Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  The event went ahead, none the less; it was won by one Albert Price, and all those involved in it were suspended. What became known as “the revolt” led to the foundation, 18 months later, of the British League of Racing Cyclists, and to a bitter 17-year conflict with the NCU, during which cycling clubs across the country were split by the need to declare their allegiance to one body or the other.

  Stallard, ironically, was expelled from the league soon after its foundation for criticising its standard of race organisation, although he returned and organised the first London–Holyhead, the longest race in Europe, in 1951. His influence was vital: in the 1950s, under the impetus of the league and its calendar of races, the Milk Race, later the Tour of Britain, was founded, subsequently running for more than 30 years; in 1955, the first British team took part in the Tour de France; and British cyclists, such as Brian Robinson and Tom Simpson, became the first Britons to compete successfully at the highest level of the sport since the 1890s.

  The BLRC and the NCU merged in 1959, and Stallard quit the sport in a state of disillusionment. Feelings ran high at the time; his assistant in the cycle shop, Ralph Jones, was the BLRC delegate at the international meeting in Spain which recognised the merged body, the British Cycling Federation. On his return to Wolverhampton, Stallard sacked him.

  Stallard made a return to cycle race organisation in the 1980s, running events for veterans, but his chief love, by then, was hillwalking. He visited Australia and the Grand Canyon, and ran more than 100 coach tours to Snowdonia and the Lake District, on which, as one participant put it, “he would try to burn everyone off”.

  He never lost his cantankerousness or gained any respect for authority. While walking up Scafell Pike one day, he and his group were told by a warden to turn back due to thick mist; the group returned, and later met Stallard at the bus, only to be told, “I came to climb the bloody mountain, so I went to the top.”

  Ironically, since Stallard’s great days, cycle racing on Britain’s roads has again come under threat, this time from the increase in motor traffic and the cost of policing major public events. The result has been a reduction in the calendar, and, two years ago, the demise of the Tour of Britain itself.

  Percy Thornley Stallard, racing cyclist and organiser, born July 19 1909; died August 11 2001.

  The Tour of Britain was relaunched three years after Stallard’s death, and has since gone from strength to strength. British Cycling have finally seemed to resolve the issue of protecting races on British roads but this has required parliamentary involvement. The threat now, alongside police costs and traffic, is now principally from a lack of willing organisers ready to raise the money to meet those expenses. As a result, the events between the Tour of Britain and the grassroots are withering away.

  Pantani dies broken and alone

  16 February 2004

  Marco Pantani’s death on Saturday in a rented apartment in Rimini was a pathetic, lonely end for one of the sport’s larger-than-life heroes, but there was an implacable logic about his final descent that was redolent of Greek tragedy.

  Initially it was thought that Pantani had died from an overdose of anti-depressants: “There were medicines of a tranquilliser nature [found with Pantani] that could have had a role in the cause of death,” said the state prosecutor Paolo Gengarelli, adding: “No one has mentioned suicide and I am excluding it.”

  However, late yesterday the news agency Ansa suggested that the cause was a heart attack. Citing investigative sources, Ansa said the coroner who examined Pantani had concluded he had died of a “cardio-circulatory arrest”, but that the cause was not known. An autopsy is scheduled for today. It is believed that he died at about 4pm on Saturday.

  Italian cycling was in a state of turmoil at the death of its most charismatic champion since the heyday of the campionissimo Fausto Coppi in the early 50s, winning the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia in 1998. “I am devastated. This is a tragedy of enormous proportions,” said the 2003 world champion Mario Cipollini.

  Pantani checked into the Roses apartment-hotel, 20 miles down the Adriatic coast from his Cesenatico home, on February 9 and spent his last five days alone, making no phone calls, with meals being delivered to his room.

  He was apparently engaged in writing his reflections on cycling, but the pages he left behind did not offer any indications of suicide. Apparently Pantani, who was unmarried, had become estranged from his family, having lost contact with his father, his most passionate supporter, and the last person he spoke to appears to have been the hotel porter.

  Staff apparently found him “strange and vacant”, and when he did not order dinner on Saturday night they checked his room and found him half-naked near the bed, with an empty box of anti-depressants nearby. Other boxes, some empty, were found elsewhere in the room containing four different kinds of anti-depressant.

  The 34-year-old last raced in the 2003 Giro d’Italia, finishing 14th. He was refused entry to the centenary Tour de France because the organisers did not consider him good enough, and he spent much of June at a clinic that specialises in depression and drug addiction.

  By the start of this year, it appeared that his competitive career was at an end: he had apparently put on two stone and told a local newspaper that he was “disgusted” with cycling after almost five years spent fighting a series of court cases and bans amid continual allegations of drug use.

  These were the final episodes in a fall from grace of epic scale and suddenness precipitated on June 5 1999 at the ski resort of Madonna del Campiglio, where he was expelled for failing a blood test from the Tour of Italy 36 hours before the finish, when well on course for victory.

  By then Pantani had risen to be Italy’s most popular sportsman – on a par with the motorcyclist Valentino Rossi and the skier Alberto Tomba. He had fought back from a compound fracture of his left shin in 1995 to win the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in 1998, the first Italian to win the Tour for 33 years and only the seventh cyclist to achieve the double.

  Pantani had already achieved vast popularity because of his unique style, wholly reliant upon do-or-die attacks in the mountains, and engaging personality – he used to take a guitar into the bars of Rimini and serenade local girls – as well as the capacity to fight back from a spate of crashes.

  His Tour de France victory in 1998 came as the Tour descended into chaos after the withdrawal of the Festina team and police raids in search of drugs. On a bone-chillingly wet day in the Alps, he demolished the 1997 Tour winner Jan Ullrich in the style of greats such as Fausto Coppi.

  It was widely believed that, because of the police raids, he was riding clean and that his epic victory had restored some of the race’s credibility. That made next year’s events the more shocking: he failed a test intended to restrict the use of the blood-booster erythropoietin (EPO) by a margin that clearly indicated use of the drug. EPO increases the quantity of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, enhancing stamina.

  Pantani was not banned after the blood test, but prosecutors opened investigations on the basis that he had fixed results by taking drugs, committing “sporting fraud”.

  By 2000 he was racing again, staging a surprise comeback to ride that year’s Giro after a blessing from the Pope at the start. In the 2000 Tour de France, he managed two mountain-stage wins before quitting the event in secret amid rumours that he was trying to avoid the drug testers.

  The 2001 “San Remo blitz”, when two police forces raided the Giro in search of drugs, destroyed what remained of his credibility. The carabinieri found a syringe in his room containing traces of insulin, and he was banned for six months. The wildest rumours followed – from a cocaine habit to anaemia due to damage to the bone marrow from years of boosting his blood cells artificially.

  Pantani spent his final years convinced that cycling had permitted him to become the scapegoat for a sport in which, by the mid-90s, drug-taking was the rule and from which, inevitably, he received little support when he was exposed.


  This Pantani piece was not a formal obituary – I did write one as well, in a more condensed version – but this piece seemed to have its place here. The Italian’s death was a horrendous event. He had been exposed as a drugs cheat, and was in massive denial, but it was impossible to forget the charismatic cyclist and the engaging, eccentric character that he was. It was also impossible to avoid the feeling that collectively the entire sport bore a measure of responsibility for his death. “We all killed him,” were my first words on hearing of his death; this is how I still feel today.

  Charly Gaul

  8 December 2005

  Cycling has always regarded mountain climbers as a race apart, performing incredible feats in the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, but slightly out of kilter with the rest of the world, and those contradictions were epitomised by the life of Charly Gaul, the original Angel of the Mountains, who has died aged 73.

  “A sad, timid look on his face, marked with an unfathomable melancholy, he gives the impression that an evil deity has forced him into a cursed profession amidst powerful, implacable rivals,” was one writer’s view of Gaul. Cursed or not, cycling was probably better than working as a slaughterman in the abattoir at Bettembourg, as he did before turning professional at the age of 20.

  One of only two Luxembourgeois ever to win the Tour, the “prince of the Grandy Duchy” was last seen at the reunion of former Tour de France winners, when the centenary race was presented in October 2002. He cut a curious figure – plump, shambling, confused – his eyes hidden behind thick spectacles above a wispy beard, a far cry from his heyday in the 1950s, when he won the Tour once and the Giro twice.

  According to one of his great rivals, the Frenchman Raphael Geminiani, the diminutive Gaul was “a murderous climber, always the same sustained rhythm, a little machine with a slightly higher gear than the rest, turning his legs at a speed that would break your heart, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock”. “Mozart on two wheels,” was how the French writer Antoine Blondin saw him.

  Gaul won 10 stages in the Tour and was twice crowned King of the Mountains, but he forged his reputation in just two days in the Tour and Giro, both in the foul weather which adds a nightmare quality to the toughness of climbing and descending mountains, but which seemed to suit him.

  His victory in the 1956 Giro d’Italia was won in a single stage through the Dolomites, finishing up the eight-mile climb to the summit of Monte Bondone, when he leapt from 11th place to first place overall, ending the stage blue with cold, barely able to stand, wrapped up in a blanket. Many of the field simply retired. “This day surpassed anything seen before in terms of pain, suffering and difficulty,” wrote the former Tour organiser Jacques Goddet.

  A year later, Gaul lost the Giro by making the elementary mistake of stopping to urinate in a hedge. His rivals attacked, he never regained contact, and earned the nickname Cheri-Pipi, which roughly translates as “Dear little wee-wee”. Afterwards, Gaul reminded Geminiani and his team-mate Louison Bobet that he was a former butcher. “I’ll make sausagemeat of you.” In the sporting sense, he managed just that at the end of the 1958 Tour, on a rainsoaked stage through the Chartreuse Massif.

  Geminiani was expected to win the Tour, and Gaul was more than 16 minutes behind – then, as now, a margin considered insurmountable. The little man pointed out to Bobet where he would attack, and did so, racing alone over five mountain passes in rain that washed the painted finish line off the road, “a curtain of water, a deluge without an ark,” as l’Equipe’s reporter described the conditions. Geminiani finished 14 minutes behind, and the Tour was in Gaul’s pocket.

  He took the Giro again in 1959, and could well have won the Tour more than just the once – in 1955 and 1961 he came third – had he not been handicapped by the 1950s system of national teams. Luxembourg was unable to field a squad strong enough to support him against France and Italy, and after his 1956 win he was shunted off into an “international” team with Danes, Dutchmen and Britons, including this country’s Tour pioneer Brian Robinson.

  Gaul retired from cycling in 1963, made an abortive comeback in 1965, then spent six months running a cafe near the main station in the centre of Luxembourg city, before slipping out of public view as effectively as he had slipped away from the pack in the Alps and Dolomites. For a quarter of a century, his whereabouts was a mystery, before he was discovered in the middle of an Ardennes forest, following a hermitic lifestyle in a small hut.

  He was invited to the Tour’s start in Luxembourg in 1989, and returned to the world. Five years later, cycling found a new angel, the Italian Marco Pantani, the only cyclist Gaul would recognise as a possible heir in terms of climbing skill, and a man with an equally troubled life, who died last year. By then, Gaul was following cycling with a fan’s enthusiasm, supported by his third wife and their daughter, who survive him.

  Charly Gaul, cyclist, born December 8 1932; died December 6 2005

  Gaul’s death was a reminder that in the early years of the 21st century there were few stars left from what I view as cycling’s golden age – the two decades following the second world war. The knowledge that the men who had born witness to that era were rapidly disappearing was what inspired me to write Fallen Angel, my biography of Fausto Coppi. I realised that it was now or never.

  Felix Levitan

  3 April 2007

  Felix Levitan, who has died aged 95, began his working life running errands at a Paris cycling magazine and rose to become an organiser of the Tour de France for 40 years. He laid the foundations for the event’s rapid growth in the late 1980s and invented two integral parts of the Tour’s make-up: the grand finale on the Champs-Élysées and the polka-dot “redpeas” jersey awarded to the race’s King of the Mountains.

  Levitan was born into a family of Jewish shoemakers in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. His brother was an amateur cycle racer, and together they tried to hang on to the best professionals of the day as they trained in the Bois de Boulogne or the Longchamp racetrack, before, at the age of 16, he began working as a telephonist on Le Pedale magazine.

  His first published piece was entitled “Vouloir, c’est pouvoir” – “if you want to, you can” – which he said was “not very good”. But more accurately, he described the title as his personal credo. Subsequently Levitan worked for the newspapers l’Intransigeant – first thing in the morning – and, in the evening, its rival l’Auto.

  Even though Levitan described himself as “appallingly irreligious”, he did not escape the round-ups of Jews during the Nazi occupation of 1940–44, and he was interned in the Cherche-Midi military prison in Paris. His wife Genevieve managed to arrange his transfer to Dijon, without which he was certain he would have ended up in a concentration camp.

  When the Paris press was restructured after the liberation, he was appointed head of sport at the Parisien Libéré newspaper, and when a joint team was appointed by the Parisien and its sister newspaper l’Equipe to run the first postwar Tour in 1947, Levitan found his true vocation. While l’Equipe’s head Jacques Goddet concentrated on the sporting side – devising the course and the entry criteria, tweaking the rules to liven up the event – Levitan made the race pay.

  The Tour had originally been devised as a means of creating exclusive copy for the newspaper that ran it, but Levitan turned it into a commercial enterprise in its own right by expanding the garish cavalcade of advertising vehicles and making stage towns pay heavily for the privilege of hosting starts and finishes. The race’s prologue time-trial was instigated in 1967 as a way of getting more cash out of the town hosting the Grand Départ. Most importantly, he understood the significance of selling television rights, which are now what pays the race’s way.

  Small and dapper, with a frosty smile, Levitan was formally appointed joint organiser in 1962, and he copied the dictatorial style of his and Goddet’s predecessor, Henri Desgrange. The eight-times stage winner from Yorkshire Barry Hoban recalled one occasion on which he had won an intermediate prize: it was confirm
ed by the judge, only for Levitan to reverse the verdict. “You can’t do that,” expostulated the cyclist. “My dear Barry, I have every right,” came the implacable reply.

  In 1975 came Levitan’s two masterstrokes. One was the decision to make the best mountain climber wear a red spotted jersey, the maillot à pois, or the “measled vest” as one English writer termed it: the jersey is now one of the race’s three major prizes together with the yellow jersey of overall leader and the green jersey worn by the points leader. For that same year’s Tour, Levitan devised the ambitious plan of running the closing stage through the heart of Paris, along the Rue de Rivoli and the banks of the Seine, with the finish on the Champs-Elysées. The French president Giscard d’Estaing welcomed the idea – and attended the finish – but his police chief restricted the race to a loop up and down the great boulevard, with the riders performing a U-turn before the Arc de Triomphe. The circuit is now the most distinctive feature of the whole event.

  Levitan did not stop there. He began a shortlived women’s event alongside the men’s Tour, and was the driving force behind the arrival of Colombian cyclists in the event in 1983. His dream was to export the Tour to America, with the race starting in New York and the riders flown across the Atlantic to complete the event in France.

  His vision of cycling as a world sport, if not that of a tour of the world, was eventually realised, but an abortive event in the US, the Tour of the Americas, proved his undoing: he was sacked suddenly in 1987 on the grounds that he could not account for the money spent on the event, but later a court ruled the Tour’s parent company had no case against him. The recipient of three grades of the legion d’honneur, he returned to the race on occasion, but he and his event were never truly reconciled.