One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Tim Hilton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ and, third, because they were used to him failing to win. Zoetemelk’s palmarès is in some ways unmatched. He started and finished no fewer than sixteen Tours and was second on six occasions. His long and admirable career was concluded when he won the world professional road race tide in 1985, at the age of thirty-eight. On the Giavera di Montello circuit he used finesse and then sheer speed to defeat Greg Lemond and Moreno Argentin.

      That may well have been Zoetemelk’s favourite victory. ‘There are those who win the Tour once and then no longer speak about it,’ says Zoetemelk. ‘I was one of them.’ The Dutchman is also one of the sizeable number of former Tour heroes who become reclusive in later life. Some of them are very odd and anti-social. We hear of them living on a farm in a remote part of their native region, or in a forest, not much liking human contact, a gun-dog their preferred companion. Others, by contrast, make their living from former sporting renown. Old Belgian champions often own bars. The more renowned a cyclist, the more likely that he will enter the public relations business. French Tour veterans contribute to the vast, and still growing, hospitality industry that accompanies cycle sport. Or they drive team cars and supporting vehicles. Retired cyclists are better at this task than rally drivers or other professional motorists.

      A select number of Tour winners become team managers. One of them is Bjarne Riis, the Dane who put an end to Miguel Indurain’s reign when he dominated him on an Alpine stage in 1996. I would rather not call him a great man of the Tour de France. The same applies to Marco Pantani. In 1998, a year in which he had already won the Giro d’Italia, Pantani flew up the roads of the Alps and the Pyrenees to become only the third man (after Fausto Coppi and Stephen Roche) to win both the Italian and French tours in the space of only a few months.

      1998 was the year of the Festina drugs scandal, when it became clear that EPO was used throughout the peloton. Whatever the illegal fuel that helped him ride, Pantani was a climber in the grand tradition. After one day in the mountains he sprinted to the heights of Les Deux Alpes nine minutes clear of his nearest rival. He was never again to ride so well.

      Like most long-time lovers of the Tour, I mull over the years in which la grande boucle was won by a specialised climber.

      Now follows a list that gives a different slant to the history of the post-war Tour. On page 66 I gave a list of the multiple winners, cyclists with three or more wins. Here are the Tour winners excluding the multiple victors.

      1947 Jean Robic, France

      1948 Gino Bartali, Italy

      1949 Fausto Coppi, Italy

      1950 Ferdi Kubler, Switzerland

      1951 Hugo Koblet, Switzerland

      1952 Fausto Coppi, Italy

      1956 Roger Walkowiak, France

      1958 Charly Gaul, Luxembourg

      1959 Federico Bahamontes, Spain

      1960 Gastone Nencini, Italy

      1965 Felice Gimondi, Italy

      1966 Lucien Aimar, France

      1967 Roger Pingeon, France

      1968 Jan Janssen, Netherlands

      1973 Luis Ocaña, Spain

      1975 Bernard Thévenet, France

      1976 Lucien van Impe, Belgium

      1977 Bernard Thévenet, France

      1980 Joop Zoetemelk, Netherlands

      1983 Laurent Fignon, France

      1984 Laurent Fignon, France

      1987 Stephen Roche, Ireland

      1988 Pedro Delgado, Spain

      1996 Bjarne Riis, Denmark

      1997 Jan Ullrich, Germany

      1998 Marco Pantani, Italy

      Let readers imagine that we are in a cafe, bar or buvette in rural France. It is the late morning of a warm day in mid-July. The television is switched on and it is following the Tour de France from, shall we say, Figeac to Superbesse, a distance of 221 kilometres. The village is quiet and so is the cafe. Fewer than a dozen customers, all male, are sitting with their morning drinks, wine mostly, maybe a Suze, in my case a Ricard, ‘un peu de soleil dans une bouteille’, as its inventor, the Marseillais genius Paul Ricard, liked to say.

      We have newspapers which give reports of yesterday’s events on the road and a page of the Tour’s General Classification, from the maillot jaune to the lanterne rouge. There are flies on the ceiling. The television grinds on. Nothing much happening in this early part of a transitional stage. Some of the men smoke Gauloises, others Caporals. I am making marks in biro against the Classement général. In an hour or so lunch will be offered, probably hors-d’oeuvre, chicken, fruit, cheese. From my place at a formica table I can see the village priest walking up and down the street. What big black boots in this summer weather. Time for another Ricard. Some children run in and out of the cafe. The television says that there has been a breakaway, not an energetic one, and after 80 kilometres of racing the peloton has come together. The TV commentator talks of the old days.

      ‘Messieurs!’ I might cry to other men in the bar. ‘I am myself a former racing cyclist, from Birmingham near Wolverhampton, of little merit, it is true, but I am a true lover of the vélo. I have with me a list of all the winners in the Tour de France in the last fifty years which excludes every rider who has won the Tour more than three times. Tell me, my friends, tell me this, were not those Tours more interesting, more émouvant, than those in which we saw the repeated triumphs of the greatest champions in the race which has occupied us for all of our lives?’

      Try this conversation in a provincial French cafe before lunch and you will still be in fierce or genial debate all afternoon, and until the dinner plates are cleared. This is the way that the Tour is – or used to be – discussed. I wish I had spent more time in such cafes. Perhaps it is not too late. A few months ago I had a café-cognac sur le zinc in a Parisian bar before the next day’s Paris – Roubaix, and the drink was with my son. So there may be a future for us all – though I can never rid myself of hankering for the old days of English poetry about club runs, which I shall now describe.

       VIII

      The first British cyclist to ride the Tour de France was Charlie Holland, a hero from Birmingham. A member of the Midland C & AC, he spent most of his life as a newsagent but had a short professional career before the war. In 1937 (the year Roger Lapébie won) he survived the Tour until its eleventh stage. He could have gone further, but was eliminated as a result of one of Henri Desgrange’s most absurd regulations. The father of the Tour had decreed that riders could not carry more than two spare tubulars. Holland suffered from punctures during the stage between Perpignan and Luchon, so was ruined.

      It had been a brave contribution to the Tour. Charlie Holland had never even seen a bigger mountain than Snaefell on the Isle of Man, so the Galibier – the fearsome, snow-capped col that rises above Briançon, the highest town in Europe – was a challenge beyond his experience or imagination. That year the riders had to struggle through thick mud from melted СКАЧАТЬ