Rough Ride (5 page)

We rested between stages in a cold, stone cottage on damp mattresses. The morale in the team was zero. We just looked at each other with the same thought in all our heads: 'What the hell are we doing here?' I decided that this pro life wasn't for me. I hated it. The afternoon stage was a nightmare. Some Portuguese bastard attacked at the bottom of the first climb and the green jerseys were immediately dropped. Raphael was in a dreadful state and was coughing up blood. Gary Thompson was physically and mentally knackered. They both quickly abandoned. I rode on in a group of five which included a Japanese rider, Takahashi. For a Japanese to get this far in the Tour de L'Avenir was an outstanding achievement. His team manager was leaning out of the car window with a loudhailer in his hand, and screamed encouragement in Japanese every time the road went up, which was regularly. This started getting to me after a while. I was irritated by my poor form and annoyed that I would have to endure the race for another six days. And now, on top of all this, there was this bloody manager making all this noise for a guy who was half an hour down. Had they no shame? The rage became uncontrollable and I turned to the Japanese team manager and shouted at the top of my voice, 'Shut fuckin' up.'

I will never forget the look on his face. He was terrified, horrified; he sat back in his car and did not say another word for the rest of the day. I felt guilty about it the next day, so I went up to him and apologised.

Raphael and Thompson both left for home and I envied them. There were only myself and John 'Kippers' McQuaid left. 'Kippers' would have got great pleasure in returning home the only Irish finisher and I would have heard about it for the rest of my life. I suppose it was this more than anything that made me go on, but I hated it. I dreaded getting up every morning to face another day's racing. And the pros irritated me: always good humoured, always laughing and joking. I had started the race as a morning grouch but by the end I was an all-day grouch. Cyril Guimard, the famous professional
directeur sportif,
also upset me. I was on the massage couch getting a rub and the hotel door was open. Guimard walked in, much to my surprise and delight. I looked at him in wonder. The great Cyril Guimard in
my
room. He approached the massage table, lifted the towel that covered my privates and said 'Baf!', waving his hand in a dismissive way and then walked out. The bastard; I hated him for it.

'Kippers' was eliminated with two stages to go, leaving me the sole Irish survivor. Five of those who had abandoned had flown home but there were no more air tickets and so we had to take the boat. I didn't really care, I just wanted to get away from there. It had been a bad end to a great season. I was saturated with cycling and needed a good rest.

I finished my four-year apprenticeship at Dublin Airport shortly afterwards. It was the policy of the company, Aer Rianta, to train apprentices and then sack them once the apprenticeship was over. I was out of a job. Where next? My plan had always been to complete my apprenticeship and then go to France to try for a pro contract, but the Tour de L'Avenir had opened my eyes. For four years Raphael and I had told our friends, family and, most importantly, the cycling journalists that we would be going to France in 1984. Could we turn back now? Then there were the Olympics to consider. Los Angeles was fast approaching and, although I was fairly sure of a place, there was no guarantee. France could clinch my selection and offer me the best preparation. So I suppose it was three things, no job, Los Angeles and the fear of being called 'chicken', which led us to the ACBB club in Paris in February 1984. We were following in the footsteps of the greats, Elliot, Roche, Millar and Anderson. We were also following in the not-so-glorious footsteps of our father, who had set out on the same quest twenty-five years earlier.

A big man met us at the airport. He had huge, shovel-like hands, greying hair and tanned skin. We thought he might be Mickey Wiegant, the legendary ACBB manager, or maybe Claude Escalon, the
directeur sportif,
but we weren't sure and hadn't the courage to ask. We sat in the back of his car like two terrified children as he drove us to Boulogne Billancourt, a suburb west of Paris.

On our arrival at the ACBB sports centre, a not quite middle-aged man in a leather jacket approached us. There was something almost sinister about his smile. I took an immediate dislike to him because of it. He introduced himself as Claude Escalon. He gave us two new Peugeot bikes, just like the pros had, and some tracksuits, jerseys and shorts. It was great to be given so much free gear but I wasn't happy with the saddle on the bike. Plucking up some courage I tried to explain to him in pidgin English that I wanted to fit my own. He laughed. We had to use the team issue saddles. Bernard Hinault used the same saddle.

'If they are good enough for Bernard, they are good enough for you.' There was no arguing with that so I agreed to use his saddle.

At four the next morning, we left in a VW van for the south of France. We were not the only foreigners at the club. There were also a New Zealander (Gerry Golder), two Englishmen (Kenny Knight and Christian Yates, a brother of Sean's), a Canadian and 'les frères Kimmage'. After twelve hours' driving we arrived at our base for the opening races, the Hotel la Quietude at Les Issambres on the Cote d'Azur. Mickey Wiegant was at the hotel when we arrived. He was an odd-looking man, impossible to put an age to, just one of those blokes who never seem to get any older. He wore a brown leather jacket and drove a huge Rover. He spoke at 400 miles an hour and we couldn't understand a word he said. He insisted we call him 'Monsieur Wiegant'. We ate when he gave us the order to eat. We spoke when he gave us permission to speak. He made us feel very small.

The team's French riders drove down in their own cars. There was also a Belgian. I remember him because of all the shit he used to take before meals: pills,
ampoules –
he was a right bloody pharmacist. When he'd catch us staring during his pill-popping, he'd say 'vitamins'. The French formed a clan and weren't too friendly towards us. We, the English speakers, formed our own clan. A Norwegian, Dag Otto Lauritzen, arrived a few days later, but he stayed at Wiegant's house and was clearly the old man's favourite. Training started immediately. We set off in a large group and followed the team car, which was driven by Escalon but directed by Wiegant.

They played little games with us. At the top of a hill Wiegant would hold a racing tyre out of the window – the prize for the first rider to the top. On the first training spin, I won two tyres. I found the first races more difficult.

Monsieur Wiegant instructed us that in his team the individual rider's personal honour did not matter. It was the victory of the team that counted. To emphasise this he would buy a huge cream cake and divide it among us equally any time an ACBB rider won. Lauritzen was the star and he won several of the opening races. A fourth place in a race at St Tropez was my best placing of the month-long stay. Raphael was riding better and was narrowly beaten in a race at St Maxime, but there was no cream cake. With Monsieur Wiegant cream cakes were for winning; second was nowhere.

During the month some of the professional riders would come to the hotel to pay homage to their former mentor and guru, Monsieur Wiegant. Bernard Thevenet, Robert Millar, Raphael Geminiani and Stephen Roche all visited and lunched with the old man. Stephen introduced me to his
directeur sportif,
Bernard Thevenet. He had a lovely, warm smile that lit up his face. I liked him.

At the end of February we drove back to Paris to begin the serious races, the amateur classics. Most of the foreigners stayed together in a flat near the team's headquarters but Raphael and I were taken to a small flat on the opposite side of Paris at Vincennes. As we entered the flat, Abel, the giant masseur who had collected us at the airport, led us down to this underground dungeon with a mud floor. I can remember thinking, 'Jesus Christ, how are we going to survive here?', but he was just showing us the shed for the bikes. The flat was five floors up a narrow wooden staircase.

We had no problems in settling in. I did the cooking and Raphael the cleaning. The flat had an old black and white television and a telephone for incoming calls only. The toilet was the hole-in-the-ground type. It doubled as a shower by placing a wooden grille over the hole. This was a great inconvenience at first. To compensate, Raphael took the middle out of one of the wooden kitchen chairs and tried sitting on the wooden frame. It didn't work, and in the end we had to squat. We became such good shots that we could shoot between the gaps in the shower grille after a while. The flat was fine. We liked being independent of the other foreigners and enjoyed the privacy. But it was awkward having to ride across Paris the day before a race to change a tyre or get information about what was going on. Wiegant remained at his house at Les Issambres, coming to Paris for the big races.

Paris–Ezy was the first classic of the season. It started in the darkness of a small foggy village at eight in the morning. I never understood why the classics always started at such a ridiculous hour. An eight o'clock start meant getting up at four. Nutrition was the biggest problem – we had to eat three hours before the race. At four in the morning I would fry minced steak and boil rice. We had no appetite and had to force-feed ourselves. As soon as breakfast-cum-dinner was over we would leave the flat, pick up the bikes from the basement and wait in the marble hallway to be collected. In our racing tights we must have looked a proper sight to the other flat residents coming home from discotheques and nightclubs. Their expressions said it all. Getting up at that hour for a bike race was totally insane, and I never got used to it.

As we waited to start the race, I was approached by a Frenchman who spoke perfect Oxford English. It wasn't our first meeting, as we had talked at a time trial a few years earlier when he had visited Ireland as a guest of the Roche family. I had asked him then about the professional life and he laughed at me, 'You don't want to be a professional, it's a horrible life.' I was shocked that a Frenchman could be so dismissive of what I felt was the greatest profession in the world and thought the guy was a nutcase. Today I admire him for his vision. We are still great friends with Jean Beaufils and his wife Ginette and have not forgotten their kindness to us in a miserable year with ACBB.

Paris–d'etatEzy was run in freezing cold wind and rain. On the finishing circuit, Raphael got into the winning move, but the uphill sprint was too hard for him and he finished fifth. We were absolutely thrilled. Fifth in the first classic of the year, what a great start. But Escalon thought otherwise. There were two other ACBB riders in the break with Raphael and neither had won. One of them, the French rider Thierry Pelosso, had gone to Escalon after the race and said he had lost because of Raphael's 'selfish tactics'. We couldn't understand a word of Escalon's raving and asked Jean Beaufils to interpret. Raphael defended himself but Escalon would have none of it, and made him the scapegoat for the defeat. Raphael's joy soon turned to tears. He was never the same again.

March and April were grim. Living in Paris was awkward for training. We had to ride for forty-five minutes in heavy traffic to find some decent country roads. So if we wanted to do a three-hour ride, we had to spend an hour and a half choking on exhaust fumes. We rode just one race a week with the club, which wasn't nearly enough to develop any kind of good form. Training was no substitute for racing and we didn't ride well. It was easy to get depressed. Some days we didn't bother to train at all; these days we labelled National Suckers Days. It usually rained in the mornings on National Suckers Days. After breakfast we'd sit looking at each other and contemplate going out into the Paris traffic on our bikes: 'No, we'll wait till it clears up.' To pass the time we'd take the Metro and sit drinking coffee on the Champs Elysées and try to figure out exactly where the Tour finished. Afterwards we'd visit the Eiffel Tower and then eat out for lunch. The afternoon was spent walking around the record shops or at an English-version movie on the Champs. The day would finish with dinner at the flat, accompanied by a bottle of cheap
vin de table
and we'd sit back and laugh about how we had been ripped off in tourist-trap Paris. But inside, we were not laughing; inside, we were screaming. ACBB was not working for us.

In April I left Paris for a week. I was picked for the national team for the Sealink International, starting at Skelmersdale near Liverpool. I felt sorry to be leaving Raphael behind. His good humour was a real tonic on the bad days at the flat. He deserved a place on the team more than I did, but Irish selectors were always reluctant to pick the two of us and so I got the nod. It was great to get out of France. My parents came across from Ireland and followed the race for the week. I struggled for the first few days – too many National Suckers Days had left me short of condition. But I started to ride well towards the end, and I returned to Paris with much better morale and form.

The classic Paris-Rouen was my first race with the club after my week's 'holiday'. The alarm went off at four in the morning and we climbed out of bed wearily. Steak and rice were consumed with the usual enthusiasm and then we gathered our kit and went down to the ground floor. It was a damp, miserable morning so we waited inside the apartment front door, sitting on the cold marble floor. Fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour. Still no sign of them. We put the bikes back in the shed, walked back upstairs and went to bed. We were sick. Sick of these heartless bastards treating us like scum. Surely we deserved at least a phone call? Furious, I phoned Escalon and demanded why no one had picked us up. He gave me a half-baked excuse about trying to contact us, and to calm me asked if we wanted to ride a race on Tuesday in a place called Ostricourt in northern France.

Ostricourt was a battle between the two strongest teams in the race, ACBB and Wasquehal, a powerful outfit being formed in the north. But the French amateur champion was also riding, and I remember being most impressed with Jean-François Bernard before team tactics got the better of him and he retired. It was a circuit race with a short climb and a kilometre stretch of cobbles on each lap. On the last lap I attacked alone on the climb and time-trialled to the finish for a solo victory. I had almost forgotten how good it felt to win a race. Ostricourt gave me immense satisfaction. Escalon shook my hand with that big smile of his but I remained cool towards him. Sunday was fresh in my mind.

In May, shortly after Ostricourt, I was told of my selection for the Olympic Games at Los Angeles. Raphael, disillusioned and short of form, decided he had had enough. Most of the foreigners who had started the year with us were gone. But there was no shortage of replacements. Australians, Brits, Americans, all were 'warmly' welcomed, tried and then unceremoniously dumped. It was like a factory production line, and it struck me that in discovering a handful of stars the club had destroyed the dreams of hundreds of amateurs whose memories of the club would be bitter and resentful as Raphael was when he returned home. He had a talent, a great talent but never got a break or the encouragement that might have made him a star. The ACBB had destroyed him. How many other great talents had been destroyed in the same way?

Encouraged by my return to form, I decided to stick it out. On the weekend that Raphael returned to Ireland I rode a three-day stage race in the north of France. It was my first stage race with the club. This was because of a French Federation rule that limited each club to one foreign rider per team. The ACBB had up to ten foreigners to choose from and I was never considered good enough, but Ostricourt changed that. Fifth on the first stage, third on the second, I became the race leader with just a seven-kilometre time trial and an afternoon stage to go. Escalon pulled out all the strokes for the time trial. I was given a special carbon-fibre bike and a one-piece racing suit for the short time trial. I was very nervous starting the test. Roche, Millar, Anderson – all had 'honoured' the ACBB in races like this one. This was my chance to join them. I blew it and lost the jersey by four seconds. Four lousy seconds. Escalon was not angry but I knew he was thinking, 'This Irish boy hasn't got it.'

I rode some evening races in Paris shortly after. It was while returning home from one of these that I heard the news. My friend David Walsh, who was working as a freelance journalist in the city for a year, told me that Martin Earley would shortly be signing as a professional with the new Spanish team Fagor for 1985. I was stunned: Earley, my arch rival. The bastard had made it as a professional. I felt more jealous than at any other time in my life.

Martin had also been picked for the Olympic Games. In July we rode a preparation race in Colorado, the Coors Classic, and then flew on to Los Angeles for the Games. I now found I no longer thought of Martin as a rival; he was assured of a pro contract, had escaped up the ladder. We became more friendly towards each other. A few days before the Olympic road race I remember training with him in the Hollywood hills. I told him that if I was given the opportunity I would turn professional for nothing. He said I was mad, but I argued that the ACBB had cost me all my savings and in a pro team I wouldn't have to put up with guys like Escalon. Looking back, I can see just how naïve about the professional game I was. Years later, when I was haggling with my
directeur sportif
Bernard Thevenet over my contract fee, I would often remember that conversation and smile. And there were
directeurs sportifs
far more ruthless than Escalon.

The Olympics were wonderful. I had always been sceptical about them, but I must admit they were one of the highlights of my career. On the big day, I was desperately unlucky – again. I had just bridged a gap to the leading group of twenty riders when a rear wheel-spoke snapped and fell out into the gear mechanism and I skidded to a halt. I didn't see the twenty-man group again. If only . . . if only . . . 'if, that word again, 'the nearly man' once more. I was riding much better than Martin that day and he finished nineteenth, the highest-ever placing by an Irish cyclist at an Olympics. I was twenty-seventh.