We Were Young and Carefree (24 page)
Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
One footnote: just for the record, French television – Antenne 2 to be exact – didn’t show a report of this Milan–San Remo, not even highlights. The bosses turned down Jean-Paul Ollivier’s request to cover the race. ‘There’s no way a Frenchman can win,’ he was told.
With my head in the clouds somewhat, I imagined that I had once again got back to what I was. Above all, I knew exactly how I had won. And I could just glimpse a return to the peace of mind of my best days. But on the podium, believe it or not, I was cursing myself for not managing to win alone. It was a stupid way to think, but my old mindset was reawakening.
Was there a whiff of a new beginning in the air?
Whatever the answer, one thing is true: the passing of a few years allows those who can withstand them to acquire an amazing ability to take control of their actions. Mind and body can be at a peak of harmony. The proof of that came the next year, 1989. To win Milan–San Remo again Alain Gallopin and I put together exactly the same programme, but with one small variant. We made the Wednesday’s training even harder, 50 kilometres longer. I was a year older and used to an extra effort or two.
To avoid being caught out, I knew that I had to avoid making the same move as in 1988. This time, no one was going to let me go anywhere on the Poggio. So I picked out another place to have a go, between the Cipressa and the Poggio. There, and nowhere else. The race panned out exactly as I needed it to. My legs didn’t hurt; the pedals turned fluidly. I felt astonishingly calm. And when the Dutchman Frans Maassen, who had just won the Tour of Belgium, pulled out a 100m lead on the bunch, I didn’t waste a second wondering whether I should go for it. It was done before I’d even thought about it. No one came up to us, and with more than forty seconds lead on the bunch at the foot of the Poggio, I pushed up the pace on the hardest part of the climb. Maassen folded. This time round, I was the only rider in the finish picture. It’s hard to describe, but winning a Classic of this importance a second time was such a rare feat. I had to have total belief in the strength of my race knowledge and in my ability to focus completely on a single day.
That year, Guimard didn’t come to Milan, although he should have been at my side at a race which was to put me in the history books. The day after, he came to pick me up at the airport when I flew in. Even now, I can still recall the surreal scene. He spotted me walking towards him while I was still a good way off, but remained seated in his armchair holding
L’Equipe
ostentatiously, wide open in front of his face. There was a vast photo of me on the front, of course. I came up, but he never moved. It was his way of saying: ‘Bloody hell, you did it.’ I stood in front of him for at least two or three minutes but he never blinked. It was his way of doing things. After a while I cracked and said, ‘You daft bugger, you could at least say well done.’
L’Equipe
ostentatiously, wide open in front of his face. There was a vast photo of me on the front, of course. I came up, but he never moved. It was his way of saying: ‘Bloody hell, you did it.’ I stood in front of him for at least two or three minutes but he never blinked. It was his way of doing things. After a while I cracked and said, ‘You daft bugger, you could at least say well done.’
CHAPTER 25
WORM IN THE YELLOW JERSEY
Having fun keeps you alive and having fun while you win prevents you from believing that you are the centre of the universe.
It’s something that poets know how to do. There are ways of sidelining yourself from the demands of daily communication. You make it hard for people to find you. You refuse to open up to any old person who comes towards you with a big smile on their face. You keep a little bit aloof, and ensure that any messages take a while to get through. I needed to make myself a bit less accessible, because the clarity with which I saw everything around me – and myself – was not to everyone’s taste. I decided to give less of myself. After my first win in Milan–San Remo, all of a sudden, people decided I was worthy of interest again. I even read a few newspaper articles which while not actually friendly – I’ve never liked biased writing – at least took a view of reality which wasn’t far from mine.
I had good form in that spring of 1988. I could feel it and I wanted to use it to the full. I came thirteenth in the Tour of Flanders and two days later I struck another blow in Paris–Vimoutiers by escaping alone on the ‘wall’ at Champeaux. They didn’t see me again and my teammates understood why I had stipulated that they must stay at the head of the bunch all day, chasing down anything that moved.
It all felt easy again. During times like these, incredible as it may seem, I never had any pain in my legs. There were some of the other riders who never believed me. I remember talking about it once with Dominique Garde. He was adamant that he suffered on his bike ‘every day’, whether he was training or racing. Throughout his entire career, he added, he had never had a good day. It was true for him, just as the opposite was true for me.
For example, that year, when I threw myself full tilt at the cobbled sections of Paris–Roubaix – a race where I hadn’t turned a wheel since 1984 – without thinking of the possible dangers, I did so because I knew I could do well. When I went into the zone that led through the Arenberg forest, usually the place where the first selection happened, my computer was reading 60kph. Kelly told me later I was crazy heading into it at that speed. It was the complete opposite of a lack of awareness. I was fully in tune with what my body could cope with; I knew the agility you have when the power is there. My only worry was that it would all disappear again and I would go back into my shell like a man returning to damnation.
I caught a sinusitis, a cold and to cap it all I cracked a bone in my right hand in an infamous mass pile-up on a descent in Liège–Bastogne–Liège: then I lapsed into a long series of mysterious, inexplicable attacks of fatigue. By the time I started the 1988 Tour de France I had reverted to a state of prickly solitude. If leg power is the judge of true nobility on a bike, I was only too aware that my status was very uncertain. I wanted time to speed up so that I could find out what was the matter. I had to know. I found out.
The new format for the prologue time trial in that year’s Tour made everyone smile. It had been renamed ‘
préface
’; each team had to start as a unit to ride a team time trial until the final kilometre, when a designated rider finished on his own. This was a ridiculous innovation by the new Tour organisers – they were very much to the fore that year – but it had one saving grace. In all of 3.8km I was given a foretaste of what was coming: I was struggling to stay with my teammates. My fears were confirmed two days later in the full-length team time trial: every camera lens was trained on me, and with good reason. About 20km from the finish my strength gave out. I was overcome with panic. I could hardly feel it at first but I was slipping back every time the team made the slightest acceleration. Then, suddenly, I slipped off the back. It had never happened to me before. The team waited for me the first time, but not the second. I told them to leave me behind and I finished 1min 20sec behind my teammates, who were devastated to have deserted their leader. I was wasted, and neither my doctors nor I had any idea why.
préface
’; each team had to start as a unit to ride a team time trial until the final kilometre, when a designated rider finished on his own. This was a ridiculous innovation by the new Tour organisers – they were very much to the fore that year – but it had one saving grace. In all of 3.8km I was given a foretaste of what was coming: I was struggling to stay with my teammates. My fears were confirmed two days later in the full-length team time trial: every camera lens was trained on me, and with good reason. About 20km from the finish my strength gave out. I was overcome with panic. I could hardly feel it at first but I was slipping back every time the team made the slightest acceleration. Then, suddenly, I slipped off the back. It had never happened to me before. The team waited for me the first time, but not the second. I told them to leave me behind and I finished 1min 20sec behind my teammates, who were devastated to have deserted their leader. I was wasted, and neither my doctors nor I had any idea why.
I kept dragging along the road, heavy with fatigue, fed up with drudgery. I struggled at the slightest effort and in the evening I would collapse with exhaustion in my hotel room. I began to wonder what was going on. There had been something I didn’t understand in the last few weeks: I had never seemed to lose any weight.
After the first individual time trial I was shunted down well beyond thirtieth place so I said goodbye to the overall standings. And then, in Nancy, I agreed to have a journalist come up to the hotel room to interview me after my massage. Shortly before he came, I went to the toilet. It was horrific: I felt something long and soft down below. I was terrified. I thought I was expelling my intestines. I called in Dominique Garde and he burst out laughing: it was a tapeworm. I pulled on it: about two metres came out. Then it broke. At last I knew what was going on.
When the journalist came in, I talked him through it and showed him the beast. He couldn’t believe his eyes. That same evening I took the medicine that would kill what remained of the parasite, which was completely ejected from my body the following evening. I was shattered.
On the eleventh stage from Besançon to Morzine, completely devoid of any strength, I forced myself to get to the finish, twenty minutes behind the leaders. It was an exploit of a sort, which had no purpose at all other than to symbolise the fact that I wasn’t going to give up. I use the term ‘symbolic’ for anything which helps to delay the inevitable or give some indication, if not actually some concrete proof, of what I might manage in the future. I wanted to force the good feelings to come back. I wanted to exhibit the last depths of courage so that I could quit with my head held high.
But I had got to my limit and gone over it. That same evening I announced that I was going home, and no one was surprised. The next morning the newspaper
Libération
printed an article that was mind-bending in its perversity and lack of professionalism. The correspondent declared point blank that I had refused to continue riding in the Tour because I knew that I had tested positive a few days earlier. As it so happened, I had not actually been tested since the start. I sued them for defamation and won. They had called me a bastard, but it was obvious who the real bastards were.
Libération
printed an article that was mind-bending in its perversity and lack of professionalism. The correspondent declared point blank that I had refused to continue riding in the Tour because I knew that I had tested positive a few days earlier. As it so happened, I had not actually been tested since the start. I sued them for defamation and won. They had called me a bastard, but it was obvious who the real bastards were.
When I caught the TGV the next morning after leaving the race, I felt relieved, as if a massive weight had been taken off my shoulders. As I watched the countryside go past, buried in my happy feelings, I read René Char. ‘Clarity is the wound that most resembles the sun.’ It’s dreadful to have to admit it, but the further I was from the Tour, the happier I felt.
I had hated the last two weeks. There was nothing to enjoy about it at all. The atmosphere at the Tour was tense a year after the departure of Jacques Goddet, who had run the race since before the Second World War. With new, less competent organisers at the helm, the race had declined into a kind of travelling circus. Those who lived through it still have painful memories. It was a Tour of excess at every level. The number of cars containing corporate guests expanded. There were more and more helicopters which came and harassed the peloton and prevented the racing from being correct. The riders were under permanent pressure and constantly stressed, because they were no longer the key element in the race, merely participants in a ‘show’. It was as if the race was merely the thing that justified all the rest of it – commercialism and consumerism.
The lack of respect for the tradition of the Giants of the Road and the myth of the Tour and its history horrified me. It felt like the end of an era. But Amaury Group, owners of la Société du Tour de France, didn’t make the same mistake twice. The new heads rolled. They only just avoided irreparable damage to their event.
You must never confuse having fun and messing about. Having fun is what prevents you taking yourself too seriously. Messing about is when you endanger something that actually matters.
CHAPTER 26
RETURN OF THE
GRAND BLOND
GRAND BLOND
Fortunately, the life of a top sportsman is not constant catastrophe. It seems that somewhere inside there is always a seed of renewal lying dormant. My eighth year as a professional, at the age of twenty-eight, was set to be a good example of that.
By the start of 1989 I was the only leader in the team. Even Charly Mottet had left. Cyrille Guimard didn’t like to hear it, but you could say the team was average in quality. It was not a team worthy of an important leader who was capable of winning a major Tour. I was well aware of it but it didn’t bother me a great deal. On the plus side, we had recruited a young Danish rider named Bjarne Riis who I had spotted at the Tour of the European Community the previous year; he was reliable and strong enough to be a good teammate. After noticing him I had said to Guimard, ‘We’ve absolutely got to hire that guy.’ It was amazing. By the end of 1988 Riis still didn’t have a team for the next year. No one wanted him. He told me later that if I hadn’t offered him a place he would have given up cycling. A career can hang on threads like that. Bjarne was happy to get stuck in, he had a solid constitution and liked to work hard. Riding on his wheel was total joy, because he could do anything: go fast when he had to and go through a gap with perfect timing. I never had to tell him anything, never had to say ‘Come on’ or ‘Slow down’. I glued myself to his wheel and didn’t have to do anything else. It’s not often as harmonious as that. I had got it right with him but I had no idea that he would make his name in any of the ways he eventually did. He had a ‘big engine’, but this has to be made clear: he was a good rider but not capable of winning a Tour de France in normal circumstances. He later confessed how he won the 1996 race – by using EPO.
During the winter training camps, Guimard had put together some really testing sessions, with a lot of power exercises. There was one we had to do on a hill at Pont-Réan, where we went round a circuit that had been used for a French national championship. Up the hill, down again. Guimard made us do it ten times, flat out. Or he would have done if we hadn’t gone out to a nightclub the previous evening, and got back to our rooms at 7 a.m. I’ll put my hand up: it wasn’t the right thing to do. But my old insouciance was back.
When I had gone back up to my hotel room, which I was sharing with Pascal Simon who had just signed with us, I made a bit of a noise. I was not alone. There were two of us making little happy sounds in my bed. Simon woke up and began watching the show that was going on under my covers. The old boy seemed very interested. All at once, just as he was getting totally fascinated, we jumped out of the bed. It was Barteau hiding under the blanket. Simon had had no idea. ‘You bastards.’ It was better than an alarm clock. And funnier.
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