William Fotheringham - Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling

CONTENTS

Bernard Hinault is one of the greatest cyclists of all time. He is a five-time winner of the Tour de France and the only man to have won each of the Grand Tours on more than one occasion. Three decades on from his retirement, he remains the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France. His victory in 1985 marks the turning point when the nation who had dominated the first eight decades of the race they had invented suddenly found they were no longer able to win it.

Hinault is the last old-school champion: a larger-than-life character from a working-class background, capable of winning on all terrains, in major Tours and one-day Classics. Nicknamed the Badger for his combative style, he led a cyclists strike in his first Tour and instigated a legendary punch-up with demonstrators in 1982 while in the middle of a race. Hinaults battles with team-mates Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond provide some of the greatest moments in Tour history.

In Bernard Hinault and the Fall and Rise of French Cycling, number one bestselling author William Fotheringham finally gets to the bottom of this fascinating character and explores the reasons why the nation that considers itself cyclings home has found it so hard to produce another champion.

William Fotheringham writes for the Guardian and Observer on cycling and rugby. A racing cyclist and launch editor of Procycling and Cycle Sport magazines, he has reported on over twenty Tours de France. He is the critically lauded author of Fallen Angel, Roule Britannia, and Put Me Back on My Bike, which Vlo magazine called The best cycling biography ever written and the Sunday Times number one bestseller, Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike.

Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson

Roule Britannia: Great Britain and the Tour de France

Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppi

Cyclopedia: Its All About the Bike

A Century of Cycling

Fotheringhams Sporting Trivia

Fotheringhams Sporting Trivia: The Greatest Sporting Trivia

Book Ever II

Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike

Racing Hard: 20 Tumultuous Years in Cycling

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Epub ISBN: 9781448156368
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Yellow Jersey, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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Yellow Jersey is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright William Fotheringham 2015

William Fotheringham has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Yellow Jersey in 2015

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780224092043

For Andy Walker, Robert Vogt and his late wife Ginette, for that golden summer of 1984.

While this book draws on interviews going back over the last twenty-five years, specific thanks are due to the following for giving up time for me in 2014: Bernard Hinault, Robert Millar, Marc Madiot, Jean-Francois Bernard, Warren Barguil, Sean Kelly, Sean Yates, Ren Hinault, Sam Abt, Philippe Bouvet, Patrick Lefevere, Joop Zoetemelk, Stephen Roche, Philippe Crepel, Daniel Gisiger, Phil Edwards.

Thanks are due to my brother Alasdair for interviewing Andrs Gandarias, Julin Gorospe and Pedro Delgado on my behalf, and to Philippe Bouvet for supplying telephone numbers, back copies of lquipe and inspiration.

Thanks are also due to my agent John Pawsey and the team at Yellow Jersey Press for all their support and hard work: my eternally patient editor Matt Phillips, copy-editor Justine Taylor, designer Kris Potter, production Phil Brown and Bethan Jones for publicity.

The most valuable contribution however has come from my wife Caroline and children Patrick and Miranda, who offer priceless affection and patience as the stresses and strains mount as each book is written.

The Mole had long wanted to make the acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed by all accounts to be such an important personage.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Everything you do is a permanent challenge. You have to be on top of it all the time but treat it as a game.

Bernard Hinault

Bernard Hinault was stuck. Crammed into the front passenger seat of the car in a backstreet of the Norman town of Lisieux, there was nowhere for him to go. The door wouldnt open; the crowd was too densely packed. Winding down the window was a no-no; too many bodies were pressed up against it. It was a balmy midsummer evening, the sun was setting, the fans had turned out in force and they had been waiting for a good while. Old, young, men, women, each wanted to get a sight of him, touch him, ask him for an autograph.

Hinault had arrived fashionably late for the start of the Lisieux criterium on 23 July 1985, and through the evening the crowd had swelled in anticipation of his arrival. They had started out looking for prime spots on the circuit, then had moved as if by osmosis, filling the pavement in front of the building where the riders were to get changed. The crush was understandable: two days earlier, Hinault had won the Tour de France for the fifth time, joining Eddy Merckx and Jacques Anquetil in the record books. Here he was, in the flesh.

I cant remember how Hinault eventually got out of the car and made it to the door of the changing rooms. What I do remember is that while the script called for a bit of badger-type aggression a snarl, at least, if not a swipe of the claws there was none of that. He sat calmly and waited for the organisers to find some muscle and give him the space to emerge. He looked slight he is one of those cyclists who looks larger on his bike than off it and not unreasonably he looked a little tired. He didnt win. That privilege was reserved for the regional Thierry Marie, a first-year professional who had just finished his debut Tour.

I wasnt in the throng around the car containing the man in the yellow jersey. Ironically enough, I hadnt come to see Hinault. The history-making and the drama of the 1985 Tour were not to be denied, but for a large group of us, the interest was more parochial. Along with a gaggle of teammates from the Etoile Sportive Livarotaise a club based in a cheese-and-cider-making village ten miles to the south Id come to watch Thierry, our clubmate of the year before. Thierry was one of three Livarotais in the big race that evening: with him were Franois Lemarchand, another first-year pro who had just finished the Tour, and Alain Percy, a first-category amateur who had been selected for the Norman regional team. They were the guys we trained, yarned and joked with. They were our conduit to the world of Hinault and company. That put the Badger well within six degrees of separation.