One of the Tour’s eccentric loners with a phobia of germs
Although Roger Pingeon was a champion of the Tour de France, one of the most forbidding challenges in the whole of sport, his single victory, in 1967, was overshadowed by two things: the death of his Peugeot teammate, the flying Briton Tommy Simpson, on the grim, bare slopes of Mont Ventoux, and by his own public image as one of cycling’s eccentric loners.
Pingeon was a hypochondriac with a phobia of germs.
Every night during his winning Tour he bathed in a solution of salt and vinegar to fight off the bugs.
He was also obsessed with sleep, and would wear eyepads and block up keyholes and door-cracks with cotton wool to ensure total darkness.
He would be first to go to bed and the last to get up - meaning, he said, that over the course of a grand tour, ‘‘I would have one more night of sleep than everyone else’’.
On rest days, while his teammates went for training rides and then partied, he would stay in his hotel room, resting or having hot baths.
He was also riddled with anxiety and self-doubt, lacking faith in himself and his equipment.
He would abandon races because he thought he had no chance of winning, or because he could not stop himself brooding on what might happen if, say, he was on a fast descent and a previously undetected crack in his bike frame gave way, or he had a gear malfunction or some other mechanical problem.
Sore joints, bad weather - the sorts of afflictions that professional cyclists regard as inevitable, if tiresome - would for Pingeon, constitute grounds for abandonment.
All this made him less popular with the public than he might otherwise have been.
His eccentricities overshadowed his achievements, and he was seen as an oddball outsider, certainly not a team player.
Although he had been on the verge of quitting the sport, thanks to the bleakness of his outlook, he was in great form going into the 1967 Tour.
And beset though he was by anxieties and neuroses, Pingeon was a savvy racer.
The fifth stage of the Tour went into Belgium, and he calculated correctly that the Belgians in the field would want to make a good showing, so he attached himself to a breakaway group who planned to make a splash in their home country.
Then, as they slowed down at a feeding station to grab their musettes, or food bags, he suddenly accelerated and left them behind.
It was not an illegal move, but it certainly went against the spirit of the race - and it gave him the leader’s yellow jersey.
He surrendered the maillot jaune briefly in the mountains before regaining it and wearing it to Paris - where, in triumph, he thanked his wife. ‘‘I owe it all to Dany,’’ he said. ‘‘I dedicate it to her.’’ L’Equipe gave him his due - and Dany hers: ‘‘He’s added panache to his athleticism and character. He fought to the end, even when victory was already his . . . On his own it might never have happened; Pingeon was on the verge of quitting the sport. Fortunately, he had his wife at his side with the words he needed to encourage him and to rekindle his ambition. She was watching from the VIP stand, radiant with joy in her summer dress . . . She never lost confidence in him.’’
The fourth of five brothers, Roger Pingeon was raised on a farm near the village of HautevilleLompnes in the Jura mountains in eastern France.
He trained as a plumber, leading to his later nickname, ‘‘le plombier-zingueur’’ - ‘‘the plumber-pipefitter’’. (He had other nicknames too: ‘‘le grand echassier’’ - ‘‘the great wader’’, thanks to his long, thin legs - and he eventually became known as ‘‘Pin-pin’’, alongside ‘‘Pou-pou’’, his team-mate, the great Raymond Poulidor.)
His first efforts to secure a racing licence foundered when a cardiac arrhythmia was found.
Like the first doctor, a second refused to sign a medical certificate, but Pingeon eventually found one who would.
His early progress with a regional team was interrupted by military service, and he returned to find the team had folded.
He went back to plumbing and married Dany, with whom he went on to have two children.
But he kept riding, and took a three-month sabbatical from his pipes to race as a freelance.
His ploy worked; he won a professional contract with the Peugeot team, albeit on what he called a ‘‘misery wage’’.
If he had any illusions about how tough he needed to be in a sport that was often brutal and unforgiving, they vanished in his first big outing, the 1965 Midi Libre stage race.
Out in the lead after a couple of days, he found his own team working against him; he was not a big enough name for them, and he lost out to a team-mate who had a higher profile, having won the year before.
Still, he was selected for that year’s Tour de France and finished a highly creditable 12th, one journalist describing him as ‘‘the revelation’’ of the race.
He might have hoped to become team leader, but for the arrival at Peugeot of the man who would become the greatest cyclist in history - Eddy Merckx.
The two became rivals as much as team-mates, and after a series of misfortunes in the 1966 Paris-Nice stage race, Pingeon quit in despair.
‘‘It’s settled, I’ll never ride a bike again,’’ he told a reporter.
‘‘Ever since last year cycling doesn’t give back to me what I put in. In the end, I’m probably just not cut out for this job.’’
He found it in himself to carry on, however, finishing eighth in that year’s Tour de France.
After his victory in 1967, he finished fifth in the 1968 Tour, its first Dutch winner, Jan Janssen, while in 1969 he was runner-up behind Merckx, as one of the few able to live with ‘‘the Cannibal’’.
He won the Vuelta a Espana thanks to his familiar tactic of winning a breakaway stage early on, then clinging on for victory, which he managed virtually single-handedly. In September 1969, two months after the first of Merckx’s five Tour de France victories, the pair went for a night out with an older Tour legend, Jacques Anquetil.
The evening started with champagne and continued at a restaurant, where the pair, watched by Pingeon, had a whiskydrinking contest, won by the younger man. Anquetil, the worse for wear, was escorted back to his hotel.
Pingeon was then astonished to see Merckx feast on soup, chicken and steak.
‘‘The Cannibal’s’’ appetite for food matched his hunger for winning.
Pingeon retired in 1974, working at various jobs, including florist and television commentator.
He divorced Dany, marrying twice more, and settled back in the Jura region.
After Ferdinand Kubler in December and Roger Walkowiak in February, he was the third Tour de France champion to die in recent months; 23 survive, led by the 1959 winner, 88-year-old Federico Bahamontes.