Napoleon Blown Apart

The 1990s Castorama team was the continuation of the all-conquering Renault 

and Système-U teams, which won manager Cyrille Guimard - known as 

Napoleon - several Tours during the 1970s and 80s. But Castorama would 

fizzle to an underwhelming end, as Procycling discovers

Writer: William Fotheringham

Procycling UK - February 2020

January 1990, and the cycling press of the world - in other words, Europe, as the cycling world was back then - were summoned to an Alpine ski resort for a momentous occasion: the world number one and his team were announcing a new sponsor, preceded by a suitably lavish gourmet dinner. Given that the team’s bike supplier was the best-known British bike maker, Raleigh, the UK press all received invites, with the added incentive of one-to-one interviews with said world number one. Laurent Fignon (for it was he) was just coming off a stellar 1989 season in which he had won Milan-San Remo and the Giro d’Italia, not to mention winning a stage in the Tour de France, and wearing the yellow jersey for eight stages. Unfortunately, he had also famously lost that very same Tour in the final stage time trial by eight seconds to his former team-mate Greg LeMond, meaning that the ‘Professor’ was now better known for finishing second in the closest Tour ever - as he would bitterly point out - than for winning the Grand Boucle twice.

Equally unfortunately, this also meant that he wasn’t mad keen on discussing the events of 1989, which we hacks saw only in the perspective of his narrow defeat: revenge in 1990, use of tri-bars, how did he get on with his American nemesis and so forth. Fignon did his press duties with the cheery aplomb of a dog owner being asked how his favourite pet had just been run over, after which the press men returned to the laden board to examine the whys and wherefores of a very fine Beaujolais. Castorama was Fignon and his manager Cyrille Guimard’s new sponsor after four years with Système-U supermarkets; here was another major retail chain, this time DIY. Since the mid-1970s, Casto had been a mainstay of those anonymous retail estates that blight the outskirts of every French city. The name had been adopted in 1969 when the founder, Christian Dubois, expanded into a DIY superstore in Lille; it derived from a French slang term, castor, or beaver, which was the nickname given to those with a bent for do-it-yourself home improvement. The firm’s motto was, Chez Casto, il y a tout ce qu’il faut; Castorama have everything you need.

The firm’s adoption of Fignon, Guimard, and their band of merry men coincided with a major push across Europe; the acquisition of the defending Giro champion was a perfect fit for a company that was about to open its first Italian stores. Germany and Belgium followed. Casto were also on the move into the discount market, with a swerve along the way into instruction courses for those who wanted to DIY their way. Finding a replacement sponsor for Système-U was a vindication of the team management system which Guimard and Fignon had put in place when Renault had pulled out of sponsorship in 1985. At this point, the pair realised the in-built weakness of the way traditional sponsorship worked, with the sponsor owning the team and employing the riders and staff. They set up a structure where they owned the team jointly through two holding companies, FranceCompétition and Maxi Sports, and the sponsor paid them to manage the squad. This is pretty much how most professional teams are now run. Fignon claimed it was his idea, and that Guimard, whose nickname of ‘Napoleon’ was well deserved, didn’t understand what he was suggesting. What’s not in doubt is the identity of the law firm that was chosen to set up the companies: Leibovici-Sarkozy, part-run by the future French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who became a director of France-Compétition, which went on to secure, at very short notice, backing from Système-U.

And then there was the jersey. At the press launch, we were told that its design reflected the form of traditional French manual workers’ overalls, and that it in turn closely resembled the outfits worn by the assistants in Castorama’s hypermarkets. It wasn’t actually that easy to figure out on first view that the vertical blue stripes on either sides were supposed to represent braces, but even so, it marked a departure in the way that kit was envisioned. In the past, teams had a jersey and put logos on it. In 1984, La Vie Claire turned that idea on its head with a radical Mondrian-inspired design that set out the team’s stall: these were guys who would do things differently. Castorama was slightly different in spirit, but was a serious attempt at a message: overalls, practical ethos, let’s get down to it. That set the tone for the 90s, a period in which design began to actually matter where team kit was concerned. You didn’t have to like Carrera’s denim-replica shorts or SaecoCannondale’s plethora of wacky designs for Mario Cipollini, but you had to concede that we were no longer in the 1970s.

On the road, Castorama started the 1990 season fourth in the UCI’s world rankings, behind two Dutch squads, PDM-Phillips Dupont Magnetic, a maker of video tapes - and low-alcohol beer brand Buckler, and another French team, RMO. Astounding it may seem now, but with LeMond and Robert Millar’s Z that made three French outfits among the first seven teams. Within weeks, Castorama was winning, with Gérard Rué taking the Tour of the Mediterranean, and Fignon the Critérium International, although without actually finishing first in any of the three stages. That was pretty much as good as it got for the Parisian, who failed to make it a hat-trick of wins at San Remo when the Italians attacked the foreign stars as they were collectively idling at the back of the bunch early on. “Something was not quite right,” he wrote later. At the Tour of Flanders, he was in fantastic form, and made a huge effort to get across to a promising move, only for the other riders to refuse to collaborate with him. Fignon climbed off. He emerged from the classics season in poor shape and headed for the Giro in poor shape. He quit the Giro, and then quit his home Tour, although at least when la Grande Boucle got underway at Futuroscope, his team mate Thierry Marie managed to win the prologue. Unfortunately, Castorama never quite lived up to its initial billing. Fignon went into an unfortunate decline, partly because he never quite regained his old confidence after his 1989 defeats to LeMond, partly because he was unlucky - a crash in a tunnel put paid to his Giro defence and put him out of the Tour on the fifth day - and partly because like Bernard Hinault had a few years earlier, he eventually fell out with his old mentor Guimard.

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Fignon’s memories of the Castorama years were bitter. He and Guimard had frequently been at odds because the team manager would cut corners to save money here and there; Fignon would notice when this had an impact on the team’s performance. Guimard would resent his partner’s interference in the way he ran the team. Running into the 1991 season, the pair’s friendship broke down, pretty much as Guimard and Hinault had fallen out in 1982 and 1983. Guimard was paranoid that as Fignon ended his career, he would want greater involvement in management, but the manager also points out in his memoirs that he and Fignon had subtly different views of the way the team they jointly ran should be managed. Fignon, as he saw it, felt that once the money had been handed over, and the sponsor had paid, “for advertising space on the jersey”, there should be distance between sponsor and team. His collaborator, on the other hand, believed that the sponsor invested, in the French sense of being emotionally involved as well as the Anglo-Saxon sense of putting in money. That, he felt, should be respected. Moreover, on the road he had found a replacement for his fading star, just as Fignon and LeMond had taken over from Hinault seven or eight years earlier. Luc Leblanc was the new chosen one, to the extent that when the 1991 Tour came around, Guimard was on the point of keeping his double Tour winner out of the team in favour of the younger rider.

At the same time, the Castorama management were getting more involved in the running of the team. For Fignon, it fell apart when Guimard asked him to ride at the front in Paris-Roubaix, simply to get the team some television exposure. That was not the Fignon way. Guimard, on the other hand, felt his financial backers had the right to make some demands. The bosses at Castorama had good reason to be a little restive. The team’s results over the years were nothing compared to those in the peak Fignon years from 1983 to 1989. They weren’t bad. In the 1990 Tour they had at least worn the yellow jersey with Marie, and in 1991 Leblanc pulled on the maillot jaune at Jaca in the Pyrenees. He lost it the next day, and for the rest of the Tour although he and Fignon wore the same jersey, they were effectively rivals, finishing fifth and sixth respectively. In finding Leblanc, Guimard showed he had not lost his knack for spotting talented cyclists. Dominique Arnould took the world cyclo-cross title in 1993 and a stage of the Tour in 1992. The enigmatic Armand de las Cuevas landed Clásica San Sebastián in 1994, and there were plenty of other wins, mainly in the races that make up the French calendar: Paris-Camembert, the GP d’Isbergues, the GP Denain, and so on. Thierry Marie scored an epic stage win from distance in the 1991 Tour. But no Castorama rider ever looked like winning the race that really mattered. The one result that was up there - on paper at least - with anything from the Fignon era was Jacky Durand’s victory in the 1992 Tour of Flanders, but it wasn’t quite out of the Professor’s copybook. The estimable ‘Dudu’ got lucky; the early break was given too much leeway, and he was the strongest rider at the crucial moment, dropping the formidable Thomas Wegmüller with 10km to the finish to win after 220km in front. It remains to date France’s last win in the classic.

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As a team, Castorama did manage to exit with a bang. At the start of the 1995 Tour de France, Guimard let it be known that he was struggling to find a new sponsor, but he struck gold when Chris Boardman fell off in the dark, rain-hit evening prologue at Saint-Brieuc, and ‘Dudu’ - who had ridden in full daylight when the roads were still dry - landed another surprise and flukey win to take the yellow jersey. He held the lead for three days; at the finish, the up-and-coming Laurent Madouas was in 12th overall. On September 27, however, France-Compétition said in a press release that it had released all its riders from their contracts. No replacement backer had been found. So ended a story that had run for two decades and had encompassed six Tour de France wins between 1976 and 1984. Guimard returned briefly to the front rank of pro cycling to set up Cofidis in 1997, but moved on. The days when he was his own boss had ended with the demise of Casto. Castorama, meanwhile, initially went from strength to strength, continuing its European expansion by linking up with the British DIY chain B&Q in 1998; it was bought out by B&Q’s owners Kingfisher four years later. But more recently it has begun downsizing amid controversy over the outsourcing of back-office jobs to Poland; it remains a major presence on the French retail landscape, with 101 stores, and 76 in Poland. And in cycling, few will ever forget those jerseys.