Maurice-François Garin (; 3 March 1871 – 19 February 1957) was an Italian-French road bicycle racer best known for winning the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, and for being stripped of his title in the second Tour in 1904 along with eight others, for cheating. He was of Italian origin but adopted French nationality on 21 December 1901.
Family life
Garin was born the son of Maurice-Clément Garin and Maria Teresa Ozello in Arvier, in the French-speaking Aosta Valley in north-west Italy, close to the French border. The name Garin was the most common in the native village of Maurice, called "Chez-les-Garin", belonging to five of the seven families. They had four daughters and five sons, of whom Maurice was the first son.
In 1885 the family left Arvier to work on the other side of the Alps, almost to the Belgian border.
Garin worked as a chimney sweep. He later moved to France. By the age of 15, he was living in Reims as a chimney sweep. He moved to Charleroi in Belgium but by 1889 he was back in France, at Maubeuge.
Garin's younger brother, Joseph-Isidore, died in 1889. The father died shortly afterwards in Arvier. Garin's brothers François and César stayed in northern France and, with Maurice, opened a cycle shop in the lower end of the boulevard de Paris in Roubaix in 1895. Brothers César and Ambroise also competed as professional cyclists.
Garin moved to Lens, Pas-de-Calais in 1902 and lived there the rest of his life. He bought his first bicycle for 405 francs, twice what a forge worker would earn in a week of 12-hour days, in 1889. Racing did not interest him but he did ride round the town fast enough to be called a madman — le fou.
Until 2004, it was said that Garin had taken French nationality when he was 21, in 1892 but in 2004, the reporter Franco Cuaz found the naturalizing act and Garin took French nationality 21 December 1901.
Amateur racing
He began racing in northern France in the same year when the secretary of the cycling club at Maubeuge persuaded him to enter a regional race, Maubeuge-Hirson-Maubeuge, over 200 km. Garin finished fifth despite suffering from the sun and decided to ride more.
His first win was in 1893, in Namur-Dinant-Givet in Belgium. He had sold his first bike and bought a lighter one — still 16 kg but with pneumatic tyres — for 850 old French francs (approx €3,000 at 2008 values). The race was over 102 km. He was leading by Dinant when he punctured. Spotting a soigneur waiting with a spare bike for a rival, Garin rested his own against the wall of a bridge, grabbed the soigneur's spare bike and rode off. At the finish, winning with ten minutes over the field, he gave back the bike and recovered his own the next day where he had left it.
Professional racing
Garin became a professional by chance. He planned to ride a race at Avesnes-sur-Helpes, 25 km from where he lived. He arrived to find it was only for professionals. Not allowed to compete, he waited until the riders had left, raced after them and passed them all. He fell off twice but finished ahead of the racers. The crowd was enthusiastic but the organisers less so. They refused to pay him the 150 francs (approx €525 at 2008 values) due to the real winner, so spectators raised 300 francs (approx €1,050 at 2008 values) among themselves. Garin became a professional.
His first true professional win was in a 24-hour race in Paris in 1893. It was held on the Champ de Mars, site of the Eiffel Tower. The riders competed, as was the custom, behind a succession of pacers. The event took place in February and the cold drove out riders one after the other. Garin rode 701 km in 24 hours, beating the only other rider to finish by 49 km. While other riders would consume much strong red wine, Garin chose a more apt diet, and said he had survived on:
19 litres of hot chocolate
seven litres of tea
eight cooked eggs
a mix of coffee and champagne
45 cutlets
five litres of tapioca
two kilos of rice
and oysters.
In 1894 he won a 24-hour race in Liège, Belgium, and the following year set an hour record for cycling behind pacers.
The first Paris–Roubaix was in 1896; Garin came third, 15 minutes behind Josef Fischer. He would have come second had he not been knocked over by a crash between two tandems, one of them ridden by his pacers. Garin "finished exhausted and Dr Butrille was obliged to attend the man who had been run over by two machines," said the race historian, Pascal Sergent.
In 1897 he won Paris–Roubaix, beating the Dutchman Mathieu Cordang in the last two kilometres of the velodrome at Roubaix. Sergent said: