We Were Young and Carefree (21 page)

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Authors: Laurent Fignon

BOOK: We Were Young and Carefree
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In Cannes, it was dark when I crossed the finish line. It was dark inside me as well. I was brimming with blackness. I was sick and tired of this season, fed up that it was proving impossible to bend destiny to my will. A few days after Blois–Chaville I cracked mentally. I almost gave it all up. I wanted to stop altogether and get rid of everything. For the first time in my career I could feel true hatred: of myself, everyone else, and the whole world.
CHAPTER 21
VICIOUS CYCLE
My relationship with Cyrille Guimard was both complex and close. We had always been hand in glove and stayed that way in spite of everything that happened, in spite of my disappointing performances, which had an effect on everyone. But by now, Guimard the administrator had gradually gained the upper hand on Guimard the legendary cycling expert and former top pro. His calculating side got the better of his human side.
Without having my nose in the accounts – although I was co-owner – I could tell that things weren’t working out in the team. Guimard wanted to cut back on everything although there was no reason to economise. I had already noticed a few serious gaps during the 1986 season but from the start of 1987 we began flirting with amateurism. There was a host of details that were lacking. It wasn’t running smoothly.
Little by little I became aware that this was no longer the best team in the world – this lasted until 1989 – simply because Guimard was now refusing to get his chequebook out. As a result some of the team riders were unable to do what was asked of them over the long term. And apart from Charly Mottet there was no real co-leader for some of the races. The back-room staff weren’t doing their jobs right in some instances. There were some things that might as well have been held together with string. No professional team can withstand such poor practice. There were some races where Guimard would only send two vehicles, which left us with no margin for error. Hitherto any problems such as a breakdown would have had no implications for the riders, but now it would suck in everyone. Time would be lost, tempers raised and effort wasted. Sometimes we were left asking other teams to give us a lift back to our hotels. It was rubbish, on the grand scale.
As for me, in the eyes of my teammates, I was at fault, twice over. Firstly because I was not producing results befitting my reputation and secondly because, as co-owner with Guimard, I was jointly responsible for the way things were going down the drain. But again, Guimard showed his weak side. The atmosphere got more and more tense, but instead of talking calmly with me about it, so that we could jointly make some decisions, he became fixated by the finances rather than the strategy. It was not the best support at a time when I needed to regain some stability.
There was a context. Times were changing quickly. Cycling would soon cease to bear any resemblance to what it had been, thanks to the joint effects of globalisation and the consequence of the arrival of men like Bernard Tapie strewing dollar bills behind them. I had come across Tapie when I was riding for Renault. He wanted to hire me, because he wanted all the best riders, but our meeting was a joke. He only wanted to talk about money, never about racing or competing. As a result we never really had the time to discuss a contract or its possible terms. We simply weren’t on the same wavelength. He was backing the wrong horse with me. I wasn’t ready to do anything for money, which may have come as a surprise to him.
Well, the fabulous blend of seriousness and frivolity which had long been the hallmark of cycling was dissipating before our disbelieving eyes. I liked change and would never be against a new order displacing an old one, but even I felt a bit disorientated, as if I’d been expelled from my old home. All the teams began being more professional, but they took it to extremes. Many of them now thought more about ‘earning’, and cash, than they did about racing to get results. The time had come when winners were to be constantly overshadowed by ‘earners’. Cyrille and I had devised a system in which sportsmen were able to take full control, but we were its victims.
Guimard was a curious man. When it came to the sporting side of team management he was uncontestably the number one, one of the best in cycling history. But as an administrator he was miscast, completely out of his depth. He landed us in a mess and that in turn meant we wasted time, because reinvigorating a professional team which is dying is like getting an oiltanker to change course. It calls for patience, and a large amount of persistence to keep holding the wheel.
I should show some humility at this point. About now I began to display a character trait that was new to me. I wasn’t capable of dealing with times of personal crisis either. I needed to plumb the depths of the abyss, because I had no idea how to stop falling. And at these times, when I was feeling utterly vulnerable, Guimard was of no help. Had we taken on too much together? Was I bearing too much responsibility for the team on my shoulders? Maybe, but until these episodes I had never felt under real pressure in anything I did; it had been the opposite. So why was it happening now? There were plenty of people who ended up wondering about my health, my willpower and my ability to return to being my former self. One journalist asked me straight up about it. I gave him a terse answer: ‘Even if I’m not good, I will go on.’ It sounded like an admission of weakness, as if I was aware of something. My mind had finally taken on board the fact that I might go back to being a mere footsoldier. But the 1986 Tour stuck in my throat. I had been deeply annoyed by the comings and goings between Hinault and LeMond, the sort of arrangement that they reached in view of everyone.
To stop the rot but without shaking up Guimard too much I hired Alain Gallopin at my own expense. He had had a curious career. He had turned professional at the same time as I did, in 1982. Three months after he made his debut, his own
directeur sportif
had run him down with a car. He suffered a serious skull fracture, came close to death and could not race again. A few months later he began studying to be a sports therapist. I told him: ‘When you’ve got your degree, call me.’ So in 1986 he phoned as agreed and I took him on, without being particularly aware that he would become far more than just company on the road. What is Alain? A friend, a confidant, a close companion. I have gone through more at his side than with all my family put together. There are not many like him: he plays fair, he’s reliable, loyal and modest. A rare bird.
I wanted him to work with me partly because of his skill as a therapist but also because he was disciplined and had organising ability that would take him far outside France one day. He was at my side continually and relieved my mind of everything that might have detracted from getting ready to race. I also needed to have someone I could rely on in my work and in a deeply fraternal way, and he did as well. He was many things at once: a brother, a confidant, a masseur, a trainer, a shoulder to lean on. We would work together until the end of my career.
To pile up the kilometres and get some speed in my legs I took part in the Bremen Six Day at the start of 1987. I had done plenty of work beforehand, but it wasn’t enough to compete on even terms with the specialists. There was no doping control and there should have been a massive trophy merely for the amphetamines doing the rounds. The pace was too high for me and on the first day I struggled to hang on to the wheels. Everyone thought: ‘He’s going to grovel’, but they didn’t understand my make-up, even though the racing was hard and the demands hellish: we rode on six days and seven nights, about 200km each day at about 50kph average speed. Slowly but surely I got in the groove and came seventh, ten laps down on the winners. The ‘stars’ like me were well paid: about 50,000 francs a day. We were paid so well that the professional track racers objected to the sums paid to the non-specialists who were sometimes dangerous and often unable to put up a performance worthy of their status. I liked these working-class events, with a glowing crowd overflowing with beer and knocking back hot sausages. With my blond hair, glasses and strong jaw, with the reputation I had for winning legendary events, in a modest way I helped to draw in the crowds twice a day, for an afternoon and a night session. I gave it all I could among the little tribe of trackies, who were halfway to being zombies. They kicked off the night by dipping their lips into flasks of pure amphetamine and ended up in their little huts in the wee hours among the beer fumes and the snores of fans sleeping off the drink.
As it was now public knowledge that I was being well paid to race and as I could turn a pedal or two, the big guys had no option but to get me into their combines, but beforehand some of them did their best to make me pay in the literal sense as well. They wanted cash, nothing else. And if you resisted you had to watch out for anything, right up to having your kit stolen. There were threats: the whole thing was built on a web of power and intimidation. To survive, you had no option but to be strong. There were Madison relay races that could last up to ninety minutes, where everything was rigged but you still had to hold your place. Only a few teams – the best – were in on the deal and knew in advance how many laps they could gain during a Madison. The big guys would sort it out among themselves and would come to see us and allot each team their number of laps. They might say ‘seven laps’ and then you would have to suffer for your bread, because those laps had to be gained during the ninety minutes. It wasn’t easy going through with it. Because if you didn’t keep your end of it you might be left out the next time the deal was done. You would be relegated to the ranks of the ‘small teams’ and then merely make up the numbers. And you could kiss goodbye to respect and status.
These happy festivities dedicated to the kings of the boards – half party, half proper racing – restored my strength and vigour. I was ready to get back on the road, with a fighter’s morale, even if I was still not at the level that might have been expected of me. What was more, although I was insulated and perhaps actually privileged simply because I had Alain Gallopin to look after me, the structural problems within the team continued to deepen. At the height of the crisis Guimard and the Madiot brothers fell out. But Yvon and Marc were two corner-stones of our credibility. Arguing with them was just taking yet another risk but the hostility would persist until, inevitably and stupidly, it arrived at breaking point.
When I started the Tour of Spain, with the status of ‘outsider’, no longer that of a favourite, I had been struggling for several days with a raging sinusitis. The doctor didn’t want me to start, and it was a death ride for several days. My results were pathetic. After finishing twenty-eighth in the prologue I was pushed out of an echelon on the first stage and was eighty-third. It was just one debacle after another, in spite of one great ride through the hills for a prestigious stage win at Avila, the same one that Hinault had won in 1983. I was not capable of moving mountains and my ‘outsider’ status was confirmed with an overall placing that still left me with a sense of what might have been: third. I wasn’t able to win or finish where I wanted but at least I wasn’t thirty minutes behind the leader, the Colombian Luis Herrera.
Which brings me to a little story. Herrera’s team manager had a quiet little word with Guimard before the last stage. Herrera had only a small lead on the German Raimund Dietzen and the whole Colombian team was afraid that Dietzen’s team might attack if the final stage was windy. Guimard warned us that the Colombians were offering to pay us not to join in any attacks; as far as we were concerned, we had no intention of attacking anyway, so we accepted the offer: 30,000 francs per man. On that stage, there was a howling gale, three-quarters tailwind, and the Colombians had been right to be nervous: it was just the situation to set up echelons and split the race apart. In fact, if we had wanted to take the initiative we could have blown their scrawny carcasses to the four corners of Spain.
To be honest, I’d had enough of Spain, which clearly was never going to work for me and I had absolutely no intention of missing the plane I was booked on that evening, two hours after the scheduled finish. But with the tailwind on our backs, the organisers put the start time back and made it look as if we might end up missing the Paris flight. You should have seen Herrera’s face when all the team went and began riding on the front. Panic set in and he believed we were stabbing him in the back. ‘What are you riding for? We paid you!’ he shouted at me. I soon put him in the picture. I was just homesick. He was overjoyed to put his name on the Vuelta’s role of honour. The Colombians were hysterical with joy and a couple of them dished out cocaine by the packet to whoever might want it. Some of the team used to bring it into Europe hidden in the frames of the bikes.
I left that Tour of Spain with my head hanging, in a rather undignified way. I was unhappy with it all and didn’t go to the podium where the first three on overall classification were rewarded. It was an affront to the organisers but my mind was elsewhere. Not that I have any idea where.
I was driven to the airport, still in my racing kit. Before taking the plane that would fly me home I got changed in the public toilets like a common thief. I desperately wanted to get away. It was shameful.
CHAPTER 22
BOTTLE BUT NO DRUG
On the one hand, you have noble tales of high deeds; on the other hand, you have a gutter press which exaggerates cyclists’ misdemeanours out of all proportion. On 28 May 1987 I experienced one of the strangest and darkest episodes of my career. I was riding the Grand Prix de Wallonie, a fine race which was run over 215 kilometres around the Namur area. I won fairly easily ahead of Pascal Poisson, which was something to be pleased about. A few days later, however, I was notified that I had tested positive due to the presence of amphetamines in my urine sample. I was devastated because it was rubbish, just like the rest of the story.

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