CHAPTER THREE

A Question of Nationality

WHEN BRIAN ROBINSON won his second Tour de France stage in 1959, that day’s racing was sponsored by a wine company, Cepno. His team won the stage’s Martini International Challenge. His food (not just his coffee) was provided by Nescafé. During the race he drank from a bottle supplied by the Vittelloise water company, and after the race he glugged down Perrier.

He was timed into the finish by Lio watches, and when he had his day of suffering in the Massif Central he was tended by Dr Dumas from the Aspro medical car. If he were staying in the centre of the stage town, he might be kept awake by the singers and accordionists of La Parade du Tour, sponsored by Butagaz. The team car driven by his manager was supplied and modified by Peugeot.

There has never been much space for the amateur spirit on the Tour. The event was devised as a publicity stunt to sell newspapers and has been a largely happy marriage between commerce and sport for the century or so since it was founded. By the 1950s, sponsors’ and suppliers’ branding was almost ubiquitous on the Tour, backed up by advertising in the newspaper L’Equipe, which organised the race.

There was one contentious area where commercial and sporting interests could not be reconciled: who ran the teams. By the late 1950s, the Tour was one of a few races where professional cyclists were grouped into national and regional selections. The rest of the season, the cyclists rode in professional squads with sponsors which could be anything from a cycle manufacturer to a coffee-maker.

The Tour organisers had imposed the national team system in 1930. Until then, the riders were organised into ‘groupes sportifs’, sponsored by cycle companies, and ‘touriste-routiers’ who competed with no back-up. That lasted until the organiser Henri Desgrange became convinced that the cycle-makers who sponsored the riders were fixing the race and it needed to be ‘purified’.

The principle was simple, the practice arcane. The teams for the Tour were selected by national federations after complex horse-trading in which the organisers of the race had a considerable amount of influence. To start with, it was Jacques Goddet and his assistants who would decide how many teams there were and how many riders each would include. The ‘international’ or ‘Luxembourg-mixed’ team for which Brian Robinson rode four Tours was set up to ensure that there was a place for stars from countries that were not strong enough to field a full team. The riders applied for places, and their allocation was negotiated between the national federations involved and the organisers, who nominated the manager.

The arrival of Robinson and the Britons in the Tour came at a time of intense debate about whether the national teams should be abandoned and the race opened to the trade squads. During the 1950s, the professional teams had become increasingly vocal as the cycle companies which had been their backers gradually gave way to extra-sportif sponsors from outside the cycle trade. Nivea was the first company to put its name to such a team, effectively turning its cyclists into travelling sandwich-board men, and other companies followed, making up for a lack of funds from the cycle companies. Extra-sportifs did not look for a lengthy commitment to a team, as a bike company might: their purpose was to get maximum publicity, then depart. The professional sponsors’ case against national teams in the Tour was simple: they paid the riders all year round, so why should they be excluded from the biggest shop window of the year?

Initially, race organisers across Europe were against the extra-sportifs because they feared competition for sponsorship income, so they banned them from the races. The sponsors, however, controlled the riders, and could dictate where they rode. Faced with the threat of having no riders in their races, by 1959 most of the organisers had given way, apart from the most powerful of them all: Jacques Goddet, the director of the Tour de France.

National teams were popular with the public, who found them easy to identify with. The intense speculation about who would be in the national teams raised the race’s profile, while the plethora of French regional teams brought in to keep the numbers up – five in 1955, for example – ensured that every part of France felt involved. So deeply involved, in fact, was the cycling public that the France team manager, Marcel Bidot, would receive threatening letters from fans who felt he had selected the wrong men.

The average Frenchman found the system easy to understand, but the managers of bigger national teams had to tiptoe through a diplomatic minefield each year as they attempted to make sworn rivals race in the same team. A ‘summit’ meeting had been necessary to bring the two Italian stars, Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali, together under the national banner in 1949, and matters came to a head in the 1958 Tour with a dispute over whether Louison Bobet, Jacques Anquetil or Roger Rivière should lead the France team.

Even though the Tour organisers had imposed national teams to reduce the sponsors’ influence on the racing, under-the-table deals were actually made more likely. There was vast potential for secret collusion between teammates who rode for the same commercial team for the rest of the year but were put in different national or regional teams for the Tour. The conflict of interest was all too obvious: for example, an Italian domestique who rode for a French trade team with a French leader eleven months of the year would be foolish not to help out his trade team leader in the Tour, even if he were riding for Italy and his leader for France.

The same conundrum applied to professional team managers. If they ran national teams in the Tour, there was every chance that they would favour their own riders, so the teams had to be directed by outsiders who did not work for a trade team. In 1955, the presence of Syd Cozens, manager of Hercules, at the helm of the Great Britain squad caused howls of protest among the French cycle trade, who felt the British were bending the rules. To guarantee their neutrality the team managers – Marcel Bidot of France, Alfredo Binda of Italy – tended to be ex-cyclists of stature who had built a career outside the sport. The manager who guided Robinson to his 1959 stage win, Sauveur Ducazeaux, had a day job running a Parisian restaurant called the Bordeaux– Paris. The day the Tour finished, he was back in the kitchen.

The strongest argument against national teams, however, was that the nations were not there. Professional cycling’s heartland was limited to half a dozen European countries; only the French, Belgians and Italians were strong enough to produce teams with true strength in depth, and thus they would have two or three teams each. Smaller cycling nations such as Luxembourg, Spain, Holland, Switzerland and Portugal either fielded far weaker squads or were combined in the ‘international’ teams. Sometimes, the outcome was totally incoherent: in the 1960 Tour, for example, France, Italy, Belgium and Spain had fourteen-man teams, while nine other squads, including four ‘regional’ French teams, had only eight riders, putting them at a serious disadvantage.

Once Brian Robinson had proved that British cyclists were capable of competing in Europe, the national team system provided an obvious pathway for those with ambition who wanted to progress beyond domestic racing. That entailed travelling to France and racing well enough to earn a place in the international team on the Tour or, later, to be selected for Great Britain. The transition from British to European racing was a tough one, but those who made the move were helped by being able to register as ‘independents’, a category halfway between amateur and professional. ‘Indies’ were often attached to amateur clubs and had the right to ride all but the biggest professional races and the better amateur events, and they could revert to amateur status after two years if they wished.

The new opportunity drew men such as Stan Brittain, the best British amateur stage racer of the time. The Liverpudlian had finished third in the Peace Race and won the Tour of Sweden, and he moved to the south of France in 1958, along with the former Hercules rider Bernard Pusey. As Robinson had in 1956, Brittain was riding à la musette. He had the name Helyett-Leroux on his jersey but was receiving no money, and in the winter he returned to his job as a joiner and pattern-maker.

That year, Brittain became the third Britannique to finish the Tour, and his experiences say much about the eccentricities that stemmed from the national team system. He turned up at the 1958 Tour start in Brussels – only the second départ outside France – knowing only three of his eleven teammates in the ‘international’ squad: Robinson, Ireland’s Shay Elliott and the other Briton, Ron Coe, who was a prolific winner in England. Their équipiers were truly ‘international’: two Austrians, two Portuguese and four Danes. Each had been selected by his national federation; in the Britons’ case, the National Cycling Union. The best rider in the team was the Austrian Adolf Christian, who had finished third the previous year.

Robinson would have preferred to race the Tour for his trade team, St Raphaël. He spoke for many other Tour cyclists when he said that as a professional whose job was to earn himself a living, he was put at a disadvantage by being thrown together in the most lucrative race of the year with riders who were not as strong as his trade teammates. And he did not like switching from his trade team to ride the Tour for the ‘international’ or ‘Luxembourg’ squad: ‘You get a “feeling” (call it team spirit, or whatever you like) in stage races when riding with your trade team which makes the task much more pleasant than when you are riding with a mixed crowd who may speak different languages.’

Brittain saw at first hand what happened when riders were thrown together in this way. ‘Robbo wasn’t very keen on the Portuguese, and the Danes were very self-contained. I turned up and Robbo said he would go and see Christian and ask if he wanted to ride with us, split the prize money. He saw him, and Christian didn’t want to know.’ Brittain, Robinson, Elliott and Coe formed their own team within a team. They ate at their own corner of the dinner table, and Elliott and Robinson would talk tactics in their shared hotel room. Brittain and Coe were delegated to work for the two stars, waiting if they punctured, helping them move through the bunch. The little band was not together long: on the day that Robinson won stage six to Brest, Coe retired, while Robinson himself was struck down by stomach trouble five stages before the finish. In spite of breaking a rib in a crash, Brittain battled through to finish sixty-ninth.

Making the mental leap from the cosy world of British domestic racing has always been a precondition for Britons who want to succeed in European professionalism. Merely crossing the Channel and racing is not enough; since Robinson, those Britons who have succeeded have accepted that what they achieved at home counts for nothing. Brittain clearly recognised this when he said: ‘Locked in a little country, sticking by tradition, we think we can ride bikes. We think we’re good if we do well in the Tour of Britain and we think the Tour of Britain might one day become like the Tour de France. It makes me laugh. We will never get to know what this sort of thing entails until we break open the gates of our tight little world and come over here and live with it.’

Brittain would, however, never finish another Tour. He missed the 1959 race after breaking a wrist and was put out by food poisoning in 1960. Even so, he continued in France until 1961 – ‘It was a living, we were never short of money; if I wanted to go home, I would just go to the airport.’ After which he returned to Britain to race out his career with the Viking team.

Another who ‘came over and lived with it’ was Victor Sutton, a slender youth with wispy blond hair from the lowlands of South Yorkshire. He set off for France in 1958 with two other Britons, John Andrews and Tony Hewson, in a three-ton Austin ambulance. It was ‘built for desert warfare’, bought cheaply in a breaker’s yard near Chesterfield and kitted out with four folding beds. Sutton was a boat-builder by profession, and did the joinery; Andrews made the mattresses.

‘We had no idea where to go, how the system worked, or how to get our hands on prize money other than primes [cash prizes at the event],’ recalls Hewson. Life in an ambulance was not ideal: the roof rack would bring down electric cables in the campsites and the ‘code of conduct’ for living in their cramped quarters included the rule ‘not more than two people to make beds, dress, undress or stand up at any one time’. The trio settled in Reims, where the Bicycle Club Rémois paid their expenses and transported them to events. They became minor local celebrities, attracting crowds of curious onlookers as they stripped the engine of the ambulance with the help of the instruction book.

At the end of the season, Andrews finished thirteenth in the world road-race championship, and became the second Briton after Robinson to earn a professional place with a French team, racing with Louison Bobet’s Mercier squad. Having worked the winter in Britain, all three earned places in the ‘international’ team for the 1959 Tour, along with Robinson and Elliott. Andrews abandoned on stage three across Belgium; four days later, it was Hewson’s turn. The nine-stone Sutton showed unexpected climbing ability, which helped him move from 109th place at the end of the first week to thirty-seventh when the race reached Paris. He was the first Briton to show that hallmark of the pure climber, the ability to change pace rapidly by spinning a small gear at speed on the Tour’s high mountain passes. He also had a Nelsonian ability to understand only what he wanted to; when asked by his team manager, Sauveur Ducazeaux, to assist a Danish teammate on the fastest stage of the race, he replied, ‘Non compris’. Hewson, who did understand, and therefore had to wait, was unable to regain contact and withdrew.

In the Pyrenees, Sutton climbed alongside Bobet, Anquetil and the eventual winner, Ercole Baldini, and in the Alps he was not far behind the two best climbers of the day, Charly Gaul and the ‘Eagle of Toledo’, Federico Bahamontes. On the time-trial stage to the Puy-de-Dôme, an extinct volcano in the Massif Central, he topped the leader board for an hour, and managed sixteenth place. He was the climbing revelation of the race, yet his inexperience meant he was terrified when it came to going down the mountains: on the biggest Alpine stage he lost six minutes on the sinuous series of hairpins descending from the Petit St Bernard Pass, to the fury of his manager. When the team car overtook him, and the mechanic tried to hand him a spare tyre, he was unable even to take one hand off the handlebars.

The following year, Sutton was one of the leaders of only the second Great Britain team to start the Tour. He was tipped to match Gaul and Bahamontes in the mountains, but he started the Tour over-raced, having finished fifth in the Tour of Switzerland a few days before the start. He collapsed on the final Alpine stage, following what appeared to be a minor heart attack. He was told he should not race again, but by the time the doctor’s letter reached him in Reims he was already competing, and he saw out the season. It was, perhaps, a premonition of the heart trouble that would eventually end his life in the summer of 1999, not long after he had finished the Étape du Tour as a celebration of what he had achieved forty years earlier.

The invitation to an eight-man Great Britain team for the 1960 race came partly because cycling in the UK was now united, formally at least. The previous year the BLRC and NCU had buried the hatchet and joined forces to form the British Cycling Federation. The Tour organisers could now be certain that the team would be selected from all the best British cyclists, in theory without prejudice. Moreover, the progress made by British cyclists – and the Irishman Shay Elliott – since 1955 underlined that interlopers could compete and integrate. Sutton, Hewson, Andrews and Brittain had all played their part, but Robinson had led the way with his stage wins and his all-round presence, and had been good enough for long enough to be considered as team leader.

Ironically the Yorkshireman was not bothered what flag he was flying as he raced to twenty-sixth place. ‘I was just doing my job by then. There was no sentiment. The target was the same whether or not you rode for Great Britain: to do something and get your contracts. I had to jolly the others along and hope they made it. They all used to moan about the food. I’ll always remember Vic Sutton saying he could murder some of his mother’s Yorkshire pudding, and to me that means he was thinking the wrong thoughts.’

Compared to the ten pioneers of 1955, the Great Britain team of 1960 was battle-hardened. Robinson was the leader; Brittain and Sutton had both finished the race before; Andrews had ridden the previous year, while Tom Simpson had shown colossal promise in less than a year as a professional, and would arrive in Paris an exhausted twenty-ninth. Harry Reynolds and John Kennedy were also based in France, as was Norman Sheil, a talented track racer.

Brittain and Reynolds were part of another cluster of British racers, based in a caravan parked in a farmer’s field near Brive. They had a ‘10 per cent man’ who would enter the Britons as a group in two or three races a week, averaging £15 a race. With primes, it made for a good living, at a time when the average wage in Britain was about £10 a week, and Reynolds sent money back to his wife in Birmingham. The Brive bunch shared their winnings and also reached an informal understanding with Sutton and his mates that they would not ride against each other.

For Reynolds and Brittain, the Tour was quite a luxury after their hand-to-mouth existence in Brive. They were, in theory, being paid £10 a day, and had masseurs and mechanics to look after them. But gastroenteritis saw off Brittain, while a broken collarbone ended Reynolds’s race. To add insult to injury, the Britons had signed an agreement with the manager, Ducazeaux, that he would deal with the money, but Reynolds for one never saw a cheque. There were little cultural differences as well: Ducazeaux banned them from drinking tea, British style, with milk. Instead, they were told to take herbal brews, so they adopted a strategy of persuading the maids to smuggle them ‘proper’ tea in a pot. Major Thompson would have approved.

The insecurity and lack of support when racing à la musette meant it was not a long-term way of life for émigré British cyclists. They either moved forward by obtaining a professional contract, as Andrews did, or returned to England after a season or two. Reflecting the rapid turnover of riders, in 1961 Brittain had three fresh companions in Brive: Sean Ryan from Liverpool, Ken Laidlaw from the Scottish border town of Hawick and a tall young man from Cheshire, Vin Denson. The Brive quartet were duly selected in the largest Great Britain team to start the Tour: its twelve members also included Simpson, Robinson – riding his last Tour – Elliott, whose Irish nationality was conveniently ignored, the sprinter Albert Hitchen, who was to carve out a career in Holland and Belgium, and four British-based riders: Ron Coe, Ian Moore, Pete Ryalls and George O’Brien.

Riders in GB teams always succumbed rapidly in the opening stages of the Tour, but the British were not alone in this. All the weaker national and regional teams suffered similarly, and Robinson, for one, believed that the ability range in the Tour was actually wider than in other major events. By stage five, in 1961, two-thirds of the British team had disappeared; those left were Elliott, Robinson, Denson and Laidlaw, who had virtually no experience of racing at this level – he had moved to France just six weeks earlier on a temporary professional licence solely to ride the Tour, having used the Peace Race as preparation.

He had already come within an ace of being eliminated. From the start, the team had expended a good deal of energy trying to assist Simpson, who had started the race with a knee injury that had been troubling him since the spring, and on stage four, across the heart of Belgium to the town of Charleroi, Laidlaw was delegated to nurse him through. Simpson was unable to hold the pace early in the stage; Laidlaw duly waited, but realised that Simpson was going nowhere and that if the pair of them continued together they would both finish outside the day’s time limit. ‘I swore at him, and said if he didn’t buck up I’d be out of the Tour. He swore back, was really pissed off with me, and tore my legs off for twenty kilometres. We went up the Mur de Grammont’ – a one-in-four cobbled climb that is a key part of the Tour of Flanders route – ‘and spotted three Italians. He said, “Stay with them, and you’re in the Tour,” and got off his bike. I never saw him again, and rode on with the Italians.’ Over forty years later, Laidlaw can remember that they were exactly twenty-two seconds outside the time limit. ‘They didn’t dare eliminate a quarter of the Italian team, so we were kept in.’

A few days later the Scot was again close to abandoning after he caught gastroenteritis. He dropped back into the convoy of vehicles behind the peloton, and was caught up by a car containing the British journalist ‘Jock’ Wadley, who had been a father figure and adviser to British cyclists on the European circuit since the Hercules days. Laidlaw said to Wadley that he was quitting, and was told, ‘You’ll regret it all your life if you do.’ It is an exchange that seems inconceivable over four decades on, and is a reminder that the Tour was then a small, almost family affair, not the impersonal monster it is now.

Wadley was right: in Paris Laidlaw finished sixty-fifth, having come close to winning the sixteenth stage through the Pyrenees. The seven-hour haul from Toulouse ended with a twenty-kilometre climb to the ski station of Superbagnères: Laidlaw took the lead at the mountain’s foot, only to be caught with three kilometres to go and left with the meagre consolation of the £95 prize for ‘most combative’ rider of the day. It was a promising first Tour, but the following year Laidlaw quit professional cycling, largely because the event had adopted trade teams. He could not find a slot in a professional team, so he returned to England and raced for the Viking team, ‘a huge step backwards’. A year later he learned he could earn five times his carpenter’s wage in New York, so he crossed the Atlantic ‘an angry young man’ and never returned.

Chances like those offered to Victor Sutton, Ken Laidlaw and Stan Brittain were about to become far more rare. The 1961 Tour had taken place amid increasing pressure from the extra-sportif sponsors, with one team, Liberia–Grammont, threatening to forbid their star rider Henri Anglade to start for the France team. Ten weeks after the race ended, Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan summoned a select group of twenty-two journalists to the L’Equipe office in Paris. It seems curious now, but the Tour was not going to take the major step of reverting to trade teams without the approval of those who wrote about the race. This was partly public relations, partly a reflection of the fact that Goddet and Lévitan were, as editors of L’Equipe and Le Parisien respectively, journalists themselves.

Not all their colleagues agreed with the change Goddet and Lévitan proposed. Maurice Vidal, director of the magazine Miroir-Sprint, wrote: ‘Since when has the intrusion of money been any guarantee of honest behaviour? Cycling needs to be a sport rather than a business.’ Goddet and Lévitan also had misgivings: they feared that rich sponsors would be tempted by the idea of hiring as many major names as they could and putting them in the same team. This is precisely what happened, and still does. The Tour organisers recognised that the reversion to the trade-team formula would make it harder to open their race to new nations, and in particular the rapidly emerging East European countries, and so Goddet and Lévitan founded the Tour de l’Avenir. The Tour of the Future ran alongside the great race as a showcase for amateur cyclists from around the world.

An initial plan to run the Tour with national teams every four years was stillborn and apart from a brief reversion in 1967 and 1968 the era of national teams on the Tour was over. From now on, the only major race where professionals would have to swap trade for national loyalties was the world championship.

This drastically reduced the openings available to Britons in the Tour. Being a good British cyclist who raced at a reasonable level in France would no longer be enough to earn a ride in the great race. To get in the Tour, a cyclist would now have to earn a trade-team place, then earn a place in that trade team’s squad for the Tour. To load the dice further, in the era before the global economy and with import duties still high, few European sponsors had products that needed publicity in the UK, so there was no incentive to hire Britons unless they could make a major impact in Europe.

The British also fell foul of an agreement between the Tour organisers and the trade teams that limited a Tour team to three or four riders from outside the country where the team was registered. This was intended to ensure that the teams had a ‘national’ flavour, but it meant a British cyclist would always be the last to be chosen. That was made clear in 1962, when St-Raphaël deemed that Brian Robinson was surplus to requirements in spite of his pedigree.

A year later, through his magazine Sporting Cyclist, Jock Wadley was already calling for the Tour to return to the national system. ‘The public prefer a national struggle and it is the public whose interest keeps the Tour going,’ he wrote. Wadley felt that the extra-sportif sponsors were buying up the strong riders to guarantee results all year round, which meant that with only nine or ten in a Tour team, big names were being left out of the race.

The Britons, he felt, had been put at a disadvantage with the end of national teams. ‘[They] enabled Brian Robinson to come to the front, to be signed on by a Continental firm; it was in a national or international team that he won his two stages,’ wrote Wadley. ‘It was the national team system which gave Vic Sutton the chance to ride the Tour and to shake us all by topping an Alpine col with Bahamontes and Gaul and all the field strung out behind. Perhaps the abandoning of trade teams would reveal some new talent.’

One man who had good reason to share Wadley’s view was Alan Ramsbottom, a laconic, bespectacled sewing-machine mechanic from east Lancashire, nicknamed the ‘Clayton le Moors demon’. He had met Brian Robinson at a North Lancashire Road Club dinner in Blackburn (‘He rolled up looking cool in a Ford Consul or whatever’), was duly inspired, and arrived in Troyes in early 1960, with £80 in his pocket, ‘enough for two months’. The main amateur club in the town, UV Aube, had advertised in Cycling for British riders; Ramsbottom’s clubmate and mentor, the journalist Harry Aspden, put him in touch. Having missed out on the Olympic shortlist, Ramsbottom had no reason to stay in England, so he drove over with two other Britons, got his bike out of the car fifty miles from Troyes and rode in, to the delight of the French.

The club was run by Marcel Bidot, a legendary figure in French cycling, whose professional career spanned the 1920s and World War II, and who had become established as the manager of the French team in the Tour. Bidot rang up the mayor of Troyes, who promptly found the Britons a flat. After two years, he helped Ramsbottom and Vin Denson, who arrived in Troyes in 1961, to professional contracts with the squad backed by Lejeune cycles and the beer company Pelforth. Ramsbottom rode from Troyes to Dunkirk for the team launch, some 250 miles. (‘How long did it take?’ I ask. ‘Well, we got there before dark,’ is the answer). That was not enough to win over the team manager, Maurice de Muer. After Ramsbottom finished in front of his team leader Jan Janssen in the Liège–Bastogne –Liège one-day classic, de Muer castigated the Dutchman for failing to beat l’Anglais.

Ramsbottom finished his first Tour, in 1962, in a respectable forty-fifth place. He had come close to catastrophe after an ill-timed stop to answer nature’s call cost him half an hour, had been shocked by descents in the Alps where the road was merely loose stones, and had lost so much weight that he ‘looked like something out of Belsen’. Yet several thousand Troyens turned out to welcome him home to a civic reception with brass bands. A popular local figure he may have been, but often his and Denson’s monthly pay cheques did not arrive. ‘I would have to go to the butcher’s and ask for credit: it was humbling, embarrassing.’ Sometimes Bidot would intervene, sometimes the pair would travel to Dunkirk to visit the manager to protest, at which he would upbraid them: ‘All you English think about is money.’

Ramsbottom felt that de Muer did not want him to succeed. During the 1963 Tour, on the Col de la Forclaz in the Alps, the race leaders had slimmed down to about a dozen, with Ramsbottom riding alongside Jacques Anquetil, Raymond Poulidor and the best climbers. The Pelforth manager drove his car up alongside the group, and told the Englishman to stop, because the Pelforth team leader Henri Anglade was ‘just behind’ and needed support.

Ramsbottom knew that de Muer knew that he understood French, so feigning incomprehension à la Vic Sutton was not an option. So he pulled to the side of the road and sat on one of the concrete blocks that line mountain roads. And sat. And sat. It took six minutes for Anglade to catch him up, and when he did, the Frenchman was astounded. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. Once a Tour cyclist has ‘exploded’ on a climb, he is unlikely to regain contact.

The minutes that Ramsbottom lost on that key day turned what could have been a top-ten placing in the Tour into sixteenth overall. Only two Britons – Simpson and Brian Robinson – had finished higher in the Tour at the time. Today, that result in only his second Tour would have transformed his status, but at the time cycling was still rigidly hierarchical: riders who were outside the small group of accepted team leaders were expected to know their place.

Ramsbottom’s relationship with his boss broke down completely the following year. The Briton was riding strongly in the Dauphiné Libéré stage race before the Tour began, when his wife called. A letter had arrived from the team saying that he was to ride the Tour of Luxembourg, but Ramsbottom knew he was also contracted to ride a race in the Isle of Man. ‘I asked de Muer about it, and he told me to ignore the letter and go to the Isle of Man. When I got back it was all over the papers that de Muer was saying I’d gone there against his instructions and he was kicking me out.’

Ramsbottom upped sticks for Ghent, where Simpson found him a place at Peugeot for 1965, but again commercial interests worked against him. The final slot in Peugeot’s Tour team was down to a straight fight between Ramsbottom and the German Karl-Heinz Kunde, who made the team because there was a strong market for Peugeot bikes in Germany, whereas taxes and import duties meant that bikes from Europe were priced out of the British market. A Belgian teammate, Georges Van Coningsloo, who had never ridden well in the Tour and hated it, requested that the Briton be given his place. Belgium was a Peugeot market as well, though, and the ploy failed.

In 1966 Ramsbottom returned home, and went back to sewing machines. For many years, as he criss-crossed the north of England in his car from one broken machine in a textile factory to another somewhere else, he brooded. ‘I would see in my mind what I might have done if I’d ridden the Tour in 1964. You wonder what would have happened if I’d been in another team.’ ‘How long did it take to get over it?’ I ask. He weighs his words: ‘Well, it lessened over the years.’

There is no such bitterness for Vin Denson, one of the few Britons who made the crossover from the national team era and who had a lengthy career, spanning seven years and six Tours. Denson had learned about the Tour at secondary school from his French teacher, who indoctrinated his pupils with pictures of the peloton riding through snowdrifts in the Alps. Like Ramsbottom, Denson met Brian Robinson at a club dinner and decided to follow him to France, drawn by the fact that the British Cycling Federation was offering temporary professional licences for those interested in making up the 1961 Tour team. He lasted until stage sixteen, when he succumbed to a stomach bug, probably caught when he filled his water bottle from a roadside spring.

After his spell in Troyes with Ramsbottom, the pair turned professional for the Pelforth team in 1962. While Ramsbottom clearly had greater ability, though it was never fulfilled, Denson was the first Briton to make a career as a domestique, a team rider who is happy to subordinate his interests to those of his leaders. The best domestiques are highly valued, for their ability to be on hand with a spare wheel or to lead a chase for mile after mile. He was capable of winning on his own account – indeed, he was the first Briton to take a stage of the Giro d’Italia in 1966 at Campobasso, near Naples – but Denson was happy with a support role. ‘I loved the idea of being well-respected and trusted, and not having too much responsibility.’

In his first Tour, 1961, he devotedly followed his hero Robinson, ‘hoping that he would puncture’. Subsequently, being a team man meant letting team leaders such as the five-times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil and the great climber Julio Jimenez ride alongside with their hand on his thigh so that they didn’t have to pedal so hard up the climbs; once, Henri Anglade dragged so hard Denson tore a buttock muscle. Denson raced his second Tour in 1964, for the Belgian squad Solo-Superia, alongside Rik Van Looy, the legendary Belgian ‘Emperor’, who won some four hundred races in an eighteen-year career. In the Tour that year, Solo had no interest in the overall standings, so the team members took it in turns to try to win a stage, eventually garnering six between them. Denson’s allotted stage was the leg to Thonon-les-Bains, which he lost by just a wheel.

The following year, he acquired the nickname ‘Vic’ – under which he appears in the record books – and found his true niche with Anquetil in the Ford-France team, nicknamed l’équipe de rugbymen because the riders were all heavily built. Denson spent four years alongside Anquetil, finishing the 1965 Tour for Ford.

On the road, the Frenchman’s epic duel with his bitter rival Raymond Poulidor in 1964 set the standard by which most French fans of a certain age still judge the Tour. Off the bike, ‘Master Jacques’ represented professional cycling at its most glamorous. His taste for champagne, oysters and whisky was legendary, and he and his platinum-blonde wife, Janine, were regulars in the gossip columns.

Cycling’s other extreme – drudgery and official indifference – is epitomised by Denson’s account of a day spent looking after his teammate Michael Wright, a Belgian of British extraction who raced for Great Britain in the 1967 Tour. The stage in question went over two of the longest passes in the Alps, the Croix de Fer and Galibier. Wright had crashed the day before and broken two ribs; for nine hours, from start to finish, Denson nursed him through, shouting to the fans to push him, pulling him by the jersey himself and constantly checking the time limit with the journalists on their motorbikes.

They made the cut by two minutes, but that was merely part one of the saga. At the finish in Briançon, Wright got into the race ambulance, and Denson sat down in the passenger seat of the British team car alongside a mechanic, Ken Bird. ‘We got off the pavement, and all the publicity caravan were coming past. A local policeman stopped us and let two or three vehicles pass, and I said, “For Christ’s sake, Ken, I’ve got to get to the hotel, I’m going to die.” Ken got out of the car and told the gendarme to move, but he was a bit timid because it was his first year on the Tour. The gendarme just sat on the bonnet of the car and said, “When I say move, you move.” I said, “I’ve been nine hours on my bike, and all I want to do is get to my hotel.” He replied, “Get back in the car, you English.” I said, “What right have you got to sit on the Union Jack?” and spun him off the bonnet, then he started blowing his whistle. I had some rice cake in my back pocket so I threw it at him, and took off my race number and threw it at him.’ The next morning, Denson was summoned into the presence of Jacques Goddet, the Tour organiser, who ‘looked like General de Gaulle, all epaulettes and so on. He said, in perfect English’ – and, perhaps, with Major Thompson on his mind – ‘“Denson, I’m very disappointed in you. I always saw you as the perfect English gentleman.”’ The gendarme brought charges against Denson, who was eventually fined £150.

The minor diplomatic incident involving a rice cake was put into perspective by the trauma that Denson would go through a few days later, with the death of his close friend, the Great Britain team leader Tom Simpson. They had first met in 1954 or ’55, and had trained together in Yorkshire, where Denson was doing national service. They had briefly been teammates in the Tour in 1961. When Denson’s deal with Pelforth fell through two years later, Simpson had found him lodgings in Ghent, where Vin and his wife Vi opened a bar – simply named ‘Vic Denson’ – with team jerseys hanging from the ceiling in a swathe of fishing net. They travelled to criteriums together, and Simpson had tried to find Denson a place in his Peugeot team, while Denson had helped Simpson to win the world title in 1965.

That they were riding together again in 1967 under the Union Jack was purely due to a quirk of history. The Tour’s return to national teams was short-lived, unsuccessful and controversial. It stemmed partly from Goddet’s belief that the Tour should occasionally revert to the old system, even though the interval was six years rather than the suggested four. Primarily, however, Goddet’s assistant Félix Lévitan believed that the commercial sponsors had been behind a riders’ strike at Bordeaux in 1966 against the imposition of dope tests. ‘Trade teams [are] close to producing all the same problems, all the same defects, all the dishonest compromises that led Henri Desgrange to take his brave decision [to adopt the national team formula] in 1930,’ said Lévitan. The 1967 Tour, he wrote, would be moralisé. It would, ironically, end up producing the sport’s most poignant morality tale.