The Tour de France

by Paul Hansford

  When Anquetil won in ’64, an unprecedented fifth Tour won in emphatic fashion, his lap of honour in the Parc des Princes was met with respectful applause; Poulidor’s was met with raucous cheering and acclamation. Anquetil’s team manager Raphael Géminiani said, ‘He never understood how you could lose and be better liked for it.’

  Reports differ as to how heated the rivalry actually was between the Frenchmen. Some say they really disliked each other, while others believe rancour was manufactured by the press and agents looking to sell papers and increase fees for the lucrative criterium races. Anquetil’s competitive spirit softened enough for the two to have a semblance of a relationship in later life, but not enough that he could resist getting one last dig in. Diagnosed with cancer and realising he was seeing Poulidor for the last time, Anquetil apologised for putting his great adversary in second place yet again on the race to the finish line in the sky.

  Bernard Hinault versus Greg LeMond

  The Hinault–LeMond rivalry is the most storied in Tour history, and rightfully so. It had it all: intrigue, betrayal, mistrust, dejection and triumph. Its two main protagonists were tailor-made for such a drama: the undisputed leader of the peloton, Hinault was a multiple Tour winner whose fierce riding style was matched by his demeanour; LeMond was the rising young apprentice who had talent by the bucketload but displayed a fragile streak at times. Together they were teammates who played out a compelling melodrama over two of the most exciting years the Tour has ever seen.

  It began in 1985 when LeMond signed with Hinault’s La Vie Claire team. Charismatic owner Bernard Tapie was looking to create a dream team of riders to help in Hinault’s pursuit of a fifth Tour win; some observers cynically noted the best way for that to happen was to have LeMond, one of Hinault’s chief rivals, on the same team.

  On a decisive climb up the Aubisque in the Pyrenees, LeMond claimed team director Paul Koechli wasn’t entirely truthful about how far Hinault was behind him. The American was told the gap was just forty seconds, when in reality it was more than a minute. Koechli’s orders not to attack cost LeMond time he could never recoup, and he was fuming after the race: ‘Koechli made me lose the Tour on the day I could have won it!’ An uneasy truce was brokered between the two riders: LeMond would ride for Hinault for the rest of the Tour and Hinault would pay him back in kind the following year.

  The 1986 Tour de France is without doubt the best in living memory (although it has a rival in 1964 if you’re getting on a bit, or French). Hinault and LeMond’s battle that year was played out as much in the mind as it was on the bike. The unfeeling way in which the Frenchman toyed with the American’s head — claiming he was putting up such strong competition because LeMond ‘must be worthy of the yellow jersey’ — must have been hell for LeMond, but it was sporting theatre at its finest for the racing fan. Hinault’s promise to help LeMond proved barely worth the paper it wasn’t written on, and he attacked early to gain a five-minute lead over his teammate. LeMond’s head was all over the place, confused as to why the idol who’d promised to help him realise a dream had turned on him. Hinault said his attacks were designed to cook LeMond’s rivals, but to all those watching the events unfold, it looked as if the Frenchman’s competitive instincts were getting the better of him.

  If Hinault was in fact racing for his sixth title, it was those competitive instincts that ultimately proved his undoing. On the stage to Superbagnères ‘Le Blaireau’ again went hard and, as he powered up the Col d’Aspin, he’d ridden to a seemingly unassailable nine-minute lead. But on the final Peyresourde climb, the Frenchman blew up; he paid the price for his earlier efforts and was caught by a pursuing group. Pulled up the ascent by teammate Andy Hampsten, LeMond took the stage and ended just forty seconds behind Hinault on the GC.

  The American then took over yellow in the Alps and never let go. There looked to be an almighty battle on the cards as the two arrived at L’Alpe d’Huez but they ultimately crossed the line together, Hinault holding up LeMond’s arm to signal the crowning of a new champion, while also ensuring his wheel crossed the finish line first. LeMond had a final wobble in the time trial when he crashed, but he ended up winning the race by more than three minutes from Hinault, becoming the first native English speaker to win the Tour.

  Hinault’s ‘selfless sacrifice’ of helping LeMond win the Tour at the expense of a record sixth win made him even more popular with the French public, and he milked his contribution to the American’s triumph:

  Thanks to me, Greg had become a very good rider. In the future, he’ll benefit greatly from the psychological warfare I’ve waged against him … I’ve taught him a lot. He’ll be able to defend himself on every terrain, and that, too, he owes to me.

  In turn, LeMond claimed he was ‘burned’ by the whole experience of 1986 and looked at his mentor Hinault’s actions from a slightly different perspective: ‘I can’t even face him,’ he said after one of the stages:

  We aren’t talking. I have no respect for him anymore … He hasn’t helped me one iota. I know I will never be friends with him after this race. Not after the way he treated me.

  Lance Armstrong versus the press

  During Lance Armstrong’s unprecedented period of dominance in the Tour, few people were questioning how the American was doing it. The Sunday Times’ David Walsh was working resolutely to expose the truth of the Texan’s doping, as were Pierre Ballester and Paul Kimmage, but they were in the minority. They had an ally, however, in the French press. After Armstrong’s first Tour win in 1999, Le Monde broke a story about Armstrong returning a positive drug test where traces of a banned corticosteroid were found. The Texan avoided a ban by producing a prescription for its use in treating saddle sores, despite it not being mentioned in any doctor’s forms that were lodged on the day he was pinged. Armstrong was asked about the test by a Le Monde journalist in a press conference, to which he famously replied: ‘Mr Le Monde, are you calling me a liar or a doper?’ (How the journo must have resisted the urge to say, ‘Both.’)

  Whispers and rumours about Armstrong and his US Postal Service team persisted without hard evidence but, in 2005, L’Equipe published a story titled ‘The Armstrong Lie’, claiming Armstrong had taken the blood-boosting drug EPO to help win the 1999 Tour. French scientists, who were perfecting EPO tests using the frozen ‘B’ samples from riders who rode in the 1999 Tour as a case study (doing so because they knew EPO use was rife during that period), found twelve positive samples from the batch. Journalist Damien Ressiot heard about the positive tests and set about finding out who the dozen riders were, and one of them turned out to be Armstrong. Again the ‘Teflon Texan’ avoided any harder scrutiny; he dismissed the report as a ‘witch hunt’ and continued riding.

  Ultimately Armstrong was taken down by testimony from other riders and ex-employees, as well as the tireless investigations by the Food & Drug Administration’s Jeff Novitzky and USADA’s Travis Tygart. But if not for the few members of the press who continued to fight the good fight in the face of enormous pressure, ‘the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program the sport has ever seen’ may never have come to light in the first place.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The weird and wonderful Tour

  As with any epic saga, the greatest Tour de France tales include romance, humour, heartbreak, intrigue, tragedy, courage and no small amount of farce. Stories of riders fixing their bikes in candlelit workshops, copping a beating from riders and spectators while cycling home, winning stages while wearing ladies’ underwear or being kidnapped on the back of a donkey may appear scarcely believable*, but then so is the thought that men would be able to cycle 3500 km into the mountains of France and beyond. (*Only one of these is not true.)

  The race has been no stranger to a little bit of artificial enhancement over the years, but in the case of the weird and wonderful of the Tour de France, the truth is m
uch more captivating than anything you could make up.

  Le charlatan, part un

  France has had its fair share of charlatans, but it seems the Tour de France breeds a special type. There have been dopers, cheats, bike throwers and dummy spitters over the years, but it takes a special kind of imposter to really stand out from the crowd.

  Baron Henri Pépin de Gontaud was not even a proper baron but, in the manner of a wealthy man who thinks he can buy anything he pleases, he both gave himself the honorific and decided to enter the Tour de France in 1907 as an isolé, a racer who pays their own entry fee. Gontaud had a bit of fitness but not enough to keep up with the pros, so he went about renting a couple of racers to pace him along the course: Jean Dargassies and Henri Gauban. The sceptical veterans were convinced by the promise of the finest accommodation and more money than they normally would’ve earned in the race, and the three merry men set off from Paris, taking their time and lapping up the crowd’s attention as they went. They picked up another rider to add to their posse along the way — a man who had collapsed in a ditch and was promptly taken to an inn to reconstitute — but the baron soon began to test the patience of organisers, who felt he was making a mockery of the race. In the end, Gontaud more than met his match when the mountains began. When he arrived at the bottom of the Col de Port on stage 5 and saw how steep it was, he thanked his riding companions and sent them on their way with a big bag of cash. True to his word, it was far in excess of the prize money the winner of the entire Tour would take home.

  Keeping it wheel

  The 1910 race was keenly contested between Octave Lapize and François Faber, although Gustave Garrigou might have also had a say in the final standings if he hadn’t fallen victim to subterfuge from one of his fellow riders. The night before the Nimes to Perpignan stage Garrigou took his bike up to his room to make some last-minute adjustments, but forgot to lock the door. The stage started at 3 am the next morning and, as he rode through a nondescript village in the darkness, his wheel fell apart: ‘Someone had done a good job of unscrewing the hub and I hadn’t noticed a thing.’ Beginning the stage only seconds behind Faber, he lost ninety minutes looking for a mechanic and effectively lost any chance of winning the Tour.

  Poison in the Pyrenees

  The tables were turned for Garrigou the following year as he became the beneficiary of sabotage and nearly paid the price as the falsely accused perpetrator of the foul deed. Frenchman Paul Duboc rode a brilliant Tour in 1911 and was only a few points behind compatriot Garrigou as the race hit the high stuff on the way to Bayonne. On the Col d’Aubisque, Duboc fell in front of a car and began convulsing on the road, mess coming out of both ends. He finally got back on his bike after receiving help from his sporting director, but he was in obvious distress and finished more than three hours behind the stage winner. Word spread that Duboc had been poisoned and, as his nearest rival, Garrigou was seen as the culprit (he wasn’t). Crowds jeered at and threatened him and, as the race was due to enter Duboc’s hometown of Rouen, organisers feared the worst. Notices were posted around town in Duboc’s name saying, ‘Citizens of Rouen. I would be leading the race if I hadn’t been poisoned. You know what you have to do when the race crosses the city.’

  Duboc believed in Garrigou’s innocence and offered to enter the town first to calm things down, but in the end an ingenious disguise of fake moustache, different kit and new goggles was agreed upon. Amazingly it worked a treat, with the angry rabble turning on each other after realising they had been duped. Garrigou won the Tour, with Duboc finishing second, only eighteen points behind.

  ‘Moooove out the way’

  Lucien Petit-Breton may be in the record books for winning the Tour in 1908, but he is also known for having to abandon in the strangest of circumstances. In 1911 he was forced to quit after barrelling into a drunken sailor (is there any other kind?) who was endeavouring to cross the road in Boulogne. If his eyesight and speed were to blame for not being able to pick out a human on the course, there was little excuse for not seeing a bloody massive cow in his path the following year, which also caused him to crash out.

  Napoleon Dynamite

  Luckily for Petit-Breton, another rider’s encounter with French farm animals topped his bovine brush. In the 1920 Tour Napoleon Paoli crashed into a wayward donkey and, when gravity had done its job, the Italian found himself lying on the back of the animal. Quite literally feeling an ass, Paoli and his disquieted donkey galloped off in the opposite direction and stopped only when the animal collapsed with exhaustion; Napoleon had to run more than a kilometre to get back to his bike. To top it off, he was then hit on the head by a rock that fell down a cliff and, in a dazed and confused state, he fell asleep in a hut at the top of the Col de Tourmalet. And so ended the most bizarre of three Tours he rode, none of which he finished.

  Pillage in the village

  In the early days, bar and store owners were either filled with joy or dread as the Tour passed through their village. Riding over far longer distances without the support of cars to give them food and water for energy, it became a tradition for riders to raid local public houses and shops in a mad, supermarket sweep–style frenzy. Some businessmen preferred to lock their doors for the few minutes it took for the hungry rabble to pass on their bikes, while others welcomed the riders with open arms, encouraging them to ransack their establishment, the shopkeepers sending the bills to the Tour the following day. The Tour proved to be a nice little earner for more than just the riders, it seemed.

  It was all yellow

  The story of how the yellow jersey became the most famous sporting garment in the world is not as clear as the official history would have you believe. The party line is that, as the newspaper L’Auto was published on yellow paper, the jersey followed suit when introduced midway through the 1919 Tour, but there are some stories that dispute this. One is that after popping into a local bike shop and making a request for more than a dozen shirts in several sizes, the owner told Henri Desgrange he could only provide them in yellow, as that was all he had in stock. Another is that Desgrange’s supplier in Paris could fulfil the large order — but just in yellow, as it was the least popular colour.

  There also seems to be a debate about who was the first to wear yellow, too. Eugène Christophe is credited with being the first rider to wear it in 1919 — having to endure several mocking cries of ‘Canary!’ from spectators that day — but Belgian rider Philippe Thys claims he was asked by Desgrange to wear a leader’s jersey in a pre–First World War race. No-one seems too bothered to clear up the mystery of the shirt, as it all adds to the mystique of this iconic piece of kit.

  Scieur the Unlucky

  The Tour is full of accounts of bad luck but few have been as cursed as Léon Scieur, who must have walked under a ladder, broken a mirror and put his shoes on the table in front of a black cat before he began his career. He first learnt Lady Luck was not on his side in 1919, when a case of cold digits meant he had problems fixing a punctured tyre. The time it took to sew it up ended up being the time he lost the Tour by.

  Feeling he’d had his fill of bad luck, Scieur continued racing — but he was struck by misfortune again two years later. In the 1921 stage from Metz to Dunkirk he broke several spokes on his rear wheel and, finding it unrepairable, had to carry it on his back the remaining 300 km to prove to officials it was broken. The Frenchman was said to have the imprint of the chain ring on his back for several years after — kind of like the way a pillow makes a mark on your cheek when you fall asleep on it, except much more painful.

  Le charlatan, part deux

  The organisers probably felt Henri Pépin de Gontaud was the last of the weekend warriors out to defile the Tour’s good name, so when a policeman from the south coast of France decided to ride the race in his summer holiday in 1924, there seemed little to worry about. Other than the fact Jules Banino was fifty-one years old and had absolutely no racing pedigree.

  Banino was known in French sporting circles
as a man who would enter any competitive event he could, just to say he took part (and he wasn’t picky, once nearly drowning after accepting a bet to be chucked in the sea in a sack like the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo). As you might imagine, the past-it pedaller — to this day the Tour’s oldest rider — struggled to keep up and had to pull out after being blinded by dust that was kicked up on the road. But Banino’s real adventure started on the ride home, when he set off on the same road as the race. Innocently riding ahead of the peloton, he caused a panic when the racers thought a rival had broken off the front, and the pack pedalled hard to make up the gap. When they finally caught up, their enquiries as to who this mystery rider was were met with, ‘I’m an amateur, just riding home at my own pace.’ Not particularly happy about having used a lot of energy catching up a non-competing old codger, the pack set about him with their fists and he was kicked into a ditch. To add insult to injury, supporters of one of the racers who gave him the beating also set about Banino with some large sticks just to make sure, and it took him several hours to recover enough to finish his journey.

  Riding pink to win yellow

  The 1920s were a time Henri Desgrange tried to destroy the riders with punishing courses and pernickety rules, but one man laughed in the face of the Tour chief’s measures. Nicolas Frantz was race leader from the first stage in 1927 and, to show he was the strongest rider in the field, he even rode one stage on a woman’s bike. Admittedly it wasn’t by choice — his bike had broken with 100 km still to race and he borrowed one from a spectator — but his crossing the finish line on a pink bike with a basket full of baguettes (unconfirmed) must have seriously aggrieved Desgrange’s sense of manhood.