Hinault, Raas and the others ended up looking on – with a certain degree of amusement – as the duel was decided. It wasn’t much of a match. There were a few attacks in the final kilometres but I kept a grip on things pretty easily. I wanted to remain in charge. It was my decision and I had to go through with it. I was the strongest rider there and, I learned later, my opponent wasn’t very popular or well respected. So when I wanted to, I rode him off my wheel. Quite easily. I kept him chasing a hundred metres behind, so I could watch him getting wound up. I know it had a humiliating side, but I was having fun, playing, really enjoying it. I didn’t realise it, but I had actually taken a huge risk by going against a decision that Hinault had taken. In a flash, that criterium almost became a real race, and it was won by the strongest rider, which was rare for those events.
The positive side of this little episode was that, obviously, it did the rounds of the peloton, throughout all the teams, and no doubt it was embellished. My reputation was established, for good. Everyone knew what they had to deal with. I wasn’t merely a rider who wouldn’t be messed about, I had the legs to retaliate if need be. I wanted people to remember my name, and I’d managed it, even more than I had hoped. In cycling the ‘rules’ which were established over time were the product of relationships based on physical strength, which were always in force. It was rare for a new order to overturn the old, but it happened. Even a team leader had to demonstrate to his teammates how and why he was worthy of leadership. Later on in my career I needed pride and physical superiority to hold off insolent youngsters. On training camps in the mountains, sometimes I had to blast my teammates away, simply to prove that I was in my proper place and they were in theirs. It was part of everyone’s make-up: they wanted to mark out their territory.
Within every champion there is a streak of spite, brutality, violence, the urge to dominate. The weaker elements, on the other hand, make the mistake of being too passive. But in cycling everyone, great and small, endures frequent torture, physical and psychological. Sometimes it’s painfully unfair.
In Blois–Chaville, the first Classic that I took part in, I was to have the toughest possible experience of that. Hinault had let it be known that he wasn’t at all interested in winning in this latter part of the season. Guimard’s assistant, Bernard Quilfen asked: ‘Who wants to get up there?’ I replied at once ‘Me! I’ll try to win.’ Everyone smiled, but Julot and I knew the roads like the backs of our hands. It was our home turf. We had no fear of the echelons which formed on those roads when the wind blew, as it often did. So when we got to Étampes, on top of a hill exposed to the autumn breeze, the whole Raleigh team took up a diagonal line across the road: an unforgettable fan-formation echelon. We fought for position, came round each other, then suddenly the whole group concertinaed. So suddenly that Jan Raas himself was taken by surprise, lost his balance and collided with my backside. My reflexes kicked in: I pushed him away. So he fell down. I didn’t. I was the very last rider to get in the front group, by the skin of my teeth.
There were twelve of us in the hunt for the win. Thirty kilometres from the finish, in the heart of the Chevreuse valley, I attacked, hard. No one took my wheel and I carved out a lead of forty-five seconds. Fifteen kilometres from the finish I was going to turn into a tailwind: the race was almost won. I stood on the pedals to lift the pace and fell heavily on the ground, without any idea of what was happening. The impact was huge. I’d broken the axle of my bottom bracket. The race was lost. I was broken-hearted: I’d already fallen off in the Tour de l’Avenir and Paris–Brussels. The explanation was a technical one: our titanium axles had turned out to be defective a few weeks earlier and the mechanics had changed them all. They had not done mine because I’d taken my bike with me on holiday. Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke of Belgium was the winner that day, but everyone had seen what I was capable of. No one looked at me in the same way after that.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
PIG HEADED
‘All you have to do is train, mate, you’ll find it a lot easier.’
I can still hear myself saying these words with an impudence that cannot be excused in any way. The words were directed at Bernard Hinault. Yes, I did say Bernard Hinault, no less.
We were in Italy at the start of the 1983 season and our Breton was really struggling: yet again his winter training had clearly left a bit to be desired. So one evening at the dinner table after he had harangued us for going too hard during a team time trial, I couldn’t resist the urge to say what I thought. Out came this slightly aggressive sentence. It came out of my mouth without any forethought. My choice of words caused a collective shiver to go around the dinner table. And something amazing happened. I was expecting a violent reaction from the four-times winner of the Tour de France, but instead he simply looked at his plate.
Guimard told me a long time after this episode occurred that from that moment he was convinced that there would be trouble between me and Hinault. There never was. Fate would soon send the Badger and me down different paths, but neither of us knew that was coming yet. Today, it’s hard to put into words quite how foolhardy I was that evening. At Renault, no one dared to say anything to Hinault. He was the most powerful cyclist in the world. Falling out with him was pure sporting suicide. But I didn’t have any hidden motives. I didn’t say to myself before I spoke: what is the risk? Or ‘I’ll show him who I am, just a little bit.’ Not at all. I had simply said what I thought at the moment that I thought it. More to the point, I was telling the truth, as I would have done with Pascal Jules. There were plenty of things that needed saying to Julot, and there was never any holding back. Whether or not I was talking to Hinault, I had spoken those words to a comrade, nothing more, nothing less. I had not targeted Hinault personally, rather the opposite.
Even so, several of the guys in the team told me later that something changed after this little event. It was clearly a turning point even though I hadn’t noticed. A moment that indirectly symbolised the tension that could be felt between Guimard and Hinault. It was as if their disagreement had got under my skin and led me to lose my inhibitions, as if it had befallen to me to state in front of everyone – and before anyone else did – that Hinault was no longer the untouchable god-like figure in the team.
It was true: Guimard and Hinault had really fallen out. I had put these issues to the back of my mind because I wanted to pay attention to my bike riding, my personal fitness. But it was clear that something worrying was brewing behind the scenes between the two towering figures of world cycling. Up until this little incident when he kept quiet, the Badger had been very irritable, more so than the year before. Guimard had always bossed him around but Hinault always bounced back in the same way. He gained strength from Guimard’s provocations. They were a source of motivation. When he was pricked, his pride always reacted and usually someone got hurt. But times were changing: on the one hand, perhaps Hinault was getting fed-up with Guimard’s ways and was pondering a change of scene; on the other, Guimard might well have decided that Hinault wasn’t going to regain the thirst he had had at twenty and perhaps it was time to think of the future.
The almost tangible disagreement between them calmed down during the 1983 Tour of Spain, where Hinault was the favourite. His knee problems had not begun yet, but my relationship with him took an unexpected turn. During the fourth stage, while I had remained strictly in a protective role thus far, I saw the Spaniard Antonio Coll making a break. What was I to do? I jumped on his wheel, but I took with me Marino Lejarreta, one of our main rivals for the overall win. The problem was that the peloton never caught up with us and Hinault lost seventeen seconds to Lejarreta. He was not happy, not happy at all. But I had won the stage.
As a devoted teammate I hadn’t contributed in any way to the success of the escape; on the contrary, I had lit the touchpaper only at the end to make sure I won the stage. How could I be at fault? I didn’t answer any of the reproachful comments which shows I didn’t feel good about it, even
if today Hinault would testify that he had few teammates who were as selfless as I was. But I still wonder why he reacted that way. When your name is Hinault you congratulate your teammate on taking a good stage win and above all you don’t waste energy worrying about seventeen unlucky seconds, do you?
But he wasn’t relaxed at all on the Vuelta, I could tell. In the early mountain stages he didn’t behave as he usually did. I had the feeling he wasn’t putting out the same power as before. I was well placed to judge: on the climbs I was one of the few riders from Renault who could stay with him and since the episode on the fourth stage I hadn’t left his wheel.
Everyone has forgotten what it was like back then. Spain had only just emerged from the Franco era. It was like the third world; anyone who went over there at the start of the 1980s would know what I mean. For cyclists like us, the accommodation and the way we were looked after were not easy to deal with. Sometimes it was barely acceptable. Professional cyclists of today cannot imagine what it was like in the 1980s in a hotel at the backside of beyond in Asturias or the Pyrenees. The food was rubbish and sometimes there was no hot water, morning or evening.
My morale wasn’t exactly bright. Then one day there was a worrying development: Hinault clearly had a painful knee. Nothing was said officially. Right up until he wanted to abandon the race. We were all concerned; he had lost time on the Panticosa mountain-top finish, where Lejarreta, Alberto Fernández Blanco and Julián Gorospe all got the better of him. The overall win looked to be slipping away. But our Hinault was clinging on through the pain, scraping down his last bits of strength to the very bone, every day. To see him suffering like this – because it was obvious when you rode alongside him – forced everyone to give him respect, beginning with me.
There was only one major mountain stage in which he could turn the race around, from Salamanca to Avila. Guimard put together a tactical plan. A real trap for the opposition. Some people said it was a masterpiece. We had three passes to cross including the Puerto de Serranillos; Gorospe was the race leader. Guimard selected me to be the final stage in the rocket that was to propel Hinault to victory, so I was one of the fortunate participants in a legendary showdown.
My task was to burn off the opposition on the lower slopes of the Serranillos. I had to go absolutely flat out. It was simple: I hit the climb as if there was no tomorrow, on the big ring for five or six kilometres, with Hinault on my wheel. The Vuelta was won and lost here; the final act of the drama was about to unfold. Lejarreta was struggling; Gorospe was hanging on. But soon, I could see that, overwhelmed by the speed, Gorospe was completely in the red. The fateful moment had come. I was about to witness close-up what the astonishing Breton was capable of, and I saw the final flourish on the masterpiece. Hinault dealt the coup de grâce and it was as if, suddenly, he had forgotten everything. He seemed oblivious to the pain, the injury that was affecting a little more of his flesh each day, his adversaries, and even his doubts. All that remained was a man in his prime who was unleashed by the strength of his character. He was such a proud devil. He epitomised the way in which the rebelliousness of an exceptional champion could become a sublime display of raw emotion. Hinault went away with no teammates, with Vicente Belda on his wheel, in an epic, unreal attack over the last eighty kilometres. We had turned the Vuelta upside down and cast a spell on everyone.
Our delight was short-lived. The bad news came through soon enough. Hinault had a serious knee injury. Among those close to Guimard the talk was that ‘it was over’. What was ‘over’? Hinault’s season? His career? We were instructed not to say a word to anyone and for weeks there was a ridiculous game of cat and mouse with the journalists who wrote whatever they could dream up. Guimard put his head in the sand. Hinault played the fool. Neither of them was speaking to the other at all any more. And we just observed the bizarre show without being able to get involved. One day, I was told: ‘His tendon is damaged. He will have to be operated on.’
I had just realised that he would not be riding the Tour.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
CYCLING’S BRIGHTEST AND BEST
I’ve never been one to follow the crowd, but I’ve always found it curious that some people don’t appreciate how strong public feeling can be. These fine minds won’t accept that a huge percentage of the French population gathers on the roadside each year to watch the greatest sports event in the world. When July comes round, it provides France with its fête. The festivities have a name: the Tour.
In 1983 I couldn’t wait to experience it, even though deep inside I hadn’t set myself any outrageous objectives. Within Renault, the dominant feeling was a massive sense of uncertainty. Bernard Hinault had to sit out the race which meant that this was the first time since 1978 that La Régie had started in the Grande Boucle without its undisputed leader, without any guarantee that it would play a lead role.
I believed that first and foremost I had to learn and I knew that I could get enough experience from a first outing to serve me well in the future. My goals? They seemed reasonable enough: a stage win, wear the white jersey of best young rider to Paris, and finish in the top ten overall. The Vuelta had strengthened what I already believed: I had no reason to envy the top Tour riders such as Lucien Van Impe, Johan Van der Velde, Peter Winnen, Joaquim Agostinho and even the ageing Joop Zoetemelk, who topped the bill among the foreign entry. And I wasn’t overawed by Pascal Simon, the Peugeot leader who had just won the Dauphiné Libéré (he would be disqualified a few months later after a positive drugs test).
During the week before the race, Cyrille Guimard spoke to us a great deal, as if he wanted to protect us, to strengthen our self-belief and to make sure that we got to the start in as confident a frame of mind as he could give us. No doubt he was worried that collectively we might react to Hinault’s absence in a way that didn’t sit well with the reputation we’d built up to now. In his head, Marc Madiot and I were more or less the leaders, at any rate the protected riders. As well as Madiot, the rest of the team was: Julot, obviously, Bernard Becaas, Charly Bérard, Philippe Chevalier, Dominique Gaigne, Pascal Poisson, Alain Vigneron and Lucien Didier. I remember one thing that Guimard told us: ‘Put the Tour of Spain out of your minds. The Tour de France is ten times more difficult to deal with. The course is harder, the pace is higher, the pressure is greater: everything is multiplied.’
One hundred and forty riders started that Tour and the prologue was pretty much on my front door: at Fontenaysous-Bois. I can’t say I was my normal self. I was nervous, tense. Paradoxically I felt I was too close to home: the air felt too familiar. I wasn’t used to having people near me and being asked to do interviews. Making my legs hurt, taking on a task and following through, that’s what I was good at. Playing at being something that I wasn’t was rather more complex. That’s why I had no delusions of grandeur and why my poor result in the prologue was in the order of things. Even though I had slipped several books by Robert Merle into my suitcase, everyone had forgotten that I was only twenty-two years old.
Not one journalist imagined that Renault could win the Tour. And when we came to the first team time trial, over one hundred kilometres, our fourth place was seen as quite promising with our best rider absent. As for me, I was close to the condemned cell. Very soon, after about twenty kilometres, there was nothing in my legs. It was genuine hunger knock, which can put you out in just a few minutes. And there were eighty kilometres to the finish. I was barely moving, and Guimard had to tell the team to slow down and wait for me while I recovered. I’d already eaten what food I had with me, and it had had no effect; luckily, Bernard Becaas came to my aid and gave me everything he still had in his pockets. Gradually I got better, but this little misadventure had almost cost me dearly; I owed my survival to the few bits of food that Bernard had given me. He paid in my place; shortly afterwards he fell victim to hunger knock as well and it was partly my fault. He couldn’t keep up with us and was left behind with no chance of regaining contact. I will never forget
what he did.
What had happened? The explanation was simple but the consequences were potentially dire. Back then, before a race as intense as a team time trial, we would consume artificial foods consisting essentially of glucose. My body couldn’t stand them and would produce an overload of insulin in the hour that followed in order to burn up the excess sugar in the blood. As a result, I would get hypoglycaemia. But my inexperience didn’t stop there. The third stage, between Valenciennes and Roubaix, left a lasting mark on me. We went over some stretches of the cobbled roads used in Paris–Roubaix; it was the first time I’d seen the ‘Hell of the North’, even if this was merely a miniature version. The trouble was that I had absolutely no idea how to ride on the cobbles. No one told me one elementary principle: you must never grip the handlebars with all your strength. That was what I did and it was perfectly understandable, because of the fear of losing control and falling off. In fact, you keep the bike stable not by the tightness of your hold on the bars but from general balance and natural pedalling rhythm. But I was in good form and I got through the day in the front of the race, without any major problems until I got a nasty surprise when I took my gloves off after the stage. I had vast blisters on both hands because of the battering they had taken over the cobbles. I couldn’t close either fist. The next day was horrendous. Three hundred kilometres were on the menu and more cobbles to end the stage into Le Havre. It was purgatory. I couldn’t bend my fingers and it was all I could do to put my hands on the bars.
We Were Young and Carefree Page 9
