It was a dash, too. I was late. Having won the stage, I’d had to go to doping control, attend the presentation and then give interviews. I’d have been able to get away from the finish much earlier if I’d just sat quietly in the slow-moving bunch all day. As for the chocolate, I never saw another gram of it.
My next race was the Tour of Switzerland in late June. It was my last outing before the Tour de France, and my first on the bike I’d use for the Tour prologue.
Lotus hadn’t sat still since we’d gone our separate ways in 1992. Having divorced themselves from Mike Burrows, they’d set about designing a road version of the Barcelona track bike and by mid-1994 the Lotus 110 was ready. They just needed someone to ride it. In theory, any half-decent cyclist should have fitted the bill. After all, as they’d made clear in our post-Olympic negotiations, the bike was the more important component. In practice, things had been less straightforward. I knew they’d already tried to prove their point on the track by sponsoring Bryan Steel, a member of the national team. He was a classy rider, but lending him a Lotus hadn’t turned him into a world champion.
My history with the company made me both the most logical and least likely candidate to pilot the new road machine; our successful partnership was a matter of public record, the acrimony of our split made even talking about resuming it a non-starter. But the Tour was impossible for Lotus to resist. As launching platforms for new products went, only the Tour de France could match an Olympics. Even better from a British manufacturer’s point of view, this one was heading to the UK in its opening week. So instead of approaching me they went to Roger and offered to sponsor the team. If Lotus became GAN’s official bike supplier, I’d be obliged to ride one whether I wanted to or not.
GAN already had a bike sponsor – LeMond, Greg’s company. But when he saw the new frame, even Roger – who wasn’t a technologically-minded person – could tell it was something special. It was light years ahead of the team’s round-tubed, aluminium time trial machines, which were barely more than road bikes with clip-on bars. I don’t know what passed between them, but Roger got permission from Greg to try out other equipment and bought three Lotus frames. Considering the back-door route they’d chosen to get me on one of their machines, I wasn’t inclined to make it easy for them, but neither was I going to cut off my nose to spite my face. I would let performance be the sole deciding factor.
So it was that Rudy Thomann and Richard Hill turned up at the team hotel in Lugano with their all-new frame. They were cutting it fine: two weeks before the start of the Tour de France and only 24 hours until the time trial stage of this, my last warm-up race.
The S-shaped Lotus 110 looked as much like a sculpture as a piece of sports equipment. Even without wind tunnel data, I’d have staked my salary on it having half the drag of the team’s current TT machine. It was clearly designed by an aerodynamics expert, but just as clearly by one who didn’t ride a bike. At the time, almost all manufacturers of time trial bikes used a smaller wheel at the front than at the back. Combined with a tiny head tube, this created a slope from saddle to handlebars that lowered the rider into an aerodynamic tuck. Lotus had opted instead for a full-size front wheel, which wouldn’t have mattered so much if the bars had sat low, directly on the crown of the fork, as they had on their original track machine. But they didn’t, the 110 utilised a standard handlebar/stem arrangement which put the tri-bars a whopping eight inches higher than on the Barcelona version.
In fact, all of the geometry was that of an upright road bike, something it couldn’t be used as because there was nowhere on the entire frame to bolt a water-bottle cage. Clearly a lot of money and knowledge had gone into creating this beautiful object, but for the want of a 30-minute chat with an actual time trialist it would never be a commercial success.
Despite all its faults and the long list of compromises that would be needed to overcome them, the frame looked fast enough to be worth persevering with. I asked the team mechanics to build it up using an articulated Look Ergo stem to get it even close to low enough at the front. On the morning of the Tour of Switzerland time trial stage, a straightforward 30 km run along the shores of Lake Lugano, I went for a test ride to see if it was going to justify all the hassle. The advantage of having large wheels and a slack head-angle was that it handled really well for a TT bike. And although it was heavy, the faster I went the more I believed the Lotus had something to offer.
That afternoon’s time trial would be the last chance to try anything new in competition before the Tour itself, so with a couple of hours to go until the start I agreed to use the bike. Over 30 km I was 45 seconds faster than Italy’s Gianluca Pierobon in second place. For me, the decision was made. For Greg, founder of LeMond Bicycles, there was an obvious conflict of interest. But he was so taken with the sleek lines of the Lotus that he also opted to use one of the frames Roger had bought for the upcoming prologue in France.
After Switzerland, I took the Lotus home, rode it daily, fettled the position and rode it some more. I had a special pair of bars made to get around the height problem at the front. By the time I set off for the Tour I was familiar with every aspect of how it handled.
CHAPTER 8
The Tour
Announcing lofty intentions a year in advance to your boss is a gamble: win and you’re a genius-cum-prophet whose opinions are suddenly held in high esteem; fail and you’re an arrogant little shit. I was about to find out which label I’d be awarded.
As well as the pressure I’d created for myself, the Tour organisers had helpfully chipped in to raise the stakes. Three days after the opening prologue time trial in Lille, the 1994 race would be marking the opening of the Channel Tunnel by putting the riders onto trains and heading to the UK for two stages. My debut Tour de France offered me the chance not just to be the first British rider to wear the yellow jersey since Tommy Simpson in 1962, but to go one better by being the first ever to wear it on home roads.
A lot had to go right for that to happen. For a start, I had to do my bit and make good on my pledge to Roger to win the prologue. Then I had to keep the race lead for another three stages. The big danger would be the third of them: the team time trial. Whatever small margin I might manage to eke out over my rivals on a course of 7.2 km would have to be protected by the whole team over 66.5 km.
On Wednesday 29 June, three days before the race began, I left the UK to join my eight Tour teammates for some training in Calais, which is where the time trial would begin. Having invested so much energy and attention to detail in making sure that I had everything shipshape for the big race, it was a shock to walk out of the hotel, shoes in hand and ready to ride, to find most of my teammates adjusting saddles and triathlon bars. This was the eve of the Tour de France and they were only now thinking about positions. It was another half an hour before the mass tinkering was complete and we set off along the race route.
After 30 km Roger shouted from the following car that we should start riding hard, so like a large breakaway in a race – which is how they approached the exercise – everyone took their turn at the front. The problem with that, of course, is that breakaways are made up of riders from rival teams and we were supposed to be on the same side.
Before our session, I’d wanted to discuss what we were going to do, the length of each man’s turn, how we were going to communicate and the best way to utilise the different abilities within the team. The others wanted to ‘just smash it’. So they hit the front one by one, none of them looking around to see how their teammates might be doing, nobody adjusting their pace to make it easier for the rider who’d just peeled off from the lead position to rejoin at the back. Unable to keep up, the weaker riders kept missing turns, breaking the relaying chain, and the resulting sprint/stall cycle was exhausting.
I imagined all our errors would immediately be picked apart in the debrief: the approach for the Tour de France would surely be more sophisticated than that of five months earlier in the Tour of the Med. It wasn’t. There was
no discussion about what had just happened or what could be done differently. The only post-ride team activity was lunch. I was frustrated: it looked like the main thing we’d learned from the three-hour outing was that riding fast makes your legs hurt. I couldn’t see how we were going to avoid a repeat performance on the big day.
It wasn’t that the GAN riders and staff were lazy or complacent: they just didn’t know what they didn’t know. In most cases they’d spent the whole of their professional lives in the closed world of professional cycling, where the past was the template for the future and the best way to do things was the way they’d always been done. As a result, progress happened at an evolutionary pace, with the odd giant meteor-type event to shake things up.
The last person who had forced change in the peloton, more than any other rider for a generation, was here now: Greg LeMond. He was the biggest modern day innovator in the sport. Greg wasn’t impressed by our collective effort either but didn’t seem to have the motivation to press for change. Perhaps it was because he’d already been in this situation too many times before and was out of fight. Perhaps he just had too much to worry about in terms of his own health. Either way, if GAN riders and staff weren’t inclined to adopt the outward-looking philosophy of their own Tour-winning team leader, they certainly weren’t going to take advice from the likes of me.
We were now just 48 hours away from the prologue, my goal of the year, so as we relocated to Lille for the Grand Départ I switched all of my attention to that. Much of what Pete Keen had prescribed for these last few days was doing nothing, which as any motivated athlete will tell you is the hardest thing of all to do. There was one activity I could focus my restless mind on and that was to familiarise myself with the course, but that was something I knew would have to wait until just before race day.
In the meantime, there was my introduction to the Tour’s annual pre-race circus, beginning with the bizarre rider medical. As far as I could tell, it served no purpose other than to let the press take photographs of skinny cyclists standing on scales with mock worried looks on their faces, or teammates listening to each other’s hearts with stethoscopes.
The other big set-piece waste of a rider’s time was the team presentation, held two days before the start and hosted by the amazing memory man of cycling, Daniel Mangeas. Daniel had been at my very first race of the year back in February. Signing on at the small roadside podium, my head had snapped up in surprise when I heard him recounting a list of my amateur results to the small crowd: no notes or aids, just a stream of perfectly recalled facts and figures.
He seemed to be present at both the start and finish line of every event I rode in France, always doing the same thing: conveying in a rush of controlled excitement a constant flow of information about whichever competitor happened to be in front of him. It didn’t matter how lowly the rider, Daniel had their career and often family information stored in his head. It was actually quite unnerving. His gravelly voice with its non-stop delivery was the inescapable soundtrack of the Tour. I wondered if he stopped when he went home. Or even whether he had one.
Medical and team presentation done, I could finally focus on my last piece of preparation, the recce. Tour prologues are almost always in city centres, along routes that don’t really exist in daily life. They start in pedestrianised squares, head the wrong way up one-way streets and reshape roads and corners with barriers, cones and straw bales. So it’s only possible to truly get to grips with a prologue course when the circuit is fully set up and closed to traffic – and usually that only happens the day before the event.
In cycling, as in motorsport, there’s little point in technical practice at anything other than race pace. The difference is that in cycling the rider is both pilot and power plant. So the proximity of practice and race day presented a physical and tactical dilemma: how could I go fast enough to learn the Lille course properly without damaging my engine? The solution we devised was for me to slipstream one of the team cars. Serge Beucherie, Roger’s second in command, drove around the flat, wide boulevards of the roughly U-shaped circuit at 55 kph, with me tucked in behind. As we approached the important corners, Serge swung the car to the inside and braked hard, leaving me a clear passage into the bends. I could see and feel the line in the same way I would in competition, yet hardly expended any energy.
I did several laps in this fashion, not so much memorising the 7.2 km route as physically absorbing every detail of it. Back at the hotel I replayed my ride again and again in my mind, until even lying in bed I could feel the body movement required to get around a given corner without braking. To Sally’s disgust, I can still remember every bend, gradient, grid placement, white line pattern and surface change of the Tour prologue courses I rode, as opposed to our anniversary or the birthdays of any of our kids.
Race day. I got to the circuit two hours before my start time and was momentarily stunned by the transformation the Place du Général de Gaulle had undergone since my training runs 24 hours earlier. The start ramp was surrounded by team cars, crazy vehicles from the publicity caravan, a tented village for VIPs and thousands of noisy spectators trying to get a glimpse of their favourite riders. I stepped into the GAN camping car and took my place at the back, an area I’d claimed as my own earlier in the year. My numbers, folded as small as I thought I could get away with inside the rules, had already been meticulously stuck onto my skinsuit, which I laid out on the narrow bench seat. Next to it, I placed a brand new set of mitts and a carefully cleaned aero helmet. It was a practice bordering on OCD, always the same.
My warm-up routine, a 20-minute set-piece mimicking the Olympic build-up of two years earlier, would begin exactly 30 minutes before my scheduled start time. All there was to do until then was wait.
Although I’d never been much of a reader, when I turned pro and was surrounded by a group of people whose language I didn’t speak I became a voracious consumer of novels. These were either good sci-fi or detective stories, never anything factual. They were a fantastic means of being mentally somewhere else.
To the incredulity of the staff, I often had my head in a book a few minutes before the start of the biggest races, when people were bustling all around me. If any of them had noted what page I was reading, they’d have seen that my outward appearance of calm was a sham. I’d stare at the same text for half an hour, my attention constantly slipping off the page and back to the present. In this setting, the time-killing exercise wasn’t the reading but the distraction of trying to.
All these activities had become part of a well-practised ritual that remained the same regardless of geographical location or scale of event. It was a familiar framework with which to face the unknown. At the 1991 World Championships in Stuttgart I’d learned about over-training. In Leicester, pursuit racing had helped me master the art of pacing over short distances. At the MIRA wind tunnel we’d gained aerodynamic understanding, and in Barcelona John Syer had taught me how to cope with the pressure of a major event. Now it was time to put all that together for the biggest time trial on the planet, the unofficial prologue world championships.
Sitting in the chair next to the start ramp, awaiting my slot and mentally rehearsing the ride one last time, I barely noticed the press snapping away. Then it was my turn.
The long beep sounded and I dropped down the shallow ramp, the first of the six bends rushing toward me. Banking right onto the wide Boulevard de la Liberté, I quickly sprinted up to speed and tucked into pursuit position, already in the biggest gear I had. My legs were spinning faster than I’d anticipated, perhaps 120 rpm. Had I started too fast? I disciplined myself to hold back. I couldn’t let the size of the occasion, the noise of the crowd, or the cries of encouragement from the following car persuade me to push on too early. How far to go? How hard was I working? Was this sustainable? Maybe. The subconscious calculations constantly running in the background.
The second obstacle, an easy 90-degree sweeping left on to the Boulevard Vauban came and went, follo
wed less than a minute later by the fast left on to Boulevard Montebello. Nearly three kilometres in already. System check: working hard, fatigue building but at an acceptable rate, under control. The large roundabout that signified the halfway mark had, like the rest of the circuit, been transformed by the presence of spectators, lining the barriers on the inside of the bend and making it impossible to see the exit. But I already had all the images I needed in my mind’s eye, already knew the speed and line I’d take.
I pedalled full gas into the wide curve, hugging the right-hand barriers, waited as long as I dared, then leaned left into the apex. From that pivot point, I started the inexorable drift out towards the kerb, sensing the angles, judging when I could start pushing again without my pedals clipping the road surface. I’d lost only 2–3 kph and was quickly back in the tuck and up to speed.
I was feeling the effort now, starting to rock as my muscles burned. Sideways energy is wasted energy. Another right, past the Place du Maréchal, two kilometres left to go, a little over two minutes of pain. I was approaching the emotional zone, the part of the race where I’d throw everything I had left into the charge for home, but it had to be timed right.
A minute 30 left. One more corner to go, back onto the Boulevard de la Liberté, the finishing straight. This final right was slightly sharper than 90 degrees and was the trickiest of the lot. I reckoned it could – just – be taken at full tilt, but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure. Of the five practice runs I’d had at this blind bend, I’d bottled it and braked three times. If I bottled it now my body was too fatigued to recover the lost speed. Holding my nerve here might make all the difference.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 11