by Paul Howard
All of this, however, was merely the appetiser for one of the most remarkable days in the history of the Tour. The situation at the beginning of stage 20, from Briançon to Aix-les-Bains, was the following: Géminiani was the race leader; Anquetil was in third place, seven minutes fifty-seven seconds behind; and Gaul was more than fifteen minutes adrift. With only the final time trial remaining as an alternative option for effecting any significant changes to this position, this last serious mountainous stage – two hundred and nineteen kilometres over five mountain passes through the Chartreuse – would prove crucial. Both Anquetil and Gaul had no option but to attack to reduce their deficit. Gaul initiated the fight at the start of the second climb of the day, the Col de Luitel (exactly as he had predicted, down to the very hairpin). In spite of the freezing rain that was Anquetil’s greatest dislike – and an ill-advised decision to wear a light silk jersey rather than a heavier woollen one – he was still within two minutes of Gaul, and ahead of Géminiani, at the foot of the next climb, the Col de Porte. Here, however, the wheels began to fall off. Anquetil’s own recollection is stark: ‘From the first hairpins of the Col de Porte, I thought I’d gone mad. I was diminished by 60 per cent. Why? I wish I knew. It was as if my lungs were stuffed with cotton wool. I was suffocating. Standing on the pedals, I must have looked like a fish out of water. The last thrashing about before . . . Before what?’
Before the chest infection from which he was suffering would eventually knock him out of the race. But not before he’d lost an incredible 22 minutes to Gaul in the space of a mere 60 kilometres. (Although he was the only one with such a legitimate medical excuse, Anquetil was not the only one to suffer at the hands of Gaul and the weather that day: Géminiani lost 15 minutes and with it the yellow jersey and any hope of overall victory.) And not before he’d once again demonstrated his exceptional courage by completing the following day’s stage, even though he knew any chance of winning had disappeared, even though he was motivated only by the contribution he could make to the team prize (worth around £3,000) and even though he was coughing up blood.
By the end of this next stage, the situation had deteriorated further. Although still entertaining thoughts of starting the next day, the reality of his imminent abandon became apparent when he was taken to hospital in Besançon with a temperature of 40.6 °C and X-rays revealed the extent of his infection. He later wrote:
Never had I felt so lonely. My morale was at rock bottom. I imagined it was the end of my career as a cyclist. I congratulated myself for having taken out insurance for just such an eventuality. I pictured myself an invalid at 24, shuffling around the village trying to be useful, doing the easy jobs normally given to old folk.
That night, he had a nightmare about a phantom cyclist made up of raindrops. Every time Anquetil approached him, he would melt away, only to reappear several hundred yards further down the road. ‘He had, of course, the sad face and modest smile of Charly Gaul.’
While Anquetil was lying in his hospital bed contemplating the possible end of his career, Gaul won the final time trial to secure overall victory. As if losing his Tour de France crown and fearing for his health and his future as a professional cyclist weren’t enough, Anquetil had to face up to two more slights. On the one hand, he was almost entirely ignored when it came to invitations to the lucrative round of post-Tour criteriums (although it seems unlikely that he would have been able to participate); on the other, the public criticism of his lifestyle and his subsequent failings as a cyclist reached a crescendo.
‘We told you so,’ his critics cried. ‘A champion can’t live such a lifestyle with impunity.’ His response was immediate and dismissive: ‘Do people still hold that against me? It started when I was 19, when I won the Grand Prix des Nations. No sooner had I bought a car than people were telling me I was getting too big for my boots. I went to receptions hosted by friends and people said I was out partying all the time.’
Not that Anquetil helped himself; he couldn’t resist provoking his assailants: ‘Here’s the routine I’d advise for the evening before a race: a pheasant with chestnuts, a bottle of champagne and a woman.’ Even though he was quite capable of such excesses, the reality of Anquetil’s preparation was somewhat different. Just because he had a singular approach to training didn’t mean he didn’t train hard, which just added to the sense of injustice he felt at the way he was portrayed. Training hard usually meant long, sustained sessions at high speed – two or two and a half hours at fifty-five or sixty kilometres per hour, depending on the route – behind either Boucher on his Derny or Jeanine at the wheel of their car. The routes were planned carefully so that this speed had to be maintained even on the hills – Anquetil’s task was simply not to be dropped, regardless of the terrain. Sometimes, for variety, he’d ride in front of the car but at a similar sustained rate, checking his time for each milestone passed.
The intensity of these rides should not be underestimated. Anquetil’s friend and teammate Jean Stablinski recalled in a special edition of Cycle Sport magazine published in 2004 how he once accompanied Anquetil on one of these outings and wanted to stop after only 20 miles. Anquetil himself said he lost three kilos in weight during each serious session on the bike. All of which appears to have been sufficient to compensate for the relative lack of distance covered: he reckoned 3,000 kilometres would be enough to get to peak condition, though the season normally started with him having covered around half that. Then there’s the meticulous way he’d prepare for time trials or important stages, memorising the route so carefully as to be able to know in advance which gears he’d use in any given corner. Géminiani was later moved to describe his preparation for time trials as an art form.
Of course, all of this should also be seen in the context of the difference in approach to training between then and now. Anquetil, for example, wrote about his distrust of the newfangled idea of interval training: ‘It makes me laugh. In fact, if I’ve understood it correctly, the idea is to emulate in training those conditions found during a race. But, by definition, each race is different from the one before and the one after, so it seems to be a red herring.’
Brian Robinson, Anquetil’s English contemporary, confirms that the approach was not widely adopted: ‘I came out of one Tour – Bobet was still there, so it was maybe 1958 – and I did the post-Tour race nearest to Bobet’s home. I’d had a week off after the Tour, and I stayed at the St Raphaël training camp. The trainer there was an old six-day man. He said, “You’ve got loads of miles in your legs. You don’t need any more miles. Go 30 kilometres out, and when you come back sprint for every kilometre sign.” Which I did, and I was absolutely flying the following Sunday at this Bobet race, and I took every bloody prime there was. But he tapped me on the shoulder on the next-to-last lap and said, ‘It’s me who wins today.”’
Robinson also points out that the racing calendar was so heavy in his and Anquetil’s day – as much as 235 days every year – that training was often secondary to racing. ‘[Rik] Van Steenbergen never trained,’ he recalls. ‘He just raced. There’s a race every day in Belgium, so he’d do his 100-kilometres training in a race. He’d have his car at the side of the road, then he’d wheel himself off, put on his tracksuit and head off back home. That was his training. He never actually trained as such. I can quite see his point, as that’s what kills you in the end.’
In contrast, prior to the 2007 Tour de France, one of the big favourites, Alexandre Vinokourov, anticipated racing a mere 30 days. Even in 2003, when he wasn’t a nominated leader for the Tour and was therefore constrained to race a full calendar in the run-up to the event, he raced for only 60 days before it started.
Nevertheless, the gap between perception and reality continued to grow in the aftermath of the Tour, with particular emphasis placed on the impact Jeanine was having on Anquetil’s career. Her high public profile, her film-star looks and her proximity to Jacques certainly made her an easy target. This was further aggravated by Anquetil’s insistence on
having her close to him at all times, breaking the strict rule in professional cycling in the late 1950s of keeping women at arm’s length. Sophie wrote:
My father knew the taboo like the others. Except he wasn’t like the others, and with regards to Nanou he wanted her by his side 24 hours a day. So Nanou didn’t leave him. She was there at the start, at the finish, at the hotel. She drove his car through the night. She passed on his requests to organisers, to soigneurs, to the whole entourage. She even collected his prize winnings from the post-Tour crits [criteriums]. She was his mistress, his mother, his wife, his nurse, his manager, his driver.
This is borne out by Jeanine’s own recollections: ‘He couldn’t do without me. He wanted me to be there all the time, so I drove, carried his suitcases, arranged his hotels. I drove 100,000 kilometres per year. That’s without counting the month of July for the Tour and without counting the winter – December, January – when we were on the coast and didn’t drive much. In the round of the criteriums after the Tours, I wasn’t one of those women who just turned up for a week. I did the whole thing, and I did all the bookings for other riders as well. And in addition to the money I collected for Jacques, I also sometimes found myself with the money for his teammates, and even for some of his rivals and friends – Altig, [François] Mahé . . . and many others. I had money in all my pockets, in my bag, in my hands, everywhere. Once showered and dressed, the guys would come and find me and say, “Have you got my dosh?” I was their cycling sister, and they were all very kind to me.’
The press was less sympathetic. Following the dictum established after Coppi’s affair with a married woman – the infamous ‘White Lady’ – the papers operated under the principle of ‘If a champion loses a race, look for his white lady’. In an unflattering play on words, Jeanine even became Bidot’s ‘bête noire’, in reference to her assumed role in the national team manager’s failure to find a French winner for the first time in five years.
Even those papers that purported to be more understanding were unequivocal in their assessment of Jeanine’s impact on Anquetil’s performance. In a France Dimanche article published immediately after the end of the Tour, entitled ‘I didn’t Lose the Tour because of the Woman I Love’, the paper still felt obliged to emphasise his distraction: ‘He stayed with her, hand in hand, right until the start. A few moments before the flag dropped, he kissed her passionately. When he got on his bike, his eyes were full of a very different passion from that for victory.’ As if the point wasn’t clear enough, the paper ran a picture of him lying with a transistor radio on his bed after a Tour stage. According to the caption, he was not listening to Tour summaries, but to love songs . . .
The couple, of course, denied all the suggestions that he was suffering from being in love, even though his dad enjoyed repeating the phrase ‘Where there’s love, there’s no cycling’. ‘Me, harm his career? But it’s the complete opposite,’ Jeanine told the paper. ‘At the start, he let his training go a bit, but it didn’t last. I quickly got things in order. He’s just a kid. I have to dress him, watch over his diet, his training.’ (She later told me a similar story: ‘He didn’t like training, so he had to do it quickly. He did three hours of training behind the car – one hundred and twenty kilometres – flat out. Then he was content. If I wasn’t in the car, he didn’t do his training. I was his trainer.’ This claim is also given credence by Guy Ignolin when I asked him about Anquetil’s apparent appetite for life rather than training: ‘He was often behind Jeanine in the Mercedes for training. He didn’t like training, but Jeanine forced him. He didn’t like it.’)
Still recovering from his chest infection, Anquetil gave Jeanine his wholehearted support: ‘What would I do without her? She’s the only one who can keep my life in order. Before knowing Jeanine, my life was crazy. I only followed a diet when I felt like it. I trained more or less seriously. I went out all the time, and I went to bed at the time when most people were getting up. Now, all that’s finished. Jeanine has completely changed my life. She’s given me my second wind. She knew how to take over from my life as a bachelor. She’s straight away shared my life as a rider. It’s quite simple – I’m not only her husband, but also her champion. What’s more, she’s been a nurse, and it’s essential for a racer that his partner knows how to provide comfort in the challenges that he faces, as much morally as physically.’
Jeanine managed to provide sufficient comfort for him to overcome what he would later describe as the lowest point of his career, even threatening to give up cycling if he couldn’t finish his first race back, a low-key criterium in Belgium (he did, just). Then, demonstrating his remarkable powers of recuperation, he finished the season with a bang, winning all three major end-of-season time trials: the Grand Prix des Nations (in another new record, his fourth in six years), the Grand Prix de Lugano and the Grand Prix Martini.
His fortunes were still on the up at the end of the year when Dr Boëda granted Jeanine a divorce. France Dimanche celebrated, with no hint of irony and with a back page devoted entirely to the happy couple, under the headline ‘Ignoring the Scandal and Gossip, Following His Heart, Jacques Anquetil is Set to Marry the Woman Who Helped Him to Remain a Champion’.
‘Everything is ready,’ Jacques told the paper. ‘Even the house on the banks of the Seine in Saint-Adrien near Rouen. Jeanine is restoring the pontoon so I can go fishing in peace and quiet.’
The wedding took place on 22 December 1958 in a ceremony conducted by Anquetil’s friend Maurice Martel, president of the French Skiing Federation, organiser of skiing races for holidaying cyclists and mayor of the ski resort of Saint Gervais in the Alps. The wedding invitation showed Jeanine and Jacques in classic pose: on a bicycle made for two.
TEN
Italian Job
IF 1958 HAD BEEN Anquetil’s année terrible, in spite of the happy ending provided by his marriage, 1959 didn’t turn out much better. He started in upbeat mode by declaring his intention, in a bid to restore some lustre to his tarnished reputation, to up the stakes and target both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia. There’s no doubt that becoming only the second rider in history – after Fausto Coppi, of course – to accomplish such a double would have had the desired effect. However, right from the beginning of the season, it soon became clear that if competing with a sporting legacy such as Coppi’s wasn’t enough, he would have another serious rival to contend with.
The emergence of Roger Rivière onto the global stage had been almost as startling as that of Anquetil himself. In the UK, Cycling was moved to write that ‘his rise to immortality is one of the most rapid ever’. Two years younger than Anquetil, Rivière announced his potential in 1957 at the age of twenty-one by becoming world pursuit champion (the closest Anquetil would come to this title was his second place the previous year) and then by breaking the world hour record that had been taken from Anquetil by Italian rider Ercole Baldini. As if this wasn’t enough, he repeated both achievements the following year, in the process becoming the first man to ride five kilometres on the track in less than six minutes and also the first to ride more than forty-seven kilometres in an hour. In fact, his new mark of 47.347 kilometres was not only more than a kilometre further than Anquetil had managed scarcely two years previously, it was also accomplished in spite of a puncture in the last quarter of an hour.
By 1959, Rivière was intent on proving that he was not just an exceptional track rider but was also capable of greatness on the roads, though this did not stop him from taking on and beating Anquetil 3–2 in an omnium (a competition made up of a variety of races) at the Vél d’Hiv at the beginning of the season. The first real confrontation on the roads came during Paris–Nice (or Paris–Nice–Rome as it was that year), where, as a result of the heavy marking to which they were both subjected, the two men were obliged to battle vicariously through the intermediary of their teammates. In this respect, round one went to Anquetil, who enjoyed victory by proxy thanks to the overall success of Jean Graczyk. The extent to whic
h Graczyk owed his victory to Anquetil became clear at the finish in Rome, where he presented his cup to his team leader. Gérard Saint, Rivière’s teammate, came third, and Anquetil had the added satisfaction of beating Rivière in the time trial.
Rivière didn’t have to wait long for his revenge, though, which came in the form of victory in the Mont Faron hill climb, even if Anquetil wasn’t present. Aside from managing to win a race in which Anquetil had never threatened victory, he also demonstrated that his talents against the clock lay not just on the flat but also on more challenging terrain. All this provided journalists with the ammunition they’d been waiting for to talk up the rivalry between the pair. Pierre Chany, one of Anquetil’s closest friends, was no different. According to an interview recorded with Christophe Penot for his book Pierre Chany, L’homme aux 50 Tours de France, he had already been encouraged by Robert Pons, Anquetil’s soigneur at the time, to goad Anquetil into a reaction with an article about this rivalry. (The goading was required in Pons’ view because of the potentially deleterious influence of Jeanine.) Chany obliged in an article lauding Rivière’s new records under a headline that concluded ‘. . . While at the Same Time Anquetil Eats Moules à la Crème’. Anquetil’s reaction to this intentional slight reveals much about his character, though the conclusions that can be drawn depend on which account you believe.
When I asked Jeanine about the episode, she recalled it with evident fondness: ‘Yes, he fell out with Pierre Chany, who was a close friend. It was in Italy, and I arrived one day, and he just wouldn’t look at Pierre. I said, “Jacques, aren’t you going to say hello to Pierre?” And he said, “No, he doesn’t tell the truth. His articles are good, but he doesn’t tell the truth.” So I said, “OK,” and went to ask Pierre what he’d done. He said, “I’ve no idea,” so they didn’t speak to each other for three weeks. After three weeks, I told Jacques to tell us why he was sulking and wouldn’t talk to Pierre, so he said, “It’s because in the paper he wrote that while Poulidor [sic] and the others are out on their bikes, Anquetil is eating moules à la crème, and it wasn’t moules à la crème it was moules marinière.” We had a good giggle about it with Pierre afterwards, but Jacques told him, “You’re a journalist. You’ve got to get things right.”’
