THE WAIT OF A NATION
A date plagues French cycling and will keep haunting it until a saviour comes along: 1985. The last victory by a Frenchman in the Tour de France, that of Bernard Hinault. Three Frenchmen have become world champions since – including current champion Julian Alaphilippe. France has still taken a grand tour victory since then – Laurent Jalabert in the 1995 Vuelta. And France has achieved several podium finishes in the Tour itself through Laurent Fignon, Richard Virenque, Jean-Christophe Péraud, Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet. Regardless of all that, 1985 remains to French cycling what 1966 is to English football: the end of an era and the start of a decline fuelled by the growing globalisation of the sport.
While Britain can claim to have invented most modern sports, France takes pride in believing it invented cycling or at least turned it into a professional sport with its codes and traditions. More importantly, it created the Tour and as such will remain the keeper of the flame in world cycling, the same as England might lack tennis number ones but still has Wimbledon. That is what makes 1985 such a painful date. France cannot afford to wait for a Frenchman to win the Tour as long as Britain waited for Andy Murray to take the baton off Fred Perry. A Tour win is essential to the success of French cycling. Or is it?
“It is definitely a burden not to have won the Tour for so long even though other countries like Belgium have not won a grand tour for ages either,” ex-pro turned national selector Thomas Voeckler told Procycling. “You need role models and maybe if a Frenchman had won the Tour it could have created vocations and helped France lose a kind of inferiority complex.”
Take Julian Alaphilippe. He is one of the most exciting talents gracing the current WorldTour. His swashbuckling style, his cheerful demeanour and evident joy in racing made him extremely popular with cycling fans the world over. But in France,
