In Copenhagen, on this last Sunday of September, cycling assigns the rainbow jersey that last year in Melbourne was worn by the Norwegian Hushvod, a jersey that in the history of the competition also rewarded illustrious unknowns by disappointing super-champions of the caliber of Bartali, Anquetil or Indurain . Championship, the Danish one, which has every appearance of being solved with a sprint sprinter (Freire, Cavendish and Farrar above all), unless a rouleur capable of formidable final progressions, such as Gilbert or Hushvod himself, doesn't shoot him away the inertia of a race whose only difficulties are the overpasses. There is no Giro and Tour winner at the start. There are not in particular Alberto Contador and Cadel Evans. Partly due to a calendar that now places it at the end of the season, when the muscles are tired and worn out, what was the most prestigious race of the year has long been losing its charm if not its importance. The path chosen by the organizers, flat as a pool table, does not help to relaunch it. Other times when the world championship race was, with the Tour, the sporting event of the summer that filled newspapers, radio and TV. Almost all the champions who have made the history of cycling have won and honored it, from Coppi to Louison Bobet, from Rik Van Looy to Merckx, from Hinault to Armstrong. Even Jacques Anquetil, the strongest time trialist of all time, went one step away from conquering it in 1966. He finished only second beaten by the German Altig. It was one of the few disappointments in a career that places Anquetil among the greatest riders ever to appear on the world's roads, winner of five Tours of France and two Tours of Italy, the first to triumph in the same year in the Tour, Giro and Vuelta. A champion of the two-wheeled circus who was in a hurry to win everything as if he foresaw that life would grant him everything but not the time to grow old. He died at just 53 killed by cancer.
Rebel in life and in racing, perfect in style and in pedaling, formidable long distance rider so much as to beat Coppi's hour record, covering 1956 kilometers and 46 meters at Vigorelli in 151: the French never loved him to the end over the years gold in which he was the absolute master of the Tour and scrambled Raymond Poulidor with ridiculous ease, the eternal second but first in the hearts of fans across the Alps. Suddenly, however, everyone was conquered by Jacquot, when by then more than thirty years old he was capable of a unique feat that in France they called "le truc de legende", a feat that smacks of legend in a weekend at the end of May 1965: win the Dauphiné criterium which finished on Saturday, sleep just one hour to be on time the following day, Sunday 30, at the start of the Bordeaux-Paris and triumph in what was the most exhausting cycling marathon in front of "colleagues" of the force by Stablinski and Simpson. He himself recognized that surely there would be riders capable of winning five or more Tour de France in the future, but no one would ever be able to repeat that "fantastic ride": 1555 km in 7 stages of the Dauphiné with the addition of another 567 km of the Bordeaux-Paris covered in over 15 hours. And he was a good prophet.
He was never afraid to expose himself on doping. In an interview with “L'Equipe” he said: “You have to be imbeciles or hypocrites to believe that a professional cyclist who runs 235 days a year can do it without stimulants”. Sure and bold enough to be able to renounce the homologation of his second hour record (1967) for refusing to undergo the first anti-doping controls, For him they were a real violation of private life. General De Gaulle even sided with him. Criticized for having awarded him the Legion of Honor in 1966 despite the sentences on doping, De Gaulle had to reply: “What doping? I only know that Anquetil has honored France by making the Marseillaise resonate around the world”. His duels with Poulidor divided France in the 2004s as the rivalry between Coppi and Bartali divided Italy in the previous two decades. But Anquetil in secular France, unlike Coppi in bigoted Italy of the 17s, was never demonized for his own turbulent and shocking private life, the details of which only fully came to light after the champion's death. In 15, exactly 1958 years after his death, a shocking book signed by his daughter Sophie came out, which removed every veil from the private life of the champion and his harem. “I was a child with two mothers… one of them was the daughter of the other, and for 1969 years my two mothers lived under the same roof,” wrote Sophie. An incredible family story with the "Sultan" Jacques at the center. A story worthy of the most thorny plots of The Beautiful, which began in XNUMX when Anquetil married Janine Lepetit (his doctor's ex-wife), who already had two children, Alain and Annie. In XNUMX, after retiring from racing, Jacques wanted a child but Janine was unable to give it to him: so there was a secret agreement between wife and husband, Annie (Janine's daughter) agreed to become Jacques' "favourite" and was born Sophie. Years later another entanglement, when Jacques wanted Dominique (wife of Janine's other son) as her lover and had Christopher from her. A sentimental tourbillon, lived for years in the luxury and silence of his castle in the French countryside, which was truncated only by the appearance of a fatal illness, perhaps originating from the many manipulations Anquetil subjected his body as an athlete. But even in the painful and gloomy days that preceded his death, he never wanted to abandon his style: and to Poulidor, his lifelong rival, who had gone to see him in the hospital, Anquetil said in his last remaining voice: " You see Raymond, this time too you have to finish second".
Jacques died on November 18, 1987. He was born on January 8, 1934 near Rouen. The last time he appeared in public, already with signs of the disease, was a few months earlier, in July, to comment on TV on Stephen Roche's triumphant Tour, the Irishman who in that season was the first to win the Giro together. Tour and World. A record that this year too is absolutely safe from any attack, regardless of today's winner in the world championship race in Copenhagen.
Roche was not the first. Monsieur Merckx had already done so.