Audax Club Parisien

Audax Club Parisien is a cycling club founded in Paris in 1904. It organises long-distance challenge rides in France and administers a branch of cycling known as randonneuring around the world. A randonnée in cycling is a challenge to ride distances up to more than 1,000 km between a minimum and maximum speed. The most prestigious event is Paris–Brest–Paris, which the Audax Club Parisien organises every four years.

In April 1904, Henri Desgrange, the editor of the French daily sports paper, L'Auto, organised a 200 km ride from Paris to Gaillon and back, a course that riders had to cover at an average 18 km/h in groups led by so-called captains of the road. Desgrange had the idea from a similar event in Italy. The Italians had called it an Audax, based on the word "audace" meaning "audacious", and Desgrange adopted the name.

The event was a sufficient success that those who rode it and others formed the Audax Club Parisien on 30 November 1904. It was a non-profit organisation "to encourage the development of long-distance touring by bicycle, to educate cyclists, to turn them into ardent cycle-tourists and hardened randonneurs, and to organise excursions." The headquarters was at the café du Veaudeville at 29 rue Vivienne, Paris. The formation of the club was announced in the journal of the French Republic on 28 December 1904.

In 1906, the ACP gave the job of organising brevet rides - so called after the card, or brevet, that riders had signed along the route to show they had ridden the distance - to Desgrange. There came a row, however, that led Desgrange to take over the Audax movement for himself. The first reason was that the ACP ran an event called the Polymultipliée de Chanteloup, one of several competitions popular at the time to show whether a derailleur gear, then not in wide use, or a single gear was superior over a range of courses. The ACP formed a partnership for its competition with L'Echo des Sports, a rival to Desgrange's 'L'Auto. The second reason was that the road captains were accused of no longer respecting the 18 km/h average demanded by the rules.

The background is complicated and lengthy and coloured by the emotions of those concerned and the passions of the era. One outcome was that some road captains left and formed the Union des Audax Clubs Parisiens, known today as the Union des Audax Français. That was the body that Desgrange began to favour. The new organisation stuck to, and still observes, the convention of long-distance rides led at a constant pace by a succession of captains.

...
Wikipedia