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

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From this vantage point, continues Hinault, ‘I saw the TI-Raleigh rider, Jan Raas, attack. And when that happened, I thought: “Right – this is war.”

‘They wanted to play?’ asks Hinault. ‘They were going to lose.’

Jones is not convinced that the attack by Raas was necessarily deliberate, far less a betrayal of the pact. It was more a consequence of the course, and the conditions. ‘It was so dangerous that everybody wanted to be at the front. That meant it split up naturally. And gradually it turned into a full-scale race.’

Still, the initial semi-truce meant the riders fell an hour behind schedule as they headed north, into the driving rain, towards hell, where spectators huddled under trees or waited in their cars, engines running, heaters on, windows steaming up. The conditions were treacherous: on one stretch of cobbles a Swiss TV car lost control and spun off the road. The pavé that featured today, totalling 20km, were ‘as bad as anything the Hell of the North could offer,’ as the report in Cycling Weekly put it. ‘Domed roadways, dotted with water-filled craters which, for all the riders knew, could have been one inch or six inches deep.’