1891 : comme c’est loin… 60 ans : comme c’est court !, by Daniel Gousseau — L’Officiel du cycle, 6 October 1951

From L’Officiel du cycle, du motocycle et du camping, 6 October 1951, the paper’s special number for the 1951 Paris Salon du Cycle et du Motocycle and its 60th anniversary, page 33: Daniel Gousseau on cycle sport in 1891 and in 1951. The title, headings, captions and lists are transcribed as printed; the text is summarized in Ebykr’s words, and the page images carry it in full.

— Page 1 —
1891 : comme c’est loin …
60 ans : comme c’est court !

M. Daniel GOUSSEAU

[Ebykr summary; the article’s text is not reproduced. Gousseau calls 1891 the real start of cycling: the improved bicycle drove out the old « Grand Bi » within a year, and the year saw the birth of the daily sports press and the great illustrated sports papers. As Cyclette Revue recalled, 1891 is also the sixtieth anniversary of Paris-Brest et retour, of Bordeaux-Paris and of Pierre Giffard’s christening of the « Petite Reine », a « bienfait social ». Sixty years on, he finds the same worries about sporting truth. Already in 1891 road racing was set against track racing; today the road triumphs with countless events and the collective madness of the Tour de France, but then it was dismissed as exhausting and unspectacular, while a campaign was waged for permanent tracks, which appeared all over France from 1892, notably the first Vélodrome Buffalo in Paris, on land of the military zone granted by the Minister of War, de Freycinet, as a public-utility cause. Doping was also debated in 1891: Cyclette Revue recently recalled its harm under Victor Breyer’s signature, while Docteur Ruffier, the following month, tolerated its use while condemning abuse. In 1891 the great Fred de Civry was seen handing mysterious little bottles to his protégés, and a Docteur O’Jennings advised cyclists to breathe oxygen stored in the sealed tubes of the frame, which served as a reservoir connected to the rider’s mouth by a rubber tube. In 1891, too, an English decree barred English amateurs from Bordeaux-Paris and the French professionals had to withdraw; in 1951, he complains, the Fédération Internationale has still not remedied this hypocrisy.]

[Ebykr summary, after a three-star break. So nothing has changed? Yes it has: in 1891 France counted 250.000 « Vélocipédomanes » (the paper’s « sic »), without any check, and this year it will count 12 million, checked by the tax office, because there is now the cycling tax, among many others.]

Daniel GOUSSEAU,
Directeur de Cyclette-Revue.

[One halftone portrait photograph, set into the upper right of the text: Daniel Gousseau, an elderly man with white hair, in a jacket and a patterned bow tie, head and shoulders, captioned under the photograph; no photographer’s credit. The article opens with the date “1891” set large as an initial. A short rule above the headline is cut by the crop’s top edge.]