Cycling: Scientific approach consigns French legacy of success to history

Eighteen years after Laurent Fignon crushed the opposition in the 1984 Tour de France, winning by a massive 10 minute margin over Bernard Hinault, the search for a new French contender to take the Grande Boucle continues. And continues, and continues.

The host nation still holds the record for wins in the Tour, their total of 36 exactly doubling those of the second placed Belgians, with 18. But right now the chances of the French making that 37 seem highly limited.

In the last three Tours the host nation's best result has been a fourth place, while the two French teams successes in this year's race so far have come thanks to an Estonian and an Australian, two countries with a theoretically weaker cycling tradition.

Neither Franck Renier, twice the provisional race leader on the road this week (before the Spaniards of ONCE-Eroski ruthlessly pulled him back into line), nor Christophe Mengin, the current leader of the King of The Mountains standings, when the biggest climb the Tour has seen so far has been all of two kilometres long, seem likely to find a place in the Tour's history books. As for Christophe Moreau – responsible for that fourth place in 2000 – a series of crashes has wrecked his podium chances in 2002.

Reminders of earlier local success have been uncomfortably close, this week. Stage five of the Tour passed through Quincompoix, the childhood town of the five-times winner Jacques Anquetil. Then half-way through yesterday's stage, the peloton raced down the Rue Louison Bobét, the street named after the Frenchman who took a hat-trick of Tours in the mid-fifties, in Bobét's home town of Saint-Méen-le Grand.

Race followers were invited to spend some of their 14 July national holiday yesterday inspecting the Bobét museum – and presumably medidate on France's former jours de gloire.

Post-1998 there was much muttering in France about a "two-speed peloton", the implication being that the non-French riders did not suffer such close inspections from their federations.

Now even some of the French riders admit this can no longer serve as an excuse for their poor results and the lack of new talent. In an interview published today in L'Equipe, David Moncoutie, widely considered to be one of France's more promising young riders, said that in 1997 and 1998 he saw what he calls the of the "le fin du truc" – an end to widespread doping. "Times have changed and now I feel I can hope to do something in cycling." Jean-Luc Gatellier, the reporter who interviewed David Millar's Cofidis team-mate, points out: "It's significant that it's Moncoutie who says this because he's a rider whose family only use homeopathic medicines. Until recently he refused even to take magnesium or amino acids" – perfectly legal products which help a rider recover after a stage – "because, as his directeur sportif says, he preferred his grandmother's recipes." In other words, Moncoutie is a hardline opponent of doping, but even he feels the playing field is beginning to level out again – and cannot hide behind that argument any more.

"Many of the French riders comment that the foreigners train more and train harder," Gatellier added. "But it's true you have to wait longer now for riders to shine. Fignon won his first Tour at 23, these days it's more usual at around 27 or 28."

However, according to the French 1960s rider Raymond Poulidor, who notched up an impressive series of second places behind Anquetil: "The riders have become too bourgeouis."

Apart from softening up socially, Poulidor argues that "it's partly a historic question". "Think of the Italians, they had to wait 35 years between their two most recent Tour winners," he said. "So the French, too, have to wait. Then the sport stretches world-wide right now, you've got countries like the Americans coming in. Look at the football World Cup, one day the USA will win that. That makes it tougher for all the traditional countries."

Struggling to produce results with their own riders, the French have increasingly turned to foreigners like Jonathan Vaughters, a scientifically minded American who studied medicine in Colorado and who has ridden with Credit Agricole for nearly three years, riding as a domestique for Moreau.

Vaughters said: "Christophe is within a very small fraction of a percent as talented as Lance Armstrong, but he doesn't know or have the interest in how to fine tune his body to that final. And he's one of the more progressive cyclists.

"You could have every stinking American coming to him and saying if you change this and this you will be almost guaranteed to win the Tour, he still wouldn't believe you.

"Questions like training, equipment and nutrition or that you're going to change your saddle position for time trials – there's a huge list that in American or even UK cycling culture you take for granted. In France they think it's all a bunch of crap, you either go fast or you can't. Traditional methods are very ingrained here and basically I don't think they work any more," Vaughters concluded.

A harsh lesson perhaps, but one that the French will have to learn if they are finally to return to top-level cycling success.

Alasdair Fotheringham writes for Cycling Weekly