Samuel Abt, an erudite writer who covered the Tour de France for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune in stage-by-stage dispatches for more than 30 years, died on Friday in Suresnes, a suburb of Paris. He was 91.
His son, John, confirmed the death, in a hospital, on the day of the seventh stage of this year’s Tour.
Mr. Abt was an editor at The International Herald Tribune (now The International New York Times), based in Paris, when he started covering the Tour in 1977. At the outset, he is believed to have been the only North American writing regularly about it.
“You have to remember that back in the 1970s, the Tour de France was nothing in the United States,” he said in an interview with Bicycling magazine in 2012. “There were no American riders; there were no Anglophone riders.”
He added: “I’ll never forget when someone at The Times said, ‘We don’t have many Belgians in our readership, so please never write another story about a rider whose name ends in ‘ckx’” — a reference to Eddy Merckx, a five-time winner of the Tour.
Mr. Abt said that he was smitten with the Tour from the first day.
“I just thought, ‘God, this is gorgeous,’” he told Bicycling. “Everything about it pleased me — the uniforms, the crowd excitement, the athletes.”
In 1989, he documented the American rider Greg LeMond’s comeback, from 50 seconds behind the overall leader Laurent Fignon at the start of the final stage, an individual time trial, to winning by eight seconds.
“By racing from Versailles to Paris in a stunning 26 minutes 57 seconds today, Greg LeMond of the United States won the Tour de France for the second time,” Mr. Abt wrote in The Times. He added: “He rode the way a person swims the crawl, keeping his head down low over his handlebars and regularly lifting it to gulp air. Wearing an aerodynamic helmet, he held his tuck from the moment of the start on the avenue leading from the Palace of Versailles.”
For his last 10 years of covering the Tour, Mr. Abt’s traveling companion from stage to stage was the cycling photographer and reporter James Startt.
“Sam’s contribution to American cycling is unmatched,” Mr. Startt said in an interview. “He introduced many Americans to the sport, and his stories helped Americans understand the race. His writing was so smart and succinct — and you would write your own story but you’d compare yours to Sam’s.”
Mr. Abt wrote many books about cycling, including “Breakaway: On the Road With the Tour de France” (1985), “LeMond: The Incredible Comeback of an American Hero” (1990), “Off to the Races: 25 Years of Cycling Journalism” (2000) and “Up the Road: Cycling’s Modern Era From LeMond to Armstrong” (2005), and “Lance Armstrong’s Comeback From Cancer” (2010).
Reviewing “Breakaway” in The Times Book Review, Steve Tesich wrote that “the narrative moves faster than the riders.” Mr. Tesich — the author of the screenplay for “Breaking Away” (1979), whose lead character is obsessed with bicycle racing — added, “It sees what they don’t see, it pauses to reflect and summarize, and then it rejoins the pack and the chase without any sense of interruption.”
Samuel Raphael Abt was born on March 20, 1934, in Brooklyn and moved to Queens with his family when he was a teenager. His father, Oscar, had a garment manufacturing business; his mother, Jean (Schildkraut) Abt, managed the home.
After graduating from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, Mr. Abt worked as an editor for The Worcester Telegram, The Providence Journal and The Baltimore Sun. He was hired by The Times in 1968.
In 1971, he was part of a group of reporters and editors at The Times who worked in secret for weeks at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan to develop a series of reports based on thousands of pages of classified documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, that detailed the history of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.
“He hadn’t been at The Times very long,” John Abt said in an interview, “but I believe they trusted him to do a good job.”
Mr. Abt was among the 22 Times executives, reporters and editors who were sued in federal court by the Justice Department to stop the continued publication of the series after it had begun. The temporary restraining order held — there was also one against The Washington Post, which had started to publish its own series about the documents — until the Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, to let the two newspapers resume publication. It was a landmark decision that defended the First Amendment right to a free press against prior restraint by the government.
Mr. Abt left The Times in the mid-1970s to join The International Herald Tribune, which at the time was jointly owned by The Times, The Washington Post and the Whitcom Investment Company. (The Times and The Post acquired Whitcom’s one-third interest in The International Herald Tribune in 1991;The Times bought out The Post’s half-interest in 2003, and in 2013 it was renamed The International New York Times.)
For his first decade at the paper, Mr. Abt was assigned to cover the Tour; after that, he used his own vacation time and was paid as a freelancer.
Mr. Abt served in various capacities there for about 30 years, including sports editor, features editor, deputy editor and day editor. Walter Wells, a former executive editor of the paper, said in an interview that Mr. Abt “was invaluable, competent, loyal and, more than that, a hell of a mensch.”
In addition to his son, from his marriage to Barbara Bell, which ended in divorce, Mr. Abt is survived by two daughters, Claire and Phoebe Abt, from his marriage to Katherine Bridge, which also ended in divorce; one granddaughter; and his sister, Vicki Goldstein. His marriage to Laura Leivick ended in divorce as well.
Mr. Abt, who wrote about doping by cyclists as early as 1978, preferred to focus on the race rather than on the drug scandals that culminated with Lance Armstrong being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles by the International Cycling Union in 2012.
“I wasn’t going to go snooping around under beds,” he told Bicycling. “I wasn’t going to interview people looking for dirt, which at the time is what The New York Times wanted.”
In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post Samuel Abt, Tour de France Writer for 30 Years, Dies at 91 appeared first on New York Times.
