“One day you’re beaten, the next you get your revenge. It’s exhilarating!” – Legendary Bernard Hinault on his unending love for racing his bike

Even four decades after his final Tour de France victory, Bernard Hinault still speaks about cycling with the instincts of a racer rather than the nostalgia of a legend.

With his autobiography returning to bookshops, the five-time Tour winner has been reflecting on the roots of that relentless competitive edge in a recent conversation with Ouest-France. Not from glory or ambition, but from the simple thrill of confrontation and revenge that first hooked him on the bike.

“In cycling, it’s competition that has always appealed to me. The fight, fair and square,” Hinault explained. “One day you’re beaten, the next you get your revenge. It’s exhilarating.”

That mentality, he insists, never left him. And it explains why the Breton was winning almost as soon as he pinned on a number.

Hinault’s first relationship with cycling was not romantic or even sporting. It was practical. A way to get to school in Saint Brieuc. But repetition bred strength and opportunism.

“One day, I said: ‘Right, that’s enough, 20 kilometres of cycling a day isn’t going to scare me,’” he recalled. “Yffiniac sits in a hollow, so you have to climb to get out of it. By repeating the same way out every day, I managed to stay in the slipstream of lorries. That’s how I learned to ‘suck wheels’.”

That instinct for shelter and timing carried straight into racing. His very first victory came at Planguenoual in May 1971, against a rider everyone expected to win.

“I stayed sheltered for a long time, until a final left-hand corner where I seized the opportunity,” Hinault said. “I dived through, accelerated, and finished ahead of Jean Yves, the clear favourite. Thanks very much, goodbye! Everyone was asking: ‘But who’s that?’ I took the bouquet home to my mother.”

It was a familiar pattern. Observe. Wait. Strike. Win. “In my very first season in 1971, I won 12 races out of 20,” he said. “That’s how I turned professional. By winning races. Over time, I was spotted. There’s no secret.”

Even at the height of his career, Hinault never softened. His attachment to Brittany remained constant, returning whenever he could and racing relentlessly in criteriums long after others would have eased off.

“There was one year when I rode 27 criteriums in 20 days,” he said. “It even happened once that I raced during the day in Montargis and in the evening in Saint Brieuc, travelling by plane between the two.”

That same toughness earned him the nickname that followed him for life. “At first, it was a generic nickname we used in the peloton,” Hinault explained of ‘Le Blaireau’. “One day, when they were being interviewed, they referred to me as ‘the little blaireau’. And it stuck. At the same time, it suits me.”

More than a nickname, it became a reflection of a rider who never stopped fighting. And even now, when Hinault talks about cycling, it is not about monuments or jerseys, but about the raw, physical joy of racing and beating the rider next to you.

A feeling, he makes clear, that never fades.