Lance Armstrong turned the magical figure of five Tours, the champions’ frontier, into dull dust, but conveniently the same system he had humiliated erased the Texan and his seven consecutive Tours in one of cycling’s darkest decades (1999-2005). Five, like the five fingers of a hand, like Jacques Anquetil’s five Tours (1957 and 1961-64) who set a limit he himself did not want to exceed, where Eddy Merckx (1969 to 1972 and 1974), Bernard Hinault (1978, 1979, 1981, 1982 and 1985) and Miguel Indurain (1991 to 1995) later stopped. Tadej Pogacar, younger than any of them, irresistibly approaches five. He does so two months before turning 28, at 27, the age Miguel Indurain waited to begin his series because the ancient patient Navarrese farmers who guided him believed that the body had reached the necessary maturity to start performing at its best.
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Indurain, who has never seen the need to publicly reflect on what it means to win five Tours, what marks a life, what it has made of him, was exceptional, a talent and a physique that did not seem suitable for dominating the race he ultimately dominated like a benevolent despot. The Navarrese only dared to try to win the Tour after several years of apprenticeship, programmed withdrawals, and working for Perico Delgado, which relieved him of pressure. He was not a prodigy from childhood, like the other four, little Mozarts who revolutionize the era they pass through and imposed themselves in their first participation. Anquetil and Hinault, at 23; Merckx, at 24, after having already won the Giro a year earlier; Pogacar, at 21, leader of a generation that lives life with urgency, for whom patience is a waste of time.
When Anquetil won his fifth Tour, France hated him more than ever. With his brilliance, his oyster and champagne breakfasts, his affairs with his doctor’s wife and his exaltation of sexual freedom, and his unsurpassed elegance on the bike, the Norman had humiliated Poulidor, the beloved self-sacrificing worker always mistreated by fate and bad luck, falls, illnesses, and perseverance. The eighth and last of his podiums (he was never first, not a day in yellow, three times second, five times third) he reached at 40 years old. The perfect symbol of Gaullism, the most loved by popular France who booed Anquetil in yellow on the final podium at the Parc des Princes. It was July 14th, precisely. Two days later, Indurain was born in Villava, and a few months later, after spending a winter of dolce far niente, Anquetil renounced running the 1965 Tour. He did not seek the sixth. It did not obsess him. With five, he was unique, two more than Louison Bobet, the previous French idol. It was an intimate decision. He did not want to continue being the despot who cannibalized the hopes of the beloved Poupou, whose popularity he did not understand and drove him crazy. He returned in 1966, at 32, in his friend Julio Jiménez’s Ford, but bronchitis forced him to withdraw. He could barely help his teammate Lucien Aimar, who won in Paris.
Like Indurain, the pupil who most followed in his footsteps, Anquetil barely expressed himself in the classics and did not even win a World Championship. His territory was pacing in time trials and suffering in the mountains. The Tour always came after laborious preparation that left no room for other objectives. The other three members of the five-five club were cycling monsters, winners all year round in all territories. Absolute dominators of their era. Merckx, in addition to also winning five Vueltas and one Giro, is the greatest winner of Monuments in history (19, plus three World Championships), and Pogacar is second (13 and two World Championships: only Paris-Roubaix resists him), while Hinault (three Giros and two Vueltas), won five, and one World Championship.
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On the last day of Merckx’s and Indurain’s fifth Tours, 1974 and 1995, the peloton’s submission was such that no one doubted that the sixth would be a done deal the following year. Both were still young (the Belgian 29, the Spaniard 31) and had shown no signs of faltering. The switch went from on to off without warning, overnight. The Belgian had received a punch to the liver from a fan fed up with the cannibal on the ascent to Puy de Dôme the day before he unknowingly faltered on the ascent to Pra Loup where Thévenet forged his victory, but he never used it as an excuse. Indurain arrived at the 1996 Tour so optimistic and confident that José Miguel Echávarri, his guide, joked about the license plate of the new Banesto bus, M-6006-TS. “That means, Miguel six Tours,” he explained in Den Bosch, before a deluge engulfed the race. He was ready to attack towards the summit of Les Arcs and seal the victory when he suffered, unexpectedly, the worst bonk of his life. Dry endings. No turning back.
Hinault grew up wanting to be Anquetil and Merckx and recognizes himself in Pogacar. “The Slovenian has lost two Tours to Vingegaard and has won five, just as I lost one to Fignon. Like me, he knows both sensations. The difficult thing is to refocus and arrive at the start telling yourself that you are going for the victory. But he, moreover, approaches the Tour with the idea of enjoying himself for three weeks, and that’s where I identify with him,” the Breton reflected in an interview in L’Équipe. “I also had the feeling of having fun, and not of working. My goal was victory, but I didn’t care if it was the fourth or the fifth. I have never gone for records, it has never been my priority; I raced for pleasure. Everyone asks me if I don’t regret not having given my all in 1986 to win a sixth Tour. But that wouldn’t have changed anything at all, except that today they would bother me even more with that. I have never tried to surpass Merckx or Anquetil, my two idols.”
Pogacar is himself. He comes from a country where cyclists are not idols. He wasn’t even born when Indurain won his fifth Tour, and like Hinault, he repeats that he doesn’t chase records. Will he race for the sixth? Does anyone doubt it?
