The Black Jersey

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  Paradoxically, it was my laziness that turned me into a climber. My new mount allowed me to reset my alarm clock for five-thirty; eventually, I started to time my routes in order to prolong my lazing in bed. It ended up becoming an obsession. Every week, I’d try to shave one or two minutes from my trip to school. I lessened the weight in my backpack, I learned to take advantage of every curve, I counted how often I put on the brakes and decreased them to the absolute minimum. Some of my schoolmates made fun of the old torn boots I’d begun wearing to school, but I didn’t care: Their thick soles allowed me to better reach the pedals and thus reduce my trip by three minutes.

  One day a teacher noticed the force I applied to the brakes when I got to school, followed immediately by a pause to check the time and record it in my notebook. She asked what I was doing and read my annotations with curiosity. A week later she told me about a race for amateur cyclists; she was one of the organizers. At first, I thought the idea was ridiculous. My torn boots and my crude bike didn’t fit with the images I had of Colombian cycling idols wearing colorful uniforms and riding aerodynamic machines. But there was no way to say no. Half the class, at least the half that had already turned thirteen, was in love with Miss Carmen. Her tireless enthusiasm, her warm smile, her green eyes, and, more than anything, the way her skirt moved when she walked made her the object of our wet dreams.

  Even though all the other racers wore better shoes than me, I was comforted to see there were a few bikes like mine. I was determined to impress my teacher. I shot out quickly from the starting line, surprised by how easily I left everyone behind. I didn’t even do anything different from what I was used to doing on the way to school. Soon I understood what had happened. The others were pacing themselves to get through the thirty-two kilometers that separated them from the finish line; I was drained by the tenth. Soon, the first racers began to pass me. When we were five kilometers from the finish line, I was in last place. It was my first experience with the torment of racing. My legs were in shreds and I could feel each pedal from my belly on down; I thought my guts were unraveling. It was also my first experience with the enemy that every cyclist carries inside, the one who begs him to put a stop to the torture. It kept telling me I’d done enough, that I was the youngest in the race, that it was better to quit than to come in last. But I imagined Carmen’s disappointment and decided not to give up, and not to come in last either. I focused on the back of the racer thirty meters in front of me and put everything I had into each downstroke. I passed him and looked for the next racer’s back. Soon I forgot my exhaustion. When I got to the finish line, I threw up and stayed doubled over for a long time because of the pain stabbing my side, but I didn’t move away: I wanted to count the racers who came in after me. There were ten. Before I left, Carmen hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  After that day, I dedicated my afternoons to biking around the hills surrounding our apartment. I designed longer courses; I read everything Carmen gave me about nutrition and racing techniques. My legs grew and I retired the boots. Although it would be a long time before I won anything, it was enough for me to see Carmen’s enthusiasm and to realize that, each time I stood at the finish line, there were more and more racers who came in after me.

  The athlete I am today was forged in those long solo training sessions. Strategy came later, but it was there I developed the essence of a professional cyclist: my ability to sustain pain, to hit the limits and still go on. I would kill myself with impossible goals, convinced my suffering brought me closer to Carmen and made me worthy of her attention and affection.

  When she left two years later, promoted to a private school in Bogotá, it shook my tiny universe and filled me with despair. After a few tormented weeks, I became convinced I could get her back with my bike: My fame as a racer would reach the capital city and bring us together. I doubled down on my masochistic training sessions. Pain became my best friend.

  It was during that time I developed another habit for which I became well-known. Measuring, timing, counting, and registering everything.

  Years later, my colleagues, including Steve, would laugh at me because of my obsession with numbers, and more than one of them would call me the calculator, wanting to get under my skin. And yet, sooner or later, every one of them would ask me how many goddamn kilometers it was until the finish line or the stats of a racer who had just broken away from the peloton. I never minded being their Wikipedia in places where nobody could use their cell.

  It was also in the mountains of Medellín that I realized others didn’t have the same strange relationship I do to my own perspiration. It’s shitty luck to be allergic to the sweat your body produces when you earn a living making your body sweat. The weather where I come from had already given me all sorts of rashes, and I’d had to turn to powders and balms in search of relief. It’s not that I hadn’t realized it until the moment I climbed on a bike, but until then it had only been an annoyance, mostly on excessively hot days. Now the burns and chafing had become a flesh-colored tattoo on parts of my body that an adolescent shouldn’t be embarrassed about, or at least not for those reasons.

  Sweating and counting, I became a familiar figure at the weekend races around where I lived. At some point, I stopped counting the racers who came in after me and started counting those who got to the finish line before me.

  Finally, I began to place and to climb the podiums. Even though I competed against adults, I won a few medals; these prizes and tips from the bettors kept me away from the voracious violence in Colombia during those years. Still, it wasn’t a happy time: My bicycle weighed more than forty pounds, and the state of my tires led to inopportune blowouts that made me abandon about half the races I entered. I’ve never felt such impotent rage as when, standing on the side of the road with tears in my eyes, I watched the racers I’d left behind minutes before pass me by.

  Drug money, from which I’d been running away, changed everything. One of the guys from the neighborhood started betting on my races. He must’ve been sixteen or seventeen years old, nothing more than a lowly foot soldier in the ranks of organized crime, but the money he flashed around seemed like a fortune to me. Once, when I came in third, he congratulated me with a lot of fanfare, celebrating as if I’d won. He must’ve been high because, in his euphoria, he grabbed my bike and threw it off the small cliff where we were standing. Before I had a chance to launch myself after it, he dragged me to a bike shop and bought me the best bike we could find. For months, I lived with the fear that he would want me to pay back the favor at any moment, but luckily he stuck to just betting on me. I want to think he recovered his investment grandly because, from that moment on, I began to win more and more races.

  Shortly after I turned seventeen, I heard Carmen had come back to Medellín as the principal of my old school. My first impulse was to go see her and show her the racer I had become. But I contained myself. I realized I had nothing but medals from amateur races. I decided not to see her until I’d won a pro race. I managed to sign up for the Vuelta la Cordillera, which would take place in three months. It was a fierce competition in which fledgling professionals and veterans in their twilight years frequently participated. I trained obsessively until I reached the kinds of numbers that convinced me I had a real shot at winning.

  Two weeks before the race I got a call from a former schoolmate telling me Carmen had been killed in cross fire between rival gangs. I kept my distance at the funeral and cried over the end of my adolescence. I never again got on the bike my narco friend had given me. And it would be a while before I got on any other bike at all.

  When I turned eighteen, my mother accepted a marriage proposal from a doctor with a good heart and galloping halitosis. It was more an act of surrender on her part than anything to do with falling in love; in any case, I had no say. Two weeks later, I left her a note in the kitchen. Three days after that, I was on the other side of the ocean, knocking on my fa
ther’s door without prior warning. He didn’t seem particularly surprised; he offered me some lentils and set me up in what had been my room during my summer visits.

  During the next few months I did what I could to earn a place by his side. If he asked me to cut wood, I’d chop down the forest until I tore my hands to shreds. I learned to make his favorite stew and to drive his ancient Ford so I could relieve him of weekly grocery shopping in town. After the first snows, I taught myself to ski with the same intensity I’d previously dedicated to pedaling my bike. My father respected winter sports and considered it foolish to wear yourself out on a bike when a motorcycle would get you to the same place with much greater efficiency. Or at least that’s what he said when I tried to tell him about my modest cycling exploits.

  It was by dint of many falls and bruises that, by Christmas, my skiing had ceased to be an embarrassment. I had just decided to work toward becoming a winter sports instructor when my father told me he’d enlisted me in the army, and had even managed to get me assigned to a regiment led by an old friend of his at the foot of the Pyrenees, close to Perpignan. This was possible because, eighteen years earlier, my father had demanded I be born on French soil, even if to do so my mother had to fly eight months pregnant with a medical certificate forged by the embassy doctor.

  I marched off to the barracks convinced I was headed to a life as a galley slave, digging trenches and going on long expeditions in the Sahara. And it might have been that way but for an unexpected turn of events that put me back on a bike. My father’s colleague died suddenly a few days after my arrival. He was replaced by Colonel Bruno Lombard, an odd man much more interested in athletic competitions between regiments than in army life or military theory. When he found out about my youthful adventures racing in the Colombian mountains, he made me a part of his beloved army cycling team.

  “Take care of it as if it was yours,” he told me ten days after his arrival, showing me a battered, scraped-up racing bike. I don’t know what Lombard did to get the team’s twelve bikes. They looked like something thrown out by a professional team from an inferior league, but they were definitely racing bikes, if a decade old.

  The bike was technically property of the French state, but I felt as if I’d been gifted a Ferrari. For the next couple of weeks, I did everything in my power to not get off that thing. Even at the risk of neglecting my military duties and ending up with saddle sores.

  Some official must have complained about my lack of diligence, because Lombard made a radical decision; it’s the reason why today, I’ve found myself playing detective on the Tour de France. He assigned me to the regiment’s small military police unit, directly under his command. It freed me from almost all the boring routines assigned to my troop, and put me in the hands of the unit’s director, who also happened to be the coach of the cycling squad.

  The coach was an old grouch, tough and uncompromising. I suppose it was his personality that kept him from working with professional teams, because he had more than enough talent and knowledge of the sport. He sensed my predisposition for the mountains and, in the following months, pushed my body to its limits racing the imposing peaks all around us.

  In the next four years, our regiment won absolutely everything. Not only the races against teams from other French government institutions, but also all of the regional tournaments Lombard could justify taking us to.

  His “boys” were basically me and twenty conscripts who rotated in and out over the years, more enthused about the breaks from military work than any talent we might have had for cycling. And Julián. Julián was a good racer and could have become a professional in time as part of a modest team, except that his past in the Marseille gangs reclaimed him when he finished his military service. But he had good instincts for racing and a savage capacity for enduring pain and maxing out on a hill. And that first taste of collaboration and competition was enough. It was all I needed to go up on the podium so many times that it ceased being fun for any of us, except Lombard. At twenty-two I was well-known in the regional press, which gave me the nickname Hannibal because I had conquered the Pyrenees and the Alps, though I didn’t find out about that until later. Initially, I didn’t understand the nickname until I was told about the Punic general who’d brought his army through the mountains on elephants to attack Ancient Rome. In time, I became fond of it, although I didn’t like that my speed on the bike was being compared to Hannibal’s elephantine march. I decided to tattoo a small dragon on my neck, which was our regiment’s symbol, hoping it would squash any reference to those damn elephants. But Lombard loved the nickname and endorsed Hannibal as if it were the consecration of a legend.

  At the end of my four years in the army, the colonel let me go, sad yet proud of his creation, but not before making sure I had a place with Ventoux, the pro team where I met Steve.

  I don’t know exactly when I decided to devote myself to a life of cycling. Perhaps it was on hearing the phrase my father used when I returned to his refuge in the Alps after my military service.

  “You weren’t even good enough for the barracks,” he said when I knocked on his door once more. He probably thought I’d become a high-ranking officer, like him. His words ended up helping me decide. In that moment, I told myself someday I’d enter Paris wrapped in the yellow jersey worn by the Tour de France champion.

  Ten years later, the press still referred to me as Hannibal even though I hadn’t managed to win a single stage in the Pyrenees, never mind any of the big races.

  Today

  The Tour, Stages 1–6

  “And let’s not even talk about sex,” said Robert Giraud, our directeur sportif. We were on the team bus, making our way to Utrecht, in the Netherlands, where we would set off on the first stage of the Tour de France. It was a rhetorical recommendation. None of us would risk a race for which we’d been preparing for months just for a night of revelry. Making it to Paris was essentially about knowing how to manage fatigue for three weeks. When you’re dropping eight thousand calories a day, sex is the last thing you need.

  The only one who didn’t seem to understand this was Stevlana. Yes, Stevlana. Wives and girlfriends were not welcome on the Tour. And none was less welcome than Steve’s partner, a Russian supermodel almost as famous as he was. She had decided to make a stop in Holland on her way to London to surprise her man and wish him good luck, much to his consternation.

  Earlier that same morning, I had gotten a call from Steve on my cell. He didn’t respond to my greeting and instead let the phone pick up Stevlana’s voice. I understood what he was getting at and went to rescue him. I knocked on his door and, in a loud voice, told him we’d been chosen for an anti-doping test that would take place in my room. The door swung open, and I faked surprise to find Stevlana there.

  “But I just got here, Stivy,” she protested. “Marc, don’t do this to me.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you, Stivy,” Steve said; his tone was so sad I almost believed him.

  Stivy is what they called each other, which the other racers loved to make fun of. Although I think a lot of them did it to try to hide the envy her spectacular breasts induced.

  Generally speaking, Stevlana believed everything revolved around her. That included the anti-doping test, a nuisance designed exclusively to ruin a morning with her lover. While Steve finished dressing, his girlfriend tried to kill the messenger with a couple of poisonous looks.

  She’d never liked me. And she liked my girlfriend, Fiona, even less. Fiona was a mechanic and inspector with the International Cycling Union (UCI), the governing body that oversees international competitive cycling events. The few times the four of us had dinner together it had been funereal. The two women couldn’t be more different, which Stevlana made sure to underscore for Steve. In the guise of fashion advice, she’d make fun of Fiona’s brusque manners, her messy hair, her thighs, as thick and hard as if she regularly ran the
100 meters, and her hands, which were always calloused and oil-stained.

  The way Fiona had become the director of technical inspectors for UCI was a curious story. For thirty years, her father, an Irish man with a long cycling lineage, had been the head mechanic for the best teams on the professional circuit. He had a legendary reputation in which the racers blindly believed. When her mother died, Fiona was only ten, and her father made her an “assistant” on the team. Friends and strangers got used to the sight of the little red-haired girl handling tools at her father’s side, like a nurse assisting a surgeon. In time, she became an extension of the bike: Her ears and hands were capable of calibrating a perfect rotation of the chain or hearing the almost imperceptible grazing that could mean the loss of a thousandth of a second per kilometer. When the old man decided to retire at seventy, his mythic status on the circuit had spread from father to daughter. By then the little red-haired girl had become an explosive beauty, with strong arms and a back broader than most of the lanky cyclists’. An Amazonian bike whisperer, desired and feared by colleagues and athletes. This was especially true now that she was in charge of the legion of UCI inspectors who ensured compliance of a complex and sometimes capricious framework of technical regulations.