Raymond Riotte has died at the age of 86. He had a career in two parts, a blazing debut and then seven years of more patient work as domestique to many top names.
Born in 1940 to parents who were farm workers near Chablis in France’s Yonne department, Riotte was one of eight children. He wasn’t interested in cycling at first, preferring football where he was a goalscorer for FC Châtel-Gérard. France had compulsory military service and at the age of 19 Riotte was sent to Algeria, then a French colony, where he spent 28 months. Not knowing anyone on his arrival at camp, he found an ally from Le Creusot, a town the other side of the Morvan hills. This friend lent him his bike he told his local newspaper Le Journal du Centre and he got a taste for cycling.
On return from Algeria, at the age of 22 he took out a racing licence and thrived. Starting out as a fourth category rider, he moved up a level each year and by 1965 he was the amateur champion of Burgundy and earning good prize money most weekends. Sometimes professionals raced the local criteriums but there was a clash, the pros wanting to top-up meagre wages while for locals “these were our Worlds, we wanted to impress the pros” Riotte told Le Journal du Centre.
During the Ronde de Seignelay in 1966, Riotte’s local race but also staged as a post-Tour de France criterium, Jean Stablinski, captain of the Ford team that had just won the Tour de France pleaded to Riotte to stop showing up the pros. Accounts of this from Riotte vary across outlets but the synthesis is “Stab” noted Riotte might be earning cash but he was having to pay his own expenses when it came to kit and the Ford captain said something mid-race to the effect of “leave us alone and you’ll get your own material”. Riotte said he thought the remark would be forgotten once the race was over but he was suddenly offered a pro contract. Only “it was 500 Francs [NB: per month, €725 in today’s money] and I could get that in my local races in two weekends” he told L’Equipe in 2015. He turned down the offer.
In the following spring Riotte won another local race in Nevers against pros and while the Ford team had become Bic that year it still wanted to recruit Riotte. Team manager Raphaël Geminiani gave him an ultimatum: sign or we won’t ask a third time. Riotte agreed and turned pro in the spring of 1967 for Bic team, joining the likes of Jacques Anquetil, Lucian Aimar, Julio Jiminez, Jean Graczyk, Vic Denson and especially Jean Stablinski. The two became good friends, one the son of miners, the other from farming. He may only have earned 500 Francs to start with but everything would change soon.
He proved helpful in the classics, rode the Vuelta and come the summer won a stage of the GP du Midi-Libre, a now-defunct stage race before the Tour de France that was as important as the Dauphiné. That summer’s Tour de France changed format and was ridden by national teams. Jacques Anquetil opted not to ride but France team manager Marcel Bidot was still spoilt for choice with the likes of 1966 Tour winner Lucien Aimar, Raymond Poulidor and Roger Pingeon. Bidot had Stablinski as a road captain and he lobbied to bring Riotte. It may not have been an easy conversation to pick a rider who had turned pro just three months ago but Riotte had impressed in a short time and was hired to work as a domestique.
On Stage 5 of the Tour de France the Tour was racing on the roads near Roubaix that were home to Stablinski and mid-stage he spotted Riotte and Pingeon lurking at the back of the peloton. “Take Pingeon to the front right away” ordered Stablinski and as they moved up a breakaway was going clear so Riotte sprinted to join it, towing Pingeon across. It was the right move and Pingeon was in yellow that evening and Riotte in green. Things were only going to get better.
On Stage 7 to Strasbourg Riotte got in the breakaway only to get beaten in the finish by Michael Wright, a British rider but who’d grown up in Liège and barely spoke English, he was seemingly in cahoots with Belgian rider Georges Van den Berghe who had grabbed Riotte’s jersey before the final corner to slow Riotte. This act of European co-operation in Strasbourg enraged Riotte who was fuming at the finish. Only for TV reporter Robert Chapatte to stun him by telling him he’d got the yellow jersey.
It was only for a day because the next stage was in the Vosges mountains and Riotte was adrift to the point of being worried about being eliminated from the race while wearing yellow. He finished, and saw team mate Aimar take the race lead, as L’Equipe said at the time it was impressive for a neo-pro who three weeks before did not dream of wearing the French tricolore jersey, let alone yellow.
If only for a day it was special as Riotte made a name for himself, he even got a telegram from his local member of parliament, François Mitterand. This made him the darling of that year’s race, a feat heightened when he won the stage to Marseille. As the conclusion team mate Roger Pingeon won the race overall.
The Tour over, Riotte went back the series of criteriums and exhibition races to earn his fill, the decision to take an effective pay cut to turn pro paying for itself many times over now as he earned enough in a few months to build a large home in Noyers-sur-Serein close to where he was born. The team tripled his pay too.
The article above headlines that there’s a lot to expect from Riotte’s return to the Tour de France in 1968 but as dramatic as Riotte’s first Tour proved, he was picked by Bidot to be a helper. It was this role that he took on for the rest of his career, riding in the service of Raymond Poulidor and Bernard Thévenet but just as Eddy Merckx was monopolising the scene. He rode the Tour de France seven more times. In his own words he was a model team mate rather than a winner and this self-description did not come across as a boast either.
Riotte proved to be as much a roublard as a rouleur, a crafty type. He was adept at brokering alliances on the road between teams when there was a shared interest in the moment to chase or block others. Coming from Chablis, he would give out cases of white wine to the moto riders in the Tour de France, notionally to promote his home region but hoping they might repay the favour if he ever needed it on the road.
He was a fixture at local races in retirement, on hand to hand out prizes and even design courses. In retirement he’d keep up with former team mates, especially Poulidor, the “eternal second” who had never worn yellow. It meant if Poulidor visited then he had to see Riotte’s yellow jersey each time as had it framed and mounted inside a rim which hung in the hallway at home. At times it was as if Riotte had changed names because he was Riotte maillot jaune this and maillot jaune Riotte that. If he only wore yellow for a day it was also for a lifetime and will always be so.
I would have liked to be a moto rider in the TdF at this time ! Bribed with Chablis !
The sentence about him by Blondin is perfect, even if I don’t know if it translates well : “le plus médiéval des coureurs par l’astuce et la trogne”. “The most medieval rider by his wit and his look”. And effectively, on the last picture of your obituary, he looks like a Rolin painted by Van Eyck or the old man of Ghirlandaio…
Blondin also branded him “le Fondu bourguignon”… a play on the fondue bourguignonne dish and Riotte’s roots in Burgundy. Riotte was very recognisable in an unassuming way, you can find other pictures and team photos and if the haircuts and jerseys change it’s easy to pick him out.
The combination of orange BIC jersey and that full Capri blue bike *plus* gloves is shockingly classy.
And note, too, the red toe straps!
A piece worth the now usual standing ovation, and thanks also to Cascarinho above.
+1
A lovely write-up, and it is nice to hear about these riders from the past who are not household names. I was surprised at how late he began his professional career. And a nice reminder about how poorly professional sportspeople were paid before widespread television converage.
And Bic was a top team at the time and they hired Riotte and he rode the spring classics and Vuelta right away, this was no shoestring operation looking to fill a space.
But the pay came in the criteriums. Riotte enjoyed riding for Anquetil in part because Anquetil would pay part of his fees to team mates, effectively employing them twice over. One often unmentioned aspect is that the French peloton effectively had two agents at the time and riders got their fees through them and so the pair had a real control over income. They could not stop a rider like Riotte who had become famous and the public wanted to see in events in August but other riders struggled.
Today’s salary system is arguably, easily so, much better.
Yes, good point about the importance of the post-Tour crits in France and also Belgium. Didn’t Anquetil skip the Tour in 1965, because winning wouldn’t improve his earnings in the crit races? He and the peloton, if I remember, always resented the fact Poulidor got more money on the crit circuit, despite his lesser palmares.
I always think it is kind of illuminating that Hinualt earned enough to buy a diary farm and set himself up as a farmer after his career. It is difficult to see any of the current superstars needing or wanting to do something like that.
The TDF series on Netflix did feature the storyline of Pinot expressing he would retire to tend to his farm after retirement. As his farm was pretty obviously not a commercial enterprise, it evolved through the series into the suggestion that he wanted a quiet life away from the spotlight (for a while at least, we presume) after he set down the torch that he’d carried as the French hopeful the fans wanted to see win the Tour, or podium at least. Not sure that he wanted or wants to make a living on his farm, more maybe that he wanted some privacy . . . that’s how the show portrays it, I think.
Some people just appreciate non commercial farming as a rewarding activity in itself, not just as a way to retreat from the mundane. I think this might be Pinot’s case rather than what (as you make clear) the show decides to depict.
Worth remembering that Pinot actually had very soon podiumed at the TDF, namely in 2014 when he was 24 yo, along with older Peraud. They were the first French on the podium after Virenque some 17 years before. However, during the following years the podium hopes were mainly carried, and satisfactorily so, by Bardet, although it was always clear he wouldn’t win the race outright, unlike what happened with Pinot in 2019 (but essentially in 2019 only – where anyway much of the attention for the first weeks of racing was on a phenomenale Alaphilippe).
As a child I grew up reading old copies of my father’s Sporting Cyclists and Cycling Weekly’s from the UK and remember the name. Great to have a story to go with the name with some nice anecodotes.
Noyers is a splendid medieval town (more accurately large village) and despite being classed one of the ‘plus beaux villages de France’ avoids the excessive tourism that mars many others. It’s also the centre of splendid cycle touring country with quiet roads and gently rolling hills.
The town is a perfect illustration of rural population loss in France with at one time almost 2000 residents, down to 1000 in the early thirties and less than 600 now leaving a large number of unspoiled, empty and slowly decaying properties. The young leave to study or find work and don’t return leaving an ageing population which can’t renew.
@gabriele would know more about this but I think this is pretty much the story of Mezzogiorno for the last 100 years or so. I know the South has made some efforts to revitalize, with very lost cost-home sales and some tax breaks for foreigners. Even bike races may help. I think the cultural loss for depopulation of small towns in Europe is huge.
In Italy there’s a transversal mix of phenomena, rural villages are left empty everywhere also in rich regions of Italy, including the North (mountain areas with no strong touristic economy, deep “pianura padana” with villages far from everything) , and even towns which are the capital of their province are losing a lot of population for example in the Marche.
Economic and social dynamics are quite complex and often changing, North/South is just one among many divides each with its own evolution (coast/inland/mountain/tourism/agriculture/industry/size of villages/towns/cities); some of them contradict and even (over)compensate each other
The last trend in the North is the growth of towns and sometimes even small villages some 10-20 kms away from the province capitals (covid effect, plus property prices in a market with propension to buy rather than rent). It brought new blood into some rural areas but also increased hugely traffic.
Other sites which were emptied by the mechanisation of agriculture now got new impulse “thanks to” the low price of land which made them eligible as “sacrifice zones” for data centres or huge logistics hubs.
An example from the very South (or “islands”) is the towns around Palermo, where the more far away ones like Camporeale, Roccamena or Trabia go down whereas for example Monreale, Misilmeri or Partinico, albeit inland, experience notable growth.
Another interesting “cycling” (race often pass by) example from Southern Italy is the relative inland of Costiera Amalfitana, where the area of Gragnano, Lettere, S. Antonio Abate had moderate but sustained growth in the last 4 decades although not on the sea nor especially close to any big city.
And there are many many others of course. Italy has always tended to complicated diversity.
That is fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing this. Another reason I love this sport is how it tours the countries and gives me a chance to learn so much about them.
Many of the town houses are now Gites or self catering properties though, so it is actually quite busy in the summer months. It is the same in many of the Plus Belles Villages, unfortunately they are not well adapted for modern living ( the town centre is pedestrianised at the Weekends) and the maintenance on ‘listed’ properties has become more and more difficult and expensive as the older craftsmen retire. And of course living amongst other people who ar on holiday when you are not….😕😡. Local people prefer a nice modern house with parking , a garden and very often a wine cellar.
well, that’s how it is in Touraine, anyway.