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First published by HarperSport 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Richard Moore 2014

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Source ISBN: 9780007500109

Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007500123

Version: 2014-06-30

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Outsider

Chris Boardman, 1994

Chapter 2 Beware of the Badger

Bernard Hinault, 1980

Chapter 3 The Bulldog

Wilfried Nelissen, 1994

Chapter 4 The Sculptor

Joël Pelier, 1989

Chapter 5 The Boy with Fire in His Eyes

Mark Cavendish, 2009

Chapter 6 For Fabio

Lance Armstrong, 1995

Chapter 7 Dutch Cold War

Marc Sergeant, Frans Maassen, 1992

Chapter 8 Trilogy

Eddy Merckx, 1971

Chapter 9 Guerrilla Warfare

Luis Herrera, Bernard Hinault, Laurent Fignon, 1984

Chapter 10 Anarchy

Stephen Roche, Jean-François Bernard, Andy Hampsten, 1987

Chapter 11 The Devil

Claudio Chiappucci, 1992

Chapter 12 Shock and Awe

Bobby Julich, Jörg Jaksche, Marco Pantani, Jan Ullrich, 1998

Chapter 13 What about Zimmy?

Urs Zimmermann, 1991

Chapter 14 The Unknown Warrior

José Luis Viejo, 1976

Chapter 15 Champagne Freddy

Freddy Maertens, 1981

Chapter 16 Honour Among Thieves

Lance Armstrong, Iban Mayo, 2003

Chapter 17 Untold Stories

Mark Cavendish, Bernhard Eisel, David Millar, 2010

Chapter 18 Playstation Cycling

Andy Schleck, 2011

Chapter 19 Redemption

David Millar, 2012

Chapter 20 La Résurrection

Greg LeMond, 1989

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Also by Richard Moore ...

About the publisher

Étape is the result of a simple idea: to tell the stories of selected stages of the Tour de France through the recollections of the protagonists. I wanted to capture and convey the mystery, beauty and madness of the great race. But new interviews were key; I didn’t want to recycle already published and in some cases familiar stories. And so I sought out the heroes and villains, the stars, journeymen and one-hit wonders. I spoke to two five-time Tour winners, a three-time winner, a one-time winner, and a former seven-time winner.

On the following pages are the fruits of this labour: a collection of notable stages, some great, some obscure. They encompass extraordinary feats and diabolical deeds, heroism and deceit, farce and tragedy. Each chapter stands alone but they are interconnected since, inevitably, there are characters who reappear. One, Bernard Hinault, even manages to have a crucial influence on a stage, and a Tour, in which he wasn’t riding.

The featured stages are personal favourites, drawn mainly from the Tours I have watched since my first glimpse on television in 1984. But I couldn’t resist others that piqued my interest: a trilogy of remarkable stages involving Eddy Merckx and Luis Ocaña in 1971; a curious win by José Luis Viejo in 1976, which I had read about in an out-of-print cycling book; any one of the sixteen stages won by one of the sport’s most endearing figures, Freddy Maertens, in the course of his bizarre career.

There were mysteries to investigate and myths to debunk – the feud between two team directors that distorted the outcome of a stage in 1992; a rest day disqualification in 1991; the untold stories of the gruppetto; and some classics: l’Alpe d’Huez in 1984, Paris in 1989, Sestriere in 1992, Les Deux Alpes in 1998.

There are a number of premature deaths – Ocaña, Marco Pantani, Jose María Jiménez, Laurent Fignon – but only one occurred during the Tour. That was Fabio Casartelli in 1995 and I can vividly remember the room and sofa where I sat, and how I felt, when television pictures showed him curled up on the road, a pool of blood forming by his head. One chapter focuses on an emotionally charged stage three days later, won by Casartelli’s team-mate, a young American called Lance Armstrong.

The older Armstrong reappears in a later chapter, from 2003: a stage and a Tour that now have an asterisk against them and a line through the winner’s name. Despite his disgrace, I wanted to include Armstrong, partly because he is difficult to ignore, partly because nobody could argue that some of his Tours (the stage I chose in particular) were not dramatic. I didn’t know if he’d agree to an interview, but when I explained the project by email he responded within minutes: ‘You bet.’ Then I wasn’t sure what he wanted out of it, other than to talk about the 2003 stage to Luz Ardiden as though it was still in the record books; as though it still mattered. ‘Those Tours happened,’ he said, ‘despite what a bunch of dickheads say.’ Of course, you might disagree ...

Mention of Armstrong raises the spectre of doping, which, as Armstrong himself is quick to point out, he did not invent, even if he has done more damage to the sport’s reputation than any other rider. But doping, cheating, skulduggery: for better or worse, all are woven deeply into the fabric of the Tour.

I thought of doping in cycling as I read the American writer Roger Kahn’s book, The Boys of Summer, in which he recalls his early days as a cub reporter in New York. His first job was to cover high school sports at a time when the coaches were striking over pay. Consequently, there was little sport. ‘But if this mess doesn’t get settled, what will there be to write about?’ he asked his editor.

‘As you say, the mess.’

Perhaps in recent years ‘the mess’ of doping has overshadowed the sport to an unhealthy degree. Of course it is an important, dare I say interesting, subject. But there is so much more: the deeply fascinating – often fascinatingly deep – people who make up the peloton; the complexity of road racing, with its teamwork and tactics; the courage and skill of a stage winner, whether a journeyman like Joël Pelier, a winner in 1989 (and now a sculptor), or Mark Cavendish, arguably the greatest sprinter of all time. I hope that the following tales illustrate all of this, and do convey at least some of the mystery, the beauty and the madness.

Chris Boardman

2 July 1994. Prologue: Lille

7.2km. Flat

‘At the 1994 Tour, everybody went for a three-week race,’ says Chris Boardman. ‘I went for seven minutes.’

Chris Boardman was, and remains, unique. In the history of the Tour de France, at least since the prologue time trial was introduced in 1967, he is the only rider ever to go there specifically, and exclusively, targeting the hors d’œuvre to the race, the prologue.

Like some other hors d’œuvre, the prologue time trial is an acquired taste. ‘As pageantry goes in so beautiful a sport, ho hum,’ was the verdict of the American journalist Samuel Abt. ‘No long lines of riders flashing by, no desperate early breakaways, no sprinters tearing for the finish line, no climbers struggling to drop one another as the road rises.’

It isn’t even a proper stage – that is the whole point. The prologue was conceived as a way of adding an extra day to the Tour without falling foul of the regulations governing how many days the riders were allowed to race. And the motivation for its inclusion was financial. Don’t hold that against it, however, because in this it is no different to the race itself, set up to market the newspaper L’Auto. The Tour has always been nakedly commercial. But the commercial imperative intensified after 1962, when Félix Lévitan was appointed co-director, alongside Jacques Goddet. Goddet and Lévitan, both journalists, remained in charge until 1987, with Goddet looking after the sporting side, Lévitan responsible for the money. After Goddet and Lévitan, there were two short-term replacements, Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, a cognac salesman, and Jean-Pierre Courcol, a former professional tennis player. Each lasted only one Tour before, in 1989, it passed once more into the safe hands of another journalist (and former professional rider), Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in turn handed it on to another ex-journalist, Christian Prudhomme, in 2005. In 110 years, the Tour de France has had only seven directors. And five of them have been journalists by profession.

The latest incumbent, Prudhomme, is no great fan of the prologue. For the first time since 1967, he opted not to include one in 2008 – then did the same in 2011, 2013 and 2014. It isn’t just a question of taste: this is also commercial. Prudhomme (formerly a television journalist) points to statistics that show the television audience is at its lowest when the Tour opens with a prologue time trial. It might be better for those who are there to watch – with the action spread over many hours, and the chance to see the riders individually and up close – but there is another and increasingly important audience to think of: TV. Like Sam Abt, and arguably most others, they prefer the spectacle of a road race.

Lévitan’s motivation for adding the prologue was to increase the Tour’s earning potential. Back then, the main source of income was the money paid by cities and towns along the route. They paid to host a start, even more to host a finish, and so Lévitan began to add what he called split-stages: more than one stage in a day. On occasion, he even managed to squeeze three stages into one day. The riders hated it.

The prologue time trial was a marginally more popular innovation than split-stages, and it was Lévitan’s way around the rule, from cycling’s world governing body the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), that stated a race could not last more than twenty-two days. Just as an hors d’œuvre is not considered a proper course in a meal, the prologue, which must be less than 8km, does not count as a proper stage. Thus it exploited a loophole in the UCI rules. And yet the first prologue, on a Thursday evening in Angers in 1967, was not actually called a prologue. It was called stage 1a (1b followed the next day). Two years later, the name ‘prologue’ was adopted.

That first one was won by an unheralded Spaniard, José María Errandonea, who held the yellow jersey only until the next day. Including stage 1a, the 1967 Tour comprised twenty-five stages over twenty-three days and 4,780km (the 2013 race was 3,400km over twenty-one stages). But the 1967 Tour is mainly remembered for tragedy. This was the Tour that saw the introduction of a new, short stage to add another day’s racing to an already packed schedule, and which saw the death of a rider, Tom Simpson, on the barren slopes of Mont Ventoux. If the two events were linked, little heed was taken – the Tour was again run over twenty-three days and 4,684km in 1968.

* * *

There are fans of the prologue, too. Thierry Marie in the 1980s, Boardman in the ’90s, Fabian Cancellara in the 2000s. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: it’s as pure a test of speed as you can get in professional cycling.

The prologue to the 1994 Tour de France was a classic. Held in the centre of Lille over a pan-flat 7.2km course, with wide boulevards and only a few sweeping bends, it was the perfect test. It was perfect in other ways, too, since it served up a tantalising confrontation between two masters in quite different fields.

It pitched the three-time Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, against a novice, Chris Boardman, whose only experience of the Tour had been as a spectator twelve months earlier. In terms of their background, they couldn’t have been more different. Indurain was steeped in the traditions of road racing on the continent, slowly ascending the hierarchy of his team until emerging as leader in 1991, the year of his first Tour victory. The twenty-five-year-old Boardman had arrived on the continent fully formed, as the finished article – but a complete contrast to Indurain, given that he came from a very different tradition. His apprenticeship was served in the obscure backwater of British time trialling.

Boardman felt like a fraud. ‘I felt like I cheated my way into this game,’ he says.

The Indurain–Boardman match-up was a little like the annual shinty–hurling international between Scotland and Ireland. They are essentially the same sport, but they exist in isolation, one quite separate from the other. When one tradition takes on another, there is always fascination and intrigue, in the same way that there might be with twins who are separated at birth and brought up in different families, in different countries. What, if anything, do they have in common?

Continental road racing and British time trialling appeared to have nothing in common, other than that both involved people riding bikes. One took place on the closed roads of Europe, often against the backdrop of the Alps and Pyrenees, and involved tactics, teams, courage and panache. The other was held in the early morning on fast, busy roads, against a backdrop of speeding lorries and cars, and involved calculation and pacing.

The British scene had never produced a champion able to convert his talent to continental road racing. But by 1994 Boardman had showcased his talent in shop windows more glamorous than dual carriageways in Britain; at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, where he won the pursuit, and then a year later at the Bordeaux Velodrome, where he went for the ultimate time trial, arguably the only one that resonated on the continent: the world hour record.

It was in July 1993 that Boardman took on the hour record in Bordeaux, 24 hours before a stage of the Tour de France finished in the French city. The timing was both deliberate and ingenious, because it allowed for a kind of cross-pollination. ‘The Hour’, already a big deal in the cycling world, became even bigger: it was amplified by its proximity to the Tour, not least because so many journalists were able to attend. At least one team manager was able to take it in, too. Roger Legeay, who ran the French Gan team, was more open to Anglophones than most, since his team, previously sponsored by Peugeot Cycles, had a history of having English-speaking riders, from Tom Simpson and Shay Elliott, through Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Phil Anderson and Stephen Roche, to his current star (albeit a fading one), the American three-time Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond.

Boardman had gone as far as he could in Britain. The only place for him to go now was the continent’s professional scene. Yet it was a step he was reluctant to take. ‘I was an outsider,’ he says. ‘I was a time triallist from Britain. The Olympics were amateur, so you either wait for someone to knock you off the top step, or you turn pro.’

The hour record that Boardman set out to break was held by the Italian road racing star of the 1980s, Francesco Moser. But by the time he came to tackle it, it no longer belonged to Moser. A week before Boardman’s attempt it was beaten by his domestic rival, the Scotsman Graeme Obree, on a track in Norway. ‘I’m disappointed not to be breaking Moser’s record,’ said Boardman at the time. He feared that Obree’s astonishing feat might remove some of the gloss from the record. He needn’t have worried. If anything, it raised interest. It meant Boardman had much to gain, but perhaps even more to lose.

He beat Obree’s mark, and with that, as Ed Pickering notes in his book, The Race Against Time, ‘The first part of Boardman’s PR ambush on the Tour was complete.’ The Tour reciprocated, staging their own ‘ambush’ as they invited Boardman to the podium in Bordeaux at the end of the next day’s stage, to share the platform with the man in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain, on his way to his third successive overall victory.

Tellingly, Boardman stood on the lower step, grinning like a schoolboy as ‘Big Mig’, in the yellow jersey, waved at the crowds with the bearing of a member of the Spanish royal family. It should also be noted that, although Indurain himself was gracious and humble, Boardman’s achievement did not meet with universal respect in the professional peloton. Luc Leblanc, the leading French rider, expressed his view that, if they put their minds to it, most members of the Tour peloton could better Boardman’s distance.

Less than a year later, in Lille, Boardman and Indurain met again, this time on the road. Indurain had built the foundations of his three Tour de France wins on his domination of time trials. He then rode defensively in the mountains, rather than with the attacking flair and panache of some previous Tour winners. If that didn’t fire the passions of many fans, it was impossible not to admire his prowess against the clock. He was a machine, most obviously in Luxembourg in 1992, when he averaged 49kph (30mph) over 65km and finished three minutes ahead of his closest challenger. ‘I thought I was having a good day and I lost four minutes,’ said a bewildered LeMond at the finish. ‘I thought for a moment I must have taken the wrong course.’ LeMond’s last Tour win had come in 1990; the speed of his decline, or Indurain’s improvement, or both, was staggering.

Boardman, meanwhile, had indeed been able to use his hour record as a springboard into the professional ranks, joining Legeay’s Gan team. ‘Roger had come to see the hour record and Pete Woodworth [Boardman’s manager] had spoken to him,’ Boardman tells me. ‘I wasn’t super enthusiastic or excited at the idea of turning pro. I was more intimidated ... No, trepidation would be the right word. We went to see him at the Tour of Britain [in August] expecting him to say, “This is the pro team; this is where you’ll fit in,” but instead he asked me: “What do you want to do?”

‘It was bizarre,’ Boardman continues. ‘I said, “Well, I’d quite like to go to the Tour de France, but only to ride ten days.” Roger just laughed and said: “First-year pros don’t often get to ride the Tour. But we’ll see.”’

Boardman guested for Gan before the end of the 1993 season, in a time trial, the GP Eddy Merckx. ‘I wore one of Greg LeMond’s skinsuits,’ he says. He won it. ‘I had no idea what to expect because you were segregated. Although I’d won an Olympic gold medal, the fact was that if you asked any pro bike rider who had won the gold medal at the pursuit in the Olympics, they possibly wouldn’t have known.’

The GP Eddy Merckx really offered few clues to Boardman’s potential. Although he was surprised to win, he was operating safely in his comfort zone in a time trial. The real test came the following year, with his induction to the peloton. Not that there was any formal induction: he was expected to know how to ride in a bunch, where to position himself, and be familiar with the unwritten rules and etiquette. Most riders graduated from the European amateur peloton, which operated to similar rules – but of course Boardman was different. He might as well have come from Mars.

‘It was always about managing my nervousness,’ he says. ‘I really struggled at first. For three months I thought, I’m not going to cut it. I don’t like it. It’s scary. It’s painful. It’s highly stressful.

‘In the bunch I was at the pointy end or the blunt end’ – the front or the back. ‘The problem with this is that at both ends you end up fighting: at the front to stay there, at the back to move up. It was terrible. Greg helped a lot, he gave me tips. Things like, “All you can see is a mass of riders in front of you, but if you’re going round a right-hand bend there will always be a space that appears on the left; so you can accelerate into a space that isn’t there yet.” Or, “Overlap your bars with someone else’s in the middle of the bunch and they’ll automatically want to move away.” Greg gave me tonnes of little tips that really helped. But it was all cerebral consciousness stuff so it was hard, hard work.’

Boardman made a breakthrough at the Tour of Murcia in March. ‘It used to be that people who were unfit or sick went to Murcia, while everyone else went to Paris–Nice. I won the prologue there and it was my first time in a leader’s jersey.’ It meant more than his Olympic gold medal or hour record. ‘The jersey was a passport to the front. I hadn’t experienced that before. It was a pivotal moment. If you were a neo-pro you got battered: you’re the softest target, people just push you out the way. But when you’ve done something in the race, you’ve got a badge. Life gets a bit easier.’

What most troubled Boardman was that all his old certainties counted for little. Up to now, his career had been built on calculation and measurement – to the nth degree; all that had mattered, through training and aerodynamics and working with his coach, Peter Keen, was making himself fast. Adding another 150-plus riders to the equation complicated things.

* * *

Boardman’s place in the Gan team for the Tour was still undecided when he rode the Dauphiné Libéré, the week-long French stage race, in late May. He guaranteed his selection by winning three stages, the haul including the prologue, the time trial and, more surprisingly, a road stage, on a 157km loop around the Alpine town of Chambéry. For that one he broke away alone – and time trialled to the finish.

But as the Tour got closer, he began to feel unwell. He suffered terribly with nerves, which led him to work with a psychologist, John Syer, in the run-up to the Barcelona Olympics. The stress would force Boardman to think himself ill, or falling ill, even when he wasn’t.

His preparation, after his triumphant Dauphiné, was typical Boardman – on the face of it, idiosyncratic, but meticulously planned and thought out. While his peers were doing warm-up road races in Europe, he rode and won a 10-mile time trial for amateurs in north Wales. Looking ahead from north Wales to Lille and the Tour prologue, he said: ‘The podium is a possibility. It’s difficult to know who will be up there. Specialists like Thierry Marie seem to be fading. Indurain has been very quiet … Rominger is lying low.’

‘Chris is very close to his best form,’ said his coach, Peter Keen. ‘He still has a slight problem with a chest infection that we’re trying to clear up. A sputum sample enabled us to find the type of microbe and he is now on antibiotics.’

Boardman kept talking about this illness, too. Now, however, he says he can’t remember being unwell. He thinks it might have been a case of getting his excuses in first. ‘I used to need mental crutches like that, like many athletes do. You’re hypersensitive to any sensation or the slightest twitch or anything. It’s a bit childish, but it’s a crutch, in case it goes wrong. You don’t just say, “I couldn’t go any faster and I wasn’t good enough.” You weren’t secure enough in those days to think like that.’

In the days before the prologue, Boardman carried on doing his own thing, as strange as it seemed to his team-mates. He had his routine for coping with the nerves. ‘What I used to do was read and sleep. They were my two escapes.’ To assist the ‘escape’ he liked science fiction – Iain M. Banks was a favourite. ‘It was a way to not be there, while you were still there. And I slept under pressure. A lot. Which is quite a handy trait.’

He didn’t do what his team-mates did, what professional riders had always done, which was to go out for easy rides in the week before the race, recce-ing the prologue course at a gentle pace to get a feel for it. ‘They used to go out and ride the course if it was open and have a chat,’ Boardman says. ‘I went out on my own and I could probably tell you now where all the grids were, where there was a bump on the road. I memorised it.’ Most importantly, he memorised it at the same speed as he would tackle it on race day. ‘They put the team car in front of me; I had to do it at race speed. So I had the car in front, it would take me up to speed, then get out of the way before the corners. I thought I could get round the whole course without braking, but that was the only way to find out. So I had it all mapped out. That was two days before. From that point forward, we got all the information we could.’

Boardman habitually uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, meaning his team – not his professional team-mates, who were mere colleagues, but his far more important support team, led by Keen. But Keen wasn’t there – he ‘felt like a fish out of water’, says Boardman, and rarely went to continental races.

Boardman’s wife, Sally, was in Lille. ‘I used to resent Sally being there,’ says Boardman, with a smile to suggest he is joking. Only, he isn’t really. ‘She used to have a good time, a party, and her friends came over. I’d see them, they’d come to the hotel, all in happy spirits. They were going to have a good day. And I’m thinking, I’m crapping myself here. I’ve got seven minutes that decide my salary for the next year. It used to, reasonably or not, make me quite angry.’

Did he dream of becoming only the second Brit after Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey? ‘I did, yeah. But you just go out there and try and win. That’s the beauty of the time trial. You do your thing. It was the psychologist who got me to realise that you can only do what you can.’

Prior to the Barcelona Olympics, Boardman spilled out his fears to John Syer. ‘What if this goes wrong? What if I can’t go fast enough? What if the other guy’s faster? What if I puncture?’

Boardman expected Syer to offer words of reassurance. Instead, he said: ‘Yeah, well those things could happen.’ Boardman was puzzled. ‘I said, “Hang on, aren’t you supposed to be helping me here?” But he said, “No, this is the deal, mate – elation and despair are two sides of the same coin, in equal and opposite proportion. If you want the big win, you’ve got to risk the big low. So instead of trying to deny that, why don’t we stare it in the face?”

‘I sat on the start line at the Olympics and thought, fuck it, I’ll just be as good as I can. And when I cross the line I’ll look at the board and see what I’ve done. He taught me that you can’t affect what others are doing, or let them affect you.’

Now, when it came to the ‘others’, there was only really one. Indurain. ‘He was a brick,’ Boardman says. ‘However he did it, it was pretty amazing.’ He had never raced Indurain before the start of the 1994 Tour, so predictions were difficult. While Indurain had won the last two prologues, Boardman was the Olympic pursuit champion and hour record holder. Indurain might confirm what many suspected – that continental road pros were a different breed, even a superior species. Then again, Boardman, although he came from a small pond, clearly had a special talent. The contrast between the pair was striking in almost every way. Indurain was tall and rangy, six foot two and twelve and a half stone; Boardman was compact and stocky, five foot nine but solid at eleven stone. On a bike, the differences were more marked: Indurain was a jumbo jet, Boardman a fighter plane.

‘It was really, really hot,’ Boardman recalls of the day. He didn’t have a special routine before the race. ‘Most of it was having the courage to do nothing. I learned that from my pursuiting days. Because when people are nervous, they go out for a ride. We were staying in a hotel just out of town. On the morning I went out on my bike for an hour. Just really easy. The others went for a couple of hours. The days before, too, they went out, and said, “Are you coming?” I said, “No, I’m going out on my own with two sprints.”

‘My routine was worked back from the time of the start: I want to be on the start line with three minutes to go, so how far is it, to walk from the bus to the start house? When am I going to warm up – because that had to be really close to the event. Where’s the signing on? When am I going to put my numbers on? When am I going to eat? It’s incredibly detailed. But the day is mainly waiting, until it’s time to act.’

While Boardman’s day was ‘dialled’, others’ were more flexible – or shambolic. ‘I remember riders getting their time trial bikes and getting their tools out, adjusting their saddles and bars.’ It was inconceivable to Boardman that this would not have been taken care of in advance. ‘This was my office; this was where I went to work. You don’t plug in a new piece of equipment before the most important meeting, do you?’

Boardman’s bike, a new Lotus ‘Superbike’, essentially a road version of the machine he’d ridden at the Olympics, attracted attention. LeMond, always interested in equipment, was spellbound. He warmed up facing Boardman outside the Gan team’s campervan. ‘Greg was like, “Oh, a shiny new piece of kit!” He was genuinely fascinated, and he picked your brains about equipment a lot. He was like a very, very intelligent kid.’

As he waited to start his effort, Boardman tried to take his psychologist’s advice and embrace the challenge ahead – which meant embracing his fear. ‘I thought, right, this is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And there’s no escaping that. There’s no pretending I’m going to have an easy day. It is going to be the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever done and I accept that.

‘It was quite liberating.’

The scale of the Tour was something new, even compared with the Olympics. ‘But I had to accept that all these people lining the road ahead of me, and the size of this event, and the millions of people watching. I can’t affect that and that doesn’t affect me. Put it to one side. It was all about my performance.’

Boardman was among the last starters, along with the young world road race champion, Lance Armstrong; finally, Indurain, in the yellow jersey as the previous year’s winner, would be the last man to go.

In the start house, Boardman was held up by an official and the TV camera lingered – the commentator Phil Liggett described it as ‘a tense but marvellous moment’ – before the countdown began, the official holding out five fingers and folding them over:

‘Cinq ... Quatre ... Trois ... Deux ... Un ...’

Boardman shot into a corridor of people: there was a huge crowd, six deep, lining the straight, pouring over the barriers, leaning into the road. Boardman sprinted, out of the saddle, before settling into his extreme position: arms stretching over the front wheel, head down, like a bullet. He remembers little of the ride. He doesn’t recall it being painful. ‘They tend not to hurt if you’ve got it right and you’re fresh, which I was.’

The rider who started a minute in front of Boardman was Luc Leblanc, who had been so dismissive of his hour record a year earlier. The contrast in styles was remarkable: the bare-headed Leblanc, his brown hair blowing in the wind, on a bike on which he didn’t look comfortable, shifting in the saddle, frequently standing up for more power – which, as Boardman knew, came at the cost of aerodynamics. Boardman had clocked Leblanc as he waited in front of him, ‘on a bike you could quite literally go and buy in [the sports shop] Decathlon. Probably 44cm [wide] bars.

‘Even if he’d been producing the same power as me, he’d have lost at least a minute …’

There was something else that Boardman knew, though he doesn’t say whether he derived any special advantage from the knowledge. Having the team car behind you could serve as an aerodynamic aid: ‘People don’t realise that having a car up your butt makes a bloody big difference. Because turbulence goes behind you and sucks you backwards, having a car behind you is beneficial. It’s 20 watts difference.’

All the riders had cars behind them, but perhaps Boardman’s was closer (it was certainly close the following year, when Boardman fell in the rain at Saint-Brieuc, and was almost run over, ending his second Tour within a few minutes of it starting).

In Lille, Boardman knew he was on a good day, but didn’t know how he was going relative to anyone else. For those watching on television, too, there was scant information; the action was mainly transmitted from a fixed camera on the finish line, which tracked the riders as they sprinted up the long, wide, gently rising finishing straight – all of them fighting, weaving from one side to the other in search of a smoother surface or the most sheltered spot, getting out of the saddle to try and generate more power.

Boardman was careful not to start too fast. He was wary of getting carried away by the occasion; the people cheering, the realisation that he was riding the Tour de France – the Tour de France! The knack to riding a good time trial is always the same: it’s all about pacing, judgement, calculation. Things that Boardman is good at. ‘The equation in my head, in any time trial, was: how far is it to go; how hard am I trying; is it sustainable?

‘And that changes depending on how far you have to go. If the answer is “Yes, it is sustainable,” then you’re not trying hard enough. If the answer is “No, I can’t sustain it,” then it’s too late.

‘So the answer you’re looking for is: “Maybe.”’

For the entirety of his ride, Boardman remains in his aerodynamic position: bum up, head down, only shifting slightly for corners. He knows where he has to touch the brakes, where he doesn’t. And as he enters the long finishing straight, he can see, in front of him, his minute-man, Leblanc.

‘Look at this!’ says Liggett on commentary. ‘The arrival of Chris Boardman! He has almost caught Luc Leblanc!’

‘I thought that was perfect,’ says Boardman, a wry smile playing on his lips. ‘After Bordeaux, he says that half the peloton could break the hour record. And next year, I catch him for a minute …’

Leblanc gives Boardman a target to aim at in the final kilometre: a big, 44cm-wide, off-the-peg bike-shaped target, hair billowing in the wind. Now it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast. Leblanc is a diminutive climber but he looks twice the size of Boardman.

Boardman aimed for his back wheel. ‘The straight was long, and seeing Leblanc allowed me to change strategy slightly.’ This was where the answer to the question always in his mind – ‘Can I sustain this effort?’ – went from ‘maybe’ to ‘no’. But it didn’t matter. It would be over soon. ‘When you see something coming up and think, “I can push on a bit more and get a ‘reward’ before the end…”’ The reward being the catch. ‘That helped quite a bit.’

Leblanc, riding up the right-hand gutter, becomes aware of the Exocet missile behind him, turns around to glance over his shoulder, then moves over as Boardman, who had seemed to be toying with which side to pass him on, rockets up the inside. The time to beat is 8 minutes, 13 seconds, by Armand de Las Cuevas. Boardman speeds through the line: 7:49. The fastest time by 24 seconds. And at 55kph, the fastest time trial the Tour has ever seen.

Boardman already knew it had been a good ride. ‘It was one of the very few moments in my entire career where I could not have done anything differently. It was perfect. They don’t hurt, you just can’t go any faster.’

He looks a little wistful as he adds: ‘I never got those conditions again.’

There’s no time to linger on Boardman in the aftermath of his ride; we see him freewheeling into a mass of bodies and disappearing. The camera flashes instead to an expressionless, yellow-jerseyed Indurain in the start house. Three seconds later, his countdown begins. Eight seconds after Boardman finishes, he starts.

Indurain, the last of the 189 riders, hammers around the course. His time trialling had let him down at the recent Tour of Italy, where he finished second to Evgeni Berzin. But now he looks formidable. Whereas Boardman was compact and bullet-like, Indurain is a blunt instrument: he bludgeons his way through Lille’s broad boulevards. He gets out of the saddle: a rare sight. His mouth is open, gasping for air: also a rare spectacle. He’s usually so cool, so impassive. Finally he appears, swinging around the final bend, on the brink of his third consecutive prologue victory – or is he? The clock reads 7:40. ‘It’s a long, long way to go, Miguel,’ Liggett’s voice crackles with emotion.

The clock counts on: 7.44 … 45 … 46 … 47 … 48 … 49 … And still Indurain powers up the finishing straight. Liggett again: ‘Boardman is the leader of the Tour de France! He’s done it!’

Indurain lunges across the line and the clock stops at 8:04: a full 15 seconds slower than Boardman.

Boardman remembers little of that eight-minute wait. ‘It’s a blur. You do something, there’s loads of noise, then people say: “You’ve done it!” And that’s the first time you start to have self-belief.’

Boardman is perhaps not as impassive as Indurain, but he is not exactly emotional, or sentimental. ‘I was happy,’ he says. Then corrects himself: ‘Relieved. That there had been this opportunity and I’d taken it. I had done what I came for.’

Classement

1 Chris Boardman, Great Britain, Gan, 7 minutes, 49 secs

2 Miguel Indurain, Spain, Banesto, at 15 secs

3 Tony Rominger, Switzerland, Mapei-Clas, at 19 secs

4 Alex Zülle, Switzerland, ONCE, at 22 secs

5 Armand de Las Cuevas, France, Castorama, at 24 secs

6 Thierry Marie, France, Castorama, at 29 secs

Bernard Hinault Leads Over the Pavé Early in the Stage

1 July 1980. Stage Five: Liège to Lille

236.5km. Flat, cobbles

The French call it pavé. It sounds exotic and benign – it could be a succulent cut of beef – but for cyclists it has a different meaning. It is the pavé that defines Paris–Roubaix, the ‘Hell of the North’ one-day classic that includes twenty-odd sections of cobbles, or pavé; hell because these cobbles are not the small stones polished by thousands of cars in a city, but large, uneven boulders planted in mud, arranged to run in narrow strips across the plains and fields of northern France and Belgium.

They are roads, but rarely used as such these days and hardly worthy of the name. Some are maintained purely for the purpose of meting out punishment once a year, around Easter time, to the cyclists of Paris–Roubaix.

Every decade or so, the pavé features not only in Paris–Roubaix but also in the Tour de France. In 2004 it was the pavé that destroyed the hopes of the Basque climber, Iban Mayo. In 2010 it did the same to another stick-thin climber, Fränk Schleck. On that occasion, even Lance Armstrong, who had capitalised on Mayo’s misfortune six years earlier, was a diminished figure, caught behind the carnage and reduced to chasing shadows, or younger, faster versions of himself, over the bone-jarring stones. ‘Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail,’ said Armstrong after the stage. ‘Today, I was the nail.’

Paris–Roubaix lends itself to great suffering and great quotes. Arguably the best is Theo de Rooy’s following the 1985 race, when he crashed, withdrew, and vented: ‘It’s bollocks, this race. You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants; you’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping. It’s a piece of shit …’

‘Will you ride it again?’ asked the reporter.

‘Of course. It’s the most beautiful race in the world.’

It’s dangerous, the pavé. In 1998 Johan Museeuw fell in the Arenberg forest section during Paris–Roubaix and nearly lost his leg; in 2001 Philippe Gaumont broke his femur; in 2010 Fränk Schleck broke his collarbone. The weather matters. On dry days the dust kicked up by the bikes and vehicles fills lungs and leaves riders coughing for days. But when the rain falls, the challenge and danger are of a different order. A very different order indeed.

On 1 July 1980, it poured. It was a grey, bleak day as the Tour prepared to leave the industrial Belgian city of Liège, to head west to Lille. Five days earlier, the Tour had started in Frankfurt, then dipped into France, to Metz, before crossing another border to Belgium. Bad weather dominated those early stages. But the fifth stage, to Lille, looked set to be the worst of the lot. The rain was unrelenting. The wind blew hard across the northern European plains. ‘Thousands were by the roadside, sheltering under trees or huddled by their cars,’ as one report put it. ‘If stages two and three were purgatory, then stage five was hell.’

* * *

Few Tours have started with a bigger favourite than Bernard Hinault in 1980. Le Blaireau (The Badger) had won the previous two, including 1978, his début. That year, although only twenty-three, he rode with such impressive authority, even leading a riders’ protest at the end of one stage, that an aura was already starting to develop. The timing was right. In the same year that the great Eddy Merckx retired, a new patron was needed, and here was Hinault, waiting in the wings, poised to stride confidently to centre stage.

He didn’t have to wait long. A year after his first Tour and first win, Hinault returned and dominated. To underline his superiority, he even claimed the traditional sprinters’ finish on the Champs-Élysées. To win there, in the yellow jersey, showed more than strength and speed. It showed panache and defiance. It was a two-fingered salute. And it was completely unnecessary. Hinault entered Paris with a lead of three minutes over the second-placed Joop Zoetemelk (which in the record books is thirteen, after Zoetemelk was subsequently docked ten minutes for a doping offence). His win in Paris was Hinault’s seventh stage of the 1979 Tour. He was at the zenith of his powers.

There was, from the beginning, more to Hinault than physical ability. Sean Kelly, the Irishman who emerged in the late 1970s as one of the best sprinters and one-day riders, is not given to exaggeration or hyperbole. Ask him about Hinault, however, and his admiration, even awe, becomes apparent. ‘He was the boss,’ says Kelly. ‘The patron, as they say. In the Tour de France especially he was very much the patron. When you had two mountain stages then a flat stage, he’d go to the front and say, “OK, today we’re going to ride slowly for the first 100km. Nobody attacks.”

‘If somebody did attack they would get a fucking bollocking,’ Kelly continues. ‘I’ve seen it myself: Hinault go after somebody and say, “If you do that again, you won’t ever win another race.”’

Graham Jones, who raced with Hinault, said that, in the main, he asserted himself ‘physically on the bike rather than verbally. He would occasionally shout a bit, but usually it was because he was on a bad day, like anybody. But I remember once at the Tour de Romandie, he was getting a bit annoyed early on and he went to the front for 20km and strung it all out and then he sat up and said, “Have you had enough?” That certainly quietened everyone down for a while.

‘He was the last patron,’ Jones continues. ‘Armstrong wasn’t a patron, because he didn’t ride enough races all year round to do that. A patron is there all year round. I can remember riding Paris–Nice or the Tour of Corsica where Hinault was there, riding to win.’

He was more than a caricature of a mafia boss, but like a mafia boss Hinault kept his friends close and his enemies closer. He could be generous to team-mates, helping them to victories in ‘lesser’ races, with the deal being their full commitment to his own cause when it came to the big ‘appointments’, to use his description. Hinault was not Merckx: his appetite for victory wasn’t as voracious as the Cannibal’s. He didn’t care about small races. He cared about big races, and he certainly cared about the Tour de France. It was always his main appointment.

Badger-watching has been an enduring fascination of the last few decades, from when he bestrode his sport like a colossus, to his annual berating of the latest current generation of French riders for being lazy and overpaid (as the last French winner of the Tour, in 1985, Hinault occupies a special, not to say important, position). In his late fifties, he has aged well. He is dark, handsome, brooding; a fearsome presence, prone to displays of the anger and aggression that were the hallmarks of his career. Yet he can also appear relaxed, calm and friendly; he smiles often, laughs regularly, and most of the riders he raced with now speak warmly of him. The overwhelming impression is of a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who doesn’t merely appear to not care for the approval of others, but is genuinely indifferent to either flattery or criticism. There is an authenticity about Hinault. For someone who seemed to race so often on anger, he doesn’t appear to be haunted by demons. He is refreshingly black or white and perfectly comfortable being Bernard Hinault, the Badger – the nickname given to him when he was a young rider by a fellow Breton, and which hints at his wild nature and fighting qualities. Just as he did when he was a rider, Hinault exudes confidence; he radiates certainty.

These days, the Badger’s job, when he has not been tending to his farm in Brittany, is to look after the podium at the Tour de France, supervising the daily jersey presentations. He is needed in this role, because on three occasions in recent years the podium has been invaded by protesters, and Hinault has appeared from off-stage, like a bouncer. Each time he attacked the younger, taller intruder (Hinault is a surprisingly diminutive five foot eight), forcing them off the podium, then glowering and snarling at the stricken figure, daring them to return. As if they would.

He used to react in the same way if somebody attacked him on a bike. One of his previous directors, Paul Köchli, has attempted to analyse the trait that made Hinault such a formidable competitor: ‘What made Hinault so successful was that he would act very emotionally in a race when he is challenged.’ When confronted by a podium invader, the same instinct surfaces. ‘The podium is Hinault’s space – he is responsible for it – and if someone is challenging him … even if the guy is two metres twenty tall, Hinault will take him on and take him down.’

It suggests some primal instinct. ‘The Badger was a boxer,’ says another of his former directors, Cyrille Guimard. ‘He needed to be permanently squared up to someone, in opposition to someone. He needed combat.’

* * *

Almost every race that he started in 1980 seemed to add another chapter to the Hinault legend. There was Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the late spring classic in the Ardennes, with its succession of short but steep climbs. This year was harder than ever, on account of the weather. It snowed almost from the start. After 70km of the 260km race, 110 of the 170 starters had abandoned. Even Hinault considered abandoning. But with 80km remaining, he did the opposite: he attacked. He could barely see through the thickening snow; he raised a hand to his face to protect his eyes, to be able to decipher the road.

‘My teeth were chattering and I had no protection against the cold, which was getting right inside me,’ he said later. ‘I decided that the only thing to do was ride as hard as I could to keep myself warm. I didn’t look at anything. I saw nothing. I thought only of myself.’

He caught the two escapees who had been freezing out front, dropping them and continuing alone. By now he was riding into a blizzard. His hands were numb, making changing gear and braking difficult. Yet he ploughed on through the snow, a fleet of vehicles gathering behind – windscreen wipers swishing – and making fresh tracks in the snow, as Hinault was doing just ahead of them. The observers in their warm vehicles must have wondered, with voyeuristic curiosity, how long he could endure; when he would bow to the inevitable. But there was no question of Hinault quitting. If anything might have persuaded him to carry on, it was the thought that people were following him, awaiting his capitulation. Similarly, he seemed to derive strength from the riders who abandoned and were back in their warm hotel on the finishing straight; as though, merely by carrying on, he was making his point.

By the time he reached Liège, Hinault was ten minutes ahead of the next rider, Hennie Kuiper. But victory came at a cost to Hinault: his frostbitten hands never fully recovered. To this day, when it is cold, he suffers discomfort in two fingers. But what made Hinault’s Liège–Bastogne–Liège even more remarkable was this salient fact: despite being from France’s coldest outpost, Brittany, he hated the cold.

It was another spring classic, held the week before Liège–Bastogne–Liège, that provided an important rehearsal for the 1980 Tour, given that the same pavé would feature in July. On 13 April, in sunny, dry conditions, Hinault was in the mix, following the likes of René Bittinger, Francesco Moser, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle and ‘Mr Paris–Roubaix’, the four-time winner, Roger De Vlaeminck. Eventually, it was Moser who escaped alone to win his third title, but Hinault came in with the first group. He was fourth.

Hinault had also ridden over the cobbles in the 1979 Tour, when, unusually, they came not in the first week of the race, but on stage nine, from Amiens to Roubaix. On that occasion, he punctured and lost over two minutes to Zoetemelk. That was the problem with the pavé. It didn’t respect strength, form, fitness or reputation. It could be a game of chance. Hinault hated it. He called Paris–Roubaix a ‘nonsense’, and worse, ‘a race for dickheads’.

In October 1979, when the 1980 Tour route was announced, and it included two stages with pavé, five and six, Hinault was not happy. After leading the riders’ strike at Valence d’Agen in 1978, he threatened the ultimate protest: another strike.

But in the first half of the 1980 season, he was on track. He could do no wrong. A few weeks after his win at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Hinault rode and won the Giro d’Italia. So when he appeared in Frankfurt for the Tour de France, and won the prologue, it seemed the script was already written. There was little point in talking of other contenders.

* * *

Thirty-three years later, almost to the day, I am sitting with Bernard Hinault in an outdoor café in, of all places, the Chelsea Flower Show in London. As incongruous a setting as any, the equivalent might be meeting the Dalai Lama at a bare-knuckle boxing match. Refined gentlemen and women, on a break from wandering around the display gardens, drink cream teas in the café, unaware, certainly, that there is a Badger in their midst. A Badger sipping cappuccino from a paper cup.

His presence is explained by the fact that Yorkshire will host the start of the 2014 Tour de France. They have a specially commissioned Tour-themed garden, beside which Hinault obligingly poses alongside various dignatories, as well as the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme. At one point, Prudhomme spots a rucksack with the Tour de France logo, worn by an elderly man, ambling from garden to garden in the company of his wife. Prudhomme leaps after him, stops the couple, then summons Hinault. Hinault strides over, shakes hands, smiles genially – he speaks not a word of English.

‘Do you know this man?’ asks Prudhomme, as the gentleman whispers to his wife that it’s Bernard Hinault, the five-time Tour winner.

There are photos, smiles, and then the couple wander off, back into the crowd, with their fanciful story. ‘Yes, yes, I’m telling you: Bernard Hinault. At the Chelsea Flower Show!’

When we sit down, and Hinault casts his mind back to 1980 and the pavé, he seems to have modified his stance, a little. ‘I always say to young riders at the start of their pro careers: “Ride Paris–Roubaix.” Why? Because the day you have to ride the cobbles during a Tour stage, you’ll know how to ride them.’

But he always said he hated Paris–Roubaix. ‘I didn’t like the cobbles in Paris–Roubaix for the simple reason that if you fall at Roubaix, and break your collarbone, you won’t make it to the start of the Tour de France.’

Almost any rider can master the pavé, Hinault explains, but only with practice. ‘Once you do it a few times, you won’t be scared. I did Roubaix for the first time in 1976, then ’77, ’78, ’79, and in 1980 I was fourth. The previous year I’d been eleventh. I had places there already.’

* * *

Graham Jones recalls that it wasn’t just the stage to Lille from Liège that made the opening week of the 1980 Tour de France so brutal. ‘Look back at the distances,’ he says, ‘260, 280km stages, and the weather was shit the whole Tour. I think it rained fifteen, sixteen days.

‘The stage began into the wind, on fairly typical straight roads across the Wallonne,’ Jones continues. ‘It wasn’t that hilly, but I was lying second in the King of the Mountains competition and chasing points, with Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, on these very small hills.’ Ahead of them loomed the pavé. And the rain showed no sign of abating. ‘There was talk of a semi-truce,’ says Jones. ‘Wet cobbles could be very dangerous.’

Not surprisingly, it was Hinault who was behind this pact. He hadn’t been able to organise a riders’ strike – though there was still talk of this in Frankfurt on the eve of the Grand Départ – but he had tried to use his influence to take the sting out of the stage. ‘I talked to all the riders,’ Hinault recalls, ‘and we said that because of the bad weather we weren’t going to race. Then I stayed in the front five at all times.’ This, too, was typical Hinault: riding at the front, asserting his authority. (‘Let’s just say that the Badger liked to keep watch,’ said his old director, Cyrille Guimard.)

From this vantage point, continues Hinault, ‘I saw the TI-Raleigh rider, Jan Raas, attack. And when that happened, I thought: “Right – this is war.”

‘They wanted to play?’ asks Hinault. ‘They were going to lose.’

Jones is not convinced that the attack by Raas was necessarily deliberate, far less a betrayal of the pact. It was more a consequence of the course, and the conditions. ‘It was so dangerous that everybody wanted to be at the front. That meant it split up naturally. And gradually it turned into a full-scale race.’

Still, the initial semi-truce meant the riders fell an hour behind schedule as they headed north, into the driving rain, towards hell, where spectators huddled under trees or waited in their cars, engines running, heaters on, windows steaming up. The conditions were treacherous: on one stretch of cobbles a Swiss TV car lost control and spun off the road. The pavé that featured today, totalling 20km, were ‘as bad as anything the Hell of the North could offer,’ as the report in Cycling Weekly put it. ‘Domed roadways, dotted with water-filled craters which, for all the riders knew, could have been one inch or six inches deep.’

Hinault, maintaining his presence in the first five, tried to enforce the truce. But Raas’s team, TI-Raleigh, managed by the formidable Peter Post, also wanted to keep watch, which meant remaining at the front, out of danger; and driving up the pace if their place at the front was threatened. This was their terrain, their conditions: the driving rain, the crosswinds, the cobbles. On the flat roads of northern Europe, they dominated. Yet there was a problem. They had come to the Tour with huge ambitions: to win stages, as they always did, but also the overall prize, with their Dutch climber, Joop Zoetemelk.

Hinault followed seven riders as they broke clear. He was simply following the wheels, he says. Also in the break were Hennie Kuiper, Michel Pollentier, Gerry Verlinden and Ludo Delcroix, and three from TI-Raleigh: Jan Raas, Leo van Vliet and Johan van der Velde. So four Dutchmen, three Belgians, and Hinault.

‘At first in the break, there were five or six of us,’ says Hinault. ‘But there were punctures, crashes, so it kept changing.’ Verlinden and Van der Velde both punctured. Hinault himself then suffered a puncture, but managed to get a quick wheel change and clawed his way back up to the lead group, now numbering five. Van der Velde made it back, only to puncture again: the front wheel this time. Raas gave him his, but neither rider made it back up to the leaders, and they were caught by the bunch. Since it was Raas who, according to Hinault, lit the touchpaper, the Badger might have been quite happy about that.

But TI-Raleigh had another problem, as Van Vliet tells me. ‘We thought Zoetemelk was going well, he rode well in the time trial, so he was in a good position. But that stage, Zoetemelk was not so good. We wanted to make the stage. But when Zoetemelk couldn’t hold the wheels, you have a problem.’ What of the truce? ‘I think for this stage Hinault was even more afraid than Zoetemelk,’ says Van Vliet.

If Hinault was afraid, he was doing a good job of hiding it. And the cards were falling in his favour. ‘We were riding for Zoetemelk to win,’ Van Vliet says, ‘so we had to wait for him.’

Once the break was established, Hinault was committed. When, with 20km to go, Kuiper attacked, opening a ten-second gap, it was Hinault who hunted him down. Delcroix was still there, and he wouldn’t help, sitting on Hinault’s wheel. But gradually Hinault closed the gap to Kuiper, so that all three were together with 9km to go. The bunch was now two minutes behind. It was one of those rare days at the Tour when the race was being turned on its head; where it was perhaps not being won, but could be lost. Aware of this, TI-Raleigh, the team that had, in Hinault’s description, declared war, were chasing hard. Zoetemelk sat at the back of a string of team-mates, splattered by the water and mud thrown up by their wheels, looking thoroughly dejected.

Ahead, Hinault and Kuiper worked together, sharing the pace-making, while Delcroix sat behind, ostensibly protecting the interests of his team leader, Rudy Pevenage. The driving rain continued; a thick gloom descended. Jones remembers ‘the car headlights on, it was so dark. And then we did a loop at the finish in Lille. It felt like night. It was grim, and the clothing was not like it is now. We had just moved from wool to acrylic jerseys. No use in the rain.’

On the outskirts of Lille, Delcroix’s hand shot up. He had suffered a rear wheel puncture. More karma. And so now there were two: Hinault and Kuiper, a shrewd all-rounder who had been Olympic road race champion in 1972, professional world champion three years later, and second overall in the Tour de France two years after that.

They entered Lille together, and began the 3.9km finishing circuit, only for Kuiper to go the wrong way when the road was split by straw bales. He corrected himself, turning around and sprinting back to rejoin Hinault. They were racing, on gloomy, rain-sodden streets, in front of a diminished and bedraggled crowd. It had taken them eight hours to ride from Liège to Lille: eight hours to do 249km. So it didn’t just look like night, as Jones recalls. It was night.

Hinault describes the finish with another of his nonchalant shrugs: ‘It was the two of us. I attacked in the sprint. Won quite easily.’ In his book, Memories of the Peloton, he elaborates a little: ‘My impression of hell was confirmed. I suppose that, as the winner, I shouldn’t complain too much, but I really can’t understand why we have to face such conditions. I think of the riders who got stuck in the mud, lost on the unmade roads, standing in the rain with a punctured wheel, waiting for the team car. I can’t understand what inhuman conditions have to do with sport.’

* * *

The next day, with more cobbles on the road to Compiègne, the organisers relented. Hinault threatened to lead another strike and Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, agreed to change the first 20km of the stage, to cut out the worst cobbled sections. Despite that, Hinault began to experience pain in his knee. ‘It hurt a lot, starting that day. It wasn’t a problem at all during the first day, but the second … They thought it was small crystals in the knee.

‘Twenty-five kilometres of cobbles one day, and then 25km again the next day,’ he adds, shaking his head. ‘Twice in two days, eh? And the rain … there was so much rain.’

This knee pain led to Hinault’s darkest hour: his midnight escape from the Tour, once it reached Pau in the Pyrenees. Earlier in the day, there had been a time trial, won by Zoetemelk, with Hinault fifth, which was enough to give him the yellow jersey. He accepted the jersey on the podium, told the journalists his knee was okay, and that night fled back home to Brittany, only telling Guimard and the race organisers. In Hinault’s absence, the race turned TI-Raleigh’s way, which offered consolation for their failure on the pavé. ‘We won eleven stages and Zoetemelk won yellow,’ Van Vliet says. ‘Raas also won the green jersey. Still, I don’t think Peter Post was happy.’

Hinault returned in the autumn to win one of the greatest ever world road race titles, on the mountainous roads near Sallanches, and the following year did something almost unimaginably defiant, even by Hinault’s standards. He rode Paris–Roubaix. Why? ‘Because I was the world champion, and when you’re world champion you have to honour the jersey,’ he says now.

‘When you’re in such good form, you just want to take advantage of it,’ Hinault adds. ‘That day, I crashed or punctured seven times in total. But it was as though it was just too easy for me. And I had luck: each time I punctured, I had a team-mate there, ready to give me his wheel, so I never really lost much time.’

At the finish in Roubaix, Hinault arrived with the leaders, including specialists such as Moser, De Vlaeminck and Kuiper. And he won. ‘It was the last time I rode,’ Hinault says with satisfaction.¹ ‘I would have gone back and won another Roubaix if Félix Lévitan had let me ride the Tour of America. But he didn’t, and I said, “In that case, I’m not doing Roubaix any more.” If he’d said I could have gone to the Tour of America, I would have won Roubaix again to thank him.’

So he would not just have ridden Paris–Roubaix, he would have won. At the time Hinault was adamant that he would never again ride the cobbles: ‘I have no intention of riding Paris–Roubaix, or the Tour of Flanders, either this year or in the future. Roads like that have nothing to do with classic racing.’

He had made his point. And as he drains the dregs of his cappuccino, he reminds us, in his brusque but amused manner, and with a typically Hinault-esque combination of pride and contempt: ‘How many riders today who are capable of winning the Tour de France even ride Paris–Roubaix?’

Hinault shrugs and answers his own question: ‘None.’

Classement

1 Bernard Hinault, France, Renault-Gitane, 236.5km, 8 hours, 3 minutes, 22 secs

2 Hennie Kuiper, Holland, Peugeot-Esso-Michelin, same time

3 Ludo Delcroix, Belgium, IJsboerke-Gios, at 58 secs

4 Yvon Bertin, France, Renault-Gitane, at 2 minutes, 11 secs

5 Guido van Calster, Belgium, Splendor-Admiral, s.t.

6 Sean Kelly, Ireland, Splendor-Admiral, s.t.

1 Hinault is mistaken. He returned one more time, in 1982, placing 9th.

Wilfried Nelissen Lands; Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, Head Down, Sprints for the Line.

1 July 1994. Stage One: Lille to Armentières

234km. Flat

They are sprinting for the line in Armentières at 70kph: a heaving, jostling bunch, a slightly downhill finish, a right-hand bend with 400 metres to go, another right-hander with 150 to go; then the road kicks slightly up; all heads go down …

Phil Liggett, the TV commentator, is shouting, his voice shrill: ‘We’ve got Ludwig up in second place … The Novemail team still trying to bring their man through, and Abdoujaparov is here! He’s on the wheel of Nelissen … Abdoujaparov is swinging from left to right, this will be a shoulder-to-shoulder battle … As they come up to the line, Nelissen …

‘Oh, and they’ve gone! They’ve gone! One after the other!’

There’s a huge noise at the moment of impact. A collective gasp, a roar: the sound of shock.

As Liggett said, they were there, shoulder-to-shoulder, and then they were gone. They were gone.

* * *

Old golfers never retire. They just lose their balls. So the joke goes. A variation of this joke could be made about Belgian cyclists – that they never retire, that is. The sport of cycling is so big in Belgium, the scene so vast, that it seems to absorb all the ex-pros. Retired riders become team directors, race organisers, national selectors, they run amateur teams, or, in Freddy Maertens’ case, they are employed in the Flanders Cycling Museum.

Not Wilfried Nelissen, however.

Nelissen seems to have disappeared. ‘Wilfried Nelissen you want? That’s a tough one. Give me a bit of time,’ says one Belgian journalist. Another one first expresses surprise that I want to contact him, then admits it might not be easy.

Nelissen was the third man in a golden generation of sprinters, though he tended to be obscured by the shadows cast by the other two, the flamboyant Mario Cipollini and the lethal Djamolidine Abdoujaparov. Cipollini – ‘Super Mario’ as he liked to be known, ‘Il Magnifico’ as he liked even more to be known – was an Italian playboy and showman who became ever more outrageous, arriving at the start of one stage of the Tour, in 1999, dressed as Julius Caesar in a chariot pushed by his team-mates. (In case you were wondering, it was Caesar’s birthday.) On other occasions, Cipollini wore one-off, non-regulation skinsuits: tiger-print, zebra-print, a translucent muscle-suit. In retirement, he hasn’t changed much. During the 2013 Tour de France in Corsica, I drove past a fit-looking forty-six-year-old riding his bike with his top off and an impressive all-over tan. It could only be Cipollini.

Abdoujaparov was his polar opposite: a dour Uzbek. He was the Tashkent Terror, a stern-faced warrior. While Cipollini was tall, bronzed and dashing, with his chiselled jaw and mouth full of white teeth, the dark-haired, razor-cheeked Abdoujaparov was compact, powerful and dangerous; outrageously fast but a menace in a bunch sprint. There was nothing malicious about Abdou. It was just that with elbows out and head down there was no telling where he would go; he weaved left, right, seemingly out of control.

But the main victim of Abdou’s erratic sprinting was Abdou himself. He was involved in one of the most infamous crashes in Tour history, on the Champs-Élysées in 1991. Head down, he was heading for the win when he veered dramatically, and wholly unnecessarily, to the right, colliding with one of the Coca-Cola advertising bollards, which jutted out from the barriers. It was as if his bike was swiped from under him. It was stopped dead by the obstacle while the sprinter was catapulted from his bike and tossed to the road like a rag doll.

Motionless, he lay in a crumpled heap, where he was hit square-on by another rider. Robert Millar, who was in the bunch as they streamed across the line, said later that it looked as though Abdou had fallen out of a plane. It was the final stage. He was in the green jersey. He had to finish. Somehow he was helped across the line and then loaded into an ambulance, an oxygen mask strapped to his face.

Abdou had a quiet year in 1992. But in 1993 he was back, and at the top of his game. So was Cipollini. And so was Nelissen, who had more in common with Abdoujaparov than Cipollini in the looks department. Dark-haired, with thick eyebrows over pale grey-blue eyes, his mouth struggling to contain tombstone-like teeth, Nelissen resembled a boxer who had lost a few fights. He looked like a typical Belgian hardman. He came from Tongeren, the oldest town in Belgium and, more significantly as far as cycling is concerned, located in the south-eastern corner of Flanders. Any athletic child in Flanders has little chance of not growing up to be a cyclist.

Nelissen turned professional in 1991, aged nineteen, with the Weinmann team, switching to Peter Post’s Panasonic (which became Novemail) in 1992. Known as Jerommeke, Nelissen came to prominence during his first year under Post: a win at Paris–Bourges, two stages at the Tour of Switzerland, two at the Dauphiné Libéré. In 1993 he won the early-season semi-classic, Het Volk, to ensure his celebrity status in his native land, especially in Flanders.

Nelissen’s nickname, Jerommeke, meant nothing to anybody outside Belgium. ‘Jerommeke is a cartoon character, with unlimited strength and speed,’ explains Jan-Pieter de Vlieger, a journalist with Belgium’s top daily, Het Nieuwsblad. ‘He featured in the Suske and Wiske series, Belgium’s most popular comic books, by Willy Vandersteen, the acclaimed cartoonist.’ Sometimes you see the Jerommeke nickname suffixed with ‘Woefie’ – the sound a dog makes? De Vlieger isn’t sure. He sends a picture of Jerommeke: like a Belgian Desperate Dan, without the cowboy outfit. Beyond Flanders, Nelissen acquired another name: the Bulldog. To his team-mates, meanwhile, he was Willie.

Nelissen was the fastest of the lot, faster even than Cipollini and Abdou, according to Marc Sergeant, his lead-out man in 1994. Sergeant was a team-mate to lots of good sprinters, and these days the Lotto team he directs includes André Greipel, one of the best sprinters of the current generation. Yet he says: ‘Honestly, Willie was maybe the fastest guy I ever worked with. He was a real sprinter.

‘Let me give you an example. Sometimes he would say, “I’m dead, I’m not good today.” We’d say, “Come on Willie, you have to do it – come on.” And when he saw the sign for three or four kilometres to go, at that point he turned into a beast. I don’t mean in a bad way. It was an instinct he had. He wasn’t arrogant or aggressive, but he could say: “I’m going to win here; nobody else,” and he could beat Cipollini, Abdoujaparov – anybody. And he was a friendly guy, with no enemies. Everybody respected him.’

In his pomp, Nelissen explained this transformation: ‘A sprinter has to be like that. The trick is to get me mad.’ He compared it to road rage: ‘There was a guy once who didn’t give way and he started beeping his horn at me. When something like that happens, I’m ready to jump out of the car. People have to hold me down or I would explode. Well, that’s the feeling I get when I start a sprint. That’s how I get going, get the adrenaline flowing, like fireworks going off. In the sprint, I would kill or eat somebody, but after the line the calmness returns.’

The 1993 Tour was set for a battle royal between the three supreme sprinters of this golden generation. The opening stages confirmed it. Cipollini won stage one, Nelissen won stage two, Abdoujaparov won stage three. But it was Nelissen who wore the yellow jersey for two days after his stage win, then reclaimed it for one more day after stage five. Cipollini fled when the race reached the mountains to spend the rest of July on the beach – as he always did. (The Giro represented the main dish to Cipollini; the Tour was dessert. But then he wasn’t a dessert man – he never finished the Tour.) That year, there were no more bunch sprints until two days from Paris, where Abdoujaparov won the classic sprinters’ finish into Bordeaux and then laid to rest the ghost of 1991 by winning on the Champs-Élysées.

It was all set for 1994, though Cipollini didn’t make it to Lille for the Grand Départ; he was recovering from a horrific crash at the Vuelta a España, when he was taken across the road and into the barriers by a team-mate, landing heavily on his head (he wasn’t wearing a helmet). There were fears his career could be over. It wasn’t. Like Abdoujaparov, and all the rest, he would be back.

This is where sprinters are different to retired golfers. They don’t lose their balls.

* * *

Not a lot was happening on stage one of the 1994 Tour. The riders rolled out of Lille at 10.45am; it was a warm and sunny day, in the high 20s. Chris Boardman was in the yellow jersey, having won the prologue. For Miguel Indurain, going for his fourth overall win in a row, a flat stage in northern France posed only a little more danger than a rest day. Boardman’s Gan team, which included Greg LeMond in his final Tour, took control in the later stages, after a three-man break had finally escaped with 67km to go, building a lead of almost two minutes. Until then, the bunch was fanned across the road, only coming to life for two bonus sprints, both won by Abdoujaparov.

The Gan team reeled in the break, then Nelissen’s Novemail took over. Typically for a Peter Post-run team, they had strong rouleurs like Marc Sergeant, Gerrit de Vries and Guy Nulens. Untypically, they also had French riders, mainly stage race specialists and climbers – Charly Mottet, coming towards the end of his career, Bruno Cornillet, Ronan Pensec and Philippe Louviot – owing to the fact that the sponsor was French.

With 50km to go, Sergeant, who would be the ‘last man’ in the sprint train at the end, went back to the team car to collect a helmet for Nelissen. ‘I remembered later that evening that I had got him his helmet,’ says Sergeant. ‘Willie was used to wearing a helmet because in Belgium it was an obligation. Not in France, but in Belgium and the Netherlands.’

The Novemail team took full responsibility as they approached Armentières, their royal blue jerseys forming the arrowhead as they entered the town to begin a 5km loop. At the back of the lead-out train sat Nelissen in his black, yellow and red Belgian champion’s jersey. The peloton was stretched in a long line behind. They began the loop: ‘That’s where it will get dangerous,’ said the TV commentator Paul Sherwen. ‘Lots of chicanes and road furniture. It’s going to be very dangerous out there, that’s one thing for sure.’

There were four team-mates ahead of Nelissen. But were they going too early? Sherwen thought so. ‘Too much, too soon for Novemail,’ he said as Mottet completed his turn, swung over, and Nelissen’s team was suddenly displaced by the pale pink jerseys of the German Telekom team, working for Olaf Ludwig. By now, Nelissen had only one team-mate left. Sergeant.

Sergeant stuck to the task. He didn’t drift back too far, to be overwhelmed by the peloton. He stayed near the front, telling Nelissen not to move; to remain glued to his back wheel. ‘I was his guy,’ says Sergeant. ‘He trusted me; he followed me everywhere.’ Nelissen called Sergeant his ‘guardian angel’.

Under the flamme rouge to signify one kilometre to go and there are now three Telekom riders on the front. Sergeant is fourth, Nelissen fifth. The road is narrow and twisting and the peloton, still a long, thin line, is travelling at 60kph. If you aren’t in the top twenty now, forget it. Abdoujaparov is there, so is Laurent Jalabert, fresh from his seven stage wins at the Vuelta.

At 550 metres to go, Sergeant spots a gap and makes his move. He takes Nelissen up the inside as they come round a sweeping right-hand bend with 400 to go. Abdoujaparov is on Nelissen’s wheel. Now Sergeant hits the front. Nelissen launches himself, sprinting up the inside. Abdou goes at the same time, drawing level. With 150 metres to go, they enter a right-hand bend. Jalabert is on Nelissen’s wheel, waiting for a gap.

Nelissen is sprinting, head down. He drifts a little to his right, towards the barriers, and then he disappears. One second he’s there, then he’s not. The sound is an explosion; and it looks as if a bomb has gone off.

Sergeant, having sat up to drift back through the peloton, sees nothing. It is his ears that tell him what happens. ‘As Willie passed me, my work was done. I was à bloc [exhausted]. But a few seconds later there was a huge noise – it sounded like two cars had hit each other. An extraordinary noise. In the next instant, there were people and bikes everywhere. I went through it, I don’t know how. I didn’t brake. I crossed the line, then looked back.’

In the confusion, it was thought that Nelissen had repeated Abdoujaparov’s error and clipped one of the barriers. This is what the TV commentators, as shocked as anyone, tell us. But it is not what happened; a slow-motion replay makes it clear.

It shows that, as the heaving bunch raced towards the finish, there was a man standing in the road. Wearing a pale blue shirt and dark trousers, he is a gendarme. His hands are in front of his face, as though he is taking a photograph. He is taking a photograph. He doesn’t move; doesn’t seem aware that the riders are so close. Nelissen slams into him, throwing him into the air. Simultaneously, another gendarme, 10 metres further up the road, takes swift evasive action, leaping on to the barrier. As the riders continue to stream past, the gendarme who was hit somehow clambers back to his feet and gropes for the barriers.

The photographers, camped beyond the finishing line, scurry forward to the stricken figures of Nelissen and Jalabert. The right side of Nelissen’s face is swollen and bleeding; his eyes are open and staring and his chest heaves up and down. He looks in shock. Jalabert’s face is bloody and he is spitting more; he has shattered collarbones and cheekbones, and four of his teeth are somewhere on the road. Fabiano Fontanelli is the third rider seriously injured; he too is out of the Tour.

The helmet Sergeant had collected for his leader might have saved his life, but now it created a problem. ‘Nobody could understand the system for releasing Willie’s helmet,’ Sergeant says. ‘He was breathing heavily, his eyes going left, right – it was pretty scary. I was able to help. I released the helmet.’

Not only had Sergeant collected the helmet, he had also come to his leader’s rescue. A guardian angel, indeed.

* * *

Every time you watch it, you wince. It is even more sickening than Abdoujaparov’s crash in Paris, than Cipollini’s at the Vuelta, because of the collision with the stationary policeman, who is upended like a skittle. You watch it and think: how did he survive?

‘Immediately after, for ten, fifteen minutes, there was panic,’ Sergeant says of the aftermath. ‘Willie was conscious but couldn’t remember anything from the whole race, the whole day. We all went to see him later, but he couldn’t remember anything. It was a disaster for our team: we were really focused on Willie for stages and the yellow jersey. But in the evening I thought about the fact I had gone back to get him his helmet. I think that was really important.’

In hospital in Lille, Nelissen woke at one in the morning, still in the emergency department. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked his wife, Anja. Then: ‘Did I win?’

There was a body in the bed next to him: Jalabert. Later he was shown the TV footage of the crash, and asked: ‘Is that me?’ He then asked the doctor how he was still alive. ‘Typical reflexes of a sprinter,’ the doctor said. ‘As soon as he feels something, he tenses all his muscles.’ Apart from his facial injuries, Nelissen suffered three displaced discs in his back. He was lucky.

The inquest began. ‘The policeman had his hand over his eyes, possibly taking a picture,’ said Jean-Marie Leblanc, the Tour de France director, the next day. ‘Nelissen was not looking, but he apparently did not make a mistake. It was the policeman’s behaviour which caused the crash.’

The policeman, twenty-six-year-old Christophe Gendron, suffered a double leg fracture. He was arguably even luckier than Nelissen. He was taken to the same hospital. He was not allowed to speak to the media, so he couldn’t deny reports that he had been taking a photograph on behalf of a little girl in the crowd. It was said that she had asked him, and he had taken her camera across the barrier.

A few months later, the recuperating Nelissen gave an interview to the Belgian journalist Noël Truyers. He was having some problems with his fingers. He had tried to assemble a wardrobe but couldn’t do it, and in the end smashed it with a hammer. ‘Everything about the crash I only know through what other people told me and from what I saw on the telly,’ Nelissen said. ‘The mechanic has thrown away my bike. The forks were broken, the frame was in two pieces. The rest is somewhere in my house: shoes that I cannot wear any more; shirt and shorts that seem to have come out of the shredder; my helmet broken into four pieces …

‘Damn, I regret this fall,’ Nelissen said, ‘because I’m sure I would have won the stage.’

It was almost overlooked, but Abdoujaparov, for once, was blameless: he sailed past the wreckage to win the stage. That was what seemed to irritate Nelissen most. ‘Everybody says that I couldn’t get past Abdou. Come on, guys, Abdou was dying, and I was just getting the 53x11 [gear] up to speed. It was the first time I used this particular gear. I had tested it a few times before, and now I wanted to score big time. You would have seen quite something …

‘They also say that if I hadn’t crashed into that policeman, I would have crashed into the barrier anyway. Everybody who says so doesn’t understand a sprinter. We have an instinct. I can feel obstacles, I can smell a barrier. We just don’t take policemen who take pictures into account.’

Even if Nelissen couldn’t remember what had happened, his body offered a daily reminder. He called them ‘souvenirs’: the scars on his knee, on his fingers and above his right eye. But that winter he was already thinking about his comeback. He attended races, where he was a star attraction. At a criterium in the Netherlands a young fan approached, open-mouthed. ‘Nelissen, is it really you?’ In France a policeman asked if he would pose with him for a photograph. ‘Too bad I don’t speak French,’ said Nelissen. ‘I would have asked him if he could make some speeding tickets go away.’ He posed for the photograph anyway.

Nelissen had no qualms about returning to the sport, he told Truyers. ‘There are always risks, but I’m not scared. I need risks, because of the thrill. They excite me, ignite the fire. I love to be challenged. I once bought a horse, just because it threw everybody out of the saddle. I’m a daredevil, but I’m not reckless.

‘I’ll never let go of the handlebars during a sprint. I never let somebody box me in. If someone pushes me, I’ll return the favour.’ And yet he admitted that one aspect of Armentières would influence him. ‘From now on, I will look out carefully to see if there’s danger on the horizon, like the Indians do, but then I will immediately look down.

‘I only fear one thing actually,’ Nelissen continued. ‘When I see the images of Armentières, I realise that I had a lot of luck. I fear that my chances to come away like that again in a similar incident are very small.’

* * *

It was as though Armentières had never happened. The following season, Nelissen won two stages at Paris–Nice, one at the Four Days of Dunkirk, one at Midi Libre. He replaced his shredded Belgian champion’s jersey: he won the national title again. The next year, he carried on: a stage at Paris–Nice, three at Étoile de Bessèges.

Then came Ghent–Wevelgem in March 1996 and the realisation of his one fear. It wasn’t a sprint; mid-race, Nelissen collided at high speed with a concrete bollard by the side of the road. He was aware of everything this time: lying on the road screaming in agony, his right kneecap crushed, cruciate ligaments ripped apart, femur and tibia broken, pelvis cracked. He lost two litres of blood and underwent emergency surgery at Ghent University Hospital.

‘As far as I’m concerned, he should never get back on a bike again,’ said Anja. ‘If he told me that he was going to stop cycling, I’d be happy. I admit there are crashes in this sport, but why is he so often among the victims? And why is it so serious each time?’

Nelissen returned again with a lower division team. But the after-effects of the crash were profound. The knee gave him constant pain; he could barely ride 40km. He had three more rounds of surgery, then admitted defeat. Nelissen retired in 1998, aged twenty-eight.

* * *

These days, Nelissen lives in Kerniel, in east Belgium. He and Anja split up but he has a new partner, Viviane. And he runs a courier company, Nama Transport.

The difficulty in contacting Nelissen owes nothing to his reluctance to speak. He is no recluse. He is simply – unusually for a Belgian ex-professional – no longer involved in the sport of cycling. He was for a while; he ran a youth team for six years. But no other door opened, partly, he thinks, because he only really worked with two team directors, Peter Post, who retired, and Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, with whom, he says, ‘I was constantly fighting.’ He still follows the sport ‘very closely, but if you look around my living room, you won’t find any cycling memorabilia, apart from the trophy for my second victory in de Omloop [Het Volk]. Even my Belgian jerseys I gave away.’

He is still regularly asked about Armentières. It is what he is remembered for. Which is ironic, because he still remembers nothing. ‘It has never come back. What I do remember now are the kilometres leading up to the finish. A lot of twisting and turning. Very fast. But the fall … nothing.

‘My first memory is waking up in the hospital. I had no idea what had happened. I knew – because I was hospitalised – that something had happened to me. But I couldn’t figure out what it was exactly. I had no broken bones or anything like that. How? Why? I had no idea. In the early morning, people started coming in, but I didn’t really speak French back then. So it was still a bit unclear. There was a television in the hospital that you had to keep going by putting coins in it. Believe it or not, that started showing the images of the race, and just when the sprint was about to happen I ran out of money! So even then I didn’t see the crash.

‘I didn’t see Jalabert in the hospital. I saw a man on a stretcher, but had no idea it was Jalabert. I just saw a lot of blood.’

Nelissen didn’t see the policeman, either. Nor did he hear from him. In his interview with Truyers in the winter of 1994, Nelissen said: ‘People say he was given a camera by a girl behind the barrier and he took the picture to do her a favour.’ Even if that were true – and it was never proven – Nelissen remarked that it was ‘very sweet of him, but not allowed. He was there to secure our safety, which didn’t happen.

‘It’s unfortunate, but he didn’t do it deliberately. Therefore I didn’t want to press charges, even though there was a lot of pressure from the team. That would just have caused a lot of misery and pain. For him, it would have been terrible; he would have lost his job, his house. That, I would have never wanted. I don’t want him to pay for the rest of his life.’

Gendron, the gendarme, worked for the French army unit CRS-3 in Quincy-sous-Sénart, though Nelissen understood that he moved – or was moved, perhaps – to the south of France with his wife and young child after the incident. The crash in Armentières was the subject of a subsequent police investigation, but Gendron was cleared of any wrongdoing.

At the time, would Nelissen have wanted to see him? ‘Huh,’ he says. ‘An apology would have been nice … I did hear stories later on that he lost his house … But what do you make of stories like that?’

Peter Post estimated that the cost to Nelissen in lost earnings was around £2 million. And although, as Nelissen told Truyers, the rider did not want to pursue Gendron through the courts, Post felt differently. ‘Peter Post didn’t want to leave it,’ Nelissen says now. ‘But what happened in court exactly, I don’t know. I personally got 65,000 Belgian Francs [about 1,500 Euros]. That’s what the policeman had to pay me. But what he had to pay to Peter Post, to the team, I don’t know. There was a legal case; I had to deposit my [medical] expenses, my bills. But I never appeared in court. I was just given this compensation.’

Nelissen recalls that he was back on his bike just two weeks after the crash. Really, he says, his injuries were not that bad. It was a miracle. It could also be partly why he harbours no ill feeling towards the policeman. On the contrary, he is remarkably generous. ‘If you hear what happened, that he took a picture for a little child,’ he says now, ‘well, everybody makes mistakes in life. He has been punished very hard for it. But I don’t really know what happened to him; I heard so many stories, it’s impossible for me to figure out what is true and what is not.’

The legacy of the crash for Nelissen is a scar above his eye and problems with his back: ‘I had three hernias that go back to the crash. My spine was damaged, but the helmet took the blow, that’s for sure. You need some luck in life.’ But he is known for his bad luck. ‘Yeah, but I was still lucky in a way. It could have been worse. That’s how I see it. I can be grateful for still being here. After my last accident [at Ghent–Wevelgem], I’m lucky to still have a right leg.

‘People have often told me I was born unlucky, but that’s not how I see it. The young rider in the Tour [Fabio Casartelli, who died in a crash in 1995], then [Andrei] Kivilev [who died in a crash in 2003], these riders didn’t have my luck. I have to see the positive.’

He still follows the sport, he says. But he doesn’t ride a bike. ‘Let me put it this way: if I do ride on two wheels, it’s on a motorbike. Nothing else. I drive a Harley-Davidson now, which I bought last year. I had one before, but now I changed it for a heavier model. A bit easier, more comfortable. Bike riding, no. No time and no motivation.’

And no fear of speed? ‘No, not at all. But I know the dangers of riding on two wheels. I take everything into account: rain, road surface, if there are small stones … I try to anticipate, because that’s when it’s dangerous. If you’ve ridden on two wheels so many times in the past, and you’ve fallen so many times, then you know what can happen.’

Nelissen appears content. The only experience that can induce anxiety is the place itself: Armentières. ‘I still get goosebumps when I pass through that neighbourhood. Which happens quite often, riding home from Calais. Same for Lovendegem [where he crashed at Ghent–Wevelgem]; you realise, this is where I fell. Lovendegem is worse, because that was fin de carrière. When I enter that town now, it’s strange. I deliver there, so I am there often. It’s not fear, just a strange feeling. This is where it all turned into shit.’

Armentières doesn’t quite hold the same memories. As Nelissen puts it: ‘There is nothing for me to forget, because I don’t remember anything.’

Classement

1 Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, Uzbekistan, Polti, 5 hours, 46 minutes, 16 secs

2 Olaf Ludwig, Germany, Panasonic, same time

3 Johan Museeuw, Belgium, Mapei, s.t.

4 Silvio Martinello, Italy, Mercatone Uno, s.t.

5 Andrei Tchmil, Russia, Lotto, s.t.

6 Ján Svorada, Czech, Lampre, s.t.

Joël Pelier

7 July 1989. Stage Six: Rennes to Futuroscope.

259km. Flat.

On the morning of the first road stage of the 1989 Tour de France, Joël Pelier told his team director, Javier Mínguez: ‘I would like to attack today.’

‘Joël, you know why you’re paid,’ Mínguez replied. ‘To protect Cubino.’

‘I was an équipier,’ Pelier explains, ‘so I worked for my team leader.’ Laudelino Cubino was a typical Spanish climber. ‘Forty kilogrammes soaking wet and he couldn’t ride at 60kph on the flat. I was his guardian angel.

‘When you’re an équipier,’ Pelier continues, ‘you don’t have any possibilities for yourself.’ But five days later, during stage six, Mínguez had a change of heart. ‘I don’t know why,’ Pelier says, ‘but he gave me carte blanche. During the stage, I went back to the car to get a rain jacket and bidons. There were about 180km left, and he asked me why I didn’t attack. It was like he was challenging me. He told me he didn’t think I had the balls to attack because there were too many kilometres left. He was laughing, but it was like a bet, or a challenge.’

It was the longest stage of the 1989 Tour: a grey, dreary slog south from Rennes, the capital of Brittany, down to Futuroscope, the futuristic but still unfinished theme park on the outskirts of Poitiers in western France. It was overcast and the stage, a bit like the theme park, promised little in the way of excitement. An unseasonably chilly wind blew directly into the faces of the riders, and they huddled together for shelter. The conditions did not suit a breakaway, the headwind favouring a large pack of riders over any small group. It was a day when there was strength in numbers.

After 31km, Søren Lilholt won an intermediate sprint. Sean Kelly won the second at 58km. John Talen took a third after 75km. Still the peloton was all together. In the lull that followed the third sprint, Pelier dropped back to the team car for his rain jacket and some bottles. And Mínguez joked, ‘Why don’t you attack?’

Pelier rode back up to the peloton, gave the bottles to his team-mates, the rain cape to Cubino, and made his way to the front. Then he proved to Mínguez that he did have balls. He attacked. ‘I thought there were others following me, but the peloton seemed surprised. So I used the surprise to go on my own. And I built a minute’s lead really quickly. But there were 180km left. On your own, that’s suicidal. You know that, because it’s such a long way, a breakaway is going to be destined for failure.’

Only one rider had ever stayed out in front on his own for longer in a Tour stage. Albert Bourlon, in 1947, was away for the best part of 253km after attacking near the start of the fourteenth stage in Carcassonne. Nobody else had gone close.

For Pelier, there were two choices. To sit up and go back to the peloton, tail between his legs, and face some gentle mocking from Mínguez, who would be unlikely to give him carte blanche to leave Cubino’s side again. Or carry on.

He carried on, bending his back and elbows to get low over his handlebars and cut into the wind.

There was something Pelier did not realise as he began his lonely effort. Waiting at the finish in Futuroscope were his parents. That was noteworthy because Pelier’s brother was severely handicapped and required twenty-four-hour care. Consequently, although his father had been able to attend a handful of events in his four and a half years as a professional, his mother had never seen him race. They hadn’t planned to travel the 700km from their home in eastern France. But Joël’s brother was in a residential centre for a few days. On the spur of the moment, they decided to drive the six hours from one side of the country to the other, to see their twenty-seven-year-old son in the Tour de France. They didn’t say anything. They wanted to surprise him.

* * *

‘I carried on and my lead kept increasing.’ When it went past nine and a half minutes, Pelier was yellow jersey on the road. But it kept growing, to ten, fifteen, eighteen minutes … ’It was twenty-five minutes at one point,’ Pelier says. ‘But even then, your mood is changing all the time. You believe, you don’t believe, you believe, you don’t believe. I tried to concentrate on managing my effort, and I did that quite well. I wasn’t a young rider; I was experienced.’

Pelier was a typical équipier, or domestique. A team man who, if he ever had individual goals, had learned that if he wanted a professional career he had to forget them. His career had been shaped by such hard lessons. In his first year, 1985, he was riding the Tour de France; they were in the Alps, on the 269km stretch between Morzine and Lans-en-Vercors, and he felt strong. So, in a moment of impulse, he attacked. ‘There were eight cols, and I attacked on the second one. What I didn’t know was that the leaders had decided to neutralise the race until the seventh climb.’

Pelier jumped away when he saw the Colombian, Luis Herrera, sprint for points for the King of the Mountains competition. He didn’t realise Herrera was not attacking: that he only wanted the points on offer at the top of the climb. Herrera sat up, but Pelier carried on. And Bernard Hinault, in the yellow jersey, set off after him. ‘Hinault caught me on the descent, and grabbed my jersey. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Don’t touch me!” He was angry and he told me, “You will never win a race!”

‘We had an argument, but then I understood. He was the patron, but afterwards it was exaggerated into a big story by the journalists, who saw Hinault go away on the descent to catch the little idiot who attacked.’

Three years later, as Pelier rode alone towards Futuroscope, Hinault set off in pursuit of him once again. When he caught him, he shouted – again. But Hinault was in a car this time, working for the Tour organisation in retirement, and his yells were of encouragement. He and Pelier had become friends at the 1986 world championships in Colorado, which Pelier rode for the French team, in support of Hinault. Now, as Pelier battled into the wind, Hinault repeatedly pulled alongside, winding down the window to speak to him. ‘He really supported me,’ Pelier says, ‘keeping me up to date with the time gaps, giving me constant encouragement. I think he was happy to see me have a go.’

Hinault knew this was a rare, perhaps unique, opportunity for a rider who had endured mainly misfortune in his career. A year after their run-in at the Tour, Pelier made the headlines again, and once more for the wrong reasons. At the finish of stage seventeen of the 1986 Tour, at the summit of the Col de Granon, he collapsed. It had been a particularly tough and high climb; indeed, the Granon is one of the highest roads in Europe, ascending to 2,413 metres, and steep too. But Pelier didn’t just collapse, he lost consciousness. An oxygen mask was strapped to his face as he was loaded into a helicopter and taken to hospital. Then he slipped into a seven-hour coma. He plays this down, dismissing it as simply the consequence of a ‘massive fringale’ – hunger knock. ‘I was hypoglycaemic. I had to stay in hospital overnight. I recovered quickly but not quick enough. You can’t have a day off at the Tour …’

Pelier’s career refused to run smoothly. Unusually for a French rider, he opted to join a Spanish team, BH, for the 1989 season. ‘I wanted an atmosphere that was warm and welcoming and I found that in Spain,’ he says. ‘I was lucky when I turned professional to ride for two years for Jean de Gribaldy.’ De Gribaldy, known as ‘The Viscount’, died, aged sixty-five, in a road accident on 2 January 1987. Pelier joined Cyrille Guimard’s Système U team the same year. ‘The Viscount is someone I think about often, even today. De Gribaldy loved cycling and loved his riders. And I needed that kind of atmosphere. With Guimard, I found a different atmosphere, one that didn’t work for me.

‘In 1988, I didn’t have a good season and it was difficult to find a team,’ Pelier says. ‘The Spanish put their trust in me and there was another Frenchman, Philippe Bouvatier, who encouraged me to join BH. The Spanish teams were full of grimpeurs [climbers], so they were always on the lookout for riders who could do everything, especially baroudeurs [fighters].’

His decision to cross the border was vindicated when, in April, Pelier crashed and fractured his sacrum, the large pelvic bone. It was another serious setback and yet it served to emphasise Mínguez’s qualities as a manager and his faith in Pelier. ‘I spent all of April, twenty-five days, lying in a plaster. The day of the accident, I thought my season was finished and I cried like a baby in the hospital in Pamplona. I was in a team that had recruited me specifically for the Tour de France. But my directeur sportif, Mínguez, he told me, as I lay in my hospital bed, to focus on getting better and that I could still be there at the Tour.’

‘If there is one rider I want to see at the Tour de France, it’s you,’ Mínguez told him. ‘For me,’ says Pelier, ‘that was huge. Your morale is really fragile when you do sport at this level.

‘You have doubts, of course. After coming out of the plaster and being able to move again, I spent the whole month of May doing rehabilitation. In June, I returned to racing. It was very, very difficult. But I knew Mínguez trusted me, and that helped a lot. It was only fifteen days before the start of the Tour that I began to get on track, to feel that I could reach my previous level.’

* * *

Still, on the road to Futuroscope, Pelier battled the wind and tried to remain focused on the task, crouched over his bike, grinding his way for kilometre after kilometre after kilometre, through largely featureless, flat countryside.

Then it began raining. The roads became greasy and wet, which helped Pelier – there was a big crash in the peloton, and they became cautious. With thirty-eight kilometres to go, Pelier led by eleven minutes. It was a big advantage – there was a full four kilometres between him and the peloton but it was tumbling from the maximum of twenty-five minutes. Pelier’s mind was a jumble of positive and negative thoughts, competing with each other: ‘I tell myself that I’m going to win, then I hear the gap is falling quickly and I think, it’s fucked, I’m going to be caught.’

As the gap began to fall, the sprinters’ teams could smell blood. Greg LeMond was in the yellow jersey and his team, ADR, had been first to take up the chase, reckoning that even a journeyman like Pelier shouldn’t be allowed so much time. Panasonic, the Dutch team, whose sprinter was Jean-Paul van Poppel, then got involved. ‘When the peloton started chasing I was consistently losing time, my lead was really falling,’ Pelier says. ‘But I had been trying to manage my effort. And when they started chasing, I accelerated. I knew I had to spare myself as much as possible, especially in that wind. I was economical with my effort all the time.

‘But the advantage you have, it’s the peloton who decide it. At 100km from the finish, it was feasible for them to catch me. A rider on his own can lose ten minutes in ten kilometres.’

The wind picked up. Pelier’s face was a picture of agony. ‘If Pelier does hit the wall, they’ll wipe him up very quickly indeed,’ said the TV commentator. He turned and hit crosswinds: treacherous in the peloton, but offering some relief to the lone rider. Then it was back into the teeth of the headwind, as torrential rain began to fall, spattering the lens of the TV camera. Through this distorted picture, the viewer could make out Pelier’s grim expression, which spoke of the torture of labouring for four and a half hours into the wind. ‘Pelier looks to be dying ten deaths,’ said the commentator.

With 10km to go, his lead had collapsed to five and a half minutes. Now there was a thunderstorm. ‘It gave me an advantage,’ Pelier says. ‘For one rider, it’s easier in those conditions; in the peloton it’s messy and becomes disorganised. It helped me. But at ten kilometres to go, I was still very worried. I knew they could still catch me.’

Inside the final three kilometres Pelier had entered the pleasure and business park that is Futuroscope. The roads were like a motor-racing circuit: wide and exposed to the full force of the wind. Pelier, as he had been for so much of his ride, was hunched over his bike, getting as low as possible, his upper body rocking as he forced a huge gear round. Earlier he had tried to keep the gears low, spinning his legs, saving his muscles. Now it was all about grunt rather than finesse. He got out of the saddle, searching for more power. Despite the greyness and rain, he kept his sunglasses on, and wore a white headband. A few bedraggled spectators stood at the side of the road, but only the hardy had bothered to come out and brave such atrocious conditions. Still Pelier could not be sure that he would hang on. ‘It was only when I was two kilometres from the finish that I knew I was going to win. I knew then that it was impossible for them to catch me.’

Inside the final kilometre, with barriers lining the road, the crowd didn’t thicken until the final 500 metres. The road rose to the finish and Pelier lifted himself once more out of the saddle. The clock ticked past six hours, 57 minutes. He had spent four and a half hours alone.

Behind Pelier as he approached the line, the official car, containing Hinault, flashed its headlights twice as though in celebration. And then, finally, Pelier sat up, at last able to straighten his back, and wearily lifted his arms. The peloton arrived a minute and a half later: they had been closing all the time.

Beyond the line, Pelier was intercepted by an army of Tour workers clad in Coca-Cola outfits, and behind them the photographers and reporters muscled in as the winner slumped over his handlebars, absolutely exhausted. ‘It was a bit suicidal,’ he managed to tell reporters, ‘because of the headwind. I think nobody behind me believed I could make it to the finish. They all thought they would see me again before the end of the stage.’

Then Pelier looked up, and stretched to see over the crowd. Word had reached him that his parents were there. But he refused to believe it until he saw them with his own eyes, and the TV cameras captured the moment when his face crumpled and tears began streaming down his cheeks. He raced towards them and as he neared his father, reached out, saying, ‘Mon père, mon père!’

It altered the narrative of the stage; surely, thought reporters, Pelier had been spurred on by the knowledge that his parents, Pierre and Janine, were at the finish. But Pelier had no idea. ‘No, absolutely not,’ he says now. ‘It was a total surprise. I didn’t know they had decided to come. To see them at the finish was a big surprise.

‘My dad had had the opportunity to see me at some races in my career, but my mum could never make it because she always cared for my brother, and stayed with him. But my brother was in a specialist centre for the holiday, and it fell during the Tour de France. My parents found themselves with a few days free and alone. It was the first time in six years my mum came to see me in a race. It was very emotional, very special.’

It was evident to all the world when he appeared on the podium and Pelier, jaw quivering and tears still streaming, accepted his prize, and his place in history, with the second longest solo breakaway in Tour history.²

* * *

‘I was married, I had four children, and I was thinking of my future.’ Pelier is talking about his retirement, just over a year after Futuroscope, when he was still only twenty-eight. ‘I had an offer to join LeMond at Z, but in 1990 I had another accident. I fractured my knee in the Tour of Spain. I had to stop for a month and during that period I decided to retire. Having two serious accidents in two years influenced my decision. The career of a sportsman hangs by a thread. A rider is like a Kleenex. Once it’s been used, you throw it away.’

He was offered a job with the Regional Council of Franche-Comté, helping professional sportspeople manage the transition to ‘civilian’ life. ‘They wanted a sportsman to run this and they gave me a budget to put in place a programme that allowed top sportspeople to retrain and find a job after their career.’

Pelier’s own transition did not run smoothly for long. His wife, whom he described as ‘an extraordinary woman’, passed away. And after three years running a programme for ex-athletes, Pelier left to set up his own business, a bike shop. It didn’t work out, and now with five children to look after he struggled with financial problems. These days, he works part-time for the municipal council in the tiny village of Chaux-la-Lotière in Franche-Comté, western France. In this role, Pelier is a handyman who might be cleaning the streets, or clearing rubbish. It is not what he dreamed of, he has said, adding: ‘If it is not rewarding, it is not dishonorable.’

But that is not all. Pelier has something else. Art. He is a sculptor, producing in his workshop magnificent wooden objects, from figurative representations of animals to swirling abstract creations. Some of the abstract objects are large but delicate looking; one could represent an athlete, perhaps a cyclist, head tilted back, arms in the air. ‘Even as a rider, I was passionate about art,’ Pelier says. ‘But I really started in the last ten years and I progressed quite fast. I have a feeling for it, and I now have a job that allows me to do it.’

When the 2012 Tour visited Belfort, close to Pelier’s home, the 1989 stage winner paid a visit. He had something for Bernard Hinault: a wooden sculpture, almost like a giant hand, with five prongs, one to represent each of Hinault’s Tour wins.

As for his previous life: ‘I follow cycling from afar, and the Tour always makes me excited, but I don’t feel the need to go to races.’ The only memento in his wood-carving workshop, where he spends so much time and where he says he feels happiest, is a framed picture of his first mentor, The Viscount, Jean de Gribaldy. ‘I have my life now,’ Pelier says, ‘and I give myself one hundred per cent to that. Cycling is behind me.’

Classement

1 Joël Pelier, France, BH, 6 hours, 57 minutes, 45 secs

2 Eddy Schurer, Holland, TVM, at 1 minute, 34 secs

3 Eric Vanderaerden, Belgium, Panasonic, at 1 minute, 36 secs

4 Adrie van der Poel, Holland, Domex, same time

5 Rudy Dhaenens, Belgium, PDM, s.t.

6 Eddy Planckaert, Belgium, ADR, s.t.

2 Two years later, another Frenchman, Thierry Marie, managed an even longer solo breakaway, staying clear for 234km to win stage six in Le Havre. The record, 253km, still belongs to Albert Bourlon, who died a month short of his 97th birthday in October 2013.

L-R: Thor Hushovd, Mark Cavendish, Gerald Ciolek

24 July 2009. Stage Nineteen: Bourgoin-Jallieu to Aubenas

178km. Undulating

On 20 July, at his hotel in the Swiss Alps, on the second rest day of the 2009 Tour, Mark Cavendish was approached by a rival team manager, Bjarne Riis.

A controversial figure who had admitted to doping when he won the Tour in 1996, Riis was now running the Saxo Bank squad, and one of his riders, Andy Schleck, was still in contention to win the 2009 Tour. As a manager, Riis had earned a reputation as one of the sport’s thinkers and innovators, whose teams were tactically astute and exceptionally well organised. Partly this reputation might have been due to his demeanour: Riis, a Dane, was cold and inscrutable, his aloof manner suggesting he was in possession of a secret code.

But today, Riis had something else on his mind when he walked over to Cavendish’s table as he ate dinner.

‘Have you looked at the profile for stage nineteen, the finish in Aubenas?’ Riis asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Cavendish. ‘Kind of. Looks like a massive climb at the end.’

‘You can get over it. We trained around there. The first half – the first three or four ks – are hard, but if you can get over that, you can settle into it. The last 10km are steady.’

‘Really?’

‘You can go for that one.’

The riders were coming out of the Alps, heading west: the stage was a bridge to the final mountain of the Tour, on the penultimate day: Mont Ventoux. But the stage Riis was talking Cavendish into – stage nineteen, from Bourgoin-Jallieu, in the Rhône-Alpes, into the Ardèche valley, then on to the town of Aubenas – was anything but flat. It was mountainous; the etymological root of the town’s name, ‘Alb-’, means ‘height’. Aubenas sits on a hill overlooking the valley.

It was the kind of stage that Cavendish, the best sprinter of his or perhaps any other generation, would have studied and then probably dismissed. Cavendish and Riis had this in common, if nothing else: both were assiduous in their preparation. Every evening, while some riders were playing computer games or phoning home, Cavendish would study the official road book: the bible of the Tour, detailing every village, every hill, every bend in the road, along with brief tourist-style descriptions of the start and finish towns (‘Aubenas,’ read the entry for stage nineteen, ‘perched on a rocky spur overlooking the Ardèche Valley, with a population of 12,000, benefits from the temperament, the accent and the radiant smile of the south. In the summer, the sunlight illuminates the treasures of the town, captivating the senses of those who visit the city of the Montlaurs …’).

When Cavendish looked at the profile for the stage to Aubenas, it did not look promising. A lumpy first 50km included two category-four climbs, and four peaks in total: up, down, up, down, up, down, up. These so-called ‘transitional’ stages can be the hardest of all. There would be too many riders who would fancy their chances. And it would be their last one, with Ventoux reserved for the overall contenders, and the Champs-Élysées, on the final day, reserved for the sprinters: for Cavendish.

It was the final week; everyone was tired. Nerves were frayed, tempers were short. The day before the stage to Aubenas was a time trial around Lake Annecy, over 40.5km, which Cavendish wanted to treat as another ‘rest’ day. Only, it didn’t quite work out like that. When he heard his time, at half-distance, he realised there was a danger he could finish outside the time limit and be eliminated. He had to ride the second half almost flat out. And he had wasted some seconds – and expended needless nervous energy – when he rode past some British fans on the hill. ‘Cavendish, get up off your arse!’ yelled one. Cavendish briefly stopped pedalling, glared at the spectator, and yelled back his own insult.

It was typical Cavendish. But in the end he comfortably made the time limit in the time trial: 126th, five and a half minutes down on Alberto Contador.

He had already won four stages at the 2009 Tour, the same as in 2008, when he didn’t finish, pulling out with a week to go. Now he was going to finish, at least. But for Cavendish, ‘at least’ was never enough. Still only twenty-four, this feisty, edgy young man from the Isle of Man already had the air and attitude of someone who knew he was capable of something special. He was cocky; he carried himself with the swagger of a boxer rather than a cyclist.

He wasn’t big-headed, he said after explaining that he was the fastest sprinter in the world. It was just a fact. How could telling the truth be construed as arrogance? Never mind that he was speaking in June 2008, before he had won any stages of the Tour. He had a point, and it wasn’t long before he hammered it home. When he sprinted to those four stage wins in 2008, it was an arresting sight. He was unlike any other sprinter. He was Usain Bolt in reverse. Just as the giant Bolt broke the mould among track sprinters, so did Cavendish, a diminutive five foot nine in a field of six-plus monsters. Low-slung, weight forward, elbows bent to about seventy degrees, nose almost touching his handlebars, he resembled a cycle-borne missile. Perhaps only Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, the ‘Tashkent Terror’ of the 1990s, looked so fast. Alongside Cavendish and the equally diminutive Abdoujaparov, other sprinters were bigger, more powerful, and punched a larger hole in the air. Unlike the crash-prone Abdoujaparov, Cavendish could ride his bike in a straight line. In fact, his bike-handling skills were extraordinary, honed by riding on the steep, sloping boards of the velodrome in fast, chaotic madison races.

Cavendish was a bundle of contradictions. Hot-headed yet analytical. Supremely self-confident and yet, at times, cripplingly self-conscious. Highly sensitive – he would burst into tears and declare his love for his team-mates – and at times coarse and aggressive. Just ask those British fans in Annecy. Blessed with intelligence, but sometimes unable – to his own frustration – to express himself as he would like.

He worried about his Scouse-sounding Isle of Man accent; about how people would judge him. ‘Although I talk like an idiot, I’m not really a fool, like,’ he tells me. Then there was the question of his athletic ability: were his gifts of the body or mind? As a teenager, Cavendish famously ‘failed’ the lab test designed by the British Cycling Academy to weed out those who didn’t have the physiology to make it as a professional; he was given a reprieve, and went on to become not just a decent rider, but one of the greatest. Whatever his physical gifts, one thing was certain: his desire. Cavendish didn’t seem to want success; he needed it. And he had decided, long ago, that he would have it.

There was something else. His ability to analyse what happened in the frenetic closing kilometres and metres of a stage of the Tour de France was uncanny, even a little spooky. It was as though Cavendish had been watching the action unfold not from ground level, but from the air; as if he had access to the TV camera in the helicopter hovering overhead. Call it spatial awareness, or peripheral vision; whatever it was, Cavendish seemed able, invariably, not only to be in the right place, but to know what was happening around and behind him: where riders or teams were moving up fast, or slowing down, or switching; and adjusting his position accordingly to emerge from the mêlée and throw his arms in the air in victory. (The peloton might look organised and fluid, even serene at times. It’s not. And in the final kilometres, it’s chaos. A neo-pro, Joe Dombrowski, sums it up best: ‘People don’t realise how argy-bargy it is. When you watch it on TV, it looks like everybody just nicely rides together and occasionally there’s a crash. But it’s a constant fight for position.’)

Road racing was memorably described by the American journalist Owen Mulholland as ‘chess at 150 heartbeats a minute’. In the bunch sprints, it is chess at 200 heartbeats a minute. Coincidentally, chess is something Cavendish plays. But speed chess. ‘Ten seconds a move. You can’t think, you just have to move.’

The 2008 Tour offered a glimpse of Cavendish’s other weapon, besides his lightning speed, his bike-handling and analytical and positioning skills. His team, Columbia-High Road, formed a lead-out the likes of which the sport had seldom seen. It was a team of strong riders but built around their young sprinter. Few teams are so assured in their focus. Their confidence in him could be seen in the way they rode. The cockiness, the swagger: it seemed that his team bought into this, and fed off it, reflecting their leader’s confidence, and reinforcing it.

* * *

I meet Cavendish in the deserted coastal town of Calpe in southern Spain, in the bar of an out-of-season hotel. It’s early January. It is a pretty bleak setting. And Cavendish is cagey and monosyllabic when asked about recent controversies – there are always recent controversies with Cavendish – and immediate plans. But ask him to discuss his best ever stage win in the Tour de France and he is tranformed. He sits upright. His eyes – framed by long, cow-like eyelashes – widen and sparkle. He uses his hands to speak. And he recites what happened as though he was reading from the road book, recalling every corner, every hill, every pothole.

But first, he has to settle on which stage win is his ‘greatest’. He thinks aloud. There are some contenders. Stage eighteen in 2012, from Blagnac to Brive-la-Gaillarde, three days from Paris, is one. ‘It was a fucking hard day. Block headwind, 230k, and it wasn’t flat, it was heavy roads.’ It was doubly – or triply, or quadruply – hard because he felt he was going against the orders of his team, Team Sky, who led the race with Bradley Wiggins. The team meeting that morning had been confused: Sean Yates, the director, told them to take it easy, at which point Cavendish, who had been led to believe they would set it up for him, raised his hand: ‘What about me?’

Wiggins piped up: ‘I’m in favour of riding for Cav,’ and the plan was changed. But Cavendish did not have the support of old; he was feeding off scraps. In the end, in the final kilometres into Brive, it was Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen who helped him, but Cavendish still had an awful lot to do: there were riders up the road in a break, strong riders, and going into the final kilometre it seemed that they would hang on.

‘At 750 metres to go, I did this calculation,’ says Cavendish. ‘I used Edvald to slingshot to the break; I did it in a split second. I knew, if I go now … I timed it perfectly. I didn’t sprint; I got my speed up; into the slipstream; slingshot off. Then [Luca] Paolini was there; I slingshotted off him; then there were three more. Then I started sprinting. I was sprinting for a good while, 350 metres, but I had that much energy to spare, because, contrary to popular belief, sprinters aren’t lazy until 200 metres [to go]. The amount of muscle damage you do in a bunch sprint is … You can’t recover from that muscle damage, you know. I hadn’t done much sprinting that Tour. I had fire in my eyes. I saw it and I just went.’

He has fire in his eyes now, as he relives it. His heart might be racing, as it was when he caught and passed the Spaniard, Luis León Sánchez, in the finishing straight in Brive. He settles back in his chair. He lifts a hand to his mouth. His brow furrows: not an unfamiliar sight. It’s difficult to tell if he is still thinking or if he is allowing himself to become pissed off, again, as he reflects on his 2012 Tour with Team Sky, when he was made to feel like a bit-part player: a luxury in a team built around Wiggins.

Then he leans forward again and the furrow vanishes: ‘Nah. That wasn’t the best one. I would say Aubenas.

‘Yeah, Aubenas.’

* * *

‘I wouldn’t even have gone for it, if Bjarne hadn’t come over and said that,’ Cavendish says.

Even after his conversation with Riis, he didn’t feel confident when he went back to the road book and studied the profile for stage nineteen. Yet he also concluded that he might never have such a good chance of winning such a tough stage. He was in the midst of his greatest season. He won thirteen times before the Tour even started, including his first ‘Monument’, the Milan–San Remo classic, in late March. That, too, had included two tough climbs towards the end, the Cipressa and Poggio. Then he had won three stages of the Tour of Italy. When it came to the Tour, he won stages two, three, ten and eleven.

Stage three to La Grande-Motte had, in some ways, been the most impressive. It was a different kind of Cavendish win. In the Camargue, where the huge plains south of Arles stretch to the Mediterranean, his team had a plan. This desert-flat but marshy expanse, where white horses gallop through the long reeds, is notorious for the strong wind that blows off the sea. When it comes from the side, as it usually does, it wreaks havoc, causing the peloton to split into echelons – especially if a team is driving at the front.

Cavendish’s team had two people, sprint coach Erik Zabel and team owner Bob Stapleton, riding the course ahead of the race. From the Camargue they reported that when the road turned sharply, with 31km to go, they would suddenly be hit by a crosswind. Just before that turn, Cavendish and his team-mates massed at the front; then they rode hard, in formation, as they came out of the bend. With the wind coming from the left, they hugged the right gutter: the other riders, each one scrabbling for shelter behind the rider in front, stretched in a line behind them, and snapped. Twenty-nine riders raced clear, including six of Cavendish’s team-mates. The sprint victory in the hideous, garish Mediterranean resort was a formality.

Two weeks later, after the Pyrenees and the Alps, and stage nineteen presents Cavendish with a chance – a slim chance – of a fifth win. But he knows that the climb at the end, the 787-metre Col d’Escrinet, is a potentially insurmountable obstacle. The Cipressa and Poggio were pimples in comparison: the Escrinet was 14km long, averaging a gradient of 4.1 per cent, but, as Riis warned, much steeper at the bottom.

The stage gets off to a tough start: the 2.6km Côte de Culin after 6.5km, the first of two category-four ranked climbs. An obvious platform for an early break. Several riders attack, and a group of ten goes clear up the climb, with two more riders joining over the top. Five more try to get across, including perennial contender Cadel Evans, but when the dust settles, just 16km into the stage, the group is eleven-strong. Nine more bridge the gap over the following fifteen, rolling kilometres. The break includes some big hitters: Evans, David Millar, David Arroyo, Luis León Sánchez, Carlos Barredo. And Kim Kirchen.

Kim Kirchen’s presence is strange. Sitting in the peloton, Cavendish wonders why Kirchen, his team-mate, has joined the break. Cavendish had said in the morning, in front of everybody in the team meeting in the bus, that he fancied this stage, and thought he could win it. ‘But I need you guys,’ he told them. ‘I need you to help me just like you helped me over the Cipressa and Poggio.’

Most had written off Cavendish. In the Astana team bus, as a Eurosport on-board camera crew will reveal, that team’s directeur sportif, Johan Bruyneel, was apparently telling his riders: ‘Cavendish will be dropped on the Escrinet.’

Cavendish recalls: ‘We went over these two climbs early in the stage, cat. 4s. On the first one, the peloton split. There were Bouygues Telecom [the French team of Thomas Voeckler] on the front and it was all over the place. Little groups of three riders, all over the shop. There was another climb after that first one.’ La Côte de la forêt de Chambaran, 40km into the stage. ‘And it settled down on the descent, at least in the peloton. But the break had gone. And we had Kim Kirchen in it. I had said I wanted to go for it, but I don’t think Kim believed me. That’s why he went in the break. It meant we couldn’t chase.’

The gap, as they went over the second climb, was still only 40 seconds. The peloton had yet to decide whether to allow the break a ‘pass’ for the day. But as Cavendish says, the pressure went off on the descent; the gap went up to one minute thirty. Though the front group was big, six teams had failed to place any men in it. One of the teams that had missed out was Rabobank, who had Oscar Freire, their Spanish sprinter who was more than a sprinter. He was a better all-rounder than Cavendish; he specialised in sprints that followed tough little climbs. With the gap creeping towards three minutes, and 100km still to race, Rabobank went to the front and began chasing. This was a sign, too, that they didn’t expect Cavendish to survive that last climb.

‘When the break went and the bunch settled down, I thought we were going to be in for quite an easy day,’ Cavendish says. ‘Then we hit the crosswinds.’ Rabobank, a Dutch team, are past masters of riding in crosswinds; they anticipate them. ‘Freire fancied it,’ says Cavendish, ‘so he got his team to ride, and when they did, it was one line. Crosswinds, crosswinds. A couple of guys ended up being eliminated because of the crosswinds. It was brutal.’

For 60km, the road was undulating, twisty, through Montelier, Beaumont-lès-Valence, Beauvallon and into the Ardèche, the geographically diverse pocket in the south-east of France, famous for its forests and rivers, gorges and plateaux. The type of terrain that doesn’t lend itself to straight, flat roads: the kind of place that is beautiful to look at, punishing to ride in.

Cavendish did as little as possible as Rabobank, with help from Milram, working for their sprinter, Gerald Ciolek, led the chase. So Milram didn’t think Cavendish would survive the final climb, either.

Up front, the size of the break was proving unwieldy. It is difficult to get twenty riders to co-operate, or to continue to co-operate once the lead starts to fall; and with 65km to go, it dipped below two minutes. Then it began to break up; Millar, Popovych, Arrieta, Gutierrez and Duque go clear. They work well, building a 45-second lead; the bunch is just under two minutes behind them. But the peloton piles it on, racing towards an intermediate sprint in Saint-Julien-en-Saint-Alban with 37km remaining, at the foot of the Escrinet.

The break is swept up, but the five leaders hang on, just. Still Rabobank lead into the base of the climb. Then they are swamped by Cervélo, working for Thor Hushovd. The panic at the front is because so many are trying to be there for the steep early part of the climb: the all-round sprinters like Freire and Hushovd, who both fancy that they can hold on and profit when the inevitable happens and Cavendish is dropped; and the overall contenders, who cannot risk any surprise attacks, or being caught among the bodies further down the peloton. So Astana are near the front – Contador, Lance Armstrong; and Andy and Fränk Schleck are marking them; and Bradley Wiggins is there, guarding his fourth place overall.

The helicopter shots show the town of Aubenas – perched on a rocky outcrop, as the brochure described, surrounded by verdant slopes. The village looks cramped, old, the roofs of the buildings forming a terracotta patchwork. The cameras switch to an alternative angle on the race, at the rear of the peloton, the business end; it shows riders being spat out the back, including a few Rabobanks, their work done.

The bunch snakes up the climb. Fabian Cancellara is another big name dropped. Wiggins moves up the outside. Armstrong is lurking there, ominous. Off the back go his team-mate, Popovych, then Stuart O’Grady, then the King of the Mountains, Franco Pellizotti. Where’s Cavendish?

‘Bernie Eisel got me up to second in the bunch coming into the climb,’ says Cavendish. ‘I just sat there and counted; counted down the kilometres. It was Tony Martin at the front; he sat in front of me and rode me up. The first three and a half, four kilometres, I was riding as though that was the summit there. I remembered what Riis had told me: that if I could get past the first 4k I could hang on up the rest of the climb. And we came to this town, and I could hear on the radio there were guys getting dropped. I heard that [Heinrich] Haussler [another strong sprinter, second to Cavendish at Milan–San Remo] was dropped.

‘I just kept my rhythm. But I stayed in the top fifteen up there. I could see Rabobank go to the front, with [Denis] Menchov up there, and I remember just feeling comfortable. Then it kicked up again, the last couple of ks. And that did hurt.’

At this point, Laurent Lefèvre attacks, and he’s joined by the world champion, Alessandro Ballan. With the increase in pace behind them, Cavendish drops to fourteenth wheel, still with Martin in front, shepherding him. He has his hands on his brake hoods, perched on the nose of his saddle, and he is frowning. But additional support arrives in the shape of his Belgian team-mate, Maxime Monfort. He sits behind Martin; Cavendish sits behind both as riders pass him and he slides down the peloton. ‘I went halfway down the peloton. Luis León Sánchez attacked over the top, and he was getting behind the [TV and photographers’] motorbikes. The motorbikes that year, they were notorious for coming close to the peloton; they came really close to breaks and that.’ And riders could profit: tucking in behind them, getting shelter from the wind: even a brief moment would help.

Ballan and Lefèvre persevere – they have thirteen seconds’ advantage going over the top – but Cavendish is still there. ‘I recovered in about 300 metres of the descent, and went straight back to the front. I can descend better than the others, and the peloton was small.’

Monfort, George Hincapie and Tony Martin now mass at the front, Cavendish behind them. They reel in Sánchez, while Ballan and Lefèvre hang on. They tear down the descent. Cavendish takes one last drink before, with 2.2km remaining, and a little uphill kick, they catch the last two escapees.

‘It was wet on the descent,’ says Cavendish. ‘It had been a dry day, but it was wet – that was strange. I didn’t understand that. We could see the two guys up the road, behind the motorbikes – again. Maxime was riding. Tony was riding. And Milram were riding for Ciolek.

‘And we caught them with a couple of ks to go. George was still there for me, and he went first. Then Tony.’ Cavendish screws up his face as he recalls the effort made by Martin. ‘Tony did, uphill, about a 1,600m lead out. And it was uphill; he was slowing down, slowing down, but hanging on at the front. I knew it was a kind of uphill finish; but it still looked like a sprint. You could see the finish. It was coming. I just whacked it in my 14[-tooth sprocket: a relatively low gear for a sprint]. Because Tony was slowing, slowing, slowing. So it was your acceleration that was the most important part of the sprint.’

There was a sharp right just before the slight uphill. The burly figure of Hushovd lurked behind Cavendish. They go into a tight roundabout; Freire misjudges it and goes straight across the grass in the middle, but doesn’t fall. He bunnyhops down the other side and ends up back where he was: eighth in line. At the kite, with a kilometre to go, Martin leads, Cavendish is second, Hushovd third.

Over a bridge, high above a river, and it’s clear that Hushovd fancies it. He glances around; he knows there’s a climb coming; he can out-power Cavendish on this kind of finish. Watching Martin is painful: he swerves from one side of the road to the other, and, with 500 metres remaining, gets out of the saddle: one last effort.

Cavendish flicks his head to the left, glancing over his shoulder, as Martin fades away and Ciolek starts to sprint. Hushovd begins his effort at exactly the same moment as Cavendish. ‘I’m in the 14,’ says Cavendish, ‘sitting there, waiting for Tony to swing over; I leave it, leave it, leave it, then I go.’ He nods, like a football manager mimicking a header by one of his players.

Cavendish’s eyes blaze as he replays the sprint. ‘And because I’m in a smaller gear than the others, who are in the 11, I get that gap. It was slow. But I got the gap. Nobody could get near me.’

Now he sits back, satisfied. More than that: vindicated. In Aubenas, he crossed the line a full length clear, five fingers held up, one for each stage win. And in Paris, two days later, he would make it six.

Classement

1 Mark Cavendish, Great Britain, Team Columbia-HTC, 3 hours, 50 minutes, 35 secs

2 Thor Hushovd, Norway, Cervélo, same time

3 Gerald Ciolek, Germany, Milram, s.t.

4 Greg Van Avermaet, Belgium, Silence-Lotto, s.t.

5 Óscar Freire, Spain, Rabobank, s.t.

6 Jérôme Pineau, France, Quick-Step, s.t.

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