DEVOURING THE CANNIBAL
On interviewing Bernard Thévenet for the first time, the obligatory question is: was the 1975 Tour de France, when he became the first rider to defeat Eddy Merckx in a grand tour since 1967, the win he cherishes the most?
The answer isn’t the expected one. It is a firm, decisive ‘ Non’. “It’s bizarre,” he tells Procycling, “that the one I won in 1975 is the one people remember. My most beautiful win was the Tour in 1977, with just a 48 seconds advantage after a truly epic battle.”
It’s freezing cold outside the day we meet him and not much warmer indoors. Sitting in a black overcoat at the back of a French café, Thévenet, now in his early sixties, does not draw much attention, or seem keen to do so. Considering he’s a double Tour de France winner and a longstanding race commentator on French TV, few people seem to recognise him.
But that sums up Thévenet. Unlike the late Laurent Fignon or Bernard Hinault, he was never one of the more outspoken of cycling stars. But even as he now concentrates more on his work as director of the Critérium du Dauphiné, for millions of French fans he remains a respected voice of authority on the sport – and not just because of his years of work on the Tour for French state TV, the race’s official broadcaster.
The Frenchman’s defeat of Merckx in 1975 was, and remains, a watershed – the end of the most crushing domination of the sport by a single rider. Thanks to his ferociously clear memory, Thévenet’s anecdotes transport us back to an era of toeclips, flares, sideburns and the cheesiest of cheesy French pop music, when Richard Clayderman and Ottawan blared out of the nation’s transistor radios.
Thévenet says the moment he realised that Merckx The Invincible was beatable came in the 1975 Dauphiné Libéré. Thévenet won and not only did Merckx not win, he was 10th.
“It was a key moment,” he says, “because prior to that, Merckx was something of a Martian – he wasn’t like the rest
of us. He’d had to come to the Dauphiné, which he hadn’t wanted to race, rather than do the Giro as he had wished, because he was sick. The fact that he had to do that, then seeing him unable to control the racing as he wanted, well… we weren’t as scared of him as we had been before. We thought we might have a little chance of doing something. It wasn’t so much the result of the Dauphiné as what I learned.”
The second key element for defeating Merckx prior to the Tour itself was, “changing our sports director at Peugeot. Previously we’d had Gaston Plaud who hadn’t had a clue about racing and didn’t give us any advice. With our new director, [ the vastly experienced Maurice De Muer] we learnt how to take races by the scruff of the neck and turn them to our advantage.”
That was particularly true in the Tour, where he credits De Muer for coming up with race-winning tactics. “He told me to repeat what I had done at the Dauphiné and, above all, to reach the Pyrenees less than three minutes behind Merckx. He said he knew I could get that back on the summit finishes.”
It was the first time Thévenet had done that kind of mathematical calculation and it inspired him not to lose any ground. “I hung on for dear life to the peloton in the first eight days racing,” he says. It was that tenacity that would prove vital.
Looking back, he feels that Merckx’s lack of one particular team-mate had an important effect. Double Liège- Bastogne- Liège winner Jos Bruyère had crashed out that spring and broken his leg in kilometres from the finish, where Thévenet finally overhauled Merckx and both the stage and yellow jersey ended up in the Frenchman’s clutches?
None of these, says Thévenet. “I wanted to finish him off completely and the only way to be sure he was finished was by pushing him beyond three minutes. I had a 58- second advantage at Pra- Loup, which against Merckx was not enough. I had to go for it on the Izoard, which brought my total advantage to over three minutes. Psychologically, that’s a barrier for most riders. It’s no longer ‘just a couple of minutes’ if you want to attack. There’s something in your head which tells you three minutes is too much to get back.”
Thévenet clearly needed the comfort of that three-minute buffer; the night after he had taken the yellow jersey, he dreamed of Merckx sneaking into his hotel room to steal it back.
“I had been so crushed by the idea of Merckx being in yellow so often that I would spend the whole day of racing wondering when he was going to attack. Mentally, that just crushes you. So that one night at the Tour, I woke up because I needed a pee but I checked the yellow jersey was still on the chair in the room. Eddy was torturing my soul!”
For those who didn’t witness the events at the time, it’s hard to appreciate the scale of Thévenet’s achievement. “Every time before 1975 that we were together in a race and Eddy had a setback, something had always managed to save him. José Manuel Fuente had managed to do that in the 1972 Giro, beating him early on at the Blockhaus. But then Eddy came round and blew him away. We were constantly asking ourselves how on Earth we could beat him.”
But curiously, once Thévenet had actually ‘devoured’ the Cannibal, the racing in the Tour was somewhat flat. Merckx did not take part in the ’76 Tour, Thévenet was in poor form and neither Lucien Van Impe nor Joop Zoetemelk, the two other most consistent Tour contenders in the previous years, made a decisive move until late on in the race.
“My form was good, I placed third in the prologue, my best I ever did in the Tour,” Thevenet recalls, “I had won the Dauphiné 15 days before and I was determined to do as well as I had the previous year. But after four days, I crashed and it never came back together again. I lost four minutes in a time trial – I still don’t know why. On the same climb that I’d gained 50 seconds on Merckx the year before, I lost 17 minutes.” He finally abandoned on stage 19.
“I had 58 seconds advantage over Merckx at Pra-Loup, which against Merckx was not enough. I had to go for it on the Izoard, which brought my total advantage to over three minutes”
the Catalan Week. Thévenet thinks his absence had a significant knock- on effect, “as much mentally as physically. Jos had always been there for Eddy in the hardest moments, and his absence must have been a blow.”
WEARING YELLOW
If Thévenet knows what played in his favour before he triumphed, there’s still much discussion as to where Merckx was truly defeated in the 1975 Tour. Was it at the summit finish of Pla- d’Adet on stage 11, where Merckx miscalculated by trying to follow earlier attacker Joop Zoetemelk but lost 55 seconds to Thévenet when the Frenchman counter- attacked? Or was it stage 14 and the Puy- deDôme, when Merckx received a punch in the kidneys from a spectator and Thévenet closed the gap to less than a minute overall? Or perhaps the famous moment on the Pra- Loup climb on stage 15, four
“That night at the Tour,
I woke up because I needed a pee but I checked the yellow jersey was still on the chair in the room. Eddy was torturing my soul!”
Thévenet’s second triumphant Tour in 1977 – the one he truly cherishes – is one of the more neglected in the race’s history, probably because it falls between two eras dominated by giants of the sport. Merckx was still lying second as the race reached the Alps but was a shadow of his former self, while Bernard Hinault was a year away from his first, spectacular, victory. On top of that, a spate of positive dope tests overshadowed the final result. Yet as Thévenet’s winning margin of 48 seconds would suggest – the smallest since the Tour of 1968 – it was still a very hard fought race. Thévenet highlights the crunch moment as stage 17 to L’Alpe d’Huez. The Frenchman had taken the lead at a time trial in Morzine while Merckx, previously just 25 seconds behind, had cracked on the previous stage, a fairly straightforward run across the lower Alps. But prior to the hardest mountain stage featuring the Madeleine, Glandon and Alpe d’Huez, there were still five riders behind Thévenet at less than two minutes. That was well below Thévenet’s psychological three-minute ‘ time barrier’ and Didi Thurau, Germany’s top rider, was a mere 11 seconds behind. Thévenet needed to pull off a similar performance to his lone assault of the Izoard but he faced two formidable rivals: 1976 winner Van Impe and Dutchman Hennie Kuiper.
Van Impe went for it first, on the Glandon, dropping the group of favourites with his third
attack. Zoetemelk and Kuiper promptly sat on Thévenet’s back wheel, refusing to work as they tried to chase down Van Impe. “I tried to drop them as well on the top of the Glandon but I couldn’t shake them off,” Thévenet recalls. “They reached me again on the descent so I had to do all the chasing myself, with those two on my wheel, right the way to the foot of the Alpe d’Huez.”
By this point, Van Impe’s advantage had stretched to 2: 45 and the yellow jersey, at least provisionally, was in his grasp. “I had a problem with Alpe d’Huez.
“I couldn’t shake them off. They reached me again on the descent so I had to do all the chasing myself, with those two on my wheel, right the way to the foot of the Alpe d’Huez”
It wasn’t a climb I particularly liked because I never knew how to tackle the lower slopes. I managed to drop Zoetemelk and Kuiper and my only hope was that Van Impe, after such an unusually long break for him, would finally end up cracking.”
In the space of the next few minutes, the race changed radically when a weakening Van Impe was hit by a car from the race caravan. Flung off the road by the impact, even though he carried on, the Belgian’s gutsy longdistance challenge was over. But by that point, even as Thévenet was closing the gap, Kuiper moved back ahead of the Frenchman and became his new main challenger. “It ended up being a one- to- one duel between me and Kuiper and it was very close.” So close, in fact, that while Kuiper took the stage win and Thévenet finished second, 41 seconds later, overall his advantage was a miniscule eight seconds.
The racing had been so intense that day, meanwhile, that no less than 30 riders finished outside the time limit or abandoned, leaving the Tour peloton strength at a very low 56.
“I had driven myself into the ground at Alpe d’Huez to keep the lead because I really wanted to start the last big time trial [ at Dijon] in yellow so I could have time references on Kuiper,” Thévenet recalls.
“I knew that Kuiper would try to go hard from the gun, so I warned De Muer that I would do the opposite, maybe lose five or six seconds and then try to claw it back towards the end. And that’s basically what happened. Kuiper took some time on me and then little by little, I regained ground.”
By the end of the time trial, Thévenet had pushed his advantage out by another 28 seconds over Kuiper, “which only made for 36 seconds in total. But strangely enough, I was lot more relaxed about that advanatge than with three-minute lead I’d had over Merckx!”
Thévenet maintained his small advantage all the way to Paris but having triumphed at two exceptionally difficult Tours, his career then rapidly faded. He abandoned the ’78 Tour on the Col du Tourmalet then quit the Peugeot team at the end of the following season. Neither racing the Giro for the first time in 1979, or joining two smaller teams – Spanish outfit Teka in 1980 and small French squad Wolber in 1981 – reversed his relentless downward trend. By 1982, he had quit. “I got scared of descending and was never in the mix after that,” he says. “It was finally time to go.”
“Merckx was able to shine in every speciality, he always wanted to win. In a sprint, Hinault would keep something back for the next stage but Merckx was always up there”
Results apart, Thévenet’s career is interesting because it spans two eras – that of Merckx and Hinault. How would he compare the two champions?
“Merckx was able to shine in every speciality, he always wanted to win. In a sprint, Hinault would keep something back for the next stage but Merckx was always up there. What was really impressive about Merckx was how hungry he was to win.”
He also was unfortunate enough to have to fight a Merckx- Hinault alliance, in the 1977 Dauphiné. “I lost that race because Eddy worked for Hinault in return for a favour Bernard had done him in a criterium,” he recalls with a smile. “I told Eddy I was all for returning favours, but maybe not in such a big a race as the Dauphiné.”
As always, French cycling continues to search for a new champion to replace Fignon, Hinault and Thévenet. From the crop of modern riders, Thévenet tips Thibaut Pinot, FDJ’s young star, as the most likely rider to do so. “Top-10 and winning a mountain stage in his first Tour, that’s something extraordinary,” he notes.
It is typical of Thévenet’s modesty not to note that he too won a mountain stage in his first Tour in 1970, which was also in his first year as a pro. But if – and it is a big if – Pinot ever matches his success in terms of results, Thévenet’s defeat of Merckx is one highlight that will forever be his and his alone. Not even Thévenet seeing his second Tour win, rather than 1975, as his most beautiful victory can change that.