My day at Dax, former French heavyweights languishing in second tier

Raymond Poulidor was the French emblem for noble failure. “Poupou” went by “The Eternal Second”, beloved as a three-times runner-up at the Tour de France behind Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi and Eddy Merckx.

For some time, Clermont Auvergne were the Poulidor du rugby. In 2010, they prepared for their 11th final — and fourth in as many seasons — in the quest to become French champions. They had lost all ten. For L’Équipe, Olivier Margot set up the occasion with elegiac allusions to Puy de Dôme, where Poulidor and Anquetil conducted an Auvergnat duel during the 1964 Tour de France; Vercingetorix, the Gallic chieftain who led a failed revolt against the Romans; and Anton Chekhov’s ruminations on the forgotten present.

Clermont, at last, won. The Bouclier de Brennus was theirs. It didn’t matter that they lost the final again in 2015 and 2019, because they had triumphed in 2010 (and in 2017). They transformed from Poulidor into Joop Zoetemelk: the Dutchman who was runner-up at the Tour six times, double Poupou’s heartbreak, but who won in 1980.

Post-Clermont, Dax are the reigning Poulidor du rugby. Five finals, five defeats. At 15th in the 16-team Pro D2, it looks like they will never win. Modern forces are against towns like this, though their reputation is great. “No one from Dax would dare say it, or perhaps even think it,” Jean-Louis Aragon wrote in Le Monde in 2007, “but Dax, a town of 20,000 inhabitants, is to French rugby what the Perpignan train station was to Salvador Dalí: the centre of the world.”

Points deductions for budget infractions have hindered Dax, yet they should stay up as they are only a handsome victory behind tenth. Players threatened to strike in December before the away trip to Grenoble. On Friday the Dacquois welcomed Grenoble to Stade Maurice Boyau and won 50-26. This column was there on a busman’s holiday as part of a crowd of 4,648, hearing first-ear the cattle bellows that mark the half-time and full-time hooter.

Dax are in hot water. Fortunately, that comes naturally to them. The spa town is renowned for the Fontaine Chaude at its heart that produces water at 64C. Within a ten-minute walk of the spring is the bullring and the stadium, at the heart of the red-and-white Feria, the famous August celebration.

We see in Dax’s rugby history all the heartache sport can offer. Lourdes, in the throes of their mighty era, were first to beat them in 1956. Béziers made it two in 1961, thanks to Pierre Danos’s improbably cute drop-goal. Agen triumphed by one point in the violent final of 1966 and Tarbes edged it 18-12 in 1973. The most famous, most gutting loss was in 1963 at the hands of Mont-de-Marsan. That was the Landes final, a rare interdepartmental showpiece, and the Montois’ only Bouclier. The next Landes derby, for clubs one point apart in Pro D2, is on April 17.

Family was significant in the 1963 final. Mont-de-Marsan had the Boniface brothers, André and Guy, after whom their stadium is jointly named. Dax had the Albaladejos, Pierre and Raymond. Fifteen months later, Raymond was killed in a car crash along with his team-mates Émile Carrère and Jean Othats, in whose honour the Chapelle Notre Dame du Rugby in Larrivière-Saint-Savin, where this column paid homage four years ago, is dedicated.

Had that trio not died, Claude Dourthe might not have ascended into the first team so rapidly, nor made his France debut aged 18. Along with Jean-Pierre Bastiat, Jean-Patrick Lescarboura and Jean-Pierre Lux, Dourthe — known as “The Camel” — brought star power to Dax, but not the Bouclier. “Many of us won everything [else], even the grand slam, and that remains my biggest regret, more for the city than for myself,” Bastiat said in 2007.

It did little to reduce the mysticism of this three-letter town. “On the western side of the Pyrenees, in Dax, there is a curious little hamlet, a tiny pocket of rugby intensity . . . all in one street,” Peter Bills wrote in Jean-Pierre Rives: A Modern Corinthian. “Claude Dourthe shares his dental practice with Jean-Pierre Lux, his co-international rugby centre of the late 1960s, through to the mid-1970s period. Downstairs in the same building, Jean-Pierre Bastiat runs an insurance company. A few doors down stands Hotel Lescarboura. The perfect rugby side, I thought to myself as I waited in Bastiat’s modern office.”

The last near-miss — and it may well be as close as Dax ever come again — was in 1996, when they lost to Toulouse in the semi-finals. Again, it was a superpower stopping a fairytale, as Toulouse were en route to the third of four successive championships. That decade, Dax had Richard Dourthe (the son of Claude), Raphaël Ibañez (the son of Jacques, another town legend), Thierry Lacroix, Olivier Magne, Fabien Pelous, Laurent Rodriguez and Olivier Roumat. Before too long they were all elsewhere, and bar a brief flirtation with the basement of the Top 14 from 2007 to 2009, Dax have been outside the professional elite.

The fraternal element was stronger still in the Nineties. In a chapter about the family nature of French rugby in his book Le Rugby: 1,001 Photos, Matthieu Le Chevallier highlighted Dax: “In the mid-1990s, the Dourthe home was a gathering place for young Dax rugby players. Among them, Olivier Magne and Raphaël Ibañez took advantage of this proximity to woo the daughters of Claude, whose sons-in-law they would become, and therefore Richard’s brothers-in-law. This family bond took the three friends all the way to the 1999 World Cup final.”

Names of that stature play elsewhere now. Few know what it means to be Dacquois, but many will recognise that Poulidor feeling. Colin Montgomerie at golf’s majors, or Jimmy White at the Crucible. Football clubs such as Blackpool, Cardiff City, Watford and Southampton remember the seasons in which they were the second-best team in the country. This year Warrington Wolves will try to win Super League and Somerset the County Championship. In France, La Rochelle and Bordeaux Bègles crave the Bouclier, having lost four of the past five finals to Toulouse.

As Poulidor showed, there can be glory, even in vain. “Sometimes I wonder: if I had won two or three Tours de France, would I be loved as much?” Poulidor told La Montagne in 2015. “I don’t think so. There’s a Poulidor of politics, a Poulidor of education, a Poulidor in every sporting discipline. I saw Anquetil a few days before he died. He told me, almost with a smile, that I was going to finish second again.”

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