French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  ‘It was a long time on my own, yes, but if you want to win the stage, well . . .’ he says. ‘Sometimes if you wait too long you can’t make the difference. You have to attack earlier to tire them out.

  ‘You’re never sure, though. You hope to make the difference, to win the stage, but Chalet Reynard is still six or seven kilometres from the top.’

  This was not graceful or elegant riding, but a demonstration of strength and ambition. Footage shows Merckx overpowering his bike, crushing the pedals, mouth agape, frowning in concentration as he contains the pain.

  Now though, surely, riders would think that such an attack, so low down the Ventoux, was too big a risk?

  ‘Bah,’ Merckx says with a roll of his eyes. ‘But it’s also a risk to wait to the last moment. These days, the tactics are different. They’re afraid – they’re afraid of each other.’

  As he rode through the desert of bleached rock, his characteristic hunching over the handlebars became more pronounced, and the pain in his back, caused by a crash a year earlier, visibly more intense. In an effort to manage the pain, Merckx reached into his jersey pocket for an Allen key and lowered his saddle slightly, even as he rode up the mountain. ‘I was adjusting my saddle because of the crash in 1969,’ he said, of the notorious stack-up on the velodrome in Blois, which, he has said, could have killed him. ‘After Blois I suffered a lot because my hips were turned.

  ‘I think my leg was broken in the crash, but after six weeks, I started riding again and my hips were out of alignment. Back then, there was no osteopath or physio. I often needed to make the saddle higher or lower, so I became a specialist at adjusting the saddle while I was riding. It wasn’t the first time. I had to do it in other races too, once or twice.’

  Only with three kilometres to go – within sight almost of the Simpson memorial – did he falter, as the commentators watching on TV screens at the summit exclaimed: ‘Merckx en difficulté!’

  Even then, he didn’t forget his obligation to Simpson. ‘I still remembered,’ Merckx said of the moment he removed his cap. ‘It was for Tommy – he was a very good friend. I liked him very much. He was a mentor to me when I was young.’

  He won the stage easily from Martin Van Den Bossche, who reached the summit well over a minute later. Lacking the energy even for a victory salute, Merckx crossed the line in a state of near-collapse. He pushed and shoved his way through the mêlée that greeted him, saying he had ‘fire in his belly’.

  ‘Listen, it’s a fact that after the finish you have the TV, radio and press and really I did feel a bit dizzy,’ he said. ‘I told them: “Enough, I’m not good.”

  ‘I already had too much oxygen in my lungs. Then the doctor gave me oxygen, which was ridiculous because it was the worst thing they could do.’

  Suddenly, three years after Simpson, some immediately feared the worst, even though the stage had been timed to avoid the scorching heat of the Ventoux in mid-afternoon.

  The prospect of another collapsed star spread panic. Breathless and seemingly close to passing out, Merckx and Van Den Bossche took refuge in an ambulance.

  ‘Merckx came in the ambulance and we were in there for an age,’ Van Den Bossche told journalist Daniel Friebe for his acclaimed book on Merckx. But others still insist that Merckx, while undoubtedly exhausted, was cunningly ensuring a quick exit. In the event, he and Van Den Bossche were sped down the mountain with a police escort.

  ‘It wasn’t a tactic,’ Merckx insisted. ‘But after an effort like I made on the Ventoux, and then you have to do Belgian TV, French TV, radio . . . It was a good thing because we got to the hotel early.’

  Van Den Bossche always found the whole tale amusing. ‘We arrived at the hotel an hour ahead of our team-mates who had been blocked on the mountain,’ he said.

  Cunning and astute it may have been, but the growing resentment towards Merckx’s dominance soon became open. During that Tour, he and his team rejected the race organisation’s official hotel allocations. That, his past rejection of partisan French values at the Peugeot team and his blunt criticism of other French-isms, hardly endeared him to host press or public. Forty-three years later, Chris Froome would experience the same frosty reception after his own dominant win on the Ventoux. Like Merckx, he and his team then obsessed over negative media coverage, forgetting perhaps that the biggest gain of all might be simply to be liked.

  I’d had a lot of disappointments in 1965. That’s cycling I suppose. But it’s not always easy to bounce back, even though I know that you have to keep plugging away. There’s been times this year, when I’ve thought the devil was against me, when everything seemed to go wrong, no matter how hard I tried or how hard I rode. I had psyched myself up for the Tour de France. Because Anquetil wasn’t there, I felt I had a pretty good chance. I knew it would be tough of course, but winning the Tour is the biggest goal for me – it has to be.

  Once we got to the Pyrenees, things picked up and I climbed up to seventh place, but I had a tumble when I was coming down the Aubisque. It was pretty standard – I ripped my jersey and shorts and picked up some cuts and bruises, but I also cut my hand. A few days later, after we’d crossed into Spain for a finish in Barcelona, it started bothering me more, and by the time we left Montpellier for the stage over the Ventoux, it was giving me grief.

  I’m not very keen on the Ventoux. It’s like another world up there. The dust clings to you, it’s always baking hot and there’s all the insects buzzing the whole time. I told Vin Denson once: ‘I hate those little bastards!’ But despite all that, and the fact that it was so hot, I felt I rode well. I was suffering, but I could see that everyone else was suffering too, and I got ninth on the stage and stayed in the top ten.

  It was a couple of days later that the roof fell in. After we finished in Gap, I got the doctors to take a look at my hand. They sorted out an abscess and put a dressing on it, but I didn’t sleep well and the next day we had a nasty stage, going into Briançon over the Vars and Izoard. I was left behind on the Vars and by the end was just happy to get to the finish.

  My hand was now a real problem because I couldn’t even hold the bars tight and to top it off, they also found that I had a kidney infection! Somehow I still thought I could get through to Paris and I stuck at it, but after we left the Alps, I knew the game was up. I was weak as a kitten and couldn’t carry on. Once I got to the hospital, all hell let loose. My hand was in a real state and then they told me my blood was poisoned. In fact, the doctor there wanted to operate on my hand there and then – he said otherwise I might lose it! After all that, I rested for almost two weeks. It took a while to get over another disappointing Tour, though.

  So I put it behind me and started thinking about the rest of the season. There were still plenty of big races to come, including the World Championships in Spain. I had a good feeling about it. I felt I had a good shout there, that the circuit in Lasarte would suit me.

  One of the reasons was that, in contrast with the Tour, the Worlds is just one day’s racing. The British team had a far greater chance of running the show on a single day than over three weeks. I knew if I could get them to believe in my chances, that we could have a really good go at it.

  It probably suited me that on the day itself it was raining. That was better than too much heat, at any rate. Barry Hoban worked like a maniac for me and I made it up to the big break. The riders were mainly Spaniards, which of course sent the locals crazy but which suited me too, because I could sit in, bide my time, wait for the right moment.

  That moment came about two laps from the end. I went, hard, giving it as much stick as I could and only Rudi Altig could follow. I knew Rudi well. He was a good man to be with, because he doesn’t shirk the effort – he does his bit and I respect him for that. We got the gap and worked well together. But I knew it would be touch and go in a sprint. To be fair, I bluffed him a bit, made out I was tired and couldn’t do that much to help. I think he looked at me and thought he had it in the bag.

  But i
n the end, I was too quick for him. I kept thinking he was coming past me, but he never did and, to be honest, at the line, it wasn’t even that close. As soon as I’d crossed the line, I was mobbed. ‘Unbelievable!’ they all said afterwards and we had a great party than night, lots of champagne and lots of fireworks, but really, I’d always believed I could do it.

  Being World Champion was big news at home. I’d never been so popular and I did enjoy getting greater recognition. I got a lot of offers to make public appearances and I reckoned that was all worth a few bob. It all put me on the map and I even ended up writing for the Sunday People, although that was nothing, really – not compared to being on Desert Island Discs and winning the BBC Sports personality of the year!

  The Franco-Belgian film, Roi du Mont Ventoux, produced in 2013, puts five stage winners – all of whom won at the summit of Ventoux – up against each other in virtual ‘real time’, based on archive footage. Merckx’s 1970 stage victory is the oldest of the chosen five.

  Why these five? Because when the film was made, they had climbed to victory at the summit via the identical 21-kilometre ascent from Bédoin, during Tours of the ‘modern’ era, perhaps better defined as the era of live television coverage. Using footage from 1970, 1987, 2000, 2002 and 2009, the film pits Merckx against the tragic Marco Pantani, Generation EPO’s Richard Virenque, Jean-François Bernard, the French Tour champion that never quite was, and, finally, against 2009 stage winner Juan Manuel Gárate.

  However spurious a thesis it may be – they all started from different stage towns in stages of differing length and difficulty, while Merckx’s win came nearly 40 years prior to Gárate’s – the aim is to establish who is the king of Mont Ventoux.

  ‘Some pretty good riders have won up there,’ says Bernard, on one of his rare non-hunting days, before adding a caveat. ‘Gárate won on the Ventoux, but you can win some races in the right circumstances.’ He shrugs, a little dismissively. ‘And he had a lot of circumstances.’

  One infamous victory, Chris Froome’s in July 2013, is missing of course. Analysing Merckx’s performance, all steel frame and muscular woollen-jerseyed flogging of huge gears, against Froome’s skeletal marginal gains and high-throttle cadence, some 43 years later, would have been intriguing. Froome’s victory is still the subject of endless speculation, fuelling a million tweets, his explosive accelerations endlessly pored over for ‘tells’ of pharmaceutical enhancement or motorised doping, all of which he utterly refutes. But the film was made before his victory happened and is therefore not included.

  It’s clear within a few minutes of the film starting – judging from the smirk on his now fuller face – that the tanned, boyish, but slightly louche Virenque, stage winner in 2002, is confident that he will, inevitably, be crowned king on what he calls ‘his’ mountain. Even though he is from the Var, Virenque claims the Ventoux as home ground. ‘I have home advantage there,’ he says. ‘It’s my climb, my fans are there.’

  Virenque’s cockiness contrasts with the melancholic ‘Jeff’ Bernard, forever depicted as the prodigal who never came home, staring wistfully out, baggy-eyed, at the Parisian autumn, as he rides a train to the TV studios. Virenque sits in the back of a Mercedes taxi as he is chauffeured to a studio in Luxembourg, while Davide Boifava – Pantani’s former sports director – strolls into a Milan studio and stands in for the late Italian. Gárate, a respected climber but hardly a household name until his Ventoux stage win in 2009, watches – a little oddly – in kit, from a studio in Spain.

  And Merckx? Well, he was busy of course. Or perhaps he thought the whole thing a little ridiculous.

  What was it he’d said to me in Ghent that lunchtime, waving his hand dismissively? ‘Bah, you can’t compare generations . . .’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked him.

  ‘The bike was heavier and the gear changers were on the bike frame. We had to sit down to change gear. We had to take one hand off the handlebars to change gear. Now you can stand on the pedals and change gear and that makes a big difference.

  ‘If you sit down to change gear you lose a lot of time. Maybe in the last two kilometres in 1970, I didn’t change gear much . . . plus it’s different racing up Ventoux after 200 kilometres to racing up it in a time trial.

  ‘The equipment is now completely different. The most important thing is to be the best of your generation. I was the best in my generation.’

  Merckx’s 1970 victory came at the end of a 170-kilometre stage in a Tour that included 29 stages and had no rest days. Already that year, he had won Paris–Nice, Paris–Roubaix, the Giro d’Italia, and several other major races. Such a programme of racing would be unthinkable for a modern-day Tour contender. ‘Cycling today has changed,’ he said. ‘When I didn’t ride a Classic I felt bad, I felt sick. It’s not like that any more.’

  For Ventoux obsessives such as myself, the film is oddly compelling. There are little details – the black-and-white shots of an elegant Merckx riding through Bédoin and on towards the forest, prior to that display of irresistible force – that linger in the memory. The footage of Merckx, grainy, monochrome and of poor quality, is almost unbearably elegiac. It compares with George Best skipping past the keeper against Benfica in 1968, Bobby Moore and Pelé embracing in Mexico in 1970, or the otherworldly images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon in 1969.

  The climax of the Merckx win, played out against a melancholic backdrop of fast-lengthening shadows, is watched by knots of spectators in Ray-Ban aviators, shielding their eyes against the setting sun, as the Belgian produces one of the most famous exploits of his career. Those pictures contrast with the weary resignation of Jeff Bernard, hiding his disappointment behind blunt pragmatism, clearly unable to forget that he came within a hair’s breadth of winning the 1987 Tour. His brutal assessments, the bitterness of the coiffed Virenque towards Lance Armstrong and the ambivalence of all towards Pantani’s deranged stage win, not to mention his whole career, all spice up a 72-minute opus that only once or twice drags.

  Asked to predict the outcome of the virtual race as the film starts, Bernard plumps for Merckx. ‘He was always so strong, he always gave it his all,’ the 1987 time trial winner says. Virenque rates himself as second fastest, behind Merckx, but ahead of Pantani.

  Bernard’s 1987 time trial win, which started under the shade of the trees in the Allée des Platanes in Carpentras, was an early example of marginal gains, or at least the philosophy behind the concept. Proof also that looking for an edge, beyond being fitter, skinnier or smarter, is nothing new. To the horror of some, the Frenchman rode a low-profile time-trial frame in the earlier flatter section of the stage, switched to a lightweight climbing bike on the approach to the Ventoux, and then rode that to the summit.

  ‘The day before the time trial, I’d decided to pull out all the stops. Ça passe ou ça casse . . . It was make or break,’ Bernard explains. But he knew that a bike change, from low-pro time-trial bike to carbon-fibre climbing frame, soon after the 20 kilometres-to-go point, seemed radical at the time.

  ‘Everyone said: “You’re mad. Don’t do that – you’ll blow up.” But I had the second bike, a climbing bike, for when we hit the real climb. It was a wild gamble, but it paid off.’

  Not everyone thought him mad. ‘Bernard got his strategy spot on that day,’ said Stephen Roche in his book, Born To Ride. ‘He may have lost 15 seconds or so making the switch but it was a smart thing to do. He was in a class of his own.’ Bernard’s stage win, two years after his mentor Bernard Hinault’s final Tour win, set French pulses racing. Jeff was immediately seen as Hinault’s successor.

  But after taking the yellow jersey on Ventoux, his high hopes fell apart the very next afternoon after a combine of star riders – many of whom were also French – isolated him. Part of that, at least according to Roche, was due to a rash TV interview Bernard gave after his stage win on the Ventoux.

  ‘We heard him on the TV saying: “I’ve just shown everybody I’m the strongest guy in the race,” ’ R
oche recalled. ‘It wasn’t a good time to knock our pride by saying he had all but won the race . . . it was clear that all Bernard’s rivals came to the same conclusion as they sat in their rooms that night.’

  In the hotels ranged around the foot of the Ventoux, Roche, Fignon, Charly Mottet and Pedro Delgado opened the Tour’s road book and studied the next day’s profile in even greater detail.

  Bernard’s puncture, the next afternoon, before the summit of the Col de Tourniol, and the flurry of attacks in a chaotic feed zone soon afterwards, ended his hopes. It was also a pivotal moment in French cycling. Since that day, no French rider has looked capable of taking the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. ‘It’s every pro’s dream to race in the Tour,’ Bernard says. ‘Naturally, my biggest disappointment is not to have won it.’

  ‘I came very close,’ he says defiantly during the film. ‘But that’s the thing – when you’re not in the running you’re not bothered, but, when you get that close . . .’

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 2000 Tour’s peloton, racing at the very zenith of EPO use, leads the virtual race into the pivotal bend at St Estève, where the gradient ramps up. Bernard is just behind, with Merckx, despite the gap in years, third. Yet Merckx’s bike alone, added to his componentry and clothing, was significantly heavier than those of his more recent rivals. ‘His bike weighed over ten kilos,’ Bernard says. That compares with much more lightweight contemporary weights.

  By the time the rival groups have climbed far into the forest, Merckx, riding 30 years earlier on a heavier bike, in lower-quality kit and using lower-quality componentry, has caught the Pantani–Armstrong train of July 2000. Nevertheless, Merckx was right that day in Ghent. There is no comparison to be made, due to the huge advances that have happened in sports science and in equipment since the Belgian climbed the Ventoux on a steel frame, wearing a sweat-soaked woollen jersey.