The 1910 Tour has given rise to no end of nonsense, not least the claim that Octave Lapize called the race organisers assassins as he crossed the Col d’Aubisuqe an hour behind schedule + 15 minutes behind a nobody.
The story of Alphonse Steinès night on the Tourmalet and the telegram he subsequently sent to Henri Desgrange has gone down in legend. Remarkably, there was no telegram, and much of what is said about Steinès’s night on the mountain is a fiction.