The Final Descent, by Michael Thompson

Title: The Final Descent – The Untold Story of the First Rider to Die in the Tour de France
Author: Michael Thompson
Publisher: Thompson
Year: 2023
Pages: 213
Order: Thompson
What it is: A biography of Francisco ‘Paco’ Cepeda, who died while taking part in the 1935 Tour de France
Strengths: Thompson’s dogged research has scraped away the layer of myth and lies that have become attached to Cepeda’s story, allowing him to get to the truth beneath and offer a fitting tribute to the first rider to die during the Tour as a consequence of a racing accident
Weaknesses: As with a lot of cycling books, a few more pictures would be appreciated

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Rising in the north of the Massif des Écrins and fed by the meltwater of the Plate des Agneux glacier, the Romanche river flows down through the valley that bears its name, passing Bourg-d’Oisans and Vizille before emptying into the Drac near Grenoble, after just 78 kilometres. In the early part of the twentieth century the river fed local industries, its water producing electricity which powered paper mills and steel works in the villages along its length.

Rioupéroux is one such village, about halfway between Bourg-d’Oisans and Vizille. Little distinguishes it from other villages in the Romanche valley. But in 1935, toward the end of the seventh stage of the twenty-ninth Tour de France, Rioupéroux’s name was written into the history books. It was there, on Thursday July 11th, on an innocuous stretch of road on the outskirts of the village, that the Spanish rider Francisco ‘Paco’ Cepeda fell and fractured his skull. His unconscious body was rushed to a hospital in Grenoble where, three days later, he succumbed to his injuries and died. He was the Tour’s first racing fatality, and only the second rider to die during the race, after Adolphe Hélière’s rest-day death in 1910 while swimming.

Except … the history books do not remember Rioupéroux. Cepeda’s death, they almost all tell you, occurred on the descent off the Galibier. Most keep it that simple, he died descending Henri Desgrange’s favourite mountain. Some of the more inventive add garish colour by having Cepeda plunge off the road into a ravine.

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Even Rioupéroux itself doesn’t remember its role in the Spaniard’s death: not even a plaque recalls the events of that fateful day. Tom Simpson has his altar on the slopes of the Ventoux, Fabio Casartelli his shrine on the Portet d’Aspet, but Cepeda – like Hélière – is without memorial on the Tour’s route.

Have we become more mawkish in recent years in the way that we celebrate the deaths of riders, or is there something about Cepeda’s death that makes it difficult for the Tour and its mythographers to mark properly?

Michael Thompson’s The Final Descent – The Untold Story of the First Rider to Die in the Tour de France doesn’t address the first part of that question (the answer, in case you are in any doubt, is yes, we have become more mawkish) but it does go deep into why the second part can also be answered in the affirmative.

Cepeda’s death wasn’t simply a racing accident. It was a symbol of the casual cruelty with which the Tour treated riders as the race became more and more commercialised. In the decade since Albert Londres had not referred to the riders of the 1924 Tour as forçats de la route much had changed, for the better. The Tour was exiting the Heroic Age of the vagabonds of the road and gearing up for the Golden Age of stars like Coppi, Koblet, and Bobet. But at the same time many of the criticisms levelled at the Tour in 1924 were still valid in the ‘30s. You wouldn’t treat a mule the way the Tour treated its riders in those years.

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Francisco Cepeda is not unlike Théo Beeckman, the ostensible subject of Ned Boulting’s recent book about the 1923 Tour. Like Beeckman’s, his name appears in all the blow-by-blow Tour histories but – again like Beeckman – he doesn’t really feature anywhere. In the big picture of the Tour, he was another who was never really all that important. Which is true of 99% of those who have contributed to the Tour’s history. (And the ghost of Homer whispered…)

Unlike Boulting’s plague diary, which ultimately had little to say about Beeckman and favoured instead the author’s manic, Covid-fed obsessions, Michael Thompson’s The Final Descent has a lot to tell us about Cepeda and his rise through the ranks of the sport, as well as painting an invaluable portrait of the Tour in the 1930s.

Thompson’s interest in Cepeda was first piqued after he and his wife bought a small apartment near Valloire, the ski resort sandwiched between the Col du Télégraphe and the Col du Galibier. Knowing a little Tour history Thompson knew – or thought he knew – that Cepeda had died descending the Galibier and so, in 2014, he set about finding out where.

He also set about finding out more about the man himself, in 2015 visiting the Basque village of Sopuerta where Cepeda was born in 1906. He devoured books about the Tour and, as well as the French journals available on Gallica, he trawled Spanish archives, from ABC to Excelsius, La Gaceta del Norte to El Mundo Deportivo.

In 2017 Thompson’s research led him to Cepeda’s grand nephew, Alvaro Rey Cepeda, who was also seeking answers to questions about Cepeda. This led to a treasure trove of research material: “The family had kept virtually every Spanish press cutting where Cepeda’s name was mentioned,” Thompson told me recently, “and every magazine article right up to the present day, so I had a wealth of material from Spain.”

Taken with the results of his own research, Thompson began to feel he had enough information available to him to tell Cepeda’s story. His first victories in 1925. His rise through the ranks of Basque cycling and then the wider realm of Spanish cycling. His debut on the international stage when, as a member of the Spanish team in the 1930 Tour, he was to the fore when the race crossed the Galibier. The disappointment of the 1931 Tour. His slide into semi-retirement. His return to racing when he was invited to ride the first Vuelta a España in 1935. His return to the Tour later that same year and his death ten days into that race.

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Buried within all the information available to him, Thompson quickly realised, was a lot of misinformation. “I came across several inaccuracies when I was writing the story,” Thompson told me. “One was from the Tour de France: Official 100th Race Anniversary Edition and was pretty bad. Under the chapter 1935 it shows a picture of Cepeda leading Vicente Trueba up the Galibier with a caption saying, ‘Soon after this image was taken, Cepeda suffered a fatal crash’. The picture is from Cepeda’s debut Tour, in 1930, when they climbed the Galibier from the southern side. In 1935, they climbed it from Valloire on the other side. This book was by the renowned Tour historian, Serge Laget. Can you describe five years as being soon?”

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The errors extend beyond badly captioned images, as Thompson explained to me: “In some of the history books I’ve read the family is described as bourgeois and wealthy. They say Cepeda didn’t need to ride for the money. That’s not true either. He certainly didn’t go into cycling for the money but when he did start to earn money it certainly helped the family. They all worked hard. With the money he earned from cycling Cepeda rented a car for the family but then worked as a taxi driver to help pay for the running of it. The family ran a very small general store from their house in the village but there were many mouths to feed.”

The idea that Cepeda was bourgeois, that comes from the pages of L’Auto, where the playwright Robert Dieudonné, eulogising Cepeda, described him in these terms:

“Poor little Cepeda! He was not, like Trueba, a little peasant who hoped to make his fortune on the roads of France. He was the son of a bourgeois family: his father is at the head of a business where his son was employed. I can see the father shrugging his shoulders when the son left to compete yet again in the Tour de France: ‘As if you needed it!’”

Whether it was his intent or not, in placing Cepeda as a member of the bourgeoisie, Dieudonné was suggesting that Cepeda was not a proper, professional cyclist, just a dilettante. Whether it was his intent or not, Dieudonné was saying Cepeda was complicit in his own death, a dedicated professional wouldn’t have fallen the way Cepeda did.

Few today blame Cepeda for what happened to him, it generally being agreed today that Cepeda’s accident was caused by the Duralumin – a lightweight aluminium-copper alloy – rims Tour bikes came equipped with in 1935, replacing the wooden rims favoured up to then. Throughout the early part of the 1935 Tour, some journalists had been blaming the metal rims for what they felt was an excessive number of punctures and crashes, the argument being that metal rims conducted heat badly and this caused the glue binding the tyres to them to melt and the tubulars to then roll off.

“I’ve had the experience of a tubular rolling off the rear rim in a road race back in the late 70,” Thompson told me. “I’d punctured warming up and didn’t have a spare wheel so I put a new tub on for the race. Much of the adhesive comes off with the punctured tyre when you rip it off and the new tyre is only stuck on with what’s left on the rim. Forty miles into the race on a corner it rolled off. It was the back wheel so I luckily just went into a slide and got the usual road rash.

“In 1935 they were puncturing multiple times so I’m not sure how much adhesive would be left on the rims or how good the adhesive was in the first place. I’ve also ridden from the Galibier all the way to Grenoble and there is a lot of braking and the route they took down the south side was a lot steeper than the present route.

“The section of road where Cepeda crashed isn’t that steep and the bend is more of a steady curve so I think it’s unlikely that the fall can be put solely down to an unfortunate error of judgement by the rider but the absolute truth will never be known.”

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Thompson doesn’t go into the story of the Duralumin rims in any great detail. “In the book I write about what I know to be true and steer clear of anything which I have doubts about or have no evidence for,” he explained to me, and when it comes to the Duralumin rims, much is unknown. That said, I personally would have preferred a bit more on this aspect of the story. Incidents like Annemiek van Vleuten’s crash in the 2022 World Championships or Thomas de Gendt’s in the 2024 UAE Tour have demonstrated we can be quite crap at properly identifying the cause of some crashes. We shouldn’t just accept unquestioningly the claims made about the role of the Duralumin rims in Cepeda’s fall.

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The cause of Cepeda’s fall is important, but it isn’t the real issue here. The real issue here is how Desgrange and L’Auto responded to Cepeda’s death. And that is an issue Thompson does go into detail on.

The short version of how Desgrange and L’Auto responded to Cepeda’s death is that they responded badly. Cepeda’s fall on the Aix-les-Bains — Grenoble stage went unreported in L’Auto and when news of his death came through three days later the race have moved on to Nice, ironically where Hélière had died 25 years earlier. As they did then, and as they have done since, the riders paused a moment in silence to remember their fallen comrade. And then got on with things.

But they weren’t all getting on with things on Duralumin rims. A report in Le Miroir des Sports claimed that even before Cepeda’s accident Desgrange had accepted there was an issue with the rims and called in replacement wheels, with tried-and-tested wooden rims. “The fact that Desgrange switched the Duralumin rims for wooden rims,” Thompson told me, “demonstrated that he had doubts about them. But he stopped short of a full and proper investigation, which I think amounted to negligence. You wouldn’t get away with that now.”

Within the pages of L’Auto, little was written about Cepeda beyond Dieudonné’s saccharine eulogy. Communist and socialist newspapers took up Cepeda’s cause and criticised Desgrange and the Tour, but unlike in 1924 when L’Auto had addressed criticisms of the race being made by Albert Londres and Henri Pélissier, this time round the critics were met with silence.

“It seemed that Henri Desgrange went out of his way not to acknowledge Paco’s death,” Thompson writes in The Final Descent. “He was presumably desperate to avoid any unfavourable coverage of his race, as well as accusations of blame. […] Primitivo, Paco’s younger brother, was angry about the absence of any financial compensation from the Tour and the fact that Desgrange did not attend the funeral or offer his personal condolences. He confirmed that the family had written to the Tour asking for the insurance coverage but, in return, had only received a copy of a clause, in which the organisers stated they were not liable for any injuries received by the riders, and, furthermore, would not even be liable for any damages caused to third parties.”

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Having washed their hands of the problem in 1935, the Tour has continued to have a problematic relationship with Cepeda. Writing in his 1991 memoir L’Équipe Belle Jacques Goddet – Desgrange’s successor, who was at the 1935 Tour – didn’t even mention Cepeda’s death when he wrote about the 1935 race, preferring instead to recount an anecdote about Georges Speicher nearly getting arrested. In the Tour’s official history, even the suggestion that the Duralumin rims might have played a role in Cepeda’s death is ignored, Laget and his colleagues instead claiming that “Cepeda suffered a fatal fall on the descent of the Galibier due to brake failure.”

Cepeda deserves better than this. His is an important story, one as relevant now as it was then for the way it shows how little we question the dangers in our sport and how used we are to just sweeping accidents away and getting on with it. The fans. The media. The authorities. It doesn’t have to be like that.

But The Final Descent is about more than just that. It is also about a man, a real person, a guy who shone brightly briefly but whose life and whose death have largely been overlooked, become shrouded in lies and half-truths. Cepeda may be without memorial on the road where he fell but Thompson here has given him a fitting tribute, one worth your time reading.

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