If Anquetil was one of those sportsmen easier to admire than to love, he belonged in that respect to a formidable line, a Don Bradman not a Tom Graveney, a Joe DiMaggio not a Willie Mays, a Roy Keane not a George Best, a Rob Andrew not a Phil Bennett. For one thing, his specialism of the time trial is by definition the least beguiling or most desiccated aspect of bike racing, the province of sophisters, economists and calculators. Time-triallists may stack up the minutes, and the scoring of the Tour is weighted in their favour, but what the public loves is doughty roadmen and even more the climbers who can make their case before the ‘judges of peace’ in the great mountain ranges.
And so, even after three victories, Anquetil hadn’t captured French hearts. In 1963, he took the opportunity of the fiftieth Tour (as opposed to the fiftieth anniversary ten years before) to show what he could do. Yes, he won the two time trials as expected, 24.5 kilometres at Angers and then 55 kilometres from Arbois to Besançon two weeks later, but he did much more than that.
Even at the height of his powers, Anquetil never looked a well man, thin, drawn, almost emaciated, and appearances weren’t deceptive since indeed he often was not very well. In the spring of 1963, five years after the illness that knocked him out of the 1958 Tour, he was infested by a tapeworm which left him lean and weakened, and his doctors advised him against taking part. ‘Never mind your doctor’s orders,’ Oscar Wilde was told in the witness box, and replied, ‘I never do.’ Anquetil followed his principle. He left Paris under the watchful gaze of Bobet and set off with the field of 130 through Champagne, Normandy and the Limousin. With Poulidor well below his best, any challenge to Anquetil would come from Bahamontes, and would come in the mountains, or so it was supposed.
In fact, Bahamontes threw down a challenge on the first day with an escape that put him ninety seconds ahead of Anquetil; the yellow jersey was taken by Eddy Pauwels, a Belgian rider with Wiels–Groene Leuw. A team time trial at Jambes was won by Pelforth–Sauvage–Lejeune, promoting one more alcoholic beverage, and one that reflects amusingly on French taste. The late Sir Kingsley Amis laid down the dogmatic principle that no decent drink should taste like medicine, which rules out most continental aperitifs, Campari, Punt-e-Mes and indeed Saint-Raphaël. But a medicinally sour fortified wine is surely less of an acquired taste than a sickly-sweet beer like Pelforth. Could anyone but the French enjoy it? At any rate it was the prevailing theme of sponsorship. Other teams were sponsored, in cumbrous portmanteau names, by tyre manufacturers, with a prize for cumbrousness taken by VC XII–Saint-Raphaël–Gitane–Dunlop. But drinks predominated.
The following day another break was led by the Irishman Shay (for Seamus) Elliott from Anquetil’s team, who had abandoned in two Tours since 1956, finished in midfield in two, and would end in sixty-third place this year, and included Henri Anglade, who gained more than nine minutes on Anquetil and looked like a real threat. Elliott then took the yellow jersey, the first Irish rider to do so, and held it for three more days. Anquetil easily beat Poulidor in the first time trial to begin a steady ascent in the GC.
In the mountains Anquetil revealed his greatness. Not at first: when they reached the Pyrenees, Bahamontes beat him over the Col d’Aubisque, but Anquetil turned tables over the Tourmalet with the sun on his back, holding Bahamontes, and then setting off in a five-man sprint for the finish at Bagnères de Bigorre to win the stage from Jose Perez Frances, Poulidor and Bahamontes. Bahamontes won one Alpine stage, from Saint-Étienne to Grenoble, to move into second place, and he took the yellow jersey at Val d’Isère when he finished upsides with the reigning champion.
‘The Tour will be decided on the Forclaz,’ Anquetil said. The following day they raced from Val d’Isère to Chamonix. Bahamontes broke away gamely from Anquetil and Poulidor on the Col du Grand St Bernard to take ninety seconds, but he lost the time downhill, unluckily slowed by rain and fog before finding the road broken up by building work. A group of ten riders formed to climb the Forclaz, the third of the day’s cols, thirty kilometres from the finish, again in gruelling conditions over what was more a gravel track than a road. Anquetil and Bahamontes dropped the group, Bahamontes attacked to go four lengths ahead, Anquetil came back.
And then he stopped. This was a ruse dreamed up by Geminiani: pretending that he had had a mechanical hitch, he changed his bike for a lighter model, and although Bahamontes took four seconds at the summit, it wasn’t enough. Anquetil had been right, and he clinched his superiority as they sprinted into Chamonix where Anquetil received the ovation of his life as he arrived to collect the yellow jersey. An even larger crowd awaited him at the Parc when he finished the race 3'35" from Bahamontes: a sad contrast with Poulidor, who hadn’t coped with the mountains, finished eighth and was derisively whistled at by the Parisian crowd for his pains. He could only nurse his injured pride and wait for next year.
But still fortune didn’t smile on Poulidor in 1964. Bahamontes won the Mountains prize, for the third year running – the sixth time in all, and the last time as it proved – while Janssen won the points prize, and Georges Groussard was the new star, riding like his brother Joseph for Pelforth, and leading from eighth to sixteenth stages. None of that mattered on this Tour besides the personal contest between the two rivals, one of the greatest such duels the race has ever seen. Neither won a stage of the clockwise race until after the last day in the Alps. Anquetil had come to the Tour in top form after winning the Giro. He took Briançon–Monaco, and then another stage to Toulon. Poulidor fought back. He could have won Andorra–Toulouse after beating Anquetil over the Port d’Envalira but for an accident near the finish, he could have won the Peyrehorade–Bayonne time trial but for a puncture, leaving it to be taken by Anquetil.
Then came a last climb, up the Puy de Dôme, on the day before Bastille Day and only four days from Paris; and it saw a culmination of that great duel. This was only the third time that the Tour had climbed the Puy. The recent fashion is for climbing stages to end up a mountain, at a ski resort which has paid to advertise itself thus. The Tour used to climb Mont Ventoux and then come down again, rather than, as in 2002, finishing on the peak to the great inconvenience of all those covering the race. But with Puy there’s no choice: it’s its own Arrivée because the road reaches the peak and ends there, with no other road down, after the climb turns from one 5-kilometre stretch at 1-in-14 gradient to another 5 kilometres at 1-in-8.
On that day the two men raced coude à coude, not in the loose sense that Tour journalists love to say ‘shoulder to shoulder’ for any two riders in close contention, but actually bumping elbows and thighs, Anquetil on the inside, Poulidor on the valley side, as they jostled behind Jimenez and Bahamontes. Finally Poulidor broke away to reach the peak ahead of his rival, but Anquetil was still 14 seconds ahead in the GC, which he had increased slightly before reaching the Parc to win the Tour by a cruel 55 seconds from Poulidor. It was cruel because Poulidor had been beaten by less than a minute after three weeks and more than 127 hours in the saddle, or by 0.00013 of the total time ridden, rather as though a 1500-metre track race lasting nearly four minutes was lost by a thirtieth of a second; and it was doubly cruel, because it was the nearest he would ever come to winning the Tour.
Defeat and victory weren’t followed by any great show of sportsmanship. Anquetil had said ungenerously at the Puy summit, ‘It wasn’t a great day for Poulidor or for me,’ and Poulidor’s directeur sportif Magne reacted angrily after the race: ‘Raymond has lost the Tour because he lied to me.’ He calmed down after a while, although Magne was at no time a warm personality, with the public, or with his colleagues, or with his Mercier riders. Sociolinguists speak of the ‘T/V’ distinction in most European languages, though not in English, native speakers of which have the greatest difficulty with this even when they speak those languages quite well; that is, the differentiation between intimate T(u) and formal V(ous). Bon bourgeois eschew tu: two couples, General and Madame de Gaulle, and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, had this in common, that they called each other ‘vous’ all their lives. Some groups – students and miners – will always instinctively tutoyer, and cyclists too, but Magne never did when speaking to his team. He illustrated the point when he said to Poulidor, ‘Raymond, vous êtes insaisissable,’ literally, ‘You’re elusive,’ or, ‘I don’t get you.’ There at least he spoke for many people.
For his part, Anquetil barely disguised the contempt he felt for Poulidor for lacking the final killer instinct, and even those who loved Poulidor and longed for him to win knew that there was something in this. I thought of his grandeurs and misères on 19 July 2002 when the stage from Lannemezan ended at Plateau-de-Beille and a vast throng made its way very slowly indeed down from the 1780-metre ski station. Sitting in the great gruesome traffic jam I turned around to look out of the side window, and realized that I was next to the Crédit Lyonnais car, and there was Poulidor, his features softened after decades of retirement but in any case always sensitive and pensive, and perceptibly sad.
If he followed the cycling news attentively Poulidor would have heard something else that year, and learned a new name. The title of amateur World Road Champion had been won by a young Belgian called Eddy Merckx. He almost didn’t take part in that race because the official doctor of the Belgian cycling federation said that his heart was ‘too small’ for serious riding. His own doctor was called in, for a second opinion that changed cycling history. When the 1965 Tour began, as far afield as Cologne, the field didn’t include Anquetil. He was much preoccupied with his life outside cycling; he had recently sold the hotel he owned in Rouen and bought a farm; he had quite enough laurels to rest on, with a Vuelta and two Giros as well as consecutive Tours; he was irritated by the way the public still preferred Poulidor to him. ‘I won’t be riding in the 1965 Tour de Poulidor,’ he told a reporter early in the year, and when asked to expatiate, said that by reducing the number of time trials, the Tour organizers had loaded the dice in Poulidor’s favour.
This wasn’t actually true, as an amused Poulidor pointed out: ‘Bloody Jacques’ always wanted to say something controversial about the Tour, he remarked, and anyway the time trials hadn’t been lengthened. As his own wife Janine admitted, Anquetil did have a knack of getting bees in his bonnet, but this one buzzed away and couldn’t be dislodged. He had a fine season, winning the Dauphiné Libéré and the Bordeaux–Paris races – travelling overnight from one race to the other – as well as a stack of Criteriums, but he held to his resolve and missed the great race, almost as if to say to Poulidor, ‘It’s all yours, if you’re up to it.’
As it proved, the man who struck first and last was Felice Gimondi, a 23-year-old Italian who had announced his arrival by winning the Tour de l’Avenir – the tour-of-the-future, or amateurs’ race, run over the Tour course – the year before. Even then, he was lucky to be taking part in the big boys’ Tour, as a replacement in the GS Salvarini team for Bruno Fantinato who had forfeited his place. He opened up a handy lead to win the third stage from Roubaix to Rouen, before Poulidor, in a most ironical comment on Anquetil’s animadversions, won the first time trial by seven seconds from him. Julio Jimenez struck back in the Pyrenees to win the stage into Bagnères-de-Bigorre, but Poulidor bravely won ahead of him up Mont Ventoux, where Gimondi managed to limit the damage. After Jimenez had won another stage, Briançon–Aix-les-Bains in the Alps, to ensure that he would finish as King of the Mountains, Gimondi won a time trial up the newly raced Mont Revard. And then, on the very last stage, run on the quatorze juillet, a mere 37.8 kilometres from Versailles to Paris, Gimondi won ahead of Gianni Motta, with Poulidor at 1'08" – which was to say 2'40" behind Gimondi in the final GC.
All the talk was of Gimondi’s prowess, and of Poulidor’s comportment in defeat. It may be thought a linguistic illustration of the English Imposture that, whereas the English words for chagrin and Schadenfreude are ‘chagrin’ and ‘schadenfreude’, the French and German words for ‘fair play’ are le fairplay and die Fair-play. However that may be, it was for his fair play and sportsmanship that Poulidor was universally admired; or almost universally. ‘Nice guys finish last’ is an old tag, and something of a misquotation. What Leo ‘The Lip’ Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, originally said – in 1949, when the National League had seven teams – was ‘Nice guys finish seventh.’ If he had followed the Tour during Poulidor’s career, he might have said: ‘Nice guys finish second or third.’
For Poulidor there was one more bitter cup to drink in 1966, though with a slightly different flavour. The race left Nancy for Dieppe and Angers on the way to Bordeaux and the Pyrenees, where a new climb had been added between Pau and Luchon, the Col de Mente, a handsome pass one day to be darkened by tragedy. Poulidor’s decency and decorum had now made him more popular than ever. On the other hand, and whether or not he was graced with those qualities (or whether or not he cared), Anquetil’s strength as a rider had never been greater. Although he was third in the Giro behind the 23-year-old Gianni Motta, he won the Liège–Bastogne–Liège race this year, along with his fifth Paris–Nice, and the Grand Prix des Nations for the ninth time in nine appearances. It seemed certain that the Tour would be won by one of the two great Frenchmen. The race was won by a French rider, all right, but not the one either pros or fans expected. In fact, Poulidor won only one stage and Anquetil none, and neither man ever held the lead.
Before the race got serious, there was drama off the road. At Bordeaux an unannounced dope test was sprung on the riders, with a court official accompanying the testers, who called first on Poulidor. Anquetil expressed his solidarity with his rival whose dignity and reputation had been affronted, and so did the whole field, who staged a token strike at Gradignan; events that gave a foretaste of cycling for a generation to come. Until that point the idea that the Tour forbade drugs was a fable convenue, a polite fiction, even a joke. Riders were honour-bound to abstain from narcotics, serious attempts to enforce the rules were rarely made, and, when they were, the cyclists protested vehemently at this insult to their good names.
The truth was that almost everyone was at it and everyone knew that everyone was at it. Solemn official edicts against dopage were rather like the scene Conor Cruise O’Brien witnessed in Accra a couple of years earlier, when Kwame Nkrumah, with a straight face, told the Ghanaian parliament that no politicians should have bank accounts abroad, and that any such that existed should be closed, while the whole assembly giggled uncontrollably. Like those legislators, the Tour riders nodded with a smile if anyone reminded them what the rules were; like them, they were outraged if anyone appeared to take the rules seriously. All that was about to change in the grimmest circumstances.
When racing resumed it was Lucien Aimar, Anquetil’s colleague in the newly formed Ford–Geminiani team, and an experimentalist who had been trying out a huge new 55 × 13 gear, who attacked over the Col d’Aubisque and steadily moved up the GC. On its passage through the Midi the Tour paid a first visit to the agreeable and agreeably unfashionable port of Sète, Paul Valéry’s ‘toit tranquille, où marchent les colombes’; a stage won by Vandenberghe. Then two days later Poulidor gratifyingly beat Anquetil in the time trial at Vals-les-Bains. And yet the race was not going well for him.
On the way from Bourg d’Oisans to Briançon, Tom Simpson escaped, wearing the World Champion’s rainbow jersey. He was ninety seconds clear as he began to climb the Col du Télégraphe, but Jimenez, destined to win the Mountains prize for the second year running, began to pick him up, followed by both his team-mate Anquetil and by Poulidor. When Jimenez caught him, waited with him, and then went ahead, Simpson realized that he had made his break too soon. Before long, Anquetil and Poulidor had also passed him.
By this point Anquetil knew that he wasn’t likely to win the Tour, but if he wasn’t, nor was Poulidor, not if he could help it. He fought flat out up the Galibier to take second place at the col to Jimenez. On the descent Jos Huysmans was close behind with Aimar plummeting at dangerous speed, throwing his bike this way and that at the corners, and Simpson was catching up again until, nearing the day’s finish, a television-toting motorbike skidded and brought him down. He rode into Briançon dripping with blood, barely able to use his right arm, and had to abandon the next day. His departure was followed by Anquetil, stricken once more, on the Chamonix–St-Étienne stage. And still Poulidor couldn’t take advantage. He attacked again and made a tremendous descent from the Col d’Ornon, but was too far from the lead. The race saw one last exploit, on the antepenultimate day from Montluçon to Orléans, when Beuffeuil won the stage after making an individual break of 205 kilometres, the sixth-longest in Tour history. At the Parc Poulidor finished third behind Aimar and Jan Janssen, surprisingly enough the first man ever to stand on the podium from the cycling-mad Netherlands.
If Holland had never produced a winner, nor had England. The best hopes our damp little island ever enjoyed in the Tour came in 1967, with Tom Simpson seemingly at his peak, and his country still elated after England’s exciting if not wholly deserved victory in the 1966 World Cup when ‘They think it’s all over’ entered the language, now to be joined by a much more poignant phrase; it would soon be all over for one brave rider. This was also the summer of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; for many an English cycling fan, what was about to happen in Provence would be remembered ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.
The race seemed up for grabs when Anquetil, despite winning the Criterium International for the fourth time, announced that he was a non-runner in the Tour; he would never take part again. After five years of commercial groupes sportifs, the race had returned to national teams, three of them French, the first-string équipe, the Bleuets, and the Coqs de France; and it began with an innovation, the Prologue on 29 June. This was actually an additional time trial, called by another name to slip it past UCI – the Union Cycliste International, the sport’s governing body – regulations. Its first running in Angers this St Peter’s Day was won by José-Maria Errandonea with Poulidor six seconds away. But yet again it wasn’t Poulidor’s year. After the race set off clockwise through Brittany, Normandy, Picardy and Lorraine, he fell badly in the Vosges, and over the Ballon d’Alsace lost any chances. They passed instead to his Tricolores team-mate Roger Pingeon, who had staked his claim with a long individual escape between Roubaix and Jambes. The lead passed to and fro, with the yellow jersey worn over three weeks by five riders as they crossed the Alps and headed for Mont Ventoux.
Where it happened. Simpson had been riding very well, and had come seventh in the stage from Digne to Marseilles two days before, a minute and a half behind Riotte. He was in good spirits that day from Marseilles, maybe too much so. It was still winked at if the riders refreshed themselves in bars, and when the field reached the pleasant village of Bédoin at the foot of Mont Ventoux, he was said to have stopped for a glass of whisky and maybe one of pastis also, never a good combination.
Then they set off for the great climb, along its endless succession of bends. Simpson was a few hundred feet below the summit when he swayed and fell. It was clear that he was gravely ill, and he was incoherent, except to say, ‘Put me back on my bike.’ If he did say that. Sceptics have wondered whether they were really his words, or the imaginative fancy of a Sun journalist. But then journalism has always tended to the view that when the legend becomes bigger than the truth you print the legend, or that there are some stories too good to check. Did George Hirst really say to Rhodes, in the electric last minutes of the 1904 Oval Test, ‘We’ll get them in singles, Wilfred’? Does it matter? As Barthes said, the Tour de France partakes of epic myth, transcending literal facts.
What’s for certain is that Simpson never spoke again. He was helicoptered to hospital in Avignon, too late. Perhaps there had been an unnecessary delay, perhaps not. In either case, he couldn’t be revived. The inquest found that he had died from heart failure aggravated by alcohol and drugs. After that the rest of the race was a shadow of itself. Gimondi won up the Puy de Dôme, the Swiss René Binggeli won the penultimate stage from Fontainbleau to Versailles and Poulidor the final time trial but Pingeon rode on with steady determination to keep the yellow jersey he had been wearing since the eighth stage all the way to the finish, supported by Poulidor. Jimenez again won the Mountains prize and Janssen the green jersey. Pingeon collected his prize in the Parc des Princes, for the last time as it was shortly to be demolished. It wasn’t his fault that the man whose name would be for ever associated with the 1967 Tour was one who never finished it, or any other race.