Re-Cycle: When Durand broke away to rule the Ronde
/dnl.eurosport.com/sd/img/placeholder/eurosport_logo_1x1.png){kind=logo}
Updated 03/04/2020 at 10:40 GMT
Felix Lowe rolls back and cuts loose with Jacky Durand on an epic 217km break that defied the odds to win the 1992 Tour of Flanders. Durand’s pyrotechnics mean he is still the last Frenchman to have won a cobbled Classic.
Re-Cycle: Jacky Durand
Image credit: Eurosport
A Frenchman winning the Tour of Flanders was inconceivable. People didn't even know there were French people in this race.
Speaking to Eurosport almost two decades after he pulled off the impossible, Jacky Durand tried to explain in 2011 just how he went about winning one of the biggest races of the season – and his career.
Durand was part of a Castorama squad that had not even sent its A-listers to contest 1992’s Tour of Flanders. And yet he broke away with three other riders, and with 217km remaining, before eventually soloing clear of Thomas Wegmüller at the business end of the race.
With the partisan home crowds silenced in disbelief, an ecstatic Durand came home 48 seconds clear of the Swiss Wegmüller to become only the third Frenchman to win in Flanders, after Louison Bobet in 1955 and Jean Forestier the following year.
That also made the then-25-year-old the first rider in the Ronde's modern history to win from a long-distance break. Durand would go on to cement something of a reputation for being a breakaway specialist of consummate Gallic pluck during his career.
Edward Pickering, a biographer of the Tour of Flanders, says Durand's triumph that day was not merely the result of a jammy throw of the dice. It might have been one of the unlikeliest outcomes imaginable for the most important date in the Belgian cycling calendar, but Durand had a plan and executed it with panache.
"I don't think physically, pound for pound, Durand was a Tour of Flanders winner," says Pickering. "I don't think he would have won it the traditional way by fighting through, staying with the leaders and attacking the best Classics riders in the world over the Muur or the Bosberg. His win came from putting himself out in the front, mastering the circumstances and having a bit of luck. He was never a contender – except for the year he won it."
Setting the scene: Jacky Who?
In his book The Ronde, Pickering paints a picture of Durand as a man with a loud voice who laughs at his own jokes. Recalling a meeting with him from 2002 at a post-Tour de France criterium, Pickering writes: "He flirted with the women, gave crushing handshakes to the men and was the centre of attention, effortlessly. I was both appalled and impressed by his presence."
Before causing the biggest Belgian upset since Eddy Merckx ordered frites without mayonnaise, Durand had hardly been pulling up trees. Entering his third season with Castorama, the relatively unknown Frenchman had one pro win to his name: the Grand Prix d'Isbergues, in 1991.
Durand was under no illusions about the difficulty of winning a race like Flanders. In his maiden appearance in 1991, he had given up at the second feed zone – leaving him to conclude that the Ronde was "something inaccessible" for a rider of his stature.
"The Tour of Flanders was not a race I dreamed of winning. I was just hoping to finish the race," Durand said in 2011.
As much as finishing Milan-San Remo or even Paris-Roubaix seemed feasible to me, the Ronde seemed totally out of reach. I'm not just saying that because I won it. But for me, it was the biggest and hardest race in the world – much harder than Roubaix.
Such was the pitiful record for French riders and French teams in Flanders, Cyrille Guimard, the manager of Castorama who himself had finished third in the 1971 edition, sent a B-team to Belgium that weekend. Guimard and his star riders instead travelled to Brittany for the Grand Prix Rennes, a far more prestigious – and realistic – prospect for the team sponsor. Durand was part of a team sent to be Flanders fodder as a "punishment".
Dudu, the breakaway king
You don't win a race like the Ronde by getting in a break. At least, that's the general consensus.
"It's a bloody hard race to win," confirms Pickering. "And when you look at the list of winners, they are all, with no exception, absolute thoroughbreds – they're the hardest, toughest, classiest, best Classics riders that there are. Except Durand."
Over the succession of cobbled bergs and sections of crude pavé, the Ronde is a drawn-out slugfest; a battle of attrition that whittles down the group of contenders until the strongest prevails – as was arguably the case in 2019 when outsider Alberto Bettiol zipped clear on the Oude Kwaremont, 14km from the finish.
"There are no winners who can be classified as luckier in the whole history of the race as Durand," Pickering says. "Apart from the fact that it's very tough, that's because it's also a very important race for the Belgians – it's their big event. The big Belgian riders who specialise in this race all focus on it and don't allow these things to happen. Durand sticks out on the palmares like a sore thumb."
Going on the attack was a tactic Durand employed for most of his career – so much so that L'Équipe's Vélo magazine ran a monthly "Jackymètre" to log the kilometres ridden at the head of races on long-range, often fruitless breaks during the course of the season. One year, it hit 2,270.
Besides delivering him a few famous wins, this famous combativity above all made Durand stand out in a way his talent never could. Durand was, says Pickering, the archetypal breakaway specialist, a precursor to the likes of Jens Voigt and Thomas De Gendt – perhaps even the original king of the suicidal attack.
"Durand was the first to make a career out of it,” says Pickering. “That was his USP. He was the guy who got into crazy long breaks.
I think he realised full well that, with his physical gifts, talents and capacities, he wasn't going to get the fame and notoriety he wanted by winning races through brute force in the same way that the Classics specialists could.
By being the breakaway guy, "Dudu" ensured he was invited on the lucrative post-Tour criterium circuit and opened up many a money-making opportunity. "There was certainly," says Pickering, "a method behind his madness in terms of these long breaks."
Durand himself put it differently. He hated the idea of riders "finishing the Tour without having attacked once, maybe the whole of the season, even the whole of their career. I'd rather finish shattered and last having attacked a hundred times than finish 25th without having tried."
Tearing away – and ripping up the rule book
He who wins the Tour of Flanders tends to play a waiting game, the rules of which favour endurance over rash impetuousness. But in the 76th edition of the Ronde, Durand played by his own rule book.
After narrowly avoiding missing the start of the race following a mishap with ill-fitting cleats, Durand survived the first frantic hour before darting clear of the peloton 40km into the 257km race. He was quickly joined by two Belgian journeymen – Patrick Roelandt of the tiny Assur team and Hervé Meyvisch of Carrera – as well as the experienced Swiss breakaway artist Thomas Wegmüller.
Wegmüller's presence in the quartet was key. A Festina teammate of Sean Kelly, the 31-year-old was a strong Classics rider who had finished runner-up in Roubaix four years earlier and seventh in 1990.
With Kelly in the World Cup leader's jersey after his second Milan-San Remo triumph a fortnight earlier, Wegmüller's role that day was to pave the way for what would probably be the Irishman's last chance of winning the one Monument that eluded him.
If having a strongman like Wegmüller in the break exonerated Festina from the burden of having to chase, it was not long before the Panasonic and Buckler teams of co-favourites Maurizio Fondriest and Edwig van Hooydonck grew tired of doing the dirty work.
Kelly remembers that day well. "Wegmüller was one of those riders who, when he made the breakaway, was just super strong,” he says. “He would ride all day on the front and never seem to tire. He was a big part of that breakaway surviving with Jacky.
I said to the Festina directeur sportif a number of times when he came back to the peloton: 'Just tell him not to ride too hard,' because the race would be won at the end. But Wegmüller just kept on riding and riding. We wanted to calm him, but he wanted to push on. For that reason, we were behind, and I couldn't use my teammates to try and chase because we had a man in front.
For his part, the man who instigated the move wasn't thinking about winning as much as he was mere survival. "When I attacked, it was clearly not to win – I just wanted to finish," Durand explained. "My plan at the time was to avoid passing the Oude Kwaremont with the whole peloton. I wanted to get over with a little gap – say five or six minutes."
As it happened, Durand and his fellow escapees had a whopping 15 minutes when the race passed over the Oude Kwaremont – down from a maximum gap of 22 minutes at the first cobbled climb, the Tiegemberg.
According to Van Hooydonck, Wegmüller was the primary concern.
"But no one was worried about the other three," he later told Cycle Sport magazine. "The two Belgians would not make it to the end, we were pretty sure.
No one seemed to know much about Durand. He was not well-known at all then. Maybe we should have asked around. Normally you can let a group get 15 minutes, maybe even a bit more if there's a headwind, but it got out of hand. But there was never a point when I thought we wouldn't catch them.
By the time they had crossed over the Peterberg, Hotond, New Kruisberg, Taaienberg and the seventh climb of the day, the Eikenberg, the lead was still a healthy 11 minutes.
"In many races," Durand said, "20 minutes early on is not enough. This is the case in the Tour of Flanders, when it can come back very quickly once the big riders ramp things up."
But with Kelly's Festina holding off, and the other big teams cancelling each other out in a stalemate, the gap did not drop as expected. Roelandt was first to go by the wayside after the climbs of Volkegemberg and Varent, before Meyvisch was distanced with more than an hour left to ride. Then Durand had his famous wobble.
Durand's Classic crisis
With around 60km remaining, the Frenchman experienced a bad patch that lasted 20km, during which he had to hang on through gritted teeth.
"I think Jacky got the old hunger knock at one point and Wegmüller did all the work, slowed it up a little and waited for him to eat something and return," says Kelly.
It's normal in these long Classic races, especially when you're out in the breakaway, to have a little period when you feel not so good. You eat a bit and rest, and you come around and feel a better. Wegmüller was that sort of guy – a real nice guy, too good, sometimes.
Too good, indeed.
But the Swiss had a big decision to make. There were still five more climbs on the menu – including the Muur de Geraardsbergen-and-Bosberg combination ahead of the finale – and to go solo with 60km still remaining might have been tantamount to signing his own death warrant.
In recent years, the Ronde has been won with solo breaks by the likes of Bettiol, Niki Terpstra and Philippe Gilbert – the latter, most memorably, riding clear with 55km remaining. But Wegmüller had already been up the road for 150km, and so you can understand his reluctance to go alone so far from the finish in Meerbeke.
Durand had been up-front about his plight, apologising to his companion and telling him he couldn't pull. If he had, it would have also jeopardised the chance of the break – with the gap now coming down quite fast.
Pickering explains how Wegmüller gambled on giving Durand a break in the hope that he would recover and contribute a bit more towards the end of the race:
Back then, Wegmüller was quite a big name and Durand was a relative unknown. Wegmüller's own calculation was: 'Keep Durand, I could use him later on,' because on a level playing field, he was the stronger rider. In bike races sometimes you have to time your bad patches as well, and Durand was fortunate that his bad patch came with 60 kilometres to go.
Durand came through his crisis and the leading duo crossed the Leberg, Molenberg and Berendries, entering Geraardsbergen, with 18km to go, with a lead of four minutes.
How the race was won
Having nursed Durand through his wobble, and withstanding the temptation of attacking on the Muur, Wegmüller was confident of dropping Durand. His plan was, in his words, to "drop one of my bombs on the Bosberg". But when he tried, he was the one who exploded. His stomach was already aching from a glucose drink he had downed after the Muur. Durand, who had by now found his legs, simply dropped him and rode away over the top.
"Wegmüller was unlucky that his bad patch came at the absolute crux of the race and not 50 kilometres earlier," says Pickering.
Behind, the Belgian defending champion van Hooydonck and Italy's Maurizio Fondriest, who had won the rainbow stripes four years earlier in nearby Ronse, led the chase. But they clearly hadn't banked on Durand's second wind, and the lone leader crested the summit of the Bosberg with two minutes still to play with.
But with the team cars ordered to drop back to give the chasing riders some space, there was a lack of information for the front runners, which made for a tense finale. As Durand explained in 2011:
I only started to think about the victory about 10km from the finish after Wegmüller gave up on the Bosberg. The problem was that there was no information on the gaps behind. I knew that Van Hooydonck and Fondriest had attacked, but the details were contradictory, and I didn't know if I had a minute, two minutes or three. At the end of a race, when you have already been in the breakaway for 200km, you go much slower than guys like Van Hooydonck.
But as Durand approached Meerbeke with around 3km remaining, the race director's car drew level with the lone leader and the window wound down. Eddy Merckx, a double winner of the race he now ran, leaned out and said: "You've won the Tour of Flanders, young man."
"This was when a really understood that it was in the bag," Durand said. "I thought to myself: 'Jacky, you pulled off the hold-up of the century.'"
Despite a small heart-in-mouth moment when almost clipping a fan who had strayed into the road on the apex of the final bend onto the home straight, Durand held on for his historic win. Wearing a white lightweight helmet, he straightened his eye-catching Castorama kit – the one that looked like a pair of dungarees – and punched the air on crossing the line after 14 hills, six sections of cobbles and more than six hours and 37 minutes in the saddle.
His winning margin over Wegmüller was 48 seconds, while Van Hooydonck beat Fondriest in the sprint for third place a further 56 seconds back. Durand recalled the bemusement of the Belgian fans, who had flocked to the race to see a home favourite take the spoils but instead had been left underwhelmed by this unknown rider from the wrong side of the border.
"They were completely dazed to see me winning," said Durand. "They would have accepted Wegmüller – he was a big rouleur and, while not one of the favourites, he had outsider status and such things were not unheard of. But a Frenchman winning the Tour of Flanders? They were hoping for Van Hooydonck, but instead they got me."
Jacky’s gamble leaves stars red-faced
The legend goes that some people in the finish area were so confused that Durand could hear them say: ‘Jacky who?’.
"It was very much an anti-climax for the local fans," says Pickering. "I understand that. It's their race and they're passionate about their race and riders. They want a Flemish rider to win the Tour of Flanders every year without fail. But I think it was brilliant. That race sums up bike racing as well as any victory by Museeuw or Van Hooydonck. It was pure cycling."
Spare a thought for Durand's manager Guimard. He might have had reason to celebrate Jean-Cyril Robin's victory in the GP Rennes some 600km away, but his decision to travel with his A-team to Brittany deprived the feted coach of the chance to witness first-hand what was arguably Castorama's biggest and unlikeliest win.
Unlikely, perhaps, but nonetheless deserved, says Pickering:
The winner of a bike race is always right. Without exception. The point of the bike race is to find out who wins the bike race, and the guy who wins crosses the line first. It's not the strongest guy, it's not the guy with the biggest lungs or leg muscles. It's the guy who works all those circumstances to get into a race-winning move.
"Durand's luck can be argued to be extremely bad judgement on the part of the so-called specialists and Classics favourites. They simply gave that break too much road. They gave a four-rider move 22 minutes. In normal circumstances this might have been okay. But it was a nice day and the wind was much more favourable to the break than it might have otherwise been.
"Then there was the composition of the break: obviously Durand had a very big engine, but Thomas Wegmüller was an incredibly good rider and an absolute horse. So, you could say that Durand was lucky, but by the same token the big favourites were stupid to let him and Wegmüller get such a gap on a day the weather wasn't too bad."
What happened next?
Lightning did not strike twice. As defending champion, Durand finished 72nd in the 1993 edition of the Ronde as Johan Museeuw notched the first of his three wins. Durand was 72nd again seven years later before failing to finish in three of his next four attempts. Such lowly finishes were replicated across other major Classics, with the Frenchman never finishing higher than 20th in any of the 21 Monuments he subsequently rode.
"He certainly wasn't a specialist," says Pickering. "They weren't going to let him win twice, were they? Even Jacky Durand probably wouldn't have the cheek to imagine he could win that race for a second time. But that wasn't the end of his career at all. He went on to wear the Yellow Jersey [in the Tour]. He won Paris-Tours as well. He was a very good rider who picked his moments. But Flanders was lightning that was only ever going to strike once."
Durand again pushed the needle on the Jackymètre when he attacked early in the French national championships at Châtellerault in 1993, resulting in victory ahead of his Castorama teammate Laurent Brochard.
In another example of riding his luck, the combative Frenchman took the Tour's Yellow Jersey on the opening day of the 1995 race when he was one of the early starters in the prologue and a sudden deluge ruined the chances of the favourites once he'd gone top of the leader board.
"Maybe Durand's real talent was picking his moments to shine because he certainly overachieved in some ways – and the Tour of Flanders and his Yellow Jersey were certainly two of those," says Pickering.
Four years later, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his seven Tours, Durand was the Lanterne Rouge of the 1999 race, some three hours and 19 minutes behind the American. On one particularly eventful stage, Durand crashed, dislocated his shoulder, remounted, collided with a team car, then had his leg run over by another. But, astonishingly, he still finished – winning the Tour's most combative rider prize in the process, earning him yet more notoriety.
For all his popularity in France, however, Durand's career was not free from controversy. He was banned for a month in 1996 after a doping infraction, while his name later appeared on the list of doping tests published by the French Senate in July 2013 that were collected during the 1998 Tour de France and found to be positive for EPO when retested in 2004.
A fixture in the gruppetto just as much off the front of the race, Durand was also booted off the Tour in 2002 for holding onto a car during an ascent to Plateau de Beille in the Pyrenees – something he was suspected to have done the previous year, too.
After retiring in 2005, Durand followed the Tour as a representative of the supermarket chain Champion before landing a role as a television commentator for French Eurosport. Still a firm fixture on the Tour, he enjoyed a few words last year with his friend and Eurosport colleague Bradley Wiggins, who told viewers, in his own inimitable way from the back of a motorcycle, that the "the breakaway guy" used to be his idol, recalling his party lifestyle and describing him as a "porn star".
All in all, Durand picked up 18 wins as a pro, including three on the Tour, two national titles and victories in Paris-Tours and Tro-Bro Léon. But his most famous win will always remain his implausible triumph in Flanders. He remains to the day only the third – and last – Frenchman to crack Flanders.
Although anticlimactic at the time, Durand's victory eventually resonated with the Flemish fans, who made him something of an honorary Flandrian as a result. Towards the end of his career he rode for Belgian teams and, at one point, when he was stopped for speeding, the Belgian policeman took one look at Durand and said, "You won the Tour of Flanders in 92," before letting him drive on.
"I was young, but nothing that I experienced afterwards could match what I experienced that day," Durand said in 2011. "I had some great victories in my career. But whether it was Paris-Tours, the French nationals or stages of the Tour – all those I knew I was capable of winning.
"But with the Tour of Flanders, I really did the impossible."
-- Written by Felix Lowe. You also can subscribe to the Re-Cycle podcast by Eurosport for audio episodes of the most compelling stories from cycling history.
Scan me
Related Topics
Share this article
Advertisement
Advertisement