After that astonishing debut, 1958 was an anticlimax for Anquetil’s fans, but the race didn’t lack for drama otherwise. In that year Rivière broke the one-hour record once more despite puncturing, Baldini won the Giro, as well as the World Champion’s rainbow jersey ahead of Bobet, and Jean Stablinski of France – a man who rode in twelve Tours but never came higher than thirtieth in 1962 – won the Vuelta. For football this was a year of grandeur and misery. A glorious Brazilian side won the World Cup, graced by a wonderful boy called Pelé, but another superb team of young players was martyred when the plane carrying Manchester United home from Zagreb crashed at Munich. Three officials and eight journalists were killed along with seven players, including Roger Byrne, Duncan Edwards and Liam Whelan, their names even now like a knell for anyone who was aged twelve that winter. And the Tour saw splendours and miseries of its own.
Although Anquetil had been in good form, the first blow was struck by André Darrigade before a steady turnover of the lead while they made their way from Brussels to Brest by way of Versailles and St-Nazaire. These two were both new stops, the latter still showing signs of the heroic British commando raid commemorated in the name of the rue du 28 février 1943. Charly Gaul won a time trial unexpectedly from Anquetil, and then another up Mont Ventoux. Refreshed by his advertising ventures, Geminiani had been chosen by Adolphe Deledda to ride for his Centre-Midi team, and he justified the choice by taking the GC lead on Mont Ventoux and holding it for two more stages, while Bahamontes won Gap–Briançon on his thirtieth birthday, and would finish with the Mountains prize.
A still more extraordinary stage from Briançon to Aix-les-Bains, one of the epics in the history of the Tour, was ridden in indescribably frightful weather, so bad that the usual time limit was remitted. While Gaul was the one rider who relished the conditions, Anquetil was flagging badly, and by the end of that stage had lost 22 minutes to Gaul, who replaced him in third place. Favero still led the GC by more than half an hour, having replaced Geminiani. For some reason Geminiani was convinced that the French team had betrayed him, and screamed ‘Les Judas!’ at them. As for poor Anquetil, he wasn’t just flagging but ailing, and abandoned on the next stage with pulmonary congestion. Gaul seized and held the lead, to become the third Luxemburger to win the Tour, thirty years after Frantz had completed his double.
Between the finish of one Tour at the Parc des Princes on 19 July 1958 and the departure of the next from Mulhouse on 25 June 1959, France was turned upside down. The bitter war in Algeria led to a military coup there, and then to the sudden return to power in Paris of General de Gaulle after years of internal exile at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. He became president under the constitution of the new Fifth Republic, although the unprecedented powers it gave him didn’t as yet enable him to resolve the conflict, or heal the bitter rifts within the French nation.
On a more trivial level, the French cyclists were also divided, with sharp rivalries between Anquetil, Rivière and Bobet which threatened the collective will of the whole French team. But now, ten years after Binda had made peace between Coppi and Bartali with the Chiavari pact, another accord, the Pact of Poigny-la-Forêt, made peace between the Frenchmen. Like de Gaulle’s return, this did not bring immediate tranquillity, certainly not for Bobet. It turned out to be the last Tour for both him and Robic, the one abandoning at the top of the Col d’Iseran, the other eliminated at Chalon-sur-Saône after the antepenultimate stage. And although both Anquetil and Rivière performed well, far from collaborating, they wore each other out. Anglade rode a brilliant stage from Albi to Aurillac, but they none of them could hold Bahamontes. The Spanish rider won the Tour with a quartet of Frenchmen behind him, Anglade, Anquetil, Rivière and Mahé.
If no Spaniard had won the Tour before, that wasn’t from a shortage of skill, especially in the mountains. Federico Martin Alejandra Bahamontes, harmlessly if unilluminatingly dubbed ‘The Eagle of Toledo’, came from a line of Spanish mountain men, of whom he was the greatest. He had already won the King of the Mountains prize in 1954 and 1958, he won it again this year, and he would win it thrice more in successive years 1962–4. Good judges, like the French journalist Pierre Chany, insist that climbing was then far harder work than it later became: the condition of the roads was worse and the gears were much tougher. Bahamontes was certainly a man of astonishing mettle, wiry and tense, although his mental resilience had one flaw. He had had a nasty downhill crash when riding as an amateur, landing in a cactus as the story went, and he never quite recovered his nerve as an enthusiastic descender. So little did he like going downhill without any support that he once reached the summit of a col on his own and stopped to eat an ice cream until the next riders joined him. His last Mountains prize came on his last but one Tour. On the Bagnères-de-Bigorre–Ax-les-Thermes stage in 1965, in his beloved Pyrenees, he abandoned and went home, for good as it proved.
A pall hung over the 1960 Tour before it began. In recent years Fausto Coppi had had a troubled career and an equally troubled romantic life, even given his reputation as a rake. He had been photographed with a lady not his wife, but unfortunately someone else’s, and the white coat she was wearing added ‘La dama in bianco’ to the language of Italian popular journalism. She had a name of her own, Giulia Locatelli, and she offered him something he did not get from his devout but mousy wife. Bruna was forever telling him to give up cycling, but Giulia adored him as her hero, the white lady’s white knight. Although the affair embroiled Coppi in sundry unsavoury rows, not least with Giulia’s husband, and was followed in lurid detail by the press, it was a true romance, and Coppi was devoted to the son she bore him. Alas, it did nothing for Coppi as a cyclist. He never rode in the Tour after 1952, and his magnificent career petered out while he went on riding elsewhere long after he should have stopped.
Promoters of Criteriums shortened them to a derisory 45 kilometres just so that he could take part with some prospect of finishing. He was still riding in the Vuelta in 1959, but, like an ageing heavyweight humiliatingly floored over and again, he was the first rider to be dropped every day, and only kept going at all by doping himself to the gills. Although he had amassed a huge fortune for a cyclist, leaving $1.5 million at his death, he was a sad shadow, ‘a magnificent and grotesque washout,’ in Chany’s words, ‘a weary and disillusioned man’ wrapped in impenetrable melancholy. In late 1959 he went to take part in some exhibition races in Upper Volta (now less well known as Burkina Faso) where he contracted malaria. Maybe weakened by whatever he had ingested over the years, he died on 2 January 1960. He was forty. According to one lurid rumour which surfaced more than forty years later he had been poisoned by an African rival, but his own doctor discounted this. According to another (which also sounds ben trovato, since it couldn’t have been substantiated without abuse of elementary ecclesiastical ethics), a priest only gave him absolution and the last rites when he agreed, if he survived, to leave Giulia. But she was at his funeral, with their son Faustino, along with Anquetil, Bobet, his enemy and friend Bartali, and thousands of others, as the line of wreaths stretched for hundreds of yards. Goddet wrote that everyone in cycling had wanted to tell him to stop, but that ‘as nobody dared to, destiny took care of it’. Flawed, magnificent, he was one of the greatest riders ever to win the Tour de France; even though he won no more than twice, some still think him the greatest of all.
One sign of de Gaulle’s new regime was monetary: Tour prize money of 47.7 million francs, 2 million to the winner, in 1959 became 400,000 and 20,000 in 1960 – but these were New or ‘heavy’ francs, which had replaced the ailing and ever-inflationary old currency. Judged by a simple test, the first prize now bought 32,258 kilos of bread, and was thus worth more than four times as much in real terms as the 3000 francs won in 1903. Whatever the prize or the currency or the value, the French still couldn’t get back into the race in 1960. Indeed, they had a dismal year, after initial promise. Anquetil had just become the first French rider to win the Giro, from Nencini and Gaul, but he didn’t take part in the Tour, and more misfortune followed for the Tricolores. Three riders wore the yellow jersey before Anglade took it, but from St-Malo to Lorient a four-man break by Rivière, Nencini, Junkermann and Adriaenssens left the field over fourteen minutes behind, disrupting Anglade’s chances. Rivière was still in with his own chances, but in the Cevennes he had a horrible fall, which ended his career and left him in a wheelchair; he died of cancer aged only forty in 1976.
This was the year the French boxer Halimi beat the Irishman Gilroy, and was reported a little implausibly to have said, ‘I’ve avenged Joan of Arc!’, words that might have pleased the general at the Élysée Palace. Gaullism wasn’t as shameless in exploiting sporting glory as different totalitarianisms had been. Even so, the Tour field was still obliged, as it neared Paris on the penultimate Besançon–Troyes stage, to stop at Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. De Gaulle shook hands with Nencini and Anglade, and the peloton saluted him. Though not an ardent sports fan, de Gaulle could recognize a great national institution when he saw one, and his successors in the Élysée Palace have been happy to appropriate the Tour as expressing their own ‘certain idea of France’.
That ceremony was missed by Pierre Beuffeuil because of a puncture, and he then adroitly used the opportunity to escape and win the stage. But it was Nencini who stood on the first place in the Parc. He had held the lead through eleven stages from Pau onwards, despite repeating Walkowiak’s curious trick of winning the Tour without winning a single stage. His compatriot Graziano Battistini was in second and the Belgian Jan Adriaenssens third.
Meantime the Algerian conflict was moving towards its messy conclusion, after de Gaulle had told the French Algerians, ‘Je vous ai compris,’ by which he turned out to mean that he understood he had to abandon those pieds noirs in the name of sacred egoism and for the good of the republic. He saw off the generals’ coup in Algiers, subsequently obtaining the 1962 ceasefire and Evian agreement which meant the end of ‘l’Algérie française’ and the departure of a million pieds noirs for France, following the departure of the army. The Paras marched out of Algiers, where they had rounded up many a usual suspect and merrily tortured them, singing ‘Je ne regrette rien’. And Edith Piaf’s 1961 hit might have been Anquetil’s song as well that year: if he regretted his departure from the Tour two years earlier and then his absence a year later, he kept it to himself, and determined on the best kind of recompense.
His victory this year was indeed devastating. Darrigade won the yellow jersey in the first half-stage, which was his fifth victory on the first day of the Tour, and he finished with the green jersey. In the time trial that immediately followed, Anquetil took the lead, and never lost it over the next three weeks. At the finish he won easily by more than twelve minutes, the French team also winning in a breeze. The only excitement at the end was when Gaul looked sure to follow Anquetil home, but the Italian rider Guido Carlesi snatched second on the last day. It was Carlesi’s first Tour; he was nineteenth the next year, abandoned in 1963 and 1966, and never rode in the race again.
That was Anquetil’s second Tour victory, the first of his unprecedented consecutive four-timer, and his last in French colours. In 1962 the Tour returned after more than three decades to the formula that Desgrange had discarded in 1930, of commercially sponsored teams. And these were truly commercial: instead of bicycle manufacturers, the new team sponsors were businesses that often had no connection with sport, or more usually several sponsors combining to back a team. Anquetil was riding for ACCB–Saint-Raphaël–Helyett–Hutchinson, generally and not surprisingly referred to as St-Raphael; one Italian team was sponsored by the domestic appliances group Moschettieri-Ignis, another by one more drinks company, Carpano. Elsewhere the commercial sponsorship of sport was also beginning – English steeplechasing already had the Hennessy Cognac and Whitbread Gold Cups – as businessmen saw an effective, and cost-effective, way to promote their wares which compared favourably with conventional advertising.
But this race was notable for something more than competing aperitifs: it was the first round of what would be one of the epic duels in the history of the Tour de France. A year earlier that last French team could have included, but didn’t, a fine young rider called Raymond Poulidor. Looking back, the team manager Marcel Bidot lamented this failure. ‘I’m sorry that Antonin Magne opposed the selection of Poulidor in the French team last year. Raymond could come to terms with Anquetil and . . . he could probably win a Tour, or a few. Together they could dominate cycling for ten years.’ They did dominate the Tour for years, but Poulidor would remain the best rider never to win the race, the ‘eternal second’: more precisely, he was second three times and third five.
This intelligent and sensitive man – to the extent that he liked any nickname, he preferred ‘Pouli’, as the peloton called him, and detested the infantile ‘Pou Pou’, which the press inflicted on him for good – was a couple of years younger than Anquetil, born in 1936 in Léonard-de-Noblet near Limoges, the son of métayeurs, poor sharecroppers at the bottom of the French rural ladder. Poulidor grew up fit as any peasant’s son from hard manual work, rode a bike when young from village to village, followed Anquetil into the army, took up cycling seriously, turned pro in 1960. His first big race was the World Road Championship that year, in which he was in the lead when he punctured, but he picked up more prizes before the 1962 Tour in which, by now twenty-six, he was chosen to ride for Mercier–BP–Hutchinson.
It was the beginning of a magnificent and melancholy career, which captured the hearts of the French. Nobody could express that chagrin and disappointment better than Poulidor himself. There have been other autobiographies published under unforgettably sad titles redolent of self-effacement or disappointment, from the Finnish composer Einar Englund’s In the Shadow of Sibelius to Vyvyan Holland’s Son of Oscar Wilde. Neither of those is more poignant than Poulidor’s Gloire sans le Maillot Jaune, and it was, astonishingly enough, true that he never once held the classification général lead to wear the yellow jersey. Between the first time he took third place in the Tour and the last time he did so was an interval of fourteen years, a superbly consistent record; but still, he never won.
He scarcely rode a better Tour than his first, leaving the start at Nancy with a hand in plaster and dropping eight minutes on that first stage. But he stuck with the field, while the lead changed hands endlessly: a record seven men wore the yellow jersey during the course of the race. One of them was Tom Simpson: first British cyclist ever to do so; fine rider; tragic hero. Another day belonged to Poulidor when he won the Briançon–Aix-les-Bains stage across the Chartreuse. But the race belonged to Anquetil, who rode with his steady, ruthless determination, winning only two stages, from the new ville-étape of Luçon to La Rochelle, and then, most convincingly, the time trial from Bourgoin to Lyons, where he took the yellow jersey and held it for the next two days until the finish, with Helyett–Saint-Raphaël winning the team prize. Poulidor had acquitted himself admirably in third, only 10'24" off the pace. Time was surely on his side.