with the pavé. It didn’t respect strength, form, fitness or reputation. It could be a game of chance. Hinault hated it. He called Paris–Roubaix a ‘nonsense’, and worse, ‘a race for dickheads’.
In October 1979, when the 1980 Tour route was announced, and it included two stages with pavé, five and six, Hinault was not happy. After leading the riders’ strike at Valence d’Agen in 1978, he threatened the ultimate protest: another strike.
But in the first half of the 1980 season, he was on track. He could do no wrong. A few weeks after his win at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Hinault rode and won the Giro d’Italia. So when he appeared in Frankfurt for the Tour de France, and won the prologue, it seemed the script was already written. There was little point in talking of other contenders.
* * *
Thirty-three years later, almost to the day, I am sitting with Bernard Hinault in an outdoor café in, of all places, the Chelsea Flower Show in London. As incongruous a setting as any, the equivalent might be meeting the Dalai Lama at a bare-knuckle boxing match. Refined gentlemen and women, on a break from wandering around the display gardens, drink cream teas in the café, unaware, certainly, that there is a Badger in their midst. A Badger sipping cappuccino from a paper cup.
His presence is explained by the fact that Yorkshire will host the start of the 2014 Tour de France. They have a specially commissioned Tour-themed garden, beside which Hinault obligingly poses alongside various dignatories, as well as the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme. At one point, Prudhomme spots a rucksack with the Tour de France logo, worn by an elderly man, ambling from garden to garden in the company of his wife. Prudhomme leaps after him, stops the couple, then summons Hinault. Hinault strides over, shakes hands, smiles genially – he speaks not a word of English.
‘Do you know this man?’ asks Prudhomme, as the gentleman whispers to his wife that it’s Bernard Hinault, the five-time Tour winner.
There are photos, smiles, and then the couple wander off, back into the crowd, with their fanciful story. ‘Yes, yes, I’m telling you: Bernard Hinault. At the Chelsea Flower Show!’
When we sit down, and Hinault casts his mind back to 1980 and the pavé, he seems to have modified his stance, a little. ‘I always say to young riders at the start of their pro careers: “Ride Paris–Roubaix.” Why? Because the day you have to ride the cobbles during a Tour stage, you’ll know how to ride them.’
But he always said he hated Paris–Roubaix. ‘I didn’t like the cobbles in Paris–Roubaix for the simple reason that if you fall at Roubaix, and break your collarbone, you won’t make it to the start of the Tour de France.’
Almost any rider can master the pavé, Hinault explains, but only with practice. ‘Once you do it a few times, you won’t be scared. I did Roubaix for the first time in 1976, then ’77, ’78, ’79, and in 1980 I was fourth. The previous year I’d been eleventh. I had places there already.’
* * *
Graham Jones recalls that it wasn’t just the stage to Lille from Liège that made the opening week of the 1980 Tour de France so brutal. ‘Look back at the distances,’ he says, ‘260, 280km stages, and the weather was shit the whole Tour. I think it rained fifteen, sixteen days.
‘The stage began into the wind, on fairly typical straight roads across the Wallonne,’ Jones continues. ‘It wasn’t that hilly, but I was lying second in the King of the Mountains competition and chasing points, with Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, on these very small hills.’ Ahead of them loomed the pavé. And the rain showed no sign of abating. ‘There was talk of a semi-truce,’ says Jones. ‘Wet cobbles could be very dangerous.’
Not surprisingly, it was Hinault who was behind this pact. He hadn’t been able to organise a riders’ strike – though there was still talk of this in Frankfurt on the eve of the Grand Départ – but he had tried to use his influence to take the sting out of the stage. ‘I talked to all the riders,’ Hinault recalls, ‘and we said that because of the bad weather we weren’t going to race. Then I stayed in the front five at all times.’ This, too, was typical Hinault: riding at the front, asserting his authority. (‘Let’s just say that the Badger liked to keep watch,’ said his old director, Cyrille Guimard.)
From this vantage point, continues Hinault, ‘I saw the TI-Raleigh rider, Jan Raas, attack. And when that happened, I thought: “Right – this is war.”
‘They wanted to play?’ asks Hinault. ‘They were going to lose.’
Jones is not convinced that the attack by Raas was necessarily deliberate, far less a betrayal of the pact. It was more a consequence of the course, and the conditions. ‘It was so dangerous that everybody wanted to be at the front. That meant it split up naturally. And gradually it turned into a full-scale race.’
Still, the initial semi-truce meant the riders fell an hour behind schedule as they headed north, into the driving rain, towards hell, where spectators huddled under trees or waited in their cars, engines running, heaters on, windows steaming up. The conditions were treacherous: on one stretch of cobbles a Swiss TV car lost control and spun off the road. The pavé that featured today, totalling 20km, were ‘as bad as anything the Hell of the North could offer,’ as the report in Cycling Weekly put it. ‘Domed roadways, dotted with water-filled craters which, for all the riders knew, could have been one inch or six inches deep.’
Hinault, maintaining his presence in the first five, tried to enforce the truce. But Raas’s team, TI-Raleigh, managed by the formidable Peter Post, also wanted to keep watch, which meant remaining at the front, out of danger; and driving up the pace if their place at the front was threatened. This was their terrain, their conditions: the driving rain, the crosswinds, the cobbles. On the flat roads of northern Europe, they dominated. Yet there was a problem. They had come to the Tour with huge ambitions: to win stages, as they always did, but also the overall prize, with their Dutch climber, Joop Zoetemelk.
Hinault followed seven riders as they broke clear. He was simply following the wheels, he says. Also in the break were Hennie Kuiper, Michel Pollentier, Gerry Verlinden and Ludo Delcroix, and three from TI-Raleigh: Jan Raas, Leo van Vliet and Johan van der Velde. So four Dutchmen, three Belgians, and Hinault.
‘At first in the break, there were five or six of us,’ says Hinault. ‘But there were punctures, crashes, so it kept changing.’ Verlinden and Van der Velde both punctured. Hinault himself then suffered a puncture, but managed to get a quick wheel change and clawed his way back up to the lead group, now numbering five. Van der Velde made it back, only to puncture again: the front wheel this time. Raas gave him his, but neither rider made it back up to the leaders, and they were caught by the bunch. Since it was Raas who, according to Hinault, lit the touchpaper, the Badger might have been quite happy about that.
But TI-Raleigh had another problem, as Van Vliet tells me. ‘We thought Zoetemelk was going well, he rode well in the time trial, so he was in a good position. But that stage, Zoetemelk was not so good. We wanted to make the stage. But when Zoetemelk couldn’t hold the wheels, you have a problem.’ What of the truce? ‘I think for this stage Hinault was even more afraid than Zoetemelk,’ says Van Vliet.
If Hinault was afraid, he was doing a good job of hiding it. And the cards were falling in his favour. ‘We were riding for Zoetemelk to win,’ Van Vliet says, ‘so we had to wait for him.’
Once the break was established, Hinault was committed. When, with 20km to go, Kuiper attacked, opening a ten-second gap, it was Hinault who hunted him down. Delcroix was still there, and he wouldn’t help, sitting on Hinault’s wheel. But gradually Hinault closed the
