We Were Young and Carefree (30 page)
Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
When it came to building relationships within the team, that happened quickly and it was a pleasant process for everyone. I often shared a room with one of two really delightful riders, Stefano Zanatta and Giovanni Fidanza. Zanatta knew a few words of French; Fidanza didn’t. At the start of the season Stanga entered me for a whole load of races that I didn’t want to do because I couldn’t stand the cold weather. Working with Guimard I had always had a say in my racing programme, but that wasn’t the case with Stanga; so much so that I started Milan–San Remo without being able to prepare as I usually did.
I remember that beforehand there was a long discussion about what the best tactic would be for the race. My opinion mattered to them: I was a double winner of the event and that counted for a lot in their eyes. I had said that in my view the best thing was to keep out of the action for as long as possible to conserve our strength. They listened to me attentively as I expounded my views, and up to the end of the meeting I believed that they would take them into account, or at least take some inspiration from what I said. But in the first third of the race all those plans went by the wayside. A group of riders got away at the front of the race and who took up the chase behind? All my boys of course. I rode up to talk to all the riders one-by-one, to ask why we had changed our tactics. ‘We’ve got to ride, we’ve got to ride.’ It was panic stations and of course we lost the race.
Basically I think I had trouble adapting to the way they raced. As far as organisation went, everything was superb, there were no criticisms to be made and I couldn’t have hoped for better. But tactically it just didn’t suit me at all. When we decided we would do something it was often the wrong moment, but, above all, most of the time we didn’t actually do anything. Worst of all the plan was to do nothing. With my new team I was guaranteed selection for the biggest events as ‘back-up leader’, but the modest way they raced and their lack of ambition took a lot of the pleasure out of it.
CHAPTER 32
A LONG, LUNATIC RIDE
As a cyclist gets older he believes that age has made him totally aware of all the information his body gives him. He imagines that this is a vital advantage, a science in its own right that gives him an extra edge. But during the 1992 season I gradually noticed an indisputable change in myself: I had lost my aggression and my ability to act spontaneously. I was less daring when I needed to push myself, even though I knew that I was as talented as before, and I may still have had all my physical ability.
I felt that I was coming into really fine form when I arrived in San Sebastián for the start of the 1992 Tour de France. It was rightly called the ‘European Tour’ because to celebrate the year of the Maastricht treaty the organisers made us visit no fewer than seven countries. I had just finished fourth in the French national championship and it wasn’t unreasonable to have a few hopes. But was there once again a difference between what I thought I could do and what was physically possible? During the first few stages it was all as I had expected: my health was good; it didn’t feel particularly tough. There were no grounds for aspiring to overall victory, of course, but no reason to feel anything was going to spoil the party. Reality hit me like a slap in the face. I was humiliated. The backdrop to this was Luxembourg. The stage was the celebrated individual time trial over sixty-five kilometres, during which Miguel Indurain pushed back the frontiers of the discipline. He put me to shame: I was caught and overtaken after he had started six minutes behind me. It was an incredible exploit, which was not in any way down to a lack of fitness on my part. Far from it: the Spaniard annihilated the opposition that day by putting more than three minutes into all his rivals. These were terrifying margins at the time. I was wounded to the quick. I didn’t like this kind of thing.
Although most of the time I was officially working for Gianni Bugno, who would eventually finish third in Paris, more than ten minutes behind Indurain, the eleventh stage between Strasbourg and Mulhouse provided a perfect opportunity to show everyone that I was still called Laurent Fignon. It was a stage through ‘medium’ mountains and was of a length that suited me perfectly – 249.5km. We had already reconnoitred this stage, which went over a fair few hills and the Grand Ballon.
That morning, before the start at the pre-stage meeting, I stood up and said, ‘We have to try something today.’ Although overall victory seemed to be slipping away from Bugno due to Indurain’s dominance, we had to try and secure his place on the podium and to do that we needed to get rid of Greg LeMond, who was already showing signs of fatigue. I thought that during this stage we could at least get rid of this one threat to Bugno so I said: ‘When I give the word, we all start to attack.’ They all agreed and then, of course, they all refused to stand up and be counted. A hundred kilometres from the finish I went and found them. I said: ‘This is the moment.’ It was a joke: they all slipped away for some reason which again eluded me. But this time I lost my temper. Big-time. I went to see Stanga and warned him: ‘If they won’t go, I’m going anyway.’ And I set off on a long ride which must have seemed crazy. First of all I rode across to the break which had gone away early in the stage; none of them were willing to share the pace, but it wasn’t a problem. One-by-one, using brute strength, I got rid of them all on the Grand Ballon. On the hilly roads of the Vosges my willpower was what counted.
Behind, Indurain’s team, Banesto, never stopped chasing: I ended up riding what amounted to a hundred-kilometre time trial. At the summit of the Grand Ballon I had a two-minute lead over the bunch but Anselmo Fuerte, who I had dropped on the final part of the climb, was not far behind, just thirty seconds. My team’s assistant
directeur sportif
, Claudio Corti, drove up to tell me: ‘Wait for him.’ I refused. The gap over the bunch was not big enough and there were still fifty-three kilometres to ride before the finish. It was a headwind all the way to Mulhouse, but I did it in less than an hour. The peloton chased furiously but I managed to hang on to a few seconds’ lead at the finish, so I had time to raise my arms. This one exploit justified my transfer to the team: they were delighted. It was their first stage win in the Tour.
directeur sportif
, Claudio Corti, drove up to tell me: ‘Wait for him.’ I refused. The gap over the bunch was not big enough and there were still fifty-three kilometres to ride before the finish. It was a headwind all the way to Mulhouse, but I did it in less than an hour. The peloton chased furiously but I managed to hang on to a few seconds’ lead at the finish, so I had time to raise my arms. This one exploit justified my transfer to the team: they were delighted. It was their first stage win in the Tour.
I didn’t learn about the background to the win until that evening; and what I found out confirmed that I had needed to be pretty strong to keep the peloton at bay; Cyrille Guimard had devised a plan which he had hoped would prevent me from winning the stage. Castorama placed four riders in counter-attacks which formed on the Grand Ballon, something which brought knowing smiles to the faces of everyone who was watching. Luc Leblanc was the last stage of the rocket Guimard had fired and he was unable to conceal what the strategy had been when he spoke to television after the stage: ‘It was Cyrille who told us to attack,’ he said, passing the buck. Then a journalist who found it quite funny asked the Castorama boss: ‘Well, Cyrille Guimard, were you riding against Fignon?’ Guimard’s answer was, ‘You know where you can stick that question.’ No one was fooled. He had put all the weapons he had into an attempt to foil me and everyone knew it.
Having won a prestigious stage I felt a weight had been lifted from my shoulders and I wanted to put all I had into helping Gianni Bugno turn the Tour around. After all, it wasn’t totally impossible. During the famous stage to Sestriere where Claudio Chiappucci became a national hero after an incredible exploit, I had concocted an anti-Indurain plan. I had noticed that when he was put under pressure he never made an effort to pull back the attackers at once. He always waited for his assailants to slow slightly to get their second wind and at that precise moment he would lift the pace to come up to them. I gave up a lot of time to explaining this to Bugno, in great detail. Then I suggested: ‘At a given moment I’ll warn you and I’ll begin to ride fast, but not at one hundred per cent of what I’ve got. Then, you attack once, without going too deep; you need to have a little bit in reserve.’ He was listening like a schoolboy with his teacher. I continued: ‘At the moment when you see Indurain lifting the pace to bridge the gap, then, at that precise moment, you attack for real. And you repeat the whole thing again as many times as you need to.’ He ended up saying vaguely, ‘Sounds good.’ But I could see a total lack of conviction on his face. He was saying ‘Yes’ but I felt that he was probably thinking the opposite. I ended up convincing him, or so I thought, by saying: ‘What are you risking? Honestly? Do you think you’ll crack before he does? Do you think you’ll lose the Tour? But if you do nothing the Tour is lost anyway, so go for it.’
On the climb that we had singled out beforehand, as agreed, I lifted the pace. And Bugno attacked just as we had envisaged. After a little while Indurain got going and I watched what happened next with horror. Not only did Bugno fail to attack again, but he put up the white flag without even challenging the Spaniard. He simply slipped on to Indurain’s back wheel. I was devastated by the Italian’s conduct. The role of team leader was just too big for him. To make the tactical fiasco complete, Stanga ordered us to attack on the Galibier the following day. We both got away, Bugno and I. Was it a ‘royal escape’, where the big names go for glory? Not in the slightest. Pushing Bugno to his limits was a fruitless task. He kept complaining, saying we were going too hard; it was an amazing thing to watch this exceptional champion committing sporting suicide in front of me. I was worn out by all the stupidity and finished the Tour in rather low spirits.
I am ashamed to tell the story of what nearly happened to me on the final stage to the Champs-Elysées. I was demoralised, ground down by the three weeks and opted to sleep in my own bed rather than at the team’s hotel. But when I went to my car to go to the stage start at La Défense, it wouldn’t fire. The battery was flat. Panic set in. It was Sunday of course, so there was no way I could get a taxi. No one was answering the phone. I could see the next day’s headlines: ‘Fignon, the non-starter’. Miraculously I ended up locating Alain Gallopin who jumped into a car and got me to the start
in extremis
. It goes to show that experience is no guard at all against sheer stupidity. My nonchalance might have been refreshing and somehow joyful, but it was unforgivable. You don’t abandon ship before you drop anchor in harbour.
in extremis
. It goes to show that experience is no guard at all against sheer stupidity. My nonchalance might have been refreshing and somehow joyful, but it was unforgivable. You don’t abandon ship before you drop anchor in harbour.
CHAPTER 33
DOPING EVERYWHERE
How do you describe a trend? One that you can only detect by sniffing the air, by vaguely following a mere nothing at all as if you have put your finger up to sense the wind direction? I understood what was happening – but I didn’t want to see. I could see – but I refused to understand. Then it all became obvious. So obvious that it became part of my thinking almost on a daily basis. Drug taking? It had always gone on. Even I had seen it close-up on a few occasions. Drug taking was rife? I didn’t really understand what that meant in practice. New undetectable drugs? The craziest rumours would often be contradicted when the facts emerged and I was well placed to know that.
But there it was. Something completely out of the ordinary was going on and, incredible as it may seem, I had to work it out for myself. No one came to see me to explain: ‘This is what is going on at the moment.’ No one stuck their neck out and declared: ‘This time, it’s going to be very serious.’
As it happened my transfer to an Italian team speeded up the process of discovery for me. Part of the culture of Italian sport is the way they look after the health of athletes: it sometimes pushes the boundaries in unacceptable ways. I’m not necessarily talking about doping here, but the use of medicine in all kinds of situations. However, the 1990s would illustrate to the point of absurdity that the boundary between legality and illegality was a very porous one. For example, after my stage win at Mulhouse in the 1992 Tour de France I had great difficulty recovering and so, to avoid a disastrous backlash, the following day the doctors were determined to make me gobble up a heap of recovery products based on vitamins and minerals and so on. Some were clearly very good. Others were not safe.
When I had first gone to see them, they were completely flabbergasted by my lack of knowledge in this area and my refusal to contemplate this sort of medical backup. ‘But what do you do in France?’ they asked in astonishment. When I explained to them that I only took vitamin C because psychologically I needed to feel how my body reacted to training and racing, there was a massive silence. They didn’t understand. Or perhaps they didn’t believe me.
As far as the recuperation stuff went, I ended up letting the doctors have their way, but it was done on my terms. I wanted to be on the spot whenever the
soigneurs
were opening the packets. I wanted to check everything to make sure that it was really vitamins and not God knows what. Honestly, I can’t say I had boundless confidence. No. I had no confidence at all. Zero.
soigneurs
were opening the packets. I wanted to check everything to make sure that it was really vitamins and not God knows what. Honestly, I can’t say I had boundless confidence. No. I had no confidence at all. Zero.
The years when everything was transformed were 1991, 1992 and 1993. From then on, nothing was the same again. They were also my last years racing a bike. You could see me as a witness with unique access, but paradoxically I was at one remove from what was actually going on. It was the way I wanted it and it took prodigious stubbornness.
I was aware of the availability of EPO without actually knowing. There were vague rumours reaching my ears, but nothing more. Let’s be clear: when I was still at Castorama in 1991 I was able to work a few things out by mere deduction, or sometimes just intuition. For example, I talk today about EPO, but I only found out much later that this was the name of the ‘miracle’ drug which was spoken about in confidence. Growth hormone has to be added to the list.
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