300 K - 100 years ago
Spencer Klaassen
There is not a lot of info about the Audax Club Parisien’s (ACP) first 300k brevet a hundred years ago, but here are some facts I dug up:
- The ride started at 10 PM in the Porte Dorée, on the southeast side of Paris on June 10/11, 2022. Riders had a nearly full moon to help them ride through the night.
- The route was a loop to the southeast of Paris with stops in numerous control towns along the way.
- A 200k brevet finish (in either the randonneur or audax format) was needed to enter the 300k brevet.
- There were 18 starters. (There were many more participants in numerous 200k brevets during that era, so the extra distance clearly scared many riders off—and given the poor lights on bikes in those days, this should come as no big surprise. The calendar shows that ACP organized their longer brevets around the summer solstice (probably to minimize the nighttime cycling.)
- The 300k time limit was 21 hours (an hour longer than the modern 20 hour time allowance for the same distance. I can’t pin down when the change was made, but probably in the post-World War II years according to my friends in the ACP.)
In the years following World War I (1914-1918), the ACP went through a bitter divorce. Prior to the war the club membership was around 200 riders, but it took many years to build it up to that level again during the 1920s and 1930s. As with so many things in French society following the Great War, change was in the air. Fewer people were inclined to simply accept things the way they used to be, including some of the members of the ACP. The traditional always-riding-in-a-group audax format still appealed to some, but increasingly more riders wanted to use the new “allure libre” or free-pace format that allowed riders to choose the pace they wanted, so long as they stayed inside the brevet pace. (Back then the minimum pace was a bit slower than our modern minimum pace of 15 kph, but I haven’t pinned down what that speed was—but a slower pace certainly makes sense, given the dirt roads and cobblestones they cycled, often with lots of mud or dust thrown in.)
As was normal in the post-World War I years, most ACP brevets went west from Paris on popular cycling roads (like the PBP route), or they went south. Many roads and bridges to the north and east were ruined by the war and not in good shape for many years after the armistice in 1918. Asphalt paving became more widespread during the inter-war years, but there were still many dirt roads in the countryside until after World War II.
At any rate, after World War I the club was split between the group-riding, steady pace audax adherents vs the speedy riders who wanted to go faster (or slower if they felt like it.) This lead to the big explosion in the spring and summer of 1921, and the free-pace contingent won a club election to adopt the allure libre format for ACP randonneuring, and there was no more “audax” in the Audax Club Parisien. The free-pace group won decisively and the audax riders unhappily decamped to form their own club. The “new” ACP held its first allure libre 200k on September 11, 1921 (which we celebrated last year.) With the days growing shorter and winter approaching, the ACP planned its new event calendar for 1922, and included a 300k and a 400k brevet. (They would adopt the 600k distance somewhat later.) For many years the 200k-300k-400k brevets formed the basis of ACP randonneuring, with several 200k events and usually a single event for each of the longer distances during summer.
Bill Bryant, RUSA #7