Tour De France: Raise High The Red Lantern, Cyclists

Officially, the Tour doesn't know where it is with the lanterne rouge. Technically, it's an honour which doesn't exist. But check out the Tour's Guide Historique and, each year, there he is, given his dues and singled out among the podium fillers and the jersey winners. The lanterne rouge. The last man home.

The lanterne rouge's status with the Société du Tour de France reached it's nadir in 1980. The previous year Philippe Tesnière and Gerhard Schönbacher had had a ding-dong battle to finish last. Tesnière was defending the lanterne rouge title he'd won in 1978, but Schönbacher was determined to see he didn't make it back-to-back victories at the bottom of the rankings. Paul Sherwen - a Fiat team-mate of Tesnière - explained what happened to David Walsh, for the Irish wolfhound's book about the 1993 race, Inside The Tour de France:

"They were a long way behind the third last rider and they both wanted to be last. On one stage Tesnière, I think, stopped for a pee and Schönbacher stopped with him. They were both left behind and they finished together fifteen or twenty minutes behind. On another day, one of them hid and let the bunch go by, only starting again when everybody else was out of sight. It ended badly for Tesnière as far as I remember. Near the end of the race there was a time trial and in trying to lose time he finished outside the time limit and was eliminated."

With TTs being run in reverse order, Tesnière and Schönbacher had to take a punt on what the winning time was likely to be. Tesnière's misfortune was to be gambling when Bernard Hinault was in full flow. The Badger won the time trial and Tesnière finished 14'39" behind him. Or, to put it another, blunter way, about fifty-three seconds outside the cut-off. Schönbacher had been that bit more conservative and was just forty-seven seconds or so inside the limit. Tesnière was out and the red lantern was Schönbacher's.

Félix Lévitan disliked the publicity accruing to the lanterne rouge, especially when it encouraged the sort of shenanigans Schönbacher and Tesnière had engaged in. Which is why, in 1980, he introduced a new rule, borrowed from track cycling. The borrowing was apt: the Tour itself had borrowed its original format from track cycling, the first Tour being a Six Day race around France spread over three weeks. To deal with the problem of riders deliberately trying to ride slower than one and other, Lévitan decided to borrow from one of track's most devious disciplines, the Devil Take The Hindmost, in which the last rider across the line on selected laps is eliminated. Sherwen to Walsh again:

"What he did was to eliminate the last rider on general classification. This was done from the fifth day to the third last day and was meant to discourage riders from being last. It was a brutal law and one that the Tour organisers would not get away with today. I remember a rider called Jacques Osmont was last at the start of one stage. He was desperate not to be eliminated and so broke away, gaining a lead of five minutes. He rode very well, stayed clear for most of the stage but was caught near the finish line and, at the end of the day, was still last. But seeing how bravely he had ridden Lévitan let him off that evening. He was eliminated after the next day's stage. It was like bringing a guy to the firing squad and telling him you weren't going to shoot him until the next day."

What was even worse for Lévitan was that the new rule failed to eliminate Schönbacher. If Lévitan was going to borrow from the Devil then Schönbacher was going to ride like he was riding a Devil. Each day he made sure he wasn't the hindmost rider while the elimination rule was in force. And only after it stopped dropped himself into last and won the lanterne rouge, finishing a good 11'12" ahead of the next-to-last rider, Roger Legeay. I wonder what ever became of him.

The Devil rule was dropped for subsequent Tours. It had actually been tried before, forty years earlier, back in 1939, when Jacques Goddet was just getting into his stride and tinkering with the formula. Then the idea had been to eliminate the last rider each day after the second stage. But on the eighth stage, the race's first maillot jaune wearer, Fournier, fell and fell down the GC, leaving him as the lanterne rouge. Goddet decided to scrap the rule rather than scrap Fournier.

Eventually the problem of the popularity of the lanterne rouge resolved itself. Part of the reason the being the last man home had been such a coveted honour was the post-Tour critérium circuit. Being the lanterne rouge guaranteed plenty of critérium invites. And that meant a lot of money. And when rider salaries were low, the critérium circuit was where you really earned your bread.

But as salaries in the sport rose throughout the eighties - on the back of the rise in salaries caused by riders like Francesco Moser, Greg LeMond and Phil Anderson and the FICP rankings putting a value on every rider - the post-Tour critérium circuit diminished in importance. Without the incentive of appearance fees on the circuit, the competition to be the last man diminished. Economic Darwinism achieved what eluded even Lévitan.

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But stories of battles between the likes of Tesnière and Schönbacher are just one part of the magic of the story of the lanterne rouge. They're the comic relief, if you will. But the lanterne rouge is not a joke.

American cycling fans remember the eighth stage of the 1993 Tour de France. Verdun. But, as always in the Tour, there was another race going on at the back of the peloton that day. Edwig Van Hooydonck rolled home last, twenty-one minutes down on the day, having been shelled out the back with a hundred thirty kilometres still to ride. He was just forty seconds away from being eliminated. Later, on the road to Isola 2000 - where Laurent Fignon rode in a reverie as he realised his career was drawing to its conclusion - Van Hooydonck scraped home four minutes inside the limit, thirty-two minutes down on the day.

These were just two bad days in a race full of bad days for the Belgian. By the time it was all over Van Hooydonck was more than twenty minutes behind the next-to-last rider and three and a half hours behind the maillot jaune. The tail end Charlie.

Was Van Hooydonck a shit rider? Of course he wasn't. Anyone who thinks that being the lanterne rouge means you're a shit rider is missing the point. Forty-four riders failed to finish that 1993 Tour. Van Hooydonck could easily have been among them. All he had to do was stop. But he wouldn't stop. That is what we love about the lanterne rouge. He doesn't stop. Even as the sport was changing and some tried to suggest that simply finishing the Tour no longer mattered, Van Hooydonck was proving them wrong, sticking with it, hanging on, grinding out the kilometres. And that's why, despite the Tour organisers' ambivalence about the lanterne rouge, some of us think it's worth celebrating.

Here's something else you should know about Edwig van Hooydonck: he won the Ronde van Vlaanderen. Twice. 1989 and 1991. Shit riders do not win the Ronde. And shit riders do not finish the Tour. Even the guy bringing up the rear of the peloton is achieving something.

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That's one way of looking at the history of the lanterne rouge. The other way is to look at stats. Having set you a lanterne rouge competition, some might find the following two tables helpful. The first is a stage-by-stage look at the race for the to be the tail-end Charlie in recent Tours, the second the complete list of all the red lanterns since 1903, along with a load of numbers to pad it out and make it look impressive. If nothing else they're a good cure for insomnia.