French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  When Jeff Bernard came past, there was a palpable sense of expectation among the crowd. He looked like he was dying, his face pulled into a spasm of agony, spittle decorating his chin and shorts. But he was visibly faster than any other rider we’d seen. Yet, as Bernard’s star rose even higher, left flailing to retain his status as French cycling’s top dog was Laurent Fignon, once Bernard Hinault’s great rival and our existential hero, due to his professorial look and rakish, insolent style.

  Fignon, Tour winner in 1983 and 1984, often appeared to be brimming with barely suppressed rage, both on and off the bike. That afternoon, however, he was filled with desperation, as yet another comeback attempt failed to achieve lift-off. In his autobiography, We Were Young and Carefree, published shortly before his premature death from cancer at just 50, Fignon describes the Ventoux as a ‘majestic theatre’. Yet that afternoon it became the theatre of his nightmares, rather than his dreams.

  ‘In front of a hysterical crowd, I had decided to give it my all,’ he wrote. But, he continued, ‘nothing happened – nothing at all’.

  ‘There was emptiness, nothingness. I’d had too much emotional turmoil, too many troubles to deal with. I was sixty-fourth, more than ten minutes behind Jean-François Bernard. I was appalled by my performance.’

  Fignon’s son had been born 24 hours earlier, during the rest day in Avignon. Some of those at the roadside had heard the news. ‘Allez Papa!’ they called as he churned painfully up the mountain.

  Yet even that failed to inspire him. ‘It was savage. I simply couldn’t move. It hurt all over. Such was Mont Ventoux.’

  After he had finished the stage, Fignon, overwhelmed by self-doubt and contemplating quitting, broke down. ‘I cracked. “I’m never going to make it,” I thought. Away from prying eyes, I wept for a long time.’

  Oddly, though, that collapse, or défaillance, at the summit of the Ventoux was the making of his Tour. ‘I have to go deep into distress before climbing back out again,’ he once said. Three days later, Fignon appeared resurrected as he joyfully won the ski station stage finish to La Plagne.

  At the time, French riders still dominated the Tour and their rivalries were intense, bitchy and sometimes self-destructive. Fignon, desperate to reassert his star status, was instrumental in the derailing of Jeff Bernard’s hopes of overall success the afternoon after his fellow Frenchman had won on the Ventoux.

  ‘The next day we decided to skip the ravito – to race through the feed zone – while the other guys slowed up,’ Fignon said. Bernard, surprised by the move but also too gauche to think through the dangers of such a scenario, hesitated to take up the pursuit. Thirty years later, his indecision still haunts him.

  ‘It was when he lost the race for good,’ Fignon, always the king of ‘franc-parler’, said in his autobiography, adding with characteristic ruthlessness, ‘It was a basic error.’

  II

  I first started riding a bike when I was 12. We used to race this old bone-shaker around the block. I loved it. After I joined Harworth Cycling Club, all I thought about was riding. I got a delivery-boy job, so I could get a better bike. I saw it as a target, a milestone to be reached. I liked that.

  I think I learned that from my dad really. He was always a grafter, he didn’t shirk. Even after he’d had his accident down the pit in Durham, he got a job in a glassworks in Harworth. I wasn’t much good at other sports, like football or cricket. I couldn’t catch a ball, so it was always cycling for me.

  Early on, I was always lagging behind on the club runs, left behind on the hills every time. I was still scrawny back then and the other lads took the piss – ‘Four-stone Coppi’ they called me – ha bloody ha!

  I showed them in the end, though.

  When I was 16 I won the club’s 25-mile time trial. After that, I was pretty pleased with myself. I got cocky and developed a bit of a swagger about it, which didn’t go down too well. In the end I left, which, in hindsight, was inevitable.

  By then, I knew I wanted to make a career in cycling. By the time I was 17, I was winning races, right, left and centre, reading about all the big races on the continent, like the Tour. Looking back, I can see I was obsessed. Cycling was all that mattered to me; winning was all that mattered.

  But my ambition got me in hot water once or twice. I was suspended from road racing for six months after I rode through a stop sign and got pulled over by a copper. It was a real blow and for a while I was pretty low. I thought I was done.

  I still had my dream, though. I rather fancied myself as the British Hugo Koblet. They called him the pédaleur de charme, always dapper, very handsome. He was the lad who used to comb his hair before he crossed the finish line! He was always well turned out, had a nice car – and a pretty girl too.

  If I wanted to make progress, I knew I had to get to Europe, get a chance with a team, learn French, and become one of ‘them’, one of the top guys. How the hell was a cash-strapped miner’s son from Durham ever going to manage that?

  I’d spent a long time racing on the track, before I realised that my heart lay in road racing. After I was selected for the ’56 Olympics in Melbourne, it felt like the world was my oyster. But when we got to the team pursuit semis, I made a right fool of myself. It was embarrassing and I never forgave myself really, because everyone knew the Brits would have been the favourites for the gold.

  It was my mistake: I did a lap flat out, but just blew up. Next time it was my lap, I had nothing left. Afterwards, I cried my eyes out. I felt so bad for the other British lads. I shall always blame myself for letting the country down and for the loss of that gold medal.

  By now, I was growing used to the travel. It always felt very cosmopolitan, arriving at an airfield and flying off to some far-flung corner of Belgium, Germany or France to race. I think I developed a bit of a taste for the high life!

  I could have carried on racing in England, I suppose, but once I’d won the Nationals, I knew that it wouldn’t have stretched me like racing on the continent would. So I had to get away. When I finally received an offer from France, it was too good to refuse. It also ensured I could steer clear of national service – in fact, my call-up papers arrived just after I left.

  ‘Good luck then, lad,’ Dad had said, bidding me farewell. I’d saved up £100 and set off for Brittany with two suitcases and a spare pair of wheels. I stayed with the Murphys, at their butcher’s in Saint-Brieuc, which turned out to be all right.

  It was a right pain not speaking French, though. I used to try but I lost my nerve and couldn’t really speak to anyone. If it was going to work out I knew I had to speak French, otherwise I’d never be accepted. And I wanted to be part of it all; I wanted to be accepted.

  Although I picked up some wins, at £35 each, which wasn’t bad going, I didn’t have that much cash. But then I got lucky – I was offered two contracts, Mercier or St Raphael-Géminiani. I chose St Raphael – on 80,000 francs a month. I still needed to win races, though. The salary alone wasn’t enough. Not if I wanted some sharp suits and an Aston Martin – and I do love cars.

  There’s something else though. I want to clear up all this stuff about me being a draft dodger. They came after me about my call-up in January 1960 but, the thing is, I knew that my professional career could be wrecked. In the end, I had to go for one of those interviews, to get cross-examined.

  ‘So you’re a special case then are you, Simpson?’ they said.

  I told them that I was racing as a pro now, that I had to get back to France for the first training camp. I left the very next day. They still sent the call-up papers again, even though they knew I was in France. It became an almighty fuss. The German papers said I was the man ‘who would not fight for his Queen’. I mean, as if, after all my hard graft, I’d let the bloody Germans, of all people, put me off my career.

  Anyway, I raced through that spring, but I kept hearing that they were after me. In fact, I even cancelled a trip to race on the Isle of Man. Just as well as it turned out because the mili
tary police were waiting for the plane when it landed. I got fined for that too, £25, but it was worth it to save me from 18 months’ national service. God knows how things would have turned out if I’d done it.

  Back home, after that, there were always people stirring it, calling me a draft dodger, but that really wasn’t the case. It was just that cycling always came first. So I got stuck in to my racing. I wanted to make my mark. I managed it at Paris–Roubaix. I went off on my own, but ran out of steam five kilometres from the velodrome.

  That day, I got more publicity even than the winner. It was the first time a Classic had been televised live. Later, they told me that people had been crying when they’d seen a lone rider get caught that close to the finish.

  Foaming at the Mouth

  I have a tattered old booklet that I once picked up, possibly from the shelves of the late lamented Sportspages bookshop in Cambridge Circus, called Fabulous Fifties, documenting what many still regard as the golden era of cycling. The rough typeset and romantic prose betray a kitchen-table labour of love. This was produced, clearly by a fan, and one with a very old typewriter.

  The few poor-quality photographs, of gaunt, slick-haired, olive-skinned riders, spare tyres wrapped around their shoulders, capture their agonies on the rough roads of post-war Europe, like the most melodramatic El Greco.

  Fabulous Fifties was one of a series of booklets ‘written by well-known personalities in the cycling world’, which sprang from the ‘high-class’ magazine, International Cycle Sport. Delve deeper and pioneering sages like Jock Wadley, Noel Henderson and Ron Kitching emerge from the pages as the driving forces behind this publishing revolution. Touchingly, for me at least, having once had a hand in both, the wiki references section cites procycling and Cycle Sport as spiritual successors.

  Yet there’s no doubting the hero of Henderson’s potted history of the post-war peloton: as you leaf through the pages, ‘Gem’ – Raphaël Géminiani – jumps out as the star, the rough diamond from the Auvergne, the outspoken catalyst for the great exploits of Koblet, Bobet and Coppi.

  ‘There was drama, comedy, even tragedy wherever Géminiani went,’ Henderson writes. Gem was, says Henderson, not the greatest rider of the fifties (he never won a major tour), but ‘there could be none whose career was more passionate, more turbulent, more fascinating, more heroic or more amusing’.

  Such adoration stems principally from the fact that, rather winningly, Gem didn’t bother trying to hide his inner chimp. His behaviour was ‘unspun’. He could be arrogant, rude, provocative, uncouth and disrespectful. The fans loved him.

  He attacked spectators, repeatedly dunked a star team-mate’s head in the bath, likened his national team boss to a donkey, and described his more successful compatriots, Louison Bobet and Jacques Anquetil, as ‘les Judas’. His moods blew with the wind, and all too often when you were riding against or alongside Géminiani, that wind was a 100-kilometre-an-hour Mistral.

  He was one of a generation of new stars in road racing who came to prominence as Europe emerged from wartime austerity. These leading lights – Géminiani, Fausto Coppi, Hugo Koblet, Bobet – luxuriated in a new-found freedom. They flaunted the trappings of liberation: trench coats, cigarettes, Brylcreem, Studebakers – even, in Coppi’s case, adultery. You can almost imagine them selling stockings and sausages on the side. The images of them all from that time exude style, confidence and a hint of resurgent post-war sensuality.

  Louison Bobet’s brother, Jean, wrote in his memoir, Tomorrow We Ride, that the four superstars – Coppi, Kubler, Koblet and his brother – ‘were not just winners, they had style. They plumped for fine hotels, fine restaurants and large cars. They lived like stars as befitted their rank.’

  These elegant, proud men, captured on mountain summits, and at dining tables, their fans and admirers gathered around them hanging on their every exploit, stare back at the camera, coiffed and clear-eyed, firing the dreams and aspirations of French, Belgian and Italian fans, drained and exhausted by the Second World War. Clear-eyed perhaps, but often wide-eyed too. There is little mention in Fabulous Fifties of the prevalence of speed in the peloton, of the rampant use of amphetamines, even though their use was well known and, through that decade, became even more of a concern.

  Mont Ventoux’s arrival on the route du Tour in 1951 played a significant part both in cycling’s post-war renaissance and in the spread of pill-popping. The Giant was a suitably daunting and dramatic stage for theatrical heroics, which coincided with the Tour’s first years of TV coverage.

  As they lined up in Montpellier’s Place de la Comédie on 22 July 1951 for the first ever Tour de France stage over the Ventoux, the riders were justifiably nervous. There had already been drama that July, more than enough, in the build-up to the Tour’s inaugural visit to the ‘bald mountain’. A grief-stricken Coppi, debilitated by the death of his brother, Serse, had almost abandoned the Tour the day before the Ventoux stage, while a few days earlier, Wim van Est, wearing the yellow jersey, had come close to death in the Pyrenees.

  Van Est’s tumble, from the ‘balcon’ of the Soulor, the Cirque du Litor, is one of the Tour’s great stories. Holland’s first-ever maillot jaune dropped into space descending the Col d’Aubisque and was rescued from a small ledge that saved him from falling into the valley below. ‘A metre left or right and I’d have dropped six or seven hundred metres,’ he said later. But it was the manner of his rescue that came straight out of the Tour’s comic-book legend.

  As the traumatised and sobbing van Est clung to what was more a grassy knoll than a ledge, a rope, tossed down the mountainside to haul him up, proved too short. As their panic grew, his rescuers improvised. Desperate to reach his stranded rider, team manager Kees Pellenaars joined together the rope and the team’s supply of inner tubes. ‘They got 40 tubulars, knotted them and threw them down to me,’ van Est, once imprisoned for smuggling tobacco, said. ‘It was all the tyres they had.’

  Eventually, watched by a crowd so stylish themselves that they looked as if they had stepped out of a Rapha catalogue photoshoot, van Est was hauled back up to the road. In an effort to calm his shattered nerves, they plied him with cognac. Maybe, in the light of his extra-curricular activities, he’d rather have had a fag.

  ‘After that,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t go on.’ Nor, their inner tubes stretched to breaking point, could his team. This being the Tour, though, there was marketing capital to be made from his near-death experience. A couple of days later, quotes from van Est featured in an ad campaign for watches. ‘My heart nearly stopped on the mountain – but not my Pontiac watch!’ it exclaimed.

  So it was a depleted peloton that rode to the foot of the Ventoux that hot Sunday. Pre-race favourite Coppi was a shadow of himself and Hugo Koblet of Switzerland had already determinedly stamped his personality on the race, seizing a series of swaggering stage wins, including the previous day, in Montpellier. Koblet admitted that his swashbuckling riding was a deliberate ploy. ‘That’s the way I’m playing it,’ he told L’Équipe. ‘Ride at the front, not in the bunch. My tactic will always be the same: don’t let my rivals steal any time.’

  But Koblet had fatally wounded his rivals long before the Ventoux stage, winning the 85-kilometre time trial to Angers and then producing a performance now synonymous with cycling’s coveted panache and which inspired that sobriquet of ‘pédaleur de charme’. On the stage from Brive to Agen, Koblet slipped clear after only 37 kilometres. One rider, Louis Déprez, followed him, but by the 64th kilometre Koblet was alone, time-trialling clear of the peloton and into the Tour’s folklore.

  His rivals – the Italians Coppi, Magni and Bartali, and the French, led by Géminiani and Bobet – gave chase. But their combined efforts had no impact. Meanwhile, the gap kept growing. After 77 kilometres, Koblet led by more than a minute and a half, and by 120 kilometres a virtually uncatchable four minutes.

  As he entered the finishing straight, Koblet relaxed and took his hands off the handlebars. In a gesture th
at immediately made him a star, he reached for a comb and coiffed his hair before celebrating the success of his 140-kilometre lone attack. Then he wheeled to a halt and pointedly checked his stopwatch, as he awaited the arrival of the peloton.

  It was a performance of such arrogance and style that his rivals were aghast. ‘I’m getting another job,’ said a crestfallen Géminiani after crossing the line, two and a half minutes later.

  Gushingly described by Miroir du Cyclisme as looking ‘closer to Clark Gable than a racing cyclist’, Koblet became an overnight heart-throb. By the time, a week later, that the peloton rode out of the Place de la Comédie, there was little doubt, even with the Ventoux looming in the distance, on the final outcome of the Tour.

  On a cloudless summer’s day, the route to the Ventoux took the convoy from the Camargue, over the Rhône via the bridge at Beaucaire–Tarascon, crossing the Durance at Pont de Rognonas, through Avignon and then to Malaucène, the side of the mountain now relegated to history by the modern Tour. French news reports of the time babble excitedly of stifling heat and huge crowds flocking to the roadside to witness the first visit of the race to Ventoux. ‘The public clapped, their cries of joy growing louder,’ said one.

  And so, through the afternoon heat haze, the relentless white noise of the cicadas reaching a crescendo, the Tour peloton arrived at the foot of the Ventoux and entered the unknown. Swinging right in Malaucène, they began the long climb. Soon after passing the source at Grozeau, where the gradient first kicks in, Manolo Rodríguez, of Spain, attacked, a dozen riders moving clear with him.