The Tour de France

by Paul Hansford

  Fausto Coppi, winner: 1949, 1952

  It is flattering to be called the best in the world, but what would Coppi have achieved if he had not lost six years to the war?

  — Eddy Merckx

  Despite only winning the Tour de France twice, Fausto Coppi is thought by many to be the greatest cyclist ever. Simply put, Coppi was a genius on a bike; to break it down for the kids, he was the Usain Bolt or Lionel Messi of cycling. He was a triple threat — a climber, sprinter and time trialist — and when he rode he won, often by massive margins. Winner of the Giro/Tour double twice (1949 and 1952), the Paris–Roubaix/La Flèche Wallonne double in 1950, the World Championship in 1953 and Milan–San Remo three times, there wasn’t a race the Italian couldn’t, and didn’t, win. Coppi was also the sport’s first superstar — as much for his tumultuous personal life as for his mercurial talent on two wheels — bringing cycling to the masses.

  Fittingly for such a talented climber, Fausto Coppi was born in the Italian Alpine village of Castellania. He burst onto the scene by winning the 1940 Giro d’Italia aged just twenty. Employed to help Italy’s number one, Gino Bartali, the youngster took the title himself and sparked a rivalry that would span more than a decade. However, the Second World War halted a promising career; Coppi was captured by the English in Tunisia and ended up as a prisoner of war. Only a few months after the end of the conflict, he returned to win the Circuit of Aces in Milan, his four-year absence from riding not affecting him in the slightest.

  After missing the first two post-war Tours, Coppi rode in 1949 and soared away from the competition in the mountains for the victory. The race signified not only a shift of power from Bartali to Coppi but also the end to a heated rivalry between the two riders (in the Tour at least). The Col d’Izoard was the scene of the detente, Bartali stopping to help Coppi with a puncture and then asking his younger rival to slow the pace as they reached the top; Fausto was clearly the stronger rider. Bartali said: ‘It’s my birthday. Let’s finish the Tour together. Tomorrow you’ll win the Tour.’ Bartali took the stage and then rode to help Coppi take his first Tour.

  A broken pelvis put paid to Coppi’s defence of the title in 1950 and, after his brother died in a race five days before the ’51 Tour was to start, he was in no fit state to mount a challenge. Re-energised to compete again by none other than Bartali, Fausto was back to his old self in 1952. That race was won in the mountains, where Coppi was in the form of his life; first he shot up L’Alpe d’Huez to take yellow, and then he left everyone in his wake the next day into Sestriere, finishing eight minutes ahead of second place. His crowning moment came on the Puy de Dôme — the first time the race visited the legendary volcano. On the steepest parts of the ascent, Coppi advanced on the pack from behind and dropped each rider in turn with an attack of sheer audacity. He was on another level that day, breezing past his opponents without seeming to break a sweat. Never was former rider André Leducq’s description of him more apt: ‘His long face appears like the blade of a knife as he climbs without apparent effort, like a great artist painting a water colour.’

  Coppi went on to win other races, but 1952 was his last Tour de France. His form began to unravel as he became embroiled in a scandal that rocked conservative, Catholic Italy to its core. His affair with a married woman, Giulia Locatelli, was front-page news for months, even prompting Pope Pius XII to urge Coppi to return to his wife. Reports of police raids and a refused divorce application kept Coppi in the papers for all the wrong reasons and results began to desert him, his skills so diminished that promoters would cut the length of races so the once-great rider could finish in a respectable time. His legend was also dented during a TV interview when he was asked if he ever took drugs: ‘Only when necessary,’ he replied.

  ‘How often was it necessary?’

  Practically all the time.

  In December 1959 he went on a promotional tour to Burkina Faso with a group of other riders, including Jacques Anquetil and Raphael Géminiani. He fell ill soon upon his return. His doctor diagnosed him with the flu, but Coppi didn’t respond to treatment and, although Géminiani warned him that they had both contracted malaria on the trip, the doctor refused to change the diagnosis. On 2 January 1960, the great Fausto Coppi died in his sleep and a nation mourned the loss of a legend.

  Jacques Anquetil, winner: 1957, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964

  For a rider who dominated an era and won an unprecedented five Tours, no man seemed to put less effort into his riding than Frenchman Jacques Anquetil. With a low, aerodynamic position, his entire upper body remained motionless, only a near-imperceptible nod of his head giving away any hint of the effort being expended. He rode within his limits, using his energy sparingly and attacking only when absolutely necessary, preferring to rely on his outstanding time-trialling prowess to wrestle a race into a chokehold and then slowly squeeze until the other riders tapped out, one by one.

  Anquetil was far from apathetic, though; his laid-back style was a result of possessing a near-flawless riding technique.

  ‘If the key to a cyclist is his style, Anquetil was unequalled. There has never been anyone who could ride so fast and so aesthetically,’ said journalist Jean-Paul Rey, while Jacques Augendre noted he was ‘quite simply the perfect aesthetic representation of a cyclist.’ As well as possessing otherworldly form, where Anquetil set himself apart was upstairs. He had a mathematician’s brain and was constantly assessing his tactics, effort and opponents for where he could best take advantage.

  Already a multiple Grand Prix des Nations champion (considered the unofficial time-trial world championship) under the tutelage of Francis Pélissier, Anquetil won the first Tour de France he entered in 1957 by nearly fifteen minutes. He then wrested control of the race in 1961 and didn’t let go until he had become the greatest racer in its history four years later. He wore yellow from start to finish in ’61 — having predicted he would do so, to much sniggering from the rest of the peloton — and in 1962, he cemented his reputation as the best time trialist in the business by destroying rival Raymond Poulidor on stage 20 to take the yellow jersey. It was a defining moment in Anquetil’s career and L’Equipe summed it up best:

  You have to have seen something like it once in your life to understand what perfection means in the world of cycling. The sight of Jacques Anquetil speeding towards his conquest of the yellow jersey, pulverising the speed records for road-racing, eclipsing the best of his adversaries, this unforgettable, overwhelming sight: we saw it, between Bourgoin and Lyon. The eager witnesses of this matchless performance will one day wonder if they didn’t dream it: Jacques Anquetil catching Raymond Poulidor in under forty kilometres.

  Even attempts by the organisers to neutralise Anquetil’s dominance in 1963 — shortening the time-trial stages and having mountain-peak finishes to encourage climbers to attack — had no effect. The Frenchman had become an accomplished climber and, by matching assaults by Federico Bahamontes in ’63 and Poulidor in ’64, he proved he could hang with the big boys when the going got steep. The book on Anquetil was that he was a supreme time trialist who lacked overall skills but, as the first rider to win all three Grand Tours (and winner of the Vuelta/Tour double in ’63 and the Giro/Tour double in ’64), he proved he was the greatest rider of his generation.

  However, the cold, calculating (and some would say aloof) manner in which Anquetil gained his Tour victories won him few fans; he was admired more than he was adored by his countrymen. And while he never courted adulation, he was confused as to why the French public preferred to shower their affections on fellow Frenchman Raymond Poulidor, a man he consistently beat.

  ‘He always comes second, usually behind me,’ said Anquetil, ‘and still they shout more for him than for me.’ For the French, Poulidor’s fight against adversity and honour in defeat seemed to strike a chord far more than Anquetil’s robot-like stranglehold on the
Tour. (Another reason could be Anquetil’s stance on doping; he was open about his drug use and once said, ‘You cannot ride the Tour on water.’ Extremely vocal in his opposition to drug testing when it was introduced in 1966, he even went so far as to say Tom Simpson’s death on Mont Ventoux the following year was because drug testing meant riders could no longer take ‘safer’ drugs.)

  Maybe Anquetil’s perceived lack of passion on the bike was due to it all being used up in his private life. ‘Maitre Jacques’ had a reputation as a bit of a playboy, once famously saying he liked to prepare for a race with a good woman and a bottle of champagne. His love for the bubbly nearly got him into trouble in 1964 when a touch of overindulgence on a rest day led to him nearly dying (‘dying’ as in the ‘I think I’m going to die’ protestations of a hung-over male, rather than any real danger to his existence) and losing the Tour.

  It was an overindulgence of the female kind that really proved scandalous for Anquetil. Not even the most unscrupulous tabloid journalist could have fabricated his private life to make it as shocking as the reality. Sparing you the blow-by-blow, here’s the quick version of Jacques’ romantic entanglements: he seduced his doctor’s wife, Janine, and they married in 1959; he desired a family, which Janine couldn’t provide due to medical problems. In a desperate bid to keep Jacques, she offered her eighteen-year-old daughter, Annie, to have his child; Annie became Jacques’ lover but the ménage-a-trois was short lived, as Annie moved out; Anquetil then began an affair with Janine’s son’s wife, with whom he had a son, Christopher, in 1986.

  The private Anquetil was a contrast to the automaton many saw in the saddle. He was fascinated with astronomy, loved playing cards and even rode a bike into his swimming pool during a particularly raucous party. But for a man of such strength and power in competition, Anquetil was a painfully shy and superstitious person and was haunted by a constant fear of death. He was convinced he would die at a younger age than his father and, when he passed away due to stomach cancer in 1987, his premonition came true. His father had died at fifty-six, while he was fifty-three.

  Anquetil retained his competitive streak and sharp mind to the very end. Although his rivalry with Raymond Poulidor mellowed with time, he couldn’t help himself when ‘Pou Pou’ came to pay his respects just before his death.

  ‘Sorry, my friend,’ said Jacques. ‘It looks like you are going to be second again.’

  Eddy Merckx, winner: 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974

  In sport, nothing more than a first name is needed to identify the all-time greats: Diego, Michael and Don are all you need to say for football, basketball and cricket fans to know exactly who you’re talking about. The same goes for cycling: when the subject of the greatest-ever cyclist comes up, all you have to say is ‘Eddy’.

  Belgian Eddy Merckx was the complete rider; he possessed the brute force of Mike Tyson, the ultra-competitive will of Kobe Bryant and the ability to dominate an entire field like Tiger Woods in his prime. On average he won a race a week for six years, including eleven Grand Tour titles — five Tours de France, five Giros d’Italia and a Vuelta — twenty-eight Classic victories and nineteen Monuments.

  Merckx knew full well he was better than anyone else and he rode with that superiority in mind, always from the front, regardless of how much of a lead he already had.

  ‘I always tried to throw the first punch, to put my rivals on the defence,’ he said. ‘If you let them take the initiative, rivals get confident and become double the danger.’

  Never was his ‘race from the front’ ethos more evident than in his first Tour in 1969, where the twenty-five-year-old upstart blazed off on his own into the mountains despite owning an eight-minute lead over the field. In what many consider to be the greatest stage win in Tour history, Merckx attacked at the bottom of the Tourmalet (with 130 km still to go) with an assault considered to be so suicidal that his rivals just let him go. Big mistake. Merckx won the stage by eight minutes and the Tour by nearly eighteen, taking out the King of the Mountains, points and the team title too, just because he could.

  His achievements in 1969 alone would have been enough to put him in the pantheon of the greats — it’s still regarded by many as the best individual performance in a Tour — but Merckx wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot. He went on to win another four Tour titles over the next five years (he took a break in 1973 to concentrate on the Vuelta a España, the only Grand Tour he hadn’t won at the time), equalling the five total wins by Frenchman Jacques Anquetil. What’s more, he made his rivals — great riders with legacies of their own, such as Luis Ocaña, Joop Zoetemelk and Felice Gimondi — look, at times, like also-rans. The reality was that when you raced against Eddy Merckx, you were invariably racing for second place.

  Although he had a knack for making his victories look easy, they often weren’t. A terrible crash on the track just after his first Tour win in 1969 left him with pelvic and back injuries that plagued him for the rest of his career — ‘Before the accident, climbing was a pleasure. Now it is a torment.’ — and, in 1974, he won despite complications from a pre-Tour operation on his perineum: ‘After the Prologue the lining of my shorts was soaked in blood. It was to stay that way for the duration of the Tour.’ (I’m presuming he meant that the problem stayed that way, and not that he was forced to wear the same blood-encrusted shorts the entire Tour …)

  If one incident sums up Merckx’s mindset, his desire to totally eviscerate his opponents no matter what the circumstances, it would be his 1971 stage win over Roger De Vlaeminck. Despite being aware that he needed to be cautious before the mountains, and that his compatriot would relish the cinder-track finish in Strasbourg, he just couldn’t hold back his competitive instinct, unwilling to let one of his biggest rivals take any small crumb of glory:

  I’m not ashamed of saying it: I took great risks that day. I went into a corner at top speed, an insane duel. I shouldn’t have, but I won and I took great pleasure in it. My great rival had it coming to him!

  If there’s any lingering doubt as to whether Merckx was the greatest Tour de France rider, consider this: in the seven Tours he competed, he spent more than three months in the yellow jersey, two and half weeks longer than the second-place rider for that honour, Bernard Hinault. If that doesn’t make him deserving of first-name terms, I’m not sure what does.

  Bernard Hinault, winner: 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1985

  If there’s a modern rider who can stake a claim to Merckx’s title as best ever, it’s Frenchman Bernard Hinault. While not as dominant as the Belgian over his career, his palmarès stands up to the comparison: ten Grand Tour wins, a winner of all three Tour de France classifications (sprint, climb and time trial), multiple Classics wins (including Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne), four Grands Prix de Nation and a world championship title.

  Like Merckx, Hinault proved himself in the northern Classics before building his reputation as a time trialist who excelled in the mountains in Grand Tours. If the two men differed in outlook while in the saddle — Merckx tried to win everything, while Hinault won what he put his mind to — they were both formidable competitors, never giving even a tyre-width to a rival if they could help it. Not a fan of losing, Hinault’s wife described her husband as someone who ‘couldn’t take failure’.

  Where Hinault stood out, though, was in his feistiness and sheer force of personality, a trait he showed from the get-go: in his first Tour in 1978, he became the ‘patron’ of the peloton after heading the group of protesting riders who were against multiple-stage race days. His fiery, prickly nature saw him live up to his nickname, ‘Le Blaireau’ — ‘The Badger’ — and he ruled races with an iron fist, often telling the peloton to ride easy on certain days, as the next one would be tough. (And he wasn’t averse to swinging those iron fists if the occasion called for it, as a group of protesters discovered while blocking the course at th
e 1984 Paris–Nice race.) He didn’t lack for confidence either, saying at the end of his first year as a pro: ‘One day, I’ll be the champion of France, the winner of the Tour and the world champion.’

  On the bike, there were few who could match Hinault in his pomp. He equalled the record of Anquetil and Merckx by winning five Tours, and he might have won more had he not suffered so much with a persistent knee injury. (He pulled out of the 1980 race while wearing yellow and missed the 1983 Tour due to tendonitis.) And it wasn’t as if Hinault didn’t have his challengers; of all the men to win five Tours, it could be argued that he fought the most hotly contested races. During his first two Tour wins in ’78 and ’79, he had to see off the challenge of pesky, large-toothed Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk, whose prowess in the mountains — and ungentlemanly sprint away from a punctured Hinault in ’79 — kept things close in both races. Hinault’s second duo of wins in 1981 and 1982 were more dominant — Australia’s Phil Anderson was the only challenger who came close — but after that not one, but two riders emerged to challenge him in his quest for a historic fifth victory: Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond.

  Bespectacled pony-tailer Fignon won in 1983 in Hinault’s absence, and followed it up by beating the Frenchman head-to-head the following year. At the time, it looked as though Fignon was poised to become the dominant rider of the time, so 1985 looked to be Hinault’s last chance with the champion out due to an injury to his Achilles. What Hinault didn’t count on was his teammate Greg LeMond being in such imperious form and, if not for an uneasy pact where the American was reined in with a promise of help from Hinault the following year, ‘Le Blaireau’ may not have taken out number five.

  With his place in history confirmed, Hinault retired in 1986, enjoying a level of reverence with the French public on a par with only Jacques Anquetil. And although time has softened the man who consistently won the ‘Prix Citron’ for the Tour’s sourest rider, ‘Le Blaireau’ still pops his head out now and again. Just ask the podium invader who was rugby tackled to the floor by Hinault during the 2009 Tour.