Marcel Bidot
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Marcel Bidot |
| Born |
December 31, 1902 Paris, France |
| Died | January 26, 1995 (aged 92) |
| Team information | |
| Discipline | Road |
| Role | Rider |
| Major wins | |
| two stages Tour de France | |
Marcel Bidot (born Paris, France, 21 December 1902, died Saint-Lyé, 26 January 1995) was a French professional road bicycle racer who won two stages of the Tour de France and became manager of the French national team. He led the team in 12 Tours and won six of them.
Marcel Bidot was the son of a failed café owner, a former racing cyclist who then ran one of the clubs in his home town of Troyes, in the Champagne region. His son, Marcel, worked for the Crédit Lyonnais bank in the town and rode for his father's club. He went training after work at 7pm. He turned professional in 1923 and at Alcyon earned 2,000 francs a month, ten times his pay at the bank. "At the time you could get a good meal for 20 francs and a newspaper for 25 centimes," he said.
He rode every Tour de France from 1926 to 1930 and then again in 1932. His first was the longest of all Tours, at 5,745 km with a stage of 435 km from Metz to Dunkirk. The organiser, Henri Desgrange, forbade riders from accepting mechanical help after breakdowns and his officials watched him pedalling with one foot after the other pedal broke. He stopped after a while and struggled on with the pedal tied to the crank with a leather strap. The judges finally relented and allowed him to borrow a bike from a spectator, but on condition that he used his own wheels. The bike was too small but Bidot still finished the stage.
That wasn't the end of his troubles. His freewheel broke in the Pyrenees and he could no longer turn the wheel - in the absence of a derailleur, which Desgrange had also banned - to ride a lower gear. He had to ride up the col du Tourmalet and three other passes in the gear in which he had planned to ride down them. The weather was so bad that only half the field reached the end of the stage at Luchon and officials had to search inns and houses along the route to see what had happened to the others.
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