Charly Gaul - Personality

Personality

Gaul was taciturn and spoke rarely to anyone but a circle including Anglade, Roger Hassenforder, Nencini and Bahamontes. The writer Philippe Brunel described his reputation within cycling as "notorious" . "His eloquence and assurance seemed reserved for the bike, and the bike alone," said Charlie Woods.

Gaul was popular with fans but not among his rivals. Roger St Pierre said: "With his boyish good looks and Jack the Giantkiller style, Charly Gaul was loved by the fans. He had his friends, too - his faithful lieutenant Marcel Ernzer even rode an identical bike so that his master would not be uncomfortable if he had to borrow it after a crash or a puncture. But he was not always popular with his rivals, his unpredictable, schoolboyish temperament, his lazy riding on the flat and his sometimes insufferable ego winning him few allies in the bunch."

Many of his problems, said the writer Jan Heine, appeared to have been caused by a hostile peloton, which often seemed to do anything to make Gaul lose. He rarely shared what he won with those who helped him, said René de Latour in Sporting Cyclist. Brian Robinson rode with Gaul in a mixed team in the 1956 Tour de France. He said Gaul had no intention of discussing tactics or of sharing his prizes with the rest of the team in return for their help. Robinson said:

"Together with the rest of the team we were all in the same hotel and every hour I expected to be summoned to what I thought would be a certainty on the eve of the start - a conference to discuss tactics, allocation of prize money, etc. That such a meeting was not held seems an extraordinary thing to me. Everybody had taken it for granted that all in the Luxembourg team would be riding for Charly Gaul. Had such a conference taken place on the even of the race and my orders had been to nurse Gaul from Reims to Paris, with the promise of a cut of the total prize money won by the team at the end, I would have obeyed those orders until I dropped. But there were no such orders and when the question of sharing the prize money was brought up during a meal, it was vaguely dismissed with 'We'll talk about that later.'"

When Robinson won £250 on the first day and became the team's best-placed rider, "many of my friends in rival teams congratulated me on my effort the least enthusiastic of all seemed Gaul. " Similar events happened in other teams. Gaul rode in 1958 for a team largely of Dutchmen. They did nothing to help him in the wind on flat stages, said the French rider Henry Anglade, who knew Gaul well, who came from the same region and was one of the few French riders close to him. "He wasn't helped to move up through the echelons, " he said. Gaul in turn said the Dutch were "too interested in their personal classification."