by Paul Howard
Another problem for Anquetil in the court of public opinion was that he also didn’t show much emotion in the way he raced. He didn’t understand the need to attack and had no desire to do so just to please others. In this, he has an unlikely ally. ‘People often reproached him for winning the Tour thanks to the time trials, but I think he wasn’t sufficiently recognised for what he did,’ his great rival Poulidor asserts. ‘I think that if you’d taken out the time trials, he’d have won anyway. He’d have sorted himself to do something special one day or another and won anyway. By emphasising his brilliance in time trials, I don’t think we acknowledged what else he achieved. He used time trials, that’s all.’
Nevertheless, while he could use time trials to engineer overall victory, he would – at the expense of all other methods, as Ignolin recalls: ‘He just didn’t want to attack. On one stage, from Angers to Limoges in 1963, I think, we wanted to get him to attack. A large part of the team worked hard for the first 15 kilometres of the stage to create a platform for him to attack. And he went. He got a lead of about 300 metres and then sat up: “I’m not crazy, you know. What do you think I want to go and ride 250 kilometres on my own for?”
‘It’s not just that it would have been an unnecessary effort. It would have led to 25 or 30 riders being disqualified. He’d have finished – like Merckx one year in the Pyrenees – seven or eight minutes ahead. It would have been a gratuitous effort, and then they would have reproached him, like they did Merckx and Coppi, for having killed the race. For having put a straitjacket on the peloton and saying, “It’s me who’s in charge.”’
This touches on another criticism of Anquetil in general and the 1961 Tour de France in particular: that Anquetil and the French national team exerted their authority in such a way as to dictate the way others raced. Again, Ignolin suggests that this was somewhat at odds with the reality: ‘In 1961, he took the yellow jersey the first day in Versailles and held it until the end, but I still won a stage, even though I was in a rival team.’ In fact, Ignolin, not noted as a climber, won the prized Alpine stage over the Col de la Croix de Fer and Mont Cenis from Grenoble to Turin. The fact that he could do so, and the remarkable margin of victory over the main bunch of 28 minutes, is used by some as evidence of the extent to which Anquetil’s real rivals were intimidated. Still Ignolin demurs: ‘In 1963, I was in his team, and I won two stages, but I didn’t win them in a sprint. I won from breakaways. One was a solo break and one from a group of five when we’d been away for one hundred and sixty kilometres. He didn’t control everything. The overall rankings, maybe, but that’s what he was there to win. He didn’t block everything.’
Yet his desire for control over the things that were important to him, whether the overall classification or the time gaps in a time trial, was once again apparent at the end of the season. Returning to the Grand Prix des Nations for the first time since 1958, Anquetil surprised no one by taking his seventh victory in seven appearances and breaking his own record for the event. The manner of his victory – more than nine minutes ahead of Gilbert Desmet in second place, with former winner Aldo Moser ten minutes down in third – and the margin by which he broke the record – one minute and twenty-three seconds – gave the crowd no option but to applaud him. Yet Anquetil was furious. He had, in fact, been misled by his directeur sportif, Mickey Wiegant. Instead of being given accurate time checks against his schedule, he had been repeatedly told by Wiegant that he was behind.
According to Poulidor, Anquetil was far from happy: ‘He said to Wiegant, “You give me the times to see if I’m ahead of the previous year.” He didn’t want to break his record by too much. His idea was to beat it by a narrow margin – like the pole-vaulter Sergei Bubka. Otherwise, the next year it would be too difficult for him to beat. But one year, Wiegant, as Anquetil was going well, kept saying to him that he was behind, and he pulverised his record. He was furious: “What will I do next year? If I’m not as good as this year, what will they think?”’ Maybe the answer was that they would have thought he was a bit more vulnerable and that he would have been a bit more popular as a result. But Anquetil wasn’t about to give them the chance to find out.
TWELVE
Just Because I’m Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get Me
THE CONSIDERABLE LENGTHS TO which Anquetil would go to conceal his occasional weaknesses became clear the following year. The extent to which he had something to hide also became surprisingly apparent at the beginning of the season. Never at home racing in cold and wet conditions – which he dismissively referred to as forced labour rather than competitive sport – he had to abandon both Nice–Genoa and Paris–Nice, his two preferred early season warm-up events. As a result of a fever, he was unable even to start Paris–Roubaix.
It was against this unpromising backdrop, then, that Anquetil arrived at the start of the Vuelta a España for the first time. There was plenty at stake. Were he to win, he would become the first man to have won all three major Tours, a feat not even achieved by Il Campionissimo himself. Were he to lose, of course, the rule of the cycling jungle was that his prestige would fall to an all-time low. This natural reaction would be exaggerated by the expectation heaped on Anquetil coming into the race as a two-times Tour de France winner and one of only a handful to have also won the Giro d’Italia. What’s more, the Tour of Spain was, and still is to some degree, considered a poor relation of the much longer established Tours of France and Italy. Certainly, in 1962 it didn’t have the history and prestige associated with the other two major Tours: it had only been founded in 1935, compared with 1903 for the Tour de France and 1909 for the Giro, and had only been run on an annual basis since 1955. For Anquetil to not win such an event would be a retrograde step indeed.
Even more serious than Anquetil’s usual and widely shared concerns about his contract value and standing in the cycling firmament, however, was the pressure he would come under within his own team. Since his meteoric appearance on the cycling scene, Anquetil had been in a virtuous circle of success breeding strong teams and preferential treatment within these teams – all breeding more success. The importance of the role of ‘leader’, to Anquetil as well as to all those who pretended to the same position, has already been made clear by the unhappy experiences of the French national teams in the Tours of 1958 and 1959. Too many leaders and the counterproductive rivalry that ensued revealed the less palatable face of competitive sport and also ended in disappointing results.
Not that Anquetil had needed such experiences to inform his behaviour. Ever since his antagonistic reaction to Francis Pélissier’s decision to follow Hugo Koblet at his second Grand Prix des Nations, Anquetil had demonstrated an innate understanding of the need to assert his pre-eminence. He had clearly managed to do precisely that within his trade teams to date, but the winter just past had seen the transformation of his 1961 Helyett-Fynsec squad into two new entities: Leroux-Gitane and St Raphaël. Anquetil was now part of the illustrious St Raphaël team and had quickly realised the need to stamp his authority on proceedings, as his soon-to-be directeur sportif Raphaël Géminiani discovered when he joined up with the team for the first time as an assistant in early 1962. ‘No cohesion had been established,’ he recorded in his book Les années Anquetil. ‘The directeur sportif only had eyes for Anquetil, eating alone with him. He took exaggerated care of some, neglecting others.’
If an excess of leaders can rebound badly on team performance, so too can an exclusive focus on one individual. Anquetil’s failings in the early season were mirrored by those of his new teammates. Only one team member made it to the finish of Paris–Nice, while all the St Raphaël riders abandoned the Tour of Germany. By April and the Tour of Spain, things had been going so badly that Géminiani had been promoted to sole directeur sportif. Although this was the same Géminiani who had previously fought tooth and nail with Anquetil, Bobet and Rivière for leader status in the Tour in the French national team, he embarked on his career as team manager by making explicit
his philosophy of egalitarianism within the team. ‘I based my approach on common sense, psychology, confidence, friendship and a sense of equality that I wanted to restore,’ he wrote. Sporting reality demanded that there was a leader nominated for the overall classification, however, and Géminiani was happy that this should be Anquetil: ‘Jacques Anquetil was our leader. He offered the best guarantee of success over 17 stages.’
Nevertheless, the harsh reality of the road and Géminiani’s desire to let his team make the most of their considerable strength in depth quickly exposed Anquetil’s relative lack of form. The victory on the second stage by Anquetil’s new teammate, and current world pursuit champion, the German Rudi Altig, set the tone. While Anquetil’s teammates won a staggering twelve out of the seventeen stages, including the team time trial that would give Altig the leader’s jersey thanks to his stage-two win, Anquetil was relegated to the unusual and for him distinctly unpleasant role of spectator. Languishing in sixth place after the eighth stage, Anquetil’s situation deteriorated still further when Altig used an attack by Spanish riders as an excuse to extend his cushion over his erstwhile leader.
Whether Anquetil was now constrained to wait until the individual time trial two days before the end of the race, or simply persisted in his belief that this would suffice and he didn’t need to attack beforehand, depends on which account you believe. According to Géminiani in Les années Anquetil, in spite of his insistence – and that of his teammates, including Altig – that Anquetil should take the race by the scruff of the neck, he refused to do so. According to Jean-Paul Ollivier, Anquetil’s teammates no longer believed in his ability to win overall, and so he was frustrated in his desire to attack by effectively being left on his own.
Whichever, on the eve of the 82-kilometre time trial, Altig still led Anquetil by a minute and a quarter. It was then that Anquetil’s insistence on his leadership manifested itself at its most Machiavellian. Not confident that he could rely on the race itself to overhaul Altig, Anquetil asked Géminiani to make sure that the German was not provided with a time-trial bike. This would have the effect of depriving him of the 13-tooth cog fitted to time-trial bikes and effectively limit his top speed. Petulant Formula one racing drivers could teach Anquetil nothing when it came to getting the upper hand, it seems.
Géminiani would hear nothing of it. ‘Jacques, you chose to wait until the time trial,’ he wrote. ‘You wanted this confrontation. It’s up to you to face up to that choice. You’ll race against Rudi with the same kit.’ Ollivier maintains that it was actually Altig who went behind Anquetil’s back by insisting on a 13-tooth cog against a prior agreement that only Anquetil would benefit from one.
But surely the point is not the timing of Anquetil trying to enforce an agreement to be able to ride with special kit in order to be able to gain an advantage over a teammate but the fact that this is what he tried to do. What’s more, Géminiani’s version was corroborated by Altig himself when I spoke to him about his rivalry – and friendship – with Anquetil: ‘He’d started the race as nominal leader, but then I took over the lead. There was a long time trial at the end, and as he was very good against the clock he thought he would be able to make up the time on me then. But I was also quite a strong time-triallist, so he didn’t want me to have the 13-tooth cog. Perhaps he knew I was going well. Perhaps he felt that he wasn’t going to win. But our mechanic said that he’d change my rear wheel anyway and gave me one with a 13-tooth cog.’
The end result was a stage victory by two seconds for Altig – paving the way for overall victory two days later – and an angry and bitter Anquetil, who abandoned before the next day, inspiring press accusations that he had been betrayed by a team that not only won more than two-thirds of the stages but also won the general classification, the green jersey and the team competition. The reasons for this abandonment are again rendered obscure by the various different explanations given. According to Ollivier, Anquetil had for several days been suffering with a temperature that eventually came to a head after the rigours of the time trial. Abandoning was the only option. Géminiani himself recalled no illness, limiting himself to the observation that Anquetil’s decision seemed spiteful and worrying. Altig is even more to the point. ‘When you lose a race, you’re always “ill”,’ he told me. ‘Yet he still finished second. Maybe he was “ill” in the head?’
Whether ill during the Vuelta – another potential explanation for the absence of attacks – or shortly afterwards, Anquetil was diagnosed with viral hepatitis on his return to France. Demonstrating once again the remarkable powers of recovery for which he was justly famed, he lined up at the start of the Dauphiné Libéré ten days later. His physical state may have been diminished by his illness, but his motivation was great. With his reputation both publicly and within his team beginning to fray at the edges, his whole season now rested on his performance in the Tour de France. In turn, his performance – even his participation – in the Tour de France depended on how he fared in the Dauphiné.
The omens weren’t good. Géminiani was still the directeur sportif and confessed that Anquetil and Altig were barely on speaking terms. He also said Anquetil was in such a poor state that he was scarcely recognisable – even paler and more drawn than he was habitually. Two days of rain and fog made things even worse. Yet Anquetil, surrounded initially by a select coterie of teammates, managed to survive and even show a semblance of form before finishing an improbable seventh overall, a respectable 17 minutes behind the winner Junkermann. Géminiani wrote:
All he had left was his pride and his courage, which was not much and yet a considerable amount at the same time. Dropped, half-dead, weakened, he rode a time trial each day to try and rebuild his fitness. Slowly, he recovered. He found his rhythm and a level of comfort. I’ve rarely seen such humility, and once again I had to ask myself where he found this formidable energy.
Anquetil’s place on the St Raphaël Tour team – now that the Tour had reverted to trade teams for the first time since 1929 – was guaranteed, even if his actual participation remained in doubt right up to the start of the race. Given his recent health troubles, it should perhaps be little surprise that after the pre-Tour medical inspection Dr Dumas, the official Tour doctor, required a waiver to be signed before he would allow Anquetil to start. Even more serious, however, was the ongoing antipathy between Anquetil and Géminiani.
After his successes in the Vuelta and the Dauphiné, Géminiani had been appointed directeur sportif of the St Raphaël team for the Tour. He had gone so far as to select his Tour team, which included Altig, who was still sparring with his teammate in the press, but would be based, Géminiani maintained, around Anquetil. Yet Anquetil remained unconvinced of the merits of his former rival as team manager and demanded the return of his former manager Paul Wiegant, brother of Mickey, even though Sophie recollects in Pour l’amour de Jacques that her father had previously voted against Wiegant after having apparently been led to believe that this was the wish of his teammates. It took a meeting of all ten Tour riders and Géminiani, as well as Anquetil’s manager Daniel Dousset and the managing director of St Raphaël, Max Augier, who said he’d had enough of ‘Mr Anquetil’s caprice’, to resolve the issue. In a secret ballot, eight out of ten riders preferred Géminiani.
Anquetil was now faced with two possibilities: yielding to the wishes of others, including Altig, and riding under the guidance of Géminiani; or foregoing the Tour. It was touch and go. As Ollivier points out, ‘Never had Anquetil yet been forced to comply with the wishes of another.’ According to Géminiani, it took a frank discussion at Anquetil’s house before the dispute was resolved. He wrote:
‘Jacques, Altig didn’t usurp you with his victory in Spain. He’s in no way involved in your defeat and everybody else in the team knows it, which explains why they voted against you. But all that doesn’t matter. I’m here to tell you that they’re more than ever confident in you. As for me, I’m convinced you’re the only one who can win the Tour.’
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‘Great. Let’s forget all that, then, and start again from scratch.’
If the relationship with Géminiani had improved, the fractious nature of his rapport with the villainous Rudi was still clear to see. The German won the first stage from Nancy to Spa to put on his first yellow jersey, and then again on stage three from Brussels to Amiens. Ostensibly, Altig was in the team to try and win the green jersey for best sprinter, although his own recollection of the tension with Anquetil suggests his aspirations – or at least Anquetil’s perception of them – were higher: ‘At the start, it was a bit difficult, but later, when I’d lost some time in the mountains, things got a bit better.’
By the tenth stage and the time trial into La Rochelle, which he won ahead of Baldini and Altig, Anquetil was beginning to dispense with Altig as a rival for the yellow jersey and cement his leadership of his own team. He still had to face up to other contenders for overall victory, however. Initially, the most important of these appeared to be Rik Van Looy. Although renowned as a rider of one-day classics rather than stage races, Van Looy was intent on changing that reputation. To demonstrate his strength, he and his team imposed a record average speed on the peloton as it wound its way through northern and western France to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Even 45 years later, Raymond Poulidor, then in his first Tour, remains impressed: ‘Yes, there was Van Looy with his red guard that meant we got to the Pyrenees at a daily average of 44 kilometres per hour. Every day, every day, flat out. He really wanted to be at the front, and he took us at a crazy speed to the foot of the mountains.’
A crash put Van Looy out of the race, however, and it became the turn of Belgian hopeful Joseph Planckaert to threaten Anquetil’s supremacy. Demonstrating the form that had already won him Paris–Nice earlier in the season, Planckaert wore the yellow jersey for seven days in the Pyrenees and Alps and earned grudging respect from his French rival, who couldn’t drop him: ‘He’s a real leech.’ It took the final sixty-eight-kilometre time trial from Bourgoin to Lyon for Anquetil to finally move into the yellow jersey, turning a deficit of more than one minute into a race-winning margin of four minutes fifty-nine seconds, which he would maintain all the way to Paris.
