Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France by Moore Richard

Author:Moore, Richard [Moore, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409028871
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

* * *

ARRIVÉE

‘We must win. And when I say “we”, I don’t mean Hinault and I don’t mean LeMond.’

Paul Köchli

‘The day comes when the two of them stand face to face over the bounty. And then it’s all about whoever can draw first.’

Eric Lahmy

CHAPTER 9

* * *

THE BULLDOG AND THE BIRD

‘Next year it’s you who will win the Tour, and I’ll be there to give you a hand.’

Bernard Hinault to Greg LeMond

Boulogne-Billancourt, Friday 4 July 1986

A RECORD 210 riders appear in Boulogne-Billancourt on the afternoon of 4 July, the seventy-third Tour de France opening with a 4.6km prologue time trial through the streets of the Paris suburb. Ten riders wear the distinctive multicolours of La Vie Claire, the world’s best team, comprising a formidable line-up of big-name stars and lesser-known domestiques.

Wearing number one as defending champion is Bernard Hinault, and his teammates’ names are listed beneath his on the official start sheet: 2. Steve Bauer (Canada); 3. Charly Bérard (France); 4. Jean-François Bernard (France); 5. Andy Hampsten (USA); 6. Philippe Leleu (France); 7. Greg LeMond (USA); 8. Niki Rüttimann (Switzerland); 9. Alain Vigneron (France); 10. Guido Winterberg (Switzerland). Of the twenty-one teams in the race, it’s the most international in the peloton: five Frenchmen; three North Americans; two Swiss; with a Swiss directeur sportif in Paul Köchli, and two French assistant directeurs sportifs: Maurice Le Guilloux and Michel Laurent.

Short prologue time trials are always tense, fraught affairs, the explosiveness of the effort serving as a metaphor for the nerves of the riders. This year there is an air of unpredictability, yet at the same time there is a sense that history beckons. Some favourites appear confident and assured; others seem edgy and uncertain. Greg LeMond falls squarely into the second category. Any symbolism attached to the fact that this year’s Tour starts on American Independence Day is lost on him.

Other symbols seem more real and more ominous: the number one on the back of his teammate, Bernard Hinault, and his yellow jersey. Both honours are bestowed on the defending champion, but the sight of Hinault preparing to start his favourite discipline, a time trial, with a single, decisive ‘1’ pinned to his yellow jersey, hardly eases LeMond’s anxiety. Neither do the headlines in the newspapers, all of them backing Hinault to win a record sixth Tour, rather than LeMond to create his own piece of history: a first win for the ‘new world’, for English-speaking cyclists.

As he has done virtually every day since the final day of the 1985 Tour, LeMond casts his mind back to the promise Hinault made the previous year. Then, as they stood together on the podium on the Champs-Elysées, having finished first and second, Hinault told LeMond a version of what he had told Jean-Paul Brouchon of Miroir du Cyclisme the previous day: ‘Next year it’s your turn.’

It seemed unambiguous and should be reassuring. Yet LeMond cannot stop the doubts entering his mind and fluttering like butter-flies into his stomach. ‘Greg was as fragile as a racehorse,’ says François Thomazeau, a journalist covering his first Tour in 1986.

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