Vuelta a España – Re-Cycle: When Rudi Altig defied teammate Jacques Anquetil to win the 1962 title

Rudi Altig had a party trick. The big German with chiselled features and blonde hair was an early practitioner of yoga, which he used to help relax and steady his breathing at the track centres where he was so dominant in the late 1950s and 60s. Occasionally, he would hold himself upside down on his powerful arms and do a head stand, staying there until he felt ready to come down. Once, in the French city of La Rochelle, he even walked out of a restaurant on his hands.

If Altig was undeniably one of the most colourful characters of his generation – reflected by the rainbow bands he eventually wore around his chest – he also had the cycling skills to match his daftness off the bike. After all, there are not many riders who win their maiden Grand Tour by defying a leader who was the world’s greatest cyclist at the time.

By the beginning of 1962, Jacques Anquetil had won the Tour de France and Paris-Nice twice, the Giro d’Italia, and all of the world’s major time trials multiple times. Having notched his first Tour in 1957 and his first Giro in 1960, the Frenchman, according to Miroir du Cyclisme magazine at the start of the season, “envisions attacking the Tour of Spain rather than the Giro d’Italia because he wants to be the first rider in history to add his name to the palmarès of all three Grand Tours”.

Franco ruled over a country that was still bitterly divided, but La Vuelta was gaining in stature and attracting a more international crowd. Having the great Anquetil – the man dubbed Monsieur Chrono for his supreme time trialling ability – on the start list in Spain was a massive coup. On a course without major climbs and with a whopping 82km individual time trial on the third-last day, the 28-year-old Anquetil looked to be a shoo-in for yellow. Not only was he blessed with all the requisite physical attributes to succeed, the Frenchman was also surrounded by the strongest team in the race. The Saint-Raphaël – Heylett team boasted the 1958 Vuelta winner Jean Stablinski of France, the versatile Belgian Marcel Janssens, the Irish sprinter Shay Elliott and Altig, the German track star tipped for great things on the road.

When Saint-Raphaël romped to victory in Benidorm in the team time trial on Stage 5, it looked very much like all was set fair for Anquetil to make history. But instead, less than a fortnight later, the proud Frenchman would leave with his tail between his legs after his young teammate Altig emerged from the shadows to write his name into the record books for Germany instead. And that would set the wheels in motion for a rivalry that endured for the rest of their careers.

Anquetil arrived in Spain for the missing piece of his Grand Tour puzzle with the 25-year-old Altig as a late addition to his classy Saint-Raphaël squad. Team director Raphaël Géminiani was undecided on whether Altig was ready to ride a Grand Tour, and he wanted the track and Six-Day specialist to prove himself worthy of a place in July’s Tour de France.

“Many nations have stereotypes and Altig fitted his well, the perfect image of the chunky German with fair hair and a square head,” Les Woodland writes in a piece that called the rider the ‘Clown Prince of Cycling’ on Cyclingnews.

Nicknamed the 'Mannheim Steamroller', Altig had made a name for himself in his city’s biggest attraction: its velodrome. While Anquetil was riding to glory in his debut Tour in 1957, Altig was dominating the German amateur scene after becoming the junior road race champion in 1953. Teaming up with his older brother, Willi, Altig specialised in the Madison and other two-man races, becoming the best in the country. In 1956, at a track meeting held on Good Friday at Herne Hill in London, the brothers, in the words of the organiser Jim Wallace, “slaughtered a top-class field of international riders, with all our best home lads. What a pair they made!”

Between 1957 and 1959, Altig won the German amateur sprint, pursuit, team pursuit and Madison titles – topped off with the world amateur 4km pursuit title in 1959. After turning pro in 1960 with Rapha-Gitane-Dunlop, Altig enjoyed stage-winning success in the Deutschland Tour and Paris-Nice but still focused primarily on the track. He won back-to-back world pursuit titles, German national titles in the pursuit and Madison, and broke several world track records.

"He gave his bikes as hard a time as he gave his adversaries," said the revered French cycling author and screenwriter, Olivier Dazat.

Throughout his road career Altig would continue riding the winter boards, notching up 22 Six-Day wins, 15 second places and 11 third place finishes from just 79 starts. His illustrious palmarès would also include European omnium and Madison titles. With his extrovert personality and film star looks, Altig helped bring about a golden period for the German Sixes.

“No man ever settled down better or quicker to a pro career than the able Altig,” Jim Wallace again, writing in Sporting Cyclist. “In the hurly-burly world of indoor track racing, Rudi never seemed a novice. Settling down at once, tearing strips off established stars, he soon started to fill indoor tracks which had long forgotten the welcome sight of a ‘house full’ sign. He brought back the biggest winter racing boom to Germany for many years, reminiscent of the balmy pre-War days. With seven tracks at home – more than in the rest of Europe – Altig had a busy time and was soon in the big money.”

Renowned for his trademark light touch, Altig had a wicked sense of humour and a keen sense of fun. He was a practical joker and crowd-pleaser who became very popular with his fellow riders, journalists and fans – while photographers enjoyed capturing for posterity his various antics, which included donning a range of hats during races.

His burgeoning success on the road was helping to draw more crowds to Six-Day races while catching the eye of Géminiani, who snapped up Altig for his Saint-Raphaël team in 1962 and then kept him sweet by bringing in his older brother one year later. While not as successful as Rudi, Willi was a pro for eight years, during which his only victory was a stage in the 1964 Giro.

It was Géminiani who pushed Altig Junior towards broadening his horizons, convincing him of his potential on the road by appealing to his wallet. “Rudi was very fast and he was so strong, but he was doubtful about doing bigger road races until I told him that if he won some of them his contract fee for the Six-Days would double. That did the trick,” Géminiani once said. It certainly did. Altig’s conversion to the road was nothing short of sensational.

After home rider Antonio Barrutia won the opening stage to and from Barcelona to don the first yellow jersey of the race, Saint-Raphaël stepped up to dominate the 17th edition of La Vuelta. On Stage 2, no fewer than six riders from the 10-man Saint-Raphaël squad went on the attack with Anquetil, Altig, Stablinski and Elliott in the break alongside France’s Jean-Claude Annaert and Dutchman Michel Stolker.

Altig sprinted to victory – and the yellow jersey – in Tortosa with the chase group 10 minutes back and the peloton almost a quarter of an hour in arrears. The French team set such a high pace in the break that their own rider, Marcel Queheille, finished outside the time limit and was sent packing.

It became clear from the outset that Géminiani’s tactic was for his team to control the race from start to finish – sending riders into all the moves, mopping up the intermediate sprints and prizes, and winning stages until, as planned, Maître Jacques turned the screw in the final time trial to secure the overall win.

When Altig relinquished the yellow jersey after two days it was only because his Irish teammate Elliott took the line in Benidorm – winning a two-up sprint against the Spaniard Manuel Martín. The result led to Martín’s manager on the Kas team to declare that “Saint-Raphaël are the Real Madrid of cycling”. Few could argue.

Victory in the team time trial the next day underlined Saint-Raphaël’s supremacy, with Altig moving back into yellow after his second stage win on day seven at Almería. Despite Elliott and Altig trading the yellow jersey like a game of musical chairs, Anquetil was still the designated leader of a team that exerted a vice-like grip over the race – a team that would end up winning 11 out of the race’s 17 stages.

But Altig’s Stage 7 win from a breakaway meant the German debutant extended his lead to almost five minutes over his French leader, as some cracks were beginning to appear in Anquetil’s otherwise smooth exterior.

The internal rivalry at Saint-Raphaël came to a head on Stage 9 between Málaga and Cordoba. After Anquetil got into the breakaway with teammate Elliott, Altig found himself in a chase group almost one-and-a-half minutes behind. Anquetil furiously drove the pace in the breakaway but Altig, with the help of his Belgian teammate Janssens and some other Belgian riders from the Wiel’s-Groene Leeuw team, managed to bridge over before the finish.

Elliott took fourth place that day to edge back ahead of Altig in the overall standings, but the atmosphere in the Saint-Raphaël hotel was so strained that Altig and Anquetil could no longer dine at the same table. Despite the simmering tension, morale was still sky high over the next five days with Stablinski and Dutchman Albertus Geldermans picking up wins before Frenchman Jean Graczyk completed a brace ahead of the all-important Stage 15 time trial.

Anquetil’s plan to trounce the opposition in the marathon race against the clock between Bayonne and Saint Sebastián was a wholesale success save for one minor detail. While he did indeed put minutes into all his rivals, he hadn’t banked on one of his domestiques matching him pedal stroke for pedal stroke over the 82km course.

The long route featured the second-category climb of the Alto d’Ibardin and Anquetil, the world’s leading TT specialist (whom one reporter once said made riding one kilometre seem like 900 metres), was confident he would end the day in the maillot amarillo. After all, Elliott, the yellow incumbent, was no expert and would surely concede to the natural order of things.

But before the stage, Altig – still second on GC and nine seconds short of being five minutes ahead of his French teammate – was asked whether Anquetil would win the stage. The German answered emphatically: “I will be the winner.”

Altig had a right to be confident. He was the world pursuit champion whose power should never have been so brazenly underestimated by Anquetil and Géminiani. But that world title was on the boards and over six-minute bursts; this challenge was a two-hour-plus race of truth over undulating roads – an entirely different prospect. The powerful German, however, took it all in his stride.

When Anquetil crossed the line in San Sebastián, he set the provisional best time of 2h17’08” – only for Altig to come home one second faster after a quite phenomenal effort. With his third stage win of his breakthrough race, the German soared back into the yellow jersey with Anquetil, his nearest challenger, now 4’52” in arrears and Spain’s José Pérez Francés in third at 7’14”.

With two hilly stages remaining, Spanish fans had renewed hope that Pérez Francés could take advantage of the rift within the Saint-Raphaël team. But Altig protected his lead in the penultimate stage to Vitoria, leading home the peloton after teammate Graczyk had picked up his third win in four days from a three-man break.

The big news, however, was Anquetil coming home way down in the peloton, all but relinquishing his quest to become the first man to win all three Grand Tours. Rumours began to spread like wildfire and the next morning, before the final stage, it was confirmed: the Frenchman was allegedly suffering from appendicitis or a gastric infection. The French press would write, somewhat hyperbolically, if not misleadingly, that “Anquetil est mort” (“Anquetil is dead”) as the humiliated double Tour champion abandoned the race.

More bitter than a citron pressé, Anquetil, on leaving the race, added his two centimes: “Everyone knows what happened. If I had my way, the entire team would be withdrawing along with me and leaving Altig on his own.”

Five climbs, including the famous Sollube, now stood between the German and a famous victory on the final stage to Bilbao. And while he was no specialist climber, Altig was able to match all the accelerations from Pérez-Francés to secure a maiden Grand Tour victory at his first attempt. The Spaniard came a distant second, while Elliott took the final spot on the podium – with another three Saint-Raphaël riders making the final top 10.

Considered too young and inexperienced to ride the Tour by his team director Géminiani, Altig had instead come to the Vuelta and seen off the challenge from within – denying his own leader a victory that everyone thought was his for the taking. And to do this, Altig became one of the few riders to top the great Anquetil in a time trial. In beating the Frenchman, Altig had ridden his first three-week stage race very much ‘à la Anquetil’ by grinding down his opposition in a display of brute force that was unspectacular but deadly clinical.

Altig’s unexpected Vuelta victory at Anquetil’s expense had created deep divisions within the Saint-Raphaël team but, by the same token, had shown that the German was simply too strong and too great a talent to leave out of the Frenchman’s squad for the defence of his Tour title.

So, off Altig went six weeks later to the Tour, where he promptly won the opening stage between Nancy and Spa to don the race’s first yellow jersey. This only antagonised Anquetil further. Winning the stage had denied the Frenchman’s GC rival Rik van Looy a minute’s time bonus, but it had also put needless pressure on Anquetil and the team, who were forced to defend the maillot jaune.

Altig conceded the jersey at the earliest possible opportunity, only to move back to the top of the GC standings after winning Stage 3, from Brussels to Amiens. A third stage win came in the final week in Antibes – all but securing the German sprinter the green jersey.

Thankfully for Géminiani, normal service had resumed in the time trials: Anquetil won the first 43km effort to La Rochelle and then doubled up with victory in the decisive 68km TT to Lyon – moving into the yellow jersey with just two stages remaining. This time, Anquetil’s measured waiting game paid off: the Frenchman’s third Tour triumph came with a gap of five minutes over the Belgian Joseph Planckaert – with Altig well over an hour back, in 31st place.

Success in his first two major stage races translated into lucrative contracts on the criterium circuit for Altig, who matched his teammate Anquetil’s four crit wins over a busy late summer travelling around the country and putting on a show. After a return to the track, and another victory in the first Six-Day race of the winter, Altig was in excellent condition for his last major event of the season: the now-defunct Trofeo Baracchi, the formidable two-up team time trial for which his partner was none other than… Monsieur Anquetil.

The winners of the Trofeo Baracchi read like a who’s who of cycling superstars, with Italian campionissimi Fausto Coppi, Fiorenzo Magni and Ercole Baldini all triumphing on numerous occasions. For the 1962 edition, Baldini, the 1956 Olympic champion who had recently beaten Anquetil’s world hour record, was paired with his friend and trade teammate Arnaldo Pambianco, who had taken the previous year’s Giro title ahead of Anquetil.

Plenty of motivation, then, for Monsieur Chrono, who was paired with his powerhouse teammate Altig, giving the Frenchman a chance to show the German who was boss after his narrow but ignominious TT loss in the Vuelta six months earlier.

Anquetil, however, was not a huge fan of the Trofeo Barrachi because, for him, time trials were a discipline best enjoyed – if that’s the word – alone. Altig, on the other hand, was a monster in a two-man effort like this, capable of using his track pedigree and all those hours riding the Madison with his brother to devastating effect – just as he did while playing the metronome in many a breakaway on the road.

In his Cycling Legends series, Chris Sidwells provides some nice context to an event that Altig would later describe as his “greatest” day on a bike, but one which left his partner on a hospital bed after a rare moment of chronic weakness.

“It rained all through the week before the race, when Anquetil was a guest of [the organiser] Mino Baracchi, and he decided to put his feet up and enjoy his Italian host’s hospitality. He didn’t train at all, but Altig did. He found a long tunnel near where he was staying, and he rode up and down it as many times as he needed to keep his race legs in trim.”

What happened during the 111km race over gently rolling terrain between Bergamo and Milan amounted to Anquetil’s worst day on a bike. As Sidwells summarises: “Altig and Anquetil won, but the German nearly killed the Frenchman. He was never more uncomfortable in the Baracchi Trophy, or maybe in any other race in his life, than he was when winning it in 1962.”

For the first two hours, the duo worked together like clockwork, averaging more than 46kmph. As they headed into the outskirts of Milan, they held a lead of one minute over the Baldini-Pambianco duo but, curiously, Anquetil suddenly stopped doing his turns and was suffering in silence in his partner’s slipstream.

Once his partner lost the wheel and let a gap of a few lengths open up, Altig first started remonstrating with him, before changing tact and trying to encourage him. He shouted at him, showed him his fist, even pushed him along; it was the ultimate humiliation for the man considered to be the world’s best cyclist at the time.

“Jacques wasn’t happy and it didn’t please him,” Altig later said. “But I wanted us to win. So I grabbed his saddle, I grabbed him by the shorts, and hop!”

The veteran French sportswriter René de Latour was following in a press car. Describing the scene, he wrote: “When Anquetil lost contact, he [Altig] had to ease the pace, wait for his partner to go by, push him powerfully in the back, sprint to the front again after losing 10 yards in the process, and again settle down to a 30mph stint at the front.”

De Latour said it was the most extraordinary athletic feat he had witnessed in 35 years of covering bike races. Anquetil’s “jour sans” was called as they raced through a tunnel into the Vigorelli velodrome, where both he and Baldini had set their world hour records. Dazed, debilitated, and ashen-faced, Anquetil failed to make the sharp turn exiting the tunnel, crashed into a pole, and landed in a crumpled heap with a badly bruised arm and blood flowing from a wound on his face.

Luckily for the pair, the timekeepers were stationed at the entrance to the velodrome and their time was enough to win the event by nine seconds. As Altig took a lap of honour, Anquetil was being loaded into an ambulance and taken to hospital.

If Anquetil already saw Altig as a threat after the Vuelta, then his antics during the Trofeo Baracchi confirmed to the Frenchman that his German teammate was not to be trusted. Altig, Anquetil concluded, was clearly trying to undermine him and usurp him as leader at Saint-Raphaël.

But the feeling of disillusionment went both ways. Géminiani preached an “all for one, one for all” policy at his team, but Anquetil – while very keen to ensure the first half of the motto was adhered to by his minions – was less willing to fulfil his side of the bargain.

A case in point came in 1963 at Paris-Nice, where Altig led with two stages remaining. Renowned for his class and temperament, the German made sure he lost enough time in the penultimate stage in Corsica to enable his teammate to leapfrog above him to the top of the podium one day later on the French Riviera.

As a reward for his selfless teamwork in sacrificing his best chance of an overall Paris-Nice victory, Altig expected that Anquetil would return the favour a few days later in Milan-San Remo. This was not to be. As Altig recalls in Géminiani’s book, Les Années Anquetil:

“We had an agreement that I would help him in stage races and he would help me in the Classics, but it was difficult. I could hardly wait for him at the side of the road. I did it once in Paris–Nice, then three days later he was supposed to help me in Milan–San Remo. But he only did 50km before stopping and getting into the car with [his wife] Jeanine, who was parked at the side of the road. I said to myself: ‘I can’t tolerate a teammate like that.’”

Géminiani places the incident not in La Primavera (which neither rider raced in 1963) but in Paris-Roubaix (which they both raced in 1961, albeit three weeks after Anquetil’s second Paris-Nice victory, when teammate Altig finished 33rd). The German was probably conflating a number of separate incidents: it was 1964 when he rode Milan-San Remo, three days after Paris-Nice, but it was the Dutchman Jan Janssen who won that edition of the Race to the Sun, while Anquetil did not appear to ride.

Either way, it was clear to all that Anquetil and Altig’s working relationship was on the slide – even if they managed, astonishingly, to remain good friends off the bike. In Paul Howard’s biography of Anquetil – Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape – Altig tells the author: “In races, he was too selfish, so we decided not to mix racing and friendship. What I can say about Jacques is that since his death he is someone I have missed.”

Once his contract was up at the end of 1964, Altig inevitably left Saint-Raphaël. He went out on a high: winning the Tour of Flanders by four minutes with a 60km lone break before supporting Anquetil to a record fifth Tour win.

He might have been riding for a different team than the Frenchman, but some things never change: at the 1965 edition of Paris-Nice, Anquetil won; Altig was runner-up, with three stage wins. A fractured hip then required complicated surgery and a long period of rehabilitation, ruling Altig out of the Tour that year. But he bounced back to animate the World Championships in San Sebastián, where he was pipped by his co-escapee and close friend Tom Simpson.

Disappointment did not last too long: a year later, Altig won the worlds on home roads – at the Nürburgring motor racing circuit. Second place? Anquetil, of course. For all his domination in stage races, donning the rainbow stripes was always something that eluded the Frenchman. Anquetil had, however, returned to the Vuelta in 1963 to complete the final piece of his Grand Tour puzzle, winning the opening time trial to wear yellow from Stage 1b all the way to the finish.

Over the course of a long career, Altig wore the Tour’s yellow jersey for 18 days and picked up 18 stage wins across all three Grand Tours. He added Milan-San Remo to his palmarès in 1968 and remained a constant fixture in velodromes all over Europe – so much so that he never rode the Giro di Lombardia, because it clashed with the start of the winter track season. “He was,” says Woodland, “not only Germany’s big star of the 1960s, but pretty much its only star”.

His final appearance at the Tour was Eddy Merckx’s first, in 1969, when the Belgian took a dominating debut victory. But Altig wasn’t quite ready to bow down to the new generation: in the opening 10.4km time trial around Roubaix, Altig beat Merckx by seven seconds to take the win, denying the Belgian the chance to wear the yellow jersey the next day as the race entered his hometown of Sint-Pieters-Woluwe. It was a performance that recalled his one-second victory over Anquetil back in the decisive time trial of his debut Vuelta in 1962. And it bookended his career marvellously: no other cyclist in history can claim to have beaten both five-time Tour champions against the clock.

Altig retired two years later, aged 34. He became a directeur sportif at the Puch-Wolber team during the 80s – an early incarnation of the Système U team – and also was the German national coach before moving into commentary with Eurosport. He died of cancer, aged 79, in 2016.

A passage in Tim Krabbé’s seminal novel, The Rider, recalls Altig’s most famous moment. And while it involved that man Anquetil, it was not the time he denied his teammate victory in the Vuelta, nor the moment he denied the Frenchman those elusive rainbow stripes.

“When at the end of his career they asked Rudi Altig about his greatest race, he didn’t mention his world road championship of 1966 or his victory in the Spanish Vuelta in 1962, his yellow jerseys in the Tour de France or his numerous pursuit championships. He spoke of the Trofeo Baracchi of 1962.”