Cyclopedia (3 page)

ANQUETIL
, Jacques

Born:
Mont-St-Aignan, France, January 8, 1934

 

Died:
Rouen, November 18, 1987

 

Major wins:
Tour de France 1957, 1961–64, 16 stage wins; Giro d'Italia 1960, 1964, six stage wins; Vuelta a España 1963, one stage win; Liège–Bastogne–Liège 1966; Ghent–Wevelgem 1964; Bordeaux–Paris 1965; GP des Nations 1953–58, 1961, 1965–66; world hour record 1956

 

Nickname:
Master Jacques

 

Interests outside cycling:
cards, alcohol, cigarettes, farming, women (especially close family members)

 

Further reading:
Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape
, Paul Howard (Mainstream, 2008)

 

A single image of the Norman strawberry-grower's son is forever etched on France's national consciousness. The elbow-to-elbow battle between “Monsieur Jacques” and Raymond POULIDOR (nicknamed PouPou) on the Puy-de-Dôme mountaintop finish in the 1964 TOUR DE FRANCE remains French cycling's equivalent of the Stanley Matthews Cup Final. The RIVALRY between the pair was one of the greatest that French sports has ever seen.

Blond-haired and with chilly blue eyes, Anquetil made his name in 1956 aged only 22, by breaking the HOUR RECORD, which had been held by FAUSTO COPPI for 14 years; like the Italian, he won the Tour at his first attempt. Coppi was his early model in his approach to cycling, and like the CAMPIONISSIMO, he was a master of cycling style: always well dressed, with immaculately slicked-back hair, and with his glamorous wife, Jeanine, gracing his arm. He was respected rather than loved by French cycling fans, who found him clinical and unemotional; the less successful PouPou remains their favorite.

Anquetil was the first man to win five Tours, his best victories coming in 1963, when he took both major mountain stages, and in 1964, when his duel with Poulidor reached its climax on the extinct volcano in the Massif Central. There, knowing he had to gain time on Anquetil before the final time trial, PouPou attacked repeatedly and Monsieur Jacques hung on for grim death. Just before the finish, he cracked, but held the yellow jersey—and the psychological whiphand—by just 14 seconds.
Their rivalry was never personal, as Anquetil later said: “Of course I would like to see Poulidor win in my absence. I have beaten him so often that his victory would only add to my reputation.”

Anquetil managed the Giro–Tour DOUBLE that year, but his most audacious feat came in 1965, when he took back-to-back wins in the Dauphiné Libéré stage race and the now defunct motorpaced Bordeaux–Paris (see CLASSICS for more on this event). The Dauphiné is eight days of racing through the Alps; the 560 km “Derby” lasted 15 hours. The stage race finished at 5 PM; Bordeaux— Paris began at two o'clock the following morning. Legend has it that Anquetil spent the time between the two races playing poker, but what is certain is that he was flown from the Alps to Bordeaux in a government jet with the blessing of General de Gaulle and then braved bone-chilling rain to win in Paris, having raced 2,500 km in nine days.

Anquetil was a supreme time triallist, winning 65 solo races in his career. He could churn massive gears in immaculate style, thanks to motorpaced training, and an efficient aerodynamic position. He made a point of ignoring conventional wisdom about diet—champagne, oysters, and whisky were among his favorites—posed for cigarette ads, and was notoriously open about his use of DRUGS, which he viewed as being no more than what it took to do the job he was paid to do. He refused a drug test after his second hour record—which was not ratified—and led a riders' strike against drug tests in 1966. His domestic life was also unconventional (see SEX).

A television commentator and gentleman farmer in retirement, as well as director of the Paris–Nice stage race, he died of stomach cancer in 1987 and is remembered with an ornate gravestone in the cemetery in his home village of Quincampoix, just outside Rouen.

 

(SEE ALSO
MEMORIALS
)

ANTARCTICA
Not the most hospitable of cycling environments, but during Sir Ernest Shackleton's abortive attempt to cross the continent in 1914–15 one of the more eccentric members of his crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, got on a bike and rode on the pack ice while the expedition's ship
Endurance
was frozen in the Weddell Sea.

Team apparel, a selection of the good, the bad, and the ugly:

 

Bic:
gloriously simple, amazingly orange, to set off the brooding Hispanic looks of Luis Ocana, not to mention JACQUES ANQUETIL.

 

Brooklyn:
Yankee stars and white stripes on a deep blue backdrop, and CLASSICS specialist ROGER DE VLAEMINCK to wear it.

 

Z:
moldbreakingly bonkers comic-book “kapow splash” on a blue background. Crazy sponsor, crazy money for GREG LEMOND.

 

ONCE:
dramatic yellow with “blind man” logo (or was it a lottery winner taking a leak?); the pink design for the Tour never worked that well.

 

EMI:
one for the connoisseur, black diamond amid black and white hoops, worn by ace climber Charly Gaul, the “Angel of the Mountains.”

 

St. Raphael:
twirly lettering and the glamour of Jacques Anquetil and TOM SIMPSON.

 

La Vie Claire:
groundbreaking Mondrian-style interlocking rectangles that took team jersey design away from the “name on colored background” template when BERNARD HINAULT began wearing it in 1984.

 

Saeco:
the uniform itself was routine red, but the crazy variants created for wacky sprinter Mario Cipollini were unique, perhaps fortunately. Green with a peace symbol for Peace in Ireland, Julius Caesar's “
veni vidi vici
,” tiger stripes, “X-ray” showing internal organs, and so on. Impactful yes, tasteful no.

 

Carrera Jeans:
basic blue-shoulders-on-white design that was simplicity itself and was fine in its first incarnation worn by STEPHEN ROCHE. But then the company decided to bring in “denim” shorts complete with fake pockets and rivets.

 

Le Groupement:
a psychedelic nightmare of red, yellow, green, purple, and blue splotches worn inter alia by ROBERT MILLAR. A merciful deliverance when the pyramid sales group went bust in July 1995.

 

Great Britain, 1997:
who can forget the green snot color that replaced good old blue with red shoulders. It certainly made the point that GB had broken with the past when lottery funding started (see GREAT BRITAIN).

 

Scotland, 1998:
tartan shorts no less. Nationalists dreamed this one up, aesthetes just covered their eyes.

 

(SEE
SPONSORS
FOR A LIST OF WEIRD AND WONDERFUL CYCLING BACKERS;
TEAMS
FOR HOW THEY DEVELOPED PLUS SOME OF THE ICONIC NAMES AND THEIR COLORS)

Born:
Dallas, Texas, September, 18, 1971

 

Major wins:
Tour de France 1999–2005, 22 stage wins; world road race championship 1993; San Sebastian Classic 1995, Flèche Wallonne 1996

 

Nicknames:
Big Tex, Mellow Johnny, Le Boss

 

Further reading:
It's Not About the Bike
, Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins, Berkley Trade, 2000;
Lance Armstrong's War
, Daniel Coyle, Harper Paperbacks, 2006;
Lance: The Making of the World's Greatest Champion
, John Wilcockson, Da Capo Press, 2010;
Comeback 2.0: Up Close and Personal
, Lance Armstrong with Elisabeth Kreutz, Touchstone, 2009

 

There are two sides to the record winner of the Tour de France: a hero to cancer survivors worldwide and a highly divisive figure within his sport. Armstrong will always be defined by his comeback from severe testicular cancer, diagnosed in September 1996 when he was only 25, but he had already won a world championship (1993), a brace of one-day CLASSICS, and a stage in the 1995 TOUR DE FRANCE. With lesions in his lungs, stomach, and brain as well as one testicle, he was told he had a 40 percent chance of survival but in fact the doctors did not expect him to come through.

Vicious courses of chemotherapy followed, but there was never any doubt about whether he would return to cycling, as his first thought when he was diagnosed had been for his sport. “When they told me about the cancer I can't remember which hit me first: I might die, or I might lose my cycling career.” But while he was in remission, no team would gamble on signing him as they were worried his comeback would end in failure.

Armstrong eventually signed for the relatively small US Postal Team and remained bitterly angry with the European managers who had rejected him. By spring 1998 he was racing again, and in 1999 he won the Tour, sealing victory with a crushing mountaintop win at the Italian ski resort of Sestrière. Suddenly, he was cycling's biggest ever star: his autobiography
It's Not About the Bike
topped the bestseller lists, by 2002 his earnings were estimated at $7.5 million, and presidents Clinton and Bush jumped on the bandwagon.

To complete the dream story, Armstrong married his fiancée, Kristin Richards, and they had three children, conceived in vitro from sperm he had banked before his chemotherapy began. His cancer charity Livestrong was a rapid success, with its most successful promotion a distinctive yellow wristband launched in May 2004 and retailing at one dollar. Over 70 million have been snapped up to date, with up to 10,000 sold on a single day in the 2009 Tour de France.

Dominating the Tour in the early years of the new century, Armstrong took cycling to a new audience worldwide and particularly in the USA, popularizing the sport to the extent that a time trial up l'Alpe d'Huez in his seventh successive victorious Tour, 2005, was shown live on a big television screen in Times Square. By then, however, his private life had unraveled: he had divorced from Kristin in 2003 and would subsequently date rock singer Sheryl Crow and various Hollywood starlets before starting a second family with Anna Hansen in June 2009. His story brought the Tour onto the celebrity circuit: as well as Crow, comedian Robin Williams and actor Jake Gyllenhaal came in Armstrong's wake. Damien Hirst customized a bike for him, while George W. Bush put him on a cancer commission.

For all the celebrity sheen, Armstrong can be vindictive toward anyone who crosses him: journalists, officials, former teammates, and other cyclists, as his exchanges with Alberto Contador after the 2009 Tour showed. During his run of seven Tour wins, a team press officer kept a blacklist of media “trolls,” and he crossed swords regularly with the WADA head Dick Pound over the latter's views on doping. In the 2004 Tour the Texan waged a personal campaign against the Italian Filippo Simeoni, because he had testified against their trainer MICHELE FERRARI in a drugs trial.

Armstrong was accused of DOPING on several occasions. In his first Tour win, 1999, traces of corticosteroids were found in his urine, but a prescription indicated it came from a skin cream. In 2000, French police investigated packaging and bloodied compresses dumped by personnel from his team, but
found nothing. When samples from the 1999 Tour de France were tested retroactively for EPO during research in 2005, several allegedly showed traces of the drug, but an inquiry concluded that no action should betaken. Questions were frequently asked about his close working relationship with Ferrari. He also won a case brought by the insurance company that guaranteed his win bonuses, alleging he had used banned practices to take his Tour wins. His response was consistently the same: he was the most tested athlete in the world and had nothing to hide. In 2005 on his retirement, standing on the winner's podium on the Champs-Elysées, he bitterly attacked those who had doubted his probity and that of his colleagues.

Armstrong returned to competition in 2009 after three seasons out. It was a lively year: a team of French drug testers claimed that Armstrong had breached protocol by taking a shower before a random test; the Texan boycotted the press during the Tour of Italy after falling out with the organizers, and when the equally combative five-times Tour winner BERNARD HINAULT questioned his comeback, the Texan responded on his Twitter feed that the Badger was a “wanker.” In the background, as well, were constant doubts about the financial status of the backer Astana, a consortium of companies based in Kazakhstan. When money failed to turn up to pay the riders, Armstrong responded by riding in a jersey with none of the Kazakh sponsors' names visible on it. Shortly before the Tour, the team was within hours of being declared financially unviable.

The 2009 Tour was dominated by Armstrong's battle for leadership within Astana with Alberto Contador, the 2007 Tour winner. The Spaniard had the legs; Armstrong had the experience, the backing of team manager Johan Bruyneel, and the ability to wage psychological war. Although Contador ended up the winner, Armstrong became one of the oldest cyclists to get on the podium when he finished third. At the end of the season he and Bruyneel quit Astana to start their own team, sponsored by Radioshack.

Team Radioshack won the 2010 Tour de France team prize, although
Armstrong placed 23rd, in part due to a serious crash on stage 8. He announced that after the January 2011 Tour Down Under, he would confine his racing to the United States. In the meantime, the FDA is investigating whether Armstrong was involved in an organized doping operation as a member of the US Postal Service team between 1999 and 2004.

 

(SEE ALSO
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
,
CHARITIES
,
LONGEVITY
,
RIVALRIES
)

 

 

ART
The best-known cycling work of art is probably
La Chaine Simpson
, a poster produced by the cycling mad impressionist Henri de TOULOUSE-LAUTREC in 1896, while bikes are also featured in the work of Salvador Dali and Picasso. The Catalan impressionist painter Ramon Casas y Carbo (1866–1932) produced images similar to those of Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Repair
perfectly captures the moment when a cyclist bends down to his or her wheel to adjust a nut or a valve.
Woman on a bike
is a cartoon of a lady tricyclist;

The Tandem
shows two hirsute, muscly men—a self-portrait of Casas and his fellow artist Pere Romeu—in full flight. Dali, for his part, produced an official postcard for the 1959 Tour de France—which no one seems able to locate today—and produced several works featuring cyclists, such as
Sentimental Conversation
(1944), in which a host of deathly figures on bikes ride across the canvas past a grand piano.

There are also a host of cycle specialist artists active today. For example, in the United
States, Brooklyn-based artist Taliah Lempert has been exhibiting since 1996 and is well known for her paintings, sketches, and prints of bicycles of all kinds: racers, shopping bikes, kids' playbikes, and classic Bianchis and Masis. Some of her work uses oils on large canvases containing a single bicycle against a semi-neutral background, with the emphasis on the machine as a work of art in itself, akin to a sculpture with its graded lines. Other works feature details of cut-out lugs and individual items such as waterbottles. In a 1999 interview, Lempert said she does not work from photographs or slides, but only from original bikes, which she rides in order to get a feel for the character of the machine: worn, shiny, pristine, etched with street grime. Lempert's work includes tangled piles of bikes such as might have been found outside a velodrome in the halcyon days of the sport, and “blind drawings,” loosely drawn and impressionistic in style; she described these in an interview with thewashingmachinepost. net as an “explosion of color and lines, there's lots of movement.”

In Great Britain, Cornish artist Peg Jarvis has produced a body of work featuring track cyclists including the award-winning etching
Pursuit 3
. “I particularly love the track; it reminds me of Roman chariot racing—the excitement, the sound, the fact that you can see everyone and everything. I need to see the cyclists at work, warming up, warming down. As an artist, you need to draw something 100 times before it sinks into the memory; on the road, they go past so quickly that they are no use to me.”

Jarvis has moved from drawings to etching, in some cases manipulating photographic negatives and shining them onto light sensitive metal plates, in others simply sitting by the trackside and scratching onto huge metal plates. More recently she has used watercolors; she is particularly proud of a painting that used the photofinish image of Olympic cyclist Jason Kenny's crash in Manchester
as its starting point. The photo was blown up, manipulated, and subdivided into sections that included artifacts such as parking tickets and stamps in order to illustrate its interaction with her own life.

Jarvis cites among her influences Italian and Russian futurists, for the way they attempted to capture speed and power: the best-known images of this kind include Umberto Boccioni's
Dynamism of a Cyclist
(1913) and
Au Velodrome
by the cubist Jean Metzinger, which includes cut-outs of words from newspapers glued onto the walls of the track.

The British artist Frank Patterson (1871–1952) has a devoted following for his pen-and-ink drawings of cyclists and the British landscape that appeared in the pages of
Cycling
magazine and the CTC journal
The Gazette
from 1893. Patterson was hugely prolific, working for other magazines owned by Temple Press, which published
Cycling
; his total number of drawings was estimated at about 26,000 in his 59-year career.

Pattersons are beautifully and precisely drawn, with an element of the draftsman to them. They are bucolic, romantic, occasionally humorous, and now look distinctly old-fashioned and even mannered, with their clubmen smoking pipes and wearing plus fours, bicycles leaning against a convenient tree while they admire the view. There is a timeless and very British charm about them.

ASO
See AMOURY SPORT ORGANISATION.