Dry Season

I'm staying off the beer, in a half-hearted attempt to get my ailing body into some sort of shape.  Still allowing myself the odd glass of wine with food.  

There's no sense losing all proportion over this; and anyway, I've been heartened by reading "Sex Lies and Handlebar Tape",  Paul Howard's intriguing biography of five-times Tour winner Jacques Anquetil.

Anquetil's colourful private life is now well-known, but is probably worth repeating.  In as short a summary as I can manage:

• He had an affair with his Doctor's wife, setting up home with her and her two young children.
• When she proved unable to bear him a child of his own, he had one with her daughter -- who was by now a teenager. 
• He then lived with the two women and his new child in an unorthodox (no wonder the French have a word for it) menage a trois.
• When this arrangement failed, he attempted to make his two former lovers jealous by having an affair with his stepson's wife, a relationship that continued until his death.

Chapeau, Maitre Jacques.  Sunday lunch at the Anquetil house must have been a bit tense.

More interesting in some ways was his attitude to food and drink. 

Anquetil had a reputation as a bit of a gourmand, horrifying traditionalists with his taste for seafood and creamy sauce. Howard suggests that some of it was pretence, done to wind up the press and opponents, but Cycling magazine looked aghast at his diet when he came to Herne Hill:

"Before his races ... Jacques ate hors d'oeuvres (sausages, meat, salad), sweetbreads in cream sauce with creamed spinach, and fresh fruit, and he drank spa water and coffee."

Sweetbreads in cream sauce?  I was lucky to get some bread-and-butter pudding when I raced at Herne Hill.

And he was partial to a drop.  After an all-night drive to one team training camp he sat down to a breakfast of langoustines with mayonnaise and a carafe of white wine.  His famous quote about training is reproduced here in full.  Asked by a young fan how best to prepare for a big race, he recommended:

"A pheasant with chestnuts, a bottle of champagne and a woman"

In particular, I like the fact that he was very specific about the food -- less so about the rest.

The book if full of interesting, almost incidental, asides that reveal the lost colour of pro-racing.

Among my favourites so far: Apo Lazarides,  on a lone breakaway up the Col D'Izoard, stopped and waited for the peloton to catch up because he was frightened of being attacked by bears; Raphael Geminiani, angry at being left out of the French team for the Tour,  turned up at a stage start with a donkey named after the selector Marcel Bidot.

Truly, it is the races that have got smaller.