We Were Young and Carefree (10 page)
Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
The man who turned up at training camp with us was only a distant relation of the champion who had hung his bike up in the garage three months earlier and who had grabbed every trophy yet again the previous season. As soon as we began to train as a group he adopted the expression he wore on his bad days. He suffered as soon as anyone pressed on the pedals. He sweated all over and swore at us. Sometimes he yelled that we were going too fast. And when he saw that one or two of us looked, if not actually annoyed then at least a bit surprised, he would shout: ‘Go on, you clever dicks. You’ll see how good you are in a few months.’ He could do anything he liked. Sure enough, less than a month later, he would win the first race he rode. When he had decided he was going to put his wheel in front of yours, a vital force would course through his veins, born of anger and pride. That was how Hinault was.
What can I say about my first races in the Renault jersey? Firstly, here is how we felt: Julot and I may have been young and impetuous, and even though we weren’t easily impressed, we were proud to be members of this small, tight-knit elite group. Without making us docile little lambs, that calmed us down a bit. We had to look, learn and then become completely ourselves when the opportunity came our way. We would only swagger once we had earned our spurs.
We soon began to get to know the other riders and quickly built friendships in the team, then in the wider peloton. A lot of amateurs we knew had just turned pro as well and we were all happy to be among the ‘big guys’. And now we were riding alongside some famous names, above all the Dutchmen: Jan Raas, another bespectacled bike rider, like his fellow countryman Gerrie Knetemann, who were the heads of the TI-Raleigh team directed by Peter Post. You have to remember that in those days the Dutch and Belgians won all the time, almost every race. Apart from the ones that went to Francesco Moser and Hinault.
I didn’t change the way I rode. I kept faith in my philosophy of cycling. I still wanted to enjoy myself as much as before. I wanted to gamble. I wanted to feel happy with it. And one race followed another at breakneck speed. Cyrille Guimard put us in a huge amount of races but didn’t ask us to do anything in particular. He was completely relaxed, totally confident in the ability of his team and that obviously meant he wasn’t going to put pressure on us at the start of the season. We were there to progress better, to protect Hinault as much as we could, and that was all. Renault’s real objectives were circled in the calendar, but came much later. Financially the stakes were still not that high even for a big team such as Renault, and there was no question of a team being harassed for any reasons other than the need to compete well. As far as I know, in this respect the directors of Renault were people of unimpeachable morality.
Because in Guimard’s establishment the people were right and proper as well. They were looking to create complete human beings rather than merely manage sportsmen. No one came into cycling simply to make money; they wanted to win races and live their passion to the full. I find it rather moving to think back to these carefree times, because the world has changed so much. Seeing how mindsets are today, I honestly wonder if the new generation has any idea how to distinguish a ‘winner’ from an ‘earner’. We were winners. ‘Earners’ – showbiz types who monopolise prime-time television – were to come a bit later on the coat-tails of Bernard Tapie.
All through my career I have hated cold weather: the wind and rain and low temperatures at the start of the season meant this was always a risky time for me physically. It was my main weakness: I kept getting colds, headaches, throat infections and so on. All the organs in my face were susceptible in wintry weather. I would often quit in races but Guimard would never bawl me out and kept his faith in all of us. We weren’t skiving, quite the opposite. We worked like mad, although that didn’t prevent us having a good time as soon as any opportunity arose. All Guimard wanted was to feel confident that we were obviously making progress, both on the bike and in the way we behaved within the team. We had to make our presence felt, make an effort and learn rapidly. He could tell if it was happening.
I was on the pace as early as February and March in the first races. The work I’d done in training paid off. At the Tour of the Mediterranean, where I won the best climber’s prize, I was at the front all the time, bridging gaps, putting in attacks, looking for openings. A few guys complained and clearly wondered who this young upstart was. Michel Laurent and Raymond Martin, who were among the ‘captains’ of the bunch, felt they needed to point it out to me. Even the great Joop Zoetemelk, winner of the Tour in 1980, had a grumble or two. I must confess, my brake lever kept touching his arse on the climbs. He didn’t like me getting that close. As for me, I found all this educational. It was character building.
In those days cycling provided those riders who knew how to suffer – of whom I was one – with the opportunity to test themselves in much longer races than today. Even on an early season race like the Tour of the Mediterranean there were still stages of 180, 200 and 220 kilometres. Today people would say that was crazy, insanely hard. But no one actually understands what went on. The stages were not designed to be hard in order to torture the riders, but simply so that the best guys, who had the most endurance, would end up in front. The way it all unfolded was completely different. The early part of the stage would be taken at a steady pace. Then, when a break had gone away and it was pretty much obvious that it was the winning move there was no debate about what to do. Everyone would sit up and finish the stage at 30 or 35kph. Clearly, having this kind of racing would be ‘scandalous’ today, although I can’t quite work out why.
The following tale demonstrates the relaxed approach Pascal Jules and I adopted, but also the way we would sometimes overestimate our own strength. In the first stage of that Tour of the Med, finishing in Port Leucate, along the coastal roads, Pascal said to me at the start, ‘Cool, there’s a hell of a gale out here. No one’s as good as us at riding in a crosswind, so we’ll show the guys what we can do.’ We had overlooked one minor detail: the Raleigh team were at full strength and if we were specialists at riding in sidewinds, the Dutch riders were the ones who had invented the technique.
How young and carefree we were. The Raleigh team knew that a move was about to go. In the first ten kilometres, with no warning they began riding in an echelon, a perfect diagonal line from one side of the road to the other. We didn’t know it was going to happen and were too far back in the field. I said to Julot, ‘No panic, we’ll get up to them.’ Ha bloody ha. How near did we get? Thirty metres behind the first group riding diagonally across the road, then twenty metres, then at last ten metres, but that was it. I could swear we were within touching distance, about to get up to them as we’d expected. I screamed, ‘One last effort and we’re there.’ We never bridged those ten blasted metres in spite of everything we’d done, and even though we took two last massive pulls at the front. It was unbelievable. We lost twenty metres, forty metres, and then we blew completely. We were in pieces, although we weren’t the only ones. By the finish, we were twenty minutes behind. That evening, having been brought down to earth, dear Pascal and I looked at each other and guffawed. ‘Well, we’re with the big boys now.’ We were good riders, in form, but we had been blown away like novices.
No matter, we weren’t going to change our ways. That very evening we said: ‘We’re not going to get anywhere overall, but we can show what we are made of!’ And we got in the front group every day. I decided to take the best climber’s jersey, and held it to the finish. And even in the time trial up Mont Faron, the climb up above Toulon, I had the time of my life. I started just ahead of Joop Zoetemelk and I knew that he would catch me early on, because he was one of the better time triallists, and he’d be going flat out. That’s precisely what happened, so I got in his slipstream, although just far enough away to avoid a talking to from the referees, and I stayed with him easily. And guess what? On the climb up to the finish, I caught up with him, overtook him and left him behind. The great Zoetemelk had been having a real go at me. ‘Get out the way!’ he kept shouting. And so when I went past him I said: ‘Come on, then, get on my wheel.’ He didn’t like it all. But he was still second in the time trial and I was sixth, so we both got something out of it.
Let’s be sensible here: I was a good new professional in 1982, but nothing out of the ordinary. Except that a few days later I won the Grand Prix de Cannes, only my sixth or seventh race with Renault. To tell the truth, I didn’t expect to put my arms in the air so soon. It was a Saturday, and the Monday afterwards it happened again, in La Flèche Azuréenne, another one-day race which finished in Nice. And that was a bit special. I was at the front all day, getting in amongst the others as usual, attacking all the time. But, at a certain point, four riders just took off one after the other. As if he was laughing at me, or was simply surprised that I wasn’t counter-attacking, Raymond Martin began teasing: ‘Come on, Fignon, you star, this is the time to move, not all those other times.’ I looked at him, stood on the pedals and said: ‘Oh, all right, I’m off then.’ And away I went. And suddenly thirty kilometres from the finish there were five of us in the front: Pascal Simon, René Bittinger, Charly Bérard, Marc Madiot, and me. Bérard and Madiot were Renault teammates of mine, so we were there in numbers. I expected Bérard to be the one we worked for at the finish, because he was from Nice and was a decent sprinter, but, surprisingly, Guimard drove up alongside us and said, ‘Laurent, you take it easy. You others, you ride for him.’
My blood froze. I was only a new pro. I heard myself saying: ‘
Non, Monsieur Guimard
.’
Non, Monsieur Guimard
.’
It was too late. He retorted: ‘That’s how it is.’ Guimard had spoken, he had made up his mind; there was no comeback. Madiot and Bérard gave it big licks, and I sat in behind them. No kidding, I was shivering with fright, literally wobbling with the weight of responsibility. I was terrified I might let Guimard down. And the bunch was coming perilously close: a minute, 50sec, 35sec. But we held out.
By the time it came to the finish sprint, Madiot and Bérard were wasted. We had to beat Bittinger and Simon, good strong riders who had been around the block. My legs died a kilometre from the finish with the fear of it all. It was the stress coming through. The feeling was shocking and completely new for me: I’d never felt like this before. And then, Simon launched the sprint, with Bittinger on his wheel. And then, I don’t quite know how, I stamped on the pedals and found the mental strength and the speed I needed. The panic attack was over. I came up alongside them with no difficulty and left them standing. They were twenty metres behind as I crossed the line. It was a fine, decisive win; more importantly, it was probably then that I managed to channel the anguish you feel at a major event, to master the tension and turn it into an asset.
Guimard, who barely ever expressed his feelings, came over to talk to me. He looked in my eyes and rather than congratulate me for the win, he explained: ‘You were the rider in form. You needed to keep on winning.’ He had made the correct decision and no one would have argued. What’s more, I had won. I had shown that I could cope with responsibility when a decision was made.
A few weeks later after my first ride in the Tour of Italy, Guimard, a man of knowledge and intuition, stated: ‘Laurent Fignon? A very good stage race rider for the future. He’s rock solid. He’s surprised me with the stamina he shows when he has to ride day after day. He’s quick enough, he knows where to ride in the bunch, and he can climb. When he attacks fifteen hundred metres from a race finish, he is fantastic at keeping going right to the line. He eats a lot, he sleeps well, he recovers quickly, he never complains and he fits in. He’s a good team rider. We’ll hear about him again, in the 1983 Tour de France.’
Although I was a first-year pro, I had finished fifteenth overall, totally devoting myself to Hinault. I’d become convinced that if I was to ride for myself I could easily finish in the top five of a major Tour. That was clear. A few days before the finish I said, with a smile on my face ‘Hinault’s lucky. If I hadn’t been in his team, I’d have just kept attacking him.’ A lot of people felt that was pretentious, but there was no doubt in my mind.
I was not the kind of person who let others say what I felt. I just put everything out there. This was a time when cycling could show us as we truly were. This sport could take off all the wraps and expose everything about us to the world.
CHAPTER 9
BACCHUS RAISES HIS HEAD
Getting to know what your body can do can be a joyous affair; nothing beats personal experience if you want to understand the deepest things. Sometimes you end up finding out just how complex your system is. In March 1982, at the Tour de l’Armor, I had my first taste of partying with the pros. There was nothing to brag about, but no reason to hang my head either.
Bernard Hinault was performing on home soil and was utterly determined to win this race in front of his fellow Bretons. We had an excellent working relationship: you could say I was a loyal, devoted teammate and the Badger never had any cause to complain about me. During this race, however, Hinault was so stressed out and so obsessed with winning that he was rarely his normal self. His eyes were so full of desire, popping out of their sockets; we ended up wondering if he was actually sleeping at night.
In the midst of it all, I did begin to sense something that felt like tension between Hinault and Guimard. Of course, we were kept well away when they had any disagreements, but we could feel it like gangrene, slowly letting its poison into the team day by day.
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