Well I just found my new favorite thing on the internet.
The clip below is of riders “raiding” cafés during the 1962 Tour de France from the documentary Vive le Tour!
Essentially, world-class athletes would run into a café and demand the proprietor give them beer, wine, champagne, or whatever other alcoholic beverages were available during the middle of the race.
They would then hop back on their bikes and chase after the peloton with their pockets loaded with booze. The idea was to restore calories while “hydrating” during the hardest parts of the race.
Check it out for yourself… 😂
These were the good ol’ days of athletics. This was long before cyclists were doping and every world-class athlete was treating their bodies as science experiments with calculated workouts and diets.
The Tour de France competitors were simply a large group of chain-smoking, alcoholic bros that could pedal their bicycles faster than anybody else in the world.
I mean, who needs water when you can slug bottles of beer, right?