Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape

by Paul Howard

  L’Équipe’s headline sums up the amazement: ‘Jacques Anquetil Baffles the Belgians in Three Stunning Kilometres’. René de la Tour’s race description was almost a eulogy:

  Must we really believe Jacques Anquetil when he so often maintains that, given his prodigious abilities in stage races and time trials, it would be asking too much to expect him to be as successful in one-day races? In those races where he has to confront a plethora of rivals with far more limited horizons? What right do we have to ask this of him? What Jacques achieved before our very eyes in Ghent–Wevelgem was truly exceptional. You have to ask yourself if any other rider in the world could have resisted, as he did, for three kilometres against the massed ranks of the best Belgians, intent on preventing the Norman win in their own backyard. Once Anquetil has decided to give it his all, you need at least two or three dozen riders working together to pull him back. And there were at least this number chasing him, under the urgings of their leaders, Van Looy, Beheyt, [Peter] Post, trying to make up the 40 metres he had acquired after having jumped from the back of the group (a model attack if ever there was one). They might as well have been chasing a rocket launched from Cape Kennedy! When he crossed the line at Wevelgem, utterly relaxed, with a smile on his face and no sign of his efforts, he was still well clear. Sitting bolt upright, he was practically free-wheeling.

  If this unheralded victory was designed to seduce the critics, it was a complete success. If the motivation was to unsettle Poulidor, however, it seemed to make no impact. In fact, Poulidor responded with a compelling performance of his own, equalling Anquetil’s achievement of winning the Vuelta a España, only for Poulidor this was victory at his first attempt. What’s more, he won the race à l’Anquetil, that’s to say in the final time trial – with a confidence no doubt reinforced by his time-trial performances at the end of the previous season – and then upped the stakes by declaring to the assembled press that he was now on a par with Anquetil in races against the clock: ‘Until recently, I suffered from something of a complex with regards to my talents as a time-triallist compared to those of Anquetil. But now that’s gone: henceforth I’m no longer afraid of him.’

  By May and the start of the Giro, the spotlight was back on Anquetil. As in 1961, Anquetil won the early time trial – this time on stage five, with victory achieved at a staggering forty-eight kilometres per hour – and put on the pink jersey of race leader. Unlike in 1961, Anquetil was fully focused on maintaining this position in spite of the difficulties of being a foreigner leading the most important Italian race. Indeed, Anquetil decided to take a leaf out of their own book – when in Rome, after all – and employ the traditional Italian football philosophy of catenaccio (literally the ‘door bolt’), mounting a meticulous defence against all attacks. These attacks, of course, came in many forms, and not just on the bike.

  First came the conditions of the race itself, as Anquetil’s teammate Ignolin recalls: ‘There was a hilly, transitional stage, ending with a ten-kilometre climb and a ten-kilometre descent with the finish at the bottom. The last ten kilometres, it was just rocks – there was no tarmac at all, and we were all puncturing. All of us. Suddenly, the team car punctured as well – the front wheel, no less. Géminiani had to do the descent on the rim, but he couldn’t keep up with the riders, so he said to Louis de Bruyckere – the team mechanic – take the bike from the roof and try to follow Jacques and give him the bike if he punctures. So Louis set off in his blue overalls on the spare bike and rode to the end of the stage. Géminiani finished the stage on the rim, by which time it was no longer round – it was star-shaped. All of the tyre had disappeared – like in Formula One. They framed the rim and hung it on the wall of the service workshop.’

  Next were the subtle, and not so subtle, attempts by adversaries and organisers alike to encourage Anquetil’s demise. Indeed, one of these incidents was so brazen as to inspire the normally reserved Anquetil to lose his cool. ‘I only saw him angry once,’ says Ignolin. ‘It was at the start of a stage south of Naples. The Italians had started riding, but there hadn’t been a whistle, a horn, a loud-speaker announcement . . . anything. It wasn’t the fault of the riders, it was the organisers – they didn’t care. Now the start is more clear cut, but at the time we just got together in a square, and the spectators were in and amongst us. They came to say hello, shake our hands, talk to us . . . So all the Italians had gone, and we were hemmed in by hundreds and hundreds of supporters, and it was impossible to get started. Even the cars couldn’t get out. And that was when Jacques got angry. He picked up his bike and spun it round above his head . . . people were being hit on the head by his wheels. Even after we’d set off, the cars couldn’t follow, because they were still hemmed in. The effort we had to make to catch the group was quite something.’

  Only after all this could Anquetil concentrate on the bicycle race itself, including Pambianco’s attempted skulduggery, disguised as affection for his wife. Even this wasn’t as straightforward as his uninterrupted wearing of the pink jersey from stage five to the finish in Milan suggests. Ignolin once more: ‘He fell on a descent during a short stage, near Genoa, perhaps. It was raining. Another rider slipped in front of him, touched him and they fell into a ditch. We asked Géminiani if we should wait, but he said, “No, he’ll be all right.” But we did wait at the bottom of the descent, as all the leading Italians – maybe 20 of them – attacked when they realised Jacques was not there. Once he caught us, we embarked on a team time trial to help him regain the lead group, but he dropped all of us one by one, and in the end got back up to them on his own. Then, once he’d caught them up, he didn’t content himself with riding with them. Once he was there, he went straight to the front of the breakaway and dragged them all along at 60 kilometres per hour – to show them just how strong he was.’

  In fact, even more than forty years later, Ignolin still seems amazed at what they had to endure in the space of three weeks and at how well Anquetil fared: ‘In this one Giro, there was Pambianco’s trick, the stony descent that wasn’t a road, not being able to start at the same time as the others, and the fall Jacques suffered and having to chase back to the lead group on his own after dropping us all. The next day, there was no more attacking. The Italians were asking Jacques if he’d let them win a stage. They realised he was unbeatable.’ When you also add in the famous incident of Géminiani’s fight with the Italian police as they tried to stop him supporting Anquetil in a break, the arrival on the scene of future winner Gianni Motta and a wrist hurt in the fall remembered by Ignolin, it is no wonder that L’Équipe described his overall performance as a ‘Giro of attrition’.

  And it is no wonder that there was also considerable concern in the St Raphaël team and in the press about the ability of Anquetil to recover from such an ordeal in time for the Tour de France, which started only 15 days later. Poulidor, of course, had had much longer to prepare after his victory in Spain.

  He also hadn’t had to cope with such distractions as having his death predicted in a national newspaper. Yet this was precisely what Anquetil had to confront as he attempted the already precarious balancing act of physiological recuperation and psychological preparation. Géminiani can hardly conceal his contempt as he records in Les années Anquetil the impact of the assertion by the ‘seer’ Jacques Belline in France Soir that Anquetil would die in a fall during the 14th stage of the Tour:

  He really must have been a complete degenerate to put such bollocks in a national newspaper. Jacques, hypersensitive, reacted to the article as if he’d been smacked in the face. I tried to pour scorn on the idea of a ‘seer’, but I couldn’t manage to reassure him.

  Yet the exact extent of the effect this had on Anquetil seems open to question. Géminiani maintains Anquetil’s innate concerns about the fragility of life – brought home so tragically less than a year before by the death of his father – meant he was vulnerable to this type of comment and became a nervous wreck. If the prediction itself wasn’t enough, he also says that he h
ad to sort through letters sent to Anquetil, trying to remove those with cuttings from the paper or unpleasant references to his possible fate.

  Certainly, it’s clear Anquetil had a surprisingly open mind on some practices of dubious scientific merit, in spite of his meticulous and methodical approach to winning bike races. He was already an avowed disciple, for example, of the curious pseudoscience of ‘magnetisme’ as practised by the healer Jean-Louis Noyès. It was Noyès who had ‘laid his hands’ on Anquetil’s sore throat prior to him setting a new record in his 1960 victory in the Critérium des As. Ever since, Anquetil had been a regular visitor. ‘He never enters a race without having come to see me first,’ Noyès ‘the man with the golden fingers’ told France Dimanche. As well as Noyès, Anquetil also made use of the magnetisme and ‘double-action baths’ provided by a certain Marthe Burger. He even went so far as to write her a dedication for an advertisement: ‘To Marthe Burger, whose baths have helped me regain form and have supported my efforts, both before and during races.’

  ‘He definitely had a side of him that was easily impressed by certain things – people who’d managed to do things that weren’t entirely logical – as with all people who’d managed to do remarkable things, physical or otherwise,’ acknowledges Dieulois. ‘He wasn’t quite credulous, but he was catholic, ready to believe that you could heal yourself in a certain way because someone had said so.’ Jeanine simply describes him as being superstitious: ‘When he was about to set off on the Tour, he had to see his magnetiseur, his hairdresser and suffer behind a Derny for 120 kilometres. If not, he said he felt handicapped.’

  Yet equally certain is that others who knew him assert that he wasn’t the kind of person to be bothered by a spurious prediction in a newspaper. Bernard Hinault, Anquetil’s only rival for the title of best French cyclist ever, became so close to him as to have been asked to be his son Christopher’s godfather. When I asked him if he thought Anquetil would have been worried by Belline’s prediction, Hinault derided the notion entirely with the same unflinching stare he used to dismiss assaults on his pre-eminence as a cyclist: ‘I think he believed in magnetisme a bit – a bit. But in the “seer”, I don’t think so. That wasn’t really his style. At least, I don’t think so. From what I knew of him, he was more inclined towards astronomy, but as for it making him scared? It’s not the sort of thing that would have scared him. No, no, no.’

  His former teammate Ignolin is just as adamant that Anquetil would not have been unsettled by astrological gibberish, as is Georges Groussard, his friend and former fellow professional cyclist from the 1960s: ‘I don’t really think he was scared. He might have said so to the journalists, but I don’t think he really felt it himself.’

  Groussard, a journeyman professional from Brittany with only a handful of professional victories to his name, exclusively in criteriums, was to play an unlikely but crucial role in the outcome of the 1964 Tour de France, a race that would in many ways come to define Anquetil’s career. I met him at his elegant detached house in the attractive Brittany town of Fougères, where he was born and where he returned to work after his eight-year career as a professional cyclist. Now retired, but still busy on the eve of the cyclosportive (a long-distance cycling event for amateurs) organised by the local club in his honour, he was happy to reminisce about his brief spell in the limelight when he rubbed shoulders with cycling superstars thanks to wearing the yellow jersey for ten stages and finishing fifth overall in one of the most famous bicycle races ever. While Anquetil and Poulidor, and other rivals such as Bahamontes, were busy watching each other, the unheralded Groussard stole a march on all of them.

  ‘I took the yellow jersey on the first stage in the Alps, to Briançon over the Col du Télégraphe and the Col du Galibier,’ he recalls with an impressive memory for detail. ‘I had already been in the breakaway the day before when we took thirty seconds out of Anquetil, and then I was in the breakaway that day and took another four minutes, so I took the yellow jersey in Briançon. The next day was over the Col de Vars and the Col de Restefond [at the time the highest motorable road in Europe], so I kept the yellow jersey in Monaco [when Anquetil beat Simpson in the sprint for stage victory and took a minute out of Poulidor in time bonuses after Poulidor had sprinted a lap too early]. Then there were some flat stages and a short time trial, and I kept the yellow jersey through them – I had four minutes over Anquetil, so I had enough in hand. Then we got to the Pyrenees.’

  It was here that the drama really started, though the initial interest was not focused on the race but on Anquetil’s activities on the rest day in Andorra – the day before the much anticipated 14th stage. In an attempt, Géminiani maintains, to distract Anquetil from what lay ahead, the pair, along with Jeanine, went to a mechoui (a lamb roast) hosted by Radio Andorra. Although even Géminiani maintains Anquetil’s consumption was not excessive, this well-publicised – and well-photographed – visit immediately created a furore. Even though the journalists should perhaps have known better, this being Jacques Anquetil, the sight of him tucking into a rare leg of lamb, washed down with a glass of wine while the majority of his rivals would have been out on a training ride, was too much to resist.

  The articles the next day once again calling into question Anquetil’s professionalism seemed to have been remarkably prescient within a few kilometres of the start of that day’s stage – the fateful stage 14. The stage ran from Andorra to Toulouse and was largely flat apart from the ascension, immediately after the start, of the Col d’Envalira. By the top, only the moral support – and strong arms – of Anquetil’s teammate Louis Rostollan had prevented him from being any further behind his main rivals than he actually was: five minutes and forty seconds on Poulidor and Bahamontes. Yet the much discussed role of the mechoui in this sudden weakness is questioned by those most directly involved in the drama that was to follow.

  ‘I don’t think it was the mechoui, rather the fact he didn’t go for a ride on the rest day and that there was the Envalira straight away the next day,’ says Groussard. ‘You should always ride for two hours on the rest day – we went and rode up the col. Of course, it depends on the riders – there are some for whom it works not to ride – but when you’re used to riding every day, you can retain fluid in the legs and the muscles can stiffen up if you don’t ride. Maybe it’s all right if you have got 40 or 50 kilometres to get going again the next day, but we were straight into a climb, and the Spaniards – Bahamontes and [Julio] Jiménez – and Poulidor attacked from the start. It exploded straight away.’

  Poulidor agrees the mechoui was of little significance but also disputes the importance of Anquetil not having ridden. ‘The mechoui? No, no, oh no. That’s of no significance. Me, I would have preferred to get out into the countryside than stay in Andorra,’ he asserts (although perhaps the difference between the two men was that Anquetil asserted himself at the time rather than lamenting not having done it later). ‘In town, it was very hot. You couldn’t sleep. There was no air conditioning, nothing. He was in the country to get some air. He had some rare meat. Well, that’s nothing, and I didn’t ride my bike that day, either.’

  The various different ways the riders spent their rest days at the time are captured by Cycling’s report of the race. Tom Simpson did go for a ride up the Col d’Envalira, but this was with a friend and was for the purpose of seeing neighbours from Belgium who were camping on the mountain. He then went to a bullfight, hardly a conventional rest-day activity. Fellow British riders Vin Denson and Michael Wright went shopping.

  Whatever the cause, Anquetil’s tardy arrival at the top of the col meant his tilt at overall Tour victory was in serious jeopardy. So, according to Belline, was his life, and the pea-soup fog at the top certainly lent a sinister air to proceedings. In Les années Anquetil, Géminiani once again claims to have found just the right words to inspire his man, perhaps also revealing how little anxiety Anquetil had actually suffered as a result of the prediction: ‘For God’s sake. If you’re going to die,
you might as well die at the front!’

  There is also a more pragmatic explanation for Anquetil’s startling recovery in not only making up the time on his rivals but also gaining an advantage of more than two and a half minutes on Poulidor by the end of the stage. Groussard again: ‘We heard on the radios of the motorbikes that were near us that Anquetil was behind and that Rostollan was pushing him. We asked each other if he was going to be able to continue – we didn’t know. Then on the descent there was a fog you could have cut with a knife. You couldn’t see more than ten metres. I remember I went through the first bend of the descent sideways. I don’t know how I managed not to fall. We went down carefully, saying there’s still 160 kilometres to go, so we can still catch the group ahead – we were a bigger group than those in front. So, we took it easy down the 20 kilometres of the descent. Then, on the descent, we found Anquetil with us. We were surprised, but there were also lots of cars behind our group, as I had the yellow jersey, and he could use their rear lights as a guide – he could follow the cars. If it hadn’t been for the fog, it’s certain that he wouldn’t have caught us.’

  And if it hadn’t been for catching the Groussard group, he might not have seen Poulidor and Bahamontes again that day: ‘If he was saved, it was thanks to my team – Pelforth – as we were stuck behind the five or six blokes away, Poulidor, Bahamontes and the others, who were two minutes ahead of us. I was in a small group of six or seven with Janssen [his teammate Jan, vying for the green jersey] and Anglade [another teammate, Henry, who finished second in the 1959 Tour], who were not quite such good climbers. But we weren’t too worried, as there was still a long way to go, and we said to ourselves we’d catch them. And, of course, it helped him. He was alone. He had no teammates with him.’