Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape

Jacques Anquetil was a man who kept to himself and followed his own council, both on and off the bike. This approach to life tends to obscure much of one’s life and magnify the importance of the rest. In Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape Paul Howard attempts to disentangle the myth, stoked by Anquetil himself during his lifetime, from the fact. As the first five-time winner of the Tour de France, a well-known bon vivant, and an unapologetic doper, the biography of Jacques Anquetil is a compelling story, but it appears that Anquetil has maintained much of the smokescreen. Given that he was the first rider to win the Tour de France five times (a record at the time that was tied, and then broken, and now just tied again) and the first to win all three Grand Tours, it is somewhat surprising that more is not known about him. However, being wedged in cycling history between Il Campionissimo, Fausto Coppi, and Le Cannibale, Eddy Merckx, Anquetil, makes him overlooked and much like Fausto Coppi, whom Anquetil was with on the fateful trip in the Upper Volta, Anquetil lived at a time when the media was not as per(in?)vasive as it is now, so he managed to keep much of himself obscured from the world.

To begin with the handlebar tape (stick around for the sex and the lies), being a great cyclist demands both great mental and great physical skills, and one of the mental skills is wearing a mask: to look weak or strong, not as you actually feel those things, but as it would be advantageous to give the appearance of feeling those things. This obfuscation reaches its peak on the climbs, in the cold and the wet (which Anquetil hated), but it begins in the proverbial locker room, in training. For Anquetil this early, mental game consisted of cultivating a reputation as a man who could stay out drinking liquor and eating rich foods until the early hours of the morning and then ride everyone into the ground the following day. However, it is not clear from Howard’s telling how true this cultivated appearance was.  He recounts several instances of it allegedly happening, but the accounts are mostly second or third hand, and in the cases where he does have an eyewitness, it is often someone close to Anquetil and interested in maintaining his legend. As Anquetil surely wanted it, we remain uncertain whether he regularly went from bottle to bike or whether he just wanted to give his opponents that impression.

One area in which Anquetil was more forth-coming, at least as he neared retirement, was his use of performance enhancing drugs, asserting that it was crazy to think that anyone could do what professional cyclists do on pan y agua, as Tyler Hamilton would style it. Howard, however, does not seem to be very interested in this aspect of his career and largely leaves it to passing references with regards to his health. The one place it cannot be ignored is with Anquetil’s second attempt at the hour record, during which he rode further than the previous record, but did not have his record ratified, because he refused (on principle according to him) to submit to a drug test.

It is a shame that Howard does not delve into this aspect of his career more deeply because Anquetil stood at the cusp of the drug-testing era, and his honesty about his use opens up vistas to other paths the history of cycling could have gone down. His contemporary Poulidor was the first rider tested at the Tour, so the framework was being laid for the future, but instead of acknowledging what was going on or instituting rigorous testing, both of which would have required acknowledging the truth of what was going on, cycling limped along for 30 or 40 years pretending that it was clean and occasionally rapping people on the knuckles (from the great Eddy Merckx on down) for, what everyone pretended were, mistakes.

If Anquetil’s embrace of chemical enhancement was not the way to go, his honesty could have at least provided a starting point from which to address the problem. However, during the 1967 Tour, when instead of riding Anquetil chose to write a series of tell-all articles, he was not protected from the Omertà by his success, but rather, like many riders before and after, was shunned. Anquetil was not the first to talk about the rampant drug use in cycling, but he was writing at a critical time. Before him, riders were just sharing secrets of the guild, the rulers of the sport were ambivalent, and the rules were absent. After him, riders who told all were not merely spilling secrets, rather they were accusing their fellow riders of cheating, and increasingly, of crimes. Such wishes are hopeless, but looking back, one wonders why the stature of Anquetil did not force an accounting. While it would have been painful at the time, surely it would have been better than letting it fester for another 30 years.

Unfortunately, Howard does not seem to be very interested in the doping. It is possible that Anquetil’s close friends would not want to talk about the doping in a book written at a time when cycling was struggling with its doping past, but from the book it is not clear whether Howard even asked. During his career such a figure as Charles DeGaulle himself was asked about Anquetil’s doping, and remained unimpressed allegedly saying when he decided to give Anquetil the Légion d’honneur, “Doping? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Has he made ‘La Marseillaise’ be heard abroad, yes or no?”

Drug use aside, Anquetil’s relationship with the French public was fraught throughout his career. Like Coppi and Gino Bartali, Anquetil was linked in the French sporting firmament to l’Éternel Second, Raymond Poulidor, and like the two Italians, the home nation’s spirits were divided into two camps. Anquetil, however, deeply resented the association, because if Poulidor was always second, Anquetil was quite frequently first.  Anquetil felt that public adulation and the attendant appearance fees should be a simple metric based on performance, and he did not understand why he was less beloved than Poulidor.

Part of Anquetil’s alienation from the public stemmed from his snubbing of the Classics. Viewing the one-day-races as too capricious to bother with, he preferred a multi-stage event where he felt there was more time for his class to tell and therefore more likelihood that he would win, and time-trials, including the then famous Grand Prix des Nations, which he won eight times, including six in a row. However, the tension with Poulidor was that Anquetil did not understand that his ruthless, almost mechanical victories, lacked the allure of Poulidor’s much more human struggle behind first Anquetil and then, at the end of his career, behind the immortal Merckx.

Aside from his cycling, the sex and lies of the title refer to Anquetil’s somewhat…unusual, domestic environment. Basically, Anquetil seems to have exclusively pursued women that he should not have pursued, who were out of bounds on grounds of propriety, or more. First, there is his wife Jeanine. When they began their relationship, she was married to Anquetil’s physician and friend, Dr. Broëda, with whom she had two children, Annie and Alain (remember them, they’ll crop up again).  While he was still racing Jacques and Jeanine seem to have a relative normal relationship, at least as normal as a professional cyclist can manage, with her slowly gaining custody of her children from her ex-husband. However, Jacques, although allegedly a good father to his step-children, always wanted to have a child of his own, and Jeanine was unable to have any more.

What happened next is obscured by the passage of time and of it taking place within a family that is still together and desirous of protecting Jacques’ memory, but one way or another it was decided (ah, the passive voice) that Annie, 18 at the time, would be a surrogate mother, and without the wonders of in vitro fertilization the conception was achieved in the natural manner and they had a daughter, Sophie. As though that was not complicated enough, Jacques continued to have a relationship with both Jeanine and Annie for the next 12 years as Sophie grew up, before the strains of the unusual familial unit broke things up.

At this point, one would think that perhaps Anquetil would back away from the mess and search either for some way to patch things up with his still devoted wife, or get as far away as possible from this mess, Anquetil, however, began a relationship with his step-son Alain’s wife Dominique, with whom he had a son before succumbing to stomach cancer at age 53. Howard sees these unusual familial relationships as evidence of Anquetil’s determination to set and follow his own standards, as he did on the bike. It seems to be an effort to maintain rigid control over his private life, and of a desire to limit the number of people who are admitted to his inner sanctum, even if it results in a rather limited selection of partners.

Howard did not manage to talk to Alain or Annie, but he paints a picture of a relatively happy family. Like Anquetil’s career this portrait is somewhat affected by the fact that the people who talked are invested in protecting the story of Anquetil, but in defense of the happy family story, it is the case that the original core, Jeanine, Annie and Sophie, at least, is still on speaking terms and lives close by each other, so there was at least something worth holding on to.

In the end, Paul Howard’s biography of Anquetil is unsatisfactory. It does little to elucidate this remarkable life and in fact makes it all feel rather mundane. However, to be fair, this lack of information and insight may be better attributed to successful management by Anquetil than failed research by Howard. Nonetheless, the book is a worthwhile introduction to Jacques Anquetil for those who know little more about him than his five Tour de France victories. Beyond the superficial, however, Anquetil remains obscure at the end of the book, presumably the way he wanted it.