QUIET ACHIEVER
Charly Mottet, one of France’s greatest ever cyclists, was born in Valence, which hosted stage 10 of the 2021 Tour. Procycling looks back at his career of a rider whose reputation never quite caught up with his palmarès
Writer Edward Pickering Photography Offside Sports Photography
The Rhône Valley city of Valence, which straddles France’s greatest river on the border of the baked plateaux of the Ardèche and Drôme départements, is a relatively modern addition to the Tour’s itinerary. It only made its first appearance in the Tour in 1996, and the 2021 visit was only its fifth, which is curious because it is perfectly positioned as a waypoint between the Alps and Pyrenees - on a clockwise Tour, it’s an ideal distance for one day’s racing from the Alps, and then you can turn right into the Massif Central or left down the Rhône and into the Languedoc. It’s also the chef-lieu, the departmental capital, so you’d think the Tour would have visited more often, but the city has obviously had a complex relationship with the race.
The Valence stage is hard to define. The last three visits have been bunch sprints, sometimes reduced ones, and the first two were breakaway wins - there’s no one kind of rider suited to the Valence stage, or perhaps that just means it is a place where anybody, one of cycling’s ubiquitous all-rounders, can hope to win. This is apt because the city’s favourite cycling son is Charly Mottet, one of his country’s greatest and most exciting yet underrated riders. Mottet, whose career spanned a decade between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, was just good enough at everything to not quite be good enough to win the Tour de France.Current fans may be wowed by Wout van Aert’s allround abilities, but Mottet was a three-time winner of the Grand Prix des Nations, a 90km individual test that was widely seen as the TT world championships of its time, and there was one Tour de France, 1991, where he won consecutive stages. The first was a flat stage where he caught out the bunch sprinters by attacking with just over a kilometre to go in Saint-Herblain and holding them off. He didn’t technically outsprint the sprinters - he wasn’t that much of an all-rounder - but attacking on a flat finish in the final kilometre and winning ahead of the sprinters is the single best way to win a bike race and it was spectacular. It’s become a difficult challenge in the modern era - so much so that the last rider to have done it at the Tour de France was Fabian Cancellara in 2007. The second stage win came following the next day’s rest day and was a multiple-mountain Pyrenean stage which crossed the Cols du Soudet, Ichère and Somport before finishing in Jaca. Mottet got into the break, which finished almost seven minutes ahead of the GC group, for a rare double of a flat stage and a mountain stage on consecutive race days. The irony is that though for a spell in the late 1980s he was the best time triallist in the world, even beating Bernard Hinault in the GP des Nations when ‘the Badger’ was at his peak, he never completed the career hat trick of Tour stages that Van Aert managed in this year’s Tour - bunch sprint, mountain stage and TT. By 1991, Mottet couldn’t match riders like Miguel Indurain in the individual stages and his best time trial result that year was 10th, in the Tour’s final test in Mâcon.