Bike, Tour de France, cinema, pub, events: the incredible course of Aveyronnais Gérard Royère

While the Tour de France is full of racing facts generating legends. Similarly, its career leads the peloton to Occitania, there is a great pleasure in referring to the memories attached to it.

So from our meeting with Gérard Royère. Nevertheless, descendant of the Mourlhon family, in La-Bastide-l’Evêque, in which, child and teenager, he came to spend his holidays. For example, And who, today, divides his time between Parisian region and Bas-Ségala.

As from “the bicycle family”, according to their expression, we are not doing better. Therefore, His cabinet of “fifty years of memories” is worth his weight in bike, tour de france, cinema, yellow, green, polka dot, rainbow.

Cycle trade … – Bike, tour de france, cinema,

Amateur cyclist from 1974 to 1980. However, passed through the Bleus clubs of France in Suresnes, AC Boulogne-Billancourt, Villefranchois Sport Vélo, VC Neuilly-sur-Seine, Junior and Senior A, he notably participated in Paris-Roubaix Amateur and at the Rouergue Grand Prix 1979: “I was especially a climber”. Furthermore, He will even be a coach at the French journalists’ championship in Montlhéry where “the Lapize coast succeeded more. Similarly, as a rise than in descent!”

But it was in the cycle trade that he made his hole in working life. Moreover, With a luxury start. Moreover, at 16, as a mechanic in the Parisian boutique of Oscar Egg cycles, avenue de la Grande Army.

“I remember dressed the pistard Pierre Trentin with a thigh -thigh thigh thighs that he asked me for scissors. to be able to put it on.”

bike, tour de france, cinema,

An experience which. after the Gypsy cycles then Lejeune or the Italian brand Benotto will put him in touch with Francisco Moser who will offer him his world champion jersey during the Super Prestige Pernod in 1978 or Roger de Vlaeminck, the Merckx rival, which he will accompany on Paris-Roubaix of which he will be the record holder of victories.

Without forgetting, at 18, the Tour de France. As mechanic. Gérard Royère will make five including that of 1976 removed by Lucien Van Impe or that of 1978 first in the series of Bernard Hinault. And how can we forget the great Merckx who. then at Fiat, made him redo his guidoline: “The bike, tour de france, cinema, stage fright I had! He gave me a jersey”. It was the heroic era when we talked about freewheel and gables, not yet a cassette.

… at the cinema. at the show

To find himself in so in reported company will earn him to enter the world of cinema and spectacle.
It’s the rocking. It will be. on a Tour de France won by Hinault, the film telling the fall of Roger Rivière in the Col du Perjuret, in Lozère, drama reconstituted not on site but in a turn of … the Alpe d’Huez with the stuntman Roland Neureuther.

bike, tour de france, cinema,

Subsequently. he will approach Michel Audiard in the shooting of a film with José Giovanni and the former champion of the six-day André Pousse become actor and friend: “My cinema dad”, he says. He will meet Patrick Bruel in the film “Off-Jeu”, will work alongside Gérard Depardieu in “Danton”.

A world of spectacle which will lead him. in 1993, to a post of general manager of filming for an event company.
“We have never finished his career” admits. at 66, this eternal intermittent of the show whose assessment passes, for the Perrier-Vittel group, by nineteen Roland-Garros as a manager, on the central course, drinks for players and media, by the Franco Folies of La-Rochelle in particular, to the series, “Ten percent” on France Télévisions from 2013 to 2020. And it is not finished …

“Mannequin” for a motorbike advertisement

At the very beginning of the 1980s. Motobécane released his “profile bike, an icon of the boom of aerodynamic bikes”. Tested in a blower, this machine is designed to offer low air resistance.

“Modernism on 2 wheels” displays the French brand proud to have won its betting bet the friction coefficient. It is still necessary to make it known and convince cyclists. Hence the search for a pilot.

It is on the Longchamp circuit. in Paris, where champions and amateurs are running in training that the pearl is found in the person of … Gérard Royère.
“They wanted someone recalling the style of Fausto Coppi,” said the 22 -year -old cyclist then. I had been spotted for my profile with my mouth in bike, tour de france, cinema, the shape of a knife “.

The casting cast, this brand calls him: “We have bad news”. And, after a silence, this sentence: “You will have to make the sacrifice of your beard”.
Gérard Royère will appear in an advantageous situation of “cracking” on the national advertising of the brand.