We Were Young and Carefree (15 page)
Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
I was the only person who felt that my results from the previous year and my freshly found confidence were more than just a front. There were two views among the commentators. There were those who saw me following the example of Bernard Thévenet in 1976, in other words a Tour winner who had struggled to live up to a result that was too big for him. And there were those who, on the other hand, already had me riding down the illustrious path mapped out by the greatest names in the sport. I have to confess that every day that went past saw me more confident that the second scenario was what lay ahead. I still didn’t feel that I was a surprise winner of the Tour. I knew how good I could be and how much there was still to come. I also knew how lucky I had been in the way it had all happened. It’s hard to restrain yourself when you feel that you are going well and you are ambitious; until then, there had been nothing to hold me back.
At the same time, I knew it would be harder proving it had not been a one-off. I wasn’t afraid of that. And among my friends and I nothing had changed. We were serious when we trained. We were reliable and robust when we raced. But we were still as carefree when we had unpinned our race numbers.
At the start of that year, while we were driving back from a cyclo-cross – Guimard made us ride them and you couldn’t get out of it – we got behind the wheels of three Renault team cars to return to training camp. In one of the cars, Vincent Barteau and Christian Corre. In the other, Pascal Poisson and Marc Madiot. In the third, Julot and I. After the cyclo-cross, the mud, the slime and the cold, we drove as you always did back then: foot to the floor, a smile on your lips. It wasn’t just that there were no speed cameras, but professional cycling team cars were so popular with the officers of the law that sometimes – if not actually all the time – they would shut their eyes to traffic offences in return for a signed cap for their son or father-in-law. With this sense of impunity, all drivers of team cars, whoever and wherever they were, had no worries about redlining it. That night in the pitch dark we were gaily floating along at 200kph, bumper to bumper on the motorway, with barely a bike length between the cars. We slalomed. We pulled out at the last second. We tooted our horns. We thought we were Laffite, Prost, Jarier or Belmondo. It was how it was. But it was crazy, and dangerous. The inevitable accident came when Barteau fell asleep at the wheel, at full tilt. No one was seriously hurt, which was a miracle. He got away with one hand in plaster.
Was it luck? Let’s just say we were pushing our luck, all the time. That day – and there were plenty of others – we survived. I was well aware of it. There was one key element in my make-up compared to guys like Barteau, who were not always able to keep a grip of themselves, and even Jules, who was every bit as fragile mentally and would let himself be taken in by any shyster. I’ve always felt something holding me back, something that has always prevented me from going further than merely mucking about, as if there is a little red light which comes on inside and says: ‘That’s it, stop there.’ Whatever we were up to, my light always flashed before the other guys’. I’ve often wondered why I should be able to make myself see sense at the right moment, and how I manage to help other guys do the same by setting an example. The answer was that I so loved racing that anything that might compromise it seemed puerile. I would say to myself: ‘Careful here, that might stop you winning something.’ At the wheel of a car, for example, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about whether I might die. But on the other hand I could see how I might end up wrecking the pleasure I felt when on the bike, and risking that was out of the question.
It was particularly out of the question in 1984. Bernard Hinault, as I said, had heard the siren call coming from Bernard Tapie and had signed for a new team completely devoted to his service, La Vie Claire. Now he was a rival, and probably the most redoubtable of the lot. I was sure of that. That meant everything had changed, but there was still another big name within my team. The American Greg LeMond, who had been carefully managed by Cyrille Guimard since he signed at Renault, was in a difficult position and didn’t keep quiet about it. He had good reason: he had been pencilled in as a possible Tour winner and my surprise victory had thrown all his plans into disarray. What’s more, Guimard had not selected him for the Tour in 1983 because he was considered too young. LeMond was worried and tried to manoeuvre the team into giving him a bigger contract after he took the world title in Switzerland. Renault refused point-blank but I benefited, indirectly. The Renault management were terrified that I would ask them for an impossible sum and then go elsewhere. They were determined to keep me in the team so I turned up and demanded a contract of a million francs a year, or F80,000 (£8,000) a month. I was amazed. Instead of choking in horror, the Renault negotiator let out a sigh of relief. He had expected far worse. I mulled it over: for days and days I regretted not asking for more. To put it in perspective, I’d ended 1982 on a salary of F12,000 a month and after the 1983 Tour, up to the end of the season, I was on about F50,000. For the time, it was a great deal, even though it was next to nothing compared to what was paid out in tennis or football.
Cyrille Guimard was never concerned. There was no way I was going to leave him, and he knew it. The ‘Guimard system’ was tailor-made for me – the team, the preparation, the atmosphere – and I still had a lot to prove. In my mind, I was now the sole leader, but in the heads of the team it wasn’t like that. Since Hinault’s departure the riders seemed less certain of the situation and less inclined to give their all. There was a lack of confidence about how I would shape up, which was understandable. With his record, Hinault instilled confidence naturally. If you looked at me, and LeMond, who was the ‘reserve’ leader, we were a similar age to our teammates. It was up to us to prove what we could do and to impose ourselves as leaders. Even though the ways of the team were slowly changing under my guidance – the team’s relationship was based on friendship rather than a rigid hierarchy – winning was the thing that would settle everything down. Nothing else would do.
And then I had a colossal problem, which had to be overcome whatever I did: I was now in Hinault’s shoes and everyone would be comparing me to him. Even Guimard must have fallen into the trap. He adopted the ‘Hinault’ way for me, item by item. The same programme, the same way of talking; everything was the same. It was too much: I wasn’t Hinault but, paradoxically, Guimard wasn’t able to change to suit me. And I was too young to know everything about my body and make him adopt new ways of thinking, new innovations.
No one conceived that I might need a racing programme that was different to the one Hinault had followed. I had won my first Tour and it was hard to imagine that anything might have gone wrong. Objectively speaking, there was no reason to change anything. We just reproduced what had worked in the past. And I paid the price. Fortunately I was really serious about my work: I didn’t want to let anyone down.
The pressure mounted and was all centred on me. The more intense it became, the more I felt relaxed, serene, strong. My legs and my mind were functioning in complete harmony. That may sound pretentious but that’s how it was.
CHAPTER 15
COKE IN STOCK
When I imagine the uninitiated reader going through the excesses and illusions of our little world, I do wonder how it all looks. No doubt this visitor would observe our mixed-up ways, and would feel that our actions were every bit as foolish as we ourselves were. We were young, impudent, and sometimes open to youthful temptation.
Talking of temptation, the Tour of Colombia 1984, or the Clásico RCN, was an astonishing experience, one for which I was hardly ready. As far as the race went, there wasn’t much to relate, apart from a pair of stage wins, one for Charly Mottet, and one for me on the final stage. The event was perfect preparation because it all took place at over 2000m above sea level, just right for boosting our red blood-cell counts. All we had to do was make the most of it and keep our eyes on the job.
As for the ambience, sometimes it was more fun than work. But we weren’t the ringleaders, that’s the least I can say, and I realised during that week that what we got up to in France was the stuff of mere choirboys compared to the values that ruled cycling in the world of the bad lads. The Colombians have a delightful way of reaching an accommodation with reality. I say delightful because they clearly don’t mind breaking a rule or two, they laugh all the time, they enjoy life and cycling and they love pedalling through their homeland cheered on by vast crowds who’ve come to hail their heroes: the Colombians were professionals worthy of being in the biggest European races.
Back then, the races there seemed to be sponsored by the local mafia. The cash flowed in torrents and there were guns in suit pockets. All the racing was rigged and on a more serious note, cocaine was dished up instead of dessert. I can remember one guy in the caravan, clearly a dealer, who had kilos and kilos of white powder on offer in the boot of his car. It was the holy grail: ten dollars a kilo. Bargain basement. Every morning, the buyers formed an orderly line, all but turning up with race numbers on their backs.
Caught up in this happy shiny world, the journalists were smiling from morning till night, snorting all day. And we messed about as well, just once, just to see what happened. It was a day that could have ruined my entire career.
Because we kept hearing people saying ‘It’s the best in the world’, ‘My God it’s amazing’, eventually we thought, ‘Come on, let’s give it a whirl.’ We did it the evening before the finish in Bogotá, where the Clásico always ended. We weren’t taking the race that seriously, so there wasn’t much at stake. Four of us got together in a hotel room, like kids with a new toy. Each of us had a gram, we divided it up and snorted.
Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I looked at the guy next to me. ‘Can you feel anything?’ ‘No.’ We couldn’t believe it. What a let-down. We pulled out another gram, shared it out and began again. Still nothing. ‘Is that all there is to coke?’ I asked, unhappily. I ended up believing that we had just been sold icing sugar. We had no idea what to do, so we snorted the whole lot. A gram each melting away in our noses.
We obviously weren’t patient enough with the first couple of doses. Clearly, the effects eventually reached our dumb little brains. Omigod. Wow. My head turned inside out. It was an indescribable feeling, a total loss of mental control; my feet left the ground. I felt as if I was producing ideas so fast that my mind couldn’t keep track of them. I had no idea who I was.
We had to go somewhere and do something; the call was too strong for us. We were so stoned we could have done anything. Off we went, and came across Cyrille Guimard and the journalist Daniel Pautrat in a bar. ‘Don’t muck about, get to bed,’ said Guimard. ‘I feel like having fun,’ I replied. I didn’t listen to a word he said. I got completely out of it, in some dodgy joint or other.
A bit later, Guimard – who didn’t nanny us – was looking for me all over. He was worried: I might end up in trouble, or just get mugged. He finally persuaded us to go back to the hotel. But with the powder still in control, there was no chance of sleep. I kept talking with my friends for the rest of the night, until dawn broke.
Next morning in the start village I was in fine form even though I hadn’t closed my eyes all night. And I was flying on the bike, so much so that I won the last stage in Bogotá. Then, when I had to go to the medical control, I realised how thoughtless I had been. In a fraction of a second I saw my whole career run past me. I couldn’t stop thinking: ‘But why on earth did I want to go and win that stage. Why?’ Of course, I believed I was going to test positive. That was the only possible outcome.
Then, before I went and peed in the bottle, I thought for a couple of minutes about where I was, about the last week’s racing, about what I’d seen and what I’d heard. The Colombians had won most of the stages and some of them seemed to be riding on cocaine. Eureka! Some of the Colombian drug-testers were turning a blind eye. I was a bit worried when I went to the control, but my logical line of thinking calmed me down. And as I expected, there was no nasty surprise after the test. I was as pure as the driven snow. White as powder.
Thinking back today, I realise it was idiotic, a massive risk. Not just because of the chance of testing positive, but because of that night out on the town where I could have come to the worst. The specialists in breaking the rules were used to risks like this. I wasn’t.
CHAPTER 16
TRAGEDIA DELL’ARTE
Among the curious menagerie of creatures that make up the cycling world, only the truly exceptional ones last, and survive down the ages. I wasn’t yet among them. But with all the excessive emotions to be found there, the roads of Italy might just be the new platform I had been waiting for. I yearned to get there. I had nothing but good memories of the Tour of Italy, which I had ridden as a new professional in 1982.
Our reunion could not have been more auspicious: I was fired up by this legendary race. Dino Buzzati was spot on when he wrote: ‘The Giro is one of the last pinnacles of the minds of men, a bastion of romanticism under siege from the mundane power of progress.’ The great writer understood that the Giro has never given up its true spirit and in my day that was even more true than it is now. I was completely bowled over by Italian cycling’s intensity, which seemed to belong to another time. I loved the spectators, overcome with passion yet full of languor at the same time. I loved the human warmth, the Italian urge to communicate, the shouts, the language. I loved the beauty of the countryside, its lustrous colours, the glare of the day, the warmth and coolness of the nights. I loved the delicately poised villages, the mountains in May, running with meltwater from the snow. I liked suffering on those roads. I felt good in Italy and my passion for the country was never to fade. The fact that I would later race for an Italian team was no coincidence.
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