[3] Victor Fontan was born in Pau but moved to the neighbouring commune of Nay, Pyrénées-Atlantiques when young.

Fontan married a local girl, Jeanne Larquey, but couldn't go out with her without a chaperone, the mother of Marcel Triep-Capdeville, later mayor of Nay.

[4] The couple had a son, Francis, who became a heart surgeon in Bordeaux, and a daughter, Gaby, a teacher in Pau.

He could not leave them to themselves because the seven flat stages were run as team time trials,[7][8] the organiser, Henri Desgrange still trying to find a way to stop riders taking much of each day steadily and racing only as they neared the finish.

The American historian Bill McGann wrote: The rule not only separated weak teams from the strong.

[6] The Pyrenees were his local climbs but he was so far behind the leaders – 1h 45m – that the favourites disregarded him when he raced off alone from Hendaye, on the Spanish border, to Luchon.

Freed of looking after others, he received the yellow jersey as leader of the general classification at Bordeaux, where he had won a stage the previous year.

A unique problem faced the organisers because Frantz and André Leducq had been in the same leading group and all three had the same elapsed time.

The former mayor, Maurice Triep-Capdeville, said the region turned out climbers, like Fontan and Raymond Mastrotto, rather than sprinters.