by Paul Howard
‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Although by nature relaxed, I couldn’t get to sleep. I reread the list of winners: [Maurice] Archambaud, Magne, Coppi, Koblet, Bobet . . . I tried to reassure myself, to rid myself of a curious feeling: fear.’
Anquetil’s anxieties can hardly have been eased by the speed of his rise from regional obscurity to the verge of international stardom. His first race against the professionals had been less than two months previously, and already Francis Pélissier, the directeur sportif of his new team, was proclaiming him as a potential winner: ‘Winning a race with somebody like Coppi is child’s play. Real sport is trying to win with an unknown. This time I’m going to make a kid win the Grand Prix des Nations.’
Although seemingly rash and clearly designed to make life easy for headline-seeking journalists, Pélissier’s statement was taken seriously, and for good reason. For a start, he was one-third of the famous Pélissier brothers, all of whom had been professional cyclists. Henri, the eldest, won the Tour de France in 1923, and Charles, the youngest, remains to this day joint holder, with Eddy Merckx and Freddy Maertens, of the record number of stage wins in any one Tour after his eight victories in 1930. Then there was the fact that Francis was no mean cyclist himself, twice winning the Bordeaux–Paris one-day event. More important still, since his retirement as a cyclist he had based his considerable reputation as a team manager on his ability to discover new talent.
It was this eye for a new star that led to Pélissier stealing a march on a host of rival managers and persuading Anquetil to sign up for his La Perle team in time for the Grand Prix des Nations. Anquetil ended up with a lucrative two-month contract worth a total of 100,000 francs (£100), apparently the same deal as Pélissier had previously arranged with 1951 Grand Prix des Nations winner Hugo Koblet, who was at the very peak of his earning powers at the time, having just won the Tour de France. This transition from regional independent to highly paid professional was not without its hiccups, however.
The crux of the matter was that having made Anquetil such a mouth-watering proposal, Pélissier insisted it was only valid if he sign there and then. After an attempt at prevarication, Anquetil acquiesced, but in doing so he almost ended his relationship with his coach at AC Sottevillais, André Boucher.
Unknown to Anquetil, Boucher had been planning for Anquetil to turn professional the following year under what he considered to be the more avuncular tutelage of Antonin Magne. The populist, anti-conformist Pélissier was something of an anathema to him. Magne, on the other hand, was a former double Tour de France winner (not to mention three-times winner of the Grand Prix des Nations) and was behind the success of Louison Bobet. Boucher considered him wise to the apparent perils of pushing Anquetil too far too soon. Softly, softly, catchy monkey was the Magne creed, and he shared with Boucher a reputation of being something of a disciplinarian when it came to the behaviour expected of his riders.
(It should be noted that this offers the intriguing possibility of Anquetil riding for the man who was to become mentor to his great rival Raymond Poulidor, though the likely success of this relationship is questioned by British rider Vin Denson, a teammate of Anquetil’s in the mid-1960s: ‘Magne would never let his riders drink wine in the evenings during a stage race, and he was always at the table taking their pulses. The morale of the riders was in their boots. With [Raphaël] Géminiani – Anquetil’s directeur sportif – and Anquetil, assuming we hadn’t done anything silly during the race, we’d always be given wine. We needed it to relax after all the effort.’)
There might also be another reason for the falling out. According to one of Anquetil’s French biographers, Jean-Paul Ollivier in Jacques Anquetil: la véridique histoire (The True Story of Jacques Anquetil), Anquetil had already decided to enter himself for the Grand Prix des Nations prior to Pélissier’s offer. To make it worth his while, he had also asked his club to guarantee him the £200 prize money should he win, but they refused. This apparently left Anquetil with less reluctance to distance himself from his erstwhile mentor.
Whatever the reason, Boucher judged the situation sufficiently serious to threaten legal action to have Anquetil’s contract with Pélissier overturned on the grounds that, being under 21, he was still a minor. Yet Anquetil somehow managed to persuade Boucher to put this disappointment behind him in time to help him prepare for the race. Although contracted to Pélissier, Anquetil insisted, even at the tender age of 19, on ignoring his training advice and on doing things his own way (a method to which Boucher had contributed greatly). This involved reconnoitring the course several times with Boucher, noting where he needed to make the greatest effort, where he needed to take care and even sending himself postcards with snippets of useful information. There were also the inevitable sessions behind Boucher’s Derny (a motorised bicycle), Anquetil’s preferred method of training.
Come the day of the race, however, conditions were far from propitious for a bike race, let alone the appearance of a young phenomenon. The morning of 27 September was grey, with rain in the air, and the wind was gusty and occasionally strong. ‘On the start line, I watched the wind blow the spectators’ hair on end like in horror movies,’ Anquetil recalled.
Whether due to the wind or nerves, he also confessed to setting off like a rocket, ignoring the carefully planned schedule. In spite of a puncture after less than three miles, and the subsequent use of a heavier spare bike for some considerable distance, this rapid start benefited Anquetil, who was leading at the first time check after thirteen miles, fifty-six seconds up on the Italian rider Agostino Coletto. Far from beginning to slow, he soon caught the riders who had set off four and eight minutes before him, and even though he was temporarily disconcerted by being re-overtaken by one of these riders – Gilbert Desmet, a Belgian who felt entirely at home on the cobbles of Rambouillet – he went on to increase his lead all the way to the finish in Paris. In fact, by the time he’d made it back to the Parc des Princes, his winning margin had increased to nearly seven minutes over the second-placed rider, Roger Creton. Ken Joy, all-conquering British Best All-Rounder champion, was beaten by nearly 20 minutes. What’s more, although the conditions were far from ideal, Anquetil had come within thirty-five seconds of the record set two years previously by Koblet.
The reaction was unanimously favourable. The headlines included every shade of congratulation, from the accurate, if tame, ‘The New French Hope’ to the more poetic ‘The Angel of the Nations’. Even in the insular world of British cycling, the magazine Cycling, the predecessor to today’s Cycling Weekly, was impressed, in spite of the capitulation of the British contingent. ‘British Hopes Fail in Grand Prix des Nations’ was the headline, though this was closely followed by ‘Great Ride by 19-Year-Old Frenchman Anquetil’. The report also demonstrated a quite surprising degree of magnanimity, given what had hitherto been assumed to be an innate British superiority in races against the clock:
The dashing of our hopes of success in a classic event in the Continental calendar should not in any way detract from the merit of the great winning ride by the 19-year-old French independent Jacques Anquetil. Anquetil, a slim, pale but beautifully proportioned rider, showed a delightful, strong and supple action.
Back in France, Pélissier himself fanned the flames: ‘Now we’re going to make them suffer. You’ve seen nothing yet. This is just the beginning.’ And L’Équipe was sufficiently moved to write, ‘Sensational! J. ANQUETIL, 19-year-old “independent”, dominates from start to finish.’ It also included a front-page editorial by the newspaper’s founder, not to mention Tour de France director, Jacques Goddet, entitled ‘When the Child Champion was Born’. ‘The triumphant explosion of the son of a strawberry grower into the world of professional cycling is certainly one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of French cycling,’ he wrote in typically flamboyant style, adding, ‘The kid from Normandy, with the angelic face, follows Pindar’s maxim: become what you are.’
What Anquetil had become, among
other things, was nothing short of a media phenomenon. In the days following his victory, he received visits from dozens of journalists – eleven in one day – all intent on finding out the ‘real story’ of this unheralded star. In what was rapidly becoming typical Anquetil fashion, however, the ‘real story’ was as much about what the papers wanted as it was about the truth of his background. Although he was now wealthier than his parents had ever been and had no further need to work on the land, pictures of him in scruffy clothes pushing a wheelbarrow full of strawberries were too tempting to resist. Although his parents had been wealthy enough for their son to go to technical college, the modesty of their surroundings was emphasised with scant regard for the accuracy of the picture painted. ‘Slave to the Land’ screamed one headline the following day.
The impact was pronounced, and nowhere more so than in the even more modest house shared by Raymond Poulidor and his parents and brothers. In fact, unlike Ernest and Marie Anquetil, Poulidor’s parents didn’t even have the luxury of owning their own land. There was no chance of Poulidor forsaking his 15-hour days in the fields to attend technical college. Pierre Chany, one of Anquetil’s closest friends, and one of the most renowned cycling journalists of all time, emphasised the disparity in their upbringing in Pierre Chany, Lhomme aux 50 Tours de France (Pierre Chany, the Man of 50 Tours de France), a series of interviews recorded by Christophe Penot, another journalist:
At 18, Anquetil was champion of France and went off to the Olympic Games. At 19, he won the Grand Prix des Nations. The first time Poulidor caught a train was when he was 20 to join the army. He came from Masbaraud-Merignat, where his parents were sharecroppers. He spent his whole childhood in clogs. It takes a while to make up for that.
To Poulidor, cycling was the only possible route out of a life of agricultural drudgery, which no doubt goes a long way to explaining his unexpected reaction to this first stunning victory of his long-time rival. Still living in his native Limousin, the region around Limoges, although in considerably more comfortable surroundings than those of his upbringing, Poulidor readily admits that Anquetil became something of an idol for him from that day on. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he recalls with a smile that belies the acrimony that would colour much of their later relationship, at least while both were still racing. ‘When he won the Grand Prix des Nations, he was 19, and I was only just 17. When he won, he was a kid. It was extraordinary, winning a time trial like that. When you look at the photos, the position he had on the bike . . . When you see him in his cycling shorts, with those little legs, there is nothing of an athlete about him. Except he was made to ride a bike.’
If this seems unlikely, Guy Ignolin, Anquetil’s future teammate, was equally impressed: ‘I remember reading in the papers when he won the first Grand Prix des Nations. It really struck me this young kid winning, and it was held over 140 kilometres at the time. Then he won again in 1954. He was a phenomenon.’
The level of interest and expectation rose another notch three weeks after his victory in Paris when he won again, this time at the Grand Prix de Lugano in Switzerland. It had taken a considerable press campaign to persuade the organisers to invite him to their race, but once there he managed to beat both the conditions – torrential rain, always Anquetil’s worst enemy – and his rivals. Although both Coppi and his great Italian rival Gino Bartali had to scratch from the race, those still present included the respected Italian Pasquale Fornara, who finished second, beaten by one minute twenty-nine seconds. Ferdi Kubler, winner of the Tour de France in 1950 and world champion the following year, could only manage third.
This success led to the silencing of the few remaining doubters of Anquetil’s qualities and also to two significant invitations. The first was to participate in another high-profile time trial, the two-man Baracchi Trophy in Italy. The second was to meet, en route, the greatest living cyclist of the time, the legendary Il Campionissimo, Fausto Coppi.
The trip was organised by a mutual acquaintance in Caen and, inevitably, by two journalists from the Paris-Normandie paper who had followed Anquetil from the start of his career and who were now keen to take advantage of the coverage likely to be afforded by a meeting between the ageing champion and the new star. Anquetil, already conscious of the oxygen of publicity, was also a genuine fan of Coppi and was only too happy to meet his hero. ‘For me, Fausto Coppi was something of a god,’ he wrote. ‘Subconsciously, and no doubt naively, I thought I’d be able to lift a corner of the veil hiding so many stunning victories and perhaps snatch a few of their secrets.’
However, according to Anquetil’s own account, few secrets were revealed. He was rather taken aback by the austerity of the room in which they met while Coppi was having a massage – bare-walled and like a monk’s chamber. He was also rather perturbed by the presence of Biagio Cavanna, Coppi’s blind masseur, who had previously performed the same role for such Italian greats as Costante Girardengo, Learco Guerra and Alfredo Binda, and who submitted Anquetil to an impromptu examination by touch. In spite of his heart racing, Cavanna was impressed, especially by his stomach, and declared him the morphological double of Coppi.
Coppi, for his part, was glowing in his assessment of Anquetil’s achievements to date: ‘His performances are all the more impressive and convincing for the fact that Jacques isn’t yet 20. They are indisputably the sign of a great talent. I’ve always thought such talent reveals itself young.’
He was also dismissive about concerns that Anquetil had been overdoing the publicity and the celebrations engendered by his victories: ‘Jacques had no choice, as everyone wanted to get to know him. What’s more, you recover quickly at his age. A few mistakes like this aren’t too serious. I for one didn’t always behave as I should have when I was 20.’
To make the point that he was now a reformed character, Coppi went on to stress the benefits of not eating too much, ‘unlike Louison Bobet’. Writing his account of their meeting some 13 years later, Anquetil couldn’t help but emphasise the irony of this comment by highlighting it with an exclamation mark. After all, it was Bobet about whom his former lieutenant and friend Raphaël Géminiani would write, ‘Louison would think for a whole week about drinking a beer. His resolve would finally snap, but after he’d drunk it he would chastise himself for two weeks for having done so.’ It was also about Bobet that the journalist Pierre Chany wrote in Sport Vedette magazine:
One of Anquetil’s finest successes has been to give Louison a complex. Louison eats grilled meat; Jacques prefers moules marinière, which are advised against in every book on sports nutrition. Bobet drinks mineral water; Anquetil opens bottles of champagne. Bobet sleeps for ten hours; Anquetil goes for a drive in the middle of the night and still turns up at a criterium the next morning as fresh as a daisy. He maintains that there’s nothing better to calm a cyclist’s nerves than a quick spin at 80 miles per hour!
It’s no surprise, then, that Anquetil couldn’t bring himself to promise to follow Coppi’s advice. The only pearl of wisdom Anquetil vowed to take to heart after his interview with the great man was the need to find a manager – someone to help him negotiate the Machiavellian world of professional cycling. Even then he managed to resist Cavanna’s attempts to seduce him. The rigours of Cavanna’s approach were too much for him: ‘I didn’t dare tell him that I was going to try and get by without too much rigour and with my own ideas about sensible behaviour. He wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t know that the group discipline of Boucher’s training methods was already intolerable and that I had to escape to go to the cinema.’
Even if Anquetil then lost to Coppi and his partner, amateur world champion Riccardo Filippi, in the Baracchi Trophy, the visit and the race served to increase his stock still further, especially when Anquetil’s own partner, experienced French rider Antonin Rolland, said he had been crucified by him and had been incapable of leading for the last 20 miles. Still more publicity was to come during a second ‘pilgrimage’, Anquetil this time taking his mother, aunt and uncle to Lourde
s. ‘Such a nice young man’ was the tone of many articles, even if he did crash the car he was driving, a Simca Chatelaine estate, won at the Grand Prix des Nations. (Looking like a French version of an Austin Cambridge and with a top speed just touching 80 miles per hour, not to mention taking 25 seconds to reach 60 miles per hour in spite of its go-faster white-wall tyres, it perhaps didn’t quite live up to the demands Anquetil seems likely to have made of it.) An exploratory trip up some of the neighbouring Pyrenean cols, including the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde, accompanied, when asked why he was there, by the sound bite ‘Because I’ll soon have to come and suffer here’, was the icing on the cake for the hacks.
Although outwardly phlegmatic, the consequences of this youthful, meteoric rise to a level of popularity and notoriety more normally associated with film stars must have been pronounced, as Anquetil’s daughter Sophie suggests in her book about her father:
What’s it like for a 19-year-old kid who yesterday was picking strawberries to be on the front page of all the newspapers? To be congratulated by the president, to have the whole of France at his feet? To earn in one race what your parents can’t earn in a year? What impact does that have on you? Surely something changes inside?
In spite of frequent interrogations, Sophie never managed to elicit a direct response, though she does reveal what would turn out to be his exceptionally far-sighted assessment of the situation:
‘I understood straight away that I was becoming a hero for others, and I also understood immediately that if I couldn’t take myself for such, I’d no business telling others not to think like that. It has irresistible advantages that you just can’t refuse. Which? Well, if you keep a cool head, you can, in your own personal life, build the life you want and of which you are the master.’
