Never trust a cyclist
What did Jeff Bernard do?
Twitter used to be a genuinely exciting and reasonably nice place to be. It was, for me, the place where I realised that there was no barrier anymore to communicating directly with someone. You didn’t need to know someone’s phone number or email address to say something to them. They were right there.
People who wrote books had always been just people who wrote books. They were names on tatty spines. They were abstract concepts from which words came from. They weren’t real people.
The emergence of Twitter coincided with the commencement of my quest to buy and read EVERY CYCLING BOOK IN THE WORLD. For a few months they were just names on spines - William Fotheringham, Richard Moore, Les Woodland, Jeremy Whittle. Then some of them started appearing on this social media thing and they became fully formed people.
I am a pedantic arsehole now. And I was a pedantic arsehole back then. I actually think I’ve toned down the pedanticarsholeism in recent years. I was way worse back then. I would read books and find mistakes in them. And now, oh my word, now… I could explain to the authors directly just how wrong they were.
My first victim was Richard Moore. In reading his book In Search of Robert Millar I remember I had found mention of ‘consecutive’ Tour de France wins by Bernard Thevenet - when of course, he won in non-consecutive years in 1975 and 1977. And I caught him writing that Stephen Roche held on to his yellow jersey at La Plagne when he nearly caught Pedro Delgado and collapsed and needed oxygen. But it was Delgado who was in yellow that day.
Of course I was delighted with myself. A less wholesome writer would have just ignored me. To Richard’s great credit he private messaged me, asked for email address and encouraged me to keep finding mistakes because he wanted to correct all of them for an upcoming reprint.
My second victim was also Richard Moore. In reading his book Slaying the Badger I had found him writing down that Bernard Hinault rode Paris-Roubaix once, won it, and never rode it again.
Again this real person who was actually real and wasn’t just a name on a bookshelf wrote back to me. Pro Cycling Stats didn’t exist back then so just looking this stuff up was not straight forward. I gave Richard all the details of the editions of Paris-Roubaix that Hinault did ride. Richard thanked me and said I should start charging money for this kind of stuff - which, looking back on 15 years later, has made me smile.
Richard’s explanation for this incorrect info about Hinault was that it had actually come from Bernard Hinault himself.
This, I find interesting. Either Hinault was utterly misremembering his own life or, more likely, he was purposely adjusting his own memories for the sake of a good story. Riders, sometimes, are very unreliable sources of information about their own careers. There is a reason that a person themselves is not considered an acceptable source for one’s own Wikipedia page.
I came across an example of this recently. Daniel Friebe has been doing an excellent podcast series throughout the Tour on the notion that Paul Seixas might finally win the Tour de France for France, if not this year then soon.
In one of the episodes, Friebos talks to a rider who was the first next Bernard Hinault - Jean François Bernard, who nearly won the very first Tour after Hinault’s retirement but the peloton rather ganged up on him and Stephen Roche won instead.
In that 1987 Tour, Jean François Bernard won two time trials - one up Mont Ventoux and another flatter one in Dijon on the penultimate stage.
Friebe said in that podcast:
Whenever anyone asks him about that 1987 Tour, ‘Jeff’ never fails to mention a curious fact - he’s the only rider ever to win two individual time trials in a single edition [of the Tour] but not win the general classification.
I’m a nerd. A geek. It’s at these moments when listening to cycling podcasts that I would tend to pause and have a little think to see if I can come up with a counter-example. If I do manage to think of a reason why someone is wrong, I tend not to Tweet it these days. Not because I have matured or anything like that. It’s just that Twitter is mostly shite now and nobody cares about anything on there anymore.
Well, here I am, storing up my own personal corrections corner for The Backpedal. What else to use this platform for other than to tell everyone else how wrong they are?
But Friebos beat me to it. Before I could shift my brain down a gear (or up a gear? nobody knows) and start thinking properly, he followed up immediately by saying:
Except Jeff is wrong. I have my suspicions when he tells me and sure enough I can think of two other examples no sooner has our conversation ended - Serhiy Honchar in 2006 and Jan Ullrich in 1998.
Damn.
I would have enjoyed trying to come up with those counter-examples.
“But hold on a minute” - I thought to myself. “There are more than just Honchar and Ullrich. What about Fabian Cancellara? He won about 50 Tour de France time trials. He must be one. There must be others”
So I checked.
Jeff wasn’t just wrong, as Daniel pointed out. Jeff was really really really wrong.
