Rough Ride (12 page)

Pierre:
'What's up with Louis? He's not sprinting very well.'

Serge:
'Yes, he had a bad crash while going for the stage win last week, and as he wasn't wearing gloves he ripped all the skin off both hands.'

Pierre:
'That's bad luck, I'm sure he'd have won a few stages here, he was going really well.'

Serge:
'Yes, but the worst part is that he can't even have a wank.'

I didn't ride well in the Paris-Bourges. I didn't ride well in any of the end-of-season races. The Tour had taken a lot out of me and I was just going through the motions at races in August. September was another quiet month. I rode three one-day French classics before lining up for Paris-Brussels, which was to be my last race of the season. I didn't want to ride, but was told I had to make up the numbers because the team needed ten starters to be paid travelling expenses by the race organisers. The night before the race I talked to Gauthier, who told me how he had abandoned the year before. The day before the race he put his bike in the car and drove to a little village fifty kilometres from the start at Senlis. He parked the car and then cycled back to the team hotel. Next day he raced the fifty kilometres from Senlis to the village, abandoned down a narrow side street as the peloton traversed the village, jumped into his car and drove home. It was too late for me to try the same stunt, but I planned something else. On the morning of the race I signed on the start sheet, dressed in my shorts and jersey. Just as the race was about to start, I hid in the toilet of a cafe across the road. When I was sure they had gone I discreetly slipped out of the cafe, jumped into the car and headed for Calais and the ferry to Dover. I crossed to England and caught another ferry to Dublin. Home. My first season was over. Well, not quite.

The Tour of Ireland, or Nissan Classic, was due to start a week later but RMO were not sending a team so I wasn't racing it. Stephen had planned to ride it in a composite team, but his knee was still giving him trouble and he pulled out. This left a place to be filled. Frank phoned the team's sponsors, Ever Ready, and proposed me as a replacement. They agreed, and on the day I arrived home Frank phoned me and told me I was riding the Nissan. I was a little bit out of condition and spent the three days before the race in frantic last-minute training. The team was made up of two Belgians, Jef Lieckens and Carlo Bomans; two Englishmen; Sean Yates, Tony Doyle and myself. On the first stage to Galway, it rained heavily. The bunch was in one long line and was being buffeted by strong crosswinds as we raced along the Oranmore road to Galway. I had bad stomach cramps and felt really weak. I was dropped. It was a cruel disappointment. I would have to ride into Galway and complete the small circuit on my own, minutes behind the whole bunch. I knew my mother and father were waiting for me and I felt quite ashamed. Just before arriving on to the circuit I rode past the team hotel. I thought very seriously about getting off and making some excuse. Any excuse. Anything to avoid the shame of riding the circuit on my own. But I kept going, Ever Ready were paying me a contract. By abandoning it, I would not be honouring it and this would not be professional. I finished the stage in a foul humour and cursed myself.

The rest of the week went off much better and I started to ride quite well. After the third stage to Cork I roomed with Sean Yates. I liked Sean. When I was an amateur he had helped me take the yellow jersey in the Tour of Britain Milk Race. He is one of the nicest and most down-to-earth blokes I have met in the game. He had a little gadget for examining blood. You pricked your finger for the sample, placed the droplet on a slide and examined it through a sort of small microscope. I asked him to test me and on examining my droplet, he said I was lacking in iron. I asked if he had any with him and he prepared me a syringe with vitamins and iron. Sean, like most of the pros, rarely went to the
soigneur
if he felt he needed something. He would simply do it himself. The idea of sticking a needle in myself repulsed me and I asked Sean if he would do it for me. He refused. 'You have to learn some time. Now is as good a time as any to start.' He gave me a piece of cottonwool with methylated spirits and the syringe, or
flèche
as it was known in the trade, and I went to the bathroom and closed the door. The door was always closed just in case anyone walked in. I often wondered about my father walking in and seeing me with a syringe in my hand. What would I have said? 'Eehh! Sorry, Da, this is not what you think.'

The syringe had to be inserted in the muscle of the buttock at about the same height as the coccyx. We had a choice of buttock, left or right, but it was equally painful. I had watched the lads do it before. There were two methods. The most painful was to place the point of the needle against the skin and slowly start pressing. Or, you could throw the syringe like a dart, so that it penetrated the flesh quickly. I decided to opt for the second method. I stood for at least ten minutes and made several efforts at throwing the syringe, but each time I was unable to release it. This infuriated me. When finally I found the courage to do it, I was so tense and my buttock muscle so contracted that the needle hit the flesh and bounced off on to the dirty bathroom floor. Furious, I picked it up, squeezed the piston and squirted the liquid down the toilet bowl. I threw the empty syringe in the bin and left the bathroom, cursing. Sean had a huge grin on his face and offered to make me another one, but I refused. I later retrieved the syringe from the bathroom bin, as it was a golden rule never to leave anything that might surprise the cleaning maid. But I was thoroughly disgusted with myself.

The Nissan finished on the Sunday in Dublin. I tried to put up a bit of show in front of my home crowd as we dashed up and down O'Connell Street, but I ultimately failed to make any real impression. Galway was forgotten, and I could at least hold my head high again. This time the season was over and I wasn't sorry. I needed a break.

The winter months were spent in Dublin. This was the fun part of being a pro, the three months spent at home at the end of every season. I enjoyed a high profile in my native land. My notoriety had started when I was an amateur. Now, as a professional, I was part of an elite band. There were just four professional cyclists in the country. Sean Kelly was the world's number one, with Stephen Roche not far behind him. Martin Earley had won a stage in the Tour of Italy and Paul Kimmage had finished, well, 131st in the Tour de France. Cycling was becoming more and more popular with the media and as a result more familiar to the ordinary man in the street. I enjoyed cashing in on my new fame. I was invited by cycling clubs throughout the country to give coaching talks and lectures on the life of a pro. There was often a five-minute television slot here or a radio slot there and gradually I was building up a name for myself. There was no money to be made out of it, but it made me feel important, as if I was something. So at the end of my break I always found it hard to return to France, where I was nothing.

I left Ireland on 9 January after a phone call from Thevenet. He had organised a pre-season training camp at Gruissan on the French Riviera. I caught the ferry to England and drove to Stoke, where I stayed the night with Martin. The next stage saw me on a stopover at Paris with my good friends Jean and Ginette Beaufils. And from there I drove to Gruissan. There were eight new faces on the team. Gauthier, Le Bigaut, Barteau, Russemberger, Mogore and Castaing were replaced by six Frenchmen, an Italian and an American. Jean-Claude Colotti, Jean-François Rault, Dante Rezze, Patrice Esnault, Vincent Lavenu and Michel Bibollet were the French newcomers. Pierangelo Bincolleto was the Italian and the 1984 Olympic champion Alexi Grewal the American.

Alexi was to be one of the leaders for the year. He had ridden one or two races with us on a trial basis in 1986, although it is important to point out that it was Alexi who was giving RMO the trial. He seemed to like it, so he signed up full-time for 1987. Thevenet thought very highly of him, but I knew there was no way it would work. Physically he had the capabilities to be an asset to any pro team on the Continent. But mentally Alexi was never going to fit into ours or any other European team.

I shared a room with him at the training camp. He had this fear that his body would run down if he didn't eat enough. Half an hour before dinner he used to light up a small portable gas stove that he had brought with him from the States. He boiled water and cooked and ate about half a ton of spaghetti. When he had finished he would come to the dining room and eat a normal dinner with the rest of us. He was a great man for stretching and yoga. Sometimes I would walk into the room to find him standing on his head or lying on the floor on a special piece of wood that massaged his back. On the team training rides, he would often ride a hundred metres behind the group on his own because he felt he was training better. And because he was Alexi Grewal he got away with it. He was paid 35,000 dollars a month, which kind of dwarfed the £700 a month that I was earning.

I found him to be the most eccentric, obnoxious person I have ever met, and yet I liked him. I despised many of the traditional European cycling values but my survival depended on toeing the line. I could never open my mouth. That's what I admired most about Alexi: nothing and nobody intimidated him.

I knew he wouldn't stick it. Alexi was too American, too inflexible. But his biggest problem was his fragile health. He was incredibly vulnerable to picking up colds, which would soon develop into bronchitis and put him out of action for weeks. Good health is one of the primary assets of being a pro. If Alexi had had the same health as Sean Kelly he would have gone a long way. But in the six months he spent with the team he was constantly sick, and I don't remember him ever riding well. By June he had had enough and returned to the States.

Of the other new guys, Colotti was the one I liked best. He was a year older than me but had only started to race four years earlier. I had been racing since I was eleven years old and the difference showed in our attitude to training and racing. He had a huge appetite for training and an infectious enthusiasm for the sport. It was all new and exciting to him but I had seen it all before. I was more laid back. Too laid back. In the opening months of the season, while I struggled desperately to find any sort of decent form, Colotti blossomed – earning regular top ten placings and winning the French classic, the Tour de Vendee. His success frustrated me. I didn't begrudge it him, I just couldn't understand why it never happened to me.

The start of the new season was soured by two deaths in the peloton. The Spaniard Vincente Mata lapsed into a coma and died shortly after crashing in the Trophy Luis Puig in Spain. A week later I was a witness to the second death. It was in the Tour de Haut Var. There was a short hill not long after the start, and the descent was narrow and twisting but not too dangerous. We were strung out in a long line. I was fifth from the front, on the wheel of Thierry Marie, when suddenly the Hitachi rider in front of him, Michel Goffin, fell off. We both managed to avoid running into him, and it didn't look a heavy fall. But when I looked back he was lying motionless in the middle of the road. The Belgian lapsed into a coma and died two weeks later. I was fully aware that cycling was a dangerous sport, but deaths were uncommon. The two deaths in February made us all feel uncomfortable about the risks involved. There was no way I wanted to die on the bike. I wore my crash hat for a few races after that. But the dangers were soon forgotten, and although my crash hat was always a part of my baggage it was rarely taken out of my suitcase.

The opening month of the season was a disaster. I rode pretty badly in almost every race I entered, so it was logical that I wasn't selected for Paris-Nice in March. On returning to Grenoble I immediately started looking for an apartment, as there was no way I was going to stick another year at the football centre. Clavet told me about a two-roomed flat that was vacant in his town, Vizille, which was just twelve kilometres outside Grenoble. I paid it a visit and decided to take it. The hassle of moving didn't do my physical condition any good and I missed a lot of training. As a result I was in poor condition when I returned to competition for two races in Belgium. I abandoned both of them and this started a run of seven abandonments, one after another. I managed to stop the rot at the Grand Prix of Rennes where I finished seventeenth and succeeded in getting my name in
L'Equipe.
This was important. Thevenet was starting to lose patience with me and the result at least showed that I existed. Things improved from then on. I finished fifty-first in my favourite Classic, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and returned to Ireland shortly after for the wedding of my brother Raphael.

It was not a triumphant homecoming. Kelly, Roche and Earley had all had fantastic starts to their seasons. Mine had been a disaster. I started to worry about the future. My two-year contract with the team was up at the end of the year, and unless I improved dramatically, I'd be lucky if they offered me another one. What would I do? Jobs were almost impossible to find in Dublin. There was not much demand for ex-professional cyclists, especially unsuccessful ones. On the day before I returned to France I had lunch with my friend David Walsh. David was a journalist with the
Sunday Tribune
and also worked for
Magill,
an Irish current affairs magazine. When I finished the Tour in 1986 he asked me to write an account of the race, or more particularly my struggles in the race, for
Magill.
The story seemed to go down quite well with everyone who read it. I had written other stories for an Irish cycling magazine in my amateur days and I liked expressing myself with a pen. I often wished I had entered university and taken a degree in journalism instead of dashing off to France for a professional cyclist's contract. David suggested that there were plenty of opportunities to write freelance cycling stories on the Continent. He encouraged me to continue on the bike and made me feel much more optimistic for the future.

I made my comeback at the Frankfurt Grand Prix, where I rode quite well. Two important stage races were coming up, Quatre Jours de Dunkirk and the Tour de Romandie. The Dauphine was just a month away and I knew that my selection for it depended on a good performance in one of the two stage races. I preferred the Romandie to the Quatre Jours and managed to convince Thevenet to send me there. Stephen was riding it and this was my first opportunity to talk to him, as up until then we had rarely raced together. He was having a dream of a season and was clearly back on top after his troubles of last year. I made a special effort to impress him during the race, as my secret ambition was to ride by his side in the same team – but only if I was good enough. I was proud of my independence at RMO. I had won my contract there on my own steam without the help of either Kelly or Roche. My plan was eventually to team up with one of my famous compatriots, but on my terms. I wouldn't accept charity. If I wasn't good enough to be offered another contract by RMO then I wasn't good enough to join Kelly or Roche. Stephen's good form continued in Romandie, where he won easily.

On the night before the last stage I shared a room with Bernard Vallet. It was the first time I had ever shared a room with him. It was almost an honour. I admired him because he was suave and classy and had always been nice to me. He told me he was pleased with my performance and that he would make sure that I had my place on the team to ride the Dauphine. Having the confidence of Vallet was a great advantage, for I knew he pulled a lot of weight with the sponsor Braillon and with Thevenet. He then asked me about my impressions of Thevenet as a
directeur sportif.
I knew they were friends but because I liked Thevenet I found no reason to lie and told him exactly what I thought.

'Bernard has one or two organisational problems but he has great human qualities which compensate largely for his faults. I like him. He is a good
directeur.
'

I was a little puzzled about his reasons for asking my impression of Thevenet. Jacques Michaud was directing the team in Switzerland, while Thevenet was looking after the Dunkirk squad. Was Vallet conducting an opinion poll behind Thevenet's back, or with his approval? I was quite unprepared for what followed.

'Braillon has asked me to take over as
directeur sportif of
the team next year.'

Silence. Ah . . . all is revealed. He looked at me, trying to gauge my reaction. I was shocked, but tried not to show it. I had expected Vallet to join Thevenet next year as his assistant – but not as his replacement.

'I want to accept, but I am in a bit of bother because Thevenet and I are good friends.'

Why was he confiding in me about this? I could see he was getting high just talking about it. He must have been dying to tell someone and I just happened to be around when the dam burst. He asked me to keep our conversation secret, saying that he needed time to make his decision. But he wasn't fooling me. His decision was already made. He would take the job.

My good form in Switzerland had gained me selection for the Dauphine. Apart from the Tour, it was my favourite race. I lived in the region and felt compelled to perform well in my own 'back yard'. There was always a lot at stake in the Dauphine, but this year especially so. A good performance meant a place in the Tour de France team. A place in the Tour team enhanced my chances of being offered a new contract, so I was not lacking in motivation. I had super form for the eight-day event, but I used my form cleverly. Even with that kind of form I knew I was not capable of winning a stage. But I was capable of helping Claveyrolat or Vallet to win one. This was what was important about being a
domestique.
It was better to put all your efforts into helping a team-mate to win than trying and failing to win yourself. Second or third. Fifth or sixth. These places have no value for a pro team. Winning is everything. I knew I was capable of getting placed on stages, but decided it was in my best interests to sacrifice myself for the leaders. Vallet and Claveyrolat were on form. Vallet would more than likely be
directeur sportif
the following year. Clavet was my friend. For the eight stages I put myself totally at their disposition. I protected them from the wind, rode at their side in the mountains, fetched their drinks, waited with them when they stopped to piss, pushed them and willed them to success. They rewarded me with praise each night in front of Thevenet at the dinner table.

'Did you see the work Paul did for us today? He was extraordinary.'

The only regret I had was for my parents. They came over from Ireland on two weeks' holiday to see the race with my youngest brother Christopher. My only bad day of the race was on the first mountain stage to Modane. It was a scorching hot day and I cracked early on the Col du Glandon. I knew my parents were waiting for me at the top. I dreaded passing them so far down the field, and in my frustration I composed a speech that explained my role of
domestique.
On seeing them at the side of the road I planned to stop and say, 'Da, I'm sorry. Look at me. This is the reality. This is what I am. I'm not a star and never will be. I am a water carrier, a
domestique,
a nothing.' I never got to say the prepared words. He was standing two kilometres from the top, with a bottle of water. I smiled, pulled in and filled my
bidon.
He said I was doing fine, and pushed me off, encouraging me further. His enthusiasm lightened my heart and my speech was cancelled.

The following day we crossed three mountains. At the summit of the second, the Izoard, I was just behind the leading group. Only Claveyrolat from our team was in front of me. Thevenet ordered me to wait on Vallet, who was chasing behind with two other team-mates, Mas and Simon. I went down the descent like a madman and we rejoined the front group in the valley. Three riders had broken clear and I was ordered to the front to chase. I rode my heart out until the first hairpins of the day's last mountain, the Col de Vars, where I soon cracked and was dropped. My work was not in vain, for Thierry won the stage and moved up to fourth overall. That night Thevenet came into the room. He praised me for my team work and told me to prepare myself for the Tour de France.