In memory of Alex Virot and René Wagner, who died accidentally here in the exercise of their profession during the Tour de France 1957″. Unlike Sant Sebastià (1992) and Bilbao (2023), the Tour has never started from Barcelona. Political conviction was lacking in all the attempts that have been made. However, there are three precedents for stages in the Catalan capital: in the editions of 1957, 1965 and 2009. And sadly, in the first, the only recorded death of some reporters, a journalist and their pilot took place , in the entire history of the French round.
On July 12, 1957, the Tour pitched its tent in Barcelona. With an unexpected leader, just 23 years old, who arrived as the great dominator of the race and was proclaimed the winner a week later in Paris: Jacques Anquetil. It was the first of his five Tours. The next day was a break and on Sunday 14 July, the French national holiday, the race resumed. The point of concentration and departure is nothing less than Plaça de Catalunya. And in front a program of 220 kilometers that basically traveled along the old N-152, that is, direction to Puigcerdà via Granollers, Vic, Ripoll, Ribes de Freser and the Toses pass. Already in French territory, the stage finished with the Puymorens hill and ended in Ax-les-Thermes.
The drama took over the Tour in the vicinity of La Farga de Bebié, a textile colony located next to the Ter, about 10 kilometers before reaching Ripoll. At a point without any danger and traveling at a slow speed as they waited for the arrival of an escapee (they were said to be going at less than 30 per hour), a press motorcycle lost control and rammed into a slight ravine, ten meters long. The pilot, René Wagner, and the journalist, Alex Virot, died on the spot after falling violently against the rocks.
Among the first to arrive at the scene was the Catalan photographer Paco Alguersuari, who explained to Mundo Deportivo the following day that most likely the pilot, destabilized by a movement of the companion, “couldn’t prevent the front wheel collided with a pylon, lost direction and both hit their heads against the rocks at the bottom”.
Virot was quite a character in the journalism of the time. In 1957 he informed the listeners of Radio Luxemburg, which is why the Spanish press spoke of him erroneously as a Luxembourger, when in reality he had been born in Paris in 1890.
He had covered 22 editions of the Tour and his radio interviews at the arrivals and reports live from mountain passes were legendary in France. He was 67 years old and had a support car, with his name visibly inscribed on one of the side windows. However, very often it was more loved to get on the motorcycle and follow the events in the front row.
In the first he was in the trenches, and during the second he collaborated with the resistance in the Savoy region. Shortly before, in 1938, he had abandoned the news coverage of the World Ski Championships that was being held in Switzerland to travel to Vienna and report live from the telephone of a bar, defying Nazi censorship, of the annexation of Austria, the Anschluss. He was also present in the Spanish Civil War.
On the occasion of the Tour’s second visit to Barcelona, ??in 1965, the organizers installed a memorial plaque at the site of the accident. It’s still there, almost 60 years later, although the stretch of road is now practically disused. The C-17 has replaced the old N-152 and only by deviating specifically towards La Farga de Bebié can you find – not easily – the plaque that remembers Virot and Wagner. “The Tour is an invention of journalists, created by the written press and popularized by the radio, of which Alex Virot was one of the first stars”, recalled a couple of years ago Christian Prudhomme, the current director of the Big Loop.
