"To the memory of Alex Virot and René Wagner, who accidentally died here in the exercise of their profession during the 1957 Tour de France." Unlike San Sebastián (1992) and Bilbao (2023), the Tour has never started from Barcelona. There was a lack of political conviction in all the attempts that have taken place. However, there are three precedents for stages in the Catalan capital: in the 1957, 1965 and 2009 editions. And sadly, the first recorded death of some informants, a journalist and his pilot, in the entire history of the French round.
On July 12, 1957, the Tour pitched its tent in Barcelona. With an unexpected leader, barely 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 five Tours for him. The next day it was time to rest and on Sunday July 14, a French national holiday, the race resumed its march. Point of concentration and exit nothing less than the Plaza de Catalunya. And ahead of it a 220-kilometre program that ran basically along the old N-152, that is, in the direction of Puigcerdà through Granollers, Vic, Ripoll, Ribes de Freser and Collada de Toses. Once in French territory, the stage ended 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 the slightest danger and traveling at a slow speed, as they were waiting for the arrival of an escapee (it was explained that they were going at less than 30 per hour), a press motorcycle lost control and fell down a slight ravine, from a ten meters. The pilot, René Wagner, and the journalist, Alex Virot, died instantly after hitting the rocks brutally.
Among the first to arrive at the scene was the Catalan photographer Paco Alguersuari, who explained in Mundo Deportivo the following day that the pilot, destabilized by a movement of the passenger, "was unable to prevent the front wheel from colliding with a pylon, he lost the direction and both hit headlong against the rocks at the bottom”.
Virot was quite a character in journalism at the time. In 1957 he informed the listeners of Radio Luxembourg, which is why in the Spanish press he was mistakenly cited as a Luxembourger, when in fact he had been born in Paris in 1890. He had covered 22 editions of the Tour and his radio interviews in the arrivals and the chronicles live from mountain passes were legendary in France. He was 67 years old and had a support car at his disposal, with his name visibly inscribed on one of the side windows. However, he very often preferred to get on the motorcycle and follow the events in the front row.
Virot was especially esteemed in his country for his activity in the two great European wars. 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 Ski World Cup that was being held in Switzerland to travel to Vienna and report live from the telephone of a bar, defying Nazi censorship, about the annexation of Austria, the Anschluss . He was also present in the Spanish civil war.
On the occasion of the second visit of the Tour to Barcelona, in 1965, the organizers installed a memorial stone at the point of the accident. It is still there, almost 60 years later, although today the stretch of road is practically in disuse. The C-17 has replaced the old N-152 and it is not easy to locate the plate that reminds Virot and Wagner by making an express detour towards the Bebié Farga. “The Tour is an invention of journalists, created by the written press and popularized by radio, of which Alex Virot was one of the first stars”, recalled Christian Prudhomme, the current director of the Grande Boucle, a couple of years ago. .
