Cycle of Defeat – An Irishman’s Diary on 30 years of French people not winning the Tour de France

Thirty years ago this week, touring Europe on that rite of passage, the InterRail trip, myself and some friends arrived in St Etienne on a day the Tour de France was also visiting.

So, equipped with sun cream and a supply of supermarket beer, we took up position at a good vantage point and waited for the drama. Unfortunately, the stage in question was a time trial, on the flat, and the drama proved as tepid as the beer soon became.

Every two or three minutes, a blur would zip past: we recognised one blur as Stephen Roche, another as Martin Early (Seán Kelly was out injured).

But before you could clear your throat to cheer, they were gone. And anyway, the Irish were well down on G.C. (as we had learned to call “general classification” in the mid-1980s, when Ireland acquired overnight fluency in bike jargon) that year,

Affable

The best thing about the occasion is that we met the affable Roche afterwards and got a picture. This became useful a year later, as a name-dropping accessory, after he joined Eddy Merckx on which is still a shortlist of only two men ever to win cycling’s “Triple Crown” – the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and the world championships.

The other significance of 1986 was that it started an extraordinary sequence in which French cyclists would fail to win their own event. Thirty end-of-race yellow jerseys have since gone elsewhere.

And although there are few other certainties this year, it will be 31 by the end of July. There is no obvious prospect of a French victory again soon.

The big question for most of the 1986 race was whether the last local winner, Bernard Hinault, would make way for his young American team-mate, Greg LeMond, who had helped him to a fifth title the year before.

Hinault had promised to return the compliment in 1986, but treachery is a cycling tradition.

And throughout the race, the veteran Frenchman looked intent on reneging, until finally he settled for second, behind LeMond, unwittingly inaugurating the era of decline.

Until recently, France could at least console itself with Britain’s failure to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon, an even more epic drought. Another excuse, especially during the years of Lance Armstrong’s chemically assisted domination, was that in a drug-tainted sport, maybe the French themselves were unusually clean.

But Armstong and his seven Tour titles have since been wiped from the record, and somehow the host country is still nowhere near challenging again.

In the meantime, the aforementioned Hinault has been merciless. His compatriots don’t win, he says, because they don’t train enough.

Success in the race doesn't mean as much as it used to, clearly – not just for the country as a whole but also for the thousand little countries that comprise it. This may not be all bad. In his great book, The Discovery of France, Graham Robb has a story from the early years of cycling – also set in St Etienne – illustrating how intense local rivalries used to be.

“On the second stage of the 1904 Tour, at three o’clock in the morning, ‘the Little Chimney Sweep’, ‘the Butcher of Sens’ (Lucien Pothier), ‘the Red Devil’ (Giovanni Gerbi), and a rider known only by his real name (Antoine Faure) reached the summit of the Col de la République [...]

“A mob was waiting in the forest. Faure, the local boy, was cheered on his way while the others were beaten up. The Italian Gerbi later retired from the race with broken fingers. On the next stage, at Nîmes, a riot broke out because the local favourite, Ferdinand Payan, had been disqualified for riding in the slipstream of a car. All along the route, nails and broken bottles were strewn on the road, drinks were spiked, frames were sawn through and hubs quietly unscrewed at night.”

In other words, the French really cared about cycling back then. And they still cared, if less passionately, for decades after. But between St Etienne 1904 and 1986, somewhere, the romance dulled.

Oh well. While reminiscing about my InterRail trip, and already feeling old, I realised that Stephen Roche’s sister Maria (Martin by marriage) must have been heavily pregnant that month.

Not that I ever met her. I just know from records that her son Daniel was born in August 1986. He grew up to be a cyclist. And as I write this, he is prominent among those vying to extend France’s epic losing streak by yet another year.