RETRO THREE MUSKETEERS

Marc Madiot, Vincent Lavenu and Jean-René Bernaudeau manage the three most prominent French teams but they also raced at the same time in the 1980s. Procycling looks at the careers of the ‘Three Musketeers’

Writer William Fotheringham

Image Getty Images

As we all reflect every July, there is nowhere in the cycling universe like France. It’s got the biggest race in the world, some of the best scenery and – inevitably – the lion’s share of the sport’s legendary mountains. It’s also bucked the trend that can be seen in cycling’s traditional heartlands in recent decades: in Belgium, Holland, Italy and Spain, the team structure has been largely hollowed out to at most a couple of top-line squads.

But in France, there are currently more pro bike riders than there were in the 1980s, and more teams at the highest level, a total of seven in the WorldTour and ProTour. That’s partly the trickle-down effect from the Tour, but it’s also down to a quarter century of effort from three men with common roots in racing in the 1980s: Marc Madiot, Vincent Lavenu, and Jean-René Bernaudeau.

The three musketeers. Madiot the quixotic, passionate Porthos, a man whose passion is on display whenever one of his riders wins. Lavenu, the serious, hard-working Athos, seeking to leave a difficult past behind. Bernaudeau the suave, superficially cold-blooded Aramis, a man devoted to his métier, who rarely displays his deeply felt emotions. The trio have gone about building their teams – Madiot’s FDJ, Lavenu’s Ag2r and Bernaudeau’s TotalEnergies – in contrasting ways, with different trajectories. But they all have one thing in common: the race experience of 1980s France. Then, two teams dominated French cycling: Peugeot, who had a long history, but at times looked complacent, and the variants of Gitane-Renault, which blossomed briefly, but remains one of the most successful teams ever. Mercier and La Redoute were the jokers in the pack, sometimes at the best level, sometimes not.

Talk to Madiot and his nostalgia for that golden era is obvious. It’s not misplaced - this was a time when every locale, urban and rural, in Brittany and Normandy, had a wealth of weekend races and local clubs. Madiot adores the notion of le cyclisme de clocher, local bike racing. “All my family were on the roadside for amateur races. My sisters cooked rice cakes, and for my dad it was simple: if there was a good race 200km from home, he got up at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows, he took me to the race, we got back and that evening he’d put on his blue overalls to milk the cows again. Cycling was a way of getting out of the house, escaping the farm, seeing something a bit further afield.” Of the trio, Bernaudeau turned pro first, groomed by Cyrille Guimard from 1978 to be Bernard Hinault’s first lieutenant at Renault-Gitane. That feeling intensified in 1979 when he wore the yellow jersey for a day in the Tour and won bronze at the Worlds road race. His partnership with the Badger was seen at its best in the 1980 Giro, when the pair escaped together over the Stelvio, with Bernaudeau winning the stage into Sondrio and Hinault taking the pink jersey.