Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  It was a good wage but you’d have to look after yourself in the winter. There were no contracts until March or April. It was £50 for a stage win and I’d look to put away about a grand in the bank at the end of the year, enough to buy a car.”

  1970s: Bernard Thevenet

  His victory in 1975 ended Eddy Merckx’s run of victories and began France’s last spell of domination, when the home nation took nine wins in 11 years.

  “My Tours were the last Tours of the old generation. Fundamentally there had not been much change since the era of Fausto Coppi, the late 1940s. Cycling was parochial. There was one New Zealander racing and I remember we all went to look at him because we’d never seen anyone from down there. I raced against an American once, at the world championship. At the Tour there might have been 10 nations at the start; this year there will be 26.

  There was less pressure on the riders, less of a scrum at the stage finish, although when I took the yellow jersey from Merckx in 1975 people just kept coming on to the podium for interviews, more and more of them. I was standing close to the edge, they all moved and I nearly fell off. There were no buses for the riders, so you got to the start, got out of the car and there were people all round you.

  The Tour was smaller, with far fewer media. The press room was about a quarter the size it is now. The riders were not cut off from the media as they are now that the Tour is so huge. We knew all the journalists, relations were good and they would come to interview us in our hotels after the finish of the day’s stage. Now they will simply go to a press conference. The riders did not specialise in the Tour; they raced from February to October, so we all raced together and knew each other.”

  1980s: Steve Bauer

  The first Canadian to ride the Tour, finished nine times, wearing the yellow jersey twice, between 1985 and 1995, the period when the event turned into an international extravaganza. Now visits the race with groups of touring cyclists.

  “It’s incredible to come back and see the Tour from the outside. You see the size, the number of people, the logistics. There was a general trend of internationalisation and innovation during my time, more media attention, more journalists from America, more television crews, a move from an evening round-up of 15 minutes on CBS to continual live coverage. Without Greg LeMond’s wins, his comeback, that might never have happened.

  A lot of the innovation was driven by Americans, mainly LeMond. It was a mix of business, invention and good sense: try this helmet, try this computer. We started wearing Oakley pilot glasses, really ugly, but now Oakley is cool and everyone has them. There were triathlon bars for aerodynamics, which Greg made popular. We were more open to change, we weren’t stuck in traditional ways and the Europeans followed.

  The racing in the Tour changed as well. At the start it was more controlled, I remember just touring through Brittany before everyone wound it up for the finish. Bernard Hinault would control things, someone would attack and he’d growl at them, “Cool it, guys. Hard day today.” Miguel Indurain never made his presence felt in the same way and I’m not sure anyone does now.

  The distances lessened and the stages became eyeballs out. There got to be more roundabouts over my time, so it all got more dangerous. I remember one pile-up on a rond-point [roundabout] in the west somewhere in 1994, 65 kilometres per hour, a whole heap of guys on the floor. And I noticed the arrival of EPO in the peloton in the early 1990s, guys kicking my ass who shouldn’t have been, whole teams superstrong that shouldn’t have been, and it was very discouraging as I came from teams which had a clean philosophy.”

  Apart from Armstrong’s duel with Jan Ullrich, the other story of the Centenary Tour was Tyler Hamilton’s battle with his broken collarbone. This interview was a rarity: a one on one with a major rider during the Tour, but it was worth it, because what Hamilton was doing fitted in with the whole Tourman-as-Superman notion. Nine years later, Hamilton revealed that he was blood doping during this Tour. That wasn’t surprising, as he had tested positive for blood doping in 2004, but to have it confirmed was depressing. Superman was a cheat. Does it lessen the courage it took to ride through the Tour with a broken collarbone? No. You can be immoral and courageous at the same time.

  The pain barrier: Broken collarbone, twisted spine and Tyler Hamilton rides on. His agony and bravery is the story of the race

  20 July 2003

  One of the great metaphors inspired by the Tour de France is that of the race as a road to Calvary. Le calvaire has been routinely used throughout the 100 years since the great race was born to describe the process of a cyclist continuing in the face of great affliction, be it injury, or illness, or the mental agony that follows the death of a close relative.

  Tyler Hamilton has put all the past century of two-wheeled battles against pain into a new perspective over the past two weeks. He has ridden on in spite of a broken collarbone, holding a high place overall as the race entered the Pyrenees yesterday. The doctors can barely believe it. Hamilton’s is le calvaire against which all others will be measured in future.

  “I work with the pain, and that’s how I go about my daily life,” he says. “Accepting the pain has turned into part of my daily routine. In my opinion, it’s better to accept it and not resist it. If you resist it, it’s even harder.” Hamilton, like all Tour cyclists, is smaller than you would expect when seen up close. He has the same deep tan, the same shuffling, strength-saving walk, as the rest. But when he comes into the lobby of his Toulouse hotel, he shakes hands with the left. The right cannot be used.

  An unassuming man from Massachusetts, Hamilton is no stranger to pain. A keen and talented skier, he broke several vertebrae in a fall and got into cycling when in rehab. Last year, famously, he came second in the Tour of Italy, bearing a cracked shoulder blade. He ground his teeth in agony so strongly that 11 have needed replacing. He lists his symptoms modestly and emphasises: “I feel I’m complaining a lot.” But much of the last two weeks has been spent in silence. Just him and the pain.

  The first station on his calvary was Avenue de l’Appel du 18 Juin 1940 in Meaux two weeks ago, where Hamilton’s front wheel landed on the prone form of the sprinter Jimmy Casper, catapulting him over the bars at 30mph and on to his right shoulder. X-rays showed a V-shaped double crack in his collarbone, and that, it seemed, was that. But the next morning, Hamilton was on the start line. “When I saw the X-rays, and I saw my Tour de France was over, I’m not ashamed to say it, but I cried. For three or four hours I was devastated. Then I learned it was maybe possible to try.”

  Critically, there was no displacement of the bones – the two parts remained in a straight line, meaning that in medical terms, it was possible for Hamilton to go on without damaging it further. Riding with three layers of foam on his handlebars and reduced pressure in his tyres to ease the shocks from the road surfaces, Hamilton rode into Sedan that evening as pale as a ghost, but 100th.

  His initial target was the team time-trial, to assist his team, CSC, the computer software company, to a respectable placing. That obstacle surmounted, more than respectably, further X-rays last Thursday showed no further movement in the fracture. Even so, he was expected to quit when the race arrived in the Alps a week ago yesterday. But at l’Alpe d’Huez six days ago, he finished with Lance Armstrong to move to sixth overall. Casper, the man he fell over in Sedan, went home the following day. Twenty-two others quit in the Alps through illness or injury.

  “A couple of days after the crash I was in so much pain when I woke up that I thought it was over,” Hamilton says. “Mentally, it’s been a rollercoaster ride. There have been points where I didn’t think I would be able to continue. The first night I got four hours’ sleep, the second five. I didn’t get a decent night’s rest for five nights.” The pain, says Hamilton, is “constant, numb. On a scale of one to 10 it was 10, now it’s seven or eight. On my bike I get sharp pains, and every bump I can feel it. When I put pressure on it, it tells me to stop.”

  The worst point, thus far, came on
Tuesday, when the race left the Alps for Marseille. “I’d had a twisted spine since the crash, and they couldn’t put pressure on it to push it back into place. It was putting pressure on a nerve that runs from my back to my stomach. It got inflamed and when I woke up I was in so much pain. Normally, to breathe, I push down with my stomach, but I couldn’t push it out an inch.”

  By sheer good fortune, that day’s route was mainly downhill and the peloton relaxed after letting a group of backmarkers escape. “If it had been a mountain stage, I’d have been in trouble, and fortunately the next day was the rest day. They gave me a muscle relaxant and pushed it back. The night before, my body was just too tense for them to do it. I was in so much pain.”

  Why do it? “One thing is my team, I owe it to them to push on. I didn’t want to give up at the first problem.” There is also the fact that Hamilton is now 32, and has only lately emerged from a career largely spent working for Armstrong. Time is not on his side.

  Last Monday, on the final Alpine stage, he was a few yards behind when the Spaniard Joseba Beloki skidded on a patch of melted Tarmac on a descent, flew over the bars and broke his hip, elbow and wrist. Going downhill through hairpin bends at 50mph is a supreme test of nerves and clear-headedness – with one arm partly out of action and a shoulder in agony from every bump, it hardly bears thinking about.

  “You try to relax. If you’re tense on a descent, it just makes it worse. The descent where Beloki fell was incredibly dangerous, the Tarmac was melting and it was one of those turns that just kept going.” Asked if falling again worries him, he doesn’t get the question. It clearly isn’t in his mental terms of reference.

  “The doctors have said it will heal normally if I crash on it again. Maybe I’d need an operation with a plate in it, but that didn’t happen when I broke it the first time. For me it’s worth the risk. I worry, but you can only worry so much.”

  Hamilton’s courage may be admired by many – asked how he feels about what his protege is doing, his team manager Bjarne Riis simply spreads his arms as wide as they can go – but his wisdom and that of his team have been questioned. Eddy Merckx, who finished the Tour in 1975 with a fractured cheekbone, feels that that hastened the end of his career, and that Hamilton is making the same error. One rival team manager has alleged that the fracture is not real, and had to be shown the X-rays to prove that it is.

  There is one question that Hamilton cannot be asked. That is how he will react if his strength deserts him, or if he falls again, and all the pain of the last two weeks was for nothing. There is no point in asking the question, as it is something that he is just not contemplating.

  The Tour has captured the imagination of its followers for 100 years because it drives men beyond their physical limits. Episodes of great courage in the face of pain are the norm rather than the exception. Even so, Dr Gerard Porte, 32 years on the Tour, 22 as chief doctor, says Hamilton’s is the most surprising case that he has ever seen.

  “A normal person would have to have four weeks off work. It is the finest example of courage that I’ve come across. It has amazed me. Obviously, medically it is possible, in that there are no counter-indications, no sign that it’s getting worse. It’s simply down to how much pain he can stand. That he still has the courage to be with the best is incredible.”

  Porte has seen other men drive themselves through injuries that would normally call for complete rest. He remembers the case of Johnny Weltz of Denmark in the mid-1980s, when the Dane broke a finger on stage six and got to Paris with it in plaster. By happy coincidence, Weltz is now one of Hamilton’s directeurs sportifs.

  In 1983, Porte was forced to look on as the Peugeot squad pushed their leader Pascal Simon from the Pyrenees to the Alps in spite of his broken shoulder blade. Simon became a legend, but he was never the same cyclist again. In 1985, Jean-Claude Bagot of France managed four stages with a broken elbow, simply because his pride would not allow him to quit before the Tour had entered his native Normandy.

  “To understand why Hamilton is still here, you have to look back a year, when he fell in the Grand Prix,” explains Porte. “There he suffered a real fracture of the collarbone, the bone was scarred and acquired a big lump. He fell in Meaux on the same shoulder, and cracked it in the same place, in the knot of scarred bone. It is an incomplete fracture, two fissures, which are not as bad as a classic fracture which would have sent him home no matter how brave he was.”

  What chance does Hamilton stand of getting through the Pyrenean stages today, tomorrow and on Wednesday, and of making it to Paris? “I think he has a chance,” says Porte. “He’s been going for 10 days, it’s through the most painful period for a fracture – and it’s becoming less painful. The question is whether riding without the full use of his right arm has weakened the rest of his body.”

  In autumn next year, the first Imax film of the Tour, provisionally entitled Brainpower, will be released. Partly sponsored by America’s National Science Foundation, it is being shot on this Tour with a 49-strong team. By freaky coincidence, it deals with the mind’s ability to overcome pain, and it is being shot largely with Hamilton and the CSC team. The scriptwriters could not have dreamt of the current scenario.

  The film Brainpower was eventually released with the title Wired to Win. Not surprisingly, Hamilton’s role was downplayed.

  The 2004 Tour de France saw Armstrong ride to his sixth consecutive victory. But by then, his story had gained further complexity, due to the publication of David Walsh and Pierre Ballester’s compilation of evidence that pointed to doping, LA Confidential. If anything, this incident with Filippo Simeoni towards the end of the Tour was actually more revelatory than Walsh’s book. It was a public demonstration of two things: Armstrong was a bully, and he was utterly paranoid about Michele Ferrari.

  Simeoni takes a savage beating

  24 July 2004

  Showing all the diplomatic skills of a playground bully, Lance Armstrong stamped his authority on one of the rebels of the peloton, Filippo Simeoni. Armstrong frequently complains that he is not universally popular with the public but yesterday afternoon’s little cameo will have done little to counter the feeling that he regards the Tour as his personal fiefdom.

  “Pippo”’s only offence, after all, is that he has taken legal action against Armstrong in his native Italy after the American questioned his testimony against the Texan’s trainer Michele Ferrari.

  Simeoni rode away from the peloton early in the stage, in pursuit of the day’s six-rider breakaway group, and what followed was bizarre. As if to make the point that he has a personal beef with the Italian, Armstrong did not ask his team to chase him, but caught up himself and the pair rode across to the leaders.

  The peloton slowed down, as if it could not believe what was going on either. In the little group, Armstrong, Simeoni and the eventual runner-up on the stage, Vicente Garcia Acosta had an intense discussion before Simeoni dropped back, and Armstrong with him.

  At the finish, the Italian was a bitterly disappointed man. “I made a super effort to get to the escape, but Armstrong said the peloton would not let the group remain in front unless I let them go,” he explained. “I slowed down out of respect for the other riders there. He shouldn’t worry about little riders like me.”

  Armstrong said simply: “I was just protecting the interests of the peloton.” If the common interest of the riders is that whistleblowers in drug trials are ostracised, perhaps he was, but it is not a widely expressed sentiment among his fellows.

  With Armstrong and Simeoni back in the peloton, normal service was resumed, and the escape duly fought out the finish, where Garcia-Acosta was narrowly beaten by his fellow Spaniard Juan-Miguel Mercado.

  The essential contradiction of the Armstrong years is all here in this end-of-Tour piece: a sporting phenomenon that could not be denied, a comeback from the near dead to win six Tours, but undercurrents that could not be ignored, given what had come before and during his reign. The use of the adjective incredible
in the headline seems amply justified with hindsight.

  Armstrong powers to incredible sixth and glory

  26 July 2004

  In November 1997 I sat down with Lance Armstrong, his future ex-wife Kristin, and three bottles of red wine on the bare floor of a room devoid of furniture in a borrowed villa on the exclusive peninsula of St Jean-Cap Ferrat, between Nice and Monaco. “We’ll go out for dinner,” Armstrong had said, and we did – to a supermarket, where we stocked up with wine, salad and pasta, which the couple cooked.

  To look back at that evening reflects how far Armstrong has travelled in sporting and personal terms. Back then he and Kristin were so uncertain about his comeback to racing in Europe that they had no idea whether to buy furniture or not. It was just over a year since he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer, and a comeback from tumours as acute as Armstrong’s had never been attempted in cycling or any endurance sport before.

  The rest is history. Armstrong is now the best Tour de France cyclist to have graced the planet. His marriage has been and gone, leaving three children along the way. When we met seven years ago he had just driven a small rented car across Europe to pick up a borrowed mattress and carried it back tied on to the roof with string. Now he is courting a rock star and courted by the President of the United States, who called Armstrong yesterday soon after he crossed the finishing line to congratulate him on behalf of the American people.

  To call him the greatest cyclist ever would be like saying Michael Schumacher is a greater driver than Juan-Manuel Fangio. Like Schumacher he is a creature of his time, “a charismatic leader who has the best means available at his disposal”, as Alain Prost said yesterday, but that merely underlines his achievement in getting the best on offer and making the most of it. [again in hindsight, Prost’s statement is masterly in its ambiguity.]