Right now you can’t go far on any self-respecting sports website without seeing a story about how Tadej Pogačar‘s goal of capturing a fifth Tour de France would see him pull off one of the crowning achievements in the sport. And they’re all right, of course.
But dig back in history, and it’s fair to say that a rider joining the Club des Cinq – as the ultra exclusive, four-strong circle of five-time Tour winners is known in France – wasn’t always the biggest story of the race. Far from it.
Take the main end-of-race analysis piece of the Tour de France or semi-official newspaper L’Équipe back in 1974, just when Eddy Merckx was on the point of conquering his fifth title.
Written by race director and leading sports journalist Jacques Goddet, the article had an extremely downbeat headline for one thing: ‘Le cyclisme pro: une malade’ – pro cycling is ill. And what made it even odder was right below the headline, there was a half-page photo of the soon-to-be-crowned Tour winner and the undisputed patron of the peloton, Eddy Merckx, in full lone flight towards Orléans. With one day remaining, he’d dropped the pack in his umpteenth display of panache and power once again, and all this by a point where he was already in complete control of the race. He was certainly not looking malade at all.
Bafflingly, there was not a mention in Goddet’s summing up of the Tour that just a day later, Merckx would win his fifth Tour de France of five starts. Or that Merckx had already moved well ahead of André LeDucq’s record-breaking total of 24 stage wins and would push it up to a new target of 32 by the end of the race. (By the end of the 1975 Tour, it was up to 34, a record that would stand for nearly half a century.) Nor even did it seemingly matter that Merckx was only 29, so in theory at least, he could take even more records in the years to come. Goddet was still unhappy.
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“The Tour de France has not brought us all the satisfactions that we had hoped for two months ago,” he wrote. And that was that. Not that Goddet had anything against Merckx in particular, it turned out, whom he said had “competently handled both the way the course played out and his rivals.”
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Rather, Goddet’s beef was that the lack of serious opposition to the all-conquering Eddy – “an apathetic peloton,” snarled part of the caption for the photo of Merckx regarding the bunch he’d just left reeling in his latest attack – had left the race looking and feeling more than a little, well, bland.
Riders had become overly concerned with their own well-being and were not willing to take risks, Goddet argued, and that was all the fault of modern society and the ‘nanny state’: its mollycoddling and obsession with safety had wreaked havoc “in this very special area of human activity” – bike racing – “where by definition, everything remains an adventure.”
What Goddet’s comments showed, then and now, is that while a fifth Tour de France title matters hugely in terms of the history of the sport, it doesn’t have to be the story of the race.
Just like last year when Tadej Pogačar was on the cusp of a winning a fourth Tour but the main media focus was on his ‘lack of motivation’ in the third week, and whether a fifth Tour victory is a close-run affair like in 1964 for Jacques Anquetil or a snooze-fest like in 1974 for Merckx, the statistic can become something of an afterthought.
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On the other side of the fence, with so many Tour victories already in the bag, rather than a feeling of etching a permanent place in the history books, the sense of an ‘obligation’ to take another can be what predominates inside a team.
“The first two or three Tours that he won were fantastic, but the last three he raced we suffered a lot because nothing that wasn’t winning made any sense,” Eusebio Unzué, sports director of Miguel Indurain, once said.
“In the last few Tours, there was a huge amount of tension, knowing that if you didn’t make any mistakes, if you got it totally right inside the team, then he wouldn’t let you down. He was almost perfect. So you had to check everything time and again, make sure it was all going to work perfectly. And what was the first thing you did when you got to Paris? Breathe easy again.”
Jacques Anquetil – the first to ever do it
But was it always like this? Certainly when it came to the first winner of five Tours, rather than feel obliged to keep going, come what may, the French star Jacques Anquetil knew exactly when to call time on the never-ending demands for greater and greater success.
After he became the first member of the Club des Cinq in 1964, in July 1965 Anquetil said he was no longer interested in taking part. As he put it, with refreshing honesty or dubious cynicism (take your pick), he wasn’t going to race the Tour that year because “My contract won’t get any bigger if I win a sixth, and on the contrary, I’ve everything to lose if I fail.”
The key point to remember, though, was that by 1964 and when fighting for Tour number five, Anquetil had already not only equalled the previous record of three, jointly held by Philip Thys (1913, 1914, 1920) and Louison Bobet (1953, 1954, 1955), he’d gone one better. So rather than records, what inspired Anquetil go for Tour number five in 1964 (when he could perfectly easily have trotted out that 1965 line about not making any more money if he did take part then, too) was a different record. It was the chance to become the only rider after Fausto Coppi to conquer the Giro, which he’d won that May, and the Tour de France in the same year.
Quite apart from a rare ‘double’, another major issue was reportedly Anquetil’s ego. Winning another Tour would mean stealing a march on arch-rival and fellow Frenchman Raymond Poulidor whose failure to win so often as Anquetil, combined with his much more downhome, salt-of-the-earth personality, had made Poulidor something of a fan favourite – and his Vuelta a España victory in April 1964 had put him on the map as the coning man. So sensitive to criticism that he once named his yacht ‘Whistles’ (in an ironic reference to the boos and catcalls he’d received after losing the 1959 Tour to Federico Martin Bahamontes), putting the Tour record out of reach with a fifth victory wasn’t apparently top of Anquetil’s to-do list. But putting Poulidor in his place, that was another story.
What’s undeniable is that of the four Tours that gave their winners the chance to enter le Club des Cinq, 1964 was by far the most dramatic. Anquetil’s tiny final margin of success, just 55 seconds, underlined the knife-edge nature of the event, and also – after years where riders would conquer the Tour or be defeated by handfuls of minutes – hinted strongly at how the Tour was lurching, albeit patchily, into a more modern, finely calculated era. Equally, on top of that, Anquetil’s domination of the time trials (of which there were three), while Poulidor was much more superior in the mountains, helped keep the pendulum swinging back and forth. The first-ever live TV broadcasts of parts of Tour stages could hardly have come at a better moment.
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The way things kept on going back in favour of one rider of the other was far from formulaic or limited to a particular type of stage, too: in the first week, Anquetil lost a 30-second time bonus because of a puncture in Briančon in the Alps (and struggled on the Galibier), then Poulidor miscalculated by a lap in the Monaco velodrome the next day, and Anquetil regained all his lost time.
Even on a single stage, the setbacks and bouncebacks succeeded in almost bewildering speed. In Anquetil’s case, overeating at a vast lamb barbecue on the subsequent rest day in Andorra, and the fear induced by the prediction from one of France’s most famous fortune tellers, La Mage Bellne, in France-Soir newspaper, that he would have a fatal crash on stage 14, left him reeling on an initial climb the following day. But after Anquetil had drunk a bottle of champagne at the summit of the Envalira (now there’s a marginal gain for you), kindly provided by his team director, he overcame his severe indigestion. Thanks to a fantastic descent and a slightly questionable alliance, he managed to catch Poulidor on the flatter run-in.
But even then it wasn’t all over. Before the end of the stage, Poulidor had crashed because of a mechanical and lost time on his arch-rival, only for Anquetil to suffer so much on the next day’s stage that after an incredibly gutsy ride across the Portillon climb, Poulidor could regain much of his losses.
As if that wasn’t enough to make it a great Tour, the image that defined the closeness of the Poulidor-Anquetil era (and again, underlines how much smaller the gaps were becoming) came just 48 hours before the finish at Paris, on the Pûy de Dome. With the final result still hanging on a knife-edge, the race’s most emblematic image of the two was taken: leaning on each other as they tackled the interminably steep climb.
The image in question only was possible because Poulidor had just gone too close to a photographer’s motorbike, scorched his leg on its exhaust pipe and was over-compensating in the opposite direction, and the point where they were in physical contact only lasted a few seconds. But it didn’t matter: that brief moment, once voted the all-time definitive image of the Tour de France in later L’Équipe polls, perfectly underlined both the ferocity of their rivalry – neither rider willing to give an inch to their opponent – and the way that their rivalry fed off and supported each other as well. To quote Goddet again: “Never had two men who fought so ferociously for the most beautiful and strangest of trophies been brought so closely together in their effort.”
(Image credit: WellOffSide/ L’Equipe)
Despite ceding a little on the Puy de Dôme, Anquetil finally won that year’s Tour, thanks to his last blast on the time trial – although even there, Poulidor initially gave him a run for his money. But rather than the notable success of five Tours, his victory was memorable much more because of how he had had such a narrow pathway to triumph. The precarious nature of the triumph was both underlined by the famous answer Anquetil gave when told his GC margin on Poulidor had been reduced to 14 seconds – that’s 13 seconds too much – not to mention his later revealed promise to himself that if Poulidor had taken yellow on the Puy de Dome, he’d have abandoned.
“What surprises me the most about him;” Poulidor said in turn, “isn’t just his class, it’s the way he knows how to suffer so much in a race.”
“I’m proud to have beaten a great champion,” Anquetil said, “in the hardest Tour I’ve ever done.”
In the midst of all of these moving reflections on the drama and suspense provided by the race, the fact Anquetil had also won the Tour five times somehow didn’t matter so much as the human angle. In an era like today’s where the results seem to be what matters the most, that’s surely something worth keeping in mind this summer in the Tour.
Anquetil’s hotly disputed but hugely memorable fifth Tour effectively rounded off his career in July – in 1966, his one remaining participation, he and Poulidor basically marked each other out of contention. But the next rider to achieve five Tour victories, Eddy Merckx, showed no sign of retiring, and was clearly in a class of his own.
It wasn’t just L’Équipe making that point, either: neither of his top challengers were present. 1973 Tour winner Luis Ocaña had been sacked by his team, BIC, before the start of the race, and perennial Dutch favourite Joop Zoetemelk was recovering from a life-threatening crash at the warm-up race of Midi-Libre. Bereft of big rivals, the process of Merckx clinching victory number five was curiously colourless, laying the foundations by picking up time bonuses wherever and whenever he could, but then blasting the opposition out of existence at Gaillard and Aix-les-Bains in the Alps.
It says it all that the one point of interest or flicker of rivalry in this “monotonous, boring Tour” – and if that was L’Équipe’s description, imagine what the rest of the media were saying – was provided by a rider nearly aged 40, the incombustible Raymond Poulidor.
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The Frenchman dropping Merckx briefly in the Alps on the Mont du Chât climb proved to be an ephemeral moment of weakness on the Belgian’s part, but at least Poulidor’s win in Saint-Lary-Soulan provided a refreshing change from Merckx’ continuous domination. But if Merckx’s success could seemingly be taken for granted, the fact his closest rival on the Tour podium was a 38-year-old made it clear that a new generation of contenders was sorely needed – one that duly emerged, defeating Merckx, in 1976.
By that point, Merckx’s position as the greatest racer of all time had been clearly established and by anyone’s standard, his 1974 season could only be considered a triumph throughout. Merckx preceded his Tour victory with a win in the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de Suisse (albeit with no Spring Classics wins for the first time in his career) and followed his July triumph with victory in the World Championships. No other rider had ever previously secured the ‘Triple Crown’ and no rider would again until Stephen Roche in 1987. That he failed to ride defensively and instead went for eight stage wins, no less, was even more remarkable as he’d raced the entire Tour with a bleeding, open, wound in his perineum.
“To race in the Tour de France five times and to win each time, that’s a dream, the kind of record I think is unusual,” Merckx said according to the New York Times, its po-faced headline ‘French Bike Tour won by Merckx’ an indication of how little cycling had impacted in the US at that time more than anything else. But it’s notable that even the Belgian didn’t make so much of the number, rather he was prouder of having remained undefeated in all his participations. Again, it was the more human side of the endeavour that mattered the most, not the drawing equal with Anquetil.
By the time the Tour reached Paris, recalls the still-active British photographer John Pierce of Photosport International, who was present on the race, the public was more “nonplussed” and resigned at the latest demonstration of power than anything else.
“The atmosphere in the velodrome” – where the Tour finished for the last time ever that year before moving from La Cipale onto the Champs Elysées in 1975 – “was a bit flat,” Pierce said. “Merckx was more like a Hollywood hero than a sporting hero, even if to me as a cyclist there’s no greater racer. Even me, was going to see the guy who’d just won the 1974 Giro, which to me was the best bike race ever, he’d won by 12 seconds, not Merckx.
“At the time I don’t think it was even mentioned that it was his fifth Tour, and I don’t think people are going to celebrate Pogačar getting five either. It’s like going to buy the same loaf of bread every day.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)Bernard Hinault – The last French hero
Even if they don’t sum it up completely, somewhere along the line in most Tours, an image emerges which captures its essence. In 1964, that’d be the Poulidor-Anquetil rubbing shoulders and elbows on the Puy de Dôme, while in 1974, it was Merckx blasting away alone to Orléans. As for 1985, it’d have to be Hinault with his bloodied, broken nose and two black eyes, crossing the line at Saint-Étienne on stage 14, and still able from then on to defy the odds and conquer the race.
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Pre-race, if it had felt only logical that a four-time Tour winner should be the overwhelming favourite to take a fifth, that logic became even even more uncompromising given the 1984 champion Laurent Fignon – who’d beaten Hinault by more than ten minutes the previous July – was a non-starter because of an Achilles tendon operation. Furthermore, with Hinault’s teammate Greg LeMond in second in Paris, the 1985 Tour was the first where a fifth, record-equalling win was also a demonstration of collective GC strength as well.
Yet there were plenty of wheels within wheels: for one thing, the race was split into unequal two halves by Hinault’s crash. The Frenchman had won the opening TT, the stage 8 time trial and then still managed to gain time on LeMond, his nearest rival, in the Alps despite failing, surprisingly, to win a mountain TT.
But Hinault’s crash in the final kilometre of the Saint-Étienne stage forced him on the defensive for the second half, particularly as congestion in his broken nose then morphed into fullblown bronchitis. The full picture behind events anchored in considerable controversy, such as LeMond being told by his team car that Hinault was much closer behind on a Pyrenean stage after he’d been dropped, remains unclear to this day, but they played out in Hinault’s favour.
The same goes for LeMond’s claims that he had to push Hinault on the following day in order to keep the Frenchman in yellow – Hinault was still in the lead as a result. The fact is that despite his struggles on the climbs, Hinault was more than capable of defending himself on the flat final time trial at Lac de Vassiviere, only ceding five seconds to LeMond. A fifth Tour was in the bag.
Hinault would later shrug off any suggestion he could have lost the 1985 Tour at any point. But even if LeMond could undoubtedly have come closer, Hinault was one of the handful of modern-day Grand Tour GC racers – Alberto Contador being perhaps the best – who could win as much or more by strategy as by brute force.
“Without my fall in Saint-Étienne, that would have been an easy victory,” Hinault told L’Équipe in Bordeaux, going on – ever the politician – to thank LeMond for his support. “We blocked the opposition easily. Only [rival Stephen] Roche did what he could.” As for the idea he might have earned extra prestige by winning injured and with two black eyes, Hinault answered succinctly, “Maybe, but it still sucks.”
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Present at the 1985 Tour as well, Pierce says the crowd’s support for Hinault’s success in Paris was “logically far greater as he’s French, it was pretty good compared to 1974. It was also to do with their personalities and how they celebrated. Merckx was much more relaxed, acting like winning five Tours was the most natural thing in the world. Hinault was a lot more nervous when he got his fifth, jumping around, hamming it up and putting on a real show.”
Yet for all the added glamour, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hinault’s win is that even as it seemed to confirm France’s domination of its home race in the post-Merckx era – nine wins from the previous eleven editions, five in a row – in fact it proved a kind of death knell for the host nation’s aspirations. To this day, Hinault’s 1985 victory remains the last time the men’s Tour has been won by a Frenchman. And no sooner had Hinault lost the Tour the following year (this despite having promised LeMond he would help him in return for the 1985 support), than he quit. For France, then as now, this was as good as it would get.
Miguel Indurain – 30 years since the last five-time winner
To judge by his interviews, for Hinault as it was for Merckx, a fifth Tour was one in a series rather than a goal in itself, particularly given the problems and setbacks he’d had achieving it. But attitudes to the fifth Tour, at latest in the media, had changed notably was by the time Miguel Indurain clinched his 1995 title, and became, in the process, the only member of the Club des Cinq to secure all five in one fell swoop. For one thing, after three of the greatest Grand Tour riders had fallen dramatically short in their sixth Tour bid or simply (as in Anquetil’s case) opted out altogether, reaching five became the new gold standard. Secondly, Indurain’s ability to win one Tour after another in immediate succession, unlike either Merckx or Hinault, focussed the interest on the number even more.
Furthemore, as Unzué says, both for the rider and for the team, Banesto, Indurain’s lifelong squad, by 1995 the Tour de France had acquired an unwieldy level of importance. (It was one that caused some controversy too: Indurain’s repeated absence from the Vuelta a España, held in April up to 1994 and which he avoided as racing it that month could have harmed his Tour build-up, even sparked questions in the Spanish parliament.) Yet if another Indurain Tour victory had become almost routine by 1995, it was curiously both the July where Indurain himself tore up his own strategy and the race where he came closest to losing.
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Up until the 1994 Tour de France, for his previous four Grand Tour wins – two in the Giro and two in France – Indurain had always opted for riding defensively in the mountains and killing the opposition in the time trials. But in 1995, Indurain switched his game completely powering away on the shores of the River Meuse in Liège the day before a crucial time trial – where he’d normally have saved all his energy – a move which completely blindsided his rivals and gaining a hefty advantage, both psychological and real, as a result.
“I changed my strategy a bit and they got confused,” Indurain once told El País. “The team might have had its ideas, but in a race, you have to take decisions.”
“What surprised me the most about his winning the Tour in any year was the time when he attacked at the end of the Liège-Bastogne-Liège route,” Unzué, confirming he had no idea Indurain’s move was coming, once said in a biography of Indurain, Relentless.
“That was a Miguel Indurain that I didn’t know, the day before a time trial, what did he need to do that for? But that was the Tour, in an case, where we saw the day he came closest to racing like Eddy Merckx.”
Yet if the Tour seemed to be completely in Indurain’s power after his knock-out blow in Belgium and equally important ride up to La Plagne in the Alps, the biggest setback of the 1995 Tour came on the stage to Mende in the Massif Central a few stages later. And it was a massive blow.
“That was the hardest day of all the five Tours,” Unzué once admitted, where “for many hours, it seemed as though something [an Indurain defeat] could happen… The Tour was slipping through our fingers.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
More than capable of defeating any rival individually, as Indurain had proved in La Plagne, what proved nearly catastrophic was when Indurain faced a collective challenge, in this case by the Spanish team, ONCE. In a move across the rugged Massif Central to Mende airfield, the presence of three ONCE riders including team leader Laurent Jalabert in a day-long break left Banesto broken apart, and Indurain and his squad had to look for all kinds of circumstantial allies to try and bring them back.
Teams with absolutely no interest in the GC battle, for reasons that shall remain purely conjectural, opted to back Indurain in his bid to quell the ONCE mutiny. For all Jalabert was at 9:10 overall, when the gap rose to over ten minutes, it felt like Indurain’s bid for a fifth Tour was about to go up in smoke.
For the Tour-centric Banesto (and a country like Spain that was obsessed with stage racing and barely had any ideas of the importance of the Classics), this was nothing less than disastrous. ONCE was the Spanish equivalent of the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and the phone lines to its headquarters in Madrid reportedly collapsed under the numbers of outraged callers, demanding to know what the squad was doing, ‘betraying’ a fellow-countryman like Indurain.
“I felt the race was in danger that day,” Indurain once told El País, “but that wasn’t my responsibility, it was the team’s. They had to control and that’s where I put them under pressure because things had got out of control. I told them to sort it out and to see how they could do it. My job was to keep the GC contenders under control, and I had them under control.”
Finally, enough teams collaborated – later claiming they were paying back an unspoken debt where Banesto would ‘gift’ stage wins to rivals – with a by-now completely isolated Indurain to bring Jalabert and co within a safe enough distance for the Navarran’s maillot jaune to be safe. Jalabert won the stage, but his advantage of 4:50 was only enough to put him briefly on the podium. The yellow was another story.
It’s true there were grumblings from 1996 Tour winner Bjaarne Riis that had the Tour raced the stage after the death of Fabio Casartelli in the Pyrenees, rather than neutralising it, Indurain might have been more vulnerable: But really the Tour ended the moment Indurain garnered enough support to keep ONCE under control on the road to Mende.
Such was Indurain’s control that El País later insisted that “nobody would dare give an answer” to the question who could stop him taking a sixth in 1996. “They would be scared of being called a madman or a fortune teller,” the newspaper reported. Yet in fact, as we know – and just like nobody ever doubted that Merckx would win a sixth, either – five proved to be the upper limit for Indurain and there it remains.
That is perhaps the pivotal fact on which all of the subsequent evaluations of five Tours really hangs. The importance of Pogačar’s fifth win really depends on what happens if firstly he gets it, and secondly what happens afterwards. If, for whatever reason, that’s as good as it gets, it will feel very different as a victory than if it’s ‘just’ another Tour win en route to becoming the first rider ever to take six. So given we’ll only know later what that fifth Tour win (if it happens) really means, for now perhaps it’s best to do as happened with Anquetil and Hinault (and to a lesser extent with Indurain) and focus in on the human experience that it took to attain that achievement – and the records can remain in the history books and for the years to come.
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