Shoulder to Shoulder. The Horton Collection

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       THE HORTON COLLECTION

      Copyright © 2015 by Shelly and Brett Horton

      All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by VeloPress, a division of Competitor Group, Inc.

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      ISBN 978-1-937715-36-6

      eISBN 978-1-937716-72-1

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      Photo retouching by Elizabeth Riley

      v. 3.1

      On the cover: Jacques Anquetil and Rick van Looy, 1963 Tour of Sardinia

       Anquetil and Van Looy share a light moment during stage 3

      A note to readers: Double-tap on photographs to enlarge them. After art is selected, you may expand or pinch your fingers to zoom in and out.

      Images referenced in the Notes section are linked to the corresponding photographs. Click on the highlighted phrases to view the images.

       For Trevor

      INTRODUCTION

      It is in some ways ironic that throughout most of the hip, happening, swinging ’60s, cycling’s most public and accomplished face was that of Jacques Anquetil, a cerebral, calculating, and distant Frenchman. Born in Normandy, France’s northern bulwark against the English, Anquetil developed a shrewd eye for profit as he worked on his family’s strawberry farm, and although he was frequently painted as a bon vivant later in his career—a man who would call for roast pheasant and another glass of champagne the night before a critical stage in the Tour de France—he never strayed far from his farming roots in the way he would coolly survey the landscape before a race and create his tactical plan on how—or even whether—to win it. He was hardly the portrait of a carefree, pop-a-pill-and-let-the-good-times-roll ’60s archetype.

      But in the same way that the Beatles could never have defined the music and mores of the ’50s (the Rolling Stones are another matter), Anquetil was the essential figure to bring cycling out of the Fausto Coppi era. Without Anquetil’s style and success, his candor in interviews, and his exotic looks in every photo, cycling would have spent another decade on the grimy black-and-white back pages of local newspapers rather than erupting onto the four-color covers of national magazines. Indeed, we all would have had to await the arrival of Eddy Merckx, and 10 years would have been lost.

      This is not to say that there were no other stars, no other cycling personalities to capture our attention and affections as the new decade dawned. This book is full of them. There was Tom Simpson, the transplanted Englishman with an earnest yet slightly befuddled mien who crossed the Channel and became a sort of honorary Frenchman in his veneration for the Tour and its traditions (mastering the language did not hurt his cause).

      There was Federico Bahamontes, a lanky Spaniard who could climb into the clouds on a trail of vapor and could barely descend a mountain without a crash. His erratic behavior and puzzling inconsistency were adorable, and he had plenty of fans.

      There was, of course, Rik van Looy—Rik II, following the reign of Rik van Steenbergen—the Emperor who steamrollered his way to a crushing total of 492 career victories. If you wanted to hang a picture of cycling success on your wall back then, Van Looy was your boy, front and center.

      Competent, great champions, one and all. Some of them, like Van Looy, a little thuggish, but that only added to their attractive danger.

      But none had the panache of Anquetil. None carried themselves in a way that made them untouchable. None were ever going to be pursued relentlessly by the paparazzi to capture their dashing elegance for the style pages of the monthly glossies.

      The fact is, all of them were cyclists. Great cyclists, to be sure, but cyclists first, athletes second, and public figures barely.

      Anquetil was essential for cycling because of all his cycling contemporaries, only he had the imperial bearing, the jaw-dropping presence, the disregard for convention that our modern heroes need to stand apart. He was the perfect man for his time because he strolled onto the athletic stage at exactly the moment when the athlete’s presence in society was being redefined.

      That redefinition of the athlete’s image was, of course, entirely due to the explosion of new media in the ’60s and its voracious appetite for fresh stars. The rapidly improving technology—color TV, four-color weekly newsmagazines, faster film emulsions, lighter and more portable cameras—doted on the photogenic and witty and shunned the unattractive dullards, no matter how accomplished.

      It was an era for the dashing and cosmopolitan, a time for the wry insider. The athletes who captured hearts were not the journeymen, the bricklayers who could persevere through the muck to stand on a rain-soaked podium; they were quite the opposite, almost indifferent to the commotion they left in their wake—still determined to win, but to win with style. They all had a touch of James Bond.

      They were athletes like Jean-Claude Killy, a giant slalom skier of unimaginable speed, hurtling down snow-covered rock faces with reckless abandon, nearly out of control, poles akimbo, skimming across the finish line on one ski, the other pinwheeling away in a cloud of snow. He married an actress. He was sponsored by Moët & Chandon. He melted American hearts with his rugged looks and charmingly accented English.

      They were athletes like Jackie Stewart, the wee Scotsman, successor to compatriot Jim Clark in Formula 1, but a better man for the media than Clark because not only did he have the accent, not only did he have the style—long hair, big sunglasses, a corduroy Breton hat—but he also had the vocabulary for the press to perfectly describe the fragmenting terrors of his profession and then the aplomb to slip into the narrow aluminum shell of his car and race off to victory.

      They were athletes like Giacomo Agostini, a suave northern Italian with movie-star looks, a Grand Prix motorcycle racer of irresistible charm who would defy death in every turn as he pushed his snarling bike deeper into the corners, then sweep into the winner’s circle and pull off his helmet to reveal a stunning mass of perfectly coiffed black hair and a wry, gleaming grin before greeting the press in three languages.

      And there was Anquetil, who gnawed over every detail but never let the public see him do it.

      In these pages we have a revealing presentation of our two Anquetils: Anquetil the champion bicycle racer and Anquetil the modern athlete. His credentials in both worlds are impeccable. As a cycling champion, he was, as we all know, the first to win the Tour de France five times. He set the hour record in 1956 and won the Grand Prix des Nations nine times and brought that exacting time trial skill to bear in every road race, pressuring his adversaries with relentless speed. He skipped the Tour de France in 1960 in favor of the Giro d’Italia and went on to win it, the first Frenchman to do so. He won it again in 1964, the same year he won his fifth Tour title and one of his first classics, Ghent–Wevelgem. He was not a rider who sought to win everything, but he invariably won the races that mattered to him, whether the motivation was prestige