As dramatic a year as 1948 had been, 1968 saw the Russian suppression of Czech hopes of freedom and America riven by the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the departure of Lyndon Johnson. And France had her own lurid upheavals, when the événements of May, originally a student rebellion, spread to parts of the industrial working class and for a moment seemed to threaten de Gaulle’s regime, as he left the country to recover his position. Unlike Johnson, he didn’t depart the presidency forthwith, but France felt very a different country before 27 June when the field of 110 riders left the mineral-water spa of Vittel.
Not only a new starting point, they were headed for a new destination: after the demolition of the Parc des Princes the race would now culminate at the Cipale, the Vincennes municipal stadium. There was another and more important change in a none too oblique reference to Simpson’s death. Under the direction of Dr Pierre Dumas, this was to be the ‘Tour de la Santé’, the healthy Tour. Now there were anti-doping tests at each finishing point, as well as close medical supervision of the whole race.
Several riders who were in good form that year didn’t take part in the Tour: not Gimondi, who had won his second successive Grand Prix des Nations, nor Guido Reybroeck with his third Paris–Tours race, nor young Merckx in the year he won his first Giro and the Paris–Roubaix one-day classic. Nor was there a repeat for the title-holder Pingeon, even though he made a brilliant break of 193 kilometres averaging 40 k.p.h. to win the stage from Font-Romeu to Albi; he finished at Vincennes in fifth place. And it wasn’t Poulidor’s year, either, as his misfortunes continued. On that same stage that saw Pingeon’s escape, Poulidor was strongly placed in the GC when he crashed badly trying to avoid a motorbike. This was lamentable but it was not amazing. Anyone who has witnessed the Tour close up may well be surprised, not that there have been so many accidents over the years, but that there have been so few. The abandon with which the publicity caravan goes through towns and villages led to the death of a little boy on the 2002 Tour, the breakneck speed at which team and press cars and motorbikes cover each day’s journey has caused at least one fatal accident, and could easily have caused more.
The Tour’s intimacy is part of its charm. Before the race left St-Martin-de-Landelles on Bastille Day in 2002, I found myself standing next to a group of Italian riders as they sat talking and joking, and then, when they had got on their bikes, I was walking towards the start when an officious official saw the Press badge around my neck and hustled me on to the road during the ‘neutralization’ period (when riders are pedalling but not racing up to the start). Before I knew what had happened, I was in the midst of an as yet mercifully almost immobile peloton, trying to move away before I did them an injury, or they me. Security on the race is far from oppressive, and long may that remain so, but the cheek-by-jowl proximity of riders, spectators and vehicles can be alarming.
At any rate, Poulidor – ‘poor’ or ‘unhappy’ seem by now almost redundant – was badly hurt. Even his critics, even Anquetil, couldn’t deny that he had the stuff of heroism somewhere in him. The way he finished that stage, in grave pain from serious injuries, was one of the most courageous performances of his life, and needless to say one of the most futile: he was forced to abandon the next day on the stage to Aurillac. His exit effectively ended the chances of his team, and it was an anticlimactic note for Marcel Bidot to leave on as directeur technique, forty-two years after he had ridden in his first Tour.
Now the Tour was wide open, and it was the Dutch who seized it. One of their countrymen wasn’t surprised. Ab Geldermans, who rode in seven consecutive Tours between 1960 and 1966 and was fifth in 1962, had had a bet that Jan Janssen would beat Herman Van Springel of Belgium to become the first Dutch winner. So it proved, although it wasn’t until the final time trial that Janssen established a winning lead, thirty-eight seconds ahead of Van Springel at the Cipale, with Spain winning the team prize, their Aurelio Gonzalez King of the Mountains, and Franco Bitossi of Italy the points winner in red jersey: red on this one occasion, absurdly enough, rather than green, at the demand of a sponsor; the Tour was good at ‘invented tradition’, but not always respectful of it.
In 1939 a Belgian had won the Tour nine months before Panzer divisions rolled across his country. Sylvère Maes died in 1966 aged fifty-seven, and didn’t live to see a compatriot as successor on the winner’s podium. But when he arrived, he was one of the greatest cyclists there have ever been, some would say the greatest of all. Not that Eddy Merckx had an auspicious inauguration into the race. At twenty-four he was already garlanded with honours, beginning with his amateur championship and by now including the professional road title, a batch of classics and the Giro d’Italia. In the 1969 renewal of that race, however, he was wearing the maglia rosa when he tested positive for illicit drugs. He wasn’t only slung out of the race, to howls about a dastardly Italian plot from Faema, his team, and from the Belgian press, he was also given a twenty-eight-day ban, which would have prevented him from joining the start of the Tour at Roubaix on 28 June.
Resentful English yachtsmen used to say about the way that the America’s Cup was conducted that ‘Britannia rules the waves but America waives the rules’. Something of the kind was true of cycling. A lesser rider would doubtless have been told to stay at home, but Merckx’s stature was clear even before his first Tour, and the UCI conveniently found a way to lift the suspension. If this seemed a challenge, to live up to his favourable treatment, Merckx responded breathtakingly from the first stages in his own country, including the third day, a team time trial in his home town of Woulwe-St Pierre.
The CLM par équipes is truly a test of collective skill, and one of the most pleasing spectacles in cycling. Its exact rules have changed over the years; to describe it in twenty-first-century terms, as of the 2002 Tour, a team of nine riders races together over a measured distance, say the 67.5 kilometres from Epernay to Château-Thierry, setting off as a little peloton of their own to race and pace together. At any moment, one cyclist gives his team the lead and sets the pace, a role that is so demanding that he will stay at the head for no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, unless he is an exceptionally strong rider in his own right, in which case he may lead for anything as much as a minute, when he slips aside to let a colleague take his place. The best view of this performance is from above: seen from helicopter-borne television camera, a team might be a skein of geese seen from below, holding a loose pattern that continually, kaleidoscopically, very slightly, rather beautifully, changes its shape. To qualify, at least five riders out of a team of nine must finish; the team is marked by the time of the fifth, but the winning team can then nominate any of its riders as the individual winner of the stage. Usually this will be the team leader, although if he is so comfortably ahead in the GC that he has nothing to lose he can graciously hand the prize to a team-mate.
When that time trial at Woulwe was won by Faema, they stamped their collective authority on the Tour, in which not only would they win the team prize but their whole team would complete the course. There was no question of anyone but Merckx taking the individual stage, and thereby the yellow jersey. He lost it the next day into Maastricht to his team-mate Julien Stevens, who held the lead for four days, but Merckx took it back over the Ballon d’Alsace and never surrendered it for the next two weeks and more, through the Alps, where he won Briançon–Digne, and into the Pyrenees.
He left Luchon with more than eight minutes in hand over Pingeon, and the cognoscenti expected him to take it easy, riding defensively and carefully, husbanding his resources. That’s what Anquetil would have done, that’s what Induráin would later do, that’s what others can still do. It was not what Merckx did. Illustrating if ever anyone did the maxim that attack is the best form of defence, he rode a ferocious race over the cols. Pingeon and Poulidor were still with him crossing the Peyresourde, Aspin and Tourmalet. But he dropped them on the descent, they not quite realizing that he might steal the stage. Merckx crossed the Aubisque alone to make a 130-kilometre escape, with the thermometer in the nineties, reaching Mourenx 7'56" in the lead.
The next stage was a sentimental occasion twice over, both because the Englishman Barry Hoban had never won a stage before, and because the finish was in the old Bordeaux velodrome that would never see the Tour again. Five years earlier, Hoban should have won Bayonne–Bordeaux on the selfsame spot, entering the stadium with a fifty-metre lead, ‘but André Darrigade was desperate to win in Bordeaux for the first time and caught me with only ten metres to go. It was the biggest blow of my career,’ Hoban said. ‘I wept.’ All untearful he now won the next day’s stage into Brive as well, but the Tour was effectively over. Merckx didn’t need to win the last climb up the Puy de Dôme, and finished at Vincennes 17'54" ahead of Pingeon, a margin which has not since been surpassed, with Poulidor another 22'13" behind in third.
It was the beginning of an era: a new champion, and the first ‘baby-boomer’ born after VE Day to win the Tour. He became one of the greatest riders in the history of cycling and of the Tour, though one of the least adored, and least understood. As Merckx himself said, ‘No one really knows me,’ and it was quite true. None of his team-mates or opponents ever worked out what made him tick. Merckx was born in June 1945, and was a mere boy when he discovered his astonishing ability as a cyclist. He rode in a number of races when he was sixteen and seventeen, though not with immediate success: his records for 1961 and 1962 are a long list of ‘fell’ and ‘abandoned’. But before long he was winning as an amateur. He competed in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics without great success, but turned pro the next year, and won more races, working his way steadily through the big races, winning the World Championship in 1967 and the Giro in 1968, as well as the Tour of Catalonia and the Paris–Roubaix, to be followed by his explosive arrival in the Tour.
With all his amazing achievements over the next decade, Merckx remained a mystery. More insaisissable, in Magne’s word, than Poulidor himself, he was what his sometime team-mate Johan de Muynck called ‘the biggest stranger in the peloton’ where he was unloved as well as unknown. Plenty of riders profited by working with him, but few enjoyed it. He won his first Tour with other braves Belges in the all-Belgian Faema team; it did not pass without comment that several of them left the team before the next season. Jan Janssen said that ‘he can be incredibly surly’, and Merckx himself revealingly admitted, ‘You have to put your own interests ahead of camaraderie.’ That was what he did throughout his career; that was why, as was said of Lloyd George, ‘he had no friends and did not deserve any’; that was why he won.
He was never prouder of any later Tour, or of any day than of that day on the Tourmalet, ‘one of my best performances,’ which Merckx didn’t believe he ever matched again, and he expressed the exhilaration and exaltation that come only rarely even to the greatest cyclists: ‘I could hardly feel the pedals.’ So complete had his domination of the race been, winning all three individual time trials as well as three mountain stages, that he collected a trio of first prize, Mountains prize and green jersey. It would have been better for him if 1969 had stopped at the moment he took the podium on 20 July. Instead, triumph was followed by tragedy. At an unimportant track meeting at Blois, he was riding behind a little motorbike in a ‘Derny-paced’ race when he and his pacer Fernand Wabst crashed horribly at full speed. Wabst was killed, Merckx was seriously injured, more seriously than was immediately realized even as he was taken unconscious to hospital bleeding from his head injuries. He also proved to have a damaged vertebra and a twisted pelvis, and he ever after said that he was never the same rider again.
At which his unfortunate rivals might have wondered what they would have had to endure without that accident. His domination in 1970 was scarcely less complete. Coming into the race fresh from winning the Giro, this time untouched by scandal, he took the yellow jersey in the first day’s Prologue, allowed his team-mate Italo Zilioli to wear it after the team time trial on the third day but soon won it back, and no one else wore it until the finish where Merckx ended a comfortable 12'41" ahead of Joop Zoetemelk. He had won a thumping eight stages, including the Prologue and two time trials. One stage from Valenciennes to Forest he tried out a new gearing, a freewheel of 11 teeth and a 51 × 11 ratio, which wasn’t so remarkable except as a reflection of his supreme confidence: no one else would have made such an experiment in the middle of the Tour. Others showed well this year. The best young rider was Bernard Thévenet, who won the St-Gaudens–La Mongie stage in the Pyrenees, and Walter Godefroot was allowed to pick up the points prize. But the race was Merckx’s, and that was that.
It had begun in Limoges, but that had brought no ‘home-team advantage’ for Poulidor the Limousin, who faded to finish seventh. One colleague, Christian Raymond, had dubbed Merckx, not very affectionately, ‘The Cannibal’; as Merckx said, it was ‘a bit of a barbaric name, but it probably reflected how my rivals truly felt about me’. Poulidor might have imagined himself not so much the contents of a cannibal’s stew pot as Prometheus when, as P. G. Wodehouse put it, the bird dropped in for a spot of lunch.
Whatever Poulidor felt about Merckx he at least kept to himself, unlike the French public and newspapers. After only two victories, French distaste for the unsmiling, unbeatable Belgian had quickly become more like hatred. Spectators jeered him as a matter of course, and Paris-Match asked, ‘Is Merckx going to kill the Tour de France?’, to which the answer was that the Tour was always bigger than any one champion, however great. And that was a truth the 1971 race demonstrated with superb vividness.
In 1970 Merckx had ridden for the Faema team (another all-Belgian team, but for Zilioli); for the next two years he rode for Molteni, and although they won the first stage in 1971, an experimental team Prologue that was discontinued after one year, they didn’t win a team prize despite their great star. He didn’t himself dominate the 1971 race as he had the previous year’s. He had just missed the Giro with an injured knee (it was won by the Swedish rider Gosta Petterson) and was patently below his best. Although he was the first to take the yellow jersey, as a curiously-shaped race wandered from Mulhouse into Switzerland and back to Alsace and Lorraine and then through the north and west of France before the action really began, the GC lead fluctuated, passing to Wagtmans, back to Merckx, to Zoetemelk – and then to Luis Ocaña. The Spanish rider was in excellent form, had gathered a strong team for Bic, and was the threat to Merckx if anyone was.
So he showed by winning on the Puy de Dôme before they zigzagged east to the Alps, and what Ocaña saw as his opportunity. Anquetil had told him: ‘Keep your nerve, wait for the mountains, and then strike,’ and Ocaña followed this advice to the letter. Coming down from the Col de Cucheron, with the Col de Porte still ahead of them but the finish then only thirty kilometres away, Merckx was riding in the leading group when he punctured. Merckx had two Guillaumes in his life, his soigneur Guillaume Michiels, and his directeur sportif Guillaume Driessens. Michiels was a sometime rider, known as ‘The Grave’ both because he had once worked for an undertaker and because of his silent and sombre manner, occasionally broken, as Disraeli said of Peel, by a smile like the silver plate on a coffin. Riders often have a relationship with their soigneur at least as close and trusting as any golfer with his caddy, and Michiels, who had known Merckx since he was a boy, enjoyed his complete confidence, the one person of whom that could be said and on whom he utterly relied.
Which was far from true of Driessens. He had been hired by Faema almost deliberately as a balance for Merckx. The self-contained, almost depressive Merckx and the bumptious, facetious Driessens might have found the attraction of opposites, but it didn’t work out like that and their dealings were always wary at best. Merckx didn’t conceal his irritation with Driessens’s laddish bonhomie and intermittent bossiness. During the 1969 Tour of Flanders, Merckx made an escape with seventy kilometres to go, Driessens caught up with him in the team car and told him he was mad, Merckx shouted back a colloquial Flemish phrase that has been reliably translated as ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and went on to win. He said later that ‘Everything Driessens did was like a big game to him.’ Eddy didn’t play games.
On that occasion before the Col de Porte, everything went wrong. Driessens was helping Wagtmans and Van Springel, all at the unluckiest possible moment of Merckx’s puncture. Merckx lost forty seconds before he was provided with a new bike, and then it was the wrong kind for him, he said. Even so, he didn’t foresee just how wrong: descending at full speed, a tyre came off the wheel rim. After being slowed down by colliding with a safety railing, he waited for repairs, before remounting, reaching the bottom, and setting off up the next climb. Despite the bike, and despite losing his rhythm, he caught one group of riders 300 metres from the summit. But another break was some way ahead, and behind them – in front of Merckx – was a flotilla of team cars. He weaved his way ferociously through the vehicles to come upsides Leif Mortensen, Ocaña’s team-mate, and meet a further problem.
The arcane Tour regulations give plenty of opportunity for tactical chicanery. If a rider had had an accident or punctured, the team cars allowed him to pass. But if a rider had just fallen behind, it was he who was required to let the cars pass towards the leaders. When the Bic team heard that Merckx was catching up, the Danish rider had dropped back to join him. And so, as Merckx sat on Mortensen’s wheel, the cars overtook them, and Goddet saw no choice but to ‘enforce the barrier’ and hold them up for what he called ‘eighty derisory metres’, with Merckx enraged, and Mortensen bringing to mind Hamlet’s assertion ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.’
When he could hit the road again, Merckx rode with heightened fury, but the leaders had now gone two minutes clear and rode together to stay there. Even after a frantic descent, Merckx was still 1'38" behind at Grenoble. The next day, following Anquetil’s advice again, Ocaña attacked early on the Côte de Laffrey accompanied by a group of hardened mountain men from various inelegantly named teams, Joop Zoetemelk of Mars–Fandria, Joaquim Agostinho of Hoover–De Gribaldy and Lucien van Impe of Fagor–Mercier, who would end the Tour with the Mountains prize, his first of five. Merckx only had his two domestiques, Marinus Wagtmans and Jos Huysmans, but they couldn’t keep up with him as he tried to catch the leaders, and he was only just ahead of the peloton as he rode up to Orcières-Merlette, an arrivée en altitude in the coming fashion, where Ocaña took the yellow jersey. Merckx’s morale was crushed, he said, as he finished 8'42" behind Ocaña, whom Merckx ruefully compared to the great torero Cordobes dispatching a bull.
And yet the Tour recognized Merckx’s stature. Goddet later looked back unhappily on the wretched ill-fortune he had inflicted on ‘probably the greatest rider of all time’. The crowds who had relentlessly jeered ‘Mossieu’, their derisive name for the Belgian, were silenced; even the ranks of Tuscany could not forbear to cheer, or the still more chauvinistic ranks of Gaul. One French reporter gave a hint of his colleagues’ shame: ‘In defeat the Belgian champion has revealed an unknown and admirable side of his character.’ His display of superhuman energy had shown as much as any successful day’s riding ‘how justly he merited the glory his victories have brought him . . . As for those who whistled at and booed him, their only excuse is ignorance of his real worth and blindness of chauvinism. In truth, Merckx’s behaviour in defeat offers us an exalted, a solemn lesson in the conduct of sport and in dignity.’
Solemn and exalted were the words for this tribute, but Merckx showed that it wasn’t empty rhetoric. The next day he rode a blinder, setting off on a huge break in baking heat. This time Wagtmans and Huysmans managed to keep up with him to begin with, and by Marseilles Merckx had taken back nearly two minutes from Ocaña, but no more: enough to salve wounded pride but not to win the great prize. For that, luck had to swing his way. They reached the Pyrenees and crossed the 1349-metre Col de Mente in apocalyptic weather, a thunderstorm emptying the skies. Merckx was leading the perilous descent when he skidded to one side. Trying to avoid him, Ocaña fell, and was remounting when Zoetemelk and Agostinho ran into him. The pile-up injured Ocaña’s legs and shoulders so badly that he had to abandon. Even hardened observers were dismayed at the way that ‘a brief storm of cataclysmic proportions’, as Antonin Blondin wrote in the Équipe with a certain freedom of metaphor, had been enough ‘to sweep our beautifully flashing blade to the ground, just when he was preparing to crown himself’.
Although Merckx reached Luchon at the head of the GC, he marked this triumph with a gesture that would be remembered a long time: he refused to put on the yellow jersey that had come to him through Ocaña’s miserable mischance, waiting until he felt he had won it fair and square. A few days later he visited Ocaña in hospital, and he had a clear conscience when he took the podium at Vincennes for his third Tour victory. Whatever his physical setbacks, Merckx had a terrific year in 1971, winning the Paris–Nice, Milan–San Remo, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Tour of Lombardy, Dauphiné Libéré, Midi Libre and World Championship as well as the Tour, but he never had a greater day than that one in the Pyrenees.
One man absent was Poulidor, who didn’t compete in the 1971 Tour, though he rode the course ahead of the field for a television broadcast. By the following year time seemed to be running out for Poulidor, who was now thirty-six. And yet his form outside the Tour was still very impressive. He won a record-equalling fifth victory in the Critérium National and he beat Merckx in the Paris–Nice. But still 1972 wasn’t to be his year. The ‘revelation’ was Cyrille Guimard, the Nantes cyclist riding in his third Tour but leaping out of the pack for the first time.
Merckx won the Prologue, but Guimard soon took the yellow jersey off him and pummelled the sprinters into St-Brieuc in his native Brittany. He and the champion jousted over the cols, fighting to the top of Mont Revard shoulder to shoulder before Merckx raised his arms in victory, too soon: it was Guimard who had won by a short head, or rather ‘by a quarter wheel’. That wasn’t going to deflate Merckx, who rode two of his great climbs over the Cols d’Izoard and du Galibier; and once more he showed that fortune favours the brave. Ocaña fell ill and abandoned again, and so did Guimard on the penultimate stage, suffering from tendinitis. By the end Merckx was able to claim a somewhat bloodless victory, from Gimondi at 10'41" and none other than Poulidor at 11'34": once more, near but so far.
By the following year the race had a new organizing body, the Société d’Exploitation du Tour de France, a new starting point in The Hague (the second time the race had begun in Holland, after Amsterdam in 1954), and a new winner. Although Merckx won a string of victories in 1973 – the Paris–Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Paris–Brussels, the Grand Prix des Nations and two out of the great three-week road races, Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España – he missed the greatest of all and left the field open to Poulidor, Ocaña and younger challengers like Van Impe and Thévenet.
After the Low Countries, where Zoetemelk won the Prologue by less than a second from Poulidor, the race turned south through eastern France, and numerous new étapes that had bought themselves publicity if not glory. Ocaña won his first stage this year from Divonne to Aspro Gaillard, crossing a new pass over Mont Saleve, as the race went on to a succession of ski resorts: Thévenet won at Meribel, Ocaña at Les Orres. Ocaña was said to be riding à la Merckx, with brutal no-prisoners determination, but there was a technical reason for his superiority besides fitness and willpower.
Although the basic design of the bicycle hadn’t changed in ninety years, and hasn’t to this day, its shape can be made out of any kind of metal (or anything else), and the revolution of this period was in materials, some developed from aviation technology, some even from space exploration. Ocaña had met an engineer from the Sud-Aviation company, who suggested that a bike could be made from titanium, until then only used in airframe manufacture. It was with this advanced bike, stronger but much lighter than any before, that Ocaña now floored the field.
The Pyrenees were Poulidor’s undoing when he fell descending from the Col du Portet d’Aspet, and by Paris Ocaña had no serious challenger. Having taken the yellow jersey on the seventh stage, he held it until the twentieth and last. Winning six stages in all, including a time trial, and imposing victories down into Luchon and up the Puy de Dôme, he crossed the finish in the Vincennes stadium an almost insulting 15'51" ahead of Thévenet and then Fuente at 17'49", compared with the 3'09" that separated Aimar in first and Poulidor in third in 1966.
After the wretched crash that had taken Ocaña out of the race in 1971, Blondin had written that although he hadn’t necessarily been the best rider in the race, ‘he was the shining star, who with the sun’ – i.e. Merckx – ‘had dazzled us for four days,’ and he seemed very much a worthy winner two years later. He was a man and a rider greatly liked for his simplicity and generosity, as well as a certain panache, playing the stage Spaniard like Simpson the stage Englishman. Instead of bowler and brolly, Ocaña allowed himself to be got up as a toreador, which was corny but apt enough, the very image Merckx had once used, and his victorious Tour had a tang of the arena. ‘It was a massacre,’ Pierre Chany said in the Équipe, ‘a sort of collective annihilation.’ It was the fifth Tour of the eight in all in which Ocaña would ride, before his early retirement, and his lamentable death, in 1994 at only forty-eight.