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

Author:William Fotheringham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448156368
Publisher: Random House

fn1 So named because it was based at 53 Champs-Elysées.

CHAPTER 10

NO FAVOURS

‘The Blaireau was a weird fellow: he frightened me. Sometimes he would attack and the peloton would string out into a long line. Then he would sit up and start laughing, mocking us. He had a godlike aura … [he was] a great champion but I didn’t like him.’

– Paul Kimmage, Rough Ride

The descent from the Col de l’Espigoulier towards Marseille and Toulon is a sinuous one, eleven kilometres where one 180-degree hairpin comes on top of another with barely any respite. The lead group in Paris–Nice descended at the limit of their tyres’ adhesion on 12 March 1984 as the end of the stage to La Seyne-sur-Mer approached. The descent had offered the perfect opportunity to dislodge the race leader, Scotland’s Robert Millar, before the flat run-out to the stage finish on the eastern side of Toulon, and Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche and Bernard Hinault were among those who had taken full advantage. ‘Hinault was in one of those moods, having one of his days,’ recalled Kelly. ‘There was a climb [l’Espigoulier] where he set a crazy tempo, there were ten or fifteen of us on his wheel, all just hanging on. Every now and then he’d look round and then give it full gas again.’

‘Millar wasn’t the greatest descender, so Hinault decided to give it a lash down the Espigoulier,’ recalled Stephen Roche. ‘We nearly broke our necks on that descent.’ ‘Hinault made the descent full on, right on the limit,’ continues Kelly, ‘and then on the flat section after the descent, one of the organisers’ cars said there was a problem.’ The road ahead of the race had been blocked by a group of strikers from the massive dockyard at La Ciotat, where restructuring had begun in 1982; the yard would be closed in 1987.fn1 ‘At a certain point we could see the road was blocked, it was a straight road and you could see it coming closer – six hundred metres, five hundred, four hundred …’

The entire group slammed on the brakes, apart from one man. ‘I was in front with Hinault because he’d got me to ride with him, and he started sprinting,’ says Kelly. ‘I followed him for a while, but then I backed off, and he just kept sprinting full gas into the strikers. One guy caught his bars, and down Hinault went, and started punching and kicking. He was throwing punches, one guy caught him by the hair … I said to Phil Anderson, “This is dangerous, let’s get out,” so we went round the side of them.’ The brief bust-up – to a soundtrack of shouts from the strikers – lasted less than thirty seconds, Roche believes, ‘although it seemed a lot longer’, but ‘Hinault would have broken a world record for the number of punches you can throw in that time’. He adds: ‘He went into them like a sprinter going for the line. His arms were everywhere. We thought, “Shit, he’s going to kill someone.

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