by Max Leonard
‘I always liked being operated on,’ Vietto said in a TV interview towards the end of his life. ‘When the surgeon took something off, I used to tell myself: “You’ll be lighter on the bike. You’ll climb better.”’
The legend continues that the toe was preserved in a jar of formaldehyde and kept on a shelf behind a bar in Marseille.
Is it weird that I became fascinated by this story?
Aside from being a useful bit of weight saving for a climber, the severed toe began to represent for me a tangible link to the heroic age of riding, to those dusty, sweat-encrusted men of old with their woollens and their goggles and caps, and their spare tubular tyres wrapped around their shoulders like boa constrictors, who were 10 times the rider you or I could ever be. The toe story was only a footnote to the Vietto legend, but there were enough reports of its fate to make me believe that at its core there was a grain of truth. If it existed, it might be the key to all these mythologies, a way of sorting fact from fiction even as the sands of time threaten to bury the distinction between the two. If, like its original owner, it no longer was – an imaginary relic of unimaginable hardship – that fact would in itself say something about how we worship our idols, and about the sacrifice industry that connects cycling present to cycling past. What is it we take with us and what do we leave behind?
A final possibility was that it was simply a piece of dead flesh in a jar. The truth status of Schrödinger’s digit bothered me for quite a while. Until eventually I thought, fuck it, and I decided to go to Marseille to find out. Before I did I contacted Vietto’s son, Jean Vietto. Jean Vietto lived in Nice, just along the coast from Cannes, but he was a long-distance truck driver and never home so our conversations only ever happened in writing. And I also found someone called René Bertrand, who was possibly René’s greatest fan and I arranged an appointment to see him. But, upon arriving in Marseille, it seemed propitious to have a drink first.
And that is how I find myself sitting in the covered terrace of a bar on the old port. The locals are wrapped in dark coats, long scarves and gloves, but there are tourists walking around in shirt sleeves. The winter sun angles fierce and low through the cross streets, streams through the masts moving gently on the water and filters through my carafe of rosé, casting an appealing colour on the Formica table.
It is not the right bar. That much was obvious before I went in. There is no toe-in-a-jar next to the Pernod. But it’s a start. If nothing else, I am getting into the swing of things. I have joined the old men, in their caps, jackets and wire-rimmed dark glasses, in drinking wine in the morning. I’m not sure Vietto would have approved. He came from a life of privation, and when he was at his best he was an ascetic, and something of an extremist. For Vietto training meant riding a gearless fixed-wheel bike at least 100 kilometres further than the race he was preparing for. At the height of his career, he would organise Côte d’Azur training camps for his teammates, during which he would ride them into the ground without mercy: puncture and you’ll be dropped; stop to pee and you’ll be dropped; eat and you’ll be dropped. He would deliberately go out in terrible conditions and every man was expected to finish the ride, even if that meant hundreds of kilometres solo after bonking (one of the many colourful expressions cyclists have for completely running out of energy during a ride).
‘René practised a very hard training regime,’ said Apô Lazaridès, his protégé and domestique, in a TV interview as an old man, with Vietto by his side. ‘I mean, he did a lot of kilometres, and he didn’t allow eating. His discipline was something else. I remember putting in the kilometres with him once and I said, “René, I’m hungry, I can’t go on.” “Eat grass,” he told me. And I ate grass that whole day.’ Jean Vietto, René’s son, confirmed this. ‘There was one time with Apô when he just threw away their bag of food and their bidons, and both of them suffered,’ Jean wrote. ‘Apô once said to me that my father had been hard on him, but it was a necessary suffering to surpass yourself.’ Jean continued: ‘Once, [Vietto] punished himself by putting the bike on his bed and sleeping on the floor himself.’
‘For me,’ René said, in that TV interview with Apô in the 1970s, ‘sleeping is dying and eating is poisoning yourself. Voilà. Go to bed at 2 a.m., get up at 4. Get up at 4 a.m. and leave at 5, whatever the weather.’ Apô laughs at this, but nervously, and has the look of a man who is glad he now runs a mini-golf resort next to the sparkling Med and always sleeps soundly until at least sunrise.fn2
My game plan here in Marseille is devastatingly simple. Go to a bar. Check the shelves for jars. Cross it off the list. Go to another one. Somewhere in the middle I will visit René Bertrand. Then perhaps another bar. Check the shelves for jars. Tick another one off the list. It is not without purpose: it will be in the service of finding one of cycling’s lost relics (and daytime drinking is always purposeful, however gratuitous), but I confess that at a certain point, even pre-rosé, I am losing focus on the toe. The sun. The boats. The Ferris wheel rising above the quay. Enough dilly-dallying. Time to go to see Bertrand.
René Bertrand was born on the same day as René Vietto, but 14 years later, which means that he is a sprightly 87 or so when he buzzes me into his building and meets me on the landing beneath his two apartments – the one he lives in and the other that houses all his cycling memorabilia. For years Bertrand owned a bike shop in Marseille, and, with Antonin Magne, was a directeur sportif for the Mercier team in the 1960s. Whenever the big cycling stars came to Marseille, they usually passed by his shop.
‘I was a fanatic,’ he says. ‘In 1934 I was six and my father took me to see the Tour in Marseille. I lived in the Rue d’Aubagne, a hundred metres from the start. Magne was in yellow, but I wanted to see Vietto. It all started there.’
Later, the men became friends. Bertrand became a dealer for Vietto’s bikes. When Vietto came to Bertrand’s daughter’s wedding in Marseille, Bertrand drove him home, all the way to Cannes. Now he is the guardian of many of the artefacts of Vietto’s life: the race number from his first win in the Boucle de Sospel, his contracts, the last bike he ever raced on. Snapshots line the walls of Vietto at all stages of his career, as well as other greats including Gino Bartali, Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor as well as Marcel Cerdan, France’s greatest ever boxer and lover to Edith Piaf, who was another friend. We talk about Vietto’s successes: Paris–Nice in 1935, his most prestigious overall win (he always liked to perform on his home roads) and his year as national champion, of the Free French at least, in 1941. But big victories were hard to come by: ‘Vietto and Poulidor were the two least lucky guys in the Tour,’ Bertrand says.
Like many of his generation, Vietto had the best years of his career taken away from him. In 1947 he was the only pre-war star to line up and, as such, he was favourite to win. In the pan-flat second stage he soloed away from the break to win in Brussels, proving his form was good and that he’d worked on his flatland riding. Later, he won in Digne, and defended his yellow jersey through the mountains, only to lose it after 15 days to Pierre Brambilla, in a disastrous 139-kilometre-long time trial. ‘He did 180 kilometres on his own, on the pavés,’ Bertrand tells me. ‘That was hard work. He shouldn’t have made that break to Brussels, he paid for it later.’ The Tour was won by Jean Robic, a relative unknown, after the Breton attacked and dropped Brambilla on the penultimate stage.
Did he regret never winning the Tour?
‘Oh yes, he never admitted it, but it was something he missed,’ Bertrand says. ‘But he didn’t make excuses, he didn’t say, “Oh, this or that happened.”’ Jean Vietto added: ‘People often asked him the question. The war really destroyed everything for him. He’d thought he’d have time to try and win other, later Tours.’
But what about the toe?
Jean Vietto again takes up the story: ‘In those days, toe clips were made of iron, and in Paris–Roubaix, passing over a pavement, one of his clips cut through his shoe and his little toe was [eventually] amputated,’ he wrote. ‘Years late
r, he gave it to M. Pierre Gueydon (a friend of the Bertrand brothers).’ If Vietto had been suffering with his toe since Roubaix, some months before, perhaps the injury was inflamed by his second passage on the northern cobbles in the Tour. What’s sure is that it wasn’t amputated in Nice; instead, on the rest day, his doctor pumped him full of penicillin and sent him off again to win. The toe was taken off after the Tour, after Vietto lost. We can only guess how a septic toe, septic to the bone, might have affected his performance. And it was indeed preserved. For a while at least, a friend of Vietto from his military service kept it at his bar, in Marseille, which was called Chez Siciliano.
What about the toe, though, I ask Bertrand.
‘Oh putain, the toe,’ says Bertrand. He goes into the kitchen, opens a cupboard. Closes it again. Opens another, gets on his knees, roots around as if looking for bin bags or sink unblocker. And then he takes something out.
It’s a glass jar with a toe in it. A shrivelled, brown, desiccated toe. Surprisingly large and with a nail and present up to the knuckle – in other words, with at least half an inch of unexpected exposed bone, an extra joint that makes it look almost like a finger. It’s the pale bone on which the rest of the beckoning digit rests I notice, more than anything, in that first moment. Around the top of the jar is written: ‘Vietto’ and ‘Doigt de pied’ (‘toe’) as if one might otherwise mistake it for a cocktail snack, or another ex-rider’s ex-toe one had lying around. I have the feeling that a curtain has been pulled back and I am looking at some rarely glimpsed medieval relics of the saints which have been taken from their resting place and exposed, if only briefly, to the light of day, and that they will soon be returned to the dark in order that they continue to burn brightly in the imagination, to exist solely as an image guiding the faith of millions back to a truer time, one of hardships, struggle and sacrifice. It is one thing seeing photos of racing from the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of cycling, but to know that this exists, that this and things like this actually happened, is something else.
Another bar on the port. I have nothing left to find, but a celebration seemed appropriate. The sun is slipping through the masts of the sailboats, between the motor yachts and down, behind the buildings lining the quay. I have a finger of Pastis left in my glass. Doigt de pied is literally ‘foot finger’. I’m still thinking about this encounter with the raw stuff of legend.
‘Papa didn’t regret it, and often said it was with this “sacrifice”, and the photo that immortalised his choice, that he made his name,’ Jean Vietto wrote to me, describing his father’s feelings about the wheel-giving. ‘Pride and sadness all at once.’ A career-defining, maybe even a sport-defining, incident – because isn’t this salt-sweet, storybook combination of selflessness and suffering more or less unique to cycling, and one reason we feel justified in believing it is better, or at least deeper, than other sports? ‘Don’t write that I lost my chance by saving Tonin [Magne],’ said Vietto about that same incident, in an interview towards the end of his life. ‘We’ve no right to diminish his performance. And anyway, it would be false. In reality I lost that Tour in one of the northern stages, following four punctures, one after the other. [Raffaele] Di Paco helped me out by giving me a tubular tyre … without him, I’d still be on the side of the road.’
Which maybe shows that when it comes to legends we remember the mountains and not the flats (no pun intended), and that reality is inevitably more prosaic than myth. Unless you happen to be looking for an amputated toe in a jar.
Jump to an interview with another octogenarian, but in Toledo, far away from Marseille, in central Spain. It is only as we are finishing up when it occurs to me that not only would my interviewee have an affinity with Vietto, but it is a fairly sure thing they would have met. We are in a former garage on the outskirts of town that is now in part a warehouse for the barriers and other things involved in running the Vuelta a Toledo annual stage race, and in part an office, HQ and self-administered fan club for the Eagle of Toledo, Federico Bahamontes. Did you know Vietto, I ask through my translator. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, and his eyes fill with admiration.
Federico Bahamontes does not admire many climbers. He rates himself, but that’s natural when you have a good claim to being the best cyclist ever to ride up a mountain. ‘The mountains [are] the basic truth of cycling for Spaniards … and the cyclist [is] the only being capable of using the strength of his legs to challenge the force of gravity and fly,’ wrote veteran Spanish cycling journalist Carlos Arribas in the El Pais newspaper.fn3 The first winner of the Tour’s mountains classification – the year before Vietto – was a Spaniard: Vicente Trueba, the diminutive Spanish climber known as the ‘Flea of Torrelavega’. However, the Eagle of Toledo soared higher. In the 1950s and ’60s he won the King of the Mountains six times, and the equivalent at the Vuelta twice and the Giro once. Only Richard Virenque has since equalled that Tour tally. Virenque, in fact, won seven, but his performances were tainted by the Festina affair (the major doping scandal in which a car from that team was stopped at the Belgian border just before the 1998 Tour and industrial quantities of performance-enhancing drugs were found, pointing to a large-scale team-administered doping programme). From 1993 to 1998 Virenque rode for Festina, and four of his polka-dot jerseys were won in that period. He finally admitted to doping in court in 2000.
Bahamontes, however, claims, and with some force, never to have doped – in an era when doping products were less effective than in the 1990s but their use equally rife. He is 88, but he has the demeanour and vigour of someone 20 years younger. His handshake firm, his step sure. ‘All the people who raced with me are now dead because of what they were taking,’ he tells me. He is still pin sharp, still totally in control of his faculties (and, moreover, also has all 10 toes), and though he sounds fierce his forthright opinions are delivered with the twinkling humour of your favourite granddad. Nobody in his era measured up, according to Bahamontes, and nobody since has either, and if that’s what he believes, then he will damn well say it. Only Charly Gaul almost made the grade, and Bahamontes calls him ‘my number one enemy’.fn4 Are the riders of today comparable to those of old? It has been one of the themes of our discussion. Their bikes are lighter and their times are faster, but can you swap brute force and feeling for power meters and heart-rate monitors? If mountains are about myths, can this rationed and rationalised experience hit the same peaks?
Bahamontes may still be pin sharp but, that said, he doesn’t immediately remember the Col de la Bonette. Bahamontes was the first man over it in the 1962 Tour de France, its first ever inclusion in a bike race. He was also first in 1964, its second outing. (Both times the race went to the full height of the Cime loop, the first time from south to north and vice versa the second.) Between 1964 and 2015, only two other men have had the honour of leading a race over the Bonette. The second was Robert Millar, in the 1993 Tour de France. The Scottish climber won the polka-dot jersey in 1984 and was for many years Britain’s greatest Tour de France rider; leading over the Bonette came late in his career, and he did not win the stage. The third man was the South African John-Lee Augustyn who, as I already mentioned, overshot a turn in 2008 and hurtled off the road just over the top. The mountain made such an impression on him that he later started a clothing company named after it. However, for Bahamontes, who did not crash, it is initially unmemorable. I am not completely surprised. There were many mountains in his career, it was all such a long time ago and I’m not sure Bahamontes ever willingly let anyone ride over a major col before him.
Alejandro Martín Bahamontes (according to the church register) was born in a small village near Toledo in 1928. The family was poor but the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime lowered them, like many, into abject poverty. For a while his father broke rocks as a road-mender’s mate; for two years, the 11-year-old Federico had to help him. As a teenager, Bahamontes stole stale bread and rotten fruit, and even killed cats to stave off his family’s hunger (cats that, Alasdair Fotheringham writes
, his mother gutted and stuffed and which the family called ‘baby goats’).
Riding a bike was part of this struggle to survive. By 18, Bahamontes was working as a market trader, unloading lorries and then picking out and selling on the rotten fruit the stallholders didn’t want, and he saved the money he made to buy a bike. The plan was he would ride from village to village, illegally picking up bread and beans and flour which he would then sell on the black market in Toledo. Anyone caught doing this by the Guardia Civil, who patrolled the roads, faced a prison sentence. Often he would ride in the middle of the day, when it was hottest and the police would be on their siesta; needless to say, speed and cunning were an asset: ‘All my strength came from the market,’ he tells me. It is difficult to imagine this poverty as he sits here now in his office, behind a huge desk, in front of a picture of himself as a handsome young man and next to a stern statue of an eagle. Bahamontes entered his first race almost by accident, when he met some friends on the road who were going and he tagged along. He came second. His first proper win was the mountains classification in the Tour of Avila, which he rode as an amateur, and he worked his way around Spain’s regional Tours – usually riding to and from the start, however far that might be. From his earliest races he always excelled in the mountains. ‘Whenever I arrived in the mountains I was happy,’ he says.
Truly, for the first few years of his career, he thought of little else. He won the King of the Mountains in his first Tour, and absolutely dominated from then on. Unlike Vietto or Charly Gaul, who would emerge to be his main rival, his style wasn’t pretty. He would stand on the pedals, curiously upright, with his shorts hitched high and his hands shifting forward and back over the bars. It was, however, devastatingly effective. A favourite trick would be to attack, slow down so that he would get caught by the bunch and then go immediately again, crippling his rivals. Either that or recover and eat a little, and then launch off for the next lot of KoM points. ‘My tactic from the beginning was attack, attack and attack again,’ he says. The French press called it racing ‘à la Bahamontes’, a backhanded compliment that implied he didn’t take it seriously enough. Remember that idea that there is something gratuitous in the climber’s art? Bahamontes is in part responsible for that. There is a story that one year he stopped at the top of a col during the Tour de France, and, having claimed the KoM points, got off his bike and ate an ice cream and waited for the peloton to come. Like the toe story this one is more or less true: it was the Col de Romeyère in the Vercors region, the year was 1954, and it was a very hot day. The main reason he stopped was that he was riding on a wheel with broken spokes and needed a replacement, but the ice cream was a pretty classy touch, and one which did not dispel accusations that he favoured spectacular over effective racing: that he was erratic, quixotic even, and excessively individualistic. At times it was more than that: he was self-isolating and troublesome. He took his wilfulness to extremes, seeming always to contrive to be discontented wherever he was, and he changed teams at least once a year for most of his career. Was it a fair criticism that he cared about the King of the Mountains competition to the detriment of everything else? ‘Always, always,’ he says, smiling. ‘I never thought about the general classification. I was always trying to get the mountains classification. In 11 Tours I made the podium 10 times in Paris.’