We Were Young and Carefree Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  We Were Young and Carefree

  1. Eight Seconds

  2. Wild but Gifted

  3. Happy Schooldays

  4. Bike or Work?

  5. Shoulder to Shoulder with the Badger

  6. Flying with Renault

  7. Doing the Job Right

  8. Right and Proper People

  9. Bacchus Raises His Head

  10. The Code of Honour

  11. Pig Headed

  12. Cycling’s Brightest and Best

  13. The Dark Side

  14. Wearing the Boss’s Trousers

  15. Coke in Stock

  16. Tragedia dell’Arte

  17. I’ll Win Five or Six Then I’ll Stop

  18. Post-operative Trauma

  19. Renault Leaves the Road

  20. Rejoice!

  21. Vicious Cycle

  22. Bottle but No Drug

  23. The End of a Little World

  24. Primeval Yell

  25. Worm in the Yellow Jersey

  26. Return of the Grand Blond

  27. Poker Face

  28. Yes, I Did It

  29. The Leader and the Doormat

  30. Finishing With Guimard is Never Pretty

  31. Respect for the Campionissimo

  32. A Long, Lunatic Ride

  33. Doping Everywhere

  34. On a Street Corner

  35. You Cannot Imagine What They Are Up To

  36. Taking On The Big Boys

  37. A Whiff of Authenticity

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407075211

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Yellow Jersey Press 2010

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  Copyright © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2009

  English translation © William Fotheringham, 2010

  Laurent Fignon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published as Nous Étions Jeunes et Insouciants in 2009 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  Yellow Jersey Press

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

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  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780224083195

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  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Mackays

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Translator’s Note

  1 Eight Seconds

  2 Wild but Gifted

  3 Happy Schooldays

  4 Bike or Work?

  5 Shoulder to Shoulder with the Badger

  6 Flying with Renault

  7 Doing the Job Right

  8 Right and Proper People

  9 Bacchus Raises His Head

  10 The Code of Honour

  11 Pig Headed

  12 Cycling’s Brightest and Best

  13 The Dark Side

  14 Wearing the Boss’s Trousers

  15 Coke in Stock

  16 Tragedia dell’Arte

  17 I’ll Win Five or Six Then I’ll Stop

  18 Post-operative Trauma

  19 Renault Leaves the Road

  20 Rejoice!

  21 Vicious Cycle

  22 Bottle but No Drug

  23 The End of a Little World

  24 Primeval Yell

  25 Worm in the Yellow Jersey

  26 Return of the Grand Blond

  27 Poker Face

  28 Yes, I Did It

  29 The Leader and the Doormat

  30 Finishing With Guimard is Never Pretty

  31 Respect for the Campionissimo

  32 A Long, Lunatic Ride

  33 Doping Everywhere

  34 On a Street Corner

  35 You Cannot Imagine What They Are Up To

  36 Taking On The Big Boys

  37 A Whiff of Authenticity

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  I have a confession to make: a teenage crime against two-wheeled taste that haunts me when I look at old photographs. In the early 1980s I wore a sweatband when I rode my bike. At the time people may have thought it was inspired by John McEnroe, but the guilty party was Laurent Fignon. I wanted to look like Laurent but it didn’t work out. His black, white and yellow Renault band looked fine against his sunbleached blond hair, thin-rimmed metal spectacles and scary blue eyes. Mine didn’t have quite the same aura, but I was struggling through ten-mile time trials on a back road in North Devon rather than wearing the yellow jersey of the Tour de France on the Col du Galibier.

  Like his contemporary Robert Millar – they both rode their first Tours in 1983 and their last in 1993 – Fignon came into my life twice in two completely different guises, first as a hero of my years as a teenage cyclist, then later as one of the more fascinating characters I worked with as a journalist. I spent the summer of 1984 with Fignon and Millar, glued to the daily Tour de France television coverage in the home of cycling-mad friends in Normandy. That was Fignon’s finest July: the most dominant Tour win anyone had seen since the years of Eddy Merckx, his tally of five stage wins – both mountain stages and time trials – unmatched until Lance Armstrong arrived. By the end of the month, the roads of France were teeming with youngsters wearing sweatbands, Fignon-style.

  Five years later, I had only recently begun working at Cycling Weekly, Britain’s leading bike racing magazine, when the then editor, Martin Ayres, came to me with a dilemma. It was the Friday before the final weekend of the 1989 Tour de France and he had to make a call over the magazine’s cover for the following week: Greg LeMond or Laurent Fignon. In essence, he had to decide which of the two would win the closest Tour de France in history. Fignon had a 50sec lead on LeMond, and jointly we calculated that this might well be enough to keep him in the yellow jersey through the final time trial. Knowing the cover picture couldn’t be changed, there was consternation as we read the wire reports on the Sunday afternoon, when LeMond overturned Fignon’s lead, achieving what had seemed impossible. We weren’t the only ones to misread that particular epic, however.

  A month later, Fignon was a key player in the first world championship road race I saw from the press box. On the rainsoaked Côte de la Montagnole at Chambéry, he refought his duel of July
with LeMond, the pair trading attack for counter-attack on the final lap. Inevitably it was LeMond who made the effort to bring Fignon back to the fold when he attempted one last move in the final kilometre. As at the Tour, LeMond got the jersey – a rainbow-striped one to go with his yellow from July – and Fignon was one of the also rans. He doesn’t even mention his sixth place in this book, quite possibly because it wasn’t something he wanted to remember. But watching him that day, it was impossible not to admire the man, the way he wanted to grab the race by the scruff of the neck and bend it to his will. That he couldn’t manage it simply added to the fascination.

  The first time I actually met Fignon was not auspicious: he was late and he didn’t like answering questions. But his slightly curt manner was a front: he wanted to sort out the professional journalist sheep from the timewasting goats. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, but he seemed to have a deeper view of his sport than most of his contemporaries. Talking to him was one of the more rewarding tasks when covering bike races. The nickname he was given briefly in the 1980s – the Professor, on the strength of an abortive attempt at university – seemed well merited. Together with photographer Phil O’Connor and Fignon’s sidekick Alain Gallopin we enjoyed a day out in Paris in 1992, shooting a vast feature for Cycling Weekly. We began with an elaborate cocktail at the Café de Flore, once the haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, followed that up with a browse in a fine antiquarian bookshop, and ended up on the Eiffel Tower. As he posed on the platform for a picture with his native Paris outlined behind him, I noticed how hard his hand was gripping the rail: he suffered from vertigo, he told me.

  All this may begin to explain why I was determined, as translator, to help bring Fignon’s story to an English-speaking audience. By the time I knew him, at the end of his career, Fignon was an elder statesman. His views on the way the sport should be run struck me as more considered than those of the guys who did run it. He was a rare beast among elite sportsmen in having feelings and ideas about his sport that went far beyond the next win and the next contract. Those facts alone should ensure this book an audience.

  The key events in We Were Young and Carefree take place between 1982 and 1989: a lifetime away for most of the cyclists now riding the Tour de France, and more for those who aspire to it. It’s a truism, but the 1980s now seem like a different world, one of Simplex Retrofriction brake levers on thin, steel downtubes, flapping gear cables, bare heads without skid lids, and crochet-backed cycling gloves. This book matters, because it describes, from the inside, the dying gasps of a style of cycling that had changed relatively little since the 1960s: far less polished than today’s sport, less predictable, less controlled, and more amateurish in every sense.

  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

  WE WERE YOUNGAND CAREFREETHE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OFLAURENT FIGNONTranslated from the French byWilliam FotheringhamLaurent Fignon

  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.