Tour de France 1966: ‘No longer a jaunt in knickerbockers from Paris to Nice’

Tour de frappe

30 June 1966

While it is not essential that a foreigner must vibrate with enthusiasm when the subject of the Tour de France is now dragged interminably into every conversation, he would be ill-advised to display discernible gloom when, during these 24 days, Frenchmen come up and describe every pant and pedal of their national heroes – Anquetil, Poulidor, Darrigade. At this moment the great heart of the French nation seems to be pulsing exclusively through its cyclists. (A curious paradox is that the French are by no means a bicycling people.)

The Tour is a series of 22 pedal stages [21 stages in modern Tours], varying in distance from over 80 miles to more than 170, undertaken by 13 European teams (and Tommy Simpson of England) which began last Tuesday week (21 June) and won’t give up until 14 July. They start at Nancy and climb to Dunkirk, take seven days to go down, by way of Bordeaux and Bayonne, to the Pyrenees, rest a day, cross over to the Riviera at Sète, go on up into Italy, rest another day, cut back to St Etienne and pull up through the centre of France by Orleans and into the Parc des Princes, where on the night of 14 July they are probably the only Frenchmen in the country who go to bed.

The tour has many practical functions in French life. For one thing, it is second only to the tierce – the national Sunday horse racing gamble – as a means of taking the country’s mind off politics. On 20 June a minister was overheard telling a colleague that he could relax now until after the national holiday; nobody would be making any political demands.

Commercial saturation

The Tour is saturated in commercialisation. Nothing resembles so much a human, mobile advertising hoarding as the tight wads of cycling teams branded on chest, arms, and back, racing through towns gay with tidings of Pelforth beer, BP petrol, Peugeot and Ford cars.

Then there is a question of national sporting prestige and an alleged healthy example to youth. On 53 occasions, with breaks during the two world-war years, Europeans have taken part in this long haul which began modestly enough, but with increasingly sophisticated mechanical and training techniques developed into a monstrous test of human endurance in long distance sprint and mountain climbing. The French Alps on the 18th day is one of the vital tests.

This year the Tour is notable for two reasons: it will mark the retirement of Jacques Anquetil – and for the first time the use of drugs is an offence by virtue of a law hurriedly passed through the Assembly a couple of weeks before the race began.

Jacques Anquetil, a 34-year-old Norman, has a status in cycling equal to that of Stanley Matthews in football or Babe Ruth in baseball. Anquetil won the tour in 1957 and then four years running – 1961, 1962, 1963, and 1964.

Francoise Sagan tells a story (not to me) of running-in her new Jaguar near her Normandy estate and being overtaken by a cyclist. Presuming that something had gone wrong with her speedometer she put her foot down and accelerated to 80 mph. A short time later the cyclist drew alongside and passed her.

But on 3 May, Anquetil won the Belgian Liège-Bastogne-Liège race; was requested to submit to a medical examination and refused. He was fined 100,000 Belgian francs and disqualified. Consternation is too anaemic a word to use to describe the effect this had on the French. But the Italians were jubilant.

Premeditated massacre

But Anquetil, who was later reinstated, was not the only one to go down before what looked like a premeditated Belgian massacre. In another race the Italian Dancelli inexplicably agreed to an examination the result of which was described as “gravely positive.” The German, Altig, refused and was fined and disqualified; a number of other placed racers were “declassed” after examination.

It is unlikely that someone of the capabilities of Anquetil and with such a long innings could have kept going on dope. A judicious use of “biological aids” would probably be the limit of his use of chemicals. But there were a number of other cases which made it clear to the French government that the time had come to rush through a law with which they had been toying for a couple of years.

Some time ago along the Pyrenees stretch a dozen French cyclists collapsed, victims of “food poisoning.” The only food, apart from a light breakfast, that these cyclists could have had was if they had stopped to pick berries along the route. The French sporting press dug up some other macabre stories, the most terrible was certainly that of the Italian, Eugene Tamburlini, who confided to a French journalist that he had taken a drug that had made him temporarily blind. A short time later he committed suicide.

In prewar years sportsmen took chances with ether, strychnine, and alcohol: but nowadays refined forms of the amphetamine drugs used by the RAF to help pilots perform prodigies of endurance during the Battle of Britain are generally used.

The pressure of the vast financial interests into which cycling has become entangled has long ago transformed what was a picturesque jaunt in knickerbockers from Paris to Nice, in the early 1900s, into a grim scientifically controlled commercial operation in which the cyclist is often hardly more than a busy cylinder working away for big business. Now with the new law rigorously enforced – this year there are spot checks along the route – the character of the Tour is likely to change. Already sports writers are complaining that this year it is too “tame.”

Aimar triumphant

15 July 1966

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