the race was being turned on its head; where it was perhaps not being won, but could be lost. Aware of this, TI-Raleigh, the team that had, in Hinault’s description, declared war, were chasing hard. Zoetemelk sat at the back of a string of team-mates, splattered by the water and mud thrown up by their wheels, looking thoroughly dejected.
Ahead, Hinault and Kuiper worked together, sharing the pace-making, while Delcroix sat behind, ostensibly protecting the interests of his team leader, Rudy Pevenage. The driving rain continued; a thick gloom descended. Jones remembers ‘the car headlights on, it was so dark. And then we did a loop at the finish in Lille. It felt like night. It was grim, and the clothing was not like it is now. We had just moved from wool to acrylic jerseys. No use in the rain.’
On the outskirts of Lille, Delcroix’s hand shot up. He had suffered a rear wheel puncture. More karma. And so now there were two: Hinault and Kuiper, a shrewd all-rounder who had been Olympic road race champion in 1972, professional world champion three years later, and second overall in the Tour de France two years after that.
They entered Lille together, and began the 3.9km finishing circuit, only for Kuiper to go the wrong way when the road was split by straw bales. He corrected himself, turning around and sprinting back to rejoin Hinault. They were racing, on gloomy, rain-sodden streets, in front of a diminished and bedraggled crowd. It had taken them eight hours to ride from Liège to Lille: eight hours to do 249km. So it didn’t just look like night, as Jones recalls. It was night.
Hinault describes the finish with another of his nonchalant shrugs: ‘It was the two of us. I attacked in the sprint. Won quite easily.’ In his book, Memories of the Peloton, he elaborates a little: ‘My impression of hell was confirmed. I suppose that, as the winner, I shouldn’t complain too much, but I really can’t understand why we have to face such conditions. I think of the riders who got stuck in the mud, lost on the unmade roads, standing in the rain with a punctured wheel, waiting for the team car. I can’t understand what inhuman conditions have to do with sport.’
* * *
The next day, with more cobbles on the road to Compiègne, the organisers relented. Hinault threatened to lead another strike and Félix Lévitan, the Tour director, agreed to change the first 20km of the stage, to cut out the worst cobbled sections. Despite that, Hinault began to experience pain in his knee. ‘It hurt a lot, starting that day. It wasn’t a problem at all during the first day, but the second … They thought it was small crystals in the knee.
‘Twenty-five kilometres of cobbles one day, and then 25km again the next day,’ he adds, shaking his head. ‘Twice in two days, eh? And the rain … there was so much rain.’
This knee pain led to Hinault’s darkest hour: his midnight escape from the Tour, once it reached Pau in the Pyrenees. Earlier in the day, there had been a time trial, won by Zoetemelk, with Hinault fifth, which was enough to give him the yellow jersey. He accepted the jersey on the podium, told the journalists his knee was okay, and that night fled back home to Brittany, only telling Guimard and the race organisers. In Hinault’s absence, the race turned TI-Raleigh’s way, which offered consolation for their failure on the pavé. ‘We won eleven stages and Zoetemelk won yellow,’ Van Vliet says. ‘Raas also won the green jersey. Still, I don’t think Peter Post was happy.’
Hinault returned in the autumn to win one of the greatest ever world road race titles, on the mountainous roads near Sallanches, and the following year did something almost unimaginably defiant, even by Hinault’s standards. He rode Paris–Roubaix. Why? ‘Because I was the world champion, and when you’re world champion you have to honour the jersey,’ he says now.
‘When you’re in such good form, you just want to take advantage of it,’ Hinault adds. ‘That day, I crashed or punctured seven times in total. But it was as though it was just too easy for me. And I had luck: each time I punctured, I had a team-mate there, ready to give me his wheel, so I never really lost much time.’
At the finish in Roubaix, Hinault arrived with the leaders, including specialists such as Moser, De Vlaeminck and Kuiper. And he won. ‘It was the last time I rode,’ Hinault says with satisfaction.1 ‘I would have gone back and won another Roubaix if Félix Lévitan had let me ride the Tour of America. But he didn’t, and I said, “In that case, I’m not doing Roubaix any more.” If he’d said I could have gone to the Tour of America, I would have won Roubaix again to thank him.’
So he would not just have ridden Paris–Roubaix, he would have won. At the time Hinault was adamant that he would never again ride the cobbles: ‘I have no intention of riding Paris–Roubaix, or the Tour of Flanders, either this year or in the future. Roads like that have nothing to do with classic racing.’
He had made his point. And as he drains the dregs of his cappuccino, he reminds us, in his brusque but amused manner, and with a typically Hinault-esque combination of pride and contempt: ‘How many riders today who are capable of winning the Tour de France even ride Paris–Roubaix?’
Hinault shrugs and answers his own question: ‘None.’
Classement
1 Bernard Hinault, France, Renault-Gitane, 236.5km, 8 hours, 3 minutes, 22 secs
2 Hennie Kuiper, Holland, Peugeot-Esso-Michelin, same time
3 Ludo Delcroix, Belgium, IJsboerke-Gios, at 58 secs
4 Yvon Bertin, France, Renault-Gitane, at 2 minutes, 11 secs
5 Guido van Calster, Belgium, Splendor-Admiral, s.t.
6 Sean Kelly, Ireland, Splendor-Admiral, s.t.
1 Hinault is mistaken. He returned one more time, in 1982, placing 9th.
Wilfried Nelissen Lands; Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, Head Down, Sprints for the Line.
1 July 1994. Stage One: Lille to Armentières
234km. Flat
They are sprinting for the line in Armentières at 70kph: a heaving, jostling bunch, a slightly downhill finish, a right-hand bend with 400 metres to go, another right-hander with 150 to go; then the road kicks slightly up; all heads go down …
Phil Liggett, the TV commentator, is shouting, his voice shrill: ‘We’ve got Ludwig up in second place … The Novemail team still trying to bring their man through, and Abdoujaparov is here! He’s on the wheel of Nelissen … Abdoujaparov is swinging from left to right, this will be a shoulder-to-shoulder battle … As they come up to the line, Nelissen …
‘Oh, and they’ve gone! They’ve gone! One after the other!’
There’s a huge noise at the moment of impact. A collective gasp, a roar: the sound of shock.
As Liggett said, they were there, shoulder-to-shoulder, and then they were gone. They were gone.
* * *
Old golfers never retire. They just lose their balls. So the joke goes. A variation of this joke could be
