We Were Young and Carefree (34 page)

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Authors: Laurent Fignon

BOOK: We Were Young and Carefree
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Is there much difference between Laurent Fignon the television analyst, and the former cyclist with passion coursing through his body? None, in my opinion. Passion still drives my actions as much as my emotions. It’s the brain fodder and beating heart of an analyst. You can’t have one without the other.
After working for a long spell at Eurosport, then at France Télévision, I can safely say that I love working in the studio as an analyst, but above all as a cycling fanatic. I still find pleasure in it, even if there have been some difficult times in the last ten years; even if, with the succession of drug scandals, a sort of disillusionment may have ground us all down a bit. I do remember races that seemed neither to have a beginning or an end because all boundaries of understanding had been abolished. Sometimes, you had to stay very patient.
I like explaining to the viewers what is going on in races, helping people to understand the action, explaining the tactics. Explaining events and saying what I feel about them is a rare pleasure, and definitely a privilege. But let’s be clear: I am an analyst, not a journalist. Unlike many others, I don’t attempt to go with the consensus. I say what I think at the moment the thought enters my head. I get the impression that the viewers like sincerity, even if sometimes what you say may turn out to be the opposite of what actually happens. Since I’ve begun analysing the Tour de France for France Télévision, I have to admit that I’ve toned down slightly what I say, in the sense that I have to take it all a bit more seriously than for Eurosport. You have to adapt a little to the public way of thinking, without ever concealing what you really are. I make an effort not to speak merely for the sake of it. I can wait ten minutes before I open my mouth, if the circumstances of the race call for it. I’m not worried about my ego.
That doesn’t stop me thinking, however, and saying if I have to, that cycling today is suffering from a sickness that affects sport in the broader sense. There is far more at stake than there was when I was racing, in the financial sense. The media has greater weight and greater power, and the sponsors are far more proactive. Everyone feeds off the others depending on what their interests are. To put it plainly, today, as soon as a rider farts on the Tour de France it seems as if he is radically reinventing his sport. That’s rubbish.
Cycling has been transformed into a defensive sport. Its
raison d’être
is attacking, but that has been overlooked. Of course you have to defend a position sometimes, for example on a major Tour, but how are you going to win a race apart from by attacking? That is the essence of cycling. That’s its spirit, and its soul. Today, the riders seem to hope that they may win if they wait for the other guy to crack: that is the mentality of the second-rate.
Who actually remembers the name of the riders who finished sixth and seventh in the last few Tours de France? No one is interested. For certain ‘decision-makers’ in today’s cycling, sponsors or media, finishing in that sort of position in the Tour is seen as more important than winning a major Classic. It’s a perversity of the current system. Finishing third or fourth in the Tour obviously does reflect a ‘sporting value’. But the rider who finishes fifth will do everything to demonstrate to his employer that he could have finished fourth: there we are referring to ‘market value’. Where is real cycling in all of that? It’s not my idea of the sport.
The first rider who embodied this way of conducting a career was Greg LeMond. In the latter part of it he only raced really seriously in two events a year: the Tour and the world championship. The rest counted for little. After his second win in the Tour in 1989 and his second world championship win a few weeks later, the American reaped a reward from this ‘model’ which was beyond his hopes. The following year the businessman Roger Zannier built the Z team around him. It was a squad created for PR. He paid the American 1.5 million francs a month. Cycling had not just entered a new era, it had found a whole new scale of values. Miguel Indurain, Jan Ullrich, Lance Armstrong. And here I should point out that I am not best-placed to ‘judge’ all these champions. I don’t know everything, but I’m not fooled by anything. I can feel, here and there, a certain respect and even admiration for some of their achievements. But they have frequently robbed the sport that I love of some of its essence. I am well placed to know this: they are the men who determine the very nature of the times in which they live.
For example, does Armstrong truly represent the new cycling? There are those who are adamant that this is the case. But he is not the only one. The only time that I met the American was in tragic circumstances, in 1996. He was sick with cancer, thin and bald, and had just announced at a press conference in Paris that he was taking a break from his cycling career. He had just undergone a brain operation. The doctors would not be drawn on the possible outcome. And get this: the evening after that press conference, before he was due to catch the next morning’s plane back to the US, he was on his own at his hotel in Roissy. Everyone had simply dropped him. My ex-wife Nathalie and I found out and invited him round for dinner. The evening is still an emotional and surprising memory. To tell the truth, I wondered if I was meeting him for the last time. He confessed his fears to us, but he was also clear how determined he was to fight it with all his strength.
What can you say about a man who overcomes cancer in this way? What can you say about a sportsman who comes back to the Tour seven times and keeps winning it, the toughest sports event of them all? From every point of view, words fail me.
There is one key rule which we should all follow when discussing cycling today: prudence. Apart from the doping issue which, as everyone knows, has unfortunately caused changes in the last fifteen years by altering the most basic physical values, it can be said that cycling has still progressed in every area. The roads are better, so too the kit, so is race preparation. So the standard of the average professional cyclist has risen markedly. The problem is that while all this has been going on, there hasn’t been much change in the races themselves. A race like Liège–Bastogne–Liège was a fearsome, highly selective race in my day, but is now just a race like any other. It’s ordinary, for one reason at least: the hills are spaced too far apart. It’s not suited to today’s cyclists. In the same way, is it right for Flèche Wallonne to come down to a sprint up the Mur de Huy? What that means is simple: the courses of the races are not suited to cycling today.
Here’s another example. I am radically in favour of a return to having three mountain stages in a row during the Tour de France. Believe me, I’m not a slave driver, rather the opposite. All the riders can get through the first mountain stage. The second is a bit tougher. The third, if it were held, would create a form of natural selection, because of cumulative fatigue. Once again we would see riders really cracking, more than we have in recent years. Today, the organisers always have a rest day after two mountain stages, allegedly so that the riders won’t be overworked, and so the temptation to take drugs will be lessened. That is a ridiculous notion: stages in the Tour have never been shorter and yet doping has never been more widespread. It’s grotesque. Everyone knows that during the rest day some riders will ‘restore their levels’. What’s more, I still believe that there are too many time trials in the major Tours, and especially in the Tour de France. They almost always decide the winner and even though in 1989 the final decision came down to the last time trial, no one will ever forget the battle that took place beforehand on all kinds of terrain. Times change and evolve and it’s necessary to adapt with them. Back in the time of Anquetil the time trials were over one hundred kilometres long. In my day they were only occasionally over eighty kilometres. Today they are between forty and fifty kilometres. Cut them again! To twenty-five kilometres if necessary. What’s the problem? Let’s have more varied courses, with no gimmicks. Let’s just dare to get back to racing and nothing else. Sport is about winning.
French cycling has had a tough few years. Initially, the problem was the fall out from the Festina drug scandal. Several generations of kids were turned off cycling, and the sport that profited mainly was football, crowned by the legends of France’ 98, of course. And then there were clumsy mistakes made by the governing bodies, in particular during the tenure of Daniel Baal at the head of the French Cycling Federation. Baal wanted to restructure French cycling to focus on major clubs that developed young riders. Big ‘centres’. That decision reduced the base of the pyramid to the part that corresponded to that idea, ignoring the fact that the clubs which are best at recruiting are the little provincial set-ups, in the villages and often supported by small local sponsors. Until then they had the chance to bring on champions of their own and were able to hang on to them for a few years. Then, thanks to regional and national squads, those at the base gradually worked their way up to the top, without the small clubs ever suffering. All this was wrecked, more or less. The young riders move on from the small clubs too quickly, without having the chance to be toughened up and to nourish the spinal column of the sport as they develop. The outcome is that the base does not radiate out as widely as before. By cutting off growth at the lowest level, the top will automatically end up in a state of drought.
That is one of the explanations – but not the only one – why since the 1990s we have not seen the two or three great French riders who could have been expected to come through at the top. We also have to bear in mind that a lot of the better French riders lived through the worst years of ‘total doping’. They all came through it, with a few miraculous exceptions: luckily there are always outsiders who do not go along with the system, or help to change it and make it evolve in their own way. From the point when France decided it should ‘wash whiter than white’, our riders have been completely left behind: that was the price that had to be paid. That is exactly what has happened since 1998. Are we now beginning to emerge from that? Maybe. The recent advancing in anti-doping measures show that as it happened, our French cyclists weren’t that bad after all. When the others cheat a bit less, the level of the French riders rises naturally: should we be surprised?
There remains just one major problem in that area. A lot of French cyclists have lost the winning habit, and they have been hardly helped in this by
directeurs sportifs
who have in some cases been fairly ineffective. Not all have been of Guimard’s quality. It’s hard to get back to a winning mindset. It was something that I was able to hang on to in spite of my dark years, because it was rooted in the deepest part of me.
Times change, even in doping. On that topic I should say without any hesitation that things have been getting better, at least in the last two or three years. There will always be a number of cheats, particularly because the core of the system, rather like the crisis-hit world economy, is completely perverted by money. It’s about money for its own sake. But the holes in the anti-doping net have got smaller. There is now a fight being waged against ‘no limits’ doping which was the rule in the 1990s and the early 2000s. That’s being done partly thanks to advances in drug-testing but above all by the inception of new rules of which the biological passport is the most complete and efficient form. By following all the physiological parameters of all the riders, the UCI can now check everything. It’s getting harder to cheat and that can only be a good thing.
For a little while now, it’s looked as if cycling is returning to more normal ways. We are again seeing exhausted cyclists. Their exploits are more coherent. And so is my passion for the sport. At a certain time, despair was gaining the upper hand, I have to admit. You would watch a race with enthusiasm on one day, and then your feelings would be dashed the next morning: what was the point? Before, when you saw a new pro, you could guess fairly quickly what his real potential was. With the doping years, all the old signposts were hidden.
Now, it feels as if the sport is regaining its classic side, and the foundations are a little cleaner. Let’s say there is a whiff of authenticity. Sniffing the wind, my eyes sparkle a little. Passion is a happier thing than pessimism.
I’ve never met anyone who has looked me in the eye and said: ‘I ride a bike thanks to you.’ But that inspiration must have happened because in 1983 when I won the Tour for the first time, there were thousands of small boys wearing the celebrated Renault sweatband. What has become of those kids?
Because your career sets the tone for your life, there are times when it says everything about your character. A career is a lengthy unveiling process, in which the great public has little idea about the possible consequences. Afterwards, our successes and failures are just the most obvious signs of what has happened.
Only the greatest of stories are graven in history. Only the great names stay in people’s minds, with the degree of their nobility stemming from the scale of their exploits. Unlike most of the other Giants of the Road, I never had a nickname that stuck. From the beginning to the end, whether people liked me or not, whether they were impressed by my exploits on the bike or not, whether or not they felt I was an exceptional champion, I remained Laurent Fignon. Just Laurent Fignon. I was myself and nothing else, neither a fantasy, nor a transposition of something else. I was just a man who did what he could to beat a path towards dignity and emancipation. I did my best to be a human being.
In the process of becoming myself, there was nothing that scared me.
In my outrageous way, and in my love of that way of being, I was just one among many.

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