frtour1-2, Exercise 3: Newspapers as sources

Model answer (check the details):

Problems:
- Interest: L'Auto owned the race and benefited from making it exciting, so its reports may exaggerate drama, heroism and circulation figures.
- Hindsight: later memoirs, often by Desgrange and others involved, tell a polished story and may smooth out the quarrels.
- Gaps: few independent witnesses wrote about the early races, and the rival paper, Le Vélo, was hostile.
- Numbers: figures for starters, finishers and circulation come mainly from the organisers.
- Retelling: anecdotes such as the founding lunch are repeated in book after book without a source.

How a historian would deal with them:
- Compare several papers, including rivals and regional papers, and official records of the cycling federation.
- Use accounts by riders and spectators, letters and police or court records, where they survive.
- Treat each statement as a claim: who made it, when and why.
- Mark what is well sourced and what is tradition.
- Look for figures that can be checked independently, such as audited circulation, and treat the rest with care.

Care: this is a general method that applies to most early sport history.