Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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Graham Jones recalls that it wasn’t just the stage to Lille from Liège that made the opening week of the 1980 Tour de France so brutal. ‘Look back at the distances,’ he says, ‘260, 280km stages, and the weather was shit the whole Tour. I think it rained fifteen, sixteen days.

‘The stage began into the wind, on fairly typical straight roads across the Wallonne,’ Jones continues. ‘It wasn’t that hilly, but I was lying second in the King of the Mountains competition and chasing points, with Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, on these very small hills.’ Ahead of them loomed the pavé. And the rain showed no sign of abating. ‘There was talk of a semi-truce,’ says Jones. ‘Wet cobbles could be very dangerous.’

Not surprisingly, it was Hinault who was behind this pact. He hadn’t been able to organise a riders’ strike – though there was still talk of this in Frankfurt on the eve of the Grand Départ – but he had tried to use his influence to take the sting out of the stage. ‘I talked to all the riders,’ Hinault recalls, ‘and we said that because of the bad weather we weren’t going to race. Then I stayed in the front five at all times.’ This, too, was typical Hinault: riding at the front, asserting his authority. (‘Let’s just say that the Badger liked to keep watch,’ said his old director, Cyrille Guimard.)