This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 16, 2008 - The human tendency to revel in the salacious details of someone else's scandal is nothing new, but the advent of the internet and the 24/7 cable news cycle has turned a guilty pleasure into a national obsession.
The latest victim of eternal vigilance is Jesse Jackson who was recently overheard recommending a rather painful surgery for Barack Obama. His intended stage whisper was caught by a microphone that he thought was turned off and broadcast around the globe. Gotcha!
Jesse's presently doing the required public mea culpa, assuring anybody who'll listen that he would never do anything to harm the senator's campaign. Unfortunately, these benign sentiments apparently do not extend to the senator's person. It's difficult to share a private thought in a wired world.
Life was not always so.
The first man to record five wins in the Tour de France was a French rider named Jacques Anquetil. His unorthodox training habits reflected an era when athletic conditioning was taken a bit less seriously than it is in Nike ads.
The son of a strawberry farmer, Anquetil correctly deduced that there were more glamorous occupations than picking produce and subsequently abandoned the family farm in 1950 to seek his fortune on the road-racing circuit. He retired a wealthy man and a continental celebrity in 1969.
Neither his professional longevity nor his remarkable success could have been predicted by examination of his life-style. Anquetil, you see, was Joe Namath on wheels -- an irreverent swinger who nonetheless delivered in the clutch.
Like Broadway Joe, Anquetil was known to celebrate victories by drinking heavily and partying late into the night. Unlike Namath, however, Anquetil couldn't sleep in the morning after because he had another stage race to ride.
Imagine awakening with a brutal hang-over, only to face a grueling 150-mile bicycle race through the Alps, and you begin to appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishments. It is reported that he occasionally filled his bike's water bottle with champagne to ameliorate the pangs of alcohol withdrawal. He was also a devoted smoker who believed that cigarettes "opened up" his lungs and thus improved his performance. Call him Champs-Elysees Jacques...
Though Anquetil's health regimen was unusual for an endurance athlete, it fades to mundane by comparison to his private life.
Trim, handsome, with blond hair, pale blue eyes and a lot of money, Jacques was a bona fide heartbreaker -- which is not to say that he didn't have a softer side.
He doted, for instance, on his personal physician's two children; a girl named Annie and a boy, Alain. Anquetil showered the kids with gifts and affection and they were understandably flattered to have a famous sports star for a patron. Soon, he began sleeping with their mother, the doctor's wife.
His new paramour, Jeanine, eventually left her husband to marry Jacques and the two became inseparable. She traveled with him throughout the racing season, serving as his personal coach, confidante and constant companion -- possibly because she didn't want to let him out of her sight. Whatever her motives, the couple was by all accounts a devoted one.
Trouble arose, however, when Anquetil announced his desire to sire "a child of my own blood." Jeanine had endured two difficult pregnancies in her previous marriage and was consequently unable to conceive.
Demonstrating an astounding aptitude for salesmanship, Anquetil convinced his wife to allow him to use her then 18-year-old daughter as a reproductive surrogate. Annie undertook this task with considerable enthusiasm, describing sex with her step-father as a "sacred mission of procreation." She ultimately bore him a daughter whom they named Sophie.
Young Sophie began life in a household composed of her mother, who was also her step-sister, her grandmother, who doubled as her step-mom, and Anquetil who was both her father and a grandparent by marriage. Delineating household relations at the common law becomes entirely too complex as these make Jeanine simultaneously her husband's wife and mother-in-law.
Believe it or not, this tortured domestic arrangement lasted 15 years before collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. Never one to be unduly daunted by prevailing social mores, Anquetil then set up housekeeping with Dominique, the wife of his step-son, Alain. That union produced a son, Christophe, thus giving Sophie a half-brother/step-cousin to add to her menagerie of hyphenated relations.
When Anquetil departed this mortal coil, he was presumably not under the care of his former physician -- whose wife, daughter and daughter-in-law he'd slept with. As he'd scored with every female member of his old friend's family, one would guess he went elsewhere for medical advice. Then again, he did die at 53.
Anquetil left behind a stellar cycling legacy and a family tree that resembled the blue print for a plate of linguini. Details of his love life became public only when daughter Sophie did the modern thing and wrote a tell-all book airing her family's dirty laundry.
Aside from its inherent tabloid appeal, Anquetil's tale is worth telling because it demonstrates that public triumph does not preclude personal indiscretion. Flawed people really can do great things -- if they're afforded the luxury of a private life.
He may have exhibited the conjugal morality of a coyote in heat, but Anquetil was the pre-eminent cyclist of his age and ranks third all-time on the list of Grand Tour Winners. Remember him the next time somebody complains that today's athletes are no longer suitable role models for our kids...
The author also used parts of the above in a column he wrote for the Arch City Chronicle. M.W. Guzy is a regular contributor to the Beacon.