In 2009, when Lance Armstrong was staging his ill-fated comeback to cycling with Astana, a cartoon appeared in Le Canard Enchainé, Charlie Hebdo’s wiser older brother. It showed a cyclist, his arse full of needles, jumping his bike from one mountain to another. An onlooker says “Chez les grands champions, c’est le mental qui fait la difference” (“With the great champions, it’s their mental attitude that makes the difference”).

It skewered the “grand champion” perfectly. More importantly, it said in one image what thousands of journalists simply refused to say in their column inches: that there was more to Armstrong’s superiority than simply le mental. It came from the pen of Cabu.

On 7 January 2015, Luz – a cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo and the man responsible for the caricatures that adorn Antoine Vayer’s ‘Tous Dope?’ – was late for the magazine’s editorial meeting. A birthday, a lie-in with his wife, a brief pause to buy a gateau were the increments of time that lie between life and death. “I was saved by love and gluttony,” he said. Luz will draw on – his image of a mournful prophet Muhammad adorns the next issue of Charlie Hebdo - as Cabu, Charb, Wolinski and Tignous are drawing willies all over heaven. Except of course, as deeply committed secularists, there will be no heaven for them.

I learned more about the murky world of cycling from the cartoonist’s pen than from the editorial team of L’Equipe and their ilk. The cartoons – those precise, puerile, perfect slashes of black pen on white paper – gave the game away by daring to show openly what others could or would only to hint at.

Images are hot-wired to our brains. They punch the message through where words can confound and befuddle us. While I might spend minutes unravelling the hidden lexicon of a L’Equipe editorial, the way we all parse the written word to unravel its meaning, a cartoon would simply punch through: Bam! Armstrong is a dopeur.

The French even have a word for that vulgar, childish, obscene visual vocabulary: gouaille – which imperfectly translates as cheekiness or cockiness. An 1853 French law banning cartooning declared caricature to be “an act of violence”. Anyone can exchange insults but once a cartoonist has staked your image through the heart with his pen there is no retaliation. But if ever a sport demanded acts of violence to shock it out of its complacency, that sport was cycling.

In 1962, when 20 riders fell ill after claiming to have eaten rotten fish, L’Equipe ran a cartoon with a group of cyclists huddled round a half-eaten fish with syringes for bones. The punchline? “We’ve eaten bad fish.” It’s the kind of cynical humour that fired “As the Toto turns”, the brainchild of Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz, that brought a savvy American twist to scurrilous cycling cartoons that are a million miles from the simple black and white drawings of Cabu, yet share a direct lineage from the images of the French Revolutionary pamphlet – the desire to mock, to lacerate and yet to be essentially truth telling. If Toto was controversial, then so was the very nature of professional cycling. Toto seems to have gone missing in action but, while it blazed brightly, it was right there in the venerable tradition of taking the piss out of a ruling elite through satire and the power of the image.

I moved to France in 1997 with a broken heart and an O-level in French that needed a hefty dose of WD40. Buying L’Equipe, of course, Canard Enchainé and the occasional Charlie Hebdo was my way into French culture. While I struggled with my schoolgirl vocabulary and dictionary, their cartoonists made life easy for me.

They hooked me effortlessly into that particularly French brand of satire that is equal opportunities mockery of unworthy elites, of the priest who neither ploughs like the peasant or heals like the doctor, to paraphrase Rabelais. A devout and committed Francophile, Cabu and his ilk ripped the rose tinted spectacles from my eyes. Out in la France profonde I discovered a deep streak of secularism behind the conservative Catholicism and a belief in the ultimate power of democracy and the republic. As my neighbour once said “I may vote for Le Pen so I will be able to control him.” I was shocked by the sentiment but admired the faith in the ballot box.



There is a stubborn faith in the heart of every French citoyen, a robust belief that the elite must be answerable ultimately to them. We saw it in Sunday’s march – how I longed to be there - a coming together around the values of liberté, égalité and fraternité crystallised into that single phrase: “Je suis Charlie.”

Nous sommes tous Charlie: we all have that childish desire to mock our “betters”, to shock and outrage like swearing children, to vent our spleen against those who are doing us down. And then we grow up and learn the niceties of language, the difference between “want” and “please may I?” We no longer need to throw a tantrum whenever we don’t get out own way. We develop language as our weapon and put away our crayons. But the Charlie Hebdo crew never put away their crayons – they never bought into the grown up consensus that shies away from giving offence while jumping to it so readily. They remained entirely, gleefully childlike in their desire to poke fun, draw obscenities and stick needles in cyclists arses.

The cartoonists who have stabbed their pencils at the dirty heart of professional cycling have left an indelible visual vocabulary. It’s cheap humour, but it makes its point with elegant economy. It says the unsayable in a way that, once seen, can never be unseen. Armstrong is right when he says that the history books may no longer record his victories but that nothing can unstop us seeing him in Yellow in Paris year after year. That is the power of the visual image, the power that Cabu and Charb, Tignous and Wolinski exploited with such deadly effect.

Armstrong reacted to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity by tweeting “ParisSTRONG” a pun as painfully self-referential and egotistical as he could possibly have made under the circumstances. But he is forever a cartoon character with a syringe sticking out of his arse, skewered on his own perfidiousness. And that is why Je Suis Charlie.



• This article appeared first on 100 Tours 100 Tales

• Follow Suze Clemitson on Twitter

• Follow Guardian Sport on Facebook