Read We Were Young and Carefree Online
Authors: Laurent Fignon
We Were Young and Carefree (5 page)
I looked in the mirror again. I knew that there were two answers. Either I could keep on mourning – and stop cycling. Or I could try to get over the agony and the injustice, and get back on the road. I was in good health. I was a lucky man, with a full life. OK, I hadn’t won the Tour again; so what? Was the world going to stop turning? Why inflict more pain on myself?
That very day, I picked up the telephone to call Alain Gallopin. He was worried about how I might be dealing with it. I said to him: ‘Come on, Alain, let’s get going. I’m going to prepare for the world championship.’
I heard him murmur: ‘That’s good, Laurent’.
Then I added: ‘I’m asking for one thing. We don’t talk about the Tour just yet. We’ll talk about it one day, but this isn’t the time.’
Because of my crutch injury I’d cancelled a few races where I was contracted to appear. So when I got back on the criterium circuit it was an event in itself. Just imagine: ‘there he is’; ‘that’s him’; ‘the loser’. There was a morbid curiosity in the looks. I tried to keep my self-respect. Seeing Greg LeMond with the yellow jersey on his back – as is the custom in post-Tour circuit races – I gritted my teeth. My blood froze. I’d had a distinct dislike for him before, and it just grew now. I know feeling that way was unreasonable, but that is how it was.
On the roadside as I went past the crowds, I sometimes heard shouts of derision: ‘eight seconds’ or ‘you’re still eight seconds behind’. The pettiness of the words pierced my heart. It was all people ever asked me about. Sometimes they didn’t even realise it hurt. No one noticed that I didn’t want to talk about it, that the wound was still raw. As soon as I felt ill at ease I would turn my back and refuse to answer. To many people, I can’t have seemed a nice guy. But what was the point?
In this testing time, I don’t remember talking to Cyrille Guimard at all. Have I forgotten or had the great
directeur sportif
vanished into thin air? This was one of his problems: in trying circumstances, he didn’t know how to talk to people. He needed a little more insight.
directeur sportif
vanished into thin air? This was one of his problems: in trying circumstances, he didn’t know how to talk to people. He needed a little more insight.
But what could he have told me anyway? I know I’m not an easy person to deal with. To hammer home that particular point, a tactless selection committee awarded me the ‘lemon prize’ for being the least pleasant rider on the 1989 Tour. Well, at least I won something.
CHAPTER 2
WILD BUT GIFTED
My full name is Laurent Patrick Fignon and I was born one Friday in the middle of the Baby Boom. It was 12 August 1960, at 3.10 a.m., in the Bretonneau hospital at the foot of Montmartre. I was 3.2kg and 52cm: completely average.
Back then, in the streets of the great cities, everyone wanted to get places fast. It was a way of demonstrating personal freedom. Renault, Citroën and Peugeot all competed to produce new cars that would give ‘modern’ couples the thrill of the road, getting away from it all. You had to go quick, and then even quicker. My mother was also gripped by this need for speed and I arrived a month before the due date. I was supposed to appear in mid-September, it was mid-August. My parents didn’t know that the cycling calendar isn’t very full at that time of year.
It seems that I was an active child, very active; dynamic, it could be said. ‘As soon as you could stand you didn’t just walk, you ran, my parents have always said to me, time and again. Even today I still move all the time; I start doing this or that, I wave my arms about. I’m incapable of keeping fixed in one place, on a sofa or an armchair. As a kid, the mere idea of doing nothing left me in hysterics. I was afraid of inactivity, afraid of the emptiness. The more energy I used up, the less tired I was. I manage to relax only when I’m busy. My teachers didn’t know how to deal with me: they just shouted at me all the time. Let’s get one thing clear: it wasn’t that I didn’t like school, quite the opposite. I’ve always liked going to school and at one point in my teenage years I was even enthusiastic about it.
I don’t remember my first three years in Paris, in rue Davy in the 13
th
arrondissement, but in 1963 my parents moved to Tournan-en-Brie in the Seine-et-Marne. We lived thirty-five kilometres east of the capital in the heart of what is now known as
la grande banlieue
– the ’burbs. But you have to think back to the 1960s: the Seine-et-Marne was the countryside. The real thing.
th
arrondissement, but in 1963 my parents moved to Tournan-en-Brie in the Seine-et-Marne. We lived thirty-five kilometres east of the capital in the heart of what is now known as
la grande banlieue
– the ’burbs. But you have to think back to the 1960s: the Seine-et-Marne was the countryside. The real thing.
My parents rented an apartment in a four-storey block. We lived on the third floor, with no lift. All I had to do was go down the stairs to be in the middle of the wilds. A hundred metres away, the woods and the fields were beckoning. My mates and I built huts, knocked them down and built them up again. The days seemed to last for ever. When dinner time came, my mother had only to shout through the window. Most of the time she had to be patient; I had better things to do. I could never be found. I got to know every last metre of the forest. I loved to be outside; I wanted adventures and independence.
There was no one in the family who did any sport. My father did have a racing bike that he had used for riding about when he was young. So sport was my personal thing; mine and no one else’s. At school I tried everything: football, handball, athletics, volleyball, and so on. I did whatever I could without holding back. I was the perfect pupil for the PE teachers.
But I only did sport on Thursdays, as part of the school timetable. Every weekend I had to get through a real trauma: family meals. They took place on Sundays in particular, at my uncles’, my aunts’ and also at my grandmother’s in Paris, in her dark three-room flat where I couldn’t move without walloping the furniture. It was simply horrendous and it’s left its mark; I’m still not all that keen on family things. My brother who is three years younger than me is completely the opposite.
As a ‘housewife’ my mother didn’t have a driving licence which meant we weren’t as self-sufficient as we might have been. As for my father, he was a foreman in a metalworks. From working-class stock, he was now earning a decent living and was the embodiment of all the values that might be expected in a family of modest means: a strong work ethic, a sense of self-denial, and a bit of a hard attitude towards himself and other people. Simple values that didn’t sanctify anything but ensured the key things you need to hand down to children, even if his methods were a bit clumsy.
He would leave for work early, about six, and never came home before eight in the evening. Like a lot of fathers, he wasn’t about much. But when he was there, he was a disciplinarian. His hand fell flat, and so did many of my pranks. I got a lot of slaps, and pretty hard ones at that. My only goal was to be myself at every instant, without any limits. Wild and hyperactive, I wanted to discover how far I could go. I had such a penchant for playing with fire you could say I was a pyromaniac. But it took only the slightest bit of stupidity for my father to lose his temper. One day he decided to punish me for a week and whacked my backside the minute he got in every evening. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t make a sound. When he stopped, I looked him in the eye and said: ‘Is that it?’ Then I pulled my breeches up in silence. No tears. Not a drop of sweat on my face. I knew how to hurt.
The way someone looks is often merely a facade, but your image sticks even if it is a long way from reality. I’ve always worn spectacles. That’s how I’ve always looked. I’ve always stuck out from the crowd. In everyone’s minds my face never changes and my eyes are always surrounded by the metal rings. You can’t miss them. Everyone knows that for a cyclist this is quite a big thing. You’d hear the same thing from all the little group who had no choice but to wear glasses at a time when contact lenses did not exist: it was a handicap.
From the age of six, my glasses have been part of me, my physical make-up, the first impression everyone gets when they set eyes on me. As a kid, I would lose them all the time, especially in the woods around where we lived. How many times did I see my father set off with a torch late in the evening in search of my specs, busting a gut to get them back? Amazingly, he always came across them somewhere.
I played football a lot with a little group of friends: it was actually the only sport I was mad about. The thing was that some of them – and this was fate taking a hand – also rode bikes, guys like Rosario Scolaro, Olivier Audebert, the Olivier brothers, Bernard Chancrin, Stéphane Calbou. I don’t really remember how it happened, but they made me want to have a go. I could see how a bloke like Rosario came into his own on two wheels.
It was 1975 and I was fifteen: until then I’d never dreamed of getting on a bike in anger. I can’t tell you why that was. But down in the cellar the old ‘gate’ that belonged to my father, a ‘Vigneron’, was waiting just for me. He meticulously restored it to working order. And I was lucky: it was a superlight bike with thin tubing and elegantly curved forks. I loved this slightly old-fashioned machine, which was pretty quick and gave me a certain status. Some guys laughed at me, and I have to confess: there were still two bottle cages on the handlebars like they had in the 1940s. It was an antique, but I didn’t care about the sneers. Nothing fazed me.
The first time I went out with the lads, my eyes were opened. It wasn’t just that I loved it straight away but from the word go – to my great surprise and the amazement of everyone else – I was able to keep up with the others. I wasn’t stylish, I was a bit clumsy, but when you needed to push on the pedals I wasn’t the first guy to suffer. One day, they decided to test me: no one could leave me behind. In the little sprints we organised among ourselves I could compete more and more often, sometimes zipping past for the win.
‘Why don’t you get a racing licence?’ Rosario asked after a little while. He hung out in the next village, Gretz, and was already wearing the green and white jersey of the local club: La Pédale of Combs-la-Ville. On the day I got my licence, in 1976, the club president, Dumahut, told me: ‘This is a tough sport, very tough. You are sixteen, which is already old, and other guys have begun a long time before you. If you want to do cycling, there can be no more messing around. Are you sure you want to do it?’ He wanted to make an impression. It was as if he wanted to put me off. Not a chance. Other guys might have taken a step back on hearing what he had to say, but it just made me even keener than before. So down I went to Combs-la-Ville with Rosario and a trainer, Monsieur Lhomme, who has left an indelible mark on my memory. Would my love of cycling have grown without him?
Pretty soon, it was obvious that I wanted to race. My parents were against it. It would have been too big a sacrifice for them to give up their family Sunday lunches, particularly for something as pointless as bike racing. They were obsessed with one thing: my schoolwork. So, behind their backs, I arranged lifts to races with my mates’ parents. Faced with a fait accompli, my parents couldn’t stop me. Back then, they had no idea how the passion was going to take up all my time and energy and come over time to dominate every thought in my mind. On the other hand, they did know that when I was determined to do something, it wasn’t easy to talk me out of it.
My first official race could only be called a masterpiece. It was at Vigneux-sur-Seine, the Grand Prix de la Tapisserie Mathieu over fifty kilometetres, a little lap to repeat countless times. I was setting off to take on a world of which I knew nothing, with only my physical strength to rely on. Until then, all I had experienced was a few frivolous training sessions, just five or six of us, each Thursday. Every morning, I had to get the bus at seven to go to secondary school at Lagny, and as my parents didn’t want me to ride after dark I could only get on my bike once a week. We played games on the bike: little races, sprints, attacks, counter-attacks. There was an anarchic side to it which attracted me.
So on the day of the race at Vigneux, along with about sixty other under-16s, I realised pretty soon that in the race there was no structure either. Without any rhyme or reason it got quicker, then it slowed up, I had no idea why but it suited a mad dog like me fine. Towards the end of the race I ended up in the break with Scolaro, Audebert, my mates, and a couple of other lads. Just as we did in training, with the same lack of thought, I attacked, hard, just to see what happened, for a laugh. Rather surprisingly, I ended up alone in the lead. I looked back in amazement. Once. Twice. Then I decided to keep going without thinking any more. No one got near me. And when I crossed the finishing line first, 45sec ahead of Audebert, I didn’t even lift my arms. I thought I had done something wrong and the coach was going to bawl me out. When he came over to say well done, I asked: ‘Was it OK for me to win?’ He just smiled.
One thing was clear: I had won because I was playing. Enjoying myself on my bike is what has always mattered. Racing is serious to a certain extent, but deep down inside I’ve always wanted to have fun at it. I love attacking, tactics. Otherwise, I get bored quickly. What I had liked the most that day at Vigneux was simply competing. The chance that I might win. Without that to aim for, I’m never as interested and don’t get as involved. As I see it, a beautiful race is one where there is constant attacking.
After my surprise win, I couldn’t help finding my way to the front. Every time we trained, every time we raced (I won another three, nothing to shout about) I only felt good at the head of the peloton. I couldn’t manage to hang about at the back. It made no sense. And of course, after that first taste of victory my parents decided to pay me some attention and there were no more family Sunday lunches for them. They were quickly drawn into the cycling world: meeting the other parents, the smell of embrocation on chilly mornings as early risers looked on with haggard faces, the smell of hot coffee, cars with cycling kit strewn everywhere in a chaotic mess; the whole Bohemian side of car parks frequented by young bike riders. There was nothing to get big-headed about. This was the time when you got up at five to bung down a steak accompanied by kilos of pasta three hours before you raced: nutrition was in the stone age.
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