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Bernard Hinault Leads Over the Pavé Early in the Stage

1 July 1980. Stage Five: Liège to Lille

236.5km. Flat, cobbles

The French call it pavé. It sounds exotic and benign – it could be a succulent cut of beef – but for cyclists it has a different meaning. It is the pavé that defines Paris–Roubaix, the ‘Hell of the North’ one-day classic that includes twenty-odd sections of cobbles, or pavé; hell because these cobbles are not the small stones polished by thousands of cars in a city, but large, uneven boulders planted in mud, arranged to run in narrow strips across the plains and fields of northern France and Belgium.

They are roads, but rarely used as such these days and hardly worthy of the name. Some are maintained purely for the purpose of meting out punishment once a year, around Easter time, to the cyclists of Paris–Roubaix.

Every decade or so, the pavé features not only in Paris–Roubaix but also in the Tour de France. In 2004 it was the pavé that destroyed the hopes of the Basque climber, Iban Mayo. In 2010 it did the same to another stick-thin climber, Fränk Schleck. On that occasion, even Lance Armstrong, who had capitalised on Mayo’s misfortune six years earlier, was a diminished figure, caught behind the carnage and reduced to chasing shadows, or younger, faster versions of himself, over the bone-jarring stones. ‘Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail,’ said Armstrong after the stage. ‘Today, I was the nail.’

Paris–Roubaix lends itself to great suffering and great quotes. Arguably the best is Theo de Rooy’s following the 1985 race, when he crashed, withdrew, and vented: ‘It’s bollocks, this race. You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants; you’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping. It’s a piece of shit …’

‘Will you ride it again?’ asked the reporter.

‘Of course. It’s the most beautiful race in the world.’

It’s dangerous, the pavé. In 1998 Johan Museeuw fell in the Arenberg forest section during Paris–Roubaix and nearly lost his leg; in 2001 Philippe Gaumont broke his femur; in 2010 Fränk Schleck broke his collarbone. The weather matters. On dry days the dust kicked up by the bikes and vehicles fills lungs and leaves riders coughing for days. But when the rain falls, the challenge and danger are of a different order. A very different order indeed.

On 1 July 1980, it poured. It was a grey, bleak day as the Tour prepared to leave the industrial Belgian city of Liège, to head west to Lille. Five days earlier, the Tour had started in Frankfurt, then dipped into France, to Metz, before crossing another border to Belgium. Bad weather dominated those early stages. But the fifth stage, to Lille, looked set to be the worst of the lot. The rain was unrelenting. The wind blew hard across the northern European plains. ‘Thousands were by the roadside, sheltering under trees or huddled by their cars,’ as one report put it. ‘If stages two and three were purgatory, then stage five was hell.’

* * *

Few Tours have started with a bigger favourite than Bernard Hinault in 1980. Le Blaireau (The Badger) had won the previous two, including 1978, his début. That year, although only twenty-three, he rode with such impressive authority, even leading 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, when, unusually, they came not in the first week of the race, but on stage nine, from Amiens to Roubaix. On that occasion, he punctured and lost over two minutes to Zoetemelk. That was the problem 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 gap to Kuiper, so that all three were together with 9km to go. The bunch was now two minutes behind. It was one of those rare days at the Tour when 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.