The Story of the Giro d'Italia: A Year-by-Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume 2: 1971-2011

by McGann, Carol

  The Belgians had no shortage of horsepower. Jan Adriaenssens was third in 1956, wearing the Yellow Jersey for 3 days that year. In 1959 he had slipped to seventh, but was only 10 minutes behind the winner, Bahamontes.

  The 1960 Tour went counter-clockwise, Pyrenees first. Continuing a long, although somewhat unsteady trend that began after the mammoth 5,745 kilometer 1926 Tour, the 1960 Tour was about 200 kilometers shorter than the year before. The 4,173 kilometers were divided into 22 stages (opening day was a split stage) giving an average stage length of 189 kilometers. This was roughly 20 kilometers longer than those of today but about 30 kilometers shorter than an average stage in 1950.

  Belgian Julien Schepens won the first stage's 14-man sprint into Brussels. Nencini and Anglade, the alert veterans, were in this lead bunch while Rivière was in the first chase group, over 2 minutes back. It was the 27.8-kilometer individual time trial that afternoon that was really interesting. Rivière won, beating Nencini by 32 seconds and Anglade by 48. Because Nencini was one of the heads-up riders in the first stage, he donned the Yellow Jersey with Anglade second, 31 seconds back. Rivière was sitting in seventh place, 92 seconds behind. Rivière had the power to win races but he lacked the tactical know-how and brains to win. As Desgrange had said over a half-century before, cycle racing is a head and legs sport.

  The next day 1959 winner Federico Bahamontes became ill and had to abandon.

  The problems with the French team started on stage 4, but it would take a few days for the effects to become manifest. 6 riders including 2 French team members, Anglade and Graczyk along with Baldini and old Wim Van Est made a successful break and beat a compact field to the finish by 6 minutes, 19 seconds. After coming so close in 1959, for the first time in his career Anglade was in Yellow. Rivière was in tenth place now, almost 8 minutes behind his teammate. Having come in second the year before and now in Yellow, one should have assumed that Anglade would at least be accorded a high level of protection within his own team.

  It all came apart for the French on the sixth stage, 191 kilometers from St. Malo to Lorient in Brittany. Rivière attacked (one account says the move was initiated by Nencini) and took Nencini and the extremely capable Jan Adriaenssens with him. Alarmed, Anglade talked to team manager Marcel Bidot and asked Bidot to have Rivière stop his attack which was taking along 2 powerful riders who were fully capable of winning the Tour. Rivière ignored Bidot's pleas and powered on. He hated the easy-to-dislike Anglade (Anglade's nickname was "Napoleon") and had no intention of doing him any favors. The carnage from the effort was complete. The main pack containing Anglade finished 14 minutes, 40 seconds behind the Rivière group. Adriaenssens was now the Yellow Jersey with Nencini at 72 seconds and Rivière at 2 minutes, 14 seconds.

  Anglade's reaction to the day's events dripped with contempt for Rivière's stage-racing abilities. Speaking about the French team's chances, he prophesied "we've just lost the Tour." Anglade knew Rivière would ride defensively in the mountains, trying to stay with Nencini, and he further predicted that Rivière would come to grief trying to descend while holding Nencini's wheel. Anglade and the other professional riders with deep road experience knew exactly how dangerous Nencini was going downhill. Raphaël Géminiani had said "the only reason to follow Nencini downhill is if you have a death wish." After the 1960 Giro Anquetil also gained a deep respect for Nencini's bike handling and passed on a warning to the other members of the French team.

  Anglade himself was an excellent descender. He and Nencini had a personal race, man-to-man, down a mountain in Italy in 1959 to settle the question of who was the best living descender. Anglade beat the dangerous Italian but he had the measure of the man and had seen Rivière descend—and come close to disaster the previous year—as well. Anglade knew what he was talking about.

  As the Tour traveled south down the western face of France Adriaenssens kept his lead. After stage 9 and at the foot of the Pyrenees, the standings stood thus:

  1. Jean Adriaenssens

  2. Gastone Nencini @ 1 minute 12 seconds

  3. Roger Rivière @ 2 minutes 14 seconds

  4. Jean Graczyk @ 2 minutes 15 seconds

  Stage 10 had the Soulor and the Aubisque climbs. Nencini decided that this would be a good time to dispatch Rivière but the young Frenchman hung on grimly. When he was dropped on the first climb Rivière regained contact on of all places, the descent of the Aubisque. Rivière won the stage with Nencini second, the 2 riders finishing with the same time. Nencini was now the Yellow Jersey with Rivière at 32 seconds and Adriaenssens at 79 seconds. Fourth place Jozef Planckaert was at a distant 7 minutes, 8 seconds. It looked like a 3-way race from here on.

  Rivière's plan was exactly as Anglade had described. He would stick like glue to Nencini through the road stages and beat him in the stage 19 time trial. At that point he was a 3-time World Pursuit Champion, had set the World Hour Record in 1957, and bettered it again in 1958. His Hour Record was so good that it stood for a decade. Rivière could be forgiven if he thought that he could easily take back a few seconds in an 83-kilometer time trial.

  The next day, stage 11, had the Tourmalet, Aspin and the Peyresourde. On the final climb Nencini attacked and increased his lead over Rivière by a minute.

  The fourteenth stage took the Tour through the Cevennes, the mountains just south of the Massif Central. On the first of the day's 3 rated climbs, Nencini was the fourth man over the Col du Perjuret with Rivière glued to his wheel. Nencini dropped like a rock down the very technical descent. Rivière was unable to stay with Nencini and went off the side of the mountain and into a ravine. His back was broken from the fall. Rivière was never to ride a bike again. At first he blamed his mechanics but it turned out that Rivière was so doped with painkillers that he couldn't manage his downhill speed. By the early 1960s many riders were using a horrible cocktail of drugs: amphetamines as a stimulant, Palfium to kill the pain in their legs and then sleeping pills at night to counteract the amphetamines. It is generally thought that the Palfium caused his crash by making it impossible for Rivière to feel his brake levers.

  After the tragic events of stage 14, here were the standings:

  1. Gastone Nencini

  2. Jan Adriaenssens @ 2 minutes 25 seconds

  3. Graziano Battistini @ 6 minutes

  4. Jozef Planckaert @ 8 minutes 14 seconds

  Through the Alps the relative positions stayed stable. Anglade tried to shake things up but Nencini never faltered. In fact, the Italians improved their position when Battistini won stage 16 which went over the Vars and Izoard. He was now within about a minute of Adriaenssens and could probably smell second place.

  Battistini secured second place the next day when he got into the winning group (which included Nencini and Anglade) of the seventeenth stage that went over the Lautaret, the Luitel and the Granier.

  All that was left to overcome was the stage 19 time trial. Run from Pontarlier to Besançon it was almost as if someone had designed the 83-kilometer downhill course just for Nencini. He didn't win and he didn't need to. He had a solid 4 minutes on his teammate Battistini and almost 6 on Adriaenssens going into the time trial. His performance that day increased his lead over both.

  From there, it was an easy 2 stages to Paris. All that Anglade had predicted after stage 6 had come to pass. Rivière, through his amateurish, grudge-driven riding had ended up handing the Tour to Nencini. That was 2 years in a row that Rivière's selfish riding had probably cost his team the victory. Nencini was a gracious winner. He gave the bouquet of flowers he earned for winning the Tour to the French team manager, Marcel Bidot to give to Rivière. It was a nice gesture to the man who had done the most, however inadvertently, to give Nencini his victory. The highest placed Frenchman was Raymond Mastrotto, sixth place at 16 minutes, 12 seconds. Ma foi!

  1960 Tour de France final General Classification: 1. Gastone Nencini (Italy): 112 hours 8 minutes 42 seconds

  2. Graziano Battistini (Italy) @ 5 minutes 2 seconds

/>   3. Jan Adriaenssens (Belgium) @ 10 minutes 24 seconds

  4. Hans Junkermann (Germany) @ 11 minutes 21 seconds

  5. Jozef Planckaert (Belgium) @ 13 minutes 2 seconds

  6. Raymond Mastrotto (France) @ 16 minutes 12 seconds

  7. Arnaldo Pambianco (Italy) @ 17 minutes 58 seconds

  8. Henry Anglade (France) @ 19 minutes 17 seconds

  Climbers’ competition: 1. Imerio Massignan: 56 point

  2. Marcel Rohrbach: 52 points

  3. Graziano Battistini: 44 points

  Points Competition: 1. Jean Graczyk: 74 points

  2. Graziano Battistini: 40 points

  3. Gastone Nencini: 35 points

  * * *

  Tourmen: The Men Who Made the Tour de France

  by Les Woodland

  Available from amazon.com in both print and Kindle versions

  Chapter 7: My Race Has Been Won by a Corpse

  Desgrange’s contempt for riders showed. Either they went faster than 30km/h, he threatened, or he’d go back to team time-trials next day. They had been warned. But he should have learned his lesson. Right from the start, Alcyon employed not only team tactics but engaged isolés—the Tour had two classes of riders supposed to be riding separate races—with whom it had a link. More than that, the team paid cash to any rival prepared to help.

  Leading Alcyon and leading the Tour was Maurice Dewaele, a Dutch-speaking Belgian from Lovendegem who had come second in 1927 and third in 1928. He had, however, fallen ill. Marcel Bidot was one of Alcyon’s riders. He recounted: “There were eight stages left, taking us over the Galibier, Aravis, the Jura, across the north, from Metz to Malo-les-Bains, which was a succession of out-of-the-usual difficulties. Fortunately, the Alcyon team was solid. Dewaele could count on André Leducq, Nicolas Frantz, Gaston Rebry and me. We cut off our arms to help him. However, he was sicker than we thought. He had a sleepless night in Grenoble and, an hour before the start, he passed out.

  “We pushed him on his bike to send him off to his misery. The opposition, of course, knew all about it. Antonin Magne, of the Alleluia team, reckoned on attacking right from the start. The race set off along a wide avenue and so, with his brother Pierre, he made the most of the darkness to take off along side roads. What he didn’t realize was that we knew, because Jules Moineau had told us. We put our sentries in place under the banner and blocked the road. It took three hours to ride 50km, so you can guess the average speed.”

  The procession helped Dewaele recover and he began to ride well on the Galibier. He rode well because his teammates pushed him, something Bidot didn’t think to add. They pushed him on climb after climb. Desgrange was furious. Whenever he turned up, the pushing stopped. When he told his driver to take his Hotchkiss elsewhere—Desgrange never learned to drive—the pushing began again. And, given Alcyon’s open wallet policy, others joined in or didn’t object.

  “My race has been won by a corpse,” Desgrange wailed. “How could a maillot jaune so easy to pluck have kept his first place? Why was the opposition so ineffective? What can we make of their tactics and the real worth of the winner?”

  Alcyon, of course, feigned hurt innocence. But they had achieved more than make a sick man win: they had contrived themselves—and other sponsors—out of the Tour. Desgrange was tired of his race, or at any rate the way he believed it was abused. He couldn’t fight the sponsors, who undermined all his intentions, and he could no longer enthuse the public. Two years of team time-trials had made them yawn. And although there were plenty of good French riders, Belgians were a surer bet and it was Belgians the factories picked as leader. And they had plenty to choose from: Belgium had no bike factories and so its riders rode for French employers. From 1912 to 1929, foreigners won 13 of the 14 Tours.

  The Tour had a life but its purpose remained to sell L’Auto and pay its employees. Just one Frenchman—Henri Pélissier—had won in 14 years and the French, like all people, bought newspapers most when one of their own did well. Sales of L’Auto stuck at 50,000. And then they started going down.

  If French riders could be brought together, their strength could be greater than their parts. A national team had potential winners in André Leducq, Antonin Magne and Marcel Bidot, and a stage winner in the dashing, in both senses, Charles Pélissier. Charles, brother of Henri and Francis, was the only Pélissier whom Desgrange could tolerate. Everybody liked Charles. Especially women. They saw something of Beau Brummel, the 19th century dandy. And that was how the papers referred to him.

  Desgrange had created a sport—bicycle stage racing—and perfected it. But the harder he tried to make it honest, the more a dictator he had to be. And the more dictatorial he became, the more riders and employers outwitted him. Instead of getting better, the Tour was becoming a farce. Jacques Goddet remembered: “Everything had been tried, in obvious chaos, with every form of encouragement and punishment. The experiments were all carried out in a spirit of permanent revolt against the bike makers. They were responsible for all the Tour’s ills. They came from their eagerness to win the Tour, on which their sales depended, by any means. They came from the disparity of their means. So, obviously, they had to be booted out, this scabby riffraff, and above all the monumental Edmond Gentil had to lose his head for wanting to annex bike-racing for himself! I had the privilege of witnessing the anguished somersaults of a man of character who preferred to throw himself into a veritable revolution, with all the risks and above all with all the expenses it would bring, than stay in the grip of the factories.”

  • • •

  Victor Goddet had relaunched L’Auto several times and in the process become the majority shareholder, making Desgrange his employee. Goddet died in 1926 and, against the law but seemingly with no objection from his sons, left fewer shares to Jacques than to his elder son, Maurice. In the fall of 1929 Desgrange discussed his revolution with Jacques, who approved, then took them to Maurice. And Maurice, more interested in partying, probably said yes with no more than a glance.

  From Wednesday, July 2, 1930, the Tour would be for France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Germany in groups of eight. “Why [just] five national teams?” Desgrange asked. “Because only five countries are in a position to provide a team: Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany and France. Luxembourg has only one man. Switzerland has only three. Austria just one. The other countries have none at all. Why teams of eight? I’m going to whisper something in your ear, confidentially. If you’ve got several hundred thousand francs that aren’t doing anything, we can maybe increase the teams to 12.”

  The size and publicity of the Tour obliged factories to release their riders. They said they didn’t like it but hindsight shows they didn’t mind: getting their best men into the Tour without having to pay for them in a worldwide recession saved a lot of money. To make up spaces liberated by Tour riders, they took on replacements given only a bike, a jersey and any bonuses they might gain, a system called riding à la musette. It put a lot of extra riders on the road, all wearing advertising at better than cut-price rates, and it undermined professional cycling for decades.

  What troubled the factories more was Desgrange’s insistence that riders not use their own bikes. Instead, the eight national teams and a further nine representing French regions would present their saddles and handlebars 48 hours before the start and mechanics would fit them to anonymous frames painted yellow to match L’Auto and labeled only with the paper’s name. In keeping with the era and the Tour’s rules, the bikes were steel throughout and had no derailleur and, despite their introduction, no alloy rims. Desgrange thought derailleurs corrupted competition and that prolonged braking on mountain descents would melt the glue that held the tires. There was no double chainring, either, for that hadn’t been invented. Instead, riders chose a 46 or 48-tooth ring and fitted a three-speed freewheel with 16, 17 and 18 teeth for the flat and 22, 23, 25 for the climbs. Changing gear still required a rider to stop, jump off and fiddle with his back wheel just as he did in the days of single gears th
at had no freewheel.

  • • •

  Desgrange, so adamant the Tour should be pure of team tactics, had created a race which could be anything but. But he had dynamited Gentil and anything was worth that. Alcyon itself lasted until 1954, when it was bought by Peugeot, and the team ended two years later. Gentil died at the start of the 1960s.

  Desgrange had to discuss the costs with the Goddet brothers. Some would come from an expected rise in L’Auto’s sales. More would come from bike factories unable to resist advertising their riders’ performances, even on yellow bikes. Those bikes, incidentally, were made by Alcyon; Feuillet leaked that to the press. And then there was the enterprising Paul Thévenin, publicity man of the Menier chocolates company. It started in 1856 and reached its peak in the 1930s. After the war, it suffered from chocolate imported from the USA as a condition of Marshall Aid, changed hands several times and is now part of the Swiss giant, Nestlé.

  Thévenin wasn’t the first to spot that driving along with a bike race exposed spectators to his advertising. The pioneer was probably the Parisian department store, Galéries Lafayette, which joined in with Bordeaux–Paris in 1922. But Menier had something to throw to the crowds—his chocolate. His only problem was that nobody knew he was there if he preceded the race; officials wouldn’t let him drive with the race and most spectators would have gone home if he followed it.

  Desgrange told Thévenin that, for a fee, he could drive just ahead of the riders. The crowd in an era without television would be at its densest. He did the same deal with La Vache Qui Rit, Graf, Biscottes Delft, Esders and Noveltex. Menier was delighted and so was the crowd: his staff threw out tons of chocolate and half a million policeman’s hats printed with the firm’s name. They made hot chocolate for fans, riders and officials in the mountains. Menier gave 5,000 francs to the first rider to the top of cols. He had the biggest publicity budget of any company in France, according to Pierre Chany, and he made the most of it. It was such a success that Desgrange had little trouble recruiting other companies when he took 20 of their representatives to lunch. Perrier, Pernod, Martini and Banania stayed for decades.