Things American may not be the flavour of the month in France right now, and motor-mouthed Texans least of all, but in one far-flung corner of old Europe a small-time farmer bucks the trend. Except that this is no ordinary paysan, and he is not thinking of George W Bush.
In his granite farmhouse close to the north Brittany coast, Bernard Hinault — one of a select quartet who have won five Tours de France — is now happily tending 130 head of beef cattle.
In between he is keeping an avuncular and detached eye on Lance Armstrong’s seamless preparation for his bid to join the greats by winning this year’s centenary Tour.
Hinault does not hide the fact that he is an Armstrong fan. ”What I like about Armstrong is the way he fights. He doesn’t like to give anything away to anyone,” he says.
”I like his character. I can see the same mental force in him that I had. For the Tour you need that character, that mental strength.
”These aren’t the same times, the champions of cycling aren’t the same, but Armstrong just goes for the jugular. He doesn’t make mistakes. You can’t categorise him or any other Tour winner, he’s just the strongest guy there.
”Perhaps he’s the one who works harder than the others, who goes and looks at all the stages when the others don’t. That is what gives him an edge.”
Fighting spirit is a Hinault speciality. He is said to have bothered turning up at school as a teenager largely because there was a good chance of getting into a scrap en route.
That particular story may not be true, but later pictures do not lie. They show Hinault delivering a punch to a striking shipyard worker who blocked the route of a spring race.
Stocky and pugnacious-looking, Hinault was (and still is) nicknamed ”Le Blaireau” (”the badger”). But it had nothing to do with the cuddly toy he marketed for charity during one Tour, nor Kenneth Grahame’s avuncular gentleman of The Wind in the Willows.
”Have you ever seen a badger cornered by dogs, and he sends them off yelping?” Hinault asks, with a chilling grin. ”That’s my sort of badger.”
Last year, as Armstrong raced almost unopposed to his fourth consecutive Tour victory, the Texan had harsh words for a section of the French public who, he said, had yelled ”dopé [drugged]” at him.
”Don’t come to the bike race to stand around and yell at cyclists. Stay at home,” he said. Whereas Miguel Indurain, the last man to win five Tours, would merely have smiled broadly and said he had heard nothing, the outburst was right out of the ”Le Blaireau’s” book, and Hinault duly approved.
”I would have been ruder,” Hinault says. ”When there’s something to be said, you should say it whether or not people like it. The best way of getting respect is to show your evil side and win.”
Each of Armstrong’s four Tour de France wins has been a slightly fraught affair, marked by a spat with an opponent in the press. Last year it was the yelling fans, in 2001 it was a journalist who maligned him over drugs.
The year before, Italian Marco Pantani was on the receiving end for a lack of gratitude. Armstrong had apparently granted him a stage win, while in 1999 the target was media and team managers who had written him off while he was stricken with cancer.
Like Hinault, Armstrong is a man who gives the impression of needing to invent enemies to motivate himself. ”It’s very stimulating, I like all that,” says Hinault.
His finest Tour in 1986 was totally in character: nominally under team orders to help American Greg LeMond, he spent the whole Tour in a series of quixotic offensives on the bike amid warnings that LeMond had to earn his first Tour win. LeMond was duly riled but still won.
He remains convinced Hinault was attempting to double-cross him, something Hinault vigorously denies.
The Breton farmer and the current golden boy of Nike and Subaru have certain things in common. Both were rebellious children.
Hinault would let out the family chickens to wind up his father, who would beat him.
Armstrong hated his stepfather, who walloped him with a fraternity paddle. Neither is from a remotely privileged background.
The American is the son of a single mother from the wrong side of the tracks. Hinault, son of a railwayman on the outskirts of the little town of Yffiniac, came from right next to the railway lines.
Like Armstrong, Hinault is not a man who effects sentiment about records. ”They didn’t interest me,” he recalls. ”Cycling was a game for me, a sport first and foremost. Results were secondary to the pleasure of competing, and money after that. Records were the last of my worries.”
As Armstrong prepares for Saturday’s start to the Tour, Hinault maintains that not much changes in a cyclist between his first and fifth victories.
”You have no particular feelings, it’s a year’s work to win a Tour just as it was the first time round.
”Perhaps you have more experience, but you lose a little bit of strength as the years pass.” The Tour retains the same popular appeal it enjoyed 100 years ago and Hinault is well-placed to explain why. ”For the spectator this is a sport that comes chezvous, it’s free, and it’s a fête at the same time,” he says. ”It appeals to everyone — you can see this from the massive public turnout whenever it goes abroad to Germany, Belgium, England, wherever.
”The beauty of cycling is that it’s a sport everyone can do. There’s no great difficulty for a boy of three or four, or a grandfather of 85. Each has his own version of the sport.”
It is one that changed profoundly and rapidly during Hinault’s career, that lasted from 1977 to 1986. In those years cycling and the Tour went from being insular, small-time and almost solely European to a multinational extravaganza.
”In my time the Irish, Australians, Americans and Canadians came in, then the South Americans. Suddenly it was an international sport and the sponsors and media followed.”
For many, the moment the United States truly arrived in professional cycling was when Hinault went to the US with LeMond (before they fell out) and was pictured in cowboy get-up, complete with rifle and stetson.
For all Hinault’s background in rural France, the final significant win of his career was in the US, late in 1986. In spite of his optimism about Armstrong, Hinault knows better than to insist that the American is a shoo-in.
Armstrong lost one Tour (in 1980), when a knee ligament gave out midway through, and spent another (1984) struggling after an operation and was powerless to halt his old protégé, Laurent Fignon.
”[Armstrong] can always be beaten,” Hinault says. ”You can’t afford to show the slightest weakness. Perhaps he’ll find that Jan Ullrich gives him a good fight. He won recently, so he is looking good. The Spanish will be strong again, as usual.”
There will, however, be no Frenchman taking on Armstrong. Since Fignon retired in 1993, there has been no realistic home contender for overall victory.
France has, inevitably, has been seeking the new Hinault since 1986 and the one man who approached Hinault or Fignon in all-round skill, Laurent Jalabert, has retired, leaving only the ageing, drug-tainted Richard Virenque.
”There is no champion,” says Hinault of his country’s chances. ”If you have a champion, it’s no problem, but there’s no great champion in Italy and none in Belgium. The only country with a super-champion at present is the US, and perhaps Germany. People keep saying they regret I’m not racing any more, but I had to stop.
”We say the young cyclists should come through, but they don’t. I don’t see any French cyclists capable of coming through at present.”
Assuming everything goes according to plan and Armstrong wins that fifth Tour, he and Hinault will meet again on the victory podium, where ”Le Blaireau” supervises the waltz of winners and celebrities amid the immaculate hostesses who hand out the jerseys and trophies.
It seems an unlikely job for the bluff farmer, who has also had a spell as race director on the Tour.
But as France’s greatest living cycling star, his presence is vital for an event that owes so much to tradition and where, in this deeply symbolic year of all years, Armstrong will be looking to carve his own place in that history. —