Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape

by Paul Howard

  I asked Groussard if it wasn’t a counterproductive move, riding in such a way as to help his most serious rival for overall victory. Goussard is realistic: ‘I never thought I’d keep the jersey to Paris. I knew full well I’d lose it, with the time trial coming. In fact, there were still two time trials to come – one of fifty kilometres – and I only had one and a half, maybe two minutes, so I knew I’d lose it then. I knew my limits. But we wanted to keep the jersey as long as possible, and we were also leading the team classification and helping Janssen with the green jersey. There was no question of not riding with him, not at all.’

  The result, therefore, was the two groups coming together. ‘When we joined up with Poulidor’s group, we still had 40 to 50 kilometres to go, then everything slowed down a bit and Poulidor punctured, changed wheels and his mechanic knocked him off. We heard this on the radio, so we attacked straight away,’ Groussard recalls with a hearty chuckle. ‘By the finish, he’d lost nearly three minutes. That was in Toulouse.’

  Not surprisingly, Poulidor has equally vivid memories of the stage: ‘The stage to Toulouse was something else. I had no plans to attack at the foot of the Col d’Envalira, as it would have been pointless – there were another 250 kilometres to go, so it was impossible to make it stick, even if I hadn’t fallen. It was the Spaniards who attacked, and I followed Bahamontes – he was a rival, after all. I followed, no more. We had maybe five or six minutes at the top on Anquetil, but because his death had been predicted all the journalists had stayed with him. When we went down the Envalira, we couldn’t see more than two metres. He went down with all the cars’ headlights. We went down at 20 kilometres per hour; he went down at 60 kilometres per hour. He caught us.

  ‘After the Envalira, he caught up the Pelforth team of Groussard, the yellow-jersey wearer, so they joined up and worked together in the valley, and that was that. But up front, we really weren’t forcing it. Then, at 25 kilometres from the finish, I broke a spoke. My wheel was slightly buckled, but I could have continued – we really weren’t forcing it, and the peloton was coming back on us, including my teammates. Then Magne – my directeur sportif – made me change wheels.’

  Tellingly, for all his avuncular nature and apparent acceptance of the surfeit of unfortunate incidents in his career, Poulidor immediately corrects me when I recap what he’s just told me and inadvertently say that he had a puncture – which would have obliged him to stop – rather than a broken spoke: ‘No, it was Magne who made me change wheels, even though it was only slightly buckled and even though the peloton with all my teammates was closing on us.

  ‘And so I changed the wheel, and it was fine. But just as I was tightening my toe-straps, the mechanic pushed me, upset my balance and I fell, and the chain came off. I couldn’t get the rest of the bike straight, either. It took a considerable amount of time. Then they attacked. Not Anquetil – I was told it was Maurice De Muer [the directeur sportif of the Pelforth team] who initiated it. And there was another problem. It was none of his business, but Jacques Goddet blocked the road to stop me taking advantage of the following cars to catch up. He wasn’t acting as a race director; he was acting as a journalist. He stopped in the middle of the road to watch, and everyone attacked. So, there was a real scrap, a side wind and my teammates were tired after chasing to get back on. I did one pull at the front of a group of riders and dropped them all. Fortunately, there were only twenty kilometres to go, as otherwise I would have lost five or six minutes.’

  Thus a day that began with Anquetil fearing death and seemingly set to lose the Tour de France had turned out to his considerable advantage. Yet Poulidor remains unconvinced that this was the defining moment of a race that would be decided by less than a minute overall: ‘So I lost two minutes [actually, two minutes thirty-six seconds], but I don’t think it was that that lost me the Tour. If that hadn’t happened, I perhaps wouldn’t have attacked the next day when I took back all the time I’d lost the previous day. Perhaps I wouldn’t have done that. For me, I lost the Tour the first day and certainly during the time trial to Bayonne. In fact, I lost it several times.

  ‘The first day – nobody’s ever spoken about it. I lost 47 seconds on the first day. I had a fall with 1.1 kilometres to go to the finish. The last kilometre is neutralised so I was only 100 metres away from being given the same time as the winner. It just wasn’t my year.’

  Nevertheless, to be foiled once by a panicky directeur sportif and a maladroit mechanic may be unfortunate; for it to happen twice appears careless. After the first incident on the road to Toulouse, the second came in the time-trial stage from Peyrehorade to Bayonne, which Poulidor started only nine seconds down on Anquetil. ‘I punctured, perhaps losing one minute as a result,’ Poulidor recalls. ‘Magne braked a bit too quickly in the following car, and my mechanic, who should have given me a replacement bike, ended up in the ditch at the side of the road with the bike. He sprained his ankle, and as the ditch was very deep he couldn’t give me the bike, so I had to climb down to get it. But because the ditch was very deep and I had cycling shoes on with no grip, I couldn’t get any purchase on the grass, so I couldn’t get back out of the ditch. Even when I did get back on the bike, I’d done 50 metres and realised the handlebar was twisted. I got off again, but it was difficult to straighten it, as it was very tight.’

  Poulidor pauses, as if to take stock of the significance of the situation. ‘You know,’ he continues, ‘I lost an extraordinary amount of time, and at that point I was leading him on the intermediate time checks – in a time trial. I think that day I would have beaten him, and that would have changed everything. The bonus at the end of the stage, the morale . . . It was several days before the Puy-de-Dôme, and he wouldn’t have had the courage to hold on like he did on the Puy. For me, I lost the Tour there. If he’d lost the time trial, it would have been all over. His morale would have disappeared.’

  As it was, whether the result of good fortune for Anquetil or bad planning for Poulidor, Anquetil beat Poulidor by thirty-seven seconds and extended his lead overall, thanks to the ten-second bonus for winning the stage, to fifty-six seconds. With Bahamontes now out of the picture, the race would come down to the famous duel on the Puy-de-Dôme and the final 27-kilometre time-trial stage into Paris. Advantage Poulidor on the climb, but advantage Anquetil against the clock. The question was simple – which would weigh most heavily in the balance?

  The stage to the Puy started with an attack, once again featuring Groussard. ‘I was in a breakaway,’ he recalls. ‘There were ten or so of us, and we were rejoined just at the bottom of the Puy-de-Dôme, so there’d been a bit of a scrap, and we’d made them work a bit. We’d certainly made Poulidor’s team work a bit. They’d led quite a bit on that stage, so perhaps he’d left a lot of energy on the road.’

  Poulidor’s motivation in restricting attacks even from those not threatening overall victory was to keep open the possibility of not just gaining time over Anquetil but also taking advantage of the time bonuses available for finishing first or second on the stage, giving an extra minute and an extra 30 seconds, respectively. He succeeded to the extent that the race was back together as the leaders reached the punishing final five kilometres. (Perhaps ‘punishing’ should be put into context here. Although only five kilometres long, this last section of the climb averages 13 per cent and in fact varies very little from this average. The result is a climb that is considerably steeper and certainly a lot more sustained than almost any other used by the Tour. ‘There isn’t a chance to recuperate,’ says Groussard. ‘It just keeps going up.’)

  Unfortunately for Poulidor, the Spanish climbing double act of Julio Jiménez and Federico Bahamontes used the steepening of the road to launch their own attacks – they were still fighting for victory in the king of the mountains competition. Poulidor could neither follow the lead pair nor even drop Anquetil. Instead, he had to battle, elbow-to-elbow, with his great rival simply to keep level with him. According to Géminiani, this was all part of anoth
er of his famous plans, a means by which Anquetil could avoid having to respond to Poulidor’s inevitable accelerations while also intimidating him into not daring to accelerate in the first place.

  Whether Anquetil was really bluffing, however, and whether Poulidor really succumbed to the tactic, remains uncertain. Groussard is certainly sceptical: ‘Did Anquetil bluff? I think they were both flat out and neither could go any faster. It was a long stage, maybe 260 kilometres, so they were both tired. I think they were both flat out, and Anquetil just cracked first, but not enough.’

  Ignolin is more convinced: ‘No, I think Anquetil bluffed a bit by coming level with Poulidor – keeping level with him. He wasn’t only a pedalling machine in terms of his muscles; he had the right head on his shoulders, too. He was always lucid, even after 12 hours on the bike, even if he’d ridden for 24 hours.’

  Eventually Poulidor did manage to drop Anquetil, but only after they’d entered the final kilometre, finishing the stage 42 seconds ahead of his rival. When Anquetil arrived, he collapsed onto the bonnet of Géminiani’s car and managed to ask, ‘How much?’ Géminiani replied, ‘14 seconds,’ and Anquetil responded by saying, ‘That’s 13 more than I need.’ It was not necessary for Anquetil to spell out to Géminiani that he was asking about the margin by which he had kept the yellow jersey. Indeed, L’Équipe chief cycling writer Philippe Brunel insists on the significance of this abbreviated conversation in revealing not just the complicity and level of understanding between Anquetil and Géminiani but also the importance of having kept the famous tunic. Anquetil himself said after the stage, ‘If Poulidor had taken the jersey, I’d have gone home tonight.’ This is reinforced by Poulidor’s only comments to me about the climb: ‘When Jacques had the yellow jersey on his back, it was impossible to take it from him.’

  And so it would prove in the final time trial, although not without one more twist in the tale. With an estimated five hundred thousand fans lining the road to watch the final twenty-seven kilometres, Poulidor started off well enough to still be within three seconds of Anquetil at the five-kilometres-to-go time check. ‘On the last day, we were a couple of kilometres from the finish, and we were even stevens,’ he recalls. ‘We didn’t know who would win.’ In fact, if he could make up just eight seconds, the twenty-second bonus for winning the stage would mean he could yet win overall. To add to the drama, contemporary television footage of Poulidor’s arrival at the finish and the agonising wait until Anquetil arrived show a man – and a crowd – who believed he had achieved the unthinkable and won. Yet Anquetil once again demonstrated his ability to judge his efforts to perfection, taking eighteen seconds out of Poulidor in the final five kilometres to win the stage and seal overall triumph by a mere fifty-five seconds.

  Victory saw him become the first-ever five-times Tour de France winner and the only man other than Coppi to do the Giro–Tour double in the same year. Yet once again, at the zenith of his career, he revealed a humility in victory that contradicts the public perception of his aloofness and arrogance when he acknowledged the scale of Poulidor’s challenge: ‘I had to give it my all. Rarely have I suffered so much. I had to surpass myself today to beat Poulidor, and I must give him great credit. My pride comes from having beaten a great champion in the hardest Tour I’ve known.’

  FIFTEEN

  The Curious Incident of the Race in the Night-time

  WHAT NEXT? WHAT COULD possibly top a year in which you’d won twenty-one races, including the two biggest and most prestigious races in the world, both in gripping fashion, and proved your all-round versatility with a stunning first victory in a major one-day race?

  This was the dilemma faced by Anquetil on the eve of his 13th season as a professional: how to maintain motivation to continue to exceed expectations if pretty much all expectations had already been exceeded. What’s more, even if a sense of sporting desire could be stimulated, what was the point if the rewards for continuing to excel were already as high as they could be? Although Anquetil had probably already earned enough to be comfortable for the rest of his life, and could certainly hope to continue to be paid his going rate for a few years to come, this was of particular importance to someone who never underestimated the importance of money or his own value. After all, being rewarded at a level commensurate with his status as the top rider was not just a practical concern but a matter of pride – hence his frustration at Poulidor earning the same appearance money at criteriums.

  Continuing to win became a galling prospect if in doing so you helped your rival maintain an undeserved equal footing. According to Géminiani in Les années Anquetil, Anquetil had already been confronted with the uncomfortable financial reality of his situation in the run-up to the previous year’s Tour. Anquetil summoned his directeur sportif to his house to tell him, ‘I’ve just had a long conversation with Roger Piel [the rival agent to Anquetil’s manager Daniel Dousset]. He made me understand that winning the Tour for the fifth time would be meaningless. The public would still be against me. On the other hand, if Poulidor won, it would be great for me, as I’d become much more popular. Poulidor and Magne know nothing about it, but Piel has guaranteed me 50 very well-paid after-Tour contracts as well as 50,000 francs [France had by then moved to the new franc, so this represented £5,000].’ The combination of improved earnings and improved popularity was tempting enough for Anquetil to need Géminiani’s reassurance before declining the offer.

  If winning a fifth Tour de France had potentially been meaningless in a financial context, then winning a sixth was even more likely to be so. ‘He didn’t see a victory in the Tour for its intrinsic value or for its contribution to his palmarès,’ explains Brunel. ‘For him, the notion of a palmarès was absurd if it didn’t add value commercially. That was Anquetil.’

  As well as being a gratuitous effort, therefore, it would also have carried a considerable risk. Like all dominant males, Anquetil was subject to constant sniping from younger rivals; like all dominant males, he would eventually have to relinquish his position at the top of the hierarchy. Yet as the Roman general Fabius understood, the art of winning a war is sometimes found in avoiding a head-on battle. Although Anquetil had managed to beat Poulidor in 1964, the margin of victory was so slight as to leave open the prospect of defeat, whether through sporting inferiority or unfortunate circumstance – as had befallen Poulidor that year.

  Anquetil was clearly aware of this and, indeed, was sufficiently concerned to want to avoid the confrontation, at least according to his former teammate at the new Ford France-sponsored team, the British rider Vin Denson: ‘In my contract with Ford France, it was stated that I was obliged to ride the Tour if selected. Anquetil was also obliged to ride, as they hoped he would win for Ford France. But he couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like if Poulidor beat him, and he had a funny feeling that he wasn’t going to make it that year. You know, that he couldn’t do it, that he’d passed his sell-by date.’ What’s more, Denson maintains that this was down to more than just the innate precariousness of his position: ‘I’ve never known a rider know himself so well. He knew when to ease off, even if he was just having a bad patch for an hour or so. He was unbelievable. He could see it before it came.’

  Whatever the precise reason, Anquetil decided on the classic Fabian tactic of avoiding direct confrontation by determining not to ride any of the three major Tours – Spain, Italy or France – in 1965. He still had to conjure up some kind of performance to demonstrate his commitment to his new team, however, and also to improve his standing with the public, or at least provide sufficient distraction for his absence from his normal hunting grounds not to draw adverse comment. Initially, this gap was filled by an unusually early start to the season, leading to a comprehensive victory over both Altig, now in a different team, and Poulidor in Paris–Nice. His first victory in the Mont Faron hill climb, followed by victory over Poulidor in the Critérium National, not to mention three days participating in a Ford car in the Monte Carlo Rally, helped keep his
sponsors happy but did little to add to his prestige or dampen fevered expectation. After all, he was by now ‘supposed’ to win these events. (Even to someone like Anquetil, this must have become a bit wearing.) They also served merely to delay the inevitable: deciding what would be his big goal for the year.

  Once again, it was Géminiani who came up with the answer: ‘Looking at the calendar, I noticed something that made me sit up. The Dauphiné Libéré was followed immediately by Bordeaux–Paris. With Jacques having decided to bypass all three grand Tours, an idea sprang into my head. It would have been premature to spell it out there and then, but I let it germinate quietly.’ The idea that Géminiani was reluctant to articulate was for Anquetil to race and win both of these events, even though the five-hundred-and-fifty-seven-kilometre Bordeaux–Paris, the longest one-day race in the cycling calendar, was due to start in Bordeaux just seven hours after the Dauphiné was scheduled to finish nearly six hundred kilometres away in Avignon. The question was how to persuade Anquetil to tackle such an improbable challenge. Géminiani wrote:

  I was convinced he could succeed. I’d mentioned it in passing, but he’d hardly been enthusiastic – in fact, that’s the best you could say. So, I had to think of another way. I persuaded Jeanine that my idea was well founded and that Jacques could do it if he applied himself fully. ‘If you help me we can persuade him. I’m not with him day and night. You are. Suggest it to him and let me know how you get on.’