We Were Young and Carefree

by Laurent Fignon

  It seems that I was an active child, very active; dynamic, it could be said. ‘As soon as you could stand you didn’t just walk, you ran, my parents have always said to me, time and again. Even today I still move all the time; I start doing this or that, I wave my arms about. I’m incapable of keeping fixed in one place, on a sofa or an armchair. As a kid, the mere idea of doing nothing left me in hysterics. I was afraid of inactivity, afraid of the emptiness. The more energy I used up, the less tired I was. I manage to relax only when I’m busy. My teachers didn’t know how to deal with me: they just shouted at me all the time. Let’s get one thing clear: it wasn’t that I didn’t like school, quite the opposite. I’ve always liked going to school and at one point in my teenage years I was even enthusiastic about it.

  I don’t remember my first three years in Paris, in rue Davy in the 13th arrondissement, but in 1963 my parents moved to Tournan-en-Brie in the Seine-et-Marne. We lived thirty-five kilometres east of the capital in the heart of what is now known as la grande banlieue – the ’burbs. But you have to think back to the 1960s: the Seine-et-Marne was the countryside. The real thing.

  My parents rented an apartment in a four-storey block. We lived on the third floor, with no lift. All I had to do was go down the stairs to be in the middle of the wilds. A hundred metres away, the woods and the fields were beckoning. My mates and I built huts, knocked them down and built them up again. The days seemed to last for ever. When dinner time came, my mother had only to shout through the window. Most of the time she had to be patient; I had better things to do. I could never be found. I got to know every last metre of the forest. I loved to be outside; I wanted adventures and independence.

  There was no one in the family who did any sport. My father did have a racing bike that he had used for riding about when he was young. So sport was my personal thing; mine and no one else’s. At school I tried everything: football, handball, athletics, volleyball, and so on. I did whatever I could without holding back. I was the perfect pupil for the PE teachers.

  But I only did sport on Thursdays, as part of the school timetable. Every weekend I had to get through a real trauma: family meals. They took place on Sundays in particular, at my uncles’, my aunts’ and also at my grandmother’s in Paris, in her dark three-room flat where I couldn’t move without walloping the furniture. It was simply horrendous and it’s left its mark; I’m still not all that keen on family things. My brother who is three years younger than me is completely the opposite.

  As a ‘housewife’ my mother didn’t have a driving licence which meant we weren’t as self-sufficient as we might have been. As for my father, he was a foreman in a metalworks. From working-class stock, he was now earning a decent living and was the embodiment of all the values that might be expected in a family of modest means: a strong work ethic, a sense of self-denial, and a bit of a hard attitude towards himself and other people. Simple values that didn’t sanctify anything but ensured the key things you need to hand down to children, even if his methods were a bit clumsy.

  He would leave for work early, about six, and never came home before eight in the evening. Like a lot of fathers, he wasn’t about much. But when he was there, he was a disciplinarian. His hand fell flat, and so did many of my pranks. I got a lot of slaps, and pretty hard ones at that. My only goal was to be myself at every instant, without any limits. Wild and hyperactive, I wanted to discover how far I could go. I had such a penchant for playing with fire you could say I was a pyromaniac. But it took only the slightest bit of stupidity for my father to lose his temper. One day he decided to punish me for a week and whacked my backside the minute he got in every evening. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t make a sound. When he stopped, I looked him in the eye and said: ‘Is that it?’ Then I pulled my breeches up in silence. No tears. Not a drop of sweat on my face. I knew how to hurt.

  The way someone looks is often merely a facade, but your image sticks even if it is a long way from reality. I’ve always worn spectacles. That’s how I’ve always looked. I’ve always stuck out from the crowd. In everyone’s minds my face never changes and my eyes are always surrounded by the metal rings. You can’t miss them. Everyone knows that for a cyclist this is quite a big thing. You’d hear the same thing from all the little group who had no choice but to wear glasses at a time when contact lenses did not exist: it was a handicap.

  From the age of six, my glasses have been part of me, my physical make-up, the first impression everyone gets when they set eyes on me. As a kid, I would lose them all the time, especially in the woods around where we lived. How many times did I see my father set off with a torch late in the evening in search of my specs, busting a gut to get them back? Amazingly, he always came across them somewhere.

  I played football a lot with a little group of friends: it was actually the only sport I was mad about. The thing was that some of them – and this was fate taking a hand – also rode bikes, guys like Rosario Scolaro, Olivier Audebert, the Olivier brothers, Bernard Chancrin, Stéphane Calbou. I don’t really remember how it happened, but they made me want to have a go. I could see how a bloke like Rosario came into his own on two wheels.

  It was 1975 and I was fifteen: until then I’d never dreamed of getting on a bike in anger. I can’t tell you why that was. But down in the cellar the old ‘gate’ that belonged to my father, a ‘Vigneron’, was waiting just for me. He meticulously restored it to working order. And I was lucky: it was a superlight bike with thin tubing and elegantly curved forks. I loved this slightly old-fashioned machine, which was pretty quick and gave me a certain status. Some guys laughed at me, and I have to confess: there were still two bottle cages on the handlebars like they had in the 1940s. It was an antique, but I didn’t care about the sneers. Nothing fazed me.

  The first time I went out with the lads, my eyes were opened. It wasn’t just that I loved it straight away but from the word go – to my great surprise and the amazement of everyone else – I was able to keep up with the others. I wasn’t stylish, I was a bit clumsy, but when you needed to push on the pedals I wasn’t the first guy to suffer. One day, they decided to test me: no one could leave me behind. In the little sprints we organised among ourselves I could compete more and more often, sometimes zipping past for the win.

  ‘Why don’t you get a racing licence?’ Rosario asked after a little while. He hung out in the next village, Gretz, and was already wearing the green and white jersey of the local club: La Pédale of Combs-la-Ville. On the day I got my licence, in 1976, the club president, Dumahut, told me: ‘This is a tough sport, very tough. You are sixteen, which is already old, and other guys have begun a long time before you. If you want to do cycling, there can be no more messing around. Are you sure you want to do it?’ He wanted to make an impression. It was as if he wanted to put me off. Not a chance. Other guys might have taken a step back on hearing what he had to say, but it just made me even keener than before. So down I went to Combs-la-Ville with Rosario and a trainer, Monsieur Lhomme, who has left an indelible mark on my memory. Would my love of cycling have grown without him?

  Pretty soon, it was obvious that I wanted to race. My parents were against it. It would have been too big a sacrifice for them to give up their family Sunday lunches, particularly for something as pointless as bike racing. They were obsessed with one thing: my schoolwork. So, behind their backs, I arranged lifts to races with my mates’ parents. Faced with a fait accompli, my parents couldn’t stop me. Back then, they had no idea how the passion was going to take up all my time and energy and come over time to dominate every thought in my mind. On the other hand, they did know that when I was determined to do something, it wasn’t easy to talk me out of it.

  My first official race could only be called a masterpiece. It was at Vigneux-sur-Seine, the Grand Prix de la Tapisserie Mathieu over fifty kilometetres, a little lap to repeat countless times. I was setting off to take on a world of which I knew nothing, with only my physical strength to rely on. Until then, all I had experienced was a few fr
ivolous training sessions, just five or six of us, each Thursday. Every morning, I had to get the bus at seven to go to secondary school at Lagny, and as my parents didn’t want me to ride after dark I could only get on my bike once a week. We played games on the bike: little races, sprints, attacks, counter-attacks. There was an anarchic side to it which attracted me.

  So on the day of the race at Vigneux, along with about sixty other under-16s, I realised pretty soon that in the race there was no structure either. Without any rhyme or reason it got quicker, then it slowed up, I had no idea why but it suited a mad dog like me fine. Towards the end of the race I ended up in the break with Scolaro, Audebert, my mates, and a couple of other lads. Just as we did in training, with the same lack of thought, I attacked, hard, just to see what happened, for a laugh. Rather surprisingly, I ended up alone in the lead. I looked back in amazement. Once. Twice. Then I decided to keep going without thinking any more. No one got near me. And when I crossed the finishing line first, 45sec ahead of Audebert, I didn’t even lift my arms. I thought I had done something wrong and the coach was going to bawl me out. When he came over to say well done, I asked: ‘Was it OK for me to win?’ He just smiled.

  One thing was clear: I had won because I was playing. Enjoying myself on my bike is what has always mattered. Racing is serious to a certain extent, but deep down inside I’ve always wanted to have fun at it. I love attacking, tactics. Otherwise, I get bored quickly. What I had liked the most that day at Vigneux was simply competing. The chance that I might win. Without that to aim for, I’m never as interested and don’t get as involved. As I see it, a beautiful race is one where there is constant attacking.

  After my surprise win, I couldn’t help finding my way to the front. Every time we trained, every time we raced (I won another three, nothing to shout about) I only felt good at the head of the peloton. I couldn’t manage to hang about at the back. It made no sense. And of course, after that first taste of victory my parents decided to pay me some attention and there were no more family Sunday lunches for them. They were quickly drawn into the cycling world: meeting the other parents, the smell of embrocation on chilly mornings as early risers looked on with haggard faces, the smell of hot coffee, cars with cycling kit strewn everywhere in a chaotic mess; the whole Bohemian side of car parks frequented by young bike riders. There was nothing to get big-headed about. This was the time when you got up at five to bung down a steak accompanied by kilos of pasta three hours before you raced: nutrition was in the stone age.

  It was a time of teenage triumphs and teenage mistakes. For a few months in 1977, my first year as a junior, I took myself for an expert bike mechanic. I made a stupid bet with Scolaro: the winner was the one with the cleanest, loveliest, shiningest bike. So every Saturday I would take my bike apart from top to bottom, item by item, before putting it back together. The only trouble was I was no mechanic and I never have been. As a result, in each of my next ten or eleven races I broke something, every time. The chain, a brake or gear cable, a pedal, a spoke . . . Without realising it, I was actually a danger to myself. To make me stop, my father had to lose his temper and ban any bike repairs. He was right. I won the next race without a single problem. My only win of the year.

  I must admit that back then I had no idea how to ride a bike. I often fell off. I raced any old how. I never saw anything coming and I couldn’t predict how a race would turn out. I was serving my apprenticeship, without understanding that this was to be my profession. I loved it. Sometimes when I was physically at my best I could sense moments of utter ecstasy, those rare fleeting times when you are in total harmony with yourself and the elements around you: nature, the noise of the wind, the smells. Let’s not get carried away. But I have to confess: I was happy.

  You aren’t serious at seventeen. But every time I paid a little attention I would win easily. I can’t explain why it was so easy, but that’s how it was.

  In 1978 I have a clear memory of the Ile-de-France team time trial championship over forty-two kilometres. For almost the entire race, at least twenty-five kilometres, no one was capable of coming alongside me to do a pull at the front. I was flying. But that day, in contrast to what you might believe, I had absolutely no sense that this might be my future. I had no notion that cycling might hold any prospects in the long term, but youthful passion is always the driving force for most cyclists. Cycling would turn my heart inside out and my competitive instinct would always be the winner.

  I was completely transformed. Something allowed my soul and my guts to function as one. Out training one day I had a marvellous and completely disconcerting feeling. Looking at the other guys around me, I thought: ‘I’m better than they are.’ I’ve no idea why. But it was there, inside me. I had no doubts. And that conviction fuelled my urge to progress as quickly as I possibly could.

  In 1978 I started about forty races and won eighteen. I raised my arms to the sky in one victory salute after another and took pleasure in what fate was providing. Everything worked. I won in sprint finishes, on my own, on the flat, in the hills. However the race panned out, I attacked, and I won. One day, a trainer muttered: ‘You have a gift.’ I’d just won five races in a row.

  But fortunately, I had no dreams of greater glory. I never said I wanted to ‘have a career’ or ‘turn pro’ or anything else. I was protected by my lust for life.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  HAPPY SCHOOLDAYS

  Clever men rarely make good sportsmen; does that mean that sportsmen are stupid?

  Right up to the end of my adolescence being shy was my Achilles heel. It took a mere nothing to make me blush. I withdrew into my shell. For a long time I struggled to contain my feelings but over time sport and celebrity cured me and instilled a simple equation in my mind: to defeat shyness you have to take risks. And isn’t taking risks an essential quality for a sportsman who wants to achieve great things?

  I knew nothing about cycling history. My father wasn’t very interested in sport and he didn’t read newspapers. At home, the television was just another bit of furniture as I saw it; I hardly ever watched it and it would never have occurred to me to turn it on if I could go outside. And let’s not forget, in that prehistoric era there were only two channels.

  Even the Tour de France barely aroused my attention, let alone any dreams. I have only two boyhood memories of La Grande Boucle. The first is from 15 July 1969. I was in the car with my parents, the radio was crackling in the dashboard and a commentator whose name I didn’t know was reporting live on Eddy Merckx’s first great exploit, the solo stage win through the Pyrenees between Luchon and Mourenx. The guy was yelling into the microphone, shouting about a ‘phenomenal Belgian’, and the sound of his voice made a huge impression, even if as a small boy aged only nine I wondered how anyone could be so worked up about a sporting achievement which wouldn’t actually change the world. I was young and didn’t understand how over the top people can be. Six days later Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon – which was a whole different level of achievement.

  My second memory takes me back to the start of the 1970s, but I’d struggle to say the exact date. We were in the Vendée and the Tour was going through. It’s painful to confess it today, but I don’t remember any of the riders. I’m almost ashamed to think it now.

  It was not until I took out a racing licence and won my first races as a schoolboy that I began to read the cycling press. But it got under my skin at once. I was a self-contained boy, already a great reader; it was my other way of escaping. I’ve always read a lot and that love has never left me. I became completely obsessed, in record time. I ended up devouring everything that I caught sight of; it all fascinated me. L’Equipe every morning, Miroir du Cyclisme, Vélo magazine, all the glossies. I didn’t just make up for lost time, in a few months I was transformed into a (small-time) specialist in the sport. Bit by bit the great cycling jigsaw puzzle pieced itself together in my mind and I came to understand that this sport was one of the oldest, one of the mos
t coveted, one of the most respected and one of the most popular. I learned that the Tour de France was related to the history of France itself in the twentieth century. The stories of the nation and its bike race were interwoven. Sport could be rather more than just a result published in L’Equipe.

  Meanwhile, I had wended my way through school without ever being very serious. I ended up in the D stream. I hardly learned a thing. With all the over the top demands cycling made, the sport had turned my mind upside down. But at the same time, I wasn’t at all thoughtful about cycling. At the age of eighteen turning professional wasn’t an objective and I didn’t even think about it. I trained, I raced, I won races, I liked it and that was all. I was completely detached from any notion of a future in that area. That was probably just as well.

  So I took my baccalauréat with the assumption that I was going to fail. In the final weeks I revised without really doing any revision and then I had the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Every topic was something that I knew about. In geography – the economy of Japan. I knew it to my fingertips and there was good reason, we’d done it in a mock exam. In physics, it was electricity: the only subject I had covered.

  As for Spanish, I had to take the oral exam last. The problem was that in the evening I had a race for the Saint Jean club. I overcame my shyness and went to see the examiners to explain how ‘dreadful’ it would be for my club if I couldn’t go to a race I had trained hard for, that personally it would be a ‘nasty setback’ for my burgeoning career and that it would cause me to be ‘dropped’ by the trainers. The teacher bought all my arguments and decided to put me through first. There was just one problem: I had no knowledge of the set text. Panic stations. But seeing how upset I was, the teacher was charitable and questioned me about Spanish and French cycling. I escaped, and got a pass in that one too.