After the Second World War, lots of writing became very grandiose, and cycling journalists in the 1950s were particularly guilty of this.
Riders were mostly working class lads who liked riding their bikes, but they were turned into these magnificent figures with allusions to Prometheus and ancient Greek gods. So for Charly Gaul to get called an ‘angel of the mountains’ for his climbing ability probably played into his ego a bit, but I think it also got him caught between reality and mythology. He didn’t quite know how to handle the portrayal of himself.
Charly Gaul was born in 1932 and lived in the Ardennes of northern Luxembourg.
He didn’t get a bike until he was 14, but by 16 he’d become one of the best riders in Luxembourg, a cyclocross champion who excelled in hilly races in the Ardennes. He went to the Tour of Austria at 18 and set a record on the Grossglockner climb and won the stage. He found his calling in the mountains, and he was built for it – slight and quite short where the winners of his day, the likes of Louison Bobet and Gino Bartali, were much more robust.
He had this unique style; he just hit a climb and started winding up the tempo, really high cadence, and it lulled competitors into a false sense of security. At first riders could follow him, but halfway up he’d broken them, slowly and inexorably. Raphaël Géminiani said he was ‘a murderous climber with a lower gear than the rest, turning his legs at a speed that would break your heart – tick tock, tick tock, tick tock’.
Gaul won the 1958 Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia twice, once in 1956 then again in 1959.
In all those races he took the characteristic Charly Gaul approach: not really pay attention in the first week, lose loads of time on the flat stages, come into the mountains 15-20 minutes down and then wait for a day – often with really bad weather – and just attack flat out. Sometimes he even told his rivals where he would do it, but they’d be helpless to do anything about it. He was Pogačar-esque.
In the 1956 Giro he took the race leader’s pink jersey on Stage 18 over Monte Bondone.
There was a freak storm and he took off on his own, riding through the freezing rain and snow wearing no jacket, just a jersey and a handkerchief knotted round his neck. He actually stopped halfway up the final climb and went into a cafe. His soigneur found him having a hot chocolate, so he got a bucket of hot water and rubbed his legs and arms with it to wake him up, then put him back on his bike. Gaul ended up winning by a huge margin, overturning the biggest deficit in Giro history [at the start of the stage Gaul was 16 minutes down in GC; by the end he was in pink, nearly eight minutes up].
He always looked immaculate on the bike.
He was a good-looking lad in his 20s, piercing blue eyes, fair hair, a kind of James Dean quiff, this rock star look to him. But as a rider he was quite a loner; pretty grumpy most of the time, really quite introverted. He didn’t get on with other riders, in particular Louison Bobet.
In the 1950s, Bobet was the undisputed king of French cycling but he wasn’t above underhand tactics. In the ’57 Giro, Bobet and his team attacked Gaul as he stopped for a nature break, and it cost him the race. Not only that, they started calling Gaul Monsieur Pipi afterwards.
Bobet was probably a bit jealous. I think the writers of the day wound him up a bit, saying Bobet was a great rider but he worked for it, whereas Gaul just had this natural grace and beauty, he floated above Bobet.
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Gaul never reached such Grand Tour heights again, and by 1962 riders were saying ‘he’s not the rider he used to be, it’s almost embarrassing’.
But he took his time to retire. He wanted to return to the Tour, to ride well, but it never happened. He finally retired in 1965 and opened a cafe in Luxembourg City. It wasn’t the best move for someone who was pretty unsociable – people would come in looking to hear stories about the Tour but all they’d get was Charly sitting behind the counter in silence, drinking most of the bar himself, by all accounts.
His second marriage was breaking down at the time, and one day he closed the bar, packed up and moved to the Ardennes forest. He put on weight, grew a beard and became an unrecognisable hermit, not to be seen for decades.
That’s the story anyway, but it’s here in Charly’s life that my book really starts to unpick the truth from mythology.
He eventually ended up as an archivist at the Luxembourg Ministry of Sport.
I went to research my book there and I was presented with big boxes stacked with clippings and photographs and magazines, and most of them were labelled in this clear handwriting. I now realise it was probably Charly’s.
• This article originally appeared in issue 156 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
