Bernard Thévenet
Thévenet at the Six Days of Grenoble 2011
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| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Bernard Thévenet |
| Nickname | Nanard |
| Born |
10 January 1948 Saint-Julien-de-Civry, France |
| Team information | |
| Current team | Retired |
| Discipline | Road |
| Role | Rider |
| Rider type | All Rounder |
| Professional team(s) | |
| 1970-1979 | Peugeot |
| 1980 | Teka |
| 1981 | Puch Wobler Campagnolo |
| Major wins | |
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Bernard Thévenet (French pronunciation: [bɛʁ.naʁ te.və.nɛ]; born 10 January 1948) is a retired French bicycle racer. He is a two-time winner of the Tour de France and known for ending the reign of five-time Tour champion Eddy Merckx, though both feats are tarnished by Thévenet's later admission of steroids use during his career. He also won the Dauphiné Libéré in 1975 and 1976.
Thévenet was born to a farming family in Saône-et-Loire in Burgundy and lived in a hamlet called Le Guidon (The Handlebar). It was there in 1961 that he saw the Tour de France for the first time, on, a 123 km stage from Nevers to Lyon. Thévenet was a choir boy in the village church. He said: "The priest brought forward the time for Mass so that we could watch the riders go by. The sun was shining on their toe-clips and the chrome on their forks. They were modern-day knights. I had already been dreaming of becoming a racing cyclist and that magical sight convinced me definitively. It was never that magical when I was actually in the peloton of the Tour!"
From the age of six he went to school on the rack of his sister's bike. He got his own bike a year later and pedalled the 10 km round journey himself. His first adult bike, not a racing machine but a sporty cross between a racer and a touring bike, came as a present for passing school examinations at 14. His parents needed him on the farm too much to be keen on his racing, but they knew their son's ambitions. Thévenet rode his first race and his parents found out only when they read the local paper. There was a row and the club president intervened by inviting the parents to see their son's next race. Thévenet won it.
He was champion of Burgundy in 1965 and 1966 and French junior champion in 1968. In 1967 the manager of the ACBB club in Boulogne-Billancourt Mickey Weigant, drove to his house to enrol him. The ACBB was an accepted development team for professionalism, particularly for the Peugeot team. During 1968, he rode for the amateur team of Jean de Gribaldy, Cafés Ravis-Wolhauser-de Gribaldy, which won the amateur Route de France. After that Thévenet did his military service in 1969.
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