Thomas Voeckler is a rider who divides opinion.
As marginal gains accelerate the march towards cycling by numbers, Voeckler stands out as a rough diamond to cherish – an emotionally-engaging underdog without whom professional racing would be a lot duller.
Edward Pickering writes in defence of modern cycling’s greatest attacking force.
TELL ME WHAT you think about Thomas Voeckler and I’ll tell you what your world view is.
I remember having an argument with a friend once about tennis. Pete Sampras was about to play Andre Agassi in the Wimbledon final, and my friend was fully behind Sampras, while I wanted Agassi to win. What my friend admired about Sampras – his elegant, languid class and effortless style – was precisely what made me want his opponent to win.
Aesthetically, Sampras was perfect. Too perfect. I wanted the underdog – the scurrying, imperfect, punchy, emotional Agassi – to prevail. I didn’t want a masterclass in efficient match-winning. I wanted to be emotionally engaged, to feel like Agassi could somehow overturn the inevitability of defeat against a better player through willpower alone.
Of course, Sampras won.
Thomas Voeckler is a bit like Agassi: living proof that wanting to win goes a long way towards not losing. Put him up against Bradley Wiggins in the Tour de France, and there’s no competition – class beats aggression every time over the three weeks of a grand tour (especially when helped along by stifling tactics and domestiques who could be leaders in most other teams). But put Voeckler in a break, in whatever terrain, and he’ll turn himself inside out to put his front wheel over the line first.
‘Je me suis sorti des tripes,’ Voeckler often says after a race. If you want to beat him, you’ve got to be ready to ride hard enough that you puke up your internal organs, too. Voeckler, according to his team manager Jean-René Bernaudeau, is also a ‘computer’ – his tactical brain is quick, and his racing decisions are usually right.
There are few other cyclists who genuinely put me on the edge of my seat when I’m watching bike races. Voeckler’s riding is visceral, and it provokes a physical reaction in me. As he bent his back with the effort of winning the 10th stage of this year’s Tour de France, a desperate slow-motion uphill grind to the finish in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, I recall subconsciously twisting in my chair, willing him to win.
His racing style is compelling, human. But it’s not to everybody’s taste. One of his nicknames is ‘Hollywood’, because what some perceive as plucky aggression, others perceive as ego. He’s not universally popular with other riders, for the same reasons.
But to describe him as either doughty fighter, tactical genius or egotistical show-off is to miss the point. Voeckler holds a mirror up to cycling fans, reflecting their own prejudices and desires for the sport.
Cycling fans exist along a spectrum. At one end, you have subjective fans; at the other, objective.
Subjective fans get a kick from the emotional attachment of picking a favourite rider or team, and supporting them whatever happens. When they win, there is a boost in self-esteem. When they lose, the fans suffer disappointment. A lot of football fans are towards the subjective end of the spectrum, and some would argue that the England rugby team forces their supporters to be subjective – to support the England rugby team is to acknowledge that winning ugly beats losing pretty. But the emotional attachment overrides aesthetic concerns.
For objective fans, sport is the thing. Who cares who wins, as long as the battle is entertaining and the narrative compelling? In cycling, in anglophone countries especially, with few home favourites to cheer, the fandom used to tend towards the objective (although Lance Armstrong brought in a lot of North American fans who paid attention to only one thing – their man winning, and, judging by this summer, Team Sky and Bradley Wiggins may well do the same in the UK).
Of course, there are many other motivations for being a fan but, at base level, subjective fans like to see their rider win, while objective fans like to see the riders race.
The funny thing about Thomas Voeckler is that he seems to sit right in the middle of the subjective/objective spectrum. His character means that fans can easily connect emotionally to his racing, making him popular with subjective fans. But his do-or-die attacking and tactical nous makes him attractive to objective fans.
You might think it would make him universally popular, but all it seems to do is accentuate the differences between the fans.
* * *
The 2012 Tour felt like a watershed in tactics and style. There was a paradigm shift in the way Bradley Wiggins won the yellow jersey – the fact that the Brit rode the same way, with the same result, in Paris-Nice, the Tour of Romandy, the Critérium du Dauphiné and the Tour de France, made it seem like cycling had changed on a profound level. The Tour, that anarchic, three-week-long festival of unpredictability and daily upheaval, had finally been conquered by science, discipline and logic.
Wiggins and his team had worked out that if they could ride at a certain number of watts for a certain number of minutes, nobody would be able to attack in the mountains, and he could then clean up in the time trials. This is not to say that it was easy – physically, it’s as hard as cycling can be, and Wiggins still had to ride faster than everybody else.
Voeckler was the antidote to Team Sky’s control. His role in the 2012 Tour was, along with a few privileged others, to provide the excitement. If the battle for the general classification was being won by science, Voeckler was fighting a rearguard action for art. He got into breaks, frowned, shouted at his rivals, gurned, rocked all over his bike, stuck his tongue out, and took two stages and the king of the mountains jersey.
The public loved it and, on one hand, so did I. Voeckler races how I like to think I would, if only I had stronger legs and better resistance to pain.
When he fought his way up the Col de Peyresourde en route to his second stage win in Luchon, through a parting sea of baying spectators, I fancied that more young fans would imagine themselves as him, riding solo to a heroic win, than they would as Bradley Wiggins, tapping up in a protective cocoon of team-mates.
I waited for Voeckler on the finish line in Luchon, at the bottom of the Peyresourde, on a kiln-hot day – the hottest of the Tour – where riders would come in crusted in salt, dried spit, blood and roadburn, and the boisterous reaction of the crowd reflected Voeckler’s popularity.
If the fans had seen what I had, at the back of the presentation podium before he received the plaudits of the crowd – Voeckler collapsing to the floor and having to sit down for a few minutes while he recovered from his efforts – they’d have liked him even more. Later on, I waited at the team bus as Jean-René Bernaudeau welcomed back his riders, one by one, in the middle of an enraptured crush of hundreds of fans, far more than for any other team – even Sky. Voeckler’s a once-in-a-generation sporting hero, a Poulidor or Virenque for the 21st century.
But, on the other hand, the more Voeckler plays the role of sporting hero, the more cemented the stereotype becomes in the minds of the public. And I’ve learned over the years that there is a considerable distance between Voeckler the sporting hero and Voeckler the person. He may bludgeon his way through bike races with his tongue hanging out and his doughy face moulded into a grimace, but that’s not how he goes through life. What’s he really like?
* * *
I first interviewed Voeckler in 2005, and I’ve spent the subsequent seven-and-a-half years trying to work out what makes him tick. I’m not sure I’m any closer to knowing now than I was at the start, but I’ve spent enough time watching him to know that he is both protected, and done a disservice, by the mythology that has sprung up around him.
It goes back to the 2004 Tour, when he surfed a cresting wave of circumstances and momentum to take and hold the yellow jersey for 10 days. The French loved his spirited defence of the race lead and, though it was five years before he really shone at the Tour again (with a stage win in 2009), and seven before he reprised his original spell in yellow with another one, even more tenaciously-defended, his popularity never seemed to waver.
Other riders, notably Sylvain Chavanel, achieved better results between 2004 and 2011. But Chavanel never matched Voeckler’s popularity – there was something about Voeckler that resonated.
It was a combination of many things – a dramatic and attacking racing style, a down-to-earth confidence, the perception that he wore his heart on his sleeve, a pleasant face and a nice smile. He’s not classically good-looking, but his boyish looks seem to bring out a protective instinct in fans, especially female ones.
Voeckler often races without sunglasses, or with clear lenses. Whether this is deliberate, I don’t know, but it makes him more accessible. When Voeckler races, I feel like I have eye contact with him, while other riders hide themselves behind dark lenses.
Commentators and the media latched on to all these things, and Voeckler’s cycling persona, his myth, started feeding off itself in a reinforcing spiral.
On one hand, Thomas Voeckler the sporting personality doesn’t really exist – he is a construct which is lazily reinforced by the clichés and assumptions of the fans and media. On the other hand, this construct handily protects Voeckler from the excesses of celebrity.
When he’s not on the front page of L’Equipe, or filling the screens during a televisual attack on the Tour de France, there’s not much of the celebrity about Voeckler, however.
I spent a few days at the Europcar team’s training camp in Alicante in January 2012 to interview Voeckler for Cycle Sport magazine, but also to watch him and his team-mates away from the races, where tiredness, transfers and pressure cause riders to withdraw into their shells.
Voeckler may inspire the same passion as Richard Virenque did in the 1990s and early 2000s (although without the same complex relationship with doping products), but there’s no similarity in how they treat their celebrity. Virenque always carried his celebrity self-consciously. He wore designer clothes and embraced his role as housewives’ favourite enthusiastically. Voeckler, on the other hand, doesn’t.
My first sighting of him in Alicante came when he was running late for a webchat organised by his team. Whoever was hosting it was obviously a gambling man, because they’d written, ‘Thomas is now here to answer your questions’ just as somebody came running through the lobby asking, ‘Where’s Thomas?’
A few minutes later he came shambling through in his team tracksuit, looking like he’d just woken up.
Voeckler wasn’t in great shape at the camp, though one of the team managers confided to me that none of the riders were, and that it was a cause for concern. He was still strong enough to lead his team-mates up the climbs on the group rides, huffing and puffing, his face flushing pink with the effort, but it was hard to believe this was the rider who’d come fourth at the Tour de France just six months previously.
Though he was sociable with his team-mates and sat with them in the bar during the evenings, when the raucous laughter that is always the soundtrack to gatherings of young men echoed through the hotel, he generally gave the impression of somebody who didn’t really want to be there.
The reasons for this became clear when we did our interview, when he talked a lot about trying to live a normal life away from cycling. First, when he’s not racing, he’s a committed house-husband. He does the school run and the housework in between training rides – ‘I’m not too important to push a vacuum cleaner round the house,’ he laughed. His kids routinely appear at the Tour on rest days – he did his press conference at Pau last year, alongside La Toussuire stage winner Pierre Rolland, with a toddler bouncing on his lap.
Secondly, he doesn’t enjoy training.
To understand the way Voeckler races, you have to understand that competition, and winning, is what motivates him to cycle. He’s not one to enjoy a pleasant five-hour ride in the countryside and he’s not in cycling to look at the scenery. He loves competing and he loves beating people, and he’s prepared to hurt himself quite seriously to do so.
Pain is the constant companion of the professional cyclist. All tolerate it. Some even enjoy it. But Voeckler is one of a few who seem to wallow in it. On that Tour stage victory in Bellegarde, the leading group changed from a coherent unit of five riders into a pub brawl on the run-in to the finish. Voeckler was all over his bike for the final kilometre, and couldn’t even raise his hands in victory as he crossed the line.
He’d beaten Michele Scarponi, Jens Voigt, Luis Leon Sanchez and Dries Devenyns, yet the only thing I could be sure of as the riders approached Bellegarde was that any one of them could have won. To say that Voeckler won because he fought harder and dug deeper than his rivals is to miss the point that Voeckler’s timing and tactics were also superior to those of the others.
Devenyns made a serious attack with two kilometres to go and gained a lot of ground, but was chased down. When Voeckler went, he was pursued for a long time by Luis Leon Sanchez, but the Spaniard could only hold the gap, not close it – they were more or less equal in strength, but Voeckler’s timing had been better. Then Jens Voigt and Michele Scarponi chased, and they looked faster than Voeckler, but Scarponi could only close to three seconds at the line. All five looked wasted at the finish, all five could legitimately say they had ‘s’est sorti des tripes’, but only Voeckler had combined grit with correct tactics. So much for plucky Thomas Voeckler – he’d had the coolest head of all of them.
Or maybe he did want it more. Voeckler’s backstory includes the terrible tragedy of his father, missing at sea, presumed dead. When you have endured something like that, the physical pain of bike racing may be easier to tolerate. But this is something we can never know, although it suits us to build it into Voeckler’s narrative.
The Frenchman is a lightning rod for opinions among cycling fans. He seems to inspire adoration and contempt in equal measure, generally because of how we have built up his mythology.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out what makes Thomas Voeckler tick, but I’ve realised that the interesting thing about him is that ability of his to hold up a mirror to cycling fans and the media.
Whatever you think about him, it says as much about you as it does him.
Edward Pickering is better at cycling than most writers, and better at writing than most cyclists. This combination of skills made a career in cycling journalism the obvious choice. He is the deputy editor of Cycle Sport, and co-author with Robbie McEwen of One Way Road.