The Tour de France has been in the Amaury family for more than 80 years, the race bequeathed by the French government to Emilién Amaury for services rendered to the Resistance during the German occupation of Paris. Emilién’s grandson, Jean-Etienne Amaury, is now the president of the Amaury Sports Organisation and with his mum, Marie-Odile, and his sister, Aurore, they own and manage the race.
From the beginning the Amaurys asked journalists to run the race; Jacques Goddet, Félix Lévitan, Jean-Marie Leblanc and, now, Christian Prudhomme. Not that surprisingly, the newspapermen showed a flair for creating stories. One of Prudhomme’s ideas for this year’s Tour was to honour the memory of one of the most dramatic stages in the history of the Tour, the 13th leg of the 1986 race.
One of the advantages for those of a certain age is that you may understand what is in someone’s mind when they reference an event from decades ago. Prudhomme decided the 14th leg of this year’s Tour would mirror the 13th stage of the 1986 race; kilometre for kilometre, climb for climb. Thirty-nine years ago they began in Pau, climbed the Col du Tourmalet, Col d’Aspin, Col de Peyresourde and finished at the summit of Superbagnères.
Hinault had won five Tour de France crowns but threw away a sixth tilt with his attacking ventures in ‘86
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And so on the third day in the Pyrenees this year, they followed the 1986 Pau to Superbagnères route.
Prudhomme isn’t wrong. That stage in ’86 was sensational; the memory has cruised through succeeding decades without losing a minute. Bernard Hinault, then a five-times Tour de France champion, had taken what seemed a vice-like grip the previous day. His lead was 5min 25sec from his La Vie Claire team-mate Greg LeMond, who started the Superbagnères stage convinced he was racing for second place.
Leaving Pau, the expectation was that Hinault would simply defend his substantial lead. That’s how it seemed on the first climb, the Tourmalet. Hinault was comfortable. As the riders took newspaper from their soigneurs at the top to stuff under their jerseys, Hinault was the one rider who didn’t. Instead, he accelerated.
La Vie Claire sports director Maurice Le Guilloux was in the team car, thinking to himself, “Why is he attacking? He is more than five minutes ahead!” At the bottom of the descent, Hinault led his rivals by 1:45. Le Guilloux tried to reason with him. “I’m not going back, I’m not waiting,” said the man affectionately known as Le Blaireau (The Badger).
No one in the team understood. The plan for the day had been to defend the Yellow Jersey by keeping the pace high and covering the attacks of the other favourites. On the second climb, Col d’Aspin, the Scot Robert Millar, the Colombian Lucho Herrera and the Swiss Urs Zimmermann committed to chasing Hinault, whose overall lead had now climbed to more than eight minutes.
Hinault, left, in the Polka Dot Jersey with LeMond in Yellow. The American won the first of his three Tours in 1986
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At that moment there wasn’t one person who didn’t see Hinault finishing the day with an eight or nine-minute lead. On the penultimate climb, the Peyresourde, the chasers began to make inroads into Hinault’s lead. In the valley before Superbagnères, the man in the Yellow Jersey began to wilt. Just ran out of energy. There were different names for it: “the bonk”, “the hunger knock”, “la fringale”. Hinault had it.
Alexi Grewal, an American riding for the 7-Eleven team, remembers catching and distancing Hinault on the first slopes of Superbagnères. He offered him the benefit of his wisdom. “You blew it, Bernie. You f***ed up,” he said. Hinault didn’t respond.
Millar, who would become Philippa York in later life, recently recalled the feeling of distancing Hinault. “He was in a state. As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘Right, payback.’ He had tried to humiliate us on the biggest stage and we liked Greg more than him. In Hinault’s eyes we were all useless. It wasn’t often you had the chance but when it came, I wanted to hurt him.”
Hinault lost 4:39 of his 5:25 lead and, in effect, lost the Tour that day, a race he had already won. He should have become the first rider in history to win a sixth Tour de France. His great friend in the team, Jean-François Bernard, then spoke to him.
Misty conditions presented a major challenge to the peloton, with Pogacar and UAE riding conservatively
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“Why did you do it?”
“Because I felt like it,” said Hinault.
Apart from the identical route, with the same four mountains, there was a curious parallel between this year’s Superbagnères stage and ’86. On this occasion too, the man in the Yellow Jersey started the day with an almost unassailable 4:07 lead on his closest challenger, Jonas Vingegaard. And so often Tadej Pogacar’s instinct urges him to attack. Mostly he says yes to his instinct. Through the course of his career, he has been a far more aggressive racer than Hinault.
And here’s the irony: over the route chosen to commemorate Hinault’s folly, Pogacar and his UAE Team rode the most conservative race imaginable, concentrating on preserving the lead they had and making sure they made no mistakes. The stage was won by the Ineos-Grenadiers rider Thymen Arensman, who escaped from his breakaway companions 37 kilometres from the finish and rode strongly to finish more than a minute ahead of Pogacar and Vingegaard.
Given that Arensman was already 40 minutes down on GC, Pogacar wasn’t overly concerned about reeling him in, concentrating instead on countering Vingegaard and dominating his rival in the sprint for second place. Oscar Onley’s remarkable Tour continued with another outstanding ride through the mountains. He finished sixth on the stage and with Remco Evenepoel abandoning the Tour, Onley moved up to fourth overall.
Arensman, on his first Tour, escaped from the breakaway 37km out to win the stage
LOIC VENANCE/EPA
It was dispiriting to hear the stage winner’s press conference. Arensman was asked two questions about the controversy surrounding Ineos’s soigneur, David Rozman, and an alleged relationship with a doping doctor back in 2012. In Arensman’s moment of victory he was telling journalists that they would have to direct their questions to the team’s management. The journalists had been doing so for a week and not getting answers.
Evenepoel was forced to abandon the Tour
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Pogacar was asked if he and his team were mindful of what happened to Hinault in ’86 and whether that played into their strategy. “I must admit I’m not such a good student of the history of cycling,” he said. “Maybe that is bad on me, but I don’t pay too much attention to these details, but the way we rode today was different to how Hinault rode, with a mind to defend the Yellow Jersey, not to attack and be aggressive.”
The rider himself knew that he was at his limit through the final kilometre of his victory at Hautacam on Thursday, the same in the mountain time-trial to Peyragudes on Friday. Over the route where Hinault perished in 1986, Pogacar decided to play safe and focus on recovery.
They climb Mont Ventoux on Tuesday and with Pogacar in the Yellow Jersey, one wouldn’t need to be Einstein to imagine that he has something planned for that iconic climb.
Stage 14 Results1 T Arensman (Ineos, Ned); 2 T Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Slovenia) +1min 8sec; 3 J Vingegaard (Team Visma-Lease a Bike, Den) +1.12; 4 F Gall (Decathlon AGR2 La Mondiale, Aut) +1.19; 5 F Lipowitz (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, Ger) +1.25 6 O Onley (Team Pincic PostNL, GB) +2.09; 7 B Healy (EF Education-EasyPost, Ire) +2.46; 8 P Roglic (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, Slovenia) +2.46; 9 T Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility, Nor) +2.59; 10 K Vauquelin (ARKEA-B&B Hotels, Fra) +3.08GC Standings1 T Pogacar 50:40:28; 2 J Vingegaard +4mins 13secs; 3 F Lipowitz +7.53; 4 O Onley +9.18; 5 K Vauquelin +10.21; 6 P Roglic +10.34; 7 F Gall +12.00; 8 T Johannessen +12.33; 9 B Healy +18.41; 10 C Rodriguez (Ineos, Spa) +22.57