THE LAST OF THE BARONS
Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle was the archetypal French pro, and his 19-yearlong career overlapped those of Merckx, Hinault and Indurain. Procycling looks at the life and career of one of cycling’s ultimate team players
On Wednesday July 18 1990, the Tour de France was headed from Lourdes to Pau over two giant Pyrenean cols, the Aubisque and Marie-Blanque, in sweltering heat. The previous day, on the final summit finish of the race at Luz Ardiden, defending champion Greg LeMond had pushed the upstart Italian Claudio Chiappucci to the limit, closing to just five seconds and making it virtually certain he would take the yellow jersey and the Tour in four days’ time when the race tackled its final time trial.
With 70km between the summit of the Marie-Blanque and the stage finish in Pau, it looked like a day for the break, not for GC action, and it was expected the main men would mark each other. LeMond’s Z team didn’t have to control the race, exactly, but they had to make sure Chiappucci didn’t gain any time. Simultaneously, they had to mark the ONCE team, who were a threat in the team prize. As a result, to push riders forward, and keep tabs on ONCE, they placed two riders in the early move: the Norwegian Atle Kvålsvoll, and local boy Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, the team’s road captain.
Either might, on paper, have a chance of winning the stage later that day, but it didn’t pan out that way. A kilometre from the top of the Marie-Blanque, LeMond punctured. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been an issue. But no help was in sight. Robert Millar had returned home with illness, Duclos and Kvålsvoll were five minutes up the road and the others had worked their socks off the day before and had been dropped. Worse, the peloton had split behind the select front group that included LeMond and Chiappucci, so the Z team car was stuck well over a minute behind.
The 90-second wait seemed like a lifetime to LeMond. Chiappucci wasn’t going to hang around, and it felt as if the Tour itself could be lost, just when it seemed order had finally been imposed. The team car, driven by Roger Legeay, and two team-mates, Jerôme Simon and Eric Boyer, all turned up at the same time. But even then, as sometimes happens in the heat of the situation, the replacement wheel didn’t cooperate, and there was a further delay while it was adjusted.
As LeMond threw himself into a fast descent (“We didn’t touch the brakes very often,” said Boyer, who struggled to hold his leader), the two Z riders in the
break were pulled to a stop in the village of Lurbe-SaintChristau, where the course levelled out. LeMond now had four team-mates at his side, but it still took around 20km to close the gap, because Chiappucci and his four Carrera team-mates were riding hard with the help of Pedro Delgado’s Banesto team. It provoked furious debate that evening, by the standards of the time.
The Tour was saved, but Duclos-Lassalle had been deprived of the chance of a lifetime: with a teammate to assist him, he would have stood a decent chance of winning in Pau that afternoon. He started the Tour 13 times during his career, taking the red intermediate sprints jersey, sponsored by Catch, in 1987, but never took a stage. “It really struck me,” Legeay recalled. “It was a golden chance, and it was in Pau, his town. But there was never any issue with him. He was a perfect road captain, a model team-mate.”
However, there are times in cycling when what goes around comes around, even if it takes a while. On April 12, 1992, ‘Gibus’ was one of a number of riders from the Z team to figure in the front group as Paris-Roubaix whipped up to its climax on a day that was as dull and chilly as that day in Pau had been bright and boiling. And when the 37-year-old escaped in the final 50 kilometres, LeMond – who described the classic as one of three races that truly enticed him, along with the Tour and the Worlds – was prominent when it came to slowing down the counter-attacks as Duclos rode to a solo victory from the German powerhouse Olaf Ludwig.
That win was an emotional one for France, which was just beginning the lean times as a cycling nation that, brief flashes of glory aside, would last until the era of Julian Alaphilippe. Classics wins were becoming relatively rare, and the country’s best days in stage racing had passed with the decline of Laurent Fignon. There was an added edge in the fact that Duclos had been chasing Paris-Roubaix for almost his entire career - his triumph came at the 15th attempt.
Duclos was 37 and one of the last of a dying breed: riders whose careers had overlapped with those of both Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault. Like Hinault, he was the product of a rural upbringing, but in France’s south west, where his father drove a delivery van for a wine-maker, and his mother raised ducks and chicken to sell in the local market. He was one of a family of five, and like chez Hinault the youngsters were expected to work hard and stay quiet.
In 1977, when Duclos turned professional, Merckx was no longer at his best, but was still influential. So too were the Peugeot team, home of double Tour winner Bernard Thévenet and a band of ‘barons’ such as JeanPierre Danguillaume and the sprinter Jacques Esclassan and, later, Jacques Bossis. The bikes were white with centre-pull brakes and all-French kit; the jerseys were designed with the famous black and white chequerboard. At dinner the ‘barons’ had a table to themselves; in races riders like Duclos were expected to push them up the hills.
Duclos made a mediocre start to his career, and initially thought of going back to his old job as a garage mechanic in Pau. “You’d never have had him down as a Paris-Roubaix winner,” said another of the ‘barons’, the Breton Patrick Béon, who rode for Peugeot in the mid1970s. Duclos was also ripped off by his manager, the late Daniel Dousset. ‘Mr 10 per cent’ had told Tom Simpson to raise his game the night before he died on Mont Ventoux, and now he was taking a cut from criteriums which Duclos never actually rode or got paid for.
To make his mark, Duclos took a different path to the average French pro. Peugeot had always had a strong classics tradition; their manager Maurice De Muer was a Nordiste, who wanted his
Duclos was famously tough. In 1983, he lost part of his hand in a shooting accident, then had the stitches out without anaesthetic
riders to shine in Paris-Roubaix and the Four Days of Dunkirk. Riders who underperformed would be sent to race the Belgian kermesses, frequently at their own expense. Some saw it as a punishment, but Duclos revelled in it. “He was big and strong and he liked riding in the cold and wet,” recalled Legeay, who was DuclosLassalle’s personal domestique and would later become the team’s DS in the mid-1980s until its final disbandment in 2008, as Crédit Agricole.
Sean Yates – no shrinking violet himself – recalls that when he arrived at Peugeot as a new professional in 1982, Duclos-Lassalle was already established as one of the patrons of the team, along with the former French champion Bossis. “He was one of those beasts. He just had massive santé,” says Yates. The French word santé translates literally as ‘health’, but in cycling terms it means resilience: being able to race hard, train hard and recuperate, without getting ill. Duclos-Lassalle had ‘santé’; so did Yates.
“The macho image was everything,” continues the British rider. “Every year, when we did the team photos, he and Bossis simply had to be on the big ring no matter how slow were riding along, or how steep the hill was that we were riding up. He wasn’t Hinault, but he wasn’t much further down the pecking order. I can imagine him dishing out the marching orders at criteriums in the way that Jan Raas did in Holland.”
It wasn’t mere bravado. Duclos was one of the toughest members of the peloton. In 1983, he famously lost part of his hand in a shooting accident, then had the stitches out without anaesthetic. In racing terms he was at his best when the weather was at its worst. His victory in the 1980 Paris-Nice surprised many, because he wasn’t one of the best climbers, but it came in the midst of horrendous wintry conditions, which hit several stages and left the race with only 58 finishers.
Toughest of all was the fourth stage into SaintÉtienne, in the chilly foothills of the eastern Massif Central, where the bulk of the field quit, where Bernard Hinault lost 45 minutes, and all the riders had to make their way through black ice and snow. Duclos escaped with Pierre Bazzo 75km from the finish. “A crazy day,” recalled Bossis. “I finished with snow all over my arms.” Gilbert, on the other hand, was smiling, according to Bossis. The break to Saint-Étienne laid the foundations for the overall win, 3:02 ahead of Swiss Stephan Mutter.
1980 turned out to be Duclos-Lassalle’s breakthrough year. He took a shock second place to Francesco Moser in Paris-Roubaix, seventh in the Tour of Flanders and eighth in Amstel Gold. All of which was overshadowed by the constant dramas around Hinault – his Giro win, his knee injury, his world title. In 1981, he finished second in a legendary Omloop Het Volk, run off in heavy rain, with 90 retirements. By now, he had caught the eye of Peter Post, who wanted to hire him at TI-Raleigh, but Peugeot matched the offer.
Cyrille Guimard, the manager at Renault-Elf, also wanted Duclos. ‘Napoléon’ considered him to be
among the strongest half-dozen riders he’d ever seen, and the two were kindred spirits in terms of their assertive personalities, but Gibus remained with Peugeot, where he pulled strings to get Legeay appointed manager, and where he would remain through the team’s later incarnations as Z and Gan. In total he would ride 19 seasons with the same team.
Through the 1980s the successes slowly came in, most notably one of the last editions of Bordeaux-Paris in 1983, for which he put in 450km training rides behind a motorbike.
Paris-Roubaix continued to obsess him, however; he would talk about it all year, according to Legeay. He had been defeated in a Tour de France stage on the Roubaix velodrome in 1981 when his foot came out of the toeclip in the sprint, and in the 1983 edition of the classic he let a golden opportunity slip when he and Moser allowed Hennie Kuiper to sneak away on the cobbles at Carrefour de l’Arbre, with neither willing to chase. Another second place was the upshot.
By the early 90s, Duclos formed the centrepiece of Z’s assault on Roubaix, and Legeay built a strong team around him and back-up leader LeMond, with support riders like Jean-Claude Colotti, Philippe Casado and Eddy Seigneur. “We did everything right – the recons, the kit, the winter tyres, the Rockshox forks. It was a huge effort,” recalled the manager. The 1992 win was relatively seamless, the 1993 victory anything but.
The Italian Franco Ballerini arrived at the start of that year’s race in astonishing form, having sailed through the early classics, and watched his GB-MG team mates Johan Museeuw and Mario Cipollini win, respectively, the Tour of Flanders and Gent-Welvelgem. After their success, it was his turn at Roubaix.
In an interview in 2001, Ballerini said he regretted his team’s total focus on him at the race - it made him forget to pay sufficient attention to the competition. “I couldn’t feel the efforts I was making on the pavé, and only Duclos was able to follow me. I could feel he was suffering a thousand deaths but I didn’t try to drop him because I felt so confident in my own strength.”
Duclos had problems throughout the early part of the race, crashing and puncturing at Troisvilles, and chasing with LeMond and Casado throughout the early sections. He missed a key split in the Arenberg Forest, getting across in extremis with Edwig Van Hooydonck, but latched onto Ballerini when he escaped 30km from the finish. Later Duclos said, “I could see myself in him. He was riding as stupidly as I had done 10 years earlier.” Ballerini asked him to take a turn, but the Frenchman
insisted he was done in; Patrick
Lefevere, the team manager in the GB car, knew better, and was aware that Duclos was a strong track rider, hardened from the winter six-days. He told his rider to drop the Frenchman, but Ballerini believed his rival was cooked.
“I didn’t know that he was a confident track rider and was betting on being able to pull something out on the velodrome. In the final straight we were elbow to elbow and we threw our bikes for the line at the same moment, but just afterwards I was in front of him. So I was sure I had won. The photo finish gave it to him, and I thought I would never manage to win the race ever. I was too confident. I looked at my pulse monitor afterwards.
In the sprint, my heart was going at 145bpm, so clearly I’d relaxed. I’d raced like a junior.”
The speaker announced Ballerini as the winner; the photo finish overturned the verdict, guaranteeing Gibus his place in history. He rode on for a couple more years, suffering appalling luck in the 1994 Roubaix, and retiring in September 1995 at the age of 41. His last race was the GP d’Isbergues, where he escaped after 30 kilometres with two riders from the Lotto team, who worked him over at the finish. He finished second, but he was given the most combative rider prize. That was appropriate as he’d received combatif awards in so many races over the years that at times it seemed like the prizes might as well have been renamed the Best Duclos Award.
In Paris-Roubaix most years, the riders come through the Trouée d’Arenberg and turn left, down the road leading to the village of Wallers. They turn right off this road, and head down a back lane that goes nowhere in particular. You bounce over a level crossing and the tarmac turns into cobbles. They aren’t the worst kind, having been restored a few years ago, when the Tour de
France came down this section in the other direction. Midway through the section is what used to be a railway bridge, with brick footings in an embankment showing where the rails used to be carried over the road. On ParisRoubaix days, the old embankments make a perfect vantage point to watch the action on a section that – unlike most in the race – has been used since the 1970s. Look carefully an hour and 12 minutes into Jørgen Leth’s film of the 1976 race A Sunday in Hell, and you can spot the bridge, where the Dane had a fixed camera set up to film Merckx and De Vlaeminck.
The brick walls are daubed with vast plaques of white paint: Pont Gibus, Gibus 92, 93. It’s quite something for a rider to have a section of cobbles named after him, but then, French wins in Paris-Roubaix are like hen’s teeth – since the Second World War only five others have managed it - and to find a Frenchman who won two years running, you have to go back to Octave Lapize in the heroic era. It’s a fitting tribute to the last hardman of French cycling.