by Paul Howard
Buoyed, perhaps, by his own success and the failure of his great rival, Anquetil then embarked on a successful end-of-season campaign. He went to the Isle of Man cycling festival and won the Manx Premier Trophy by half a wheel from Eddy Merckx, and then won the Critérium des As and the Grand Prix Forli. He also became the first person to win the Grand Prix des Nations, the Grand Prix de Lugano and the Baracchi Trophy in the same year, winning the Baracchi Trophy with the ever faithful Jean Stablinski.
In the Grand Prix des Nations, on a new, shortened course of only 73.5 kilometres, Anquetil set a record average of 46.793 kilometres per hour, prompting another flattering L’Équipe headline: ‘Without Rivals’. Given that Poulidor and that year’s Tour winner Gimondi were both riding, and were both beaten by more than three minutes, this was indeed impressive. The paper congratulated him on having the courage to face up to these new pretenders, then concluded that he was ‘more imperious, more determined and also more generous than ever’. In spite of another article elsewhere in the paper under the headline ‘A Season with Neither Yellow nor Pink Jerseys’, cycling’s dominant male had lived to ride another year.
SIXTEEN
Anyone but Poulidor
WHEN YOUR ADVERSARIES ARE dead set on a confrontation, Fabian tactics cannot endure for ever. If you’re a Roman general, you might get away with passing the responsibility of fighting a rampaging Hannibal to someone else and retiring to Rome for a bout of gladiatorial politics, as Fabius did, but if you’re Jacques Anquetil facing up to your would-be nemesis Raymond Poulidor, you can’t shirk the challenge. Even the prestige of the previous year’s epic double victory in the Dauphiné Libéré and Bordeaux–Paris can’t provide shelter for long.
Thus it was that the two inevitably came face to face in a stage race for the first time in nearly a year in Paris–Nice at the beginning of 1966. Even before that, though, Anquetil was beginning to show signs of frustration at his remarkable career being defined solely in relation to his great rival. ‘It’s diabolical to live in such a symbiotic relationship with a rider who’s no worse but no better than many I’ve encountered in 14 years of racing,’ he recalled in En brûlant les étapes. He went on to cite the coverage of his victory in the early season Tour of Sardinia stage race as an example, complaining how little of it was about the actual race and how much about the next duel with Poulidor: ‘What’s that got to do with my victory? Why should Poulidor’s name be in any way linked to a race in which he didn’t participate? Frankly, it’s an aberration.’
Maybe Anquetil himself suffered an aberration by the time Paris–Nice reached Corsica, for he had to give ground – 36 seconds to be precise – to Poulidor in his favourite domain, the time trial. It may have been, as Géminiani pointed out loudly at the time, a tricky, technical route with a significant climb in it that was a long way from favouring Anquetil’s superior power and straight-line speed. Yet this hardly mitigated Anquetil’s own displeasure at finding himself not only beaten in his speciality, but also relegated to second place in the overall classification by Poulidor.
Clearly, Anquetil had to find a way to react if he wasn’t to be seen for the first time in his career as accepting defeat without a fight. The problem was that with only two stages remaining, one of them a flat sprinters’ stage with little opportunity to make up time, the opportunities to do so were strictly limited. Worse was the likely reaction to any eventual failure of Anquetil’s to overcome his rival, a reaction of which Anquetil was well aware: ‘And then I thought what would happen if the results were reversed: first, Poulidor, second, Anquetil. Then, I’d have been written off straight away. One lone defeat would count as much as fifteen or twenty victories. Was that fair? I could already picture the crocodile tears being shed because of my supposed decline.’
In the end, he had little choice but to put all his eggs in one basket and wait until the last stage to attack. This he did to great effect, first through the intermediary of his teammates, dispatched by Géminiani on a series of seemingly suicidal breaks in a bid to wear out Poulidor’s Mercier team physically and to heighten the war of nerves already initiated between the two protagonists. After rapidly running out of teammates, Poulidor was eventually required to assume all the responsibility for controlling the race himself and was obliged not just to chase after Anquetil and his team but also attacks from all of his major rivals. Géminiani complimented him on the panache this involved but also said that it was this expenditure of energy that paved the way for Anquetil’s decisive move with less than 40 kilometres to go. By the time he arrived at the finish on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, he had established a lead of one minute forty-four seconds, more than enough to wipe out the deficit incurred in the time trial in Corsica.
The reaction to this success depended on whether you were in the Anquetil or Poulidor camp. In the Anquetil camp, there was nothing but exultation and, according to Anquetil himself, a great sense of pride at one of his most hard-fought victories. In the Poulidor camp, and in the press, there was a sense of outrage at what were perceived to be nefarious manoeuvres – riders ending up in ditches and supposedly rival teams assisting in the wearing out of Poulidor and his teammates, not just with attacks, but also by physically getting in the way of any attempts to counter them. The report in L’Équipe went as far as to suggest that the controversy would unleash a civil war in French cycling. Responding to persistent questioning from journalists, Poulidor, although not explicit, left little doubt as to his assessment of events: ‘I note simply that Anquetil is still the patron of cycling. I don’t deny his strengths, nor even his superiority in many domains, but I consider that his teammates did not behave well on the road to Nice. Jacques Anquetil would acknowledge as much if he is honest with himself.’
Anquetil, in fact, did nothing of the sort. ‘Poulidor is a cry-baby,’ he declared. ‘The interview in which he repeated the accusations made by his team to cast a doubt over the correctness and sincerity of my victory, that interview is not worthy of a champion, and I will find it difficult to forgive him.’
More than 40 years later, Poulidor is prepared to be more open about what happened, though he still refuses to blame Anquetil himself. ‘The rivalry had grown even fiercer since the Tour in 1964, and it culminated in our confrontation in Paris–Nice,’ he recalls, pausing to consider his words carefully. ‘He had great difficulty in accepting defeat, especially his entourage, those people around him. So when I’d beaten him by 37 seconds in a time trial, his speciality, he wouldn’t accept it. The result was that on the last day, rival teams teamed up, it must be said, and what shocked me the most was that these arrangements happened in front of the race director [Jean Leulliot]. He let it happen, as he was closer to Anquetil than to me. They played tricks on my teammates – [Barry] Hoban and [Jospeh] Spruyt – tipping them into the ditch, and everyone attacked. Orders had been given. Anquetil had done nothing – I’ve nothing to reproach him for. When he attacked me, I was at the end of my tether. People say I’d wasted too much effort chasing after others, but [Michele] Dancelli attacked – he was only two minutes down – and [Vittorio] Adorni was the same.’
The implication that it was Géminiani, as Anquetil’s directeur sportif, who had greased the necessary palms to ensure a collusion to dethrone Poulidor is clear. In Les années Anquetil Géminiani goes to some considerable lengths to pour scorn on these suggestions and to clear his name, even recording how he offered 10,000 francs (£1,000) to anyone who had any proof of wrongdoing. There were no takers – proof, of course, is hard to come by.
According to Brunel, Géminiani was right – it wasn’t the teams ganging up, it was the managers: ‘There were two managers – agents, if you like – in France. Roger Piel and Daniel Dousset. Dousset had Anquetil, [Franco] Bitossi, [Lucien] Aimar, Altig and Adorni. Alliances in the peloton were arranged by the managers, not between the teams. Sometimes there were link-ups determined by a race, but there were also alliances to protect the “aristocracy”. In this Paris–Nic
e, there was Adorni, who raced for Anquetil because Dousset told him he had to. He said, “I need to maintain Anquetil’s prestige for the critériums [so he could maintain the value of his ‘10 per cent’].” That was the reality until after Bernard Hinault. It was Cyrille Guimard, Hinault’s directeur sportif and manager, who broke their power off, but it was like that for a long time, and Anquetil was part of the system.’
But no one should be under any illusions as to the fact that collusion between cyclists wasn’t also a frequent occurrence and indeed still is. It most often manifests itself in the more acceptable form of several teams with top sprinters pooling their efforts to reel in a breakaway and thus ensure a sprint finish that they will then at least have some chance of winning through their man. And ‘acquiring’ – that’s to say buying – the services of other cyclists was, and is, common practice.
Tom Simpson wrote three exposés of the world of cycling for The People newspaper after becoming world champion in 1965, in one of which he admitted to having offered the Irishman Shay Elliot £1,100 to help him win the world title in 1963 and that he had accepted £500 to work for a team other than his own. Anquetil himself was no exception. Later in the year, he would finish third in the Giro d’Italia, ostensibly the result of having lost more than three minutes to seven of his main rivals through a momentary lapse of concentration on the otherwise anodyne descent of the Col de San Bartolomeo on the first stage. Finishing third after such a slip is no mean feat and implies a good degree of determination, but his teammate at the time, Vin Denson, suggests Anquetil’s lack of concentration was perhaps less careless than it at first seemed: ‘Julio Jiménez [by now a teammate] went away in the break, and the idea was to get him to win. I don’t think Jacques was 100 per cent interested in winning the Giro. He was more interested in touching money from others, because there was a lot of money moving about, you know.’
Whether or not Jiménez’s presence in and Anquetil’s absence from the break was planned, Brunel confirms that once Anquetil was out of the running for overall victory he had another agenda to follow. If not directly about money, this was still the indirect motive – the money associated with the prestige of victory. ‘The reality is that Anquetil went to see Géminiani that night and said, “I’ve lost the Giro. There’s still 20-odd stages to go, but I’ve lost it. I can take three minutes back from six of them, but there’ll always be one of them who can keep their advantage,”’ says Brunel. ‘And then he said, “I’ve lost, but I can perhaps decide who will win.” And that’s what he did. He didn’t want Gimondi to win, as he’d won the Tour de France and he was a growing rival, so in the end he raced for Motta. In fact, on the last stage he found himself alone with Motta on a climb, and he came out of a bend and dropped him. He turned round and saw Motta dropped. But he waited for him. He had promised to wait for him, so he waited for him, even though he could perhaps have gone on to win the Giro himself. He’d given his word. That’s how Motta won the Giro. And he was so appreciative of what Anquetil had done that he arranged for Anquetil to come to a criterium in his home town near Bergamo after the Giro. It was such a small criterium that normally they couldn’t have afforded to have Anquetil race, so Motta paid for everything. He paid for the trip, paid for his accommodation, paid for his contract, and Anquetil didn’t know.’
According to Denson, there may well have been other even more powerful commercial forces at work behind the scenes: ‘We seemed to get a strange bonus – we were told to work for this other team, because as Ford France we were only really riding the Giro to get fit for the Tour de France, and Ford France didn’t want to give Ford Italy any publicity, because there was such competition between them on the border around Menton, Monaco, Nice – the cars were cheaper in Italy, apparently. When we finished a stage in the Giro, we were straight away given a hat with a very large Cynar logo on it – a brand of Italian aperitif – and only a very small Ford France logo. As soon as we’d finished, they gave us a hat and a tracksuit with Cynar on it so we covered up Ford France on the rostrum.’
Even after the successful completion of his outrageous Dauphiné Libéré and Bordeaux–Paris double, doubts were cast over the honesty of his victory in the second half of the challenge. As Cycling recalled, evidently with some exasperation, Tom Simpson, who eventually finished third, was accused of having sold Bordeaux–Paris to Anquetil:
‘My own pacemaker came up to me and, before witnesses, accused me of having been bought off by Anquetil. There was nothing I could say. The man was so convinced that he would not have believed a word I said, and I told him this, for what it was worth. Of course, the whole story is ridiculous. I would never have sold, in this race above all, my chance of beating Jacques Anquetil at his own game; it is an insult to Jacques and to me.’
Cycling appears to have been convinced, quoting famous British cycling journalist Jock Wadley, then editor of Sporting Cyclist magazine, as an eye witness: ‘“The three of them, Stablinski, Simpson and Anquetil, were trying so hard that they could not have spoken a word, let alone made an agreement; the whole story is stupid.”’
In his own series of provocative articles written for France Dimanche in 1967, mirroring those written by Simpson, Anquetil avoids such unsavoury details, but he is candid about collusion being an integral part of the job:
Everybody knows that the greatest cycling champion can’t ride alone. He needs a team. Yet there are still those who whisper, ‘Yes, of course, so-and-so won because he “bought” such-and-such a rider.’ Once again, this is pure hypocrisy. It’s quite clear that we ‘buy’ riders, and I say that it’s quite normal. We pay them for doing their job and that’s all. They’re the same as any other worker or employee. They sell themselves to the highest bidder, and it can happen that the auction takes place at the most unlikely moments – at the end of a race, for example.
The point, Anquetil maintains, is that you’re buying support in order to win rather than buying the victory itself:
When I talk about buying riders, I must make one thing clear: you can’t buy a victory. That’s in your legs, and the best teammate in the world can’t sell it to you. In a stage race, if you buy riders it’s above all in order not to be constantly attacked, jostled, harried, not to say threatened.
The point also is that a cycling team does not have the same sense of identity or belonging as would a football or rugby club. With winnings from races contributing as much to a rider’s income as his basic salary, if not more, and with the cycling tradition of pooling these winnings, a tradition apparently instigated by the self-important Bobet, his first allegiance is to his teammates rather than the team itself. In the best teams, this can make an effective bond, as Brian Robinson’s experience makes clear: ‘We were young riders, and we all wanted to make money. We were always the team that won the most money, no matter if we won the race or not. We always made the most money in the kitty.’
It’s hardly surprising, though, that the entirely unpredictable way a race can develop, with lead groups consisting of domestiques rather than stars, may lead to the ad hoc alliances that Anquetil describes. In an interview with Lui magazine – a French version of Playboy – in 1969, Anquetil explained further:
‘I’ve never sold a race, and a champion can’t afford the luxury of buying a victory. At my level, I’m in a constant battle for prestige with other champions. What’s at stake compels us to confront each other with no holds barred. But it can happen that we pool our resources against others in a breakaway.’
But paying lesser riders for their help was commonplace, even if defining the status of a rider was not without peril: ‘You can believe me that a rider only gives up his own chances after having thought about it carefully. It’s not always easy to explain to them that they’re not capable of winning a race.’ The real controversies arise not because these arrangements exist but when their inevitably informal nature leads to them breaking down. The most famous – infamous – example was in the world championships in 1963 when An
quetil apparently gave up victory by sitting up when ahead of the bunch and inside the final kilometre. His own take on events, however, is that he was simply reacting to a perceived feint from favourite Rik Van Looy and was gathering his forces for one last sprint to the line. With Anquetil concentrating solely on Van Looy, and vice versa, neither of them noticed Van Looy’s teammate Benoni Beheyt launch his race-winning sprint: ‘When we wanted to react, it was too late. Van Looy couldn’t get over it. He was mad with rage. In the changing-room, he had to be held back. He wanted to lay in to Beheyt. “I’d paid him to help me,” he shouted. But it was too late. Beheyt was world champion.’
If buying riders and collusion between teams is a fact of life, then perhaps the most accurate assessment of Paris–Nice would come from someone who has experienced it first hand. In this respect, the verdict of Guy Ignolin, admittedly Anquetil’s former teammate, is clear: ‘I think Jacques had a better team and had better teammates than Poulidor. And don’t forget, when he got away it was his final attack. He’d said, “If I don’t make it this time, that’s it.” But he really went for it, and Raymond blew up. They found themselves together, then very slowly Jacques was away, and once he was off he was like a train . . . So that’s how he won Paris–Nice.’
