If France was a much calmer country at home in the early 1950s than twenty years before, she was still much troubled by the ebbing tides of empire. One French army was mired in a bitter war in Vietnam, and in April 1952 it launched what was meant to be, but wasn’t, a decisive attack against the communist Vietminh (the background for The Quiet American by Graham Greene). Disaster wasn’t far away, and a French win in the Tour would have been more welcome solace than in most years. It wasn’t to be, not just yet, and France could manage no higher than fifth in the 1952 Tour.
Even then, the narrowest Gallic chauvinist couldn’t deny that this was one of the greatest Tours there have ever been. The race was a modified version of the previous year’s but in the opposite direction: leaving Brest to cross Brittany, Normandy and the north, it turned south through Belgium to Lorraine and Alsace, traversed the Alps, headed to the Pyrenees and then turned from Bordeaux into the Massif Central to reach Paris by way of Vichy. Once more to discourage the field from resting on their pedals, there were two new prizes introduced, one for teams, and the other a prime of 100,000 francs for the rider plus combatif, designed to encourage escapes and attacks. As further tests of toughness, the race for the first time climbed both Mont Ventoux and the Puy de Dôme, the latter geographically part of the Massif Central but dramatically standing all on its own at 1582 metres to overlook Clermont-Ferrand, an unjustly neglected industrial city with an interesting old quarter and two fine churches worth seeing, the cathedral and Notre-Dame-du-Port.
At first the race seemed to lack competitive edge because of the absence of Koblet, Kubler and Bobet, but there were plenty of other cracks and rising stars – and for the first time they could be seen on television not only at the finish but while they were riding road stages, with Henri Persin as the intrepid cameraman perched on a motorbike and Georges de Canes as travelling commentator. Partly thanks to the new team prize, which had revved up the Belgians, the first stage was taken by Rik Van Steenbergen, whose victory in this year’s Paris–Roubaix race ahead of Coppi showed that he was in fine fettle. But the Belgians subsided after that start, or at any rate devoted themselves to supporting Ockers. The fifth stage from Roubaix to Namur was won by Diederich, but more to the point Coppi flexed his muscles for the first time to follow him home, before winning a 60-kilometre time trial by 34 seconds from the Belgian Roger Decock.
This was a fairly extraordinary feat in itself, given that Coppi punctured his front tyre, and then, as he was trying to change the wheel, lost additional time when his mechanic absent-mindedly handed him a spare rear wheel. Anyone standing close to them could have learned some interesting colloquial Italian. Over the Ballon d’Alsace it was Geminiani’s turn to strike, but the race had barely begun before the Alps, where Coppi reigned supreme. There were two stages finishing at altitude, l’Alpe d’Huez, and Sestrières the next day. Coppi won them both, with poor Robic floundering in his wake, eighty seconds behind him at l’Alpe d’Huez.
But it was the next stage that people would still talk about fifty years later. Over the Cols de Croix-de-Fer, Télégraphe and Galibier, Coppi was in a class of his own. No one who saw it ever forgot the way he accelerated past the field up the steepest of slopes. Nor did Robic forget it, nor the young French rider Jean Le Guily, who gave what would have been an unbeatable climbing performance on any other day, nor Ruiz, who finished in second place eight minutes behind Coppi, now with a twenty-minute lead in the race.
It had been supposed that Bartali was riding in the Tour for old time’s sake, and certainly not for friendship’s. To everyone’s astonishment both suppositions proved wrong. On the stage to Monaco, Coppi punctured once, then his rear wheel broke. And Bartali stopped to hand his own wheel to the man who was supposed to be his bitter enemy. It was a knightly deed, and one of the most touching gestures in the history of the great race. Maybe providence rewarded virtue two days later. Robic rode explosively up Mont Ventoux to win by two minutes from Bartali, who was now third overall, 49 minutes behind Ockers, who was 25'27" behind Coppi. The first of the Pyrenean stages was won by Raphael Geminiani after he had failed to escape over the Peyresourde, but then managed to do so over the Aspin.
All of that was eclipsed by Coppi’s breathtaking ride to Pau the next day. He was already sure of winning the Mountains title as well as the Tour, but he accumulated even more climbing points by leading over the Tourmalet, Soulor and Aubisque. And even that wasn’t the end of it – nor the greatest moment in his victory. When they reached the Puy de Dôme, he did it again, and more. The mark of the great grimpeur is the ability to climb a slope with the gradient of a ski run, which would exhaust most people on foot, and to overtake the field almost as though the road was flat. On the Puy Coppi sized up the field from the rear, and he then cut down his rivals one by one, Ockers, Robic, Geminiani, Bartali, until only the Dutch rider Nolten was still ahead. Then he too was passed, as Coppi reached the summit to win by a bare second, and quite brilliantly.
On the last two stages to Vichy and Paris (two names with unhappy political overtones when linked together) Coppi took it easier. He could afford to. He ended in the Parc with the Mountains prize and at the head of the winning Italian team, as well as winner of the Tour by almost half an hour from Ockers, then Ruiz, Bartali and Robic.
Over the course of a century the Tour’s palmarès have developed as it were by compound interest. Petit-Breton won the fifth and sixth Tours back to back, but it wasn’t until Thys in 1920 that a rider had won three Tours. By 1939 only Bottecchia and Frantz had followed Petit-Breton to win consecutive Tours, and truly great cyclists like Leducq and Coppi won no more than two Tours each. By contrast, the distinctive feature of the race in the second half of the century was the increasing dominance of suc cessive generations by one rider. That’s to say that a rider won the first hat-trick of consecutive victories in 1953–5; another won the first four-timer in 1961–4, and then became the first to win five in all for the first time; both those records were matched less than a decade later in 1969–72; then in the 1990s a rider won five successive Tours and in the years on either side of the centenary in 2003 the race was ostensibly “won” seven years in a row, although by means now known to have been fraudulent.
This consistency represented by those post-war champions – Bobet, Anquetil, Marckx, Hinault, Induráin and Armstrong (as it seemed before his disgrace) – may be a reflection on the technical improvement of bikes, which gradually reduced some of the elements of chance, on increasingly efficient training, on ever-greater fitness and more sophisticated medical treatment of one form or another. At any rate, the fiftieth anniversary Tour of 1953 saw Bobet stamp his authority on the race. Apart from taking in three new stages, at Cauterets, Albi and Montluçon, and bidding an emotional farewell to Bartali, riding in the race for the last time after an astonishing twenty-six years, the Tour saw one more historic innovation, the maillot vert.
This green jersey is often called the sprinters’ prize, which is a simplification of a complex truth. It is an award ‘by points’, themselves allocated on a system whose complexity would tax the combined talents of a senior wrangler and a Chancery Silk. Points are awarded inter alia for ‘hot-spot’ sprints interspersed on the road stages, and for consistency at the finish, which itself, given bunch sprint finishes, favours specialist sprinters. And so the green jersey, although not literally a sprinting prize, is usually won by sprinters. The first green jersey was won by the Swiss rider Fritz Schaer, who finished sixth overall, and Kubler won the second (four years after he had won the Tour) while finishing second. Then Ockers’s double in 1955–6 announced that the points jersey would become something of a Belgian benefit: from 1955 to 1988 Belgian riders took the green eighteen times in thirty-four races.
But the Tour winner of 1953 was a Frenchman, albeit the victor more of a French civil war than an international contest. The 1947 winner Robic was locked in a sharp dispute with the national team, and rode instead for Ouest. After the lead had passed from Schaer to Roger Hassenforder and back, Robic took the yellow jersey. But the French team were biding their time until the Pyrenees. Robic had caused surprise and amusement by turning up for the race in a new white-rubber helmet. For more than fifty years cyclists had ridden the Tour in casquets or cotton caps, and many hated – some don’t much like even now – the idea of hard headgear. Helmets were thought wimpish, which they may have been, and uncomfortable, as they certainly were. Robic was no wimp, but he was accident-prone, his regular falls earning him the unkind nickname of ‘glass head’ from the Italians. He angrily responded to mockery of his new titfer by defying his team-mate François Mahé to hit him on the helmet with a screwdriver handle, which Mahé cheerfully did, until he drew blood.
It was not a good augury. Robic tried another quaint wheeze on the Tourmalet, filling a bidon with lead so as to add weight – and hence speed to – his downhill run, which was less impressive than alarming. Indeed, if the climbs weren’t quite as hairy as the journey Yves Montand and his comrades made in Le Salaire de la Peur, this year’s spine-tingling movie, the riders counted their own wages of fear. After Koblet had fallen on the Col du Solour, Robic fell in the Fouremont, and the lead passed to his team-mates, Mahé and then Jean Mallejac. On the Albi–Béziers stage the Tricolores struck. But, although they had taken over the race, the French team now fell out among themselves. During that stage Robic made a mess of his sprints; there was an unseemly squabble between him and Geminiani over bonus points; and it took the best efforts of the team manager Marcel Bidot to reconcile them.
It was the sixth Tour in which Louison Bobet had ridden, five years after he had captured the imagination of France, and he finally came into his inheritance over the Col d’Izoard, with a superb performance that delighted Bidot and was applauded by one inconspicuous but illustrious spectator: standing on the roadside in shorts and with a camera round his neck was Fausto Coppi. Bidot said that Bobet had found ‘la bonne carburation’, his body firing on all cylinders and pumping in perfect harmony like a motor; Coppi said with meiotic eloquence, ‘He looks good.’
At the Parc everything had been done to make the Cinquentenaire a sentimental occasion, already marked by the government with a special 12-franc stamp. Fifteen former winners were present, including the very first, Maurice Garin now a ripe eighty-two, as well as Garrigou, both the Maes, Leducq, Magne, Lapébie and Kubler, and Christophe who had worn the very first yellow jersey thirty-two years before. All of this famous crowd cheered home Bobet, 14'18" ahead of Mallejac. There were other heroes besides: two riders had shown what they where capable of, Hassenforder wearing the yellow jersey on behalf of Nord-Est-Centre over three stages from Caen to Bordeaux, Darrigade winning a stage for the first time, and the boy star of the race, Charly Gaul of Luxembourg, riding in his first Tour at only twenty.
No one who had ever seen Louison Bobet in his infancy would have supposed him to be born a hero. For a great athlete he was very highly strung, not to say a bundle of neuroses, who was angered by the smallest irritation like a grease mark on his front tyre or the colour of the wrapping of his spare tyre. A domestique of his was once sent off to get him a bottle of mineral water from a bar, haggled at length over payment (or perhaps hoped not to pay at all, as riders often enjoyed free drinks), finally and desperately caught up with the peloton which had left him far behind to hand the water to his boss, who said angrily, ‘You know very well I don’t like that brand.’ Foibles like that, and his distinctive personality in general, helped explain why France was by now divided into two camps, Bobetiste and anti-Bobetiste: not quite as seriously as the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards whose schism had indirectly brought the Tour into being, but fiercely partisan enough.
If the antis wanted to see Louison get his come-uppance next year, they were to be disappointed. At least the Tour provided some relief for a France which was wading deeper into its late-imperial struggles. Although 1954 was the year when Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his exalted Mémoires de Guerre, it was also the year that would leave far grimmer memories of war, with the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and withdrawal from Vietnam, and the beginning of the Algerian uprising that would poison France for years to come.
Winning the Tour this year was made easier by the absence of the Italians. Their attempts to drum up publicity outside cycling led to an acrimonious row with the Tour organizers, who had themselves found a new sponsor or partenaire officiel in the car company Peugeot. And for the first time the race began outside the borders of France, in Amsterdam. The first stage to Antwerp was aptly won by the Dutchman Wout Wagtmans, who held the yellow jersey for two more stages, but from early on it was clear that the race was never likely to be won by anyone but Bobet. He had a tussle with Gilbert Bauvin, riding for Nord-Est-Centre, who won the Bordeaux–Bayonne stage, but Bobet had taken the lead by Millau on the way to the Massif Central, and seized complete control of the race over the Col d’Izoard. Robic and Koblet both fell and were eliminated, and Bobet added a time trial at Nancy before crossing the line at the Parc comfortably ahead of Kubler, who took the green jersey as consolation. Beside them on the podium was a young Spaniard: Federico Bahamontes had won the Mountains prize for what even he couldn’t have guessed would be the first of six times.
Even his two victories in the Tour, to which he added the World Champion’s rainbow jersey, couldn’t make all of France love Bobet, and even respecting him was made no easier by his behaviour. In the early summer of 1955 he was afflicted by a hardening of his skin, which created acute saddle sores. Although it was painful, it wasn’t unique or irreparable, but Bobet always gave the impression that he could turn a problem into a drama into a disaster; or to be more charitable, his physical malady accentuated his psychological malaise, and as a crisis of self-confidence gripped him he talked of pulling out of the Tour, for all that he was on a hat-trick, as cricketers would say. Few of his colleagues warmed to him, any more than much of the public, what with his brusque manner and self-absorption and tightfistedness, but Bidot knew how badly the French team, and France, and the Tour, needed Bobet. And so he enlisted the support of Raymond Le Bert, Bobet’s soigneur, and between them they talked him out of quitting.
A clockwise race started at Le Havre and went into Switzerland and as far as Zurich before reaching the Alps, where the action really began. When it did it took the unexpected form of a dazzling display by Gaul. Still only twenty-two, the Luxembourger annihilated the field over the Cols du Télégraphe and Galibier and had a thirteen-minute lead on the stage into Briançon to take third place in the GC. He outstripped Bobet again towards Monaco before crashing on a wet road and surrendering third place to him.
Other casualties included the first British team to take part in the Tour. Sceptics had wondered whether the British were yet up to it, even if there were plenty of good English cyclists with achievements to their credit in track events: this very year Norman Sheil was the first British rider to win the World Pursuit Championship, from his countryman Peter Brotherton. The team comprised David Bedwell, Tony Hoar, Stan Jones, Fred Krebs, Bob Maitland, Bernard Pusey, Brian Robinson, Ian Steel and Bev Wood; and their names joined those annals of gallant failure that adorn our island story. It was a tough race, and only 69 of 130 starters finished. Those who abandoned included all the British cyclists apart from Robinson, who finished twenty-ninth and thereby began a continental career of some distinction, and Hoar, who ended the Tour as lanterne rouge, the last to finish, just over six hours behind the winner. It mattered not that he had won or lost but that he had played the game.
Being an English fan in many sports has long been a spiritual exercise, or an education in disappointment, which takes the form of elation when our lads flatter to deceive, do well against each other, and then less well against foreigners. Tim Henman could beat most British tennis players, but not so many Europeans or Americans; cricketers who looked good in county matches look double-plus-ungood against the Australians. And in late 2001, when Arsenal were about to follow Sir John Moore to Corunna and play Deportivo, one football correspondent asked plaintively why the team with much the best away record in the domestic league had such a poor away record in Europe. His question brought to mind the cruel saying of the great historian Sir Lewis Namier that, since the fifteenth century, no Italian army has ever beaten anything apart from another Italian army.
After Lucien Lazaridès had won the stage to Marseilles came what proved the decisive day of the race, from Marseilles to Avignon over Mont Ventoux. Despite that tumble, Gaul was another king of a rainy country who actually liked racing in cold wet weather, and he didn’t enjoy what turned out to be a blisteringly hot day even for Provence in July. Bobet did. He climbed the great peak relentlessly, with Bidot shouting encouragement from his car alongside, and with his rivals falling away one by one. This was the first year that the Tour used a photo-finish camera to separate riders, but no snapshots were needed in Avignon: even after a puncture, Bobet entered the papal city alone.
The yellow jersey was still held, from Briançon, by his team-mate Antonin Rolland, Miguel Poblet having already taken it – the first Spaniard ever to do so – as well as Wout Wagtmans and Van Est. But Rolland was about to lose the lead. Gaul won one more stage, from Albi to St Gaudens, and it was here that Bobet took the overall lead and held it despite a challenge from Jean Brankart. And despite his own condition. Those who failed to warm to Bobet’s personality couldn’t fail to recognize his courage. As he had feared, his sores grew worse as the race wore on, he looked ungainly and even comical with his backside waving up in the air as he tried to keep it out of the saddle.
The penultimate Châtteleraut–Tours stage was a time trial, and a time of trial it was for Bobet, who was now in acute pain. It was won by Brankart, a deserved second overall when they reached the Parc, but not as deserving as the winner. Bobet’s saddle area was so seriously afflicted that later in the year it required surgery. He won other races, Paris–Roubaix and Bordeaux–Paris, but he said that he was never the same rider again after that July, and he may have been right. He retired in 1961, and, like all too many winners, died before his time, in 1983 aged only fifty-eight.
If the rule of the second half-century of the Tour has been for one outstanding champion to consolidate his position over several years, and for form to be confirmed, then rules are defined by exceptions. Few years have ever seen such a surprise as 1956. Roger Walkowiak won a race which was full of oddities, not least his repeating the curious feat of Cornet in 1904 and Lambot in 1922 by winning the Tour without finishing first in a single stage. The yellow jersey changed hands eight times and was worn by six riders; Darrigade and Walkowiak both won it, lost it and won it back. A French citizen, but not even riding for the national team, ‘Walko’ (his nickname a little more forgivable than most) had been drafted into the Nord-Est-Centre team directed by Sauveur Ducazeaux who discerned his quality despite his reputation for useless impetuosity in the form of the cyclist’s forlorn hope, the échappée bidon or doomed breakaway.
Many a rider of strength and spirit can escape from the peloton, sometimes by a good distance, sometimes for a large part of a day. The question is whether such an escape is going to endure and have a serious impact on the race or whether it’s a gallant but empty gesture. In recent years Jacky Durand was the master of the échappée bidon, making long lonely escapes to while away the time well ahead of the field and often winning the daily award for combativité, as most aggressive rider. But he rarely seems to end very high in the GC, and the great escape too often has a ring of the RAF officer in Beyond the Fringe: ‘We need a useless sacrifice at this point.’
Like treason in Talleyrand’s phrase, road racing is a matter of timing. That’s peculiarly true of contre la montre stages, time trials where the successful rider is the one, as used to be said of Lester Piggott on the racecourse, with a clock in his head. But throughout the Tour individual riders and teams need to have an acute sense of time, of who stands where in the table. Riders are kept informed of their and others’ relative positions, formerly by directeurs sportifs shouting the news from cars, or by signs at the roadside with timings chalked on them, nowadays less romantically by the earpieces of the radios tucked in a jersey back pocket to which all riders are constantly tuned in. Hence other riders can watch with detachment as Durand or any other escape artist sets off on his foray, simply because he is so far behind in the overall classification. But occasionally the break succeeds, and the escapers actually establish a commanding lead.
In this respect also, 1956 was exceptional. Going anticlockwise from Rheims through Belgium, Normandy and Brittany, the race took fire between Lorient and Angers when a group escape of thirty-one riders got eighteen minutes ahead of the peloton. The group was led by Walkowiak but also included the man who would prove his main rival, Gilbert Bauvin of the French team. A climbers’ contest developed in the Pyrenees among Walkowiak, Bahamontes, Ockers (who would finish with the green jersey) and Gaul (who weeks earlier had won the Giro with an epic ride through the snow on Monte Bondone, and would finish the Tour with the Mountains prize). Walkowiak made another – individual and brilliant – break over the Croix de Fer to take the overall lead into Grenoble and keep it through Lyons and Montluçon, reaching the Parc 1'25" ahead of Bauvin and then Adriaenssens and Bahamontes.
Although Walkowiak never won the Tour again, it was no freak result. Jacques Goddet called 1956 ‘one of my favourite Tours’, and its quality was simply demonstrated by a record average speed of 36.268 k.p.h. A final prize for good loser and good humour should have gone to Roger Chaussabel, the Marseillais rider who finished as lanterne rouge more than four hours behind Walkowiak. ‘I don’t ride, I don’t climb, I don’t sprint,’ he wryly said. ‘I’m a complete racer. Donc un homme du Tour.’
If the French rider who won the Tour wasn’t in the national team, it was still a good year for the French, on bike or on foot: far away at the Melbourne Olympics, Alain Mimoun won the Marathon gold medal while, of French cyclists, Jean Forestier won the Tour of Flanders, Bobet won Paris–Roubaix, and André Darrigade – who showed well in the Tour to win the yellow jersey at Pau – won the Tour of Lombardy. And there was young Jacques Anquetil, who hadn’t yet ridden in the Tour but who won a fourth consecutive Grand Prix des Nations, and broke the one-hour speed record with 46.393 km. He was the man to watch.
His speed record lasted only until the following year when it was broken by Roger Rivière, but that was small worry for Anquetil when he made his Tour debut. Born in Rouen in 1934, the son of a small farmer who grew strawberries and apples, he had been sent to technical school before he got a low-paid job at a metal factory. But his heart was never in it. Anquetil loved cycling, and he dreamed of the rewards it would bring: even before he had the means to gratify them, Jacques had luxurious tastes in food and wine. He became an independent, the stepping stone between amateur and pro, was soon established as a brilliant time-triallist, and in 1952 began winning races by the fistful.
Before long, he had caught the eye of a member of a famous family. Henri Pélissier, winner in 1923 and greatest of the three brothers, had died in 1935 aged only forty-six, but Francis Pélissier had survived and prospered and was now directeur sportif of La Perle. He saw in Anquetil at first a potential champion time-triallist, and he offered him a two-month contract at 30,000 francs a month. When Anquetil duly won the 1953 Grand Prix, he became a national hero. Journalists flocked to the family farm at Quincampoix, where Pélissier managed to get in on the act, photographed with cigarette in lips and thumbs hooked into waistcoat.
The young champion was now living high on the hog, dining out and buying an expensive car, a Renault Frégate in bright red (or ‘crushed strawberry’ as it was jocosely suggested). But there was one thing no fame or money could avoid: military service. A couple of years later another famous young star was drafted into the United States Army, but Elvis Presley’s career was not more inconveniently interrupted than Jacques Anquetil’s. The French army even insisted on following regulations and sending him to Algeria, a good deal more of a trouble spot at the time than Elvis’s Bavarian posting, but he was sensibly allowed to spend his time here riding a bike, before returning to civilian life and competitive cycling. After an astonishing palmarès in shorter-distance races in 1956 – French Pursuit championship, six Criteriums, and two top time trials, the Grand Prix of Geneva, and that Grand Prix des Nations, for the fourth out of six in succession – he made his still more astonishing debut in the Tour in 1957.
This new ace was one of the least romantic or beguiling men to have ridden in the Tour, and he never became the best-loved winner, but he was one of the most admired, and was certainly one of the most intelligent. Those who knew him well said that he was essentially shy (that useful excuse for any form of ill humour or bad manners), and he was doubtless solitary by disposition. In later years he didn’t get about much any more, but stayed on his Norman estate, eating and drinking on his own and looking at the stars. Even when he was one of the most famous men in France, a seemingly farouche and arrogant manner annoyed colleagues, and alienated fans. Some of it was deliberate, as when he summoned a reporter one evening during the Tour to watch him consume a large plate of seafood washed down with Muscadet, knowing that this would be recorded and would incense rivals whose digestive systems barely allowed them more than liquid rice. Still, if other riders were modest men, then many of them had a good deal to be modest about, and if Jacques Anquetil was a proud man, he had a good deal to be proud of.
At first, Anquetil had said that he wouldn’t ride for the French team alongside Bobet, but that problem was resolved during the Giro when Bobet said he would not be taking part in the Tour. A year that saw the death of Maurice Garin, fifty-four years after his victory in the first Tour, also saw the Tricolores dominating the Tour almost from beginning to end of a sultry July. They won between them thirteen stages, with André Darrigade, René Privat and Jean Forestier successively wearing the yellow jersey, interrupted only by Nicolas Barone of the Île-de-France regional team, until Anquetil took command.
From Nantes to Rouen to Belgium and then down to Alsace, he bided his time, before striking in the mountains. Or rather, he struck a first blow on the Roubaix–Charleroi stage with a brilliant climb over the Grammont ‘Wall’, before beating a group of eight, more than ten minutes ahead of the field, in a sprint finish to Thonon-les-Bains. He then rode fiercely over the Galibier, challenged by the tough Gastone Nencini – who would end with the Mountains prize – until shaking him off.
But Anquetil’s finest moment in this Tour came in the Pyrenees. He had a severe défaillance and seemed near collapse on the Aubisque, before fighting back into the race by pure willpower, holding the yellow jersey in the end all the way from Briançon to Paris, and reaching the Parc disdainfully more than fifteen minutes ahead of Janssens. Tragedy marred Anquetil’s first great victory. As the race had dipped into Catalonia and back, on the Barcelona–Ax-les-Thermes stage, the press motorbike in which the famous Tour reporter Alex Virot was being driven by René Wagner crashed, and both were killed. It was Virot who, not long before his death, had given Anquetil a piece of advice: ‘If you concentrate on making money you’ll lose races, if you concentrate on winning races, you’ll make money.’ This was the cycling version of Pushkin’s maxim, ‘Write for pleasure and publish for money,’ and it was one that Anquetil took to heart.
If anyone was keen on making money it wasn’t the riders but the organizers: 1957 saw the baleful innovation of commercial affiches – advertising logos – on cyclists’ jerseys. The appearance of riders was slowly changing. In photographs until the Second World War they look heavier: heavier bikes with sturdier tyres, cork-topped tin bidons on the handlebars, chunky dust goggles worn over strong cotton caps, heavy cloth shorts and woollen jerseys with one large pocket for food, emblazoned with the team name, Alcyon or J.-B. Louvet, as Jean Brankart and Stan Ockers are still grinning in post-war races above the modest Elve-Peugeot strip on their chests. Now Raphael Geminiani took the initiative in drumming up advertisers, and Anquetil rode to victory bearing the name of the aperitif St-Raphaël. It might have seemed a small step but it might, forty-five years later, also seem a sad one: ‘Gem’ didn’t foresee the day when cyclists’, footballers’ and racing drivers’ clothing would be so heavily covered with commercial names that their colours were barely visible, when the patron’s initials ‘HD’ were discreetly removed from the yellow jersey to make room for other names, and when only baseball teams – surprisingly but admirably in the home of advertising – remained ad-free.