by Paul Howard
(It should be noted that Anquetil wasn’t always this candid. In a 1961 French television documentary, several professional cyclists were asked what they understood by the phrase ‘saler la soupe’ (add salt to your soup), a common euphemism for doping. While several riders looked rather uncomfortable and contrived different ways to avoid answering, and while another tapped his nose and said it was a trade secret, Anquetil didn’t even blink and simply denied ever having heard the phrase before.)
However, he then added that he didn’t defend doping:
I don’t defend it, but I’m fed up with the hypocrisy surrounding it, one of the most obvious examples being the famous anti-doping law rushed in last year. This is shameful, as it only targets one profession – cyclists. Nobody’s worried to know if a student, an overburdened lawyer or a labourer who wants to work overtime takes stimulants. How would you react if a doctor and a police officer turned up at your house and told you to pee into a flask in their presence? The same way as me, I’m sure – that it’s an affront to my dignity and my personal freedom.
In a separate article for Lui magazine, Anquetil expanded on the reasons for his resistance to being tested:
I don’t want to destroy anything, certainly not cycling, as that’s what’s allowed me to be ‘somebody’. But I must be true to my convictions and my understanding of a man’s dignity, and above all of those involved in sport, when confronted with drugs tests carried out in humiliating conditions. We are not animals. We have the right to be treated with respect. I’m not against doping controls, but I am against the conditions in which these tests are undertaken.
Anquetil went on to criticise what he saw as the inconsistencies of the law – all injections were banned, but not caffeine the substance, so you could drink coffee, for example, but you couldn’t inject caffeine – and the fact that it was not strictly enforced. He cited the example of a Dutch rider unable to produce a sample after a race who was told he could take a flask home with him and provide one when he was ready; when the sample was returned and tested, there were no traces of doping products, but the rider was pregnant – it was, of course, his wife’s urine. Yet the main thrust of his argument was centred on the way cycling as a profession was singled out for special treatment and that this was beneath the dignity of the star riders, whose prestige after all was largely based on their public image.
He reinforced this view with his article the very next week in the immediate aftermath of Tom Simpson’s death on the Mont Ventoux in the Tour de France:
Tom Simpson, my friend Tommy, is dead. He died doing his job, fighting for his sport, in the hardest conditions, in 40-degree heat in the mountains. Later, I’ll explain why he was my friend and what a great guy he was. But first of all I want to express my indignation. The very day of his death people thought of only one thing: to cast aspersions on Simpson and through him the whole of cycling. Straight away, people spoke of one thing and one thing only: doping. The police, the judiciary were all involved. Without a thought for his widow or his two daughters, they decided to conduct an autopsy on this family man, who died through overestimating his own strength. In all walks of life, there are men who die when conditions are against them. A roofer can fall, a miner can be run over by a truck, a pilot can crash his plane. But nobody says: ah ha, he was drunk, or he was drugged. Road cycling is a hard and dangerous profession and everybody knows it, although there are fewer deaths than in motor racing, horse riding or climbing. Yet Tommy is dead, and straight away everyone says: it’s because he was doped. They’re all doped. What good would it do to know if he had been doped? Leave him in peace. That we should undertake to prevent or manage doping, I agree. But it’s through education and training of young riders that we’ll succeed, rather than through adopting police methods and treating us like criminals.
If there is anything that justifies Anquetil’s stance against measures such as drugs tests that were designed to root out the nefarious practices of professional cycling, it is this notion of going from superstar to criminal without having done anything differently from how you did things in the past. Last year, a few amphetamine tablets and a caffeine injection were accepted as tools of a very arduous trade. This year, drugs tests mean the same activities could earn you a suspension and even a prison sentence (not to mention loss of reputation and income).
What’s more, Anquetil was right in seeing cyclists as being singled out. The products used – by and large amphetamines, though steroids and hormones were growing in popularity and would be in widespread use by the 1970s – were both legal and widely available. ‘You could buy them over the counter,’ remembers Jeanine. ‘My husband who was a doctor gave a Maxitot [one of the most famous brands of amphetamine] to my daughter when she was 15 or 16 to help her pass her exams. It was just a little pick-me-up. To keep you alert while driving, you’d take a Corydrane [another brand of amphetamine mixed with aspirin]. Cyclists weren’t allowed them, but I could take them for driving, and they were available over the counter.’
Brunel confirms how readily obtainable these products were: ‘You couldn’t just go and buy them. You needed a prescription, but any doctor could give you one and would give you one. There was no trafficking. It’s not the same process as today. There was no criminalisation of the act, where maybe you’re in contact with people you wouldn’t otherwise want to be in contact with. At the time, everything was easier, more straightforward.’
Jeanine wasn’t the only one to use them, and it wasn’t all flower power and hippies either. During the Second World War, fighter pilots and naval captains were regularly provided with amphetamines to help them perform for longer, as were workers in Japanese munitions factories. Then there was one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre. Asked in an interview with the New York Review of Books about the sense of urgency that pervaded his work, he replied, ‘I started writing Critique de la raison dialectique, and it was this [sense of urgency] that was gnawing at me. I worked on it ten hours a day, taking Corydrane – in the end, I was taking twenty pills a day – and I really felt that this book had to be finished. The amphetamines gave me a quickness of thought and writing that was at least three times my normal rhythm, and I wanted to go fast.’
Anquetil’s former teammate Guy Ignolin describes the effect they would have on a cyclist: ‘We took amphetamines every now and then. Tiny things, about three milligrams – the stuff you could buy in a chemist’s. They lasted about 50 kilometres, an hour, an hour and a half maybe, and then afterwards you’d feel worse than before, so you only took them in the last 50 kilometres. They didn’t make you any stronger, but you just saw everything better – the road, bumps, the wheels – everything was clearer.’ Poulidor agrees with the idea that the effect and the quantities used were minimal: ‘He never hid it. He did it a little, but he certainly didn’t exaggerate. He said he took his little pick-me-up. It was nothing like what goes on today, though. It was a little pill to make you feel better, something like students take, that’s all. Now it’s a medical preparation.’
If this makes the quantities consumed sound reassuringly insignificant, William Fotheringham in Put Me Back on My Bike, his biography of Tom Simpson, suggests otherwise. First, the ‘recommended’ dose he uncovered was eight milligrams, not three. Even this was likely to be far less than was actually consumed, however. One unidentified former professional he spoke to said 50 milligrams was more usual. The reasons for this apparent discrepancy were twofold: regular amphetamine users acquire resistance over time, meaning more has to be consumed to stimulate the same effect; and cyclists conform to the athletic stereotype of assuming that the more they consume of anything, the better they will perform. The fact is that cyclists are already a self-selected group of individuals with physiological capacities – whether effort expended or substances consumed – far in excess of the norm.
Ignolin also lends support to the assertion that it was the workload that came with being a professional cyclist that was
the catalyst for their drug consumption: ‘We didn’t take them until we were maybe 25 or 26. Until then, we’d always been warned against them and told not to take them. Clearly, Anquetil didn’t take anything when he won his first Grand Prix des Nations.’ (Maybe, maybe not. It should not be forgotten that while Anquetil was an exceptionally precocious talent who certainly arrived at the top thanks to his natural ability, his directeur sportif for his first Grand Prix des Nations, Francis Pélissier, was the epitome of the old pro who knew all there was to know about the trade, warts and all.)
Yet, once again, the argument of pressures of the job seems flawed, as not all cyclists of the time were drug users. Anquetil’s teammate Vin Denson, a man capable of cycling Bordeaux–Paris with grit in his shorts and crippled by a trapped nerve in his nether regions, swears he never took anything stronger than sugar. In fact, he went to extreme lengths to ensure he didn’t: ‘I took rice cakes and rice pudding, apples, sliced up bananas, plus calcium, and I put a lot of glucose in my drinks. I used to take my bottles up to the bedroom and mix my own drinks, then I used to put bike tape round the tops and I put a Rizla paper in the middle, without anyone knowing, so I knew if anyone had tampered with them. I’d give them to the soigneur or the mechanic for the feeds on the road, and I’d say, “If anyone touches my bottles, I’ll take you right through the courts.” To the best of my knowledge, nobody did. They knew I was a bit forthright and totally against it.’
Anquetil knew this as well as anyone. ‘One day, he asked me to give him an injection at a criterium, and I refused,’ Denson continues. ‘I said, “Go out and get someone else. I’ll do anything with these legs, and I’ll give you a push with my hand, but I won’t do anything else like that. I would not encourage you on that side whatsoever. I don’t want to get involved.” He was a little bit taken aback. The next minute, I saw Stablinski coming round the corner, and he waved him across.’ That it was Stablinski who appeared to help out should have come as little surprise. ‘The big organiser of products at the heart of the French team was Stablinski,’ says Brunel.
Anquetil was right in one aspect, however: all cyclists were being tarred with the same brush. ‘It came to a stage when you were taking your kids to school – kindergarten in Belgium – and the kids would say, “Have you been on the drugs again this morning?” and I would say, “Look, I’m pure. I don’t take them. I’ve been through tests 30 or 40 times,”’ Denson explains. ‘One of the papers latched onto this, and I did an article. I tried to bring in an anti-drug movement.’ As the recent history of cycling confirms, however, the attempt was short-lived. ‘We had 80 per cent of riders against drugs then in the 1960s. It was in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s they forgot about it.’
EIGHTEEN
Jacques of All Trades
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER HIS 1967 hour record was ratified or not, Anquetil had achieved his twin goals of cementing his place in cycling folklore and reclaiming his place at the top of the bill, though whether this was a result of popularity or notoriety remained a moot point. In practical and financial terms – the terms that meant the most to him – this restoration of his pre-eminence, even if as something of an elder statesman rather than the dominant rider of previous seasons, afforded Anquetil the luxury of determining his own timetable for retirement, rather than having it imposed upon him by a loss of form or a fall from grace. In fact, Anquetil would end up drawing out his farewell to the world of professional cycling that he’d been immersed in since he was nineteen by another two years until 1969.
‘The 8 January next year I’ll be 36,’ he told L’Équipe. ‘I always intended to race until I was 34, but I was tempted to carry on a bit longer, and I don’t regret it, as I don’t think I’ve made a fool of myself. But enough is enough. It’s time to move on.’ He certainly didn’t make a fool of himself in terms of his race results. The glory days of the early part of the decade may have been definitively behind him, but in 1968 he still found it in him to win the Baracchi Trophy for the third time, this time in partnership with Felice Gimondi. In 1969, his last year as a rider, he earned a glowing review in L’Équipe for his performance in the Tour of the Basque Country, his last major victory: ‘A French rider has beaten the Spanish in their own country, and that rider is Jacques Anquetil!’
Even finishing third to Poulidor’s second in Paris–Nice (after being caught by Merckx in the time trial up the Col d’Èze) and then losing to his arch-rival in the Circuit des Six Provinces provoked only a measured response. After chasing down a Poulidor break on one stage, he explained his motives: ‘I chased to prove something to myself, and I thought I could make it to the lead group, but then I started to get cramps in my legs when we went up the Col de la Forclaz. That hadn’t happened to me since the world championships in 1955. Perhaps I was tired after the chase, or perhaps it was a lack of race miles. I haven’t raced much this year, and my mind’s on other things. I think if I focused exclusively on cycling, I could still be right up there for victory, but, like I say, my mind’s on other things, even during a race – on the person behind the rider. It’s peculiar, though, that at 35 I’m still acting as if it’s up to me to control the race.’
The story was similar in the Critérium des As. Even before the event, Anquetil was talking down his chances: ‘I don’t think I can win. One hundred kilometres behind a motorbike is no joke, and I know I won’t get any presents from the Belgians.’ He was right. Walter Godefroot went on to claim victory, while Anquetil came fourth. ‘I did what I could. Two laps from the end, I thought I might make it. A few years ago, things would have been a lot more straightforward!’
Seen in the context of the pride and fierce rivalry that inspired so much of his career, this phlegmatic response to defeat, first at the hands of his greatest rival and then in an event he’d won four times previously, raises the question: why was he still racing? Certainly, he’d admitted himself that his mind was elsewhere and that he was short of race miles. In May of his last year, he gave his own explanation in an interview with Lui magazine: ‘Out of curiosity, no doubt. Out of fear of suddenly being deprived of competitive cycling. Out of pride, also. I’m thirty-five, and I’m constantly facing up to adversaries who are ten or fifteen years younger than me. They can’t always show me who’s boss, and I’ll admit that gives me a degree of pride. For the next generation of riders, Jacques Anquetil is still the man to beat, the public-enemy number one.’
According to Richard Marillier, who describes Anquetil as being more than just a friend to him, and who worked alongside him when he was technical director of the French national cycling team in the 1970s, there was also another more prosaic reason. He wanted the money: ‘I hope somebody’s told you this. You’d find it somewhere anyway. He had decided to stop racing. He said, “That’s it. I’m stopping.” He’d bought a farm. It started like that, with something like 400 hectares – it was enormous – but only a few buildings. Then the bloke who looked after his business interests – his solicitor, if you like – said the chateau is for sale, the one by his farm and the one he rode past as a kid. “But how much?” The answer was that it was a price that represented a very good deal. So he rode for two more years solely to pay for the chateau. He borrowed 90,000,000 francs at the time [Marillier still talks in old francs, so this is the equivalent of £90,000]. He paid it off in two years, but he rode solely for that.’
This was towards the end of 1967, and although he may not actually have earned quite enough to completely pay off such a mortgage, Anquetil himself acknowledged the financial benefits of his two-year swansong in his interview with Lui: ‘The paroxysm of effort in sport is in fact only acceptable through the moral or material satisfaction it provides. I still have a furious desire to race, but I never do it just for pleasure. Pure, unadulterated amateurism is a chimera. It doesn’t exist. It can’t exist, and everybody knows it. Why this hypocrisy is tolerated, I don’t know. I would have been as pure and irreproachable an amateur as the next man as long as one way or another, throu
gh whatever detours it took, money was being put into my wallet.’
Nor would this money have been inconsiderable, he claims, suggesting a top amateur was likely to receive in the order of £200 per month plus appearance money, more than double the average salary of the time. Yet Anquetil was more ambitious than that: ‘I’ve been a pure professional for more than 15 years and have never been embarrassed to be one. It’s never tarnished my reputation. It’s never brought into question what I’ve achieved.’
He might not have been embarrassed, but his memory appears short. His candid articles two years earlier in France Dimanche – including his confessions about buying riders – certainly cast a shadow of sorts on his reputation. Yet as an unabashed professional, he was happy to continue, explaining the comfortable financial situation he was now in: ‘I started investing at the end of my military service. On my return to civilian life, I wanted to buy a sports car, a beautiful red one, a car for someone of my age. But instead I chose to buy a small block of flats on rue Malaitre in Rouen. My first property, and my first capital investment. Now I have quite enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my days.’
Two extra years would undoubtedly have helped, however. According to figures Anquetil himself provides in his interview with Lui magazine, his basic salary in his last contract with the Bic team was £12,000 per year (although Géminiani suggests he was paid £30,000 per year). He said he could then more than double this through the contracts he was given to race in criteriums (between 50 and 100 of these each year, worth £300 each, giving a total of between £15,000 and £30,000) and other appearance money. On average, he said he declared £36,000 per year for tax purposes, a good reason to keep cycling (even if he chose to ride the Tour de France route one day ahead of the race in 1969 to provide a stage description for Europe 1 because he earned more from that than from racing).