Poitiers (AFP)

"Zero autograph, zero selfie": if there is one that the slogan of the Tour de France version Covid would have grieved, it is Raymond Poulidor.

"Poupou" is this year the big absentee of the Big loop, which will pay homage to him while passing at his place Thursday.

The character died ten months ago, the legend remains very much alive.

Stop planned in the capital of "Poulidorie" Thursday.

Shortly after 2:30 p.m. and 114 kilometers of the 12th stage of the Tour de France, one of the racing cars will stop at Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat in Haute-Vienne, the city of residence of Raymond Poulidor for years, where the Deputy director of the Great Loop will pay him a quick tribute in the absence of Christian Prudhomme.

Like the LCL caravan, of which he was the ambassador during 19 Tours de France: "We are going to do small things, strong signs, which he would certainly have appreciated", says its manager Sophie Moressée-Pichot.

"I do not want to reveal it but there will be small modifications, something discreet, on the caravan. It will be by our side", testifies the Olympic champion of fencing 1996 who accompanied him during 19 editions, one " a year and a half of life together, ”she calculated.

- The recipe for "Poupoularité" -

This will not be the first tribute to Raymond Poulidor: since the Grand Départ in Nice, the "Merci Poupou" signs, which have sprung up along the roads, bear witness to the tenacious aura of the "eternal second".

In the front row to see the character's "pupoularity" which had even exceeded that of the runner, Sophie Moressée-Pichot remembers "several thousand impressions for her photos signed on the Tour".

"He said that his popularity was absolutely inexplicable", reports Philippe Bouvet, former pen of the Team, 35 Tours de France covered and author of the test "Our years Poulidor".

The journalist retains a lot of symbolic aspects that can explain it.

First, the bad luck, "he did not win the Tour and suffered this incredible curse of the yellow jersey", which he never wore.

Seniority also, "he climbed on the podium of the Tour at 40 (in 1976), at the time an already advanced age" for a rider.

And finally, his face of "champion of deep France and especially rurality".

- Involuntary heirs -

Seen in this way, it is difficult not to find in the 2020 peloton some very involuntary heirs of Poulidor, the one who erected the "curse in radiant virtue", according to the formula of Antoine Blondin.

In 1968, after crossing the Pyrenees where Poulidor had taken more than two minutes from his direct opponents, a fall caused by a motorcycle during the 15th stage shattered his dream of a yellow jersey in Paris.

The episode recalls the abandonment of Thibaut Pinot last year, due to a mysterious injury, after having been the most prominent of the favorites at Tourmalet then at Prat d'Albis.

"There is a bit of him in Pinot", agrees Philippe Bouvet.

When you believe that it is well underway, it happens to unconventional misfortunes.

Popularity is irrational.

The conditions of his abandonment, along with the live tears, did a lot for his popularity. "

If the fascination for Poulidor remains Franco-French, the Poulidorian tropism transcends borders.

There is something of the "vox populidor", dear to Blondin, in Nairo Quintana, coming from a family of peasants, like "Poupou", the "champion plowman".

"Most of the runners at the time were of modest and peasant extraction, relates Philippe Bouvet. It was similar to the courses of those coming out of their countryside in Colombia".

Like Quintana, this other subscriber to the podium (three times) but never yellow jersey!

© 2020 AFP