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Pro team history: St Raphaël
May 20th 1964, Stage 5 of the 47th edition of the Giro d’Italia, a 50km time-trial from Parma to Busseto. Among the starters is the world’s premier racer against the clock and star rider for the St Raphaël team, Jacques Anquetil – ‘Monsieur Chrono’ himself. Anquetil is well down on GC, 18th overall, nearly three minutes behind race leader Enzo Moser. But no one is in any doubt as to who will be wearing the pink jersey tonight.
‘With what advantage will the Frenchman win?’ writes Gigi Boccacini in the pages of La Stampa. ‘50km of almost absolute flat, almost continuously straight, on the entire route only – we are told – six or seven curves. The perfect terrain, in short, for Anquetil.’
Rival sports directors offer views on Anquetil’s likely winning margin: ‘One minute on [Ercole] Baldani, three on the others,’ says one; some say the winning margin will be a minute and a half; another says Anquetil can gain 30 seconds every 10km on everyone – so that’ll be two and a half minutes then. The only question is whether Anquetil would want pink this early in the race and have his team defend it for the next 17 stages into Milan.
As it turns out, the answer to that question would be an emphatic yes.
‘The blond Norman swept from his path with an enterprise that, without giving in to hyperbole, is truly prodigious,’ the paper reported the next day. ‘Not only did he win, but he did it with such superiority, with such an advantage that in one leap he overtook everyone [on GC]. As we have seen, an hour’s run (and what a run!) was enough for him to muzzle everyone – at least for a few days.’
Anquetil had taken nearly a minute and a half off second-placed Baldani. Only two others got within a couple of minutes of him. Anquetil now wore pink, presented to him by three-time Giro winner Gino Bartali, by 30 seconds.
‘Those who followed him say that his march was a masterpiece of speed and regularity,’ wrote Vittorio Varale. ‘“I have never seen a spectacle like it,” [Giuseppe] Pinella, Fausto Coppi’s faithful mechanic, who followed him from the beginning to the end, will tell me later.’
Anquetil never lost the jersey and would go on to win the Giro by 1min 22sec over Italo Zilioli.
‘You see the result and it seems that it was a close race between us, but if I’m honest he was never really under pressure from me,’ Zilioli told author Herbie Sykes decades later in the book Maglia Rosa. ‘I think he won while saving energy for the Tour.’
The previous year Anquetil had won the Vuelta-Tour double for St Raphaël. Twelve months on and he had just secured phase one of a more prestigious double.
It started with a drink
The story of the St Raphaël cycling team can be traced to a medical laboratory in 1830s France when Doctor Ademar Juppet was working on an aperitif made from quinquina (the source of quinine) and wine. The story goes that Juppet’s sight was failing as he was working on his drink. Remembering the biblical tale of the archangel Raphaël restoring sight to a blind man, he prayed to the archangel for help, and when he was able to finish his recipe he named his new tonic St Raphaël.
The drink was a success, and in 1900 the St Raphaël company offered visitors to the Paris Universal Exhibition trips in a hot air balloon splashed in the brand’s colours. Fast-forward to 1954 and the drink manufacturer became one of the first brands to enter cycle team sponsorship that had no connection to the cycling industry.
The team’s first win came in June 1954 when Louis Bergaud won the Tour de la Corrèze. Just two years later one of its riders, Roger Walkowiak, surprisingly claimed the Tour de France (albeit while riding for the Nord-Est-Central regional team, trade teams not featuring in the Tour at the time).
The team’s most notable rider during this time was Raphaël Géminiani, who was instrumental in bringing the brand into cycling. Géminiani would become the first St Raphaël rider to win a Tour stage (1955), but his biggest impact at the team came after he became a sports director in the early 1960s, signed Anquetil in 1962 and set about forming a formidable partnership with his new charge.
This was the period when the team enjoyed its greatest success. Rudi Altig won the Vuelta (1962) and the Tour of Flanders (1964); Jo de Roo won Bordeaux-Paris (1962) and claimed back-to-back Il Lombardia victories (1962/1963); and Jean Stablinski became World Champion (1962). And all while Anquetil was reigning supreme as the team’s foremost rider.
Make mine a double
Following that 1964 Giro victory, Anquetil entered the Tour aiming to become only the second man to win the Giro and Tour in the same year, emulating Fausto Coppi (1949/1952). He was also going for a record-extending fifth Tour title. Earlier in the year René de Latour had written an article for Sporting Cyclist asking if Anquetil would ride a ‘holiday Tour’ in 1964 after the Frenchman had complained of long stage distances.
‘This would be like another holiday for me. Watching others flog away from a ringside seat. How I would enjoy such a show,’ Anquetil had said. But no one believed him. Everyone knew he was the man to beat, even if he had only finished the Giro two weeks before.
The early stages proved uneventful as Anquetil’s teammates controlled matters. Then he began to falter. On Stage 8, over the Galibier, Anquetil struggled, losing 1min 49sec to 1959 Tour champion Federico Bahamontes. He recovered to take a couple of stages over the next few days but going into the final rest day in Andorra, Anquetil remained more than one minute behind race leader Georges Groussard.
Anquetil cut a seemingly relaxed figure during that rest day. He accepted an invitation to a barbecue, eating lamb and drinking with his sports director Géminiani. In truth though he would soon become unsettled by a nonsensical prediction published by an astrologer in France-Soir that he would suffer a fatal fall on the next stage.
When they returned to racing, Anquetil’s rivals attacked early on the Col d’Envalira. Bahamontes and Raymond Poulidor disappeared quickly up the road.
‘Then a terrible fog descends on the road and Anquetil is overwhelmed; the clairvoyant’s prediction is going to come true,’ writes Paul Fournel in Anquetil Alone.
Anquetil slows. He is nervous and thinking about quitting when Géminiani drives up.
‘He hands him a water bottle filled with champagne,’ Fournel continues, ‘and says, “If you are going to die, you might as well die in the lead.”’
And with that Anquetil is a changed man. He reaches the summit, descends through the fog with abandon and catches all the riders who had left him for dead a few hours previously.
Three days later Anquetil finally took yellow when he won the race’s penultimate time-trial into Bayonne. There would still be trouble – Stage 20’s climb to Puy de Dôme when he went shoulder to shoulder with Poulidor is one of the Tour’s most famous days – but St Raphaël’s leader would cling on, beating Poulidor in Paris by just 55 seconds before calling it ‘the hardest Tour I have ever known’.
It was the fourth year in a row that Anquetil had paraded around the Parc des Princes as Tour winner (and the third as leader of St Raphaël). It would also be the last. Anquetil would never finish the Tour again and St Raphaël would leave cycling at the end of the season, with Ford taking over as title sponsors.
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