Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape

by Paul Howard

  Suitably inspired, or perhaps chastened would be a better word, Anquetil attacked in the feeding zone on the last stage before the Alps and made up 11 minutes on his most serious rivals en route to winning the stage into Thonon-les-Bains. He finished close enough to the front on the next stage into the Alpine town of Briançon to regain the yellow jersey, having been fortified both on the rest day and in his passage over the fearsome Col du Galibier by a draught of champagne (the first courtesy of team sponsor Félix Potin, the second received from a supporter in the crowd). By doing so, he won further approving comments from his friend and mentor: ‘I didn’t think you’d be such a good climber. You may not be Charly Gaul, but there isn’t a bloke born who’ll beat you by five minutes.’

  Even several further moments of inattention – notably on a transitional stage to the Pyrenees when seven riders from the top ten overall broke away while Anquetil was dawdling at the back of the bunch, requiring Darrigade to lead him in a fearsome pursuit that he later described as the greatest achievement of his career – and what Bidot described as a ‘serious rough patch’ in the Col d’Aubisque in the Pyrenees, couldn’t prevent Anquetil from extending his lead all the way to Paris, winning the two remaining time trials on the way. In doing so, he became, at 23, the youngest Tour de France winner since the war and at the time the fifth youngest ever. (Only Felice Gimondi and Laurent Fignon have won at a younger age since, while the ‘surprise’ 2007 winner, Alberto ‘Kid’ Contador, was 24.)

  The celebrations in Paris included a rapturous reception from the crowds and a telegram from the president. The enthusiasm was exaggerated by the success of the entire French team. In addition to overall victory, it had accumulated 21 days in yellow, the team prize and 12 stage victories. To emphasise Anquetil’s unique stature, hinted at by newspaper headlines such as ‘Anquetil Wins His First Tour de France’ and ‘He Came, He Saw, He Conquered’, Darrigade couldn’t help pointing out that the beaten rivals didn’t just extend to those who’d been in the race. Clearly thinking of Bobet, he said, ‘Jacques was simply the strongest. It seems those who stayed away made the right decision.’ Anquetil himself later referred to Bobet’s decision, telling L’Équipe, ‘It was a brazen challenge. The best way possible to ensure we stuck together as a team.’

  After a whirlwind tour of the lucrative post-Tour criteriums, Anquetil again won the Grand Prix Martini and the Grand Prix des Nations (beating Ercole Baldini, the man who broke his hour record, into second both times) before being reunited with Darrigade – along with Italian rider Fernando Terruzzi – for his first appearance at the Paris Six Day, which they of course won. Jean-Paul ollivier reported Anquetil’s response when asked about his preparations for coping with the lack of sleep inevitable in such a race: ‘I’ve been to the circus in Rouen and several times to the cinema. These past few weeks, I’ve quite often not been in bed before midnight, which is as good a preparation as any. It certainly meant I could have some fun with my friends.’

  The acclamation of the notoriously hard-to-please Parisian crowd was nothing short of remarkable. Little did Anquetil know, however, that this was as good as it was going to get for some considerable time.

  NINE

  Femme Fatale?

  EVENTUALLY, THE CLANDESTINE NATURE of Anquetil’s affair with Jeanine became too much of a burden. Although the peripatetic life led by Anquetil and the apparent ease with which Jeanine could find time away from her husband meant the practicalities were not insurmountable – a skiing holiday in the Alps provided ample opportunity for them to be together, for example – the emotional pressures on the couple meant that things soon came to a head. It was Jeanine who precipitated the next stage of their relationship in early 1958 by revealing all to her husband, whose response was to cut all ties with his former friend and insist she stayed with him. With Anquetil ensconced in an early season training camp on the Côte d’Azur and her husband showing no inclination to give her a divorce, Jeanine found herself on the edge of the abyss.

  According to Sophie, Jeanine was so traumatised by the dilemma of her situation – choosing between Jacques and her children – that she swallowed a whole packet of sleeping tablets and switched on the gas. Only the timely intervention of a servant prevented anything more serious than ten days’ recuperation in hospital and being whisked off to stay with family friends.

  Down by the Mediterranean, Anquetil’s distraction was clear for all to see: his legendary appetite was diminished, his training performances were well below par, and his habitual ability to sleep like a log was compromised. Finally, his anxieties got the better of him, and he returned to Normandy in an attempt to discover Jeanine’s whereabouts and take her away with him. The scene when he found her address and knocked on the door adds even more potency to the Anquetil legend: it was Jeanine herself who answered, clad only in slippers and a nightie (or a dressing gown, depending on which source you believe), and the couple immediately fled into the night in the back of a van borrowed from the Paris-Normandie newspaper. Within a couple of hours, the lovers were shopping for new clothes for Jeanine in the chic boutiques of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.

  The thrilling nature of their flight is still evident in her eyes when Jeanine recalls the events of that fateful night: ‘Oh yes, it was an adventure all right, because when I left I was a doctor’s wife, I had two children and a fine house, and I left in slippers and a dressing gown. I left without so much as a penny, and Jacques had only just won his first Tour when I left. I didn’t know if he was going to make a career out of cycling. We didn’t know. It really was jumping into the unknown.’

  The picture of Jeanine swapping her well-heeled but conventional lifestyle for something infinitely and immediately more exciting inadvertently gives further credibility to the maxim that life imitates art. In particular, it reinforces the curious correlation between Anquetil’s life and the Normandy society so powerfully portrayed by his famous literary predecessors from Rouen. This time it was not Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, however, but Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s most famous creation, who was being invoked. Bored, frustrated and perhaps unappreciated, Jeanine had emulated her fictional double and jumped wholeheartedly at the opportunity for freedom and fulfilment that life with Anquetil seemed set to provide.

  Yet while part of the allure for Jeanine was this sense of romantic adventure, she maintains Anquetil was the exact opposite. Although happy to enjoy the high life afforded by his successes as a cyclist, these luxuries accrued thanks to his calculating approach to making the most out of his chosen profession. Not for him the whimsical notion of fulfilling a dream. ‘Oh no, he wasn’t an adventurer at all,’ she remembers. ‘He knew exactly where he was going. When he was younger, he’d told me he would earn a living from the bike. As soon as he saw he could be a champion, he set about riding his bike in the same way as a director goes about running a company. This meant he pushed himself to the limits to get the best out of himself – even his teammates acknowledged that he would suffer more than they would [Jeanine repeats this several times, for emphasis]. That was Jacques – he knew nothing would be able to stop him from achieving success. And if he couldn’t have been a cyclist, he’d have done something else. He wasn’t the reckless type who’d just say let’s give it a go and see. He was much more considered.’

  Perhaps for this reason he felt able to reassure Jeanine, even as they were driving to Paris, that though she was choosing him over her children she would end up with both in the end. On the other hand, perhaps his words were no more than the seductive platitudes voiced by a lover keen to reassure his quarry that she had made the right decision. Certainly, Jeanine’s explanation of Anquetil’s reasoning is itself unclear – or at least her memory of it is: ‘I knew I’d get them back. I knew they’d come back to me later. He loved kids so much. The proof is that when he knew he wanted to marry me, even though I knew I couldn’t have any more children and that that was his thing – he said, “Yes, but after my career I’ll have a c
hild, because I want a child of my own. We’ll see about that later – not while I’m racing – because otherwise, by the time I’ve retired, it will be six or seven, and I won’t have seen it grow up.” That was his love for kids, and he loved mine as if they were his own.’

  Rather confusingly, then, Jeanine appears to see this willingness to postpone his desire to perpetuate his lineage at best a delaying tactic for not facing up to the reality of their situation, at worst a declaration of guaranteed infidelity as proof of his love for her (even though he would have to use a surrogate mother to satisfy his needs) and confirmation that her children would return. Equally confusing is how such an obsession with becoming a blood father sits with her assertion that he loved her children as though they were his own.

  Whatever the motivation, in the end, of course, he would prove to be right, no doubt judging correctly that the appeal of the glamour associated with cycling (not to mention a much-missed mother) would prove more alluring than the best a remote, intellectual father figure could offer, however well intentioned. Initially, the children were conferred exclusively to the care of Dr Boëda, who also had Jeanine’s parents staying with him. ‘They were with my ex-husband and my parents,’ she remembers. ‘My parents had stayed at the house to start with, so he used that as a reason that I shouldn’t see my children. Then he showed my parents the door, so the children were left with my ex-husband and his new wife, who didn’t care for them that much, and eventually the children couldn’t put up with this stepmother who kept them away from their father any more.’

  First of all, the children visited Anquetil and their mother as a result of the limited access Jeanine had subsequently been allowed: ‘The children were already quite big – they were seven or eight years old – so even though they stayed with their father, they had but one dream, which was to come to the house and go to races with Jacques. They had an admiration for Jacques that was overwhelming. As soon as I had them, I took them everywhere. We took them to Italy once when Jacques was racing there, and I had to go to court because we took them one day early. I was acquitted, of course, because taking them only one day early . . .’ The result, according to Sophie, was that within two years of Jeanine’s departure the children started to ignore the strictures placed on them and made their own way to see their mother and Anquetil.

  Back in 1958, however, there were no children to be cared for, and the two lovers concentrated their attention on each other, as Jeanine recalls: ‘The happiness I felt to be by his side night and day, the freedom to belong to each other as we wanted, was so powerful that I even managed to forget, for an instant, the enormous loss of my children.’ Anquetil endeavoured to repay the compliment by saying his motivation was to be ‘worthy’ of Jeanine. This romantic aspiration went so far as to drive him to make his first serious attempt to win Paris–Roubaix, then as now the most prestigious of the one-day classic races.

  Jeanine even suggested there was a precedent for such devotion in his pursuit of victory from their youth: ‘Do you know he won his first race for me when he was eight? He was still scared of monsters at night but could already turn the pedals of his bike like a madman. For me, he beat the son of the butcher by the width of his tyre.’ For the romantic at heart, it may come as a disappointment to discover that this story is unlikely to be true, or at best to be apocryphal. Although Jeanine and Anquetil were both born in Mont-Saint-Aignan, by the age of eight Jacques had already been living in Quincampoix for a year. Even if he had taken his bike with him on a return visit to friends or family (although these were in Bois-Guillaume rather than Mont-Saint-Aignan), it’s still difficult to see what the then fifteen-year-old daughter of a respectable family would have been doing watching an eight-year-old strawberry grower’s son beating the butcher’s boy on his bike. Perhaps the answer is provided by the fact that the paper that carried this story was sufficiently interested in the romantic to overlook such tedious factual discrepancies; after all, it also said that Jeanine was 26, while Jacques by this time was 24. In reality, Jeanine was nearly seven years his senior.

  Unfortunately, the romance of the story came to an end with a bump – several thousand bumps, more like – on the notorious cobbles en route to Roubaix on 13 April (unlucky for some). Having decided to counter the acknowledged expertise in this kind of event of several of his rivals – notably Van Looy, Léon Van Daele, even Bobet – by employing the unlikely tactic of a long break, Anquetil and three companions (he’d dropped the rest) were still ahead of the main bunch with only fifteen kilometres remaining. Disaster struck, however, when Anquetil punctured, obliging him to make a solo burst to regain the lead group. Even though he succeeded in this objective in only five kilometres, the effort proved futile, as the main bunch also caught the leaders with only four kilometres remaining, leading to a mass sprint, won by Van Daele. Anquetil ended up 14th.

  This admittedly unfortunate series of events, depriving Anquetil of his only real chance of success – breaking away on his own before the velodrome – immediately led to assertions that the puncture had robbed him of certain victory. For anybody other than Anquetil, this would be impossible to claim. For a start, his breakaway companions remained to be beaten – even if he was the strongest, this was far from guaranteed (although he maintained he was certain to have beaten them in the sprint). Then there was the fact that the lead held by the front four with fifteen kilometres to go had already been cut to one minute fifteen seconds. Given that Anquetil and his companions had been away for the best part of 200 kilometres and that the bunch behind was still made up of 70 riders, such a margin looks uncomfortably small.

  Yet Anquetil built a reputation on achieving that which others maintained was impossible, and he certainly believed it was simply bad luck that had deprived him of victory. Bad luck, of course, was not an excuse Anquetil was accustomed to having to make. Demonstrating once again his desire for mastery of his surroundings, he declared, with a distinct hint of bitterness, ‘One-day races are a lottery. I’m not interested in them any more.’

  In doing so, he immediately exacerbated his increasingly strained relationship with the public. Although a degree of sympathy for his plight was felt, his reaction had in effect cast aspersions on a significant part of cycling’s reputation. Although Anquetil didn’t seem to want to admit it, there was more to the sport than stage races and time trials. One-day races were an integral part of its appeal, so for Anquetil to imply that 60 years of cycling heritage and legend – including everybody who’d been anybody as a cyclist, from Maurice Garin to Coppi, and from Magne to Bobet – was based solely on good fortune did not go down well. What had started as a fairy tale, with a homage befitting his stature in L’Équipe on the day of the race – ‘For the first time in his career, Anquetil is starting a classic race with the declared intention of winning. Until now, Jacques has always achieved his goals. It’s one of the most remarkable aspects of his career.’ – had turned into a public-relations disaster. Worse was to come.

  Before the 1958 Tour de France had even started, Anquetil had been obliged to mount another political campaign to determine the make-up of the team. This time, as defending champion, his presence was not in question. Instead, it was a question of who would join him – and whom he would accept as teammates. The debate centred on Bobet, of course, and Raphaël Géminiani, Bobet’s right-hand man, previously a Tour runner-up in 1951. Anquetil could countenance one or the other but not both: ‘They know each other too well. I don’t want them to truss me up like a turkey.’

  Eventually, Bobet agreed to the sacrifice of his former lieutenant, and what had seemed likely to be a two-way battle for overall victory between Anquetil, aided by Bobet, and Charly Gaul became a three-way tussle, with an enraged Géminiani banished to the Centre-Midi regional team. (He was so contemptuous of French national team directeur sportif Marcel Bidot that he paraded a donkey around at the start of the Tour and said he’d named the beast Marcel, as it too was stubborn and stupid.)

  Ke
eping his promise to attack, Géminiani stole a ten-minute advantage over Anquetil on the stage to Saint-Brieuc before Anquetil suffered another setback in the first time-trial stage, losing his speciality by seven seconds to Gaul. In practice, such a small deficit was little more than a blow to his pride, although the extent to which Anquetil’s pride was wounded should not be underestimated. Before the race had begun, Anquetil had complained to journalists that the time-trial stage up Mont Ventoux should not have been called a time trial: ‘It’s not the time I’ll lose to Gaul that worries me – three or four [minutes] at the most. It’s the fact that people will say he’s beaten me at my own game, and I don’t like that.’

  The Pyrenees passed without great incident, the next significant event coming on the 17th stage, the day of the time trial up the fearsome Mont Ventoux (1,610 metres of altitude gained over 22 kilometres of climbing at an average of 7.1 per cent, with a steepest section of 11 per cent). Here, Gaul beat Anquetil by just over the predicted four minutes, while Géminiani put on the yellow jersey, a position he was to cement on the next stage to Gap thanks to Gaul suffering a mechanical problem, reputedly the victim of sabotage.