a riders’ protest at the end of one stage, that an aura was already starting to develop. The timing was right. In the same year that the great Eddy Merckx retired, a new patron was needed, and here was Hinault, waiting in the wings, poised to stride confidently to centre stage.
He didn’t have to wait long. A year after his first Tour and first win, Hinault returned and dominated. To underline his superiority, he even claimed the traditional sprinters’ finish on the Champs-Élysées. To win there, in the yellow jersey, showed more than strength and speed. It showed panache and defiance. It was a two-fingered salute. And it was completely unnecessary. Hinault entered Paris with a lead of three minutes over the second-placed Joop Zoetemelk (which in the record books is thirteen, after Zoetemelk was subsequently docked ten minutes for a doping offence). His win in Paris was Hinault’s seventh stage of the 1979 Tour. He was at the zenith of his powers.
There was, from the beginning, more to Hinault than physical ability. Sean Kelly, the Irishman who emerged in the late 1970s as one of the best sprinters and one-day riders, is not given to exaggeration or hyperbole. Ask him about Hinault, however, and his admiration, even awe, becomes apparent. ‘He was the boss,’ says Kelly. ‘The patron, as they say. In the Tour de France especially he was very much the patron. When you had two mountain stages then a flat stage, he’d go to the front and say, “OK, today we’re going to ride slowly for the first 100km. Nobody attacks.”
‘If somebody did attack they would get a fucking bollocking,’ Kelly continues. ‘I’ve seen it myself: Hinault go after somebody and say, “If you do that again, you won’t ever win another race.”’
Graham Jones, who raced with Hinault, said that, in the main, he asserted himself ‘physically on the bike rather than verbally. He would occasionally shout a bit, but usually it was because he was on a bad day, like anybody. But I remember once at the Tour de Romandie, he was getting a bit annoyed early on and he went to the front for 20km and strung it all out and then he sat up and said, “Have you had enough?” That certainly quietened everyone down for a while.
‘He was the last patron,’ Jones continues. ‘Armstrong wasn’t a patron, because he didn’t ride enough races all year round to do that. A patron is there all year round. I can remember riding Paris–Nice or the Tour of Corsica where Hinault was there, riding to win.’
He was more than a caricature of a mafia boss, but like a mafia boss Hinault kept his friends close and his enemies closer. He could be generous to team-mates, helping them to victories in ‘lesser’ races, with the deal being their full commitment to his own cause when it came to the big ‘appointments’, to use his description. Hinault was not Merckx: his appetite for victory wasn’t as voracious as the Cannibal’s. He didn’t care about small races. He cared about big races, and he certainly cared about the Tour de France. It was always his main appointment.
Badger-watching has been an enduring fascination of the last few decades, from when he bestrode his sport like a colossus, to his annual berating of the latest current generation of French riders for being lazy and overpaid (as the last French winner of the Tour, in 1985, Hinault occupies a special, not to say important, position). In his late fifties, he has aged well. He is dark, handsome, brooding; a fearsome presence, prone to displays of the anger and aggression that were the hallmarks of his career. Yet he can also appear relaxed, calm and friendly; he smiles often, laughs regularly, and most of the riders he raced with now speak warmly of him. The overwhelming impression is of a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who doesn’t merely appear to not care for the approval of others, but is genuinely indifferent to either flattery or criticism. There is an authenticity about Hinault. For someone who seemed to race so often on anger, he doesn’t appear to be haunted by demons. He is refreshingly black or white and perfectly comfortable being Bernard Hinault, the Badger – the nickname given to him when he was a young rider by a fellow Breton, and which hints at his wild nature and fighting qualities. Just as he did when he was a rider, Hinault exudes confidence; he radiates certainty.
These days, the Badger’s job, when he has not been tending to his farm in Brittany, is to look after the podium at the Tour de France, supervising the daily jersey presentations. He is needed in this role, because on three occasions in recent years the podium has been invaded by protesters, and Hinault has appeared from off-stage, like a bouncer. Each time he attacked the younger, taller intruder (Hinault is a surprisingly diminutive five foot eight), forcing them off the podium, then glowering and snarling at the stricken figure, daring them to return. As if they would.
He used to react in the same way if somebody attacked him on a bike. One of his previous directors, Paul Köchli, has attempted to analyse the trait that made Hinault such a formidable competitor: ‘What made Hinault so successful was that he would act very emotionally in a race when he is challenged.’ When confronted by a podium invader, the same instinct surfaces. ‘The podium is Hinault’s space – he is responsible for it – and if someone is challenging him … even if the guy is two metres twenty tall, Hinault will take him on and take him down.’
It suggests some primal instinct. ‘The Badger was a boxer,’ says another of his former directors, Cyrille Guimard. ‘He needed to be permanently squared up to someone, in opposition to someone. He needed combat.’
* * *
Almost every race that he started in 1980 seemed to add another chapter to the Hinault legend. There was Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the late spring classic in the Ardennes, with its succession of short but steep climbs. This year was harder than ever, on account of the weather. It snowed almost from the start. After 70km of the 260km race, 110 of the 170 starters had abandoned. Even Hinault considered abandoning. But with 80km remaining, he did the opposite: he attacked. He could barely see through the thickening snow; he raised a hand to his face to protect his eyes, to be able to decipher the road.
‘My teeth were chattering and I had no protection against the cold, which was getting right inside me,’ he said later. ‘I decided that the only thing to do was ride as hard as I could to keep myself warm. I didn’t look at anything. I saw nothing. I thought only of myself.’
He caught the two escapees who had been freezing out front, dropping them and continuing alone. By now he was riding into a blizzard. His hands were numb, making changing gear and braking difficult. Yet he ploughed on through the snow, a fleet of vehicles gathering behind – windscreen wipers swishing – and making fresh tracks in the snow, as Hinault was doing just ahead of them. The observers in their warm vehicles must have wondered, with voyeuristic curiosity, how long he could endure; when he would bow to the inevitable. But there was no question of Hinault quitting. If anything might have persuaded him to carry on, it was the thought that people were following him, awaiting his capitulation. Similarly, he seemed to derive strength from the riders who abandoned and were back in their warm hotel on the finishing straight; as though, merely by carrying on, he was making his point.
By the time he reached Liège, Hinault was ten minutes ahead of the next rider, Hennie Kuiper. But victory came at a cost to Hinault: his frostbitten hands never fully recovered. To this day, when it is cold, he suffers discomfort in two fingers. But what made Hinault’s Liège–Bastogne–Liège even more remarkable was this salient fact: despite being from France’s coldest outpost, Brittany, he hated the cold.
It was another spring classic, held the week before Liège–Bastogne–Liège, that provided an important rehearsal for the 1980 Tour, given that the same pavé would feature in July. On 13 April, in sunny, dry conditions, Hinault was in the mix, following the likes of René Bittinger, Francesco Moser, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle and ‘Mr Paris–Roubaix’, the four-time winner, Roger De Vlaeminck. Eventually, it was Moser who escaped alone to win his third title, but Hinault came in with the first group. He was fourth.
Hinault had also ridden over the cobbles in the 1979 Tour,
