Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
We Were Young and Carefree (2 page)
As he told me, and as he writes here, Fignon has gone down in cycling folklore as the man who lost the closest Tour ever, rather than a man who won it twice. His place in the pantheon should be among the few who won the Tour at their first attempt – Bernard Hinault, Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx – and the elite who have taken five stage wins en route to the overall title. He is also one of the select group who have taken back to back victories in Milan–San Remo, one of the hardest Classics to win. Others include Merckx, Coppi and Classics non-pareil Roger de Vlaeminck.
Results only count for so much, however. The emotional impact a sports star makes on his chosen sphere matters far more, and that is why this biggest of characters will always be remembered for losing the Tour by eight seconds rather than for destroying Bernard Hinault in 1984. By 1989, Fignon had become an enigma. As he says in these pages, he had shut himself off from the press and his fans as he attempted to deal with the stress of coming back after countless setbacks, but on 23 July that year, he showed raw emotion in defeat. By then, it had become clear how complex his character was: what drew us to Fignon after that defeat was the brutal way in which that private man was stripped of his mask in public. It was so cruel, but so compelling.
What follows is a rare thing in a sports autobiography: the tale of the prodigy who was thrust to the top, brutally thrown down, and then spent the rest of his career trying to climb back. The true value in this book lies in the background to that great defeat: the complexity of the years that preceded the ‘eight-second afternoon’, as Fignon tried so hard to turn the clock back to 1984. Back then, we had little idea of the sheer desperation of that search: it’s all in these pages. As on that July afternoon, the mask is removed again: this time it’s voluntary, but it is no less compelling for that.
William Fotheringham, June 2010
CHAPTER 1
EIGHT SECONDS
‘Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour de France by eight seconds!’
‘No, monsieur, I’m the guy who won the Tour twice.’
We knew no fear.
Those four little words: blasphemous, outrageous, unreasonable? I chose this opening well in advance but when it came to putting those words on paper, I hesitated. I was not sure I wanted to let them out in public. Perhaps they will be seen as evidence for the prosecution rather than what they actually are: words that testify to how it was. How my time was. That’s the truth: we weren’t afraid of anything, but we didn’t do just any old thing.
What follows is my personal story, but it also describes a wider world, a lost world which created complete men rather than just sportsmen: in me, the man has always had the upper hand over the sportsman. The lust for excitement, tempests and battles has always been there. It springs from the tiniest inkling of an idea. It looks wide-eyed out at the world. I always wanted to grab life in both hands. Otherwise, what’s the point of being on this earth? Is it pride when you prefer the surge of living things to slavish complacency? Is it vanity when you want to surprise yourself again and again? Is it a crime to have a competitive soul and a gambler’s blood?
Cycling is a living, breathing art. Those cyclists who forget that are halfway to becoming sloths. Isn’t it better to gamble on victory than to secure a comfortable defeat? I didn’t want life to be somewhere else, some other time. I wanted life to be full, every instant of it, beginning again every day, I wanted it to be complete, and loaded with surprises.
You could call me a lucky man. Between the beginning and the end of the 1980s, on the cusp of two very different cycling worlds, my career saw the end of the last untroubled age of bike racing. The men of that era still looked each other in the eye. We didn’t tiptoe away when the time came to light the fuse: we preferred rousing anthems to gentle lullabies. And we didn’t mind getting burned if necessary. A true cyclist sometimes has to bite the dust before he can reach the stars.
Win.
Survive.
Hang in there.
It’s a race against oblivion, a race against time, a race against yourself: a career, a life. Can a man’s character be represented in the way he rides a bike? If so, has cycling said all it can say about me?
I’m not certain what my era stands for, but without knowing it I lived through a golden age. That sounds pretentious but here is how I define it: they were the last days when cycling was a dignified matter. You won’t find any nostalgic sentences here; at most a hint of melancholy now and again. I may linger around feelings, facts and deeds as if to keep the highlights of my story intact. I must confess: I’ve never felt it was better in my day. It was just different, that’s all, as all the various eras are. But even so I still feel that I lived through the cycling equivalent of the Swinging Sixties. I even believe I was one of the movers and shakers. Some compared me to ‘the Leader of the Pack’. Some leader. Some pack.
At the very least we never compromised in our approach to life. Let’s just say we were the rebellious element rather than yes-men. We were always alive, even if sometimes we weren’t in the best of health: we were never robots. We were crazy, but had a certain dignity about us. We were very young in some ways, very mature in others. Sometimes I’m asked: ‘In what way was it so very different?’ And the same people often add: ‘and when was the tipping point, when it all began to change?’
I have mixed feelings when I go through my memory bank for details and key scenes. But I can be fairly precise about when the change came: the turning point was the final day of the 1989 Tour de France. A day of insane sadness. A day of monstrous defeat. The only day in my whole life when a few seconds were an eternity. Many people feel that this is the day that divides two radically different kinds of cycling. Is it that surprising? The craftsmen were defeated by mass-production. Handmade goods were overwhelmed by factory-made stuff. Individuals were submerged in the anonymous mass. The people’s heroes were strangled and the glory of the Giants of the Road trickled away.
There is a before and an after. It’s 1989: the Tour de France. Eight seconds. The Champs-Elysées. A via dolorosa. Hell on the cobbles.
Come on, let’s burst the abscess before we really get started. The wound has to be left open. Let it bleed away in silence. It will bleed a good while yet.
The Tour de France is a landmark in twentieth-century history, a microcosm that creates and displays characters as over the top as the event itself. Whether you win or lose, you cannot escape that. As the winner in 1983 and 1984 I’d already drunk that cup to the full. I knew how delicious every drop tasted. And I knew the price to pay if you missed out . . .
As far as I was concerned, there was plenty at stake in the 1989 Tour. A month earlier I’d won the Giro d’Italia. Not only had I gone back to being the racer I wanted to be, but at last I could see a chance to achieve the Giro–Tour double; a major achievement that had been snatched from me in 1984. And even though I didn’t need to win the Tour to know who I was and what I was capable of, winning it again would earn me a place in the very small group of triple winners, on the same standing as a rider like Louison Bobet, for example.
However, I remember that the day before the start I suddenly thought of a phrase I’d whispered a few months earlier in the ear of my masseur and confidant, Alain Gallopin: ‘You know, 1989 will be the last year I’ll be able to win the Tour.’ I’d said it well before my win in the Giro, aware that I was nearly twenty-nine. Physically I was not over the hill – let’s not get carried away – but I sensed this was the final flowering of my physical ability. It was as if I’d had an early warning that the swansong wasn’t far off and that I had to use to the full what I had left before the swans tuned up in public. Saying that to Alain, I’d had a sudden flash of awareness.
After several years of structural crises, I knew that my team was completely behind me for the big test. With Cyrille Guimard as
directeur sportif
, the Super-U team could still be considered one of the best in the world and often was the best. Or at least I was convinced of that, deep inside. Even though I didn’t know what actually went on in other teams, in spite of whatever the guys who had left us might say, I felt that Guimard was the best manager to work with. He had retained the capacity to adapt as new generations arrived, at a time of massive upheavals within cycling, which we could all feel was mutating irrevocably into something else – but what? Cyrille put together personal training plans and all he needed was to see a guy on his bike at a training camp or even just a simple training ride, to know what the rider’s form was, how he had worked in the weeks before and what he needed to turn the pedals quicker. Guimard had that awareness in his eyes. He could analyse things rapidly, and if something had escaped him, he would rectify the situation.
directeur sportif
, the Super-U team could still be considered one of the best in the world and often was the best. Or at least I was convinced of that, deep inside. Even though I didn’t know what actually went on in other teams, in spite of whatever the guys who had left us might say, I felt that Guimard was the best manager to work with. He had retained the capacity to adapt as new generations arrived, at a time of massive upheavals within cycling, which we could all feel was mutating irrevocably into something else – but what? Cyrille put together personal training plans and all he needed was to see a guy on his bike at a training camp or even just a simple training ride, to know what the rider’s form was, how he had worked in the weeks before and what he needed to turn the pedals quicker. Guimard had that awareness in his eyes. He could analyse things rapidly, and if something had escaped him, he would rectify the situation.
This all meant that we could get going quickly at the start of the season, usually earlier than much of the opposition. And even though some of the guys in the team believed that we weren’t as strong as before – largely because they had heard themselves saying it – our spring results in 1989 soothed any nerves. The team relied too much on me, but it was the collective effort that everyone looked at. That year, we were as good as we were held up to be. And as for me, I was still going strong after being given up for dead at least a hundred times.
Before the Tour’s
grand départ
in Luxembourg, we all went through a fine training camp in the Pyrenees. I felt my form was great, and the rest of the team could see it. I was dying to get the kilometres in. And for the Tour, I had a well-knit, highly competitive team: Gérard Rué, Vincent Barteau, Thierry Marie, Pascal Simon, Dominique Garde, Christophe Lavainne, the Dane Bjarne Riis and the Swiss Heinz Imboden.
grand départ
in Luxembourg, we all went through a fine training camp in the Pyrenees. I felt my form was great, and the rest of the team could see it. I was dying to get the kilometres in. And for the Tour, I had a well-knit, highly competitive team: Gérard Rué, Vincent Barteau, Thierry Marie, Pascal Simon, Dominique Garde, Christophe Lavainne, the Dane Bjarne Riis and the Swiss Heinz Imboden.
First came the prologue, 7.8km and won by the Dutchman Erik Breukink. After going absolutely flat out, I came second in the same time as the American Greg LeMond, which suggested two things that would prove to be correct in the next three weeks. Firstly, my form was perfect. Secondly, the man to beat would probably be LeMond, who had shown very little since his serious gunshot wound during a hunting party in 1987. The man to beat would certainly not be the defending champion Pedro Delgado, who was the author of an unimaginable blunder before the race even began: he arrived at the start nearly three minutes late. Victory in the Tour was already a distant memory for him.
I can still remember it all. Before and after the prologue, the photographers were going berserk around me. I was still radiant with the reflected glory of the Giro’s pink jersey, so I’d again become salesworthy in the eyes of the press. Pictures of the likely winner shift a newspaper or two, as we all know. It was quite a spectacle. There were dozens of them in a glutinous mass all round me, popping away like machine guns, elbows all over the place, shoving me if need be. I almost had trouble keeping my mind on the job in hand. As I usually did, I grumbled at them a bit. I can’t have come across very well. What can you do? Not only do you have to concentrate on the day’s work, you have to give them what they want and then they expect you to be happy with the pressure, do they?
In the second stage, a team time trial over forty-six kilometres around Luxembourg – too short for my taste – I was in sparkling form. Apart from a few fleeting moments, on the final part of the loop no one was able to share the pace making with me. I could feel the power inside me, the power that was there on my best days. I could simply pound the pedals without worrying about the consequences. It was almost ecstasy, knowing that I had come back to the level of the very best like this, knowing that I was (almost) back to what I had once been in the Tour. Even so, I didn’t feel we were going that fast. Guimard had come up to tell us we were in the lead: not only did we win the stage but along the way we gained forty seconds on Greg LeMond’s ADR team, who weren’t exactly in sparkling form. As for Delgado, now more than seven minutes behind, from that day on we viewed him as being definitely out of the battle for overall victory, even if you took into account what he could do in the mountains.
There was only one name to reckon with: LeMond, winner in 1986. Since the Tour of Italy, Guimard had been very worried about him. After lurking deep down the overall standings for the whole Giro he had finally broken the surface by taking second place in the final time trial. In Guimard’s eyes that was a sure sign. And LeMond was to prove him right in the fifth stage of the Tour, an individual time trial over a colossal seventy-three kilometres between Dinard and Rennes. Because of his lower overall placing, LeMond started about an hour before me and had more helpful weather; I had to contend with a few showers and a lot of headwind. The American won the stage from Delgado, who was 24sec back and I conceded 56sec in third. That might seem like a vast gap, but it needs a little explanation.
Firstly, as everyone knows, LeMond was unrivalled as a time triallist, much better than me when it came to riding alone and unpaced. In addition, he was using a very special bike equipped with handlebar extensions with elbow rests, giving him a far more aerodynamic position and four support points – pedals, saddle, bars and elbow rests – which was totally revolutionary but also strictly against the rules. Until then, the referees had only allowed three support points. For reasons that still elude me, Guimard and I didn’t make a formal complaint . . . and the idle
commissaries
shut their eyes. The rules were being bent, and the consequences would be way beyond anything I could have imagined.
commissaries
shut their eyes. The rules were being bent, and the consequences would be way beyond anything I could have imagined.
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