Jacques Anquetil of France. Anquetil won his first Tour de France that year, but he wasn’t good enough yet to take on Charly Gaul at full force in conditions that suited the Luxembourger. Gaul crushed Anquetil and everybody else in one horrible wet stage in the Chartreuse mountains to win the 1958 Tour. Then Gaul repeated his defeat of Anquetil in the 1959 Giro d’Italia.
Anquetil was leading the race by four minutes at the start of the twenty-first stage out of twenty-two, but that stage from Aosta to Courmayeur was 296 kilometres long, and included the Col de Petit St Bernard. When Gaul hit it he went into overdrive, holding close to 30 kilometres per hour for the entire length of the climb. That was Gaul’s climbing strength; he hit a high pace revving a low gear and held it there. Rivals thought they could stay with him, so they followed him, and they could stay at first. However, Gaul always rode half a kilometre per hour faster than his rivals could sustain. They hung on and hung on, in a way goaded by Gaul’s pace to do so, but while he could handle it they were slowly going deeper into the red. By the time they realised what was happening they were so deep they cracked, often losing minutes. It was an infuriating way to lose.
That’s exactly what happened to Jacques Anquetil on the Petit St Bernard in 1959. He followed Gaul, and because Anquetil could suffer like no other he held him until three kilometres from the summit, then he cracked – really cracked. By the summit Anquetil had lost seven minutes to Gaul, and he was ten behind at the finish in Courmayeur in the Val d’Aosta. Gaul had won another Grand Tour in one incredible day.
But that was the end of the Angel’s days of cycling grace. Anquetil won the 1960 Giro d’Italia, the first Frenchman to do so, and then he won the 1961 Tour de France. He won the Tour again in 1962 and 1963, then in 1964 Anquetil won the Giro again, the first part of a Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double that year. That made him the first rider in history to repeat Fausto Coppi’s 1949 and 1952 Giro/Tour doubles, and the first to win five Tours de France.
Anquetil also helped boost the international profile of the Giro d’Italia, and Eddy Merckx took the first of his five Giro victories in 1968. Then a Swede, Gosta Petterson, won in 1971. The Giro d’Italia was a truly international race now, and one that every big star wanted to win. What’s more, doing the double by winning the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same year became a mark of greatness.
Coppi did the double, as did Anquetil and Merckx, then Bernard Hinault; and in time Miguel Indurain and Marco Pantani would do it too. But road racing’s triple crown is winning the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the world road race championships all in the same year. Up until the start of 1987 only Eddy Merckx had done that; then came Ireland’s Stephen Roche.
Roche’s career by then could be summed up as periods of bike racing genius interrupted by accidents, injuries and slumps. He fought back from a serious knee problem in 1986, which saw him thinking he would have to give up cycling altogether, but then everything just clicked into place, literally.
Roche was sure he could win the 1987 Giro, but his team-mate, the 1986 winner Roberto Visentini, was in the way. Their Carrera team, which was Italian, had told Roche that Visentini would support Roche in that year’s Tour de France, but Roche knew Visentini had no intentions of even riding the race, so he had no choice but to attack. With Visentini leading, Roche attacked and took the pink jersey from him: a move that left the Irishman isolated within his team and the subject of a hate campaign by the Italian supporters, who wanted their countryman Visentini to win, and saw Roche’s attack as treason.
Roche’s only allies in the race were his Belgian domestique, Eddy Schepers, and the British climbing star Robert Millar, who rode either side of Roche for as long as possible to protect him from the fans. They were his only help in controlling the revenge attacks launched by Visentini and a number of other Italians.
Roche won in Milan, the first English speaker to win the Giro d’Italia, and Robert Millar took the climber’s jersey, as well as second place overall. The first jewel in the triple crown was in place. Then Roche went on to win the Tour de France and the world championships, making 1987 his golden year. Still, thirty years later, only Eddy Merckx and Stephen Roche have ever done that.
The 1988 Giro was every bit as dramatic as 1987, and its winner, the American Andy Hampsten, just as ground-breaking. Victory was founded with a display of courage and endurance on a day when it snowed on the Passo di Gavia, one of the legendary climbs of the Giro d’Italia. The stage is still referred to as the day grown men cried.
Hampsten was warned well before the start that terrible conditions awaited the race on the Gavia, and he and his 7-Eleven team prepared accordingly. They all packed bags with warm clothing in them to be handed to them before things got too bad on the climb. But, as he recalls, they didn’t know how bad it would get.
I began to realise what was in store when I descended the Aprica that day. It was pouring with rain and my clothes were soaked. In the valley I changed as much as I could, but I kept my neoprene gloves on, which were keeping my hands warm. There’s no point in swapping wet neoprene gloves for a dry pair. Your body has already warmed the layer of water that neoprene lets in, that’s how it works. If I’d taken them off and let my hands get cold, then I wouldn’t have been able to function at all. The climb was still a dirt road from the side we climbed in 1988, and so was the first bit of the descent. As we reached the first 16 per cent uphill section I attacked. The others knew I was going to do it, but I wanted to go early and demoralise them.
Hampsten has recounted that story so many times, but says it still gives him a little shudder when he does so.
The Dutch rider Eric Breukink was the only one not broken by Hampsten’s attack. He was distanced by the American but chased hard on the descent, catching and passing Hampsten to win the stage. But even the descent was factored in to Hampsten’s plan. ‘I took my time putting on the hat and wet-weather clothes I’d arranged to be handed to me before the top of the climb. I also worked out from the wind direction that things were going to be much worse on the descent, so I saved some energy. Breukink descended quicker than me because he had no rain jacket on, but there was no way I was taking mine off,’ Hampsten says.
He made the right choice. Being conservative not only gave Hampsten the pink jersey, but it preserved his strength to defend it, and so he became the first, and only rider so far from the USA, to win the Giro d’Italia, the number two Grand Tour behind the Tour de France.
The year of the first Giro d’Italia saw the Tour de France take a big jump of its own. The start list grew from 109 riders in 1908 to 195 in 1909. The majority were French, but the numbers of Swiss, Italian, German and Belgian entrants all increased. Under pressure from team sponsors, all of them bike manufacturers because interests from outside cycling weren’t allowed to sponsor riders, Desgrange allowed them to list their men together. They weren’t teams as such, because riders weren’t permitted to support each other or engage in any kind of teamwork we would recognise today.
There were twelve pro ‘squads’, ranging from Legnano and Alcyon, with six sponsored riders each, to Le Globe with one. There were also 154 ‘Isolés’ – independent riders from France, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, who looked after themselves, booking their own hotels, and so on, for the entire race.
The first stage
