then he went back and we set off again. I often wondered why he had spoken to me first and then later I got the answer. The General was vising Lyon and I was one of those invited. The chef du protocole introduced me and the General said 'One does not introduce Henry Anglade'. I asked him why and he said 'You were wearing our flag and I owed it to you' [je vous devais bien ça]. It was the first time the Tour had stopped during a stage. Downhill race Anglade's downhill race with Gastone Nencini has become part of the legend of cycling. Anglade was a proud rider and Nencini one of the fastest down hills. "The only reason to follow Nencini down mountains is if you have a death wish," was how Raphaël Géminiani put it. It was in trying to follow Nencini down a mountain that Roger Rivière missed a bend, crashed over a wall and broke his spine. Anglade and Nencini met at a col in the Dolomites during the Giro d'Italia. The weather was bad and a snowstorm had forced 57 riders to abandon that day. Anglade said: I couldn't tolerate the idea that Nencini was the best descender of the peloton. I said to him, call the blackboard man, we'll do the descent together and whoever comes second pays for the aperitifs this evening. So he called the ardoisier and asked him to follow us. The road was of compressed earth. We attacked the drop flat out. I let Nencini take the lead so that I could see how he negotiated the bends before attacking him. In the end I dropped as though I was alone. At the bottom, I had taken 32 seconds out of him, written on the blackboard. I was really tickled. I had beaten Nencini. The next time I saw him was that evening in the hotel I was staying at. He had just bought me an apéritif! Doping Anglade raced at a time when riders made much of their income in the criterium races, for which they were paid start money as well as prizes, that followed the Tour de France. In 1967, in the concern about doping that followed the death of Tom Simpson in the Tour four months earlier, Anglade said: "I've driven 4,000km in three days, I've ridden 400km of race with only six hours