We Were Young and Carefree

by Laurent Fignon

  I’d started to enjoy it again. Something was happening in my head. That evening I had a massage, ate a bowl of rice and went to bed. The next morning it was a little outing, about two hours, just a leg-stretcher.

  I was absolutely determined to travel to Milan on the Thursday, because flying has never worked for me. I don’t know why, but the air pressure always seems to make my legs swell up, which is unpleasant for a cyclist. I had to lose my temper with Guimard before he would allow me to travel on the Thursday. He just didn’t want it. More surprisingly, he didn’t understand why suddenly I was making so much out of the first Classic of the season. He even ended up muttering: ‘Milan–San Remo, what use is that?’ He didn’t say I wouldn’t win, but he wasn’t far from it. He didn’t believe I could, and he proved it by putting out a team of just six, while I wanted a full team of nine. That was how Guimard was. I forced the issue: he gave in.

  The day before the start in Milan it just so happened that I was the first rider to collect his race number. ‘Because I’m going to win,’ I smiled at the organisers. I was back in the permanently unstressed state which had been my trademark until 1985.

  Milan–San Remo is a special race. The course isn’t difficult but it’s long and stressful. The two vital qualities it takes to win it are patience and punch. You have to be able to attack once, flat out and in the right place. I’d worked out my tactic beforehand: keep hidden in the bunch as far as Alassio, 240km into the race, then move up into the first twenty in the bunch and make just one attack: on the Poggio, the gradual twisting climb just before the finish. I would have one opportunity, and it would either work or it wouldn’t. That was the law of Milan–San Remo. As I’d planned, I stayed away from the front all day, apart from on the Turchino pass, which takes the race away from the Lombardy plains and down to the outskirts of Genoa. The descent can be dangerous and there are often crashes. It felt sacrilegious keeping to the back of the peloton so I had to fight my natural instincts and keep a tight grip on myself. I hated having no idea of what was going on at the front of the race. It was counter-intuitive. After about two-thirds of the race I said to myself, ‘My God, I’m flying.’ It was fabulous: apart from on the Poggio my legs never hurt, the entire day. It hadn’t been that way for such a long time. On the Turchino I might as well have had a fag in my mouth. On the Capo Berta, where you can lose the race in a split-second, I climbed as if in a dream. It was such a feeling that I remember the thought coming into my mind, very strongly, ‘I’m going to win.’

  The Dutch team PDM were an awesome outfit including Adri Van der Poel, Rául Alcalá, Steven Rooks, and Gert-Jan Theunisse. All four of them were up at the front. Then we came to the foot of the final climb, the Poggio, a sort of little hummock which rises up above the Italian Riviera. I was fairly well placed. Earlier in the race I’d said to my friend Sean Kelly, ‘I’m going to make a big attack on the Poggio. If it doesn’t work, I’ll lead you out in the sprint.’ Since 1983 or 1984 I’d had a close relationship with the Irishman, who was a straight-dealing individual who never held back when it was time to repay a debt of honour. We were good friends and we were happy to squash the smaller guys for the common cause. So in the first few hundred metres of the Poggio, Kelly came alongside and said, ‘You better move up, Laurent.’ I hadn’t asked him but the Irishman always felt that if a deal had been done, he had to stick to it. I didn’t think twice, but followed him. It was a good job I did. No sooner had I got to the front than the PDM team got rolling. They gave it everything they had. Kelly had saved my skin.

  For about two miles we were all hurting like hell. I hung fire, but I wasn’t sure that my chance would come. Suddenly though, my legs stopped feeling sore: it was as if I’d only just got on the bike. At moments like that, I never panicked. I just waited, calmly. The speed was still high, so high that when we got to the place where the road got slightly steeper, and where I had decided beforehand that I would attack, I began to wonder whether I would be able to make my move. The window of opportunity was small, perhaps 150m of tarmac. But because this is the hardest part of the Poggio, Theunisse, who had been setting the pace, gradually began to weaken a little. It probably wouldn’t have been obvious to television viewers, but it was more than enough for me.

  I didn’t think twice. I went through the little gap that had opened in front of me between the Dutchman and the wall by the roadside, and I stood on the pedals, putting in all the weight of all my time on the bike and the anger I felt at all the sacrifices I’d made in the last few years. I had been waiting impatiently for this one instant and I felt that this was a big, big attack. Kelly was on my wheel and kept his side of our bargain by letting a gap open. I was using 53x15, a colossal gear, and I was convinced I had left everyone gasping; to my surprise, however, I caught sight of Maurizio Fondriest, a mere youngster, just behind me. I had no idea how he had managed to get across to me. But he didn’t worry me for a second. I knew I could beat him. He had no chance. So on the descent I used a cunning old man’s trick; I swung wide out on the bends, pretending to be a poor descender. The idea was to let him come past so that he would make the pace on the straights. He fell for it like an amateur. On the television, the commentators didn’t have any idea what was going on: I was totally in charge and deliberately saving my strength and they said I was ‘struggling’. Idiots.

  That year, the finish was 1km from the foot of the descent. One of us was going to win. In terms of natural ability, as the rest of his career would show, Fondriest was quicker than me in a sprint. But he was only young, and with almost 300km in my legs I knew exactly what I was capable of: in a one-to-one sprint I was almost unbeatable. Just like Hinault did at the finish of Paris–Roubaix in 1981, I kicked off the sprint a good distance from the finish. We were side by side until 100m out, and then he suddenly cracked. I was 20m in front by the time I hit the line.

  My God. I’d done it. I don’t remember anything about it, but those who were there said I screamed with joy. It was a yell that came from back down the years. A sound that was almost ‘primeval’, said some. Gallopin had been right, right to convince me I could do it and right to go through with it. When you think that victory in San Remo always eluded a world champion and Classics specialist of the time like Moreno Argentin, it’s incredible to think I had managed it.

  One footnote: just for the record, French television – Antenne 2 to be exact – didn’t show a report of this Milan–San Remo, not even highlights. The bosses turned down Jean-Paul Ollivier’s request to cover the race. ‘There’s no way a Frenchman can win,’ he was told.

  With my head in the clouds somewhat, I imagined that I had once again got back to what I was. Above all, I knew exactly how I had won. And I could just glimpse a return to the peace of mind of my best days. But on the podium, believe it or not, I was cursing myself for not managing to win alone. It was a stupid way to think, but my old mindset was reawakening.

  Was there a whiff of a new beginning in the air?

  Whatever the answer, one thing is true: the passing of a few years allows those who can withstand them to acquire an amazing ability to take control of their actions. Mind and body can be at a peak of harmony. The proof of that came the next year, 1989. To win Milan–San Remo again Alain Gallopin and I put together exactly the same programme, but with one small variant. We made the Wednesday’s training even harder, 50 kilometres longer. I was a year older and used to an extra effort or two.

  To avoid being caught out, I knew that I had to avoid making the same move as in 1988. This time, no one was going to let me go anywhere on the Poggio. So I picked out another place to have a go, between the Cipressa and the Poggio. There, and nowhere else. The race panned out exactly as I needed it to. My legs didn’t hurt; the pedals turned fluidly. I felt astonishingly calm. And when the Dutchman Frans Maassen, who had just won the Tour of Belgium, pulled out a 100m lead on the bunch, I didn’t waste a second wondering whether I should go for it. It was done before I’d even thought about it. No
one came up to us, and with more than forty seconds lead on the bunch at the foot of the Poggio, I pushed up the pace on the hardest part of the climb. Maassen folded. This time round, I was the only rider in the finish picture. It’s hard to describe, but winning a Classic of this importance a second time was such a rare feat. I had to have total belief in the strength of my race knowledge and in my ability to focus completely on a single day.

  That year, Guimard didn’t come to Milan, although he should have been at my side at a race which was to put me in the history books. The day after, he came to pick me up at the airport when I flew in. Even now, I can still recall the surreal scene. He spotted me walking towards him while I was still a good way off, but remained seated in his armchair holding L’Equipe ostentatiously, wide open in front of his face. There was a vast photo of me on the front, of course. I came up, but he never moved. It was his way of saying: ‘Bloody hell, you did it.’ I stood in front of him for at least two or three minutes but he never blinked. It was his way of doing things. After a while I cracked and said, ‘You daft bugger, you could at least say well done.’

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  WORM IN THE YELLOW JERSEY

  Having fun keeps you alive and having fun while you win prevents you from believing that you are the centre of the universe.

  It’s something that poets know how to do. There are ways of sidelining yourself from the demands of daily communication. You make it hard for people to find you. You refuse to open up to any old person who comes towards you with a big smile on their face. You keep a little bit aloof, and ensure that any messages take a while to get through. I needed to make myself a bit less accessible, because the clarity with which I saw everything around me – and myself – was not to everyone’s taste. I decided to give less of myself. After my first win in Milan–San Remo, all of a sudden, people decided I was worthy of interest again. I even read a few newspaper articles which while not actually friendly – I’ve never liked biased writing – at least took a view of reality which wasn’t far from mine.

  I had good form in that spring of 1988. I could feel it and I wanted to use it to the full. I came thirteenth in the Tour of Flanders and two days later I struck another blow in Paris–Vimoutiers by escaping alone on the ‘wall’ at Champeaux. They didn’t see me again and my teammates understood why I had stipulated that they must stay at the head of the bunch all day, chasing down anything that moved.

  It all felt easy again. During times like these, incredible as it may seem, I never had any pain in my legs. There were some of the other riders who never believed me. I remember talking about it once with Dominique Garde. He was adamant that he suffered on his bike ‘every day’, whether he was training or racing. Throughout his entire career, he added, he had never had a good day. It was true for him, just as the opposite was true for me.

  For example, that year, when I threw myself full tilt at the cobbled sections of Paris–Roubaix – a race where I hadn’t turned a wheel since 1984 – without thinking of the possible dangers, I did so because I knew I could do well. When I went into the zone that led through the Arenberg forest, usually the place where the first selection happened, my computer was reading 60kph. Kelly told me later I was crazy heading into it at that speed. It was the complete opposite of a lack of awareness. I was fully in tune with what my body could cope with; I knew the agility you have when the power is there. My only worry was that it would all disappear again and I would go back into my shell like a man returning to damnation.

  I caught a sinusitis, a cold and to cap it all I cracked a bone in my right hand in an infamous mass pile-up on a descent in Liège–Bastogne–Liège: then I lapsed into a long series of mysterious, inexplicable attacks of fatigue. By the time I started the 1988 Tour de France I had reverted to a state of prickly solitude. If leg power is the judge of true nobility on a bike, I was only too aware that my status was very uncertain. I wanted time to speed up so that I could find out what was the matter. I had to know. I found out.

  The new format for the prologue time trial in that year’s Tour made everyone smile. It had been renamed ‘préface’; each team had to start as a unit to ride a team time trial until the final kilometre, when a designated rider finished on his own. This was a ridiculous innovation by the new Tour organisers – they were very much to the fore that year – but it had one saving grace. In all of 3.8km I was given a foretaste of what was coming: I was struggling to stay with my teammates. My fears were confirmed two days later in the full-length team time trial: every camera lens was trained on me, and with good reason. About 20km from the finish my strength gave out. I was overcome with panic. I could hardly feel it at first but I was slipping back every time the team made the slightest acceleration. Then, suddenly, I slipped off the back. It had never happened to me before. The team waited for me the first time, but not the second. I told them to leave me behind and I finished 1min 20sec behind my teammates, who were devastated to have deserted their leader. I was wasted, and neither my doctors nor I had any idea why.

  I kept dragging along the road, heavy with fatigue, fed up with drudgery. I struggled at the slightest effort and in the evening I would collapse with exhaustion in my hotel room. I began to wonder what was going on. There had been something I didn’t understand in the last few weeks: I had never seemed to lose any weight.

  After the first individual time trial I was shunted down well beyond thirtieth place so I said goodbye to the overall standings. And then, in Nancy, I agreed to have a journalist come up to the hotel room to interview me after my massage. Shortly before he came, I went to the toilet. It was horrific: I felt something long and soft down below. I was terrified. I thought I was expelling my intestines. I called in Dominique Garde and he burst out laughing: it was a tapeworm. I pulled on it: about two metres came out. Then it broke. At last I knew what was going on.

  When the journalist came in, I talked him through it and showed him the beast. He couldn’t believe his eyes. That same evening I took the medicine that would kill what remained of the parasite, which was completely ejected from my body the following evening. I was shattered.

  On the eleventh stage from Besançon to Morzine, completely devoid of any strength, I forced myself to get to the finish, twenty minutes behind the leaders. It was an exploit of a sort, which had no purpose at all other than to symbolise the fact that I wasn’t going to give up. I use the term ‘symbolic’ for anything which helps to delay the inevitable or give some indication, if not actually some concrete proof, of what I might manage in the future. I wanted to force the good feelings to come back. I wanted to exhibit the last depths of courage so that I could quit with my head held high.

  But I had got to my limit and gone over it. That same evening I announced that I was going home, and no one was surprised. The next morning the newspaper Libération printed an article that was mind-bending in its perversity and lack of professionalism. The correspondent declared point blank that I had refused to continue riding in the Tour because I knew that I had tested positive a few days earlier. As it so happened, I had not actually been tested since the start. I sued them for defamation and won. They had called me a bastard, but it was obvious who the real bastards were.

  When I caught the TGV the next morning after leaving the race, I felt relieved, as if a massive weight had been taken off my shoulders. As I watched the countryside go past, buried in my happy feelings, I read René Char. ‘Clarity is the wound that most resembles the sun.’ It’s dreadful to have to admit it, but the further I was from the Tour, the happier I felt.

  I had hated the last two weeks. There was nothing to enjoy about it at all. The atmosphere at the Tour was tense a year after the departure of Jacques Goddet, who had run the race since before the Second World War. With new, less competent organisers at the helm, the race had declined into a kind of travelling circus. Those who lived through it still have painful memories. It was a Tour of excess at every level. The number of cars containing corporate guest
s expanded. There were more and more helicopters which came and harassed the peloton and prevented the racing from being correct. The riders were under permanent pressure and constantly stressed, because they were no longer the key element in the race, merely participants in a ‘show’. It was as if the race was merely the thing that justified all the rest of it – commercialism and consumerism.

  The lack of respect for the tradition of the Giants of the Road and the myth of the Tour and its history horrified me. It felt like the end of an era. But Amaury Group, owners of la Société du Tour de France, didn’t make the same mistake twice. The new heads rolled. They only just avoided irreparable damage to their event.

  You must never confuse having fun and messing about. Having fun is what prevents you taking yourself too seriously. Messing about is when you endanger something that actually matters.

  CHAPTER 26

  * * *

  RETURN OF THE GRAND BLOND

  Fortunately, the life of a top sportsman is not constant catastrophe. It seems that somewhere inside there is always a seed of renewal lying dormant. My eighth year as a professional, at the age of twenty-eight, was set to be a good example of that.

  By the start of 1989 I was the only leader in the team. Even Charly Mottet had left. Cyrille Guimard didn’t like to hear it, but you could say the team was average in quality. It was not a team worthy of an important leader who was capable of winning a major Tour. I was well aware of it but it didn’t bother me a great deal. On the plus side, we had recruited a young Danish rider named Bjarne Riis who I had spotted at the Tour of the European Community the previous year; he was reliable and strong enough to be a good teammate. After noticing him I had said to Guimard, ‘We’ve absolutely got to hire that guy.’ It was amazing. By the end of 1988 Riis still didn’t have a team for the next year. No one wanted him. He told me later that if I hadn’t offered him a place he would have given up cycling. A career can hang on threads like that. Bjarne was happy to get stuck in, he had a solid constitution and liked to work hard. Riding on his wheel was total joy, because he could do anything: go fast when he had to and go through a gap with perfect timing. I never had to tell him anything, never had to say ‘Come on’ or ‘Slow down’. I glued myself to his wheel and didn’t have to do anything else. It’s not often as harmonious as that. I had got it right with him but I had no idea that he would make his name in any of the ways he eventually did. He had a ‘big engine’, but this has to be made clear: he was a good rider but not capable of winning a Tour de France in normal circumstances. He later confessed how he won the 1996 race – by using EPO.