The whole team ended up dancing on a pleasureboat in the Seine. I went through my first experience of ‘celebrity’. I was a bit drunk and without even noticing I ended up in the arms of a gorgeous girl during a slow dance. Of course, we’d never met before. Nothing special happened, except that the next morning on the front page of France-Soir the whole country saw a photo which immortalised the brief encounter, with the headline: ‘The winner of the Tour de France relaxes with his fiancée.’
The only thing was that we weren’t engaged. At the time, my fiancée was called Nathalie and she was to become my first wife. Nathalie worked for Radio France and we had kept our relationship a secret to avoid her having problems in her work. That was why she hadn’t been at the party. I hardly need to tell you that she woke me up with a phone call in which she screamed down the line, ‘Who was that tart?’ I barely even remember the dance, let alone the girl.
After that famous night, I barely had any time to savour my success, or to rest and reflect. A Tour de France winner, especially a French one, has a debt to his people and the cycling world was waiting expectantly for me in the criteriums. I think I rode twenty-five on the trot. Obviously, as the ‘rules’ stipulated, I won a fair few of them. And I earned a good deal in appearance money.
I liked the atmosphere. The criteriums were a sort of continuation of the after-Tour party which suddenly went on another month. You finished the race, and in the evening, as tradition demanded, you picked up where you had left the previous night’s festivities. It was stimulating but tiring. The ascetic life of a sportsman competing at the highest level doesn’t really fit in with letting it all hang out in nightclubs.
It took me a while to work out why there have been so few French world champions in cycling history. Back then the world title was run at the end of August or the start of September, and not at the end of September as it is now. After a month travelling from one criterium to another, barely sleeping and knocking back a drink or two to keep everyone company, the French riders – who were in greater demand for the criteriums than the foreigners – were worn out. After riding the criterium circuit I would be almost more tired than after the Tour, which is saying something.
In addition, I was faced with the dark side of glory, partly because of riding all these criteriums where the organisers make any successful riders feel even more like megastars. It was the shadowy face of the shining light. After the Champs-Elysées all that happened for several weeks was one long victory parade. For a long time I couldn’t see the difference between the winner of the Tour (the one that all the people wanted to glorify) and the Laurent Fignon who was somewhere inside him – the true me. While the Tour winner kept playing the part to the point of caricature, the Fignon ‘inside’ withdrew into a persona that was no longer anything like him.
I didn’t do anything serious, compared to how others have behaved in similar circumstances. Let’s just say it all went to my head. I began to behave like a guy who looks down a bit on everyone. You know, the sort of bloke who’s made it to the top and reminds everyone of it in every word and deed, in case they might have forgotten. I put ridiculous demands on people, said things I shouldn’t have said. I thought the world revolved around me, and I have to admit: you come to a point where you genuinely believe that. People kept asking me to do things, and I was ferried here there and everywhere. You are constantly made to feel you are the centre of things, so you begin to think that way.
It was ridiculous, it was vulgar, and it was lousy for my self-respect.
The way other people looked at me had changed as well. It was worrying. Everyone looked so appreciative. When I saw a cyclist looking at me, I knew he was jealous; when I caught a glance from a woman, I imagined she must fancy me. All I would have to do was snap my fingers. My feet were no longer on the ground: I had flipped over into a parallel universe. I could have stayed there.
The whole thing is smoke and mirrors. I was never the centre of the world, but at most – and only for a few days – the centre of the cycling world. In the minds of some of those close to me, I must have become totally impossible for a while. One day, the Dutchman Gerrie Knetemann, who had been world champion in 1978, said to me: ‘After I took the title my head swelled, really swelled, believe me. It was perfectly understandable, but what is not normal is if your head stays like that.’
You are the best. The strongest. You can ask for things. Demand that things be done. Just for fun. You just have to want it.
When I began to pull my head out of the sand and open my eyes the whole thing horrified me. I felt truly pathetic. My pride had been completely misplaced. It had been the pride of a little upstart, a little twat. It was rubbish. I am ashamed to look back on it.
How long did it go on for? I’d say a month, not much more. For some guys, it lasts the rest of their lives: I escaped the worst at any rate. In my defence, I’d call in my close friends: the way I behaved towards them hadn’t budged a centimetre. Nothing whatsoever had changed between me and Julot, for example. He was my closest friend. I was happy; he was happy for me; and I was happy to feel that he was happy. Nothing and no one could spoil the way we felt.
There was a good side to winning the Tour: I now felt completely relaxed in the way I raced.
I had gone over a threshold and become a different sportsman. It was like being a lone sailor going round Cape Horn, or a top climber going over 25,000 feet without oxygen. It was obvious as soon as I began training again. It was a fabulous feeling. It was as if the aura of that victory had ended up instilling all its vital force in every pedal stroke I took. My physical confidence was so high that everything seemed straightforward. Just after the criteriums ended I won the third stage in the Tour du Limousin, just for fun. I had rediscovered the feeling of pleasure that cycling gave me. Racing for its own sake, for the hand-to-hand combat, the whiff of a fight. That’s the beauty of cycling: you have to be constantly up there. I could never have done athletics, or focused on being good every four years for the Olympics. An appalling notion.
And because I was back to my previous self, the Route du Berry gave me a nice chance to remind everyone I was still there. It was a race that no one took seriously. We would know every year that there was never any dope control; there’s no point saying that a lot of the boys were full of amphetamines and some pushed it too far. One of them was so wired and unaware of what he was doing that he kept jumping his bike onto the pavement without braking. He wasn’t the only one. That year, only twenty-one riders finished the race. I abandoned and as I got to the finish pretty early, with the help of a few other riders I made a fake notice that was fixed prominently to a local building: ‘Controle Medicale’.
It was right after the finish, so when the riders crossed the line, they couldn’t miss it. It had the desired effect. It was quite a sight: the boys were completely spooked. It was panic all round. It was delicious. We giggled for hours.
CHAPTER 14
* * *
WEARING THE BOSS’S TROUSERS
There is no point in possessing a body at a peak of physical development, no use having muscles full of energy unless the whole unit is at one with the mind. Sometimes, the messages transmitted by your body are contradictory: you have to keep them to yourself. You can suffer in secret, in the same way that you can revel in absolute dominance without the slightest scream of triumph.
At the end of the 1983 season at the Montjuich hill climb in Barcelona, a cycle tourist coming the other way down the road ran straight into me. It was a head-on collision which could have cost me dearly. I broke my hand but still finished the race. Two weeks later I had already forgotten it. Pain is nothing if you accept it as something which is just there, rather than thinking about the implications.
At twenty-three, well able to make myself suffer and thirsty for new experiences, I began the 1984 season as team leader. Bernard Hinault had gone off to pastures new. Initially, however, close observers of the sport must have wondered what was going on. ‘What�
��s happened to the Tour winner?’ they must have asked. The cold weather, my worst enemy, had got the better of me again. I contracted a vicious sinusitis, forcing me to forget the Critérium International and to abandon in Milan–San Remo and Tirreno–Adriatico.
I was the only person who felt that my results from the previous year and my freshly found confidence were more than just a front. There were two views among the commentators. There were those who saw me following the example of Bernard Thévenet in 1976, in other words a Tour winner who had struggled to live up to a result that was too big for him. And there were those who, on the other hand, already had me riding down the illustrious path mapped out by the greatest names in the sport. I have to confess that every day that went past saw me more confident that the second scenario was what lay ahead. I still didn’t feel that I was a surprise winner of the Tour. I knew how good I could be and how much there was still to come. I also knew how lucky I had been in the way it had all happened. It’s hard to restrain yourself when you feel that you are going well and you are ambitious; until then, there had been nothing to hold me back.
At the same time, I knew it would be harder proving it had not been a one-off. I wasn’t afraid of that. And among my friends and I nothing had changed. We were serious when we trained. We were reliable and robust when we raced. But we were still as carefree when we had unpinned our race numbers.
At the start of that year, while we were driving back from a cyclo-cross – Guimard made us ride them and you couldn’t get out of it – we got behind the wheels of three Renault team cars to return to training camp. In one of the cars, Vincent Barteau and Christian Corre. In the other, Pascal Poisson and Marc Madiot. In the third, Julot and I. After the cyclo-cross, the mud, the slime and the cold, we drove as you always did back then: foot to the floor, a smile on your lips. It wasn’t just that there were no speed cameras, but professional cycling team cars were so popular with the officers of the law that sometimes – if not actually all the time – they would shut their eyes to traffic offences in return for a signed cap for their son or father-in-law. With this sense of impunity, all drivers of team cars, whoever and wherever they were, had no worries about redlining it. That night in the pitch dark we were gaily floating along at 200kph, bumper to bumper on the motorway, with barely a bike length between the cars. We slalomed. We pulled out at the last second. We tooted our horns. We thought we were Laffite, Prost, Jarier or Belmondo. It was how it was. But it was crazy, and dangerous. The inevitable accident came when Barteau fell asleep at the wheel, at full tilt. No one was seriously hurt, which was a miracle. He got away with one hand in plaster.
Was it luck? Let’s just say we were pushing our luck, all the time. That day – and there were plenty of others – we survived. I was well aware of it. There was one key element in my make-up compared to guys like Barteau, who were not always able to keep a grip of themselves, and even Jules, who was every bit as fragile mentally and would let himself be taken in by any shyster. I’ve always felt something holding me back, something that has always prevented me from going further than merely mucking about, as if there is a little red light which comes on inside and says: ‘That’s it, stop there.’ Whatever we were up to, my light always flashed before the other guys’. I’ve often wondered why I should be able to make myself see sense at the right moment, and how I manage to help other guys do the same by setting an example. The answer was that I so loved racing that anything that might compromise it seemed puerile. I would say to myself: ‘Careful here, that might stop you winning something.’ At the wheel of a car, for example, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about whether I might die. But on the other hand I could see how I might end up wrecking the pleasure I felt when on the bike, and risking that was out of the question.
It was particularly out of the question in 1984. Bernard Hinault, as I said, had heard the siren call coming from Bernard Tapie and had signed for a new team completely devoted to his service, La Vie Claire. Now he was a rival, and probably the most redoubtable of the lot. I was sure of that. That meant everything had changed, but there was still another big name within my team. The American Greg LeMond, who had been carefully managed by Cyrille Guimard since he signed at Renault, was in a difficult position and didn’t keep quiet about it. He had good reason: he had been pencilled in as a possible Tour winner and my surprise victory had thrown all his plans into disarray. What’s more, Guimard had not selected him for the Tour in 1983 because he was considered too young. LeMond was worried and tried to manoeuvre the team into giving him a bigger contract after he took the world title in Switzerland. Renault refused point-blank but I benefited, indirectly. The Renault management were terrified that I would ask them for an impossible sum and then go elsewhere. They were determined to keep me in the team so I turned up and demanded a contract of a million francs a year, or F80,000 (£8,000) a month. I was amazed. Instead of choking in horror, the Renault negotiator let out a sigh of relief. He had expected far worse. I mulled it over: for days and days I regretted not asking for more. To put it in perspective, I’d ended 1982 on a salary of F12,000 a month and after the 1983 Tour, up to the end of the season, I was on about F50,000. For the time, it was a great deal, even though it was next to nothing compared to what was paid out in tennis or football.
Cyrille Guimard was never concerned. There was no way I was going to leave him, and he knew it. The ‘Guimard system’ was tailor-made for me – the team, the preparation, the atmosphere – and I still had a lot to prove. In my mind, I was now the sole leader, but in the heads of the team it wasn’t like that. Since Hinault’s departure the riders seemed less certain of the situation and less inclined to give their all. There was a lack of confidence about how I would shape up, which was understandable. With his record, Hinault instilled confidence naturally. If you looked at me, and LeMond, who was the ‘reserve’ leader, we were a similar age to our teammates. It was up to us to prove what we could do and to impose ourselves as leaders. Even though the ways of the team were slowly changing under my guidance – the team’s relationship was based on friendship rather than a rigid hierarchy – winning was the thing that would settle everything down. Nothing else would do.
And then I had a colossal problem, which had to be overcome whatever I did: I was now in Hinault’s shoes and everyone would be comparing me to him. Even Guimard must have fallen into the trap. He adopted the ‘Hinault’ way for me, item by item. The same programme, the same way of talking; everything was the same. It was too much: I wasn’t Hinault but, paradoxically, Guimard wasn’t able to change to suit me. And I was too young to know everything about my body and make him adopt new ways of thinking, new innovations.
No one conceived that I might need a racing programme that was different to the one Hinault had followed. I had won my first Tour and it was hard to imagine that anything might have gone wrong. Objectively speaking, there was no reason to change anything. We just reproduced what had worked in the past. And I paid the price. Fortunately I was really serious about my work: I didn’t want to let anyone down.
The pressure mounted and was all centred on me. The more intense it became, the more I felt relaxed, serene, strong. My legs and my mind were functioning in complete harmony. That may sound pretentious but that’s how it was.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
COKE IN STOCK
When I imagine the uninitiated reader going through the excesses and illusions of our little world, I do wonder how it all looks. No doubt this visitor would observe our mixed-up ways, and would feel that our actions were every bit as foolish as we ourselves were. We were young, impudent, and sometimes open to youthful temptation.
Talking of temptation, the Tour of Colombia 1984, or the Clásico RCN, was an astonishing experience, one for which I was hardly ready. As far as the race went, there wasn’t much to relate, apart from a pair of stage wins, one for Charly Mottet, and one for me on the final stage. The event was perfect preparation because it all took place at over 2000m above
sea level, just right for boosting our red blood-cell counts. All we had to do was make the most of it and keep our eyes on the job.
As for the ambience, sometimes it was more fun than work. But we weren’t the ringleaders, that’s the least I can say, and I realised during that week that what we got up to in France was the stuff of mere choirboys compared to the values that ruled cycling in the world of the bad lads. The Colombians have a delightful way of reaching an accommodation with reality. I say delightful because they clearly don’t mind breaking a rule or two, they laugh all the time, they enjoy life and cycling and they love pedalling through their homeland cheered on by vast crowds who’ve come to hail their heroes: the Colombians were professionals worthy of being in the biggest European races.
Back then, the races there seemed to be sponsored by the local mafia. The cash flowed in torrents and there were guns in suit pockets. All the racing was rigged and on a more serious note, cocaine was dished up instead of dessert. I can remember one guy in the caravan, clearly a dealer, who had kilos and kilos of white powder on offer in the boot of his car. It was the holy grail: ten dollars a kilo. Bargain basement. Every morning, the buyers formed an orderly line, all but turning up with race numbers on their backs.
Caught up in this happy shiny world, the journalists were smiling from morning till night, snorting all day. And we messed about as well, just once, just to see what happened. It was a day that could have ruined my entire career.
Because we kept hearing people saying ‘It’s the best in the world’, ‘My God it’s amazing’, eventually we thought, ‘Come on, let’s give it a whirl.’ We did it the evening before the finish in Bogotá, where the Clásico always ended. We weren’t taking the race that seriously, so there wasn’t much at stake. Four of us got together in a hotel room, like kids with a new toy. Each of us had a gram, we divided it up and snorted.
We Were Young and Carefree Page 11
