In the third volume of his Cycling Legends series, author Chris Sidwells focused on the first man to win all three Grand Tours in his career and the first to win the Tour de France five times. Monsieur Chrono was the nickname given to Jacques Anquetil, who built his reputation through his brilliance as a time trial racer. With his sporting heyday from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s and with his early death at 53 in 1987, many of today’s cycling fans are not that familiar with his impressive accomplishments. The first English-language biography of him only appeared in 2008. This new book is subtitled The Man Behind the Mask and the author’s aim was to reveal who Anquetil really was, someone far more complex, in both his professional and personal lives, than his public image suggested.Born in Normandy in 1934 and raised on a strawberry farm, Anquetil left the village school at 14 to enter a technical college where he became friends with a fellow student who was a cyclist. Soon Jacques was riding with the local club, where he surprised the others with his natural talent. Anquetil believed that bike racing offered an escape from the dreary everyday life that seemed ahead of him and was in a hurry to succeed. By 1952 as an amateur he won the Normandy provincial championship, followed by the French national one that same year. These results qualified him for the French Olympic team, which won the team medal at…
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