SIXTEEN
WHEN YOUR ADVERSARIES ARE dead set on a confrontation, Fabian tactics cannot endure for ever. If you’re a Roman general, you might get away with passing the responsibility of fighting a rampaging Hannibal to someone else and retiring to Rome for a bout of gladiatorial politics, as Fabius did, but if you’re Jacques Anquetil facing up to your would-be nemesis Raymond Poulidor, you can’t shirk the challenge. Even the prestige of the previous year’s epic double victory in the Dauphiné Libéré and Bordeaux–Paris can’t provide shelter for long.
Thus it was that the two inevitably came face to face in a stage race for the first time in nearly a year in Paris–Nice at the beginning of 1966. Even before that, though, Anquetil was beginning to show signs of frustration at his remarkable career being defined solely in relation to his great rival. ‘It’s diabolical to live in such a symbiotic relationship with a rider who’s no worse but no better than many I’ve encountered in 14 years of racing,’ he recalled in En brûlant les étapes. He went on to cite the coverage of his victory in the early season Tour of Sardinia stage race as an example, complaining how little of it was about the actual race and how much about the next duel with Poulidor: ‘What’s that got to do with my victory? Why should Poulidor’s name be in any way linked to a race in which he didn’t participate? Frankly, it’s an aberration.’
Maybe Anquetil himself suffered an aberration by the time Paris–Nice reached Corsica, for he had to give ground – 36 seconds to be precise – to Poulidor in his favourite domain, the time trial. It may have been, as Géminiani pointed out loudly at the time, a tricky, technical route with a significant climb in it that was a long way from favouring Anquetil’s superior power and straight-line speed. Yet this hardly mitigated Anquetil’s own displeasure at finding himself not only beaten in his speciality, but also relegated to second place in the overall classification by Poulidor.
Clearly, Anquetil had to find a way to react if he wasn’t to be seen for the first time in his career as accepting defeat without a fight. The problem was that with only two stages remaining, one of them a flat sprinters’ stage with little opportunity to make up time, the opportunities to do so were strictly limited. Worse was the likely reaction to any eventual failure of Anquetil’s to overcome his rival, a reaction of which Anquetil was well aware: ‘And then I thought what would happen if the results were reversed: first, Poulidor, second, Anquetil. Then, I’d have been written off straight away. One lone defeat would count as much as fifteen or twenty victories. Was that fair? I could already picture the crocodile tears being shed because of my supposed decline.’
In the end, he had little choice but to put all his eggs in one basket and wait until the last stage to attack. This he did to great effect, first through the intermediary of his teammates, dispatched by Géminiani on a series of seemingly suicidal breaks in a bid to wear out Poulidor’s Mercier team physically and to heighten the war of nerves already initiated between the two protagonists. After rapidly running out of teammates, Poulidor was eventually required to assume all the responsibility for controlling the race himself and was obliged not just to chase after Anquetil and his team but also attacks from all of his major rivals. Géminiani complimented him on the panache this involved but also said that it was this expenditure of energy that paved the way for Anquetil’s decisive move with less than 40 kilometres to go. By the time he arrived at the finish on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, he had established a lead of one minute forty-four seconds, more than enough to wipe out the deficit incurred in the time trial in Corsica.
The reaction to this success depended on whether you were in the Anquetil or Poulidor camp. In the Anquetil camp, there was nothing but exultation and, according to Anquetil himself, a great sense of pride at one of his most hard-fought victories. In the Poulidor camp, and in the press, there was a sense of outrage at what were perceived to be nefarious manoeuvres – riders ending up in ditches and supposedly rival teams assisting in the wearing out of Poulidor and his teammates, not just with attacks, but also by physically getting in the way of any attempts to counter them. The report in L’Équipe went as far as to suggest that the controversy would unleash a civil war in French cycling. Responding to persistent questioning from journalists, Poulidor, although not explicit, left little doubt as to his assessment of events: ‘I note simply that Anquetil is still the patron of cycling. I don’t deny his strengths, nor even his superiority in many domains, but I consider that his teammates did not behave well on the road to Nice. Jacques Anquetil would acknowledge as much if he is honest with himself.’
Anquetil, in fact, did nothing of the sort. ‘Poulidor is a cry-baby,’ he declared. ‘The interview in which he repeated the accusations made by his team to cast a doubt over the correctness and sincerity of my victory, that interview is not worthy of a champion, and I will find it difficult to forgive him.’
More than 40 years later, Poulidor is prepared to be more open about what happened, though he still refuses to blame Anquetil himself. ‘The rivalry had grown even fiercer since the Tour in 1964, and it culminated in our confrontation in Paris–Nice,’ he recalls, pausing to consider his words carefully. ‘He had great difficulty in accepting defeat, especially his entourage, those people around him. So when I’d beaten him by 37 seconds in a time trial, his speciality, he wouldn’t accept it. The result was that on the last day, rival teams teamed up, it must be said, and what shocked me the most was that these arrangements happened in front of the race director [Jean Leulliot]. He let it happen, as he was closer to Anquetil than to me. They played tricks on my teammates – [Barry] Hoban and [Jospeh] Spruyt – tipping them into the ditch, and everyone attacked. Orders had been given. Anquetil had done nothing – I’ve nothing to reproach him for. When he attacked me, I was at the end of my tether. People say I’d wasted too much effort chasing after others, but [Michele] Dancelli attacked – he was only two minutes down – and [Vittorio] Adorni was the same.’
The implication that it was Géminiani, as Anquetil’s directeur sportif, who had greased the necessary palms to ensure a collusion to dethrone Poulidor is clear. In Les années Anquetil Géminiani goes to some considerable lengths to pour scorn on these suggestions and to clear his name, even recording how he offered 10,000 francs (£1,000) to anyone who had any proof of wrongdoing. There were no takers – proof, of course, is hard to come by.
According to Brunel, Géminiani was right – it wasn’t the teams ganging up, it was the managers: ‘There were two managers – agents, if you like – in France. Roger Piel and Daniel Dousset. Dousset had Anquetil, [Franco] Bitossi, [Lucien] Aimar, Altig and Adorni. Alliances in the peloton were arranged by the managers, not between the teams. Sometimes there were link-ups determined by a race, but there were also alliances to protect the “aristocracy”. In this Paris–Nice, there was Adorni, who raced for Anquetil because Dousset told him he had to. He said, “I need to maintain Anquetil’s prestige for the critériums [so he could maintain the value of his ‘10 per cent’].” That was the reality until after Bernard Hinault. It was Cyrille Guimard, Hinault’s directeur sportif and manager, who broke their power off, but it was like that for a long time, and Anquetil was part of the system.’
But no one should be under any illusions as to the fact that collusion between cyclists wasn’t also a frequent occurrence and indeed still is. It most often manifests itself in the more acceptable form of several teams with top sprinters pooling their efforts to reel in a breakaway and thus ensure a sprint finish that they will then at least have some chance of winning through their man. And ‘acquiring’ – that’s to say buying – the services of other cyclists was, and is, common practice.
Tom Simpson wrote three exposés of the world of cycling for The People newspaper after becoming world champion in 1965, in one of which he admitted to having offered the Irishman Shay Elliot £1,100 to help him win the world title in 1963 and that he had accepted £500 to work for a team other than his own. Anquetil himself was no exception. Later in the year, he would finish third in the Giro d’Italia, ostensibly the result of having lost more than three minutes to seven of his main rivals through a momentary lapse of concentration on the otherwise anodyne descent of the Col de San Bartolomeo on the first stage. Finishing third after such a slip is no mean feat and implies a good degree of determination, but his teammate at the time, Vin Denson, suggests Anquetil’s lack of concentration was perhaps less careless than it at first seemed: ‘Julio Jiménez [by now a teammate] went away in the break, and the idea was to get him to win. I don’t think Jacques was 100 per cent interested in winning the Giro. He was more interested in touching money from others, because there was a lot of money moving about, you know.’
Whether or not Jiménez’s presence in and Anquetil’s absence from the break was planned, Brunel confirms that once Anquetil was out of the running for overall victory he had another agenda to follow. If not directly about money, this was still the indirect motive – the money associated with the prestige of victory. ‘The reality is that Anquetil went to see Géminiani that night and said, “I’ve lost the Giro. There’s still 20-odd stages to go, but I’ve lost it. I can take three minutes back from six of them, but there’ll always be one of them who can keep their advantage,”’ says Brunel. ‘And then he said, “I’ve lost, but I can perhaps decide who will win.” And that’s what he did. He didn’t want Gimondi to win, as he’d won the Tour de France and he was a growing rival, so in the end he raced for Motta. In fact, on the last stage he found himself alone with Motta on a climb, and he came out of a bend and dropped him. He turned round and saw Motta dropped. But he waited for him. He had promised to wait for him, so he waited for him, even though he could perhaps have gone on to win the Giro himself. He’d given his word. That’s how Motta won the Giro. And he was so appreciative of what Anquetil had done that he arranged for Anquetil to come to a criterium in his home town near Bergamo after the Giro. It was such a small criterium that normally they couldn’t have afforded to have Anquetil race, so Motta paid for everything. He paid for the trip, paid for his accommodation, paid for his contract, and Anquetil didn’t know.’
According to Denson, there may well have been other even more powerful commercial forces at work behind the scenes: ‘We seemed to get a strange bonus – we were told to work for this other team, because as Ford France we were only really riding the Giro to get fit for the Tour de France, and Ford France didn’t want to give Ford Italy any publicity, because there was such competition between them on the border around Menton, Monaco, Nice – the cars were cheaper in Italy, apparently. When we finished a stage in the Giro, we were straight away given a hat with a very large Cynar logo on it – a brand of Italian aperitif – and only a very small Ford France logo. As soon as we’d finished, they gave us a hat and a tracksuit with Cynar on it so we covered up Ford France on the rostrum.’
Even after the successful completion of his outrageous Dauphiné Libéré and Bordeaux–Paris double, doubts were cast over the honesty of his victory in the second half of the challenge. As Cycling recalled, evidently with some exasperation, Tom Simpson, who eventually finished third, was accused of having sold Bordeaux–Paris to Anquetil:
‘My own pacemaker came up to me and, before witnesses, accused me of having been bought off by Anquetil. There was nothing I could say. The man was so convinced that he would not have believed a word I said, and I told him this, for what it was worth. Of course, the whole story is ridiculous. I would never have sold, in this race above all, my chance of beating Jacques Anquetil at his own game; it is an insult to Jacques and to me.’
Cycling appears to have been convinced, quoting famous British cycling journalist Jock Wadley, then editor of Sporting Cyclist magazine, as an eye witness: ‘“The three of them, Stablinski, Simpson and Anquetil, were trying so hard that they could not have spoken a word, let alone made an agreement; the whole story is stupid.”’
In his own series of provocative articles written for France Dimanche in 1967, mirroring those written by Simpson, Anquetil avoids such unsavoury details, but he is candid about collusion being an integral part of the job:
Everybody knows that the greatest cycling champion can’t ride alone. He needs a team. Yet there are still those who whisper, ‘Yes, of course, so-and-so won because he “bought” such-and-such a rider.’ Once again, this is pure hypocrisy. It’s quite clear that we ‘buy’ riders, and I say that it’s quite normal. We pay them for doing their job and that’s all. They’re the same as any other worker or employee. They sell themselves to the highest bidder, and it can happen that the auction takes place at the most unlikely moments – at the end of a race, for example.
The point, Anquetil maintains, is that you’re buying support in order to win rather than buying the victory itself:
When I talk about buying riders, I must make one thing clear: you can’t buy a victory. That’s in your legs, and the best teammate in the world can’t sell it to you. In a stage race, if you buy riders it’s above all in order not to be constantly attacked, jostled, harried, not to say threatened.
The point also is that a cycling team does not have the same sense of identity or belonging as would a football or rugby club. With winnings from races contributing as much to a rider’s income as his basic salary, if not more, and with the cycling tradition of pooling these winnings, a tradition apparently instigated by the self-important Bobet, his first allegiance is to his teammates rather than the team itself. In the best teams, this can make an effective bond, as Brian Robinson’s experience makes clear: ‘We were young riders, and we all wanted to make money. We were always the team that won the most money, no matter if we won the race or not. We always made the most money in the kitty.’
It’s hardly surprising, though, that the entirely unpredictable way a race can develop, with lead groups consisting of domestiques rather than stars, may lead to the ad hoc alliances that Anquetil describes. In an interview with Lui magazine – a French version of Playboy – in 1969, Anquetil explained further:
‘I’ve never sold a race, and a champion can’t afford the luxury of buying a victory. At my level, I’m in a constant battle for prestige with other champions. What’s at stake compels us to confront each other with no holds barred. But it can happen that we pool our resources against others in a breakaway.’
But paying lesser riders for their help was commonplace, even if defining the status of a rider was not without peril: ‘You can believe me that a rider only gives up his own chances after having thought about it carefully. It’s not always easy to explain to them that they’re not capable of winning a race.’ The real controversies arise not because these arrangements exist but when their inevitably informal nature leads to them breaking down. The most famous – infamous – example was in the world championships in 1963 when Anquetil apparently gave up victory by sitting up when ahead of the bunch and inside the final kilometre. His own take on events, however, is that he was simply reacting to a perceived feint from favourite Rik Van Looy and was gathering his forces for one last sprint to the line. With Anquetil concentrating solely on Van Looy, and vice versa, neither of them noticed Van Looy’s teammate Benoni Beheyt launch his race-winning sprint: ‘When we wanted to react, it was too late. Van Looy couldn’t get over it. He was mad with rage. In the changing-room, he had to be held back. He wanted to lay in to Beheyt. “I’d paid him to help me,” he shouted. But it was too late. Beheyt was world champion.’
If buying riders and collusion between teams is a fact of life, then perhaps the most accurate assessment of Paris–Nice would come from someone who has experienced it first hand. In this respect, the verdict of Guy Ignolin, admittedly Anquetil’s former teammate, is clear: ‘I think Jacques had a better team and had better teammates than Poulidor. And don’t forget, when he got away it was his final attack. He’d said, “If I don’t make it this time, that’s it.” But he really went for it, and Raymond blew up. They found themselves together, then very slowly Jacques was away, and once he was off he was like a train . . . So that’s how he won Paris–Nice.’
Nevertheless, the shadow cast over his achievement by this controversy was enough to deprive Anquetil both of the pleasure of victory and of his motivation. He abandoned the Critérium National – won by Poulidor – and even came close to retiring such was the hostility of the reaction. ‘After Paris–Nice, he was completely downhearted,’ noted Géminiani. It took until the end of the spring classic season was approaching for Anquetil to recover his appetite for battle, and he decided to demonstrate just how strong it still was in typically remarkable fashion.
For a start, the setting – the Liège–Bastogne–Liège one-day race – was unusual. Although the kind of gruelling race that should have favoured such a strong rider as Anquetil, he had done nothing previously to show either an inclination or aptitude for it. What’s more, as a one-day race it fell into the category of events he had described in the aftermath of his failed bid for glory in Paris–Roubaix in 1958 as lotteries. In the intervening eight years, a handful of impressive stage victories in the Tour de France and his victory in Ghent–Wevelgem apart, he had done nothing to suggest he had changed his mind.
Yet, his ability to perform in one-day events was not in doubt. Ignolin for one shares the widespread belief that he could have won Paris–Roubaix in 1958, and also suggests victory escaped him in unfortunate circumstances in Paris–Tours in 1965: ‘Yes, he could have won Paris–Tours. He had broken away near the end and was following the cars, but when he needed to turn right they went straight on, and he followed them. It was all over. It was in the last kilometre, so he couldn’t get going again.’ Poulidor agrees, and he was in the race at the time. ‘He nearly won it the year we did it without derailleurs,’ he recalls, the absence of derailleurs being a throwback to a previous age and restricting the riders to the use of only two gears, one on either side of the rear wheel. ‘He was off the front, and I think there was a diversion, and he went slightly the wrong way. As he had a very big gear, 48 or 49 x 13, he couldn’t get going again, so he was caught. He had been going very strongly and was well clear, so he could well have won.’
Instead, it was motivation that was lacking, and this was primarily due to the relatively small contribution his performances in these races could make to his financial position. Even victory could add little to his contract value for appearances in criteriums, which was already as high as it could be thanks to the reputation he had built through his performances in stage races and time trials. And even for Anquetil, these contracts were an essential part of his income. ‘The real earning power came from the series of contracts after the Tour,’ recalls Robinson. ‘You’d be riding nearly every day for thirty days, getting as much as £80 per day, so it was pretty good money.’ Robinson, of course, would have earned less and had fewer contracts than a star like Anquetil: ‘Unlike us, who just rode contracts after the Tour, the stars rode contracts all year round. So, there were those to fit in, and, speaking purely as a professional, he’d be busy enough without worrying too much about the one-day races.’
‘In those days, when you won a classic you won hardly anything,’ confirms Hinault. ‘When I won Liège–Bastogne–Liège, it was about 6,000 francs to share with the team – only 600 francs [£60] each. That’s not much. But it helps your palmarès. If you can’t win the Tour, you can always win the classics, which then helps with the criteriums. And don’t forget, base salaries were very small. More than half your income was from the criteriums. If you’re thinking about “Père Jacques” . . . if he raced ten criteriums, he could buy a house.’
Then there was the fact that precisely because his reputation – and earning power – derived from stage races and time trials, he was not usually confronted in the one-day arena by the same kind of rivalry that inspired so much of his success. According to Jeanine, the importance of this as a source of motivation for him should not be underestimated: ‘Yes, he said that he was not interested in one-day races, that right from the start you could be in the wrong fall, in the wrong break, that one-day races really were too fickle. But he wasn’t entirely happy about it, and if Rivière, for example, hadn’t crashed and had started to do well in one-day races . . . If it had been Rivière instead of Poulidor, then there would have been a rivalry. Anquetil against Rivière would have been full of panache, as Rivière could have won things Poulidor couldn’t. So it would have wound up Jacques, and I’m sure he would have ridden classics to win.’
This is precisely what Anquetil did in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and his rival for once was not Poulidor but someone who appeared to be about to fulfil the role that had been vacated so unfortunately by Rivière. Walter Godefroot, who would go on to win the race the following year, rode the 1966 race with Anquetil. On the eve of the 2007 event, he told me why he thought Anquetil had finally thrown off the shackles in a one-day race: ‘Why did he win Liège–Bastogne–Liège? I think it was because Géminiani, at that time, had said, “Listen, Jacques, you’ve now got a rival who’s young, who wins the Tour and who wins classic races. He’s called Felice Gimondi. He’s not just won the Tour, but also Paris–Brussels, Paris–Roubaix . . .” I don’t think that went down well, and that’s why he won.’
L’Équipe agreed:
Jacques Anquetil dislikes anyone who casts doubt on his supremacy, and he had taken umbrage at the praise that had been heaped on Gimondi every time he won a race. Therefore, in Liège–Bastogne–Liège he decided to make a clear statement of who was boss.
The statement was certainly clear. Attacking initially on the Côte de la Bouquette to leave his immediate companions – no lesser riders than Gimondi, Altig, Motta and Merckx – he then caught the early break that was still a minute up the road before definitively leaving them behind with another acceleration on the Côte de Mont-Theux. L’Équipe was ecstatic:
For 12 years, we’ve been waiting for just such an exploit by Jacques Anquetil – to win a classic one-day race. In Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the hardest, most demanding of them all, he finally filled the gap in his palmarès in front of impotent rivals, including Eddy Merckx, who expressed his astonishment at the way in which Jacques had built a lead before beating them all home some forty kilometres later by four minutes fifty-three seconds.
The rivalry with Poulidor just wouldn’t go away, however. Even his third place in the Giro d’Italia was insufficient to distract attention from their much-awaited Tour de France rematch. Much as Anquetil might complain that ‘you can’t reduce current cycling simply to us two’, that’s precisely what the public and the press were inclined to do. There’s little doubt that some of the apparent intensity of this rivalry was exaggerated by the press. ‘I was in the Anquetil camp, as I was his generation, but then I joined the Poulidor camp, as we went skiing together,’ says Brian Robinson. ‘They were both different characters and both good fellows. As you probably know, the press make a lot of these things. I think they admired each other. At the end of the day, they respected each other. The rivalry was in the press, really.’ Jean Milesi, who has the unusual distinction of having been a teammate for both men, agrees: ‘I was with Poulidor during one Tour. I sat with him in the hotel, and he was reading the papers full of articles about him and Anquetil and saying, “I didn’t say that. That’s not what I said.”’
Jeanine, too, points her finger at the press, though for a slightly different reason, one that confirms that Anquetil determined at least some of his actions because of the reputation of his rival: ‘The rivalry grew because the journalists talked up Poulidor. But there were other riders who deserved talking up, the proof being that when Jacques didn’t ride the Tour it was Gimondi or Merckx who won. Poulidor was a class below the great champions such as Merckx, Gimondi, Baldini – they were real rivals. He didn’t understand why Poulidor was placed on the same level.’
Indeed, Anquetil was at times dismissive of Poulidor. In the first of his provocative articles for France Dimanche in 1967, entitled ‘Why I Don’t Like Poulidor’, he wrote:
In my opinion, the simple difference in the number and prestige of our victories contradicts any notion of sporting rivalry. I’ve ridden in 80 races with Poulidor, and I’ve won 77. For me, it’s quite simple. There has never been a duel Anquetil–Poulidor. The result was decided long ago.
Yet the fascination continued, stimulated in part by the obvious contrast between the two men: the open, vulnerable Poulidor; the cold, calculating Anquetil. Their contemporary, Antoine Blondin, novelist and cycling journalist, wrote in his preface to Pierre Chany’s La fabuleuse histoire du cyclisme, ‘Où Anquetil incarne la partie libre de l’homme, Poulidor incarne la partie fatale.’ (Where Anquetil embodies the part of man free to choose his own destiny, Poulidor embodies the part that accepts his fate.)
Still Anquetil was unmoved. In En brûlant les étapes, he wrote:
I find it quite absurd, this division of sporting France into two camps, with their threats and their passions. I’ve even received death threats in anonymous letters. It’s time to forget this obsession Anquetil–Poulidor, Poulidor–Anquetil. At the risk of stirring up the emotions of my adversaries, I would also add that the key thing for me isn’t this duel, in my opinion meaningless, but trying to win the Tour for a sixth time and in doing so fighting against Raymond Poulidor, if he’s still in contention, and if not against all of the other serious rivals for victory, because that’s what sport is all about. In the next Tour de France, do you not think my greatest rival won’t be called Gimondi, Motta, Adorni or Merckx, if he races, rather than Poulidor?
Gimondi, Motta, Adorni and Merckx were all absent from the 1966 Tour, however, and once more it seemed destined to come down to a duel between Anquetil and Poulidor. That was until Anquetil’s teammate, Lucien Aimar, took advantage of Poulidor’s understandable concentration on his leader and joined a breakaway group on the first stage in the Pyrenees that led to him gaining more than seven minutes on Poulidor. Aimar was no slouch, having already finished second in the 1964 Tour de l’Avenir to eventual 1965 Tour winner Felice Gimondi. More importantly, he had also already been identified by Géminiani as an alternative card to play in the Tour de France as and when Anquetil’s hegemony came to an end. According to Géminiani, the two in fact started the race as joint leaders, a situation apparently accepted by Anquetil on the basis of Géminiani’s reassurance of his belief in Aimar’s ability to fulfil his potential.
The importance of this move would soon become clear. First, Anquetil lost seven seconds to Poulidor in the time trial to Vals-les-Bains. Then he lost 40 more seconds on the stage to Bourg-d’Oisans, leading to him declaring in the immediate aftermath of the stage that he’d also lost the Tour. His spur-of-the-moment assessment seemed all the more accurate the next day when in spite of a show of defiance on the Col du Galibier he could not shake Poulidor, who by now led Anquetil by one place and one minute and eight seconds in the overall classification.
Yet Anquetil having lost the Tour did not mean Poulidor had won it, especially since Anquetil had the alluring prospect of being able to assuage his defeat by facilitating the progress of his teammate Aimar. According to Géminiani, team tactics were thus modified to allow Aimar to attack in order to buy himself sufficient time over Poulidor – poised in sixth place, three and a half minutes down on Aimar – and current yellow-jersey wearer Jan Janssen. This he did with some aplomb on the next stage to Turin, surprising both his rivals – still focused on Anquetil and deprived of Tour Radio to keep them up to speed with events due to the mountainous surroundings – while extending his advantage by just over two minutes and putting on the yellow jersey in the process. The next day, Anquetil turned from passive decoy into active assistant, overcoming the worsening cold from which he’d been suffering for several days to help Aimar contain Poulidor’s attack on the Col de la Forclaz, limiting the deficit to a mere 49 seconds.
The mountains were now complete, and the only likely opportunity for change in the overall classification would be the final 51-kilometre time-trial stage, in which Anquetil could no longer help his teammate. At the foot of the otherwise insignificant Côte de Serrières, on the stage from Chamonix to Saint-Étienne, he therefore retired, worn out but once again with his primary goal accomplished: Aimar held on in the time trial to win the race by one minute and seven seconds over Janssen and two minutes and two seconds from Poulidor. The tears – yes, tears from the ice-man Anquetil – that accompanied his descent from his bike as the race disappeared into the distance in front of him made it clear that he knew his career as a Tour de France cyclist was over.
The season was far from finished, however, and nor was France’s favourite sporting duel. The final instalment in the saga took place at the world championships on the Nurburgring circuit in Germany, and the controversy of the outcome – Anquetil second, Poulidor third but both beaten by Rudi Altig – even managed to overshadow everything that had gone before. As if the disappointment of having its two cycling greats beaten by a German wasn’t enough, France was outraged at the suggestion that Anquetil had actually cooperated with the German to ensure Poulidor wouldn’t win.
The suggestion, in the press, was based on a number of factors, notably that Altig, according to some, only caught up to the breakaway containing Anquetil, Poulidor, Motta, Italo Zilioli, Gimondi, Merckx and Martin Van Den Bossche with the help of – you’ve guessed it – Lucien Aimar, especially since Altig had been seen being sick at the side of the road earlier in the race. Much was also made of the fact that Anquetil and Altig had by now buried the hatchet and were known to be great friends. Anquetil and Jeanine even stayed with the Altigs before the race, and the two reconnoitred the course together. (‘We saw it was very hard, designed for cars, not for bikes,’ Altig recalls.)
According to Georges Groussard, who was in the French team on the day, the allegations against Aimar don’t stack up, even though he admits that it was Aimar who was the catalyst for Altig’s unlikely recovery: ‘I was there. There were four or five, including Anquetil and Poulidor, in a break, and the peloton was two minutes behind. We, the French team, were doing our job to make sure that as they were ahead one of them would win. Altig was being sick at the side of the road with maybe 50 to 60 kilometres to go, and I said if there’s someone who’s not going to be champion today, it’s him. Then, five kilometres later he was feeling better, and he attacked – or, rather, it was Aimar who attacked to try and get a placing. Altig followed. There were no earpieces, so there was no collusion between Anquetil and Aimar. He knew perhaps they were chasing, but that was it.’
This still doesn’t explain why Aimar took the risk of such an attack. The best he could have hoped for was a minor placing, certainly not victory or a podium spot, and in doing so he helped a serious rival from a different national team bridge the gap. Yet Poulidor is adamant that there is no truth in the suggestion he was the victim of anything crooked: ‘No, Aimar’s not compromised. We were a bit like Claude Criquelion and Stephen Roche in Liège–Bastogne–Liège when they neutralised each other and Moreno Argentin was two minutes down. They messed about; Argentin came and won. It was the same for us. He was scared I would win, and I perhaps didn’t want him to win, either. It was our bad blood that allowed Altig to come back. At the finish, Anquetil was upset and disappointed, as after he’d come second he realised he could have won. Then there was a drugs test at the end of a lot of brouhaha, and at first I was the only one on the podium, but then Altig came.’
Yet Hinault is clearly convinced Anquetil was at least prepared to risk losing his own chance of victory if it ensured Poulidor also lost: ‘If Jacques had really wanted to race, he could have won it. He could have chased Altig [who attacked on his own after catching the lead group] if he’d wanted, although so could Poulidor, but the first to react might have lost. So, given Anquetil and Altig were friends, he would rather it was Altig than Poulidor. I’m not sure that there wasn’t also the thought that because he was a friend – a really good friend – that it wouldn’t have given him as much pleasure as if he’d won himself.’
When I spoke to Altig, he would neither confirm nor deny he’d made any arrangements with Anquetil and deliberately left open the intriguing prospect of there being some foundation to the journalists’ assertions. ‘I don’t think the truth will ever come out,’ he told me. ‘I think the truth is that he was second and Poulidor was third. He was a bit angry, and that’s why he didn’t come onto the podium. That’s all I’m going to say,’ he concludes, before nevertheless adding, ‘The rest, only he can tell you, but, of course, he can’t tell you now.’
It seems that even missing out on probably the best chance he ever had to fulfil a childhood dream and once again incurring the wrath of a nation in the process was a price Anquetil was prepared to pay to avoid the glory going to Poulidor. For someone who by his own admission was increasingly frustrated with this rivalry, this may seem extraordinary, yet, as Jeanine confirms, it also reveals the extent of the catch-22 situation in which he found himself: ‘He said, “If Poulidor beats me one day, they’ll kick me out the door. I’ll be finished. I can’t allow Poulidor to win, because they’ll say Anquetil’s finished.” He understood what he needed to do to be popular, but he couldn’t do it.’