THE GRAND DUCHESS the Inaugural Women’S World Championships Took Place in 1958
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Retro {1958} THE GRAND DUCHESS The inaugural women’s World Championships took place in 1958. Procycling recalls its winner, the late, great Elsy Jacobs Writer: Herbie Sykes Photography: Ministère des Sports Luxembourg here’s currently a body of opinion that change it must. If it doesn’t then women’s cycling will Marianne Vos is the world’s greatest never cross over into the mainstream. cyclist. Maybe it’s true. It’s certainly The good news is that an all-conquering inarguable that she’s the most prolific. champion, if marketed correctly, will eventually T Vos wins everywhere, on all terrains, all break through the glass ceiling. Vos might lack the the time, and in that sense draws easy parallels with charisma of a Connie Carpenter or a Leontien Van the great Eddy Merckx. Moorsel but history tells us that sooner or later, Ultimately though, the Vos/Merckx analogy is women’s cycling will find a way. It will find its Chris overly simplistic for many reasons, the main one Evert, its Mia Hamm or its Nadia Comaneci. Each being that women’s cycling has nothing like the appeared to be an overnight sensation but in reality, talent pool of the Merckx era men’s sport. Of course their respective crossovers had been decades in the that’s not Vos’s fault – she can only beat what’s put in making. The three of them – and their respective front of her and she’s a sensational athlete regardless. sports – owe much of their fame to the pioneering In one important regard, however, women’s spirits who preceded them. racing is broadly similar to that which Merckx so It was ever thus in sport and so it will be with completely dominated. There are fewer races, fewer women’s cycling. And that, more than the medals, genuinely world class practitioners, and very little will be the true legacy of champions like Vos, Beryl specialisation. Exponentially, therefore, we see more Burton, Fabiana Luperini and… Elsy Jacobs. of Vos, the great champion, and in sport it’s the great In Garnich, a pretty little village twenty minutes champions who create public awareness. west of Luxemburg City, lived the Jacobs family. They Yet the women’s sport is still light years behind reared their animals, cultivated their eight hectares 1970s men’s racing as regards public interest and and at the weekends, the boys – Roger, Robert, participation. Moreover its fans and followers are Edmond and Raymond – rode their bikes. Sister still overwhelmingly male as, crucially, are its Cécile, hopelessly outnumbered, promptly found administrators. For that to change will take time but herself a job in London. 100 PROCYCLING DECEMBER 2014 PROCYCLING DECEMBER 2014 101 Retro {1958} It therefore fell upon the youngest of the flock, little her was absurd. If, they added, she wanted to race, from the family home and out from under the Elsy, to help her mum in providing for the menfolk. she’d need be doing it with the men, because the very family’s yoke. She needed to focus on becoming the Blonde and sweet-natured and brim-full of energy, idea of women’s racing was, well… unnatural. In that best bike rider she could be because that was the only she loved nothing more than to toil from dawn till case, she told them, they’d best just issue her a license chance she had. If she was going to make a living dusk. Actually not quite nothing. What she loved and she’d get on with it. A license? – they spluttered. from her bike, she also needed to be where the races most of all was a challenge. That, they said, was why For a woman? How ridiculous! It was 1951. Elsy were and that could only mean one thing. Elsy Jacobs she once harvested 250 kilograms of potatoes in Jacobs was 18 years old. upped and left and caught a train to Paris, back to a single working day. In July, she finished ninth in an unofficial race at CSM Puteaux. Elsy Jacobs was an extremely determined girl, Audun-Le Tisch, just across the French border. Now she couldn’t afford to let the Parisian grass then, and an extremely strong one. Given the Smitten now, she’d scan the cycling press for the grow under her feet. If she were to become the abundance of racing bikes around the house (and weekend’s races then just turn up with her bike. female Charly Gaul (unlikely in light of her rapacious given that if you can’t beat ’em you may as well join When they asked to see her license, she’d plead appetite; she probably weighed more than pipsqueak ’em) she started borrowing them. She’d prepare ignorance, inform them she’d ridden all the way Gaul) she’d need to hit the ground running. But first lunch, clean up afterwards, then task herself with from Luxembourg and beg them to let her start. she needed money to tide herself over until the racing riding 100 Ardennes kilometres in time for tea. Necessity being the mother of invention she could be started. That meant housekeeping and babysitting Elsy liked cycling a great deal, both the freedom it extremely persuasive, so invariably the French, alongside secretarial work for the cycling club offered as well as the wooosh. What she didn’t like charmed by her smile and by her comely accent, president. She was a long way from home and the was being the only girl. Being a sociable sort, she was would acquiesce. Then, given that she’d not the workload was still huge. Out of the frying pan Elsy… the odd one out on the bike just as she was at home. faintest of idea of how to race tactically, she’d just By and by she bumped into a 20-year-old rider As luck would have it, someone mentioned to her ride off on her own. who was just getting started as a cyclist. She’d met that they organised girls’ races in France, Belgium By 1953 she was racing for a French club, CSM Renée Ganneau the previous year, at her first race. and Holland and that the French even had their own Puteaux, on a French racing license. In the Auvergne Now the two of them started training together, and national championship. she took part in the pretty soon they were inseparable. Their friendship That did it. Elsy Jacobs’s very first women’s would endure but mind was made up… HER APPEARANCE FEES stage race, a five day would be conditioned The suits at the WERE STRATOSPHERIC affair organised by by Elsy’s ferocity on the Luxembourg Cycling FOR A MINORITY SPORT, a forward-thinking guy, bike and her sheer Federation were having BUT ORGANISERS Marcel Léotot. She obduracy off it. none of it. The notion finished 20th, then 17th On the road, Elsy’s that they might tear up KNEW SHE’D THRILL at the six-stage Tour de 1957 season was much the rule book just for THE PUBLIC Paris Féminin. like the previous one. Because she had no In the winter of 1954, Alphonse Risch, director of the By the season’s end, Edmond Jacobs had proved his So Nullis voloribus sprint, she was always Dippach Cycling Club, called on the Jacobs family. exeriam, in et latinum ex et, condemned to attack talent unequivocally. He would ride the Tour the sequia pore, consequ iatqui He wanted Raymond and Edmond Jacobs, the two following year but wily old Arny Franck only had optatqu from a long way out local heroes, in his team. He figured that if he threw eyes for his sister. He’d been a racer back in the day, and often as not, they So Nullis voloribus their kid sister a bone by offering her a bike, a jersey and he recognised a potential champion when he exeriam, in et latinum ex et, tagged her before the and her expenses, they’d likely be persuaded. He did saw one. He set about trying to teach her some race sequia pore, consequ iatqui finish. She won three of and they were, then all three of them started turning craft and it worked, after a fashion. Though she was the 23 races she entered heads. To have two brothers in the club, each of them worse than useless as a sprinter, she won six times in At the UCI conference, but finished on the winners, was pretty big news. Two brothers and 1956. She still just took off and, as often as not, they’d therefore, a motion was podium in another 14. a sister, though, was something else again. not see her again until the clubhouse. That Was Elsy. tabled for a women’s The problem was that Next, Jean Leulliot, an influential French journalist Cycling was very big news in little Luxemburg. World Championships. as the number of riders and race organiser, had a very bright idea. Leulliot Charly Gaul had ridden through a Dolomite blizzard They lost the vote, but competing increased, so had successfully re-launched Paris-Nice in 1951 and to conquer the Giro, becoming a national hero in the only just. Of the too did the quality, but his new creation, the ‘Tour de France Féminin’, would process. Elsy was much further down the food chain delegates, 32 out of 74 not the distance. Elsy capture the public imagination as never before. but she was winning friends and influencing people had been with them, so now suddenly the was accustomed to big, long training rides, so she Over five stages and 373 kilometres, they would race all the same.