It fell on a Sunday, that July 14, 1926. The day of the Nice-Briançon stage, exactly one hundred years ago, transformed itself once again into a "jour de gloire" (cit. La Marseillaise) for a son of nearby Piedmont, supported (presence proportional to the travel possibilities of the time) by quite a few supporters who had come from Italy.

Had there been a tunnel from his Virle, in the plains of lower Pinerolo, leading to the Queyras, Bartolomeo Aymo would have reached the foot of the Izoard in just 40 km. The route for the experienced cyclist (whose stature has often been underestimated during Bottecchia's heyday) and for the entire group was obviously far more eventful: in that edition starting from Evian on June 20, the French national holiday hosted the 14th stage and the race standings were already decided in favor of Lucien Buysse, who unsurprisingly arrived in Briançon with something like 27'02" (that is, twenty-seven minutes and two seconds) ahead.

Aymo received a scolding, good-natured but not entirely so, from Henri Desgrange, who on L'Auto began thus: "if Aymo had not contracted the bad habit of wasting precious time at the beginning of each of his Tours, if his form had been better at the start, then perhaps he would be today's yellow jersey wearer. Yes, if at the start from Nice this morning he had not been more than 2 hours behind, he could have stolen the final victory from Lucien Buysse, exhausted and admirable for his courage and having become a refined tactician...".

With ifs and buts history is not made, and yet both the Tour's inventor and good Bartolomeo have written history. Aymo – a fact known but never sufficiently explored in its genesis – by earning himself a place in A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the masterpiece of 1928, ten years after the end of the First World War, experienced by both the American Nobel Prize winner (Red Cross volunteer) and the engineer soldier native to Carignano (he also participated in the Libya campaign), just a handful of kilometers from Virle.

You say July 14 and think of scorching heat: instead the rider who inspired Hemingway – Bartolomeo Aymo the name of the stretcher-bearer character at the front – that day in 1926 sealed a historic double in the Nice-Briançon, already won by the Turin native the year before. Soon after leaving behind the sea of the Côte d'Azur, the cyclists found themselves dealing with a day of absolute hell: "incessant rain at Vars, becoming a downpour at the 2400 meters of the Izoard. My men, whom I could not equip with raincoats (the cyclists managed even with oilcloths provided by the inhabitants of the small towns they passed through, editor's note), are frozen. There are only the members of the Queyras Syndicat d'Initiative, fearless" added the powerful editor-in-chief, describing the heroism of the competitors and the enthusiasm of the spectators.

In the scorching summer of 2026 it seems almost strange to recall such bad weather. Aymo, born in 1889, who achieved fame and excellent results late in his career, upon his return from Argentina, must have told his four children about his exploits at the Giro (second in '22 and three times third overall) and at the Tour (two third-place finishes), with that singular double that makes him the hero of the Nice-Briançon. These were the years in which the Route des Grands Alpes was experiencing great momentum, but the logic of territorial marketing perhaps also benefited from absurd weather conditions like those in which Aymo pedaled furiously toward the finish line. Joking about it from the team car, journalist Gonnet added: "from the Atala team car, so mad with joy, the driver let out the cry of someone abandoning the trenches: 'Forward Savoy!'". A rather muted militarism, compared to our days.