Etape

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.