French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  During most of his time on the race, either on a motorbike or in the doctor’s car, doping, although generally frowned upon, was not banned. During those years, Dumas claimed to have witnessed it all. Pill-popping, hysteria, riders openly injecting mid-race, riders blaming illness on bad fish, and an almost voodoo-esque belief in the soigneurs and their magic suitcases.

  After the scare on the Ventoux with Malléjac, Dumas became increasingly aware of just how pervasive amphetamine abuse had become. ‘The cyclists took everything they were offered. It didn’t matter what they took, as long as they believed in it,’ he said. ‘If someone won a stage using a certain product, they all wanted it.

  ‘They had no idea what they were doing. I was horrified. It all scared me shitless.’

  VI

  I love Corsica. The beaches are beautiful, it’s always sunny and the kids love it. I’ve bought some land and I’m planning on building there – it’s a big commitment but I see it as a long-term investment.

  I’ve always fancied a place in the sun. Somewhere calm, warm, by the sea, where the kids can swim and Helen can relax and enjoy a sunbathe in the afternoons. It’s not much to ask for, really, is it? A nice house and a nice car. Not after all those years making sacrifices, grafting on the bike.

  It will all cost money. I’m not stupid – I know I have to get the most out of my racing career. And to do that, I need to show them all what I can do – then they’ll realise what I’m worth.

  Who knows how long I’ll be a professional anyway? I’m not getting any younger and I need to make my money now, while I’m racing. I know that I have to do better in the Tour. It’s all very well winning smaller races, but I’ve had my fill of being a nearly man. I’ve had too many disappointments. If I didn’t have to ride it, I wouldn’t, but it’s the Tour that makes you a star.

  The Tour is the race that earns the big money. The Tour is the race that ensures you’re never forgotten, even when your racing days are over. The Tour is the race that makes a cyclist immortal. So I’ve got to prove I can do it in the Tour. I’ve got no more excuses. I can’t keep saying, ‘next year I’ll be better.’ I’d only be kidding myself.

  I mean, I can see what’s going on at home, with the Beatles, Carnaby Street and miniskirts and all that. There’s money to be made if you’re famous. I don’t just want to be famous in France or Belgium. I want to be famous at home as well. Like in ’62, when they made a fuss after I’d got the yellow jersey in the Tour. There was a big shindig at the Albert Hall that winter, dancing girls from the Moulin Rouge, plenty of free drink and me up on stage, riding the rollers. It nearly brought the house down! Now, that was fun.

  If you want to be competitive, you have to play the game. We’re all professionals – it may look like it’s fun sometimes, riding along on a sunny day, having a chat and a laugh, but it’s our job too. We’re paid to get results. That’s how they value you.

  So I have a scientific way of doing things. I look after my kit and keep it clean, because if you don’t then you can easily pick something up, like a saddle sore from dirty shorts. I like a proper massage each night. Some of the lads just have 20 minutes or half an hour, but that’s not enough for me. I need a lot more work on my legs than that. I’m sure it makes a big difference.

  Every now and then you need a pick-me-up, a tonic or some medicine. You can’t last the pace without tonics. There’s a lot of twaddle talked about druggies in cycling too, but I don’t worry about that.

  Pills, when you need them, are necessary. A couple of Mickey Finns every now and then aren’t going to hurt. And tell me where you draw the line between dope and tonics. Even the experts can’t agree on that one!

  But I’ve never taken dope. I take medical aid. There is a big difference between tonics and dope. Besides, there’s not much drug-taking in cycling, not as far as I can see – certainly not as much as the TV and newspapers make out.

  By July 1967, Tom Simpson was almost as desperate to hang on to what he’d got as Eddy Merckx was to break through. Simpson wanted to consolidate his value, to be considered a potential Tour de France winner and to ensure that he maintained the level of profile that he had already achieved. Winning the ‘Course au Soleil’ – the ‘Race to the Sun’ – in March and holding off Merckx as he did so, had shored up his standing among the best teams.

  But when it came to the Tour, he knew, too, that time was running out, that his weakness in the heat and in the biggest climbs held him back. The decision to run the 1967 Tour de France on national lines, rather than as trade teams, also weakened his hand. Tour director Jacques Goddet’s move separated Simpson from both of his Peugeot team-mates, Roger Pingeon and Merckx. The Frenchman became a rival, while Merckx, then just 22, watched the Tour from his home, after making his debut in that year’s Giro d’Italia.

  At a stroke Simpson’s ambitions of a strong result in the Tour were dealt a devastating blow. He knew that a British national team had no hopes of rivalling the strength in depth of the French, Spanish, Belgian or Italian teams. Great Britain’s best cyclists, willing though they were, were not equipped to deal with the rigours of the Tour.

  And then there was the Ventoux, looming large on the horizon, expected to be a pivotal moment in the 1967 Tour and the ultimate immovable obstacle for a rider who suffered in the heat and at high altitude. As spring on the Côte d’Azur turned to summer, Simpson and the Ventoux, the mountain that had already driven a series of riders to a state of collapse, were on a collision course.

  Long after Simpson’s death, Merckx made it clear that he’d never seen the British rider as a Tour winner. ‘He probably made a stupid mistake on the day,’ Merckx said of his team-mate’s death in Rik Vanwalleghem’s biography. ‘He continued to kid himself he could win the Tour. His ambition knew no bounds and he ended up paying the price for it.’

  Golden Years

  If the 1986 and 1989 Tours de France were notable for their intense rivalries – Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond in 1986 and LeMond and Laurent Fignon in 1989 – the 1987 Tour was characterised by cliff-hanging uncertainty, and by the importance of time-trialling. There were 209 kilometres of time-trialling in that year’s race, run over 25 stages and with five summit finishes, including the mountain time trial to the summit of the Ventoux. It was a Tour for rouleurs who could hold their own on the major climbs.

  Jean-François Bernard was such a rider. He won two time trials that July, including that gut-wrenching ride on Ventoux. But ‘Jeff’ is remembered as a French nearly man and the first in a long line of home hopefuls – including Virenque – who flattered to deceive.

  The previous year’s winner, LeMond, was absent in July 1987 because he was recovering from a hunting accident, while his and Bernard’s mentor, Bernard Hinault, had retired. That turn of events had opened a path for third-year pro, Bernard. Riding for the Toshiba team, Jeff had been prematurely anointed as Hinault’s successor, both by the outgoing French superstar and by the extraordinary Bernard Tapie, the entrepreneur whose attitude to rider wages smashed cycling’s old-fashioned salary structure.

  Bernard had announced his talent by winning one of the longest stages of the 1986 Tour, a 246-kilometre trawl across the Gard, Vaucluse and Drôme, circumnavigating the Ventoux en route from Nîmes to Gap, the ‘gateway to the Alps’. He won that near eight-hour stage by three minutes after breaking clear on his own. His success was a brief distraction from the internal battle being waged within the La Vie Claire team, between its two leaders, LeMond and Hinault, as documented in Richard Moore’s book, Slaying the Badger.

  Before then, he’d been detailed to ride for his leaders, whatever the circumstances. The trouble was that nobody in the team could agree which leader to ride for. At least, Bernard says, that Tour was never boring. ‘The night of the time trial in Nantes, LeMond ate a Mexican meal with his wife, instead of staying in the hotel with the team,’ he recalled. ‘The next morning he had dreadful diarrhoea. The doctor gave him something to stop it, but it didn’
t work, he couldn’t keep anything in.

  ‘There was no question of him abandoning, because he was supposed to be there to win. So for the whole of that stage, I was detailed to stay with him.’

  LeMond’s glass stomach was well known in the peloton. He was also stricken with the same malaise during the 1989 Giro d’Italia. ‘It was running down his legs and he had to stop four times to go, and every time we had to chase back to catch the peloton.’

  LeMond, already on edge due to his broken relationship with Hinault, somehow made it to the finish, but it didn’t end there. ‘It stank,’ Bernard said. ‘Luckily, nobody shared a room with him. He was frightened of sabotage so he kept his bike in his room.

  ‘That’s how bad things were. Hinault died laughing at the whole thing, but kept it quiet.’

  Tapie, meanwhile, was luxuriating in the soap opera and relishing the publicity.

  Described as a ‘French Donald Trump’, although his lustrous head of dark hair had no need of hairspray or a comb-over, the extraordinary Tapie was part Alain Delon, part Terry Venables – an olive-skinned, chameleon fixer, once a singer, once a soccer magnate, once a convict, once an actor, once a clothing manufacturer, once a politician. Tapie didn’t have much time for cycling’s old-school niceties. He wanted to make money, grab airtime and, most of all, win.

  His blind ambition was encapsulated by LeMond as he described the time, after a Tour stage in 1984, that he was summoned to the Frenchman’s hotel. ‘I saw this beautiful girl, like a Bond girl, arrive on a motorbike at our hotel in Alpe d’Huez,’ LeMond remembered. ‘She said: “Greg LeMond? Come with me – Monsieur Tapie wants to meet you.” It was like something out of a spy film.

  ‘She took me to the La Vie Claire hotel on back roads, so nobody would see us. Tapie was waiting for me with Hinault. He showed me a prototype Look pedal and said: “You’re going to earn more than you can dream of . . .” ’

  LeMond signed with Tapie’s La Vie Claire team soon afterwards.

  Tapie didn’t renege on the outlandish promises he made to his riders. When Jeff Bernard took his solo stage win in Gap – a mere sideshow to the drama unfolding between his team leaders, LeMond and Hinault – the entrepreneur offered to buy him a gift. ‘As a laugh, I said, “I’ll have a Porsche!” He moaned a bit but then he said, “Ah, OK.” In November, the Porsche I’d asked for turned up . . .

  ‘Tapie made cycling more media-friendly,’ Bernard said. ‘At the 1986 team presentation, we had spotlights, dancing girls . . . Usually it was just a bunch of suits and Daniel Mangeas [French cycling’s answer to Phil Liggett] reading out your results.’

  In a sport dip-dyed in old-school chauvinism, Tapie was also an unlikely feminist. Told by his team directeur sportif Maurice ‘Momo’ Le Guilloux that any attempt to put Madame Tapie in the team car would be blocked by the Tour’s organisers, Tapie responded: ‘Oh yeah? We’ll see about that . . . I promise you that if she isn’t in the car, we’re quitting the race and going to Club Med.’ Dominique Tapie spent the day alongside Le Guilloux, untroubled, in the passenger seat.

  Tapie was an innovator. He was a globalist, happy to sign up little-known Americans and Canadians and to borrow influences from contemporary culture. Look-style pedals soon became standard and the La Vie Claire jersey, based on the systems art of Piet Mondrian, was distinctive, funky and remains, even now, much loved. But by the 1987 Tour, there had been a change of scene, and not just because Hinault had retired and Toshiba had moved in as title sponsor.

  Bernard’s first stage win in his debut Tour, as a 24-year-old, deluded many into thinking that a successor to Hinault had already been found. The French media bought into the notion of seamless continuity, of Hinault passing the torch to another Frenchman. That left others, equally ambitious, on the sidelines. One was La Vie Claire’s brilliant young American climber, Andy Hampsten, who watched the Bernard bandwagon gather momentum. ‘I thought, “I’m not sticking around for the Jean-François Bernard show,” ’ Hampsten said later. He went on to win the 1988 Giro d’Italia, memorably leaving his rivals behind in a freezing blizzard on the climb of the Gavia.

  Others saw Bernard as cannon fodder, doomed to fail, a sheep in wolf’s clothing, David Moyes after Alex Ferguson. The mercurial Tapie, missing the drama and tension of the Hinault–LeMond years, was readying to move on too. ‘He didn’t want to hang around and didn’t understand why we weren’t winning any more,’ said Yves Hézard, sports director at Toshiba, of Tapie’s limited faith in Bernard. ‘He never came to a race with me after that.’

  Poor Jeff. It could have been so different for him. If he had been more discreet and a little less cocky, if he’d kept his wits about him on the road to Villard-de-Lans, he could have been a Tour de France champion, famed for a dazzling win on the Ventoux; he could have ushered in a new generation of young French talent. Instead, the line of French Tour winners ended in 1985. There hasn’t been one since, just a long line of pretenders and nearly men.

  So Jeff is remembered for what might have been, for one tantalising glimpse of an imagined future, high on the Giant, face creased in pain, sweatband across his forehead, drool spooling from his chin, in July 1987.

  The Accidental Grand Tourist

  OJ Borg, never one to sit still, wants more, more of the Ventoux. In fact, OJ can’t get enough of the bloody thing. We’ve ridden up and down the climb numerous times, shot a sunrise and a sunset, and we’ve met the deputy mayor. My legs feel like pipe cleaners after climbing repeatedly through the bend at St Estève.

  But there must be more, surely? So we sit in Bédoin, pondering what other content we still need for the short film he is making for the BBC on the myths and legends of Mont Ventoux. ‘I’ll try Caritoux again,’ I say. So I call Éric Caritoux, local hero and the most famous cyclist in the Vaucluse, and this time he picks up.

  ‘Why don’t you come over now?’ he says in his balletic Provençal twang, in which ‘demain matin’ becomes ‘domanga matanga’.

  ‘Great, and thanks Éric,’ I say. ‘Where exactly . . .?’

  He gives me precise directions. ‘You know where the road from Flassan drops down towards Villes-sur-Auzon and there are some vines running uphill on your right with a small chemin leading to a borie?’ he says, as if this is as well known a spot as the Place de la Concorde.

  ‘Ah! Oui . . . yeah – I know . . .’ I say a little uncertainly.

  ‘Ça marche?’ says Éric. ‘C’est OK . . .?’

  It turns out, in fact, to be perfect. After we head south across the vineyards and olive groves running below the dreaded virage at St Estève and quickly arrive in Flassan, we find Éric among the vines, and film him chatting as the sun goes down on the mountain – his mountain.

  Caritoux, the surprise winner of the 1984 Vuelta a España, is as much a part of village life in Flassan as the flurries of snow in early January, the tar-melting heat of August, or the wafting woodsmoke of November. Tucked into the southerly slopes of the Ventoux, with expansive views across the Monts de Vaucluse and on towards the Rhône valley and the distant Luberon, Flassan defines the ubiquitous ‘sleepy French village’ of tourist guides. The only café and restaurant, Chez Camille, is now closed, after chef Camille Stabholz ended a short tenure and moved across the Ventoux foothills to L’Entre-Pôtes in Le Barroux.

  Before that the restaurant had been run by the Reynard family for 55 years and had become a local legend, famed for extremely hearty cuisine de terroir, such as sanglier stew, as well as a groaning cheese board of fetid fromage, wheeled tableside, by the rotund and red-faced maitre d’. The Reynard wine list relied almost exclusively on local cooperative-produced reds, with Château Pesquié as a top-end choice. They had no time for newer, less traditional, producers such as Château Unang or Les Amidyves, considered far too arriviste to be endorsed.

  Since the restaurant and bar closed, Flassan has become, if it’s possible, a lot quieter. But there are a few holiday homes, a primary school and, on the outskirts, a new de
velopment, which should breathe some life into the village.

  As well as being home to Caritoux, the nearly forgotten French Grand Tour winner, Flassan is notable for having played a pivotal role in the development of New Labour. In a holiday home, in the summer of 1994, Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair thrashed out their grand plan for the media rebrand of the Labour Party. It was in Flassan that Campbell, against the advice of Neil Kinnock, finally succumbed to Blair’s winning charm and agreed to become his press secretary.

  The main road, the D217, snakes through the village, past the closed-up restaurant, and then begins a long, rough-surfaced climb, of long ramps and broad hairpins, winding up through the maquis and then deep into more mature woods, before joining the road over the Col Notre Dame des Abeilles, and eventually dropping down to Sault. It was here, on this cracked old road, on the flanks of the Giant, that Caritoux first learned to climb. He knows the back roads around the Ventoux, and on through the Vaucluse, almost as well as the lines on his face.

  Éric sits among the vines, talking Ventoux, childhood memories of cycling through the Vaucluse, the never-resolved spats with Laurent Fignon, and his lifelong love for this bucolic landscape, its cherry orchards, vineyards and olive groves sheltering in the lee of the mountain. After a few minutes, his brother-in-law Bruno arrives, with a bottle of Côtes du Ventoux, cuvée Caritoux. They open the bottle and Éric turns the wine gently in the bowl of his glass, dipping his hook nose towards it and breathing deeply.

  Behind him, the white rocks at the summit slowly turn auburn in the setting sun.

  Éric Caritoux’s a middle-aged man now, but you can still sense the wiry build of the professional racer who won the Tour of Spain, and many other races, beneath the jeans and the fleece jacket. His résumé, of 30 race wins during a long career, is impressive. It includes the Vuelta in 1984, and twice the championship of France, in ’88 and ’89. In fact, the first race he ever won was on the Ventoux, when, famously, he beat Fignon.