Etape. Richard Moore
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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