BLAME IT ON THE BADGER

WHEN IT WAS announced that the 1994 Tour de France would visit England, I was beside myself with excitement. On a pigeon-grey morning in Trafalgar Square, when Bernard Hinault was scheduled for a photocall to publicise the Tour’s visit, I skipped work and made a pilgrimage to see the legendary Badger, ‘Le Blaireau’ – so called because cornered badgers always come out fighting, although having never personally baited a French badger I can’t verify this – in the flesh.

For a long time, I endured an overpowering sense of sadness and melancholia over Hinault’s premature retirement at just thirty-two, when a sixth Tour win would surely have been possible. I felt deprived, peeved even. In the fantasy Tour in my head, in which Eddy Merckx took on Fausto Coppi, and Greg LeMond struggled to contain Charly Gaul, no other rider compared to him. I missed his narcissistic macho posturing, his arrogant taunting of his rivals, his mocking of their masculine inadequacies, as he strutted around like some demented porn star. Certainly, I hadn’t suffered this morbid state of depression when, for example, the big-nosed, balding Italian, Massimo Ghirotto, hung up his racing wheels.

But Hinault’s growling good looks, his Breton granite physique, his tendency to six o’clock shadow, his love of Ray-Ban Aviators and his D’Artagnan smile, allied to his pugilistic bloody-mindedness, had all made him so appealing. In the bland age of monosyllabic Miguel Indurain and ‘Swiss Tony’ Rominger, his flamboyant and outspoken personality was sorely missed.

The robotic anonymity of the new champions of the early 1990s made them the anti-Hinault. The Badger was the kind of reckless Frenchman who relished risk, a have-a-go hero who’d roar up to your back bumper at the wheel of a soft-top Peugeot, gesticulating wildly and cursing, flashing his lights and hooting, before shooting you a devil-may-care grin and swerving past on a blind hairpin, narrowly missing a Belgian camper van as he did so.

Yes, at times he could be a bit of a twat.

No pilgrimage to meet the Breton would have been complete without a copy of his absurdly bombastic biography, Memories of the Peloton, as Napoleonic and self-aggrandising a text as in any French oeuvre. Clutching the hardback in my sweaty paw as I emerged from the Northern Line, I nervously rehearsed a few lines of French with which to charm Saint Bernard. Perhaps we would fall into conversation, and laugh and joke; then, showing his trademark impetuosity, he would tear up his schedule, wave his minders away and suggest we head off for lunch, somewhere discreet and intimate, up the road in Soho.

But then they always warn you about meeting your heroes, don’t they?

I spotted the familiar figure adrift among a sea of Japanese tourists, loitering under Nelson’s Column, clad in a shiny green suit that must have lit up like a Christmas tree when he took it off at night. Unflatteringly, it also revealed the beginnings of a paunch, and was so ill-fitting that it displayed an alarming length of white towelling sock above his pig-nosed shoes.

Was this the athletic colossus whose duel with LeMond had fired my dreams, who had conquered Galibier, Tourmalet, Ventoux, who had ridden alone through the blizzard-swept Belgian Ardennes to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège, crossing the finish line with frozen hands and icicles dangling from his bike frame (if not his nose)? Was this the proud man of the soil who had played such sophisticated mind games with LeMond that the American had been reduced to a nervous wreck, the same man who had ridden with such carefree panache that all France had flocked to lionise him?

No – this was a middle-aged French farmer in a bad suit on an away day.

I took a deep breath and walked up to him. ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Hinault,’ I said. ‘Comment ça va?’

He glanced at me, smiled a tight smile and continued talking to a similarly green-suited colleague from the Tour organisation about lunch or taxis or how much longer he had to stand here in this draughty London square.

There was a pause. What should I say? How could I break the ice? ‘So did you laugh when Greg got mistaken for a turkey?’ might have raised a quizzical eyebrow, but would also perhaps have struck the wrong note.

So I settled for ‘U-un signature, s’il vous plaît …’ and I thrust the book at him. He scribbled something and pushed it back into my hand, before turning on his heel and striding off towards a waiting taxi. Another sea of tourists came between us and then he was gone. I should have known. Nobody puts The Badger in a corner.

I stood there clutching the signed book amid the pigeons and the tourists. The sense of anticlimax left me swooning. Heroes – hah! What are they good for?

In July 2007, thirteen years after my brief encounter with Hinault, the Tour returned to London and south-east England. This time it arrived against the backdrop of Ken Livingstone’s two-wheeled Utopia, of London as Olympus, a city of sporting excellence and endeavour, a city where cabbies and bus drivers looked on admiringly as you pedalled past pavement cafés through perpetually sunlit streets, rather than spitting vitriol and abuse as you got in their way when a rutted cycle lane suddenly dropped into a rainwater-filled crater deeper than the Grand Canyon.

This time the Tour de France was welcomed with open arms to the heart of the capital, with one of the most beautiful prologue routes, slaloming through Whitehall, St James’s, Hyde Park and the Mall. This time the Tour was the answer, to obesity, slothfulness, congestion, xenophobia and environmental catastrophe. The bicycle remained simple, beautiful and clean, even as the Tour – the bloody Tour – just kept on getting dirtier.