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| Anquetil in full flow |
The Chrono des Nations will be the final professional race of the season in late October. While this event can still attract some of the best time trialists in the sport (Tony Martin has emerged victorious from the previous two editions), it is a mere shadow of its predecessor, the legendary Grand Prix des Nations.
The most prestigious time trial event of the year, the Grand Prix des Nations was used to crown the world’s best rider in the race of truth. However, with the inclusion of a time trial in the UCI World Championships from 1994, the prestige of the event quickly declined in the late 1990s, with the last edition run in 2004. This swift decline was not befitting of a race with such a long and glorious history.
The post-war era had seen the race dominated by some of the biggest names in cycling. Fausto Coppi took two victories in 1946 and 1947, while Hugo Koblet won the 1951 edition after capturing the Tour de France in the same year. But for one reason or another the big names were nowhere to be seen in Versailles in September 1953.
Maurice Blomme was probably the highest profile rider, having won the race in 1950, but had done nothing since. Jacques Dupont had won the kilometre time trial at the London Olympics, but that was five long years ago. There was a Bobet in the field, but his first name was Jean, by all accounts less talented than his older brother Louison who had won the Tour two months earlier.
Perhaps then a first British victory was on the cards. The insular world of British cycling could offer up two riders capable of challenging. Ken Joy was a four-time Best British All-Rounder, and had ridden 100 miles in an impressive four hours six minutes the previous year.
The other rider was Bob Maitland, a road racer who hadn’t raced against the clock in a number of years, but hoped to carry form from the recent Tour of Britain. The mouthpiece of the British cycling establishment, Cycling magazine, was quietly confident.
No one, perhaps with the exception of a few journalists from the regional newspaper Paris-Normandie, was keeping an eye on a slender, baby-faced nineteen year old from Rouen, Jacques Anquetil.
Anquetil had enjoyed a rapid rise to the start line of the Grand Prix des Nations over the last couple of years. On the encouragement of a school friend he had joined the local club, AC Sottevillais, in 1950 at the age of 16, and began to enter races the following year.
It was at Sottevillais that Anquetil was first introduced to André Boucher. A decent rider himself, Boucher had briefly turned professional in the late 1930s before World War II curtailed his racing career. After the war he had returned to his native Normandy to open a bike shop, and had become directeur sportif at AC Sottevillais.
Throughout the winter of 1950-51, Boucher had Anquetil working hard to prepare for his first season. Abandoning a six week career as a metalworker, he maintained an unblemished attendance record for the AC Sottevillais club runs, while the flexibility of working picking strawberries on his father’s farm meant that he could train with the rest of the club’s young riders on Thursday afternoons.
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| Anquetil in the junior ranks |
By all accounts, Anquetil’s first season was a great success. As would be the case in his professional career, many of his victories were achieved through solo breakaways, where he would often put minutes into the chasing peloton.
The cherry on top of this fine debut season was the individual time trial that would end the regional junior competition organised by the Paris-Normandie. Of course Anquetil won, and by a huge margin, covering the eighty-two kilometre course in under two hours. Not bad for a kid.
But while 1951 had been a success for the seventeen-year-old Anquetil, he was not content with victories on a regional level, and again trained hard over the winter in preparation for his move to the senior ranks.
The first key race of the 1952 season was the Normandy championship in late May. After his success the previous year, Anquetil found himself marked by five riders from the strong Caen club and over five minutes behind the front of the race.
However with Boucher refusing to let his protégé abandon, Anquetil set off in pursuit of the leaders. In eighty kilometres he caught the front group before continuing on to a solo victory. Boucher would later write that ‘Anquetil the champion was born then’.
This victory meant the strawberry picker had qualified for the national amateur championships in Carcassonne, a race which he of course won, gaining him a place in the French team for the 1952 Olympics.
Anquetil would leave Helsinki disappointed, although this was more a sign of the young man’s haughty expectations than any poor performance. Twelfth place in the road race and bronze in the team competition would have satisfied lesser men, but for Anquetil this was not enough.
Perhaps disillusioned with amateur racing, and seeing himself as worthy of greater things, our Jacques again prepared to move up in the cycling world for the 1953 season, taking out a license as an independent (essentially stepping-stone between the amateur ranks and full professional status).
In his first professional stage race, the Tour de la Manche in late July, Anquetil finished second on stage one, behind a 21 year old Jean Stablinski, before dominating the following morning’s thirty eight kilometre time trial, taking the race lead by two minutes twenty one seconds with two stages remaining.
The penultimate stage, won by future Paris-Tours winner Gilbert Schoedeller, passed without incident, but on the final stage Anquetil found himself on the receiving end of a hazing by the more experienced professionals.
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| Pélissier and his young charge |
After being forced to crash, lesser riders would have thrown in the towel, but this was not Anquetil’s (or Boucher’s) style. Anquetil lifted himself off the road, caught the bunch and claimed overall victory by more than two minutes.
Victory in the Tour de la Manche was clearly impressive, but its short time trial did not allow Anquetil to truly demonstrate his immense talent in the discipline. The 123.5 km time trial that ended the Normandy season provided this opportunity. Anquetil dominated the event, winning by nine minutes at an average speed of over forty two kilometres per hour. The Grand Prix des Nations was on the horizon.
Never one to doubt his own ability, Anquetil, the Norman teenager with only a handful of professional races under his belt, was already preparing to enter himself for the biggest time trial on the calendar. Then along came Francis Pélissier. ‘I’m going to make a kid win the Grand Prix des Nations’ proclaimed the former Paris-Bordeaux winner, and he put his money where his mouth was, offering Anquetil a two-month, 100000 francs, contract to race for his La Perle team.
Unfortunately this move did not go down well everywhere. The authoritarian streak within André Boucher could not bear to see his young protégé slip into the hands of the non-conformist and laissez-fairePélissier. Boucher threatened legal action, but Anquetil’s diplomacy belied his tender years. He convinced Boucher to help him in his preparation for the Grand Prix des Nations, much to the chagrin of his new team manager.
So only a month after his first professional race, Anquetil was getting ready for the most prestigious time trial event on the world calendar. Preparation was meticulous, with numerous derny sessions complimented by a trip to Versailles to ride the course, noting where to take care and where to really turn the screw on the most important parts of the route.
Sunday 27th September 1953, not a good day for bike racing. The morning was grey and the dark clouds filled with rain. Of more concern was the strong south southwesterly wind that blew across the Départment de la Seine-et-Oise. The wind has put paid to the hopes of many a time trialist, and even the best laid plans of Anquetil and Boucher could go awry on the roads of northern France.
The course was relatively simple, a triangle jutting out from southwest Paris. It was the wind that would present the main obstacle over the first two sides of the triangle, but would then push the riders back towards the finish at the Parc de Princes.
The difficulty on this last section was provided by the two short, sharp climbs out of the valleys carved by L’Yvette and La Mérantaise rivers, a tough finale for tired riders with well over 100 kilometres in their legs, but familiar topography for the young Anquetil with his upbringing a stones throw from the steep Seine valley in Rouen.
For the thousands of spectators that lined the route outside Paris the wind meant keeping one hand on their berets, but for the competitors, particularly those who could only call on the experience of a single professional race, the wind meant that careful early pacing was crucial.
Later in his career, Anquetil would gain a reputation for being calculating, an expert at pacing, but this is something learnt through experience. The start of the nineteen-year-old’s first race on the big stage was anything but calculated. Any strategy devised with Boucher was thrown out the window as Anquetil let nerves get the better of him.
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| At ease on the climbs |
Despite a puncture before he had even left Versailles, forcing him onto a heavier spare bike, Anquetil had an advantage of almost a minute at the first time check after twenty kilometres. The young man had put one minute twenty seconds into Jean Bobet, while Bob Maitland had lost almost three minutes.
At forty kilometres, the riders passed through the second time check at Houdan. Far from fading after his early efforts, Anquetil seemed comfortable, stretching his lead to put another minute into the second placed rider, Agostino Coletto of Italy.
Then came the southbound section towards Ablis, the toughest part of the course with its persistent headwind. After such a fast start it was here that many thought Anquetil would suffer. But again the Frenchman had extended his lead to an almost unassailable four minutes twenty eight seconds over Coletto, while those at the back of the field were already well over ten minutes down.
With the wind now sweeping him towards Paris, Anquetil, already exhibiting his low, elegant style, continued to look strong over the final leg of the course, easing his 68kg frame over the final climbs in contrast with the heavier, less talented men.
By the time he reached the Parc de Princes, Anquetil’s advantage had increased to almost seven minutes. Even more impressive was his time of three hours, thirty two minutes and twenty five seconds for the 141 kilometre event, only thirty-five seconds shy of the course record, set two years earlier in almost perfect conditions by Giro d’Italia and Tour de France winner Hugo Koblet.
Reaction to Anquetil’s stunning victory was divided, as usual, by the English Channel. ‘British Hopes Fail in Grand Prix des Nations’ was the headline in Cycling as the British magazine sifted around for explanations for Maitland and Joy’s fourteenth and fifteenth places. On Anquetil’s ride there was only a couple of paragraphs, but the magazine was clearly impressed with the Frenchman’s superiority:
‘He plugged into the wind with deceptive ease and took the steepest gradients of the Chevreuse climb in his stride, a great contrast to many of the riders, who made really heavy going of this climb.’
On the other side of the Channel L’Équipewas verging on hysterical. ‘SENSATIONNEL!’ screamed the headline, with a front-page editorial by Tour de France director Jacques Goddet, who wrote that Anquetil’s domination of the race was ‘one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of French cycling’.
But unlike many of the young French riders of recent years who have burst onto the scene with big performances in big races, Anquetil lived up to the hype, and consolidated his reputation in what remained of the 1953 season.
After his exploits on the roads of France, Anquetil was suddenly the name on everyone’s lips. An invite to the Grand Prix de Lugano, a seventy six kilometre time trial in Switzerland, should have given the young Frenchman a chance to do battle the legendary Italian duo of Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali, as well as 1950 Tour de France winner Ferdinand Kübler.
But fate would intervene. Briefly suspended by the Italian federation, Coppi was forced to withdraw, while Bartali crashed his car on the way to the race, sustaining injuries that would end his career. However Kübler remained, and Anquetil won, again in conditions hardly conducive to bike racing, covering the hilly course at an average of nearly thirty nine kilometres per hour, beating the Swiss favourite by more than two minutes.
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| Time trial position par excellence |
In October Anquetil was invited to the Trofeo Baracchi, a 103 kilometre two-up time trial from Bergamo to Milan, where he would finally meet Coppi.
Although the Italian would emerge victorious, this was largely due to being able to count on the support of his partner, newly crowned amateur world champion Ricardo Filippi, while Anquetil was accompanied by the rather average Antonin Rolland, who was unable to take a turn for the final thirty kilometres, and described his experience as ‘crucifixion’. But the result was immaterial. Maître Jacques was here to stay.
Before Louison Bobet’s victory in the 1953 Tour, the French had not won the race for five years, their longest dry spell since the era of Belgian domination either side of World War I. The 1950 and 1951 races had been won by the Swiss duo of Kübler and Koblet respectively, while Italian rivals Bartali and Coppi had claimed the other three editions to place France a solid third in the hierarchy of world cycling.
But by the end of 1953 a teenager from a village Rouen had proven that he was the equal, if not the better of all of these men. Had it not been for the conditions, Anquetil would have comprehensively beaten Koblet’s record in the Grand Prix des Nations, while Kübler had been defeated at Lugano. As for the Italians, Bartali’s career was all but over while Anquetil had stood shoulder to shoulder with Coppi at the Trofeo Baracchi.
The 1953 Grand Prix des Nations had propelled Jacques Anquetil to the pinnacle of world cycling. The few months between Anquetil’s triumph at the Parc des Princes in September and his first victory over Coppi at a track meet across town at the Velodrome d’Hiver in November signalled a wider change.
The Italian and Swiss challenge faded while France embarked on one of its great cycling eras. In the fifteen years from 1953, Frenchmen would win the Tour eleven times. In contrast the Italians would win two, while the Swiss? Well, we’re still waiting…
As for Anquetil, the 1953 Grand Prix des Nations was the genesis of one of the greatest careers in cycling. Of those eleven French Tour de France victories after 1953, Anquetil would contribute five, alongside two Giros and a Vuelta, becoming the first rider to win all three grand tours.
And of course he would go on to win the Grand Prix des Nations an astonishing nine times. ‘Monsieur Chrono’ they would call him in the years to come, but at an age where he barely merited the title ‘Monsieur’, Anquetil had already leapt from provincial strawberry picker to the top of the cycling world at a speed that could only be matched by the rate that the man himself traversed the Chevreuse in September 1953.
Student Cyclist 