We Were Young and Carefree (28 page)

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Authors: Laurent Fignon

BOOK: We Were Young and Carefree
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My act of rebellion was a silent one. At kilometre 124 as we approached the feeding station at Villers-Bocage, I was already in limbo, a footnote in the story of the 1990 Tour and I let myself slip behind a small group that was trying to regain contact with the bunch. I pulled on the brakes and got off the bike. I unpinned my race numbers. I said nothing, just made this one proud gesture. Unpinning my race numbers. It wasn’t a normal abandon and it certainly didn’t feel like capitulation. No, it was a gesture born of disillusionment and pride, a way of sticking up two fingers at fate. You must never disdain a symbolic gesture when you get the chance, even if it’s done in infinite sadness. Otherwise you end up looking for them everywhere, constantly seeking compensation or reparation to boost your soul. It’s like an eternal time trial, and the
contre la montre
is a lonely affair.
I remember that evening, in a state of utter depression, I thought back to what I had told Alain Gallopin more than a year before: ‘1989 will be the last year I can win the Tour.’ The 1990 Tour had gone elsewhere, without me, and I could not escape from the notion that my premonition was coming true. It was a devastating idea. Soul-destroying and yet so completely real.
The end of the season was like going through a desert. I don’t remember much about it: there wasn’t a great deal of any interest.
Things were so bad that at the start of 1991 I forced myself to make one single resolution: not to go through another year of hell. That was all that mattered. I now entered a time filled with strange doubts. Wondering about what I wanted to do next with my life – and not just my cycling career – I began to question whether I really still wanted to suffer desperately on a bike. I knew that I was no longer the cyclist I had been in 1983 and that it was now time to stop kidding myself. It was no longer a matter of courage, but whether or not. I still had a burning desire to keep living the life of a professional cyclist with all the personal sacrifice that goes with it. I can still see myself, a few weeks earlier, saying to Cyrille Guimard just how worn out with it all I was and – more seriously than anything else in the world – explaining how I saw our work at Maxi-Sports developing in the future.
I was thirty years old. He was thirteen years older. I never for an instant imagined that I could cause him the slightest concern, but with hindsight I believe that Guimard thought I wanted to edge him out. The idea of having two managers in our business was not something he could envisage. That was a mistake on his part. There was no reason why we should tread on each other’s toes and we knew each other inside out. The trouble was that I felt rapidly that something was going against the grain with him. Day after day, he didn’t seem to see me in the same way as he had in the past. He did not approve of my wish to become more involved in running the team. Deep down, Guimard did not agree but he refrained from admitting it to me face to face. As for me, after ten years as a professional bike rider I was at the end of my natural cycle. I have noticed since that every ten years I seem to want to change something fundamental.
A new co-leader, Luc Leblanc, had signed with the team and I could clearly see from the outset that Guimard was trying to turn his ambition against me. Guimard manipulated him and that was all Leblanc needed. He showed few scruples, in contrast to what he claimed as soon as a microphone was shoved under his nose. He set to this perverse game with astonishing gusto. Guimard was no longer like he used to be. The man I had been so fond of was drifting away from me, irretrievably, with some added impetus from the Castorama directors. As opposed to what we had expected, these guys were beginning to push Guimard over the edge by racking up the pressure on him. Not only did they want to know every detail of our accounts, such as how much we paid the riders, but more seriously they began to ask for something more than results: they wanted me to be a television ‘presence’.
It was part of a bigger picture. The reaper was sharpening his scythe. He was about to cut a swathe through the cycling I had known. This was new territory for me, and also for Guimard. Even if he didn’t let me in on everything, I am personally convinced that never before had he been under the slightest pressure either from Renault or from Système U. So now we were being influenced by the need for a return on our sponsor’s investment not merely through the image of the team, but also through our results. Our world was undergoing a radical change, and I didn’t like it. Never had I envisaged a sponsor wanting to interfere in the sporting side of the team to that extent. I felt that it was scandalous and degrading for our integrity. But Guimard had clearly got off on the wrong footing with them or else had lost any bargaining power that might have enabled him to resist in some way. He refused to be disturbed by it.
I felt I was heading into uncharted territory. I was the co-owner of the team but Guimard was becoming more distant from me and was deciding a huge number of things without consulting me. The sponsor was putting a gun to our heads and was exerting power over the team that I felt to be damaging and possibly fatal. And amidst all this I was searching in vain for my old power on the bike and for the motivation without which it was meaningless to imagine better days.
I finished Paris-Nice in tenth place, which barely matched what I’d hoped for, and during the race I had a massive row with Guimard. During a stage where we were supposed to keep our cards to our chests and save our strength, all of a sudden I saw several members of the team get to the head of the peloton and begin riding hard as if they were defending the leader’s jersey. I had no idea what was going on and rode up to find out. I had a grumble and asked what they were up to. One of them shouted, ‘Cyrille asked us to get riding.’ There was a simple explanation: Guimard had decided to implement a cunning manoeuvre to defeat the Toshiba team, but without telling me. Guimard had not warned me, not even a hint! It was unthinkable: until then we had always discussed race tactics together, exchanged our views and then decided on the line to follow. It was the first time that he had acted in this way. I felt betrayed.
That evening at the hotel, Cyrille and I exchanged words. Swear words. It amounted to mutually assured destruction. For the first time in our life together we didn’t like each other any more.
An incredible thing happened a few weeks later at Paris–Roubaix. Guimard came up alongside me in the car and, at a completely pointless moment in strategic terms, he asked me to get up to the front of the race because we didn’t have anyone from the team showing his face. I didn’t really understand at the time why he was asking us to take this precaution but I assumed that he must know what he was doing so I blindly went along with the tactic. I only learned the truth a little later. It was a grim truth that I had not dared admit to myself beforehand, because I knew how I would react. The Castorama directors had put pressure on Guimard to ensure an ‘on camera presence’. They wanted ‘television time’ so that at the start of live coverage the cameras could show their colours. I was disgusted by the idea. The important thing on Paris–Roubaix was to be in the front in the final phases, rather than grinning at the television pretending to put on a show. It was the first time I had been asked to ‘do it for the cameras’.
I need hardly say that I made my feelings clear to Guimard after I learned about his dealings with the sponsor. This latest violent verbal altercation left me shocked and depressed. Our differences had become irreparable. We both decided, without anything being said, that we were not going to talk to each other any more. We even avoided meeting.
I have no idea how far the breakdown in my relationship with the man who had shared my whole life as an elite sportsman – in other words, most of my adult life – had a knock-on effect on my general behaviour and on my private life. But it just so happened that at the same time I began to experience serious difficulties in my relationship with my wife Nathalie. It was more and more of a struggle to go back home with a carefree, joyful heart. The lack of care and of the haven of peace that I felt I should be waiting when I returned home had turned into a furnace of tension as well. Nothing was working out there either.
These are painful memories of multiple doubts that invaded every area of my life. My whole environment seemed to be falling apart and the more time passed the more everything around me seemed destined to failure, personal failure. Without feeling completely responsible for all this, apart from my lack of success on the bike, I believe that I was ground down by everything, by the pace of a life lived at a hundred kilometres per hour and the humdrum routine that I had got into over the years. I did the same work. I rode for the same team. The same people looked after me. I came home to the same woman. It was a hard thing to admit but I needed change. I needed a revolution.
The inevitable duly happened. Cyrille Guimard didn’t content himself with keeping me at arm’s length but ended up working against me. At the time Guimard had a vast amount of personal credit among the press and the wider public and he had no trouble exerting his influence. So for the journalists, for example, to explain away my repeated lack of results, he dreamed up imaginary injuries that were all equally grotesque. There were some hacks who weren’t fooled, which simply added to the breakdown in the relationship.
I had no notion how difficult Guimard would be. At the Giro di Puglia, not long before the 1991 Tour de France, I actually managed to win the penultimate stage. I was happy, but not my manager, who looked pretty ill at ease. Guess why. If I had not managed to win a single race before the start of the Tour, Guimard might well have dropped me from the Tour squad. Unfortunately for him not only did I manage to raise my arms in a victory salute but it actually looked as if I might be coming into some kind of form for the Tour. His plans were going awry. Up to a certain point, anyway.
Before the French road race championship I was called to a meeting with Guimard and Jean-Hugues Loyez. During the season I had been calling Loyez to explain to him in no uncertain terms that I was having trouble working with Guimard and that I would no longer be in the team in 1992, whatever happened and however I decided to continue my career. I was far from having any notion of what was going to happen in this meeting which, to begin with, seemed more like a trial to me. I had barely sat down before Guimard began laying into me, accusing me of ‘failing to do my job properly’ and ‘disrupting the harmony of the team’ by ‘failing to make proper allowances for the demands of the press and other media’. Then he added: ‘You have to make a public statement that you are not riding the Tour.’
I was flabbergasted, to say the least. But I responded immediately, calmly but firmly. I said ‘What?’ Then I added without raising my voice but leaving no doubt that I was determined on it: ‘I am doing the Tour. That’s all there is to it.’ Then I turned to Guimard, looking him straight in the eye. ‘From this moment on, I’m not saying anything more to you. Guimard, you should be ashamed of yourself.’
In contrast to what I assumed was coming, Loyez seemed rather impressed by my attitude. He clearly hadn’t expected me to react like this, and Guimard wasn’t ready for it either. He tried to counter-attack by demanding certain conditions that he was sure would be unacceptable to me.
Firstly, I was to apologise to the press and answer any requests that might be made of me.
Secondly, I was to give up my status as leader and ride for the good of the team.
Then I turned to Loyez. ‘If you refuse to give me the chance to ride the Tour you will have to give an explanation in public. Otherwise it will come from me, and I will give a full account of how you are treating me. You must understand that there is no chance of me saying that I am the one who doesn’t want to race the Tour.’ They looked at each other in silence. ‘I will set one condition,’ I continued.
Guimard interrupted, ‘You have no right to set conditions.’
I looked at him: ‘I’ll hear nothing from you. I don’t talk to doormats.’ Then I turned back to Loyez. ‘I want the following conditions. After the Tour de France, which I will race as well as I can, you will ask nothing else of me. There will be no demands from your side and I will race whatever I want. That’s all. Guimard will no longer force me to do anything. Up to the Tour, I agree that I will do everything I can to make life easy for you, but afterwards it’s all over. I’ll be out of Castorama.’
Guimard shouted: ‘But I’m the boss.’
I didn’t deign to reply. To me he had become a somewhat pathetic figure.
We all understood that I was prepared to make concessions in order to start the Tour, but my determination had frozen their blood. Guimard, who was no longer my master, was furious, but clearly he had no option but to give way.
Eventually I was alone for a second with Jean-Hugues Loyez who was absolutely determined to talk to me one-to-one. He just said, ‘Well done, Monsieur Fignon.’
I didn’t understand how he had reacted: he had not an ounce of enmity towards me, he was just astonished, as if he had been impressed. But what was there to be impressed at?
CHAPTER 30
FINISHING WITH GUIMARD IS NEVER PRETTY
When we turned up in Lyon for the start of the 1991 Tour de France, the fact that Guimard and I had reached the point of no return had seeped out into the cycling world. There had been insinuating articles in the papers that hinted at a possible divorce, but by skirting round the topic and talking in general terms everyone held back a little to avoid compromising our chances in the Tour. That was going to be a grim affair due to the circumstances. The best that can be said is that there weren’t many smiles in the camp.

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