French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  Kübler scoffed at Gem’s advice. ‘Well, Ferdi’s not like any other rider,’ he said with a swagger as he stormed off up the mountain, Géminiani cursing in his wake . . .

  Or did he?

  Interviewed years later, in Vélo magazine, Kübler denied the story. ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘I never said that. Géminiani is a great storyteller. In the peloton his nickname was “Telephone”. We’re good friends but this story, it isn’t true.’

  It is certain, however, that it was Kübler’s first time racing on Ventoux. He was 36 years old and it was excruciatingly hot. Even before he got close to the summit he was in a state of delirium, frothing at the mouth, his hook nose drooping low over the handlebars as he weaved back and forth.

  He wasn’t the only one swooning in the heatwave. Some spectators had already fainted and Belgian climber Richard Van Genechten, third in the 1954 Tour’s King of the Mountains classification, fell exhausted at the roadside and had to be given oxygen. Further down the mountain, French rider Jean Malléjac collapsed unconscious on the verge, ‘his face the colour of a corpse’ according to one witness, with race doctor Pierre Dumas fighting to revive him. After 15 desperate minutes lying unconscious at the roadside, eyes wide open and lifeless, the Breton was given oxygen, loaded into an ambulance and finally came around.

  Kübler pressed on, steadily losing both his speed and his marbles as he did so. Zigzagging his way through the final kilometres, he was caught and left behind by Bobet. Now riding at a snail’s pace, Kübler was followed – at one point on foot – by his team director, Alex Burtin, who ran alongside, yelling encouragement. By the time Kübler hauled himself over the summit, and began the descent, Bobet was already in Malaucène.

  This, then, was where the Kübler story really took off. En route to the finish, he crashed, twice apparently, then sat in a ditch, swore unintelligibly in German, and frenziedly downed beers in a bar, before setting off again – in the wrong direction. He finally got to the finish in Avignon 26 minutes behind Bobet, whom he’d been hoping to overcome. Bemused by his collapse, he announced his retirement, citing his age and the pain of cycling. ‘Ferdi has killed himself on the Ventoux,’ he said in his valedictory speech.

  Kübler was a font of great stories, some no doubt exaggerated over the years. One related the tale of a frantic tyre change, mid-race, by one of the domestiques. ‘We had to change our own tyres when we punctured,’ he recalled. ‘Once, my domestique, Emilio Croci Torti, helped me. I saw him, when it was cold, tearing a tubular off the rim with his teeth. Word of honour. It was unbelievable.

  ‘And we had to ride with a spare tyre wrapped round our shoulders. I put them round my shoulders just so, with the valve just where it ought to go. You had to, because if you crashed, the valve could cut into your back.’

  Racing during those Fabulous Fifties, long before marginal gains, Twitter accounts and the talk of air-conditioned, luxury mobile homes, was tough. ‘Every morning at the start,’ Kübler said, ‘we got a card with the name of the hotel we’d be staying at that night. We had to get there on our bikes after the finish, which often wasn’t easy.

  ‘On the Tour, you’d often get to a hotel where there’d be just one room set up as a bathroom for everybody, with a single bath. It was full of water but it was never emptied. You had to share it with your team-mates, so you can imagine the colour at the end of it.’

  How much of all that yarning is actually true? Probably only some of it, but it doesn’t really matter. These memories are not digital: there’s no video evidence to refer back to. Instead, they are based on memory and eyewitness accounts. As such they are mythical and fluid, shifting with time. What is clear, however, is that Kübler should have listened to what Géminiani said to him at the foot of the Ventoux.

  Ferdi was the last of the Coppi, Bobet and Koblet generation of Tour winners to survive. He finally let go, four days after Christmas 2016, aged 97. In one of his last interviews, his memories captured exactly why that post-war period had been so compelling for so many. ‘I became a champion because I was poor,’ Kübler had told L’Équipe in 2003. ‘I fought to eat and to make a better life. I won the Tour because I dreamt of it and because I knew that after I’d won, I’d never again be poor.’

  Bobet’s performance in July 1955, which due to his saddle sore was no less painful, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. After passing and dropping Kübler and Géminiani, he crossed the summit of the Ventoux almost five and a half minutes ahead of a struggling Gaul, and, despite a puncture as he closed on Avignon, he held on to win the stage. But the victory almost broke him and after the stage, he took to his bed telling his brother Jean that he couldn’t carry on.

  Rolland clung on to yellow until the Pyrenees, when he finally ceded the maillot jaune to Bobet, who sealed his third consecutive overall victory. But Bobet paid for it and after that third win, only finished one more Tour, that of 1958. The chronically infected saddle sore ultimately required surgery and there were rumours of a more serious illness. Precise details remained unclear, partly because Bobet was always discreet and perhaps also because such areas of the male anatomy remained something of a taboo subject in the mid-fifties. Those rumours of something more than a mere saddle sore, of cancer, haunted him after he retired, as did speculation over his amphetamine abuse.

  Bobet died in March 1983, of cancer, the day after his 58th birthday. Yet it was the sight of Malléjac, comatose and in a deranged state, collapsed halfway up Ventoux that baking afternoon, which resonated most – and which shone a light on the growing excesses of unsupervised doping. Malléjac, unsurprisingly, always insisted he had been ‘given something’ – doped effectively – that day, against his will. There was an inquiry, of sorts, and some sabre-rattling against ‘prescriptions’ by the Tour organisation. But it had been a wake-up call and one that had only intensified Pierre Dumas’s anxieties.

  In an interview on 11 July 1967 – two days before Simpson died in that year’s Tour – Malléjac claimed not to have appreciated that his life may have been in danger at the time. ‘It was only afterwards, when people explained what had happened,’ he said.

  The circumstances of his collapse were eerily similar to those of Simpson’s. ‘It was really hot, really hard,’ he said. ‘I’d had stomach problems for a couple of days and was suffering at the start. We started tackling the climb and, well, I had some problems.

  ‘I remember passing a spectator, who gave me some water, and then, a few metres later, falling. I don’t remember anything more than that, only that I was there for 15 or 20 minutes, unconscious.’

  In an interview that only alluded to doping, Malléjac said that he’d drunk from a bidon – a bottle – given to him by a soigneur, half an hour or so earlier. ‘It was still in my jersey pocket in the ambulance, but then when they wanted to analyse it, it was empty,’ he said, in an answer that suggested either skulduggery or a heightened state of denial. ‘That astonished me. It seemed strange.

  ‘It’s possible it was doped, maybe. I don’t want to accuse anyone but I’d like to know what was in the bidon,’ he said, before adding: ‘I put my trust in the people around me on the Tour de France . . .’

  If that remark smacked of naivety, his final comments were almost unbearably prescient. ‘The riders are going faster and faster,’ he said. ‘The faster the races, the bigger the gears and obviously the body becomes more fatigued. That’s when the body needs more support than before.

  ‘It’s very dangerous for a rider, continually intoxicated, continually needing doping. They risk becoming addicted.’

  Within 48 hours, Tom Simpson had died on the same mountain where Malléjac had collapsed, 12 years earlier.

  Charly Gaul always liked forests and mountains. When he retired from racing he became a hermit for a while, living in a woodman’s hut in the Ardennes forest, hunting most days and living without running water or electricity. ‘I spent my days planting vegetables,’ the Luxembourger recalled after he came out of the
forest and rejoined the world. ‘Roe deer would come and graze at the bottom of my garden. There was nothing but trees and water.’

  Gaul, who had worked in an abattoir before turning professional, was at home at altitude too. ‘It’s beautiful up high in the mountains and the views are fantastic,’ he said. ‘I feel happy up there.’

  The south side of the Ventoux, cloaked in deep, dark forest populated by deer and wild boar, leads ever upward until it emerges into the white light to offer panoramic views of the south of France, far below. Such a place might have been created with Gaul in mind.

  There are two maverick climbers who embody the existential ideal of the haunted loner, exorcising his demons in splendid isolation as he races towards the glowering peaks. One was Charly Gaul and the other, Marco Pantani. Both were angstridden and tormented, both were isolated and both feuded with the other stars of their era. Both men also won Tour de France stages on the Ventoux.

  Géminiani described Gaul as ‘a murderous climber, always the same sustained rhythm, a little machine with a slightly higher gear than the rest, turning his legs at a speed that would break your heart, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock . . .’

  Gaul’s win, as those Fabulous Fifties ended, came on 13 July 1958, in the Tour’s first ever mountain time trial. He came to that year’s race brimming with resentment, particularly towards Bobet, who he blamed for instigating an unsporting attack in the 1957 Giro d’Italia, as Gaul urinated at the roadside.

  On the eve of Bastille Day 1958, the 21.6 kilometres from Bédoin to the summit of the Ventoux were lined by 100,000 people. While Gaul had set his heart on a stage win, intrigue surrounded relations between the three French stars, Géminiani, Bobet and Jacques Anquetil. Long before the Tour had started, the infighting within the French national team was making headlines. Team boss Marcel Bidot found himself caught in the middle, as he realised that Géminiani’s loyalty to Bobet might derail Anquetil’s hopes of a second Tour success. Anquetil hammered the point home, arguing that he would never be able to rely on Géminiani, whose devotion to Bobet was obvious. Either Bobet or Géminiani had to be dropped from the team, the defending champion told Bidot.

  In the end, Bidot dropped Géminiani, which is why, when he was gifted a donkey as a mascot by a loyal fan, Gem made great play of calling the beast ‘Marcel’. But the falling-out didn’t prevent Anquetil and Gem later forging a new bond as rider and manager, once Géminiani had retired from racing.

  As he lined up in Bédoin, Gaul, even though he’d always disliked racing in intense heat, had every reason to be confident. Géminiani, ostracised by the national team he had served so well for so long, was riding for a French regional squad and was keen to undermine ‘les Judas’ – Bobet and Anquetil. Gaul, meanwhile, had already shocked Anquetil by winning the first time trial in Châteaulin, and the absence of rest days seemed to suit a rider whose stature was growing as the Tour went on.

  The riders left the Bédoin start line every two minutes, with Federico Bahamontes, the great Spanish climber, already on the mountain as Gaul set off. Bahamontes was quick enough, but he was no match for Gaul. As he rounded the bend at St Estève, keeping a wide line to avoid the rough road surface on the inside of the bend, Gaul, in stark contrast to Bahamontes and Anquetil, who had already been forced to stand on the pedals to maintain their speed, stayed in the saddle. He began tackling the Ventoux’s toughest section and quickly closed on Bobet, who had started immediately before him. Gaul rode through the airless forest, fixated on revenge, closing relentlessly on Bobet’s rear wheel until he drew level.

  He stared straight ahead as he passed Bobet and was soon well beyond him. In fact, he was past the rider who had started eight minutes ahead of him, Louis Bergaud, before he even reached Chalet Reynard. Alone with the summit in sight, Gaul rode on across the bleached scree, before he reached the final bend and launched himself over the finish line, 31 seconds faster than Bahamontes, but more than four minutes quicker than Anquetil. Gaul’s time for the climb, on a bike that weighed 13 kilos, of 1 hour, two minutes and nine seconds, stood as a record until Jonathan Vaughters, racing for US Postal in the 1999 Dauphiné Libéré on a cocktail of doping products, beat it 31 years later.

  Géminiani crossed the line five minutes behind Gaul, yet after all the years of working for others was compensated by the maillot jaune. But his joy was short-lived and he soon realised that Gaul was now overall favourite. Three days later, Gaul’s legendary attack to Aix-les-Bains broke him. Géminiani, who ended the stage in tears, lost more than 12 minutes to the Luxembourger, the eventual winner of that July’s race.

  Yet Gaul, like Koblet in 1951, never attained such heights again. There were, as with his peers, tales of amphetamine abuse, with one account of Gaul’s growing disenchantment with the demands of racing making its way into L’Équipe. One evening in St Gaudens during the 1962 Tour de France, Gaul spoke to his team-mate Marcel Enzer.

  ‘You know, Marcel, I’m scared now,’ Gaul said.

  ‘Scared of what?’ Enzer replied.

  ‘There are too many guys blundering around because they’re on stimulants,’ Gaul said. ‘They can’t react properly.’

  Gaul was thinking of Roger Rivière, who had plunged into a ravine on the Col de Perjuret in 1960, his reactions blurred by an over-reliance on doping. Rivière’s injuries confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  The warning signs were everywhere. Gaul knew it and so did Pierre Dumas, scarred by his frantic quarter of an hour crouching over the stricken Malléjac on the Ventoux in 1955. But nobody, it seemed, was willing to act on them. And the Ventoux, more exhausting and asphyxiating than perhaps any other climb, revealed the truth with frightening regularity.

  III

  You never forget your first Tour de France. I went through it in mine, I can tell you. I finished the 1960 Tour a bloody wreck, two stone lighter than when I started, my face cut and sore, and totally exhausted.

  It had all started so well. I got into a breakaway on the first day, and was the best-placed British rider. I even became leader ‘on the road’ at one point, but didn’t hang on to that lead to the finish of the stage. I was still second overall, though.

  But it was a real eye-opener. It was a hell of a fast race, very intense, and for some of the other British lads it was almost too much. It wasn’t their fault but the racing in Britain hadn’t hardened them up for a race as quick as the Tour. I didn’t feel I was carrying them, or anything like that, but I knew I’d never get the support that I needed if they stuck to national teams. And when we got to the mountains, the cracks really started to show.

  I’d been looking forward to the Pyrenees. I thought maybe I could move up the general classification a bit, climb into a better position. I did just that on the first mountain stage, even though I took a tumble coming down the Aubisque, but I don’t think I’ll ever know why things went so wrong after that.

  The second mountain stage included the climb up the Peyresourde. I’d attacked, with Gastone nencini and Roger Rivière, but suddenly my head was swimming and I felt as though I would burst. The climb seemed to go on for ever. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was being asphyxiated. I slowed to a crawl to save myself and had to watch as the whole bunch rode past me and on up to the top of the pass. It was bloody humiliating. I thought I might recover going back down the other side, get down fast, catch up, but I didn’t.

  When I got to the hotel, I couldn’t stomach any food and went straight to bed. I slept right through, but that still didn’t fix it. The next day, I had to get through the stage to Toulouse. I managed it all right, but after Harry reynolds crashed out, we were down to four riders. We were all pretty down in the mouth that night.

  After that every day was agony. Brian Robinson tried to chivvy me along, but I’d gone into my own little world. Fighting for survival I was, just counting the kilometres until we got to Paris. But it would have taken wild horses to drag me off the bike. I was determined to make it because I knew
Helen was coming. And I knew that if I got to Paris, I’d still earn well at the crits – the exhibition races – after the Tour. I had a few lined up. It meant a lot of driving, mind, and I knew I’d be tired, but I’d pick up a few bob, so it was well worth it.

  By the time I got to the Parc des Princes, I never wanted to ride the Tour again. Helen’s face was a picture when she saw me, all skinny, dark-eyed, banged-up and blistered. We didn’t have long together, though. I had my round of exhibition races – the criteriums – and she had to get back to her job in Germany.

  In the week after the Tour, I rode in Évreux, milan, Turin, Sallanches and Lyon, before a few rides in Belgium. It certainly racked up a few kilometres, but it was worth a fair bit of cash too. After that it was down south, to Nice. I borrowed a car and floored it to get there in time, driving the thousand miles on my own in 24 hours.

  But I was done in. I had one last crit to race in, in central France. I was so tired that I crashed and came down with a bit of a bang. In some ways, that was a blessing because I packed it in, exhausted.

  Now, at least, I could rest.

  PART 2

  ‘I felt shocked and then saddened. Life does this to you sometimes: leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit.’

  – WILLIAM BOYD, Any Human Heart

  Summer

  Early on an August morning, I slide wearily out of bed, walk across a cold, uneven tiled floor and make my way downstairs. The Provençal sun is already filtering through the unopened shutters, dust rising in the shafts of sunlight in the lounge. At this time of the year, the sun appears around six in the morning, rising first over the distant Alps and then the Montagne de Lure and the Plateau de Sault, where the morning air carries the scent of lavender, before it climbs above the eastern flanks of the Ventoux.

  I unlock the doors to the terrace, step into the sunlight and open the parasol. The outside wall is already warm to the touch. A startled lizard scampers down the wall into a crevice. It is too hot to sit anywhere but in the shade.