Me and my friend Jacques: Bu to Perriers-sur-Argelles

March 22, 2015

Jacques Anquetil: like a man falling down a lift-shaft

MY hero, back when cyclists looked like cyclists and had wool vests and leather saddles, was a Frenchman called Jacques Anquetil. He had high cheekbones and his blond hair was always coiffed upwards, so that when his cheeks sunk in, he looked for all the world like a man falling down a lift-shaft.

Jacques Anquetil won the Tour de France five times, the first to do it, and to this day nobody has bettered him. His problem was that he did it in such a boring manner, a technique bettered since only by Miguel Indurain, never bothering to be first over a mountain even when he was with the leaders, never troubling to win a stage when there was no advantage in it.

For all that, Anquetil was my teenage hero and I longed to ride even a third that fast or to look a quarter as graceful on a bike.

Anquetil's grave at Quincampoix, near Les Andelys

Well, that all came back today when I rode through Les Andelys, which is where he lived. His château is still in the family, and Anquetil's complicated and near-scandalous family life was always far more interesting than his racing.

I remember Jock Wadley, the finest cycling writer of his generation, speaking of how Anquetil went training behind the Derny pacing motorbike of a bike-shop owner in Rouen, André Boucher, and that Boucher often chose the long hill south out of Les Andelys to give his charge a hard time right from the start.

I began to see just how hard a time that must have been this afternoon, because it went on and uncomfortably on..

The very first building you see as you enter the Eure. Makes you feel good about the place, doesn't it?

This is proper Normandy, a land of rolling hills, gentle but nagging, villages with the last of the traditional wood-framed buildings, one of them an abandoned hotel with lurid love messages and suggestions written in the grime of the windows

Now, that's more like it: traditional Norman wood frames. Shame you can't see the lurid messages written in the grime, though...

Hundreds of other riders passed me this morning, alone or in groups, each group distinguished by their club uniforms.

"Deux cent bornes?", one puffing man in red found the breath to ask.

"Au moins", I shouted back.

- Off for 200 kilometres?

- At the very least...

I think it must have been what in France is known as an ouverture, an opening. It's a big tradition here, from the days when barely anyone rode through the winter. Getting back together for a day of aching legs and burning lungs at the start of spring was such a moment to be treasured - and suffered - that a club in each region would lay on a meeting place and refreshments and mark out circuits of different lengths.

French riders are like anywhere else these days and most ride all year. But the tradition continues, which I think is rather pleasant, and clubs from all over will meet at the chosen venue and ride together and speak of what cyclists speak.

My own lunch was rather duller: cheese in nasty white bread (believe nobody who says French bread is always delicious), sitting on a wind-scarred bench in a street of anonymous magnolia houses. I took my mind off what I was having to eat - it was all I could find - by trying to guess the sex of car drivers from how far out into the road they drove.

Tomorrow will be my last day through France, the day I reach Dieppe. The gentle pleasures of Normandy, a land granted centuries back to bad-tempered Norse-men - hence the name - on condition they stay there and stop making themselves a nuisance, has come as a treat. I picked the straightest line across the country, going for directness rather than beauty, and today finally I have found there really was a cherry on top of a not always tasty cake.

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