INSIDE THE PARISIAN DREAM FACTORY

by James Startt
The Cycling Anthology – Volume Four (2014)

Paris, France – The old clubhouse on Rue de Sèvres has long closed down and the team apartments reconverted into private housing. And the lustre has more than faded around the current clubhouse on Rue Yves Kermen, planted ignominiously in the shadows of a Bricorama, a low-cost home supply supermarket on the outskirts of Boulogne-Billancourt, itself a suburb of Paris.

Only the sign over the archway reading Complexe Jacques Anquetilhints at a more glorious past, as does a small selection of trophies on show in the window.

Once inside the current clubhouse of the Athletic Club de Boulogne-Billancourt, the discerning eye will notice other remnants of the club’s zenith. There is the white jersey with red polka dots awarded to the best climber in the Tour de France. Made of wool, it dates back to 1984, when one of the club’s protégés, a certain Robert Millar, became the first Scot to capture such a prize. And then there is a yellow jersey from the Tour de France. Made of nylon and sporting the Carrera team’s logo on the chest, it belonged to Ireland’s Stephen Roche, the last of the club’s alumni to go on and win the Tour de France in 1987.

In its prime years during post-war France, the Athletic Club de Boulogne-Billancourt, more commonly known as l’ACBB rose to prominence as the country’s pre-eminent sports club, boasting Olympic champions in an array of sports.

Bit it was in bicycle racing where the club left its biggest mark, producing Tour de France champions such as Jean Robic, Jacques Anquetil, the first five-time winner, or Bernard Thévenet, himself a two-time winner.

In the 1970s and 1980s the club unwittingly encouraged the transformation of bicycle racing in Europe. The club ushered in the first great Anglophone invasion and the sport’s days as an almost exclusively European pursuit were over.

Not that the club’s motivation was particularly visionary. It wasn’t. They weren’t necessarily interested in revolutionising cycling, or offering opportunities to foreign riders, they were simply interested in maintaining their position at the top of the annual ranking of amateur clubs in France. ACBB fielded the crème de la crèmeof British, Irish and Australian talent, helping to develop the best of them into the most respected professionals of their generations.

Leading the initiative was the cycling club’s general manager Paul Wiegant, known to everyone as Mickey. Wiegant was a dapper director who, after consolidating the club’s supremacy in the 1960s with stars such as André Darrigade, Jean Stablinski and Jacques Anquetil, the expanded the frontiers of France in the 1970s.

His moniker, apparently given to him because he wore a Mickey Mouse patch on his jersey during his formative years as a track racer, reflected an uncharacteristic detour of frivolity to his otherwise exacting demeanour.

«Monsieur Wiegant was truly old school,» says one long-standing member of ACBB. «You always called him “Monsieur Wiegant”. He would tell you what clothes to wear for dinner and if your elbow was on the table, he would knock it off with a knife. And in a race he was even capable of shutting down a breakaway with four of our riders in it, just because the “right” rider was not in it.»

For many, Wiegant’s club was nothing less than a university for cycling, and the team’s results far surpassed even those of the French national amateur team.

Through his strong ties with the town of Boulogne-Billancourt he was able to secure housing where riders from the provinces or foreigners could live and his ties to the legendary Peugeot professional team allowed ACBB to serve as a feeder club, offering the best riders the opportunity to graduate to the professional ranks in a seamless manner.

The first British rider to do so was Paul Sherwen, who raced for the club in 1977 and turned professional in 1978. But Sherwen preferred to sign with the rival Fiat team. Before leaving, however, he recommended his friend Graham Jones to ACBB. Jones won prestigious amateur Classics such as Paris-Troyes and Paris-Évreux as well as the Grand Prix des Nations time trial while riding for ACBB and became the first British rider to graduate from ACBB to Peugeot..

After Sherwen and Jones, the floodgates opened. The clubhouse doors opened to Scotland’s Robert Millar and London-born Australian Phil Anderson in 1979, Dubliner Stephen Roche in 1980, British riders Sean Yates and John Herety in 1981, Australian Allan Peiper in 1982 and Ireland’s Paul Kimmage in 1984.

Graduates of the Paris club were known as “acébébistes” and the anglophones were called, collectively, the Foreign Legion. Anderson held the yellow jersey at the Tour de France for two spells, Roche won the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and World Championships in 1987, Millar became one of the best climbers in Europe and Peiper and Yates were respected domestiques. The club’s reputation for recruiting talent from previously untapped areas and developing them into riders to rival the best France could produce was confirmed.

For a handful of Anglophone riders, it was possible to turn professional without ACBB, as Ireland’s Sean Kelly and the Americans Jock Boyer and Greg LeMond proved, but for many the most direct route was through the doors of the ground-breaking Parisian club. 

Although ACBB ushered in a wave of foreign riders, Monsieur Wiegant had no global vision for cycling. No, he was far too much the Machiavellian. Results were all that mattered to him, and this band of ragamuffin riders proved to be the perfect mercenaries.

«Wiegant was looking for good riders and that’s all,» says Jean-Claude Le Dissez, on of the club’s secretaries at the time. «It was just about results. Wiegant liked the foreign riders because they didn’t ask questions. They were just there to ride.»

On the face of it, the ACBB squad left little to be desired, even when compared to some professional teams. Known as “les petits gris” for their distinctive orange and grey jerseys, they were sponsored by one of France’s top automobile and bicycle producers and showed up to each race with Peugeot bikes as well as team cars.

But seen from the inside, the foreign riders soon learned another reality: that of a heartlessly competitive system where only victory won you the respect of Wiegant or his top directeur sportif, Claude Escalon.

«Someone was supposed to meet me at the airport and take me to the training camp. But when I arrived there was no one to meet me,» says Stephen Roche of his arrival in France. «There were no mobile phones at that time, but I had the address for the clubhouse soI took a cab to Rue de Sèvres. The cab arrived at the bottom of the one-way street and the driver pointed and said, “The clubhouse is up that way.”

«I got out of the car and dragged my suitcase up the street. It was late, though, and of course everything was closed when I got there so I just jumped over the gates, hid my bags behind the bushes and went off to try and find a meal. Afterwards I returned, got my bag from the bushes and just slept on the porch.

«Then the next morning at about 5 a.m. two guys stopped by. They were on their way from Lille down to the training camp on the Côte d’Azur

«They opened the gates and said, “Are you Roche?”

«“Yes,” I said. And they said, “Come with us.”

«I climbed into the back of a Peugeot 104 and sixteen hours later I was in the south of France. That was my welcome to France.»

riders who joined the club before and after Roche tell a virtual carbon-copy tale of their own arrival in Paris, so much so that many suspect the botched rendezvous was an unspoken litmus test for the new boys.

«I took the overnight bus from Victoria station [in London] to Gare du Nord,» remembers Sean yates, who followed in Roche’s footsteps. «They said that they would have someone to meet me but there was no one. I reckon it was a way of seeing how though you were because some of the foreign riders had a reputation for being a bit soft, and some went home after a couple of weeks. So if you passed that first test they really liked that.»

Once in France, riders were quickly shown their lodging before being shipped to southern France for the team’s first early-season training camp – and, as was often the case, further testing.

«They would ship everybody to the Côte d’Azur for the ealy training races like the Grand Prix of St Tropez,» says Neil Martin, a member of the class of 1979, and father of Garmin-Sharp’s Tour de France stage winner, Daniel. «Basically it was a test area. There were about forty of us down there and it was only when we got there that we found out that only twenty-two were going to race for the rest of the year. After a week or so you just didn’t see some guys any more.

Martin is one of many who did not “make it” with ACBB. A roommate of Anderson’s, Martin raced consistently well. As an eighteen-year-old he won one of the early-season races but at the end of his first season he was not invited back for another.

«We were the best club in France. Even guys like Jacques Anquetil knew that it was with us that they had the best chance to pro,» says Charles Desorbaix, a card-carrying “acébébiste” since 1948. Today, he is the senior member of the club and still accompanies juniors on the Wednesday afternoon training outings in the nearby Longchamps Hippodrome. «The foreigners that came here were really serious. They were all scared that they would get sent back if they weren’t. And they knew that they had one season to prove themselves,» he says.

Victory, the riders also learned early on, was the only thing that mattered at ACBB and for some of the foreigners, winning was the only way they’d make enough money to eat.

Unlike many of their French teammates, they received no monthly stipend. In essence, they understood, they were racing in exchange for their equipment and the rent on the apartments at 110 Rue de Bellevue. Extra money for food would, on occasion, be paid ads an advance against future prize earnings. But there was no free lunch.

Yet while the terms of employment were austere t best, the foreign riders largely accepted them without question. They understood that ACBB offered the most direct path to the professional ranks, something that only a few yeas earlier would have been nothing more than a pipe dream.

For most riders, the move to ACBB was a considerable step up. Australian Allan Peiper came to the French club after three years racing in Belgium, where his accommodation was simply some space in the local butcher shop. By comparison, the two-bedroom flats ACBB provided in Boulogne were extravagant.

«The apartments were actually very nice. We had beautiful bikes and a great kit,» Peiper recalls. «But a lot of times I was in the apartment by myself. I was just completely isolated. I didn’t have any money. The hardest thing was finding and paying for food. I remember one day there was a choice between half a baguette and a yogurt or half a baguette and some apples. I had to make the choice of eating two things and not three because I didn’t have any money.»

Sean Yates apparently ate better than Peiper as he made himself quite useful as a lead-out man to sprinter John Herety in the week-night nocturnecriteriums. The two would then split the primes for food money.

With victory such a commodity, the newcomers often found themselves at odds with French teammates, who could often be tougher rivals than riders from other clubs. After all, the were all fighting for the same spots on a professional tam the following yea, and by the early 1980s some French riders must have felt like they were submitting to an anglophone invasion. The first riders to join ACBB, Sherwen and Jones, may have been viewed by the locals as oddities, but with the stunning success of Anderson, Millar and Roche, the foreign riders were soon seen as direct rivals to the French.

«I remember racing in the Franco-Belge race,» Peiper says. «It was a race that if you won it you turned pro. I was in the leader’s jersey on the final day. We hit the final circuit and the team car was not allowed to follow. And I punctured. All my teammates just stopped. They just pulled out. Finally I got a wheel from a tourist on the side of the road. I caught the peloton and went to the front, because the second and third-place riders went up the road when I punctured. I chased and chased, but I lost the leader’s jersey by one second. My teammates let me down. But you know they just really didn’t give a shit.»

But it is hard to deter oddballs with unfavourable odds. The foreigners that made it through ACBB not only had to be outstanding bike riders, but fiercely independent and self-sufficient at a very young age. For many, the heart of their education came on the road.

The world, it is often said, is a smaller place today because of telecommunications, the Internet and the ease of travel. But it appeared far different in the 1970s and early 1980s. Those leaving home to race in France could not count on Facebook, email or a mobile phone to keep in touch with friends or family on a daily basis. Instead they had to go weeks or months without even a phone call. And while the astute traveller can find the airfare from England to France for less than a hundred euros today, back then it could cost four times more. There was, of course, no channel tunnel linking Paris and London by rail, and the ferry was out unless a rider could get from the capital to Calais by train.

But if those coming from England were making a huge leap, riders from Australia had to make a comparative interstellar journey to arrive in France. Only the toughest – or those who, like Yates, admitted to being «a bit of a loner» – survived.

Coming to France required a huge personal investment and the riders that endured the adventure never lost sight of what motivated them to make the journey in the first place: a shot at reaching the pro ranks. Likewise, many of the lessons learned at ACBB would help them further down the road if they did earn a professional contract.

«They develop a sense of responsibility when they leave their countries to seek their fortunes here,» said Maurice De Muer, directeur sportif of the Peugeot professional team in an article headlined “A Little English on the Tour”, by Samuel Abt, that was published in the International Herald Tribunein July 1981. «The only choice they have is to do well or go home. [Phil] Anderson was so eager to make good he even cut his long hair!»

From the start of the 1980 season Stephen Roche had performed tremendously for ACBB, winning many early season races as well as the first major amateur Classic of the year, Paris-Ezy. He was also a regular visitor to the podium but, when he asked whether his results would stand him in good stead when it came to getting a professional contract, Wiegant was dismissive of all his results bar the victories. He told Roche matter-of-factly: «It is not second and third places that get pro contracts.»

Roche responded two days later by winning the amateur Paris-Roubaix. «I’ll never forget in the final I was with the Belgian Dirk Demol. The ACBB car had a broken window during the race, but Wiegant was leaning out yelling, “Roche, if you don’t win here you’re going home!”»

The next thing, Roche rang his boss at the engineering company where he worked as a maintenance fitter, and said: “I’ve just won the biggest amateur Classic. I’m not coming back.”

The jealousy may have run deep with some of the French riders but they could not deny that the foreign riders were getting results.

«A chain of similarly gutsy riders came through ACBB,» says Australian journalist Rupert Guinness, author of TheForeign Legion, a history of anglophone riders who went to mainland Europe, mostly France, in the 1980s. «Wiegant liked them. He saw that they were willing to have a go and attack and, whether it was their bravado, or that the French riders didn’t know them, they got results.»

According to Jean-François Oléon, one of the French riders at the time: «They were just hungrier!» A top junior in France, Oléon was recruited by Wiegant as a first-year senior in 1980 and has remained a life-long friend of Roche. «They had a fighting spirit 24 hours a day and they didn’t ask questions. They weren’t going to complain if their shorts or jersey didn’t fit quite right. That wasn’t always the case with us French riders.»

Jean-François Guiborel, another French amateur who was not hostile to the newcomers remembers mostly the sheer talent or classethat the foreigner all seemed to possess. «I don’t know he did it but Wiegant just found one good rider after the next. They were all good, just so good.»

In reality, the golden age of English-speaking riders at ACBB was relatively short. Sherwen was there in 1977 and in 1986 Paul Kimmage was the last notable rider to turn professional, although he spent a year with CC Wasquehal after leaving ACBB. But in a shot period of time these riders left an indelible mark. This Parisian club suddenly had international cachet because so many of them had notable professional careers.

Wiegant, perhaps aware of the potential of certain riders, was known to have his favourites. On occasion he was even known to loosen his iron grip, inviting selected riders to stay at his house in the south of France to prepare for the early season races or a particular objective. Roche, Yates, and Peiper all benefited from Wiegant’s hospitality and Peiper attributes his late-season Grand Prix des Nations time trial victory to a stay at Wiegant’s, one filled with two training rides a day and motor-paced sessions.

More often than not, the riders that excelled under Wiegant’s watch at ACBB went on to excel in the professional ranks. 

«Oh yeah, they really stood out,» says Samuel Abt, himself one of the pioneering anglophone journalists in cycling and a veteran of thirty-one Tours de France. «L’Équipehad stories about them all the time. They were so different. Nobody had seen so many anglophone riders and they just sort of burst on the scene. And this was way before there were any Eastern Europeans. Daniel Mangeas [the Tour de France’s official speaker] could never pronounce their names. Guys like Anderson and Roche were doing very well at the start. It was a new wave.»

While the Foreign Legion left his mark on professional cycling in the 1980s and clearly helped pave the road for the international spot that cycling is today, Abt avoids saying that the anglophone presence in the peloton was prescient. «It was just a handful of guys sprinkled around. We didn’t get the sense really that the times were changing. There weren’t that many of them. But it was extraordinary because the sport was so European. The sport up until then was just so French, Belgian and Italian.» 

Within years, the empire that Wiegant built unravelled. Peugeot began to gradually withdraw from cycling in 1986 and the town of Boulogne-Billancourt appeared less interested in the foreign aspect of their club, perhaps because the flood of talent was waning. Yet by all standards it had been an exceptional run.

For those that shared the common but unique experience that was ACBB there are few egrets. Most feel that they were the fortunate ones to be part of something truly special at a time when the sport was taking its first tentative steps towards being truly international.

«It was a great schooling. Even outside of sports it was just a great education,» Roche says without hesitation. «By 1982 standards it was avant-gard,» says Peper.

Even Neil martin, who, like the majority of stagiaires, did not make it to the professional ranks with the club, admits that the ACBB experience was «a proper grounding. I was always proud that I was part of it.»

It also provided some long-term dividends. «You know my son Dan had a very similar yea to myself starting out at Vélo Club La Pomme in Marseille,» Martin says. «That’s the ACBB of today with, what, twenty-seven guys turning pro in six years. But it was pretty rudimentary, with six guys in an apartment for three. What ACBB gave me was a complete understanding of what he was going through and I think that possibly helped him because anything he was going through I had experienced. He was eighteen, exactly the same age as I was when I left. But he survived. And they are looking for the survivors.»

Dan Martin of course has done better than survive and after winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège as well as stage in the Tour de France in 2013, the Irishman is seen as one of the peloton’s top talents. But while his success, like that of Sir Bradley Wiggins, Cadel Evans or Chris Froome, continues to forge new territory for British, Irish and Australian riders, these riders are not packaged into a specific group the way the Foreign Legion were. Today their numbers are simply too great for them to be considered an oddity or an anomaly. Some might even say that the invaders have taken over.

James Starttwill cover his twenty-fifth Tour de France in 2014, making him the senior American journalist in the Tour de France press room. Startt is the author of Tour de France/Tour de Force(Chronicle Books, 2000), the first history of the Tour de France in English. He has served as Bicyclingmagazine’s Man in Europe, since 1999.