by Paul Howard
THREE
The Apprentice – Part I
IT’S ALL VERY WELL saying that genetics and upbringing are integral to the development of a champion, but the list of key ingredients is incomplete if you don’t also take into account chance or fate. Anquetil was widely considered to be a lucky rider during his 17-year professional career. He had a couple of serious illnesses during this time – enough to end the careers of lesser riders. But in spite of the inevitable falls and crashes associated with such a long time involved in such a dangerous sport, he never once broke a bone.
Yet the biggest slice of luck to come Anquetil’s way arrived in 1947, before his career had even started. It came in the form of a chance encounter with a friend who would stay close to him throughout his life. That friend was Maurice Dieulois: ‘We met for the first time at technical college – Lycée Marcel Sembat in Sotteville. In fact, we met a couple of weeks before school started, when there was an introductory day to explain the courses available to us, and it just happened that Jacques and I were sat together in the hall. We hadn’t known each other previously, and we didn’t know anybody else at the school. I was all set to train as a car mechanic – I was reasonably interested in that sort of thing. Jacques was undecided. The teachers explained the courses, what was involved, and I changed my mind and decided metalworking sounded more appealing. Jacques said that it didn’t sound bad, so we both ended up choosing metalworking together. All a bit by chance, really.’
Another stroke of chance came on the first day of term two weeks later. ‘After we’d met and got on during this introductory day, we met again in the schoolyard,’ recalls Dieulois. ‘The teachers called the metalworkers’ class together, so we went in and sat next to each other – the benches had two places each. As the days and weeks passed, we became good friends.’
The crucial aspect of this blossoming friendship was not that the young Anquetil – he would not be 14 until the following January – now had a friend to help offset the effects of his naturally reserved character, not to say timidity, nor that he had settled on becoming a metalworker. More important was that Dieulois was a cyclist – a racing cyclist.
‘As a result of my family background, I was passionate about the bike,’ says Dieulois. ‘My father had been a cyclist and was also director of the AC Sottevillais, the local club. He rode in the late 1920s, or thereabouts, and had a good career as an amateur – mainly regional but some national races. I spent all my childhood surrounded by bikes. On Sundays, we went to watch races or to club meets. I knew all the riders.’
Although the bike had been significant in Anquetil’s life up to that point, it had only been so as a result of it being an object of considerable value that he had to work hard to be able to afford and because it was of great practical importance. ‘I didn’t like it or dislike it, my bike,’ he told his daughter. ‘It meant a lot to me, because it was useful, but there was no hint of a calling to be a professional cyclist.’
For obvious reasons, Dieulois’s relationship with his bike was much more affectionate: ‘I had a bike, which I used to get to school, and Jacques had a bike, too. He lodged in Sotteville during the week, going home on Thursdays and Saturdays, and the bike was for the journey. But for me the bike was already more than just for that. It was also for going out on rides, and the more we became friends the more we started to go out on our bikes together.’
Before the seed of competitive cycling and the possibility of it becoming a profession began to germinate, however, there was the small matter of some adolescent fun and games to be enjoyed. In Anquetil’s own book, his school friends recall this as ‘the time of friendships, of getting into trouble [though the French phrase they used can also mean sowing wild oats] and of Jacques dreaming only of doing the things others wouldn’t dare’.
‘He came from the country, we were from the town and we thought we were a bit better than the country boys,’ remembers Dieulois. ‘He was a bit reserved, but he was quickly at ease and happy to be with his group of friends. Pretty soon he liked to make it clear that he was capable of doing what others could do. Rising to a challenge wasn’t just a trait that would come to the fore when he was on the bike. If a friend was doing something, he’d have to do it, too. I remember one example. We often went with friends to the riverside after school to mess about among the barges. They were tied up to the quay with metal ropes, and we would challenge each other to climb up the ropes, hand over hand, without falling into the river. I saw him fall in once – he was up to his waist in the water. But he had to make it, so he went back and did it all the way the next time – that was his character.’
Not that swimming was a problem for Anquetil. One of his more audacious stunts was to swim under the boats travelling along the river, in spite of the proximity of their propellers. Unsurprisingly, he was described by another friend as a ‘hell of a swimmer’.
When cycling did enter into this Boy’s Own world of adventures and escapades, it was still just another form of mucking about with mates. ‘Our first rides together were just rides in the woods, as you would now do on a mountain bike,’ says Dieulois. Collectively and affectionately known as the ‘Cyclo-cross of Saint Catherine’s hill’, after their preferred destination, another friend told Anquetil’s co-author Joly how Anquetil used to hate the fact that they would play these games on bikes with fixed wheels: ‘They’re crap. You have to pedal all the time.’ But it didn’t stop him persisting until he was the only one still racing. The same was apparently true of the slalom races through the trees. Even if they all ended up in an inevitable tangle of legs and bikes, Anquetil always managed to last longer than the rest.
When there was a more serious sporting element to Anquetil’s activities – such as during college PE classes – he demonstrated the same degree of aptitude and talent, even if it didn’t involve two wheels. ‘His first competitions were running races when he was at school,’ explains Dieulois. ‘The gym teacher took us running in the woods next to the school, and Jacques showed his athletic qualities there – he had a good heart and good legs. He was a good runner; in fact, he even won an inter-school cross-country race at Bihorel, a suburb of Rouen. He used to say, “If I’d never met you, perhaps I’d have persevered with cross country instead of the bike.”’ In the wider context of the history of cycling, the importance of the coincidental meeting of Anquetil and Dieulois in a Rouen schoolyard sometime previously is clear.
It took a while, however, for his talent on a bike to show itself. Once again, it was Dieulois who initiated the process. ‘We started going out for good rides, doing some proper training. Physically, he wasn’t very strong to start with. When he arrived at school at the age of 13, he wasn’t very athletic, and he had pretty chubby cheeks. I was ahead of him physically at that age, even though he grew taller than me later on.’
Within a couple of years, however, the boys were managing regular rides to the sea at Dieppe, some 30 miles away, allowing Anquetil to demonstrate another of the attributes that would serve him so well later in his career. ‘He didn’t have great kit, and he had quite a heavy bike,’ Dieulois remembers. ‘What he did have, though, was great tenacity, never wanting to be dropped.’
on the rough and sometimes steep lanes of the Normandy countryside around Rouen, it would indeed have taken considerable willpower to keep up with ostensibly superior companions, especially given unfavourable material and an age disadvantage that manifested itself in physical inferiority. I went for a ride with the heirs to Dieulois and Anquetil at the AC Sottevillais and discovered this much for myself – and also that I didn’t have his excuses. I’d like to say that my struggles were a result of riding with younger and fitter guides riding on their better bikes, but, apart from the fitter bit, the reverse was the case. From personal experience, therefore, I can vouch for the fact that just the climb from Rouen to Quincampoix is hard work – gaining over 300 feet in altitude – and this is far from the toughest climb in the area. In fact, the Seine and its tributar
ies have carved steep-sided valleys into the surrounding plateau, creating a punishing series of short but often steep climbs, interspersed with the winding undulations of the plateau itself. One of these climbs, leading to the village of La Neuville-Chant-d’oisel, where Anquetil bought his chateau and where his second companion Dominique still lives, has been renamed ‘La Cote Jacques Anquetil’, complete with pictures of the man himself and distance-to-go signs. Nearby, there is also a Côte des Deux Amants (Hill of the Two Lovers); given his later personal life, it might have been more appropriate simply to rededicate this in his memory. Add to this a network of small lanes running through the agreeable pastoral landscape, with few cars even today, and it’s clear Anquetil had plenty of scope for effective training rides throughout his life.
By the last year of his schooling in 1950, Dieulois was already taking advantage of this blessed geography by participating in the club runs of AC Sottevillais: ‘André Boucher was in charge, and I was already under his wing doing gym work in the winter. In this respect, Boucher was ahead of his time – as he was with encouraging us to do mountain-bike-style riding in the woods. When it wasn’t a training ride too tough for me, I went out with him and the other riders.’
This soon led to racing: ‘I was 16 and a half when I got my first licence and started to race. It was at this time that Jacques started to become more interested. He came to see me race, and we talked about these races in class up until we left school in July 1950. So that’s how he got to know the people in the club and how I came to introduce him to André Boucher.’
A more detailed account in En brûlant les étapes has it that Dieulois finally threw down the gauntlet to Anquetil to join him on a club training ride after being exasperated once too often by his friend’s deconstruction of his races and how he made it all sound so easy – too easy. Even though this was Anquetil’s first ride of anything like the distance and intensity involved – eighty miles at a typical club average of maybe twenty miles per hour – it took four of them working together to drop him in the last two miles. It was this impressive performance that inspired Dieulois to make the crucial introduction to Boucher.
It was too late in the summer of 1950, however, for Anquetil to consider racing that year. Instead, the plan was to begin at the start of the 1951 season. This would provide plenty of time for the pre-season training invaluable to even the most gifted athletes. It would also provide Boucher with all the time he needed to assess the potential of the young Anquetil, which in reality was very little time indeed. The ease of his pedalling, the speed with which he could regain a group after a puncture and his tenacity was all Boucher needed to see. ‘I had in my hands a natural-born cyclist, whose legs went round like clockwork,’ he told Joly. As a result, he made Anquetil the same offer he’d made to Dieulois the previous year: the provision of two bikes (one for training and one for racing), a year’s free supply of tyres, free maintenance of the bikes for the year and a performance bonus. ‘You were paid so much per kilometre for races won or those in which you finished in the top three,’ recalls Dieulois. ‘It was X centimes multiplied by X kilometres.’
Needless to say, this appealed to the hard-headed Norman peasant in Anquetil and his appreciation of the value of money, a trait Dieulois acknowledges: ‘Yes, he was motivated by a desire to improve his social standing. His parents were working class, and they didn’t earn the moon, just enough to get by. Jacques quickly understood that the bike meant both the chance for a bit of freedom and to lift himself up the ladder. Even at amateur races, there were important prizes. In fact, when he was still a young amateur, at the age of 17 or 18, he kept a little notebook in which he noted down all the prize money he’d won. He’d cut out the results from the Sunday papers and stick them next to the tally of his winnings.’
This reveals the state of Anquetil’s motivation when he was faced at the beginning of 1951 with the choice between pursuing a career as a metalworker, for which attendance at Lycée Marcel Sembat had been intended to prepare him, or the altogether more alluring world of professional cycling, for which the lycée had also provided an unexpected opportunity.
Not that he was particularly averse to metalworking per se, and he had certainly shown some aptitude for it while a student. ‘He did fine at school, because he was a bright kid,’ says Dieulois. ‘But he just did what he had to. He wasn’t motivated to do more than that. Having said that, being at technical school, we had to do practical classes and make things, and at the end of the school year there was a show of our work. When he brought his parents, he was very proud to be able to show them what he’d made with his own hands. We’d worked for a year on the machine – we’d used hand tools more in the first year – and he was proud to have turned something as a metal worker.’
Nevertheless, this doesn’t convince Dieulois that his friend would have been happy to stay a metalworker for long in the event of his sporting ambitions, either as a cyclist or as a runner, having been curtailed: ‘I think he’d have tried to find something else to do to advance economically or socially. He would have struggled to have worked as a metalworker in a factory or workshop.’
This identification by Dieulois of what amounts to a restless thirst for success is another of the list of key ingredients in the stereotypical sporting champion that can be ticked off in Anquetil’s make-up. There may have been an unbridgeable gap in the physical abilities of the two young men that was the essential reason for Anquetil’s eventual rise to the very top of world sport while Dieulois was left only with fond memories of his brief period as a promising amateur. But the fact that Dieulois exhibits not a hint of bitterness or envy at his friend’s success, after having been something of a hero for the young Anquetil (six months his junior, a significant difference at the age of fourteen) and the catalyst for his future fame and fortune, implies a fundamental difference in character. When I met Dieulois, he was the picture of contentment in his modest but respectable detached house in a quiet Parisian outer-suburb near to where he worked for 40 years until his retirement. He was happy to reminisce about his old friend and happy to indulge his grandson Benjamin’s desire to show me his small collection of Anquetil memorabilia. While Benjamin was out riding his bike around the garden, in full cycling garb, it was not without a degree of pride that Mme Dieulois said Anquetil was something of a favourite uncle for her grandson, even though he died more than ten years before Benjamin was born. Yet for all Anquetil’s apparent modesty with regard to his own achievements and his loyalty to his friends, it’s difficult to imagine a similar picture had the roles been reversed.
All of which makes it seem less surprising that Anquetil in fact gave up his first job as a metalworker after only six weeks. (He maintains he was proud to have worked for three months at the Julin workshop in Sotteville, from 31 January to 1 March 1951.) The straw that broke the camel’s back was not the prospect of the career extending ahead of him, nor the relatively meagre pay of 64 francs per hour (this was before the conversion of 100 ‘old’ francs into 1 ‘new’ franc by de Gaulle in 1960, equating to about 6.5p per hour or around 60p per day). Instead, it was being deprived of Thursday afternoons off for training.
Dieulois recalls the fateful decision: ‘André Boucher required us to train with him on Thursday afternoons, so you needed time off to do this. I had a boss – I was also working as a metalworker to start with – who let me free. But when Jacques worked with Julin, next door to my parents – he came to eat at their house at lunchtime – he couldn’t get the time off. André Boucher had already seen he could be good, and he said you need to come training. So, he left, and with M Boucher had to persuade his parents to take him on and let him have the afternoon free, because it was his parents who decided the work that needed doing. I remember that it was M Farcy, who was the club president, and Boucher who went to see Jacques’ parents to say, “He absolutely needs his Thursdays to train.” I don’t remember exactly what his father said, but he accepted, and that’s how Jacques went back to his
parents to work on the strawberries.’
FOUR
The Apprentice – Part II
IN SPITE OF ALL the upheaval and risk, Anquetil wasn’t unduly concerned by the prospect of abandoning his first career: ‘I had my club jersey, and at night I dreamed about my first winner’s bouquet and also, to be quite honest, about the “Miss . . .” who would hand it out.’ In his own book, he admits that he wasn’t always a winner, at least at that stage of his life, when it came to girls.
This youthful, somewhat naive assessment of the possible glamour associated with cycling captures one of the sport’s most powerful appeals. Anquetil’s teammate Guy Ignolin was a member of the supporting cast rather than one of the leading lights. He was someone who would never earn enough from cycling to not have to work after he retired from the sport. Yet even for him there was more than just the reflected glory of being alongside a star and a deferral of the need to get a proper job. Now retired after a second career as the owner of a bar, he remembers the hard work and the hours spent travelling but says to paint a picture of a gruelling and unglamorous treadmill is not always accurate: ‘Apart from one Tour of Spain, where the hotels were a bit iffy, there was nothing to complain about, certainly when I was with Jacques. In fact, we mostly stayed in nice establishments that I couldn’t have afforded to stay in otherwise.’
Brian Robinson, Anquetil’s English contemporary, has similarly fond memories: ‘We went on a tour of criteriums in Spain. I don’t know what year it was, but there was [Federico] Bahamontes, Darrigade, Anquetil and me – just the four of us. It was early days in Spain then, and we were riding around football fields against a load of locals. It was a lot of fun. We took it as a holiday, actually, as it was so easy, and we stayed in the best hotels. It was great – best week’s holiday I’ve had. Certainly, Anquetil would have champagne breakfasts and that sort of thing. What else happened, we don’t know, but Jeanine was there . . .
