Raymond Poulidor - Anquetil-Poulidor: The Social Significance

Anquetil-Poulidor: The Social Significance

Anquetil unfailingly beat Poulidor in the Tour de France and yet Poulidor remained the more popular. "The more unlucky I was, the more the public liked me and the more money I earned", he said.

Divisions between fans became marked, which two sociologists studying the impact of the Tour on French society say became emblematic of France old and new.

The extent of those divisions is shown in a story told by Pierre Chany:

The Tour de France has the major fault of dividing the country, right down to the smallest hamlet, even families, into two rival camps. I know a man who grabbed his wife and held her on the grill of a heated stove, seated and with her skirts held up, for favouring Jacques Anquetil when he preferred Raymond Poulidor. The following year, the woman became a Poulidor-iste. But it was too late. The husband had switched his allegiance to Gimondi. The last I heard they were digging in their heels and the neighbours were complaining.

While Chany's story may be apocryphal, Poulidor himself says he knows of couples who divorced and of fights that started in bars when fans debated whether he or Anquetil was the better.

Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard, in their study, wrote:

Those who recognised themselves in Jacques Anquetil liked his priority of style and elegance in the way he rode. Behind this fluidity and the appearance of ease was the image of France winning and those who took risks identified with him. Humble people saw themselves in Raymond Poulidor, whose face - lined with effort - represented the life they led on land they worked without rest or respite. His declarations, full of good sense, delighted the crowds: a race, even a difficult one, lasts less time than a day bringing in the harvest. A big part of the public therefore finished by identifying with the one who symbolised bad luck and the eternal position of runner-up, an image that was far from true for Poulidor, whose record was particularly rich. Even today, the expression of the eternal second and of a Poulidor Complex is associated with a hard life, as an article by Jacques Marseille showed in Le Figaro when it was headlined "This country is suffering from a Poulidor Complex".

Poulidor himself says that people would no longer talk of him had he won the Tour. As it is,

Research showed that more than 4,000 newspaper articles appeared about him in France in just 1974 and that no other rider "had ever incited so many sociological investigations, so many university theses, seeking to find the cause of his prodigious popularity.