The road, only completed in 1932 and still gravel-strewn and rough in places, steadily took its toll. The riders plodded on, some seeking the few patches of shade, and many visibly wilting in the heat. By the time the leaders reached Mont Serein, at 1,432 metres, where the Chalet Liotard hotel and restaurant now overlooks nursery ski slopes and dominates a broad flat hairpin, the front group, their spare tyres wrapped around their shoulders, had reduced to Géminiani, Bobet, Bartali, Lazaridès and the peerless Koblet. These were the ’51 Tour’s ‘royals’. Those scattered behind on the rocky road to the top of the Giant were the also-rans.
With three riders from the French national team – Lazaridès, Géminiani and Bobet – all in the front group, their manager Jean Bidot’s sole aspiration was to prevent Koblet taking more time. As they left Mont Serein, and the road reared up again, Bobet faltered, as Géminiani, hunched and frowning, redoubled his efforts to drop Koblet. Under a burning sun, a huge crowd, crammed in across the steep white scree, lined the final ladder of hairpins to the observatory. Bobet slipped further behind and Géminiani still battled to break Koblet, but without success.
Yet it was a man born in Athens, adopted Frenchman Lucien Lazaridès, who accelerated and led over the top to become the first rider in the Tour de France to reach the summit of Mont Ventoux. His brother, Apo, passed the observatory four minutes later. ‘Lucien is a rider for severe but consistent gradients,’ Apo, sounding like a team PR, had told French journalists before the Ventoux stage. Clearly, he knew his brother’s strengths well.
But although he lost ground on the climb, Bobet was not out of the picture. Just over a minute behind Lazaridès at the summit, he launched himself into the long descent, plummeting past Chalet Reynard and down through the forest, through the virage at St Estève and on into Bédoin. He raced across the plain towards Avignon. By the time the Frenchman had reached Carpentras, he and five others, including Lazaridès, had joined forces. As they closed on the finish line in Avignon’s Allée de l’Oulle, Bobet, of little interest to Koblet who only had eyes for Lazaridès and Géminiani, attacked to win the stage.
Bobet’s success drew a mixed reception. His stage win was scant consolation for what had in fact been a forgettable Tour for him. He had been criticised for his poor climbing and his personality had little traction with the fans. He was also developing a reputation for moods and anxiety. His relationship with the loud, irrepressible and sometimes bombastic Géminiani, who insisted on truncating Bobet’s first name to ‘Zonzon’, was not easy.
For Coppi, the first ascent of the Ventoux in the Tour had been another humiliation, as he oscillated between ‘campionissimo’ and catastrophe. His schizophrenic nature was highlighted 48 hours later, when he broke away after 50 kilometres of stage 20 and rode alone over the mighty passes of the Vars and the Izoard to win in Briançon. Such a turnaround may have had something to do with Coppi’s self-confessed affection for pill-popping. His own banal acceptance of amphetamine use – la bomba – was famously documented in one television interview.
After admitting to taking la bomba, ‘whenever it was necessary’, Coppi was asked how often this would be. ‘Almost all the time,’ he replied, with a pragmatism that has become legendary.
Whatever the fuel behind Coppi’s Alpine resurgence, Koblet’s overall advantage by then was such that he didn’t care. By the time his Tour ended in victory, he was a post-war superstar, a romantic hero, a suave, seductive and glamorous figure, comb at the ready, car keys in his hand, a glint in his eye.
The Zürich baker’s son made the most of his success and fame. He bought sports cars, was – obviously – sponsored by a comb manufacturer and married a model. He had, it seemed, got it all. But 1951 proved to be his peak: he never completed another Tour de France. As rapidly as it had ascended, his star was extinguished.
Such was the success of the Tour’s inaugural Ventoux visit that the 1952 Tour included a second ascent, this time from Bédoin. But Koblet, Ferdi Kübler and Bobet were not on the start line. In a Tour peppered with long mountain stages and three new summit finishes – at Alpe d’Huez, Sestrières and the Puy de Dôme – Fausto Coppi expected to shine.
But the enduring and resilient Géminiani, second overall to Koblet in 1951, was still there as well, and still sounding off. Renowned for his temper tantrums, his delight in intrigue and gossip and his arrogance, Géminiani was the post-war peloton’s big mouth. When I first met him, more than 40 years later, he hadn’t changed.
On my first European race, the 1994 Paris–Nice, he was more than a little irritated to be asked to chaperone me, a random British journalist, when I pitched up with a backpack at a start village in St Étienne.
‘Do you not have a car?’ asked race organiser Josette Leuillot, incredulously, after I had put myself at her mercy.
‘Er, no,’ I said.
I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have any hotels and I only had about 200 francs to last me the entire race. But I was blessed: the Leuillot family’s generous hospitality was fully extended to me.
I watched as Josette toured the start village and asked the clannish French media if they had space for me. Finally, she had a word with Géminiani, then working on the race as analyst, in-house bon viveur and generic old cove. There was an explosion of disbelief and protest, a spitting of breadcrumbs, red wine and forestier pâté and – it may have been a contractual obligation – a theatrical mini-storming-off.
Josette watched him go, shrugged and walked over to me. I smiled hopefully.
‘Get in with Gem,’ she ordered sternly. ‘He’ll drive you to the finish.’
An hour later, I was cowering in the back seat of Le Grand Fusil’s Peugeot saloon as we barrelled down the Col de la République, just ahead of the peloton. Gem, one hand on the wheel, one hand gesturing and his head turned away from the hairpins ahead, launched into another of his epic monologues. ‘Breetessh Petroleeeum!’ he said every 30 seconds, shaking his head, and adding an amused chortle for dramatic effect.
‘Ah oui – ha ha! – bien sûr!’ I responded in a circular conversation that lasted through the Rhône valley and on into the afternoon, until Pascal Richard climbed to victory in the Alps, at the little-known ski station at Vaujany.
When I climbed out of Gem’s car at the finish, sweaty-handed, nauseous and in desperate need of a pee, I thanked him for the ‘experience’. ‘Now you’re part of cycling’s big family!’ he called grandly, as I limped cross-legged towards the nearest Portaloo.
Later that week, when we stopped at a mid-stage press buffet somewhere near Aix-en-Provence, I watched as he launched into a ‘bah, kids today!’ style rant, and gave a group of French journalists an extended blast from the Géminiani hairdryer. Yet in his more reflective moments, Gem revealed surprising insight. Once he described how, in post-war France, the sight of the climbers of the Tour reaching for the sky would gladden hearts downtrodden by years of Nazi occupation and fear.
‘The fans always had a weakness for climbers,’ Gem said. ‘Robic, Bartali, Coppi, Kübler, Koblet. They all won the public over because they were such great climbers.’
Thus the Ventoux, which like Alpe d’Huez was first used in the early 1950s, became a theatre of post-war dreams, an impossibly intimidating arena where the great climbers fought against a fearsome obstacle, and, like France itself, were eventually liberated from their shackles.
As the fans, riders, teams and media discovered just how spectacular the Ventoux could be, it became a regular haunt both for the Tour de France and the Dauphiné Libéré, the week-long early-June stage race that traced a tortuous route through the French Alps.
The Dauphiné, first held in 1947, was – like the Tour – created to fuel newspaper sales, in this case the Grenoble-based Alpine paper, the Dauphiné Libéré. The race first took the peloton over the Ventoux in 1949, via the banks of snow lining the route up from Malaucène, in a 246-kilometre stage from Gap to Avignon. It returned frequently throughout the 1950s, including in 1951, the
summer of the Tour’s first visit. It was also included in 1950, 1953, 1955 and 1957, en route to a regular stage finish in Avignon.
As a final test for the Tour, the Dauphiné became almost essential and for many recent Tour champions – from Miguel Indurain to Lance Armstrong to Chris Froome – that preference continues.
Géminiani was among the favourites prior to the 1952 Tour. He’d demonstrated his resilience in 1951, and now felt he could challenge for victory. But by the time the race reached the south of France, Coppi had already won the first time trial to Nancy and the summit finishes at Alpe d’Huez and Sestrières. He led the peloton by almost 25 minutes and the race was effectively decided.
As Coppi stole the show, the Tour organisers, fearful of a loss of interest, doubled the prize money for second place in Paris, hoping to stimulate exciting racing from his closest rivals. Drama had become even more important as, for the first time, the Tour was televised. That, in itself, was a race against time. Two cameramen shot footage of the race from BMW motorbikes, and, after the stage finish, it was rushed to Paris. There, in the Rue Cognacq-Jay, legendary broadcaster, playwright and polar explorer, Georges de Caunes – father of Antoine of Eurotrash renown – added his commentary over a highlights package.
TVs were not widespread in France in 1952, with only around 50,000 households, mainly in Paris, actually having a set. But already, the power and reach of television was firing the race organisation’s imagination. These days the needs of live television take precedence over all other considerations, including, often, those of the riders.
On the morning of 10 July 1952, the convoy gathered in Aix-en-Provence. If the riders knew that the Tour’s outcome was already decided, French everyman and winner of the 1947 Tour de France, Jean Robic – or ‘Biquet’ – was on a mission to take victory on the Giant. Robic’s ungainly style of climbing saw him expend almost as much energy rocking sideways as he did moving forward. This was married to a constant gurning, matched only during intervening years by Thomas Voeckler, a winner of the Tour de Yorkshire, who also led the Tour itself for nine days in 2011.
Like Biquet, Tommy’s have-a-go-hero face-pulling has endeared him to French fans. He instinctively seems to know when the TV cameras are on and the live broadcast begins. I can’t confirm, however, if his face resumes normal status during the ad breaks.
There is a great YouTube clip from the 2014 Tour of Voeckler climbing wearily to the ski station at Chamrousse. Far behind the peloton-fixated prowling TV motorbikes, there is no gurning; instead, just a mantle of exhaustion as he slowly plods to the finish. The clip, shot on a spectator’s phone, captures him pedalling through a bend as a bunch of sun-struck, inebriated fans jeer mockingly at him. In the tradition more perhaps of Géminiani than Biquet, the outraged Voeckler slams on the brakes and starts shouting back.
‘Oi! You ever ridden a bike?!’ he rants.
Stunned, the shamefaced fans quickly apologise – ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ they mumble. Head shaking in disgust, Voeckler rides on.
Up on the Ventoux in 1952, Robic’s own facial rictus was in overdrive as he mauled his machine and fought his way towards the summit. Biquet’s decisive attack would probably cause uproar today. After French team-mate Géminiani had made a tentative move at the St Estève bend, the slight, gurning Robic followed suit – just as Coppi punctured.
The continuing tradition of the Tour being raced on the basis of national rather than sponsored teams consistently threw up odd bedfellows and tactical conundrums. Géminiani and Coppi, for example, had raced as trade team-mates during the 1952 Tour of Italy, which Coppi had won. Now, only a few weeks later, they were rivals and Géminiani was one of a team stabbing him in the back.
Given the commercial interests, national teams would be unthinkable now. Imagine if, for example, a British team set out to win the Tour with a line-up including all the stars – Wiggins, Froome, the Yates twins, Geraint Thomas and Mark Cavendish. That might be a chimp too many, even for Dave Brailsford to manage.
In 2012, some of those riders raced together for Team Sky. But it’s well known that those alliances were fraught, that Cavendish was miserable and that relations between Wiggins and Froome were particularly tense. Little, however, compares to the Biquet-and-Gem hotel bathroom fracas in 1952. After a stage through Belgium during the Tour’s first week, in which Géminiani had chased a dangerous breakaway while Robic sat in his slipstream before himself attacking, the Breton was holding court as he sat in his hotel room’s bathtub. Gem overheard his team-mate bragging to journalists, saying he had ‘played dead’ and had effectively used Géminiani for his own ends. Enraged, Gem burst in and pushed Robic’s head underwater. Only after a team manager and a soigneur had wrestled with him did he let go.
Géminiani found Robic irritating and pretentious. Even though he was born in the Ardennes, Robic saw himself as a French everyman and insisted on playing the part of the definitive stubborn, arrogant Breton. ‘I was born in the Ardennes by mistake,’ he maintained defiantly.
The 1952 Tour wore on with an uneasy truce between the pair. Géminiani won the stage to Mulhouse and was working his way back up the race classification, when a puncture halted his climb of the Galibier. Neither Robic nor a French team car stopped to help him as he stood stranded at the roadside.
Nor did Robic hesitate to attack when Coppi, wearing the maillot jaune, punctured on the way up the Ventoux. The Italian, with his 25-minute cushion to fall back on, didn’t panic and rode his way steadily back to the leading group. Up ahead, at Chalet Reynard, where a huge crowd had accessed the mountain via the new road climbing up from Sault, Robic dropped his final companion, Gilbert Bauvin, and headed on towards the summit. Behind him, Géminiani played the part of the perfect team-mate, sitting menacingly on the rear wheel of any pursuer as his bathroom betrayer built a two-minute lead.
In spite of his diminutive stature, Robic had a reputation for being a fearless descender, helped perhaps by the canny use of a lead-filled water bottle for the longest drops. Whether ‘Leatherhead’ – he had a penchant for a leather hairnet helmet – put some extra lead in his pencil as he swooshed down towards Malaucène is unknown. With his new team boss Marcel Bidot – Gem’s ‘donkey’ – yelling encouragement from the team car as he exited Malaucène, Robic forged on into the Rhône valley, winning in Avignon by over a minute and a half from Bartali, Géminiani and Coppi.
And Coppi? He went on to win the 1952 Tour by over 28 minutes, with Biquet, for all his gurning, finishing fifth overall, more than 35 minutes behind him.
By the mid-1950s the Dauphiné and the Tour, for any pretenders to success in July, went hand in hand, particularly if both races included the Ventoux, as was the case in 1955. Bobet, once so vulnerable to criticism of his climbing ability, was the dominant force on the Giant that summer. Wearing the world road race champion’s jersey, Bobet had already proved irresistible in that year’s Dauphiné, winning three stages, including a time trial, and finishing second on the stage that climbed the Ventoux.
But a month later the Giant took him, and others, to the brink, in a traumatic stage that revealed the dangers the extreme conditions on the mountain sometimes posed. The drama of the 1955 Tour’s ascent of Ventoux was a prelude to what was to come a little over a decade later.
‘Zonzon’ had won the Tours of 1953 and 1954, and with Coppi and Koblet absent, he was the clear favourite for final victory in Paris. But Bobet was fighting illness while fending off the irrepressible Luxembourger Charly Gaul, among the greatest climbers of his generation. Gaul had already staked his claim, flamboyantly winning the 253-kilometre stage to Briançon, and putting a 14-minute gap into Bobet in doing so.
While the French national team’s Antonin Rolland held the lead as the race arrived in Marseille, the Ventoux stage was to be pivotal for both Bobet and Gaul. The methodical Bobet, after two successive Tour wins, knew he was in danger of being outshone by Gaul, who personified the romance of the mercurial lone climber against the fearsome mou
ntains. The French public, despite his success in the Tour, didn’t see Bobet the way they saw Robic, as one of their own.
Boos and whistles had mingled with the cheers that greeted Bobet the previous evening when the Tour arrived in Marseille. As he listened, stoically, he realised that the Ventoux offered him a chance to suffer for his public, with the panache that the French had come to expect of him. He and team manager Bidot hatched the plan for a major attack on the Ventoux, but it was a bigger gamble than his rivals knew at the time. The already anxious Bobet was fighting the agony of a chronic saddle sore so severe that he rode for long periods out of the saddle in an attempt to relieve the pain.
Radio and newspaper reports of that day’s 198-kilometre stage over the Ventoux describe it as ‘torrid’. A succession of attacks came and went and by the time the peloton reached Cavaillon, on the banks of the Durance, the field was already fragmented.
Steadily, the temperature rose until, by early afternoon, it was nudging 40 degrees. In the villages en route to Bédoin and the foot of the Ventoux, the riders reached into the crowd, grabbing bottles of cold water wherever they could. Some fans even brought hosepipes to the roadside, showering the baking bunch as they pedalled past. But the heat didn’t deter Ferdi Kübler, of Switzerland, from attacking. After his double victories in the Ardennes, the Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and his 1950 Tour win, Kübler had thought he was special, at least until the afternoon in July 1955 when the Ventoux taught him a harsh lesson.
Accounts of what exactly was said vary, particularly between the key protagonists who later contradicted each other. The spoken words may have been different but there’s no doubt that, as Kübler launched himself at the gradient, Géminiani, sitting on the Swiss rider’s wheel on behalf of Bobet, gave him a word of warning.
‘Easy tiger’ – or words to that effect – said Gem, as he watched the Swiss rider enthusiastically churn the pedals. ‘The Ventoux’s not like any other climb, you know . . .’
French Renaissance Page 6