen Angel, Roule Britannia, and Put Me Back on My Bike, which Vélo magazine called ‘the best cycling biography ever written’. A racing cyclist and launch editor of Procycling and Cycle Sport magazines, he has reported on almost thirty Tours de France.
1. Director Jørgen Leth with cyclist Ole Ritter (Heine Pedersen)
2. Jørgen Leth on the site of the 1976 Paris – Roubaix race (Jørgen Leth)
3. Italian champion Francesco Moser leads reigning world champion, Dutchman Hennie Kuiper (Offside/Presse Sports)
4. Roger De Vlaeminck waves a motorbike and cameraman out of his way on the Neuvilly ‘hill’ (Offside/Presse Sports)
5. The Neuvilly ‘hill’ today (Author’s own)
6. ‘The Gypsy’ in the Roubaix showers (John Pierce/Photosport International)
7. The Roubaix showers today (Author’s own)
8. Cameraman Dan Holmberg prepares for a day of filming (Dan Holmberg)
9. Albert Bouvet contemplates his beloved cobbles during a route recce in winter 1993 (Graham Watson)
10. David Saunders, the ‘voice’ of the film for English speaking fans (John Pierce/Photosport International)
11. The finish sprint in Roubaix (Offside/Presse Sports)
12. Marc Demeyer celebrates victory (Offside/Presse Sports)
13. Demeyer congratulated by Lomme Driessens (Offside/Presse Sports)
14. The 1976 winner’s plaque in the Roubaix showers (Author’s own)
15. Demeyer’s grave in Outrijve, West Flanders (Author’s own)
16. Chemin de Bourghelles (Author’s own)
17. The former Café de la Place on Avenue Desandrouins, Valenciennes (Author’s own)
18. Freddy Maertens, West Flanders, September 2017 (Author’s own)
19. The author and Jørgen Leth, Copenhagen, September 2017 (Author’s own)
Jorgen Leth and Dan Holmberg’s notebooks here, here and here and film poster here reproduced courtesy of Danish Film Institute
Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to correct any omissions or mistakes in future editions.
To the memory of Albert Bouvet, without whom the Paris–Roubaix we know and love today would not exist in its current form.
Throughout this book you will find in the margins time codes which relate to key moments in A Sunday in Hell. There are at least three versions extant of the film that I know of, on DVD and other media. These time codes relate specifically to the Danish Film Institute DVD issued in the box set Jørgen Leth 2: Sports Films.
0:12We start with the sound of a chain, the tick-tick-tick of the links running over the bar that has been thrust into the gap between the drop-outs of the silvery frame as a mechanic lovingly brushes the transmission with diesel. After fifty seconds, the camera pans upwards to the man’s face. We don’t know to whom the bike belongs or, initially, what make it is. We never learn the identity of the mechanic; we are aware only that he is intent on his work. We can eventually surmise, from his green jersey, that he belongs to the Sanson team … but we can only do this in hindsight; as we watch initially, the colour means no more than the images. A minute in, the mournful sound of a cello starts up.
As we wait to find out what is going on, we are allowed to feast our eyes for a full three minutes on the finest products from Campagnolo’s Italian stable: a three-quarters rear shot of the finely sculpted Record chainset, the black anodised pedal with its perfectly arranged leather toestrap, the bars waiting to have tape wound onto them. The cameramen, Henrik Herbert, has captured the mechanic’s total involvement so lovingly, so lingeringly, that it feels almost fetishistic. Intent though he is, the mechanic is still brisk as he rotates the cranks, checks the tyres, taps the brake blocks into place with a hammer, puts a wheel into the rear dropouts and finally runs through each gear. Click. Click. Click. Tap tap. Brush brush. Whirr whirr.
It takes nearly two minutes for the credits to come up, and another minute and a half before we get any sense of what might be going on, as David Saunders intones the opening words on the English soundtrack. Nearly four minutes go past before the bike race, Paris–Roubaix, even merits a mention. All this time there is sound and image – and wonder. Even if we know – as we most probably do on first viewing – that this film is about the ‘Hell of the North’, we are made to wait before we enter it.
Something is brewing. Something is building.
‘It’s the afternoon of Saturday the tenth of April. Roger De Vlaeminck arrives at the Brooklyn team’s hotel in Lamorlaye, north of Paris …’
In 2010, I was asked to act as the compere when a Bristol film festival ran a screening of the film A Sunday in Hell,fn1 the Danish director Jørgen Leth’s full-length documentary account of the 1976 Paris–Roubaix. We watched the film on the big screen – a rare enough event in itself – after which I hosted an audience question-and-answer session with Leth, who had travelled from Denmark just for us.
We all knew the race: Paris–Roubaix is not cycling’s most celebrated one-day Classic for nothing. Its reliance on archaic cobbled lanes nicknamed ‘the Hell of the North’ makes it the stand-out event in a sport that hinges primarily on the interaction of man, bike and landscape, and where the fundamental premise is extreme: asking man and bike to do things they are not intended to do. ‘Paris–Roubaix is cycling’s Cape Horn,’ said the double winner Marc Madiot – in other words, its ultimate challenge – adding that, ‘in an era of cycling by computer it sublimates the artists who use pen on paper. It’s as beautiful as a parchment manuscript.’ This race is anachronistic, but glorious.
I’d become completely smitten the fifth time I reported the event, on 10 April 1994, when a blizzard struck the field as they left the start. That marked the point when you paused for breath and realised just how insane this entire exercise was. And, therefore, just how special. Every one-day Classic makes massive demands on the participants for the same basic reason: they are the most coveted single-day races in cycling, the action condensed over the hardest courses. Wet editions of Paris–Roubaix are rarities because truly sodden springs are relatively infrequent, and the cobbles drain fast when the weather dries up; in spring 1994 the press corps had been scanning weather reports and speculating for weeks about how bad this one might be – or good, depending which side of the computer keyboard you were on.
The 1994 edition of Paris–Roubaix was the toughest race for many years, the cobbles so slippery that at one point there was not a single motorcycle left upright to carry a television camera, and conditions so tough that sixty kilometres from home there was only one rider left in front of the field: a chippy little former Soviet called Andrei Tchmil, who sported a banana-shaped grin on good days and a fixed Stalinesque set to his jaw on the bad ones. This was a Stalin-mask day. There were no other cyclists in sight at times. The motos and the drivers had been defeated and all of Tchmil’s pedal-powered rivals had either fallen off, punctured, or simply been unable to handle the cold, wet, mud and stress. There was just Tchmil and the gloop.
Leth’s film was shot eighteen years before Tchmil’s glorious ride through the snowstorm, but it has all the elements that still make up the madness that gives me and hundreds of thousands of others around the world that collective tingle down our spines every second Sunday in April – the chaos, the crashes, the passion, the suffering, the humanity. But the director has added an epic dimension that sums up what really appeals to us: this race is so much larger than life. There are close-ups of muscles as they are battered by the cobbles like jellies balanced on a pneumatic drill, surreal music, scenic vistas from soaring viewpoints, intimate human details, and a smattering of humour.
There is more to it than his personal vision, however. This film is a snapshot of a moment in cycling history, a time capsule of a sport about to emerge from the homespun postwar era and become a bigger, more sophisticated, more anonymous entity.
There is a poignant touch in that the winner of the 1976 race, Marc Demeyer, died tragically young – the English version of the film is dedicated to him – and most of the men who contested that year’s race with him were household names. Eddy Merckx looms large, as he always did. His successor as a five-time Tour de France winner Bernard Hinault makes a cameo appearance, in complete anonymity. France’s most popular cyclist ever, Raymond Poulidor, has a walk-on role. The film’s other stars – Roger De Vlaeminck, Francesco Moser, Freddy Maertens, Walter Godefroot, Hennie Kuiper, Joop Zoetemelk, Bernard Thevenet – make up a hit-list of cycling greats of the late 1970s and early 1980s. 1976 was a key generational turning point: Merckx was past his best; Poulidor was about to retire, closing a protracted coda to the 1960s when he and Jacques Anquetil had ruled the roost. It was one hell of a generation captured on celluloid in a single slice of time.
The film is also peppered with lesser-known personalities who were still on the circuit in 1994 – tending to be older and fatter – which makes the sense of continuity still greater; men such as the voice of the Tour de France for forty years, Daniel Mangeas, who is the voice at the start of Leth’s Sunday; the television commentators, some of the lesser riders. Among the bit-part players who can be spotted are two men who drove me and the photographer Graham Watson along the route of the race one memorable winter afternoon in the early 1990s. Albert Bouvet pops up now and again waving a baton, showing exactly the same body language as when he worked on the Tour de France and other races in the nineties. His sidekick Jean-François Pescheux was actually riding the 1976 race, and can be spotted in the background.
A Sunday in Hell is also a paean to a kind of race that had disappeared during the 1980s: the one-day Classic contested by stars of the Tour de France. By the time I first visited Paris–Roubaix, in 1989 – just thirteen years after Leth captured it – the sport’s most high-profile champions no longer turned up at the race. Cycling was increasingly specialised, as the Tour de France became the focus of an increasingly skewed season. A star targeting the Tour didn’t want to be in form in April, and if racing he didn’t want to risk a broken leg on the cobbles. Only Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond kept the faith. As a result, for a spell, the one-day Classics became increasingly peripheral and devalued as far as mainstream media were concerned.fn2 The Tour de France became the only focus. Leth’s film is a lasting reminder of the eternal values of a one-day annual event on a unique course: a Classic.
As well as the essential madness of the spectacle itself, this timelessness draws fans and media to major bike races. Each year’s Tour de France, Milan–San Remo or Giro d’Italia, Tour of Flanders or Paris–Roubaix is a single moment in a greater continuum. The essentials don’t change. So the villages where Leth shot his masterpiece don’t look that different over forty years later, and nor do the spectators, who still turn out in April – in greater numbers admittedly – at some of the same places their fathers, grandfathers and uncles have done, to crane their necks and shout at their heroes in exactly the same way.
Paris–Roubaix is timeless in its own unique fashion, and so is the film. The challenge of surviving those cobbled roads on a bike was essentially the same in the early twenty-first century – better tyres and factory-made wheels notwithstanding – as it had been when Leth made the film in the 1970s. The pavés themselves, although not always exactly the same ones, were as treacherous as they had been when I drove them with Bouvet and Pescheux and when Tchmil rode through the gloop left by the snow in 1994. The place names we passed were still the same – Orchies, Compiègne, Valenciennes, Templeuve, Gruson, Hem – and in a few cases the cobbled sections were virtually unchanged from when they had appeared in the film. There were individual spots that could be recognised down to the last metre: a disused railway bridge, a village church spire, a town square, a level crossing or two.
However, it was not preserved in aspic, far from it. Road races are picaresque events where individual characters appear and develop, live and die, suffer and thrive, all against an ever-changing backdrop. One-day Classics look like a bastion of stability in many ways, but the continuity is only in their essentials: they evolve as well.
I’d surmise that most of us at the showing had some idea of what we were seeing. But having Leth in front of us changed everything: we were made to look at what he had tried to do, how he had tried to do it, and how much of it he had actually achieved.
The director himself was – and still is – a larger-than-life figure, his vision of the race a poetic one. He didn’t just set out to put together a film of a bike race because it seemed like a good idea or because the money was good. He had a vision and he had passion, immense passion, probably on a par with the riders who went to such lengths to get through the toughest one-day race their sport had to offer. Like me, like all of us in that hall, like those who make their annual pilgrimage to their chosen desolate corner of the depths of northern France, he clearly loved this race.
Asked to describe the cobbles, Leth once said: ‘It’s like the stones have just been thrown there, the roads are falling apart. It’s fascinating from a film-maker’s point of view. It gives you a certain tingle, a feverish feeling, when you come to these races every year. It’s fantastic to imagine that the next day, the Sunday, whether it rains or shines, the race will come here full power and the riders are not blindly riding out on these fantastic obstacles, but with a lot of courage.’
Leth had gone to immense lengths to capture the essence of Prais–Roubaix, that much was clear. Portraying cycling is brutally reductive, as I had been painfully aware since day one of my career as a journalist. There are myriad sources of inspiration: the sport’s sense of place, its colour and flavour, the deeper character of its participants, and their back stories, the ever-changing backdrops. Unfortunately, these tend to be reduced to footnotes because of the immediacy of reporting on what happens in a race amid the constraints of time and space.
We now see sport as a televisual entity, but television and radio are still more challenging when it comes to painting a complete picture of a bike race. The small screen is where we experience sport, so our view of almost every major sports event is mediated by the editors’ choices of images and angles, and by the commentators’ words. Unlike a stadium sport, if we read a report of a stage of the Tour de France – except on very rare occasions – we are looking at the reporter’s interpretation of what he has been shown on television. What happens is mediated twice over; that makes for distance, uncertainty, grey areas.
A Sunday in Hell is an attempt to capture visually a one-day Classic in its entirety, to move outwards from the racing to the qualities that make every bike race unique: location, people, characters, history. That was a first. When the film was made, television stations across Europe showed only the final hour of many major races; we take it for granted today that we will know everything of note that has happened in a major cycle race and that, in the biggest races, we will be able to watch most of it on screen.
In the 1970s, Leth’s objective of capturing every key moment in an entire bike race on screen was a radical one. Today, races are increasingly shown from start to finish with every minute live on television – the Tour de France, the Tour of Britain – and it is somehow appropriate that the trend began with Paris–Roubaix in 2016, forty years after the director tried to do something similar in spirit.
Cycling has spawned a vast, diverse culture: novels, photographs that could happily hang in any gallery, movies of all shape and size, poetry, drama, opera, some of the greatest sports writing; cartoons, caricatures and magazines as well as clothing and bikes and components which frequently have an artistic element to them – the delicate fretwork of a Magnum Bonum steel lug on a 1950s Hetchins frame for instance – and on occasion are made into works of art by the likes of Damien Hirst and Paul Smith.
The cultural diversity has various explanations: cycling functions on more levels than most other sports. It is not something that has been artificially created and which is restricted to the confines of a stadium. The social context is massively varied, so too the backdrops, not to mention the random factors when it takes place on the open road – punctures, crashes, weather, aggressive fans – and the infinite variety of tactics and politics forged by an individual sport contested by teams. The componentry involved has always brought with it an element of craftsmanship akin to the small custom Formula One car builders of the 1940s and 1950s; in some ways, that remains the same.
In relation to other sports, professional cycle road racing stands alone because of its variegated backdrops and cultural settings, but most of all due to its fundamental madness. You cannot describe the FA Cup or Wimbledon as bonkers. You can marvel at the skill on display on turf or lawn and love the twists and turns of a Cup run or a Men’s Final, but any innate wackiness stems from the participants and fans, rather than the nature of the event itself. Cycling’s eccentricity goes back to its roots, to the days when promoters wanted more and more extreme feats from the participants in their events: riding from Bordeaux to Paris, partly behind motorbikes; cycling around France in three weeks over every mountain that could be found; racing for six days straight on a track that might measure a mere 200 metres round; racing from the French capital to the Belgian border or the Riviera.
Leth’s film remains the best depiction of a uniquely outlandish event in a uniquely extreme and demanding sport. Over forty years after it was made, it still appeals on so many levels: an introduction for the newcomer to cycling, a montage of bike porn for those who fetishised the equipment of the period, portraits of legendary figures, a depiction of one region’s big day out, and so on.
‘I still think it’s one of the best sports films I’ve ever seen,’ says Morten Piil, the consultant who originally commissioned the film, and who became a leading authority on Danish cinema. ‘It’s clean in a way; it’s not trying to be psychological, or critical or sociological in a way that overstates things. It’s lyrical, heroic, beautiful, but also matter-of-fact, and the composition of the film is superior. It takes its time. It’s a kind of heroic poem.’
It is also the product of a unique cinematographic exercise in terms of documentary, and in sport. In Bristol that evening, Leth went through the resources he had devoted to his film: the planning, the hours of footage distilled into what we had just seen, the legwork he and his team had put in to find locations such as the café at a feed station that would be – briefly – at the centre of the cycling world as the early stragglers climbed off their bikes right outside. Clearly, the making of this film was a story in itself, with its own heroes, villains, untold tales, and mysteries.
Leth’s project was a massively ambitious one, bordering on foolhardy: to capture on camera every major happening in a single event taking place over a course of more than 150 miles through open countryside, and to turn it into a coherent narrative that celebrated the race’s heroes in epic style. The constraints that this implied, not to mention the possibility of outside events intervening – as they did on the day – made this a risky investment, the more so as Leth had not actually seen the race before he started shooting. It was the ultimate one-day shoot with no second takes. The question is simple: just how the hell did he do it?
Great art transcends time. A Sunday in Hell is great art, but that does not mean its subject matter is immutable or untouchable. Rather the opposite, which is where this book comes in. The film raises questions aplenty, starting with the story of how it was born and developed to maturity. There is its creator’s story, and the unheard tales of the men who helped him make this meisterwerk. Was there anything that Leth missed out, by accident or design?
The film has its back story: the era in which, when we watch it, time stands still for almost two hours. Capture a moment in history, and you are bound to leave narrative threads hanging. So what has become of all those characters, the men exalted by Leth and assaulted by those cobbled lanes? What is left today of the race Leth depicted? Just as importantly, where is that café with the most hallucinogenic wallpaper and the most knowledgeable cycling fans in the whole of France?
Standing in the heart of Paris on a winter morning late in 1975, the two men from Denmark were impressed but also a little intimidated. Jørgen Leth and Christian Clausen were newly arrived from Copenhagen, fresh from many hours clank-clanking southwards through Germany, Holland and Belgium, which had been lightened by several bottles of burgundy to get them ‘in the mood for France’.
The building, 10 Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, stood just south of the Gare du Nord, not far from the Folies Bergère, a typical four-storey office block in a busy Parisian street. The man they had come to meet, Félix Lévitan of the newspaper Le Parisien Libéré, had the power to make or break their project, a radical one: to film a documentary about the Paris–Roubaix single-day Classic, one of the biggest of the bike races organised by Lévitan’s newspaper and its partner title l’Equipe. Leth, the director of the putative project, knew there was no question of Lévitan making any concessions by talking English to his Danish visitors. In fact, there was very little chance of his making any concession of any kind.
‘Elegant, arrogant, almost criminal,’ is how Leth recalls Lévitan, the commercial mastermind behind the Tour de France and the other events run by the two Parisian newspapers. ‘Everyone was afraid of him. All the journalists were terrified of him – he could throw them off a race at no notice. I remember the way he used to talk to them. I had a friend who was a journalist at Le Parisien, we went ahead of the race to have lunch one day, and Lévitan phoned the restaurant to ask where he was.’ As for their meeting, before they even got the cameras rolling, it turned out to be, ‘a big drama. A big drama.’
A dapper little man who exuded chilly aristocratic hauteur and foxy, Machiavellian cunning, Lévitan had come a long way from running errands on a cycling magazine in his youth. Born into a family of Jewish shoemakers, he had survived internment during the round-ups of the Second World War – the most brutal moment, he recalled, was watching from his cell window in the Cherche-Midi prison as the editor of the communist paper l’Humanité, Gabriel Péri, was executed.
He had been made head of sport at Le Parisien when the capital’s press was restructured after the liberation in 1945; and had joined forces with l’Equipe’s editor Jacques Goddet when Le Parisien’s publisher Emilien Amaury had taken over l’Equipe. The two papers’ list of events was a long way from the sprawling, multinational quasi-monopoly now enjoyed by their linear successor Amaury Sport Organisation, but the roster included one-day Classics such as Bordeaux–Paris and Paris–Tours as well as Roubaix, the Grand Prix des Nations time trial, the Critérium National and the under-25 Tour de l’Avenir.
There was a theatrical tenor to proceedings. Lévitan’s office had a close-fitting, soundproof door. ‘Spectacular’, recalls Leth; ‘they just whisked us in there.’ It was all part of the aura that Lévitan liked to project; the hard commercial man compared to his co-organiser, Jacques Goddet, who seemed more approachable and cerebral. Lévitan would go as far as intervening in his own races to ensure the interests of his sponsors prevailed; on one occasion when he overruled his own judges’ ruling on a sprint result it drew an angry protest from the British cyclist Barry Hoban, who questioned his right to make the call. Lévitan answered firmly: ‘Moi, mon cher Barry, j’ai tout le droit.’ He could do whatever he wanted.
Leth and Lévitan had history; the film-maker describes their relationship as ‘strange’ and ‘difficult’. Five years earlier, Leth had turned up at the Tour for the first time, a rising star of Danish film-making with seven years of radical cinematography behind him. He and his collaborator Henning Camre wanted to make studies for a proposed feature film on the Tour, funded by the Danish Film Institute. In those days, official visitors to the Tour who did not speak French (or who happened to be female) received a somewhat chilly welcome until they had been accepted into the family as long-standing members of the caravan. ‘The relationship with Lévitan wasn’t easy,’ recalled Leth. ‘We had the backing of Nordfilm in Denmark; they had written to him to get us access, but we had difficulty getting the accreditation we had previously secured in writing.’ The film never saw the light of day – so Camre recalls – due to the potential cost.
Lévitan would not give the Danes permission to film the 1970 Tour. The picture rights to the race had not yet acquired the massive commercial significance they hold today, but Lévitan would not deliver anything relating to his races to any party unless he felt the price was right. In the 1970s, the Tour was, commercially at least, on shaky ground, and he was innovating constantly in repeated attempts to square the financial circle. ‘Lévitan said to us, “Don’t film anything,”’ said Leth. ‘So we had only a still camera and a Super 8 camera’ – a classic cine camera made by Kodak and using 8mm film – ‘which I wanted to get some footage on, for study.’
The Tour’s commercial head and the experimental film-maker had lived contrasting lives. Born in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, in 1937, Leth had studied literature and anthropology there and in Copenhagen, and had started working life as a journalist for the magazines Aktuell and Politiken. He took a particular interest in jazz, sport, film and theatre. He started writing poems and making films almost simultaneously; they overlapped – and still do nearly sixty years on – with inspiration flowing from one to the other and vice versa in the spirit of the sixties. He was inspired by the anthropologist Malinowski, by Andy Warhol, by Jean-Luc Godard; inevitably for a Danish cineaste, by Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc remains one of his favourite films). His films at this stage were largely experimental; his curiosity for life was insatiable.
Some of the footage from the 1970 Tour eventually made it into Leth’s 1973 experimental film, Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee: the stage finish in Rouen won by Walter Godefroot, the peloton topping Mont Ventoux, and a sequence at a stage start that focuses closely on the Cannibal. But Lévitan was not happy. ‘At some point he saw me with that camera and said, “I’ve told you Mr Leth, no filming. If I see that again, you are out [of the race].” He threw people out all the time.’
Leth was inspired by cyclists and their sport, but in a far more abstract, mystical way than the cold-bloodedly commercial Lévitan. ‘I had always been in love with cycling,’ he recalled. He had begun riding on a ‘big black bike’; his father had put a stick behind the saddle so that he could be safely steered along. He had raced for the local cycling club as a junior, without conspicuous success (‘I didn’t want to fall off the bike; I didn’t want to repair it’). As a boy, he had seen the greats of track cycling on the velodrome at Aarhus, which was run by his uncle, Erik Linde, ‘an excellent sprint champion’, says Leth, who raced on the track himself.
Track sprinting is now largely reduced to the formalities of the Olympic Games, but in the 1940s and 1950s, at its zenith, it married the claustrophobic atmosphere and larger-than-life stars of the boxing ring with the spectacle and intrigue of WWF wrestling. From within the track centre – a special place for a youngster to be invited into – the teenaged Leth watched sprinters such as Jef Scherens, Reg Harris, Arie Van Vliet, Jan Derksen, and Toto Gérardin. It was, he said, ‘a romantic era, when even the velodrome in the little town [of Aarhus] was full. Those fantastic matches stayed in my memory, and later became material for my Sports Poems.’ Track racing opened his teenage eyes to the international world: exotic, eccentric foreign stars, flags fluttering for the Grand Prix. His curiosity was sparked.
He can still reel off those names, sixty years on: ‘I still have the autographs of fifty of the greatest sprinters in my notebook.’ He recalls Jef Scherens’s ‘double jump’ – his ability to produce a second acceleration which would devastate his rivals – and Reg Harris sitting on the trackside ostentatiously smoking a pipe as his great rival Arie Van Vliet scurried around in a panic about his and Harris’s seeding. Harris, four times a world sprint champion, and the most popular cyclist in Britain for many years – indeed one of the most popular British sportsmen of the fifties – attracted Leth because of his back story as a Second World War hero. ‘You educate yourself from the stories these heroes tell you. Harris coming out of the burning tank – the only one who survived – I want to know more about that.’
Road racing came next, through Leth’s friendship – which endures to this day – with Ole Ritter, the top Danish cyclist of the 1960s and 1970s, a double medallist at the world road-race championships, a multiple-stage winner in the Giro d’Italia, and holder of the prestigious world Hour record. The pair first met in 1961. ‘Jørgen was a journalist and I was an amateur racer,’ recalls Ritter. ‘I was strong, and I rode in a special way, always trying to make solo breaks, maybe with fifty to sixty kilometres to the finish.’ That quixotic approach struck a chord with Leth.
‘The next year I got two silver medals at the world championship and we were always friends after that; we always wanted to make a film together.’ The friendship was to influence all Leth’s cycling work. One project was to film Ritter naked, painted blue, against a backdrop of white houses. ‘He had the idea that all people were blue,’ explains Ritter. The film was never made.
One early cycling hero was Fausto Coppi, whose story is, as his friend Raphael Geminiani told me,fn1 a life worthy of a novel in itself, one of the narratives so beloved of Leth, who wrote a poem dedicated to the Campionissimo in his collection Sportdigte, in 1967.
Fausto Coppi
Fausto coppi.
was a fantastic human being
most at ease when alone
Invincible
in the mountains, he
was a fantastic human being
Took leave of this world prematurely
fausto coppi
fausto coppi
Another was the equally ill-fated Luis Ocaña, whose duel with Eddy Merckx in the 1971 Tour remains the stuff of legend, ending as it did with his dramatic crash and abandon while wearing the yellow jersey: ‘For me it was the biggest Tour de France of all; the drama, the feeling of fate, the defeat, the lack of luck. Ocaña was a personality – [he showed] pride I’d never seen before, the way he was challenging Merckx was incredible, unprecedented. That stage at Orcières Merlette, the accident on the col de Menté. I’ll never forget those images – him lying there, fantastic but terrible … hit by Agostinho and Zoetemelk. Then [the next day] Merckx refusing to take the yellow jersey – beautiful.’
At the back end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there was a romantic, exotic side to professional cycling. That was felt by only a few within the circumscribed group of European nations that made up its heartland – writers like Antoine Blondin – but it was part of what drew the small number who came from outside to discover a sport that was new to them. That sense of adventure and romance – cycling as road trip – underpinned a friendship which had begun in 1970 during Leth’s first visit to the Tour when he met another newcomer, the cinematographer Dan Holmberg.
Holmberg, who would become Leth’s closest collaborator, was shooting the event for Swedish television. He recalled: ‘We had a brand-new rented Peugeot. It was light blue and had a sunroof that you could shoot from. I loved it, of course. It was an adventure. There was another Peugeot in the race. A much older one and it was black and had Danish number [plates]. The two Danes in the car were Jørgen and [another future collaborator] Henning Camre. Jørgen told me that they were researching for a possible film on bike-racing. As the “expert on bike-racing-cinematography” I probably had a lot to say on the subject. After all I was an old hand at this … a few days of shooting in Italy and a few days in France. Ho ho.’
When the Tour reached Paris on the final Saturday, Leth and Holmberg went out to celebrate with ‘a big bunch of journalists’, over choucroute and wine, after which he lent Leth some money to enable his new-found friend to pursue the evening in the company of another new-found friend. ‘The next morning I woke up when the maid was placing a very elegant tray on top of my bed with café-au-lait … orange juice freshly pressed … bacon and eggs … warm croissants and so on. It was a very nice hotel close to the Champs Elysées by name of Bellman. I fell asleep again of course and woke up this time with my right leg hurting from the hot café-au-lait and my left leg deep-frozen in orange juice and ice. Later that day Jørgen and I met again at the finish line [this would have been in the Piste du Bois de Vincennes in western Paris]. Jørgen paid back his short-term loan and from now on we were friends.’
Five years later, with two low-budget cycling documentaries to his name – The Impossible Hour and Stars and Watercarriers – Leth was in Paris again. The idea of a film about a single-day Classic came about after a conversation with a young producer, Steen Herdel, although each now claims the other man raised the idea first. Leth says that Herdel suggested he make another cycling film; the director recalled that his initial reaction was ‘… It will need to be totally different from the first [cycling films], but if you really insist I will have to have a think, decide upon a one-day race and do it in a totally different way from the first one.’
Herdel’s recollection is subtly different. ‘Jørgen came into my office and said, “Have you seen this magazine, with this crazy bike race in northern France in it? I’m going to make a film about it – what do you think?” I said, “You should do it.”’ It was a shot in the dark in one sense. Leth had not actually seen cycling’s greatest one-day Classic at this point. He had read about the race in the newspaper l’Equipe and magazines such as Miroir du Cyclisme (then as now, he was a voracious consumer of newsprint – ‘it’s fuel to me’ – who still has to have his copy of the French newspaper when he is at the race today). He had discussed it with Ritter, his most important contact within the sport. ‘I was always talking to him about it; I said it was a fantastic race and he should make a film on it,’ recalls Ritter.
Leth knew enough to have made up his mind, but he was still taking a punt on an event he had never seen. ‘I said, “I want to film the hardest race of all, I want all the cameras I need.” I’d had a big success with Stars and Watercarriers so it was a good basis to come back for another cycling film. I wrote a proposal the same day for the Danish Film Institute.’
‘Jørgen wrote six to eight lines to the guy at the DFI,’ recalled Herdel. ‘He knew Jørgen, he knew me, so it was very easy. Today, you wouldn’t be allowed to make a film like that. People in offices educated at university wouldn’t have the brain cells to see it.’
The earliest extant version of the proposal is a single page of typescript, dated Frederiksberg, 6 October 1975. Leth has written a prose poem, in elaborate, exalted language: lyrical, rhythmic, rhetorical.fn2 It is less a business proposition than a paean to cycling’s greatest one-day race. When he gets to the cobbles, his cadence becomes reminiscent of a Nordic saga: ‘Here the field is stretched, here the merciless weeding out takes place, here is the great manslaughter.’ He talks of ‘moments stretched out of time in a long frieze of incredible, emotionally captivating scenes’; of ‘actors’ heroic in stature; the 500 words is peppered with terms such as ‘epic’, ‘ritual’, ‘mythology’. He concludes: ‘I do not want to make an ordinary documentary about a subject from humdrum real life, but instead I hope to bring forth a scintillating, novel and epic film.’
It is an immense leap of imagination and faith to write so eloquently and in such exalted tones about something you have never actually seen. Only a poet could have done it.
The idea fell on receptive ears: the consultant at the Danish Film Institute, Morten Piil, was a cycling fan who did not know much about Paris–Roubaix, but who had reviewed Stars and Watercarriers, and had clearly loved it. ‘We had an answer the same day,’ said Leth. ‘Today you’d have to wait for months. That was incredible.’ Here, Leth got lucky. The system of allotting grants to films at the Institute gave immense power to consultants such as Piil, who had considerable input and close interaction with directors rather than merely looking at a script: ‘What they wanted was the law,’ says Piil. Thus, he could act rapidly. ‘It wasn’t difficult to decide and it wasn’t difficult to get acceptance from the Board of Directors. It was one of the easiest decisions I ever made.’
‘It wasn’t a question of what [Jørgen] wrote as much as what he told me. Personal contact was very important,’ says Piil. ‘The decision was based on a long conversation I had with Jørgen, my knowledge of his writing, his whole attitude to professional cycling. He described so many details. This was to be the first film about cycle racing to follow an event in its totality. I found this idea very seductive. He had other projects that he’d sketched for me, but this was the best. One key point was that you couldn’t see a whole race on film at that time, but he wanted to show it all.’
Within four days, Piil had released 10,000 kroner (about £800 at the time, or close to £5,000 today) for ‘research expenses’ to enable Leth and his producer to travel to Paris to negotiate with Lévitan, who had – so Piil’s justification for the bill reads – ‘already expressed his interest in writing’, although that sounds like a stretch given the timescale involved.
Fixing an appointment with the Tour’s head with a view to making a deal was the easy part. In the sealed meeting room in the office building in the Faubourg-Montmartre, the Frenchman’s opening gambit was that Leth’s project was not feasible.