Another quinquennium of French victories awaited as the new decade began, but it proved to be the last such years of success during the first century of the Tour, followed by a striking national défaillance: no Frenchman has won France’s great race since 1985. Maybe it really was a turning point in French history. If 1981 saw the deaths of René Clair and George Brassens, most brightly enchanting of film directors and most saltily mordant of singers, it saw also the election of François Mitterrand as president, to the elation of the French Left (I was with a party of reporters in the deserts of Namibia when we heard the news, and the South African correspondent of the Monde could scarcely control his rapture), and a Grand Slam by the French rugby team. At least one of those triumphs proved illusory, as Mitterand’s career slowly dissolved in a puddle of scandal. The one lasting French success of these years was the opening of the TGV, which cut the journey from Paris to Lyons to two hours; by the time I took the train from Mâcon to the Gare de Lyons after the penultimate day’s time trial in the 2002 Tour, the journey on that magnificent line had been reduced to ninety minutes for almost 400 kilometres, in shaming contrast to my own country’s contemptible trains travelling at half the speed if they’re running at all.
One of Brassens’s songs, for which the word salty is inadequate, is about the novice tart and her talents, or lack of them: ‘L’avait l’don, c’st vrai, j’en conviens,/L’avait le génie,/Mais, sans technique, un don n’est rien/Qu’un’ sal’ manie.’ Or roughly, I know it’s true she had something, genius even, but without technical skill no gift like that’s any better than a dirty habit. These are words with which any cyclist might agree in his own context, and they applied notably to Bernard Hinault. He had both, the génie and the technique, as he showed yet again in 1981 with the second of his two back-to-back victories in the Tour. The race directors Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan had been joined by three assistant directors, and once again the parcours was much meddled about with, beginning in Nice, with a Prologue won by Hinault, before riding westwards to the Pyrenees. Knetemann took the lead from Hinault and then ceded it to Phil Anderson, who made his own footnote of history as the first Australian to wear the yellow jersey.
These were mere pleasantries. The seventh stage was a time trial from Nay to Pau. Hinault won it, grasped the GC lead, and never relinquished it again, all the way north to Le Mans, north-east to Brussels, down to Mulhouse, on to the Alps, and then turning for home. A fine ride by Freddy Maertens gave him five stage wins and the green jersey at the end, while Van Impe won the red-peas jersey as consolation, but he was very decidedly runner-up, almost a quarter of an hour behind Hinault at the finish. The winner received both cash and kind, 30,000 francs and what was by now the traditional apartment in Merlin-Plage. Since Hinault won in all five of these riparian retreats, it’s to be supposed that he realized their sale value, now given at 120,000 francs. Jacques Tati died in the year of Hinault’s fifth and last Tour victory, and Monsieur Hulot himself might have had a comical holiday trying to juggle the five at once.
At any rate, Hinault had no difficulty in claiming the prize: 1982 was his most uneventful Tour, though echoing the previous year’s in several respects. Hinault won the Prologue in Basle, let the lead pass to Ludo Peeters and then Phil Anderson, but racked up four stages and held the yellow jersey for ten days before finishing ahead of Van Impe. The only event that disturbed the somewhat placid course of this race was a demonstration at Fontaine-au-Pire, a new ville-étape, which led to the annulment of that stage, a team time trial, and its replacement by another from Lorient to Plumiec. Otherwise Hinault hacked up, crushing the field in a time trial at St-Priest when he covered the last kilometre in a minute, and again in the final Champs-Élysées sprint. Bernard Vallet of France won the red-peas jersey, Sean Kelly of Ireland the green, and Anderson of Australia the white, awarded since 1975 to the best young rider, but it was Hinault’s year, as the dour Breton took the Giro–Tour double, and his fourth Grand Prix des Nations.
By now Hinault had overtaken Thys and Bobet with their three victories, and looked as if he would equal the five of Anquetil and Merckx. But he sat out the 1983 Tour, for reasons about which he was a little evasive. He had been suffering from tendinitis, but he suffered also from a blunt or even surly disposition. His career was lived in a series of rows with rivals, colleagues and managers, and most reporters attributed his absence to a row with his Renault team. It was thus an open race, and in more senses than one: amateur riders were invited, and indeed took part in the form of a team from Colombia. They were accompanied by a conspicuous phalanx of thirty-two Colombian journalists, two of whose papers, the Tiempo and the Espectador, daily devoted three pages each to their heroes’ progress.
The race left Fontenay-sous-Bois outside Paris on 1 July, to loop across the Belgian border and then turn back westwards towards Nantes, then south to the Pyrenees. The lead passed from Eric Vanderaerden to Jean-Louis Gauthier to Kim Andersen to Kelly – who followed his stage win in 1978 with two in 1980, one each in 1981 and in 1982, when he won the green jersey and was the first Irishman to wear the yellow jersey – before Pascal Simon took the GC lead at Bagnères-de-Luchon, after a stage won by Robert Millar of Scotland. Simon then had a bad fall and fractured his shoulder, which should have taken him out of the race. But with remarkable courage he rode on for another six days, up the Puy de Dôme and into the Alps. It was only when he was finally overcome and had to abandon on the La Tour-du-Pin–l’Alpe-d’Huez stage, still wearing the yellow jersey, that the Parisian novice Laurent Fignon was able to take the lead.
On the preceding stage from Issoire to St-Étienne there had been another curious episode. Michel Laurent and Henk Lubberding made an escape together and were racing to the line when Lubberding veered into Laurent, knocking him off his line until he crashed; he could only manage seventh after remounting. As they might have said at Newmarket, it was a clear case of bumping and boring, and a stewards’ enquiry did something most unusual, disqualifying Lubberding for dangerous riding and promoting Laurent. But the Tour was Fignon’s. He held that lead to the finish, where he won what was then a unique double of yellow jersey and white as best young rider. It was hail to the young and farewell to the old; or not so old: the year also saw the deaths of three former Tour winners, Antonin Magne at seventy-nine, Romain Maes at sixty-nine, and Louison Bobet at only fifty-eight.
Even then, Fignon hadn’t quite set the Seine on fire. He was a former dental student, and looked the part, a bespectacled swot with a fixed grin. Although he had never ridden in the Tour before, Cyrille Guimard, directeur sportif of Renault–Gitane, discerned his quality and chose Fignon along with Marc Madoit as key players in his team after Hinault’s defection. As the race was nearing its end, detractors pointed out that Fignon had yet to win a stage, to which he duly responded by winning the Dijon time trial on the penultimate day. But if he never quite shook off his nerdy image, he answered his critics still more convincingly in 1984. Hinault had been hired by the lurid and dubious Bernard Tapie for his new La Vie Claire team, funded with what was then the enormous sum of 10 million francs, and they had made an explosive start together, with Hinault winning the Flèche-Wallonne and Vuelta in 1983, and the 1984 Grand Prix des Nations (his fifth). In the Tour he began as he meant to continue by winning the Prologue at Montreuil-sous-Bois on 29 June. But the lead soon passed to a Low Countries trio of Vanderaerden, Jacques Hanegraaf and Adri Van Der Poel, before Fignon took the lead.
He was helped by his new bike. The Giro had just been won from Fignon by Francesco Moser, who was riding an up-to-the-minute machine which Fignon asked his team’s experts to match. They duly provided him with the Delta: fin-shaped handlebars and streamlined body. Riding this, he brilliantly won three stages up to Alpine ski resorts. At La Plagne he wasn’t so much confident as exalted: ‘My physical condition means that I can cycle to the maximum and keep going to the limit with no risk. Bike racing in these conditions is enchantment.’ Fignon was no less enchanting when he won the three time trials, and at the finish he easily beat Hinault by 8'58".
More remarkable was the man in third, Greg LeMond. When he had won the 1982 Tour de l’Avenir, his name as yet scarcely registered with fans or press, who barely imagined that American riders would ever play any serious part in the Tour, and understandably so, since they were completely unknown quantities. In the 1976 Tour the sixth stage to Nancy had left from Bastogne and from the place McAuliffe, a resonant American name. Less than twenty-eight years earlier, in a desperate last throw of the dice just before Christmas 1944, Hitler had launched an attack in the Ardennes, the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. In that Belgian town the line was held by ‘the battling bastards of Bastogne’, the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe. For generations of genteel French ladies, ‘le mot de Cambronne’ was the only way to allude to the unspeakable expletive ‘Merde!’, General Cambronne’s contemptuous reply at Waterloo when ordered to surrender. The mot de McAuliffe was ‘Nuts!’ in reply to the same demand in 1944, a great moment in the history of America in Europe.
And yet there was no American rider in the place McAuliffe in 1976, and none took part in the Tour until 1984. By reaching the podium in his first Tour, wearing the white jersey as best young rider, LeMond announced in the most dramatic way that a new nation had appeared on the scene. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber had startled France in 1967 with his book Le Défi américain, about the economic and political challenge posed by the United States; seventeen years later, another American challenge had arrived unmistakably. The Yanks were coming.
After a two-year absence from the winner’s place, Hinault returned there after winning the Giro in 1985, but this Tour was eloquent of the future and not of the past. The man who had beaten Hinault a year earlier was absent hurt, as Hinault had been in 1983: the misfortune this time was Fignon’s, undergoing an operation on his Achilles’ tendon. It was altogether a good year for younger sportsmen, with the unknown seventeen-year-old Boris Becker brilliantly winning the Wimbledon men’s singles; it was a wonderful year in the Tour for Ireland, with heroic performances by Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly; and it was an ominous year for European cycling.
By winning the Prologue, Hinault immediately reclaimed his yellow jersey. Another rider, the Belgian Alfons de Wolf, finished more than two minutes down on Hinault, after he had turned up five minutes late for the start, and suffered the unusual indignity of being ejected from the Tour on the first day for not trying. One other rider didn’t do quite so badly, finishing 100th in the Prologue and abandoning three days later. Any failure was only temporary: Miguel Induráin would be back for more. From Brittany the race wound north and east to Lorraine and south towards the Alps, while the lead passed to Vanderaerden and then the Dane Andersen. Hinault won another time trial from Sarrebourg–Strasbourg to take the yellow jersey again, and looked to be in control until the fourteenth stage out of Autrans.
In Fignon’s absence the challenge had turned out to come from one of Hinault’s own team-mates in La Vie Claire–Wonder–Radar (to give it its not very catchy full name), none other than young LeMond, who had transferred from his previous team. Hinault was leading from him in the GC when a sprint finish into the Cours Fauriel at St-Étienne ended in a collision between Hinault and Anderson riding for Panasonic. Hinault fell and was badly injured, his nose broken by his sunglasses, blood pouring from his head, and rows of stitches needed. If he had abandoned he couldn’t have been blamed by anyone, except himself. Instead, he rode on with indomitable courage, holding his three-minute lead over LeMond intact until the Pyrenees.
The turning point of the race came on the exceptionally tough Toulouse–Luz-Ardiden stage, and it came in unheroic and displeasing fashion. Hinault’s wounds had taken their toll, and he was suffering. Unable to breathe easily, he was dropped over the Col du Tourmalet, while LeMond was riding more strongly and smoothly than ever, palpably cutting into the lead of his captain Hinault, and ‘strong enough to attack’, as he said later. At which point Paul Koechli, team manager of La Vie Claire, quietly stepped in and told a mortified LeMond to take it easy. It was quite close to telling a boxer to throw a fight, and LeMond’s reaction echoed Marlon Brando’s ‘I coulda been a contender’ in On the Waterfront. As the American said bitterly, ‘The team lost me the Tour.’
This cast a vivid and questionable light on the Tour as at once an individual and a team event. A domestique isn’t there to win but to ‘follow my leader’ and serve him loyally, in a way that distinguishes cycling from other team sports. Of course a football manager can take a player off, a baseball coach can retire a pitcher, a cricket captain can declare an innings closed even when a batsman is on the point of making a century, all for the good of the team. But what happened to LeMond in 1985 was different in kind from those. There had also been an altercation between Hinault and Joel Pelier, Hinault ticking the young French rider off for attacking pointlessly, wasting effort in suicidal escape bids. That was one thing, a rebuke by a much more experienced and successful rider to a younger for wasting his substance, though the rebuke might have been better delivered in private. LeMond’s ‘suicide’, in contrast, was more like Seneca’s or Rommel’s, acting under orders, and it clearly confuted any idea that each rider should at least have the opportunity to do his best.
Whatever his feelings, LeMond did as he was told, although on the penultimate day of the Tour at Lac du Vassivière he seemed to be making a point rather sharply when he won the time trial – and the first Tour stage ever won by an American – to leave him only 1'42" behind his boss at the finish a day later. In third was Roche, who had ridden a splendid race to become the first Irishman ever on the podium. His compatriot Kelly was fourth, winning the green jersey for the third of the four times he would take it.
For British Tour fans the year was notable for one other novelty: television reports were carried daily for the first time, needless to say on Channel 4 rather than the BBC, which has rarely shown any very lively interest in cycling. I have called the Tour a curious spectator sport, and that goes for the press corps. They will watch the Départ of each day’s stage, then get into their fleet of cars and set off, very often at hair-raising speed, to the Arrivée, seeing next to nothing of the race itself but relying on the Tour’s own running radio commentary to tell them what’s actually happening. Then at the finish they will see the cyclists arrive, although nowadays they are less likely to do this en plein air than in the exceptionally well-appointed press centres, where hundreds of laptops are plugged in at tables, and where the finish can be watched on large-screen television, followed by the daily routine of interviews with stage winners and jersey wearers.
During the course of the 2002 Tour I was obliged to return to England for a few days, and thereby made an interesting rather than amazing discovery: if you merely want to know what’s going on, the best place to watch the Tour is at home in front of a television. Even if it has failings of its own – for all the advances of technology, the camera still sometimes misrepresents what it shows by foreshortening distances – television gives the viewer a more complete picture of the race at any moment than is enjoyed by anyone on the road. It may be that the very idea of the privileged ‘ringside seat’ is now doubtful in other sports also, from football to baseball, and not just in sports. Years ago some of us made another simple discovery when covering party conferences, that this is best done by staying in one’s hotel room and watching the debates on screen before setting out for lunch. And a friend who was given unique ‘access’ to Tony Blair during his triumphant 1997 General Election campaign – travelling with him by road and air, sitting in his various offices and his constituency home morning and evening, never hearing a radio or watching a television – says that at no election he has ever covered did he know less about what was actually going on. The Tour de France is a quite extraordinary événement. Watching it close up is a delight, and covering its whole length is a wonderful experience. All the same there is a paradox, that you need the broadcast media to learn the progress of the race.
By an allusion no one can have deliberately intended, the 1986 Tour began on the Fourth of July. That proved astonishingly apt: this race would truly mark a declaration of independence for American cycling. The prize was there to be taken. Hinault was now thirty-one. After his victory in 1985, he had said a little grandiloquently, and not quite accurately, that, ‘My only real rival was the ghost of my former self which insisted that I equal my previous performances.’ Although he recognized that he hadn’t been in the physical shape of ten years earlier, ‘I had a wealth of experience and my enthusiasm was undimmed’. It was scarcely more dimmed a year later, but if the spirit was still willing, the flesh was weaker. Hinault announced that he would retire late in 1986, on his thirty-second birthday, and intimated also that this year he would pass on the torch to his young team-mate: now he would work for LeMond, and not the other way round. Having said that, he confused the issue by wondering out loud whether he might not after all go for a last Tour victory: ‘I said I’d help LeMond win the Tour but he’s got to earn it. He must be worthy of the yellow jersey.’
The Prologue was in Boulogne-Billancourt, the industrial suburb of south-west Paris, famous as home of the Renault motor works, and notorious for Sartre’s saying in a different context, ‘Il ne faut pas désésperer Billancourt’ (sc. we mustn’t dishearten Billancourt, or disappoint the working class, by telling them the truth about Soviet Communism). Hinault’s fans were disheartened, not only when Thierry Marie took the Prologue, on a bike with an appui dorsal, a new kind of saddle, or when the yellow jersey passed to Alex Stieda, the first Canadian ever to wear it, but by the later outcome of the race. On their way through the north-west and south-west to the Pyrenees, it seemed that Hinault’s second thoughts had prevailed. He attacked repeatedly and wilfully to wear out the climbers even before they began climbing, so that they ‘had nothing left’, as he said himself. ‘You have to attack them until they can’t recover. It’s not hard to do.’ LeMond evidently agreed, and told journalists that Hinault was out to do him down, an impression reinforced in the Pyrenees. On the first mountain stage from Bayonne to Pau over the Col de Marie Blanque, Hinault attacked alongside Pedro Delgado. The Spaniard took the stage but Hinault took the yellow jersey. LeMond was provoked into actually winning the next stage into Superbagnères, one of the rather few stage wins in his career, and began to whittle away at the lead. By the Alps he had taken the yellow jersey.
But not without difficulties. For one thing, LeMond never really got inside the way the European team system worked, or the peloton: on the one hand, samurai fealty by domestiques to leader, on the other, continually changing tactical alliances. It was one thing for riders from different teams to combine against another team leader, but in one race in America, the 1985 Coors Classic, LeMond had actually worked with riders from another team to attack his team-mate Hinault, a shocking assault on European concepts of esprit de corps, not to say omertà. Maybe it was a sign of American individualism, but he couldn’t emotionally grasp the idea of a rider serving his liege master as a page served his knight, and he would never have done what Merckx did in lordly fashion in 1968, when he handed a race to Guido Reybroeck for services earlier rendered, or Hinault himself had done on one stage of the 1980 Giro when Jean-René Bernaudeau helped him up the Stelvio climb and, at the finish, Hinault waved his colleague through to take the stage.
At any rate, the Colombian Luis Herrera led over the Col du Galibier in 1986 alongside Guido Winterberg, from La Vie Claire, followed by a group including Hinault. LeMond had been dropped, but he caught up on the descent and then towards the Col du Télégraphe, where Hinault and LeMond broke away together and stayed clear over the Col de la Croix de Fer and the Col du Glandon, with Hinault always keeping a perceptible upper hand. He took the stage into l’Alpe d’Huez – but he did so clasping hands with LeMond alongside him. If the gesture looked rather artificial, that was no more than the case. There was still little love lost between the two, and little mutual sympathy. Hinault congratulated the American, saying that he had thrown everything at him for days and put him under as much pressure as possible. This was true, and was recognized by the award to Hinault of the short-lived Prix de la Super-Combativité (‘extra aggressive’) at the end of a hard race.
What looked like a coming American supremacy was interrupted by Spanish success, and before that a glorious Irish triumph. It has never been necessary to be Irish, or to have any sympathy for the nastier manifestations of Irish nationalism, to be a vicarious Irish sports fan and to find Irish sporting achievements very endearing. Jackie Kyle, Tony O’Reilly, Willie John McBride, Paul Wallace and David Humphreys put a dash and a delight into rugby that eluded even the best English players, and the feats of the Irish football teams in recent World Cups have, as the great Myles na Gopaleen would have said in his ‘Catechism of Cliché’, imparted heat to many an obscure coronary mollusc (‘Sure, it warms the cockles of me heart’). Every such mollusc was heated by the triumphs of Stephen – never ‘Steve’ – Roche.
The 1987 Tour started further from France than ever before or ever since, in a Berlin still separated from West Germany, though not for much longer. After three days of Prologue, road stage and time trial, which left the Polish rider Lech Piasecki in the yellow jersey, the riders hadn’t left the once and future German capital. It was indeed an odd race. A largely new team was in charge after Félix Lévitan had departed from the Société du Tour de France, leaving Phillipe Amaury as administrator alongside the managing director Jacques Goddet, Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet as director-general – and the new conseilleur technique in the form of Bernard Hinault, retired at last from the saddle. Whichever of them was responsible, or whatever commercial pressure had been applied, it was curious and unsatisfactory for a Tour de ‘France’ not to reach French soil until the end of the first week. Just as awkwardly, the race then circled the country anticlockwise and only reached the mountains after two weeks.
Until then it was an uneventful race, with the Swiss rider Erich Maechler holding the yellow jersey for six days, from Stuttgart to the Loire, where Roche won the Saumur–Futuroscope time trial, as it proved his one and only stage of the race. Martial Gayant took over the lead at Chaumeil before Charly Mottet took it for five days. Then, after a time trial up Mont Ventoux, the action began in the Alps. Several Spanish climbers were in their element, with Pedro Delgado taking Valréas–Villard de Lans, when Roche finally gained the yellow jersey, only to cede it to Delgado on the next stage from Villard de Lans up to l’Alpe d’Huez, won by Delgado’s countryman Federico Echave. The next stage, a tough 185-kilometre ride from Bourg d’Oisans to La Plagne thus began with Delgado twenty-five seconds ahead of Roche. It was won by Fignon, making something of a comeback after his years of greatness, and destined for seventh place in Paris. But the real duel was a minute behind him.
Up and down the Galibier went Roche, and he attacked with a group of riders to put ninety seconds between them and Delgado. But Delgado didn’t run down his flag. He relentlessly pursued them and caught them after fifty kilometres. The foot of the last climb to La Plagne, with less than fifteen kilometres to go, found Roche and Delgado upsides. Fignon and Anselmo Fuerte attacked and broke away and Delgado followed, but Roche kept his counsel and kept his cool, knowing the overall position, and knowing that he had one more time trial to come. Delgado fell back from the two leaders, but still had two minutes on Roche, who cleverly lulled him, until the cheers at the finish were audible: ‘I decided to wait until four kilometres to go and then give it everything.’ By the four-kilometre sign, he had whittled Delgado’s lead down to 1'15", and then ‘went into overdrive’. He saw the cars following Delgado, and knew he had done it: by the line, he was only four seconds behind the Spaniard.
And then he collapsed. Suddenly pole-axed by exhaustion and white as a sheet, Roche was stretchered to an ambulance and taken to hospital, with just time to say, ‘I’m okay, don’t worry.’ Delgado was still twenty-nine seconds ahead of him in the GC, which became thirty-nine seconds when Roche was penalized for having scoffed an illegal feed. Astonishing as it may seem, Roche was cleared by the medics the next morning, and rode another fine stage in the last day in the mountains to finish second, eighteen seconds ahead of Delgado. All Roche needed now was to hammer Delgado against the clock in Dijon, which he duly did. The stage was won by Jean-François Bernard, victor of the Mont Ventoux time-trial, in 50'1", with Roche at 21", and Delgado at 1'2": a gap that decided the Tour. Roche reached Paris in triumph to take the race from Delgado and then from Bernard and Mottet. He had won by the same forty-second margin of the Dijon time trial, the second-smallest margin in the race’s history, but quite enough.
A British trade team called ANC hadn’t prospered in the Tour, with only four riders finishing, led by Adrian Timmis in seventieth. For French cycling the death of Jacques Anquetil at only fifty-three seemed a melancholy mark of national eclipse, while France had once more to look elsewhere for sporting consolation when the rugby team won its fourth Grand Slam. But Irish eyes were smiling. In a gloriously polychromatic triumph of yellow, pink and rainbow jerseys, Roche won not only the Tour, he won the Giro and the World Championship, a feat only Merckx had accomplished before. And yet in the official UCI world rankings he finished the year second – to his compatriot Sean Kelly, who had crashed in the Tour and broke his collarbone but had won his third Critérium International.
The man who capped this Irish year of triumph was a Dubliner, son of a milkman who had encouraged his son to stick to cycling even when grave injury early in 1986 in a six-day race in Paris had almost persuaded him to give up. Modesty as well as bravery made Roche popular not only in his own country but in France, where the Équipe saluted his victory with the excruciatingly punning headline ‘TOUR: UNE NOUVELLE EIRE’. There was in fact to be no prolonged Irish domination. A nouvelle ère or new era was dawning, to be sure, but the men who would rule over it were Spanish and American.