Up ahead I could see a team car. I was catching Festina’s Luc Leblanc who’d set off a minute before me. I focused on its tail lights, committed to the last bend without braking, and had to use every millimetre of the wide road to stay upright. The risk had paid off, I’d taken a chunk out of the distance between me and Leblanc and I could sense how much faster than him I was going. A minute 15 left.
In the hot, airless streets, I could feel the pull of Leblanc’s team-car 100 m ahead. A moment later it swung out of the way but I’d already had the benefit of a precious few seconds’ tow. A minute to go. He was just ahead now, providing a welcome distraction as the effort threatened to overwhelm me. I broke from my plan and started spending the last of my energy early, sprinting to get into his slipstream.
Thirty seconds to go. I catapulted past Leblanc, no time to thank him for giving me a target, and switched my attention to the finish banner looming in front of me. With no shelter and all distraction gone, I was fading fast but it didn’t matter, I was already passing over the Fiat logo painted on the road right before the banner. One final lunge and it was done, I was over the line and into the scrum. Michel Laurent, the team’s logistics manager, had his arm around me, half holding me up, half steering me towards a chair.
There were still a handful of riders left to come in. Normally the few minutes of waiting for the rest of the field to finish is agonising, but this time I didn’t care. It was the closest I’d ever got to a perfect time trial. I’d even got a rare catch to help me maintain speed at exactly the right moment. Regardless of what the others did, I could do no more: 7.2 km in 7 minutes 49 seconds.
I sat surrounded by cameras as one by one the favourites failed to beat my time. Michel was certain it would stand. Someone was saying it was the fastest prologue ever. As the final rider, defending Tour champion Miguel Indurain, came into view it was clear he wasn’t even going to get close. The team were celebrating before he hit the line to make it official. I’d won my first ever stage of the Tour de France and with it the most coveted leader’s jersey in the world. The previous July, after the hour record in Bordeaux, I’d stood on this podium posing for photographs with the great Indurain. Now I had it to myself.
The rest of the day was a stream of relentless noise and questions like nothing I had experienced before. And on top of the questions, instructions: photographers telling me to hold the champagne glass up, kiss Sally, hold baby George. My initial reaction – the inability to grasp it all – was very much the way I’d felt in Barcelona after my gold medal ride. It was too much and happening too fast to take in. The difference here was that there seemed to be no escape, no protected athletes’ village to retreat into. When I walked into the lift at the team hotel a Channel 4 camera crew walked in behind me.
The other advantage of an Olympic medal is that there’s no having to get up and defend it the following day from other athletes who want it take it off you. Opening my eyes the next morning confirmed that at least I hadn’t lost it overnight. There was the jersey draped across the bedside chair. I lay there for a moment, breaking the news again quietly to myself: I was the leader of the Tour de France. Wow.
At the start, next to the new train station connecting Lille with London, I posed with the other jersey wearers for photographs on the front row of the peloton. I was at the head of 188 of the best professional bike riders in the world, and although handshakes and small talk were being exchanged it was clear the bonhomie wasn’t heartfelt. There was an undercurrent of tension. Everyone was acting – more relaxed, confident, cheerful than they probably felt – but I had full-blown stage fright. It was a waking version of the classic anxiety dream: standing in the wings on the opening night of a West End play with no idea of my lines, yet somehow I had the lead role and knew I had to go on anyway. I’d spent years becoming familiar with every aspect of winning time trials, but winning this one had put me in a position I felt hopelessly unqualified for.
For more than half of the opening stage there was a nervous stalemate, everyone poised with their fingers on metaphorical triggers, waiting for someone else to fire the first shot. Eventually, after an intermediate sprint, the uneasy truce was broken and an escape group of three riders slipped away. One of them was Jean-Paul van Poppel, a multiple stage winner in previous Tours. The other teams looked at us. The chief responsibility to control the race always falls on the team of the yellow jersey, but there were plenty of other people with an interest in pulling the break back – all the squads with sprinters on them, for a start. The situation called for a cool head. When the breakaway’s lead approached two minutes, I cracked and urged the team to give chase. I wouldn’t have made a good poker player.
A little later, Novemail’s riders joined in and between us we caught the breakaway with 8 km to go. As we flew into the outskirts of Armentières and under the kilometre flag all together, the sprinters’ teams took charge. On the finishing straight, with the line in sight, I started to relax, pleased to have got through my first day without incident and still in yellow. A split second later there was a terrible and familiar crunching sound: bicycle parts hitting tarmac. Back in 30th position, I careered to the left, narrowly dodging the fallers and the bits of bike skidding across the road.
Belgium’s Wilfried Nelissen, one of the big favourites for the stage win, had ridden head-down and full tilt into a policeman, who incredibly had been standing in the road taking a photograph. Both officer and rider were badly injured and they weren’t the only ones. Laurent Jalabert had landed on his face as his frame snapped in two beneath him. I can still see the images of Jalabert sitting dazed and covered in blood on the road.
All this I learned later from TV reports. Then, my first reaction was a slightly shaken relief at not having been brought down myself, and the thought that I needed to find Sally to reassure her that I was OK. I imagined her horrified, tears in her eyes, fighting to get through the crowds to see if her husband was one of the casualties. She was in the VIP area drinking champagne.
The crash eventually led to changes in the design of finish lines that are still visible today: regularly spaced scallops in the home straight barriers for policemen to stand in. Presumably, the gendarmerie also introduced a strict no-photo policy for officers on duty. More immediately, the incident seemed to have a sobering effect on the peloton and stage two was a low key affair. Festina’s Jean-Paul van Poppel took the win, but again, no one took any time from me. I was now just one day from home, one day to survive in yellow before I could lead the race into the UK.
That day, though, was the team time trial. The closest rider to me was Miguel Indurain, 15 seconds back, with the rest of the top ten spaced between 19 and 30 seconds. They were decent gaps for a 7.2 km prologue, but easily erased over the 66.5 km of a lumpy team time trial course, so there were plenty of riders who felt they had a chance of stealing the yellow jersey and taking it through the Channel Tunnel.
Our team rolled down the start ramp in Calais as badly prepared to defend the lead as our pre-race rehearsal had suggested we would be. After 10 km my handlebars came loose. That wasn’t a disaster in itself, but the way we dealt with it was. While I dropped back to the support car for an Allen key to carry out some high-speed mechanics, most of the team just charged on oblivious, intent on implementing plan smash-it. By the 22 km mark, we’d lost 36 seconds to the GB-MG Team. Their leader, Johan Museeuw, had started the day seventh, 23 seconds behind me, and was now the leader on the road.
As the strong westerly winds blowing in off the Channel began to buffet us, Francis Moreau was dropped. He was soon followed by Thierry Gouvenou and Jean-Claude Colotti. We were barely past half distance and we were down to six men. With 17 km to go, Eddy Seigneur, one of our strongest riders, powered up the final hill, distancing an ailing Greg LeMond. Greg courageously fought his way back on over the top, which was just as well because Jean-Philippe Dojwa was dropped on the descent. Our time for the stage would be taken on the fifth rider across the line, we couldn�
��t afford to lose anyone else. So at 10 km to go, when Eddy Seigneur inexplicably rode into the crowd rather than take the right hand bend with the rest of us, we lost more precious seconds waiting for him. In the end, we finished a disappointing eighth, one minute and 17 seconds behind the GB-MG team. We were virtually in sight of England’s shores and I’d lost the jersey to Johan Museeuw.
Instead of being ushered towards the podium, I was directed with the rest of the team – the other four who hadn’t been dropped – in the direction of the camping car to get changed for the journey across the Channel. The transformation from being the focus of the race to a member of the pack was abrupt. The leader’s yellow skinsuit was stuffed in the bottom of my day bag, no longer needed. Everyone was flat and no one wanted to talk about what had happened. Roger was putting a brave face on it, as he always did, but I wasn’t ready to look forward: I was still frustrated by the needlessly premature end to my ego trip. I continued to brood as we drove the team cars onto the shiny new Eurotunnel train and headed for Dover.
Our island nation didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with the Tour when it arrived for the first time in 20 years. Stage four started in the grounds of Dover Castle. A military brass band in full ceremonial dress played on the ramparts in direct competition with a troupe of American cheerleaders strutting their stuff. Meanwhile, the yellow jersey arrived by parachute to be presented to the race leader by a rather rotund and out of place MP. The stunt fell flat, as Johan Museeuw wasn’t inclined to change out of the yellow jersey he was already wearing.
Sean Yates and I, the only British riders in the race, were ushered to the front for photographs. I felt a little embarrassed, having failed to be the one in the race lead for the day. It was a relief to roll out through the castle gates and away from small talk, interviews and shouts for autographs.
The race snaked across southern England with me somewhere near the tail. The crowds were huge, pressing in on either side of the road and making it difficult to move up. It wasn’t until we reached the barriers of the finishing circuit in Brighton that I finally succeeded in getting to the front. The general classification squads had been riding tempo all stage to keep the time gap to the day’s breakaway under control. I arrived just as they were in the process of handing over responsibility to the sprinters’ teams for the run-in. I took the opportunity to attack and was surprised to find myself allowed to get away. I shouldn’t have been.
Spain’s Francisco Cabello and Emmanuel Magnien of France had been out front for most of the day, with Italy’s Flavio Vanzella just behind them. With eight kilometres to go the leaders still had a healthy advantage of 1:30, and I’d just launched myself into the gap between them and the bunch. No man’s land. At the top of the final climb, with the crowd roaring in my ears, I was joined by another Italian, Enrico Zaina, and we began to work together. But Cabello couldn’t be caught. Having dropped Magnien he rode the final five kilometres alone to take the win. Vanzella hung on for third – taking the yellow jersey from his teammate Museeuw in the process – and I took the sprint for fourth. I’d at least shown myself at the front for the crowds. Some sort of honour had been satisfied, although it didn’t feel particularly satisfying.
There was no showing off for the home fans the following day. For one thing, I was knackered, and in any case the sprinters’ teams took control on stage five to ensure a bunch finish in Portsmouth. By the standards of the time, the Tour’s two-day visit to the UK was widely agreed to have been a great success, with an estimated two million spectators watching the race speed by. But when they turned away from the roadside there was nowhere for them to go. No British Cycling machine geared up to guide them into cycling themselves, no mass participation events for them to enter with friends from the pub and no Sky Rides for families. There was just a queue of traffic and a lot of litter. Being in the vanguard of something is not as rewarding an experience for the participants as it is for those who come after. A seed had definitely been sown, but it would take another 13 years for it to germinate.
*
Attacking on the run in to Brighton had been an emotional move born out of frustration and that minor placing came at a heavy price. If I was tired the following day in Portsmouth, I was wiped out by the time we got back to France. Stage six from Cherbourg to Rennes was 270 km, the longest of the race, and I laboured through it. Greg LeMond, though, was in real trouble. Struggling from the off, he finally conceded and abandoned the Tour, citing deep fatigue. He made a few appearances over the remainder of the season, but it was that moment on the road to Rennes that he really called it a day. To leave the Tour in the broom wagon was an inglorious end to what had been an amazing career.
At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Sean Yates, after ten Tours spent almost entirely in the service of others, was having his well-earned moment in the spotlight. Sean had infiltrated the day’s breakaway and built up an advantage sufficient to take the yellow jersey. Thirty-two years since the first British leader of the Tour de France, we’d had numbers two and three in the space of a week, even if neither of us had managed it on home roads. Between us, Sean and I had the UK surrounded.
Although all my pre-Tour planning had focused on the prologue, I’d also marked the stage nine time trial from Périgueux to Bergerac as one I might be capable of winning. By the time it arrived I’d lowered my sights. I was now struggling every day not to get dropped. I still rode as hard as I could but was only able to finish fifth, losing a whopping 5 minutes 27 seconds to Miguel Indurain. It was a relief to hit the halfway point of the Tour, the moment in the plan, agreed seven months earlier, that I’d be leaving the race in order to prepare for the world championships in Sicily.
Roger, though, was caught between honour and emotion. He knew what he’d agreed to, that our strategy made sense, but now we were here he wanted me to keep going and worry about the Worlds later. He pleaded with me to continue until the rest day, where we’d ‘see how you feel then’. Annoyed at being made to feel uncomfortable when I wasn’t the one who was changing the deal, I let myself be persuaded to start stage 11. But it was soon clear, at least to me, that I was utterly spent, emotionally as well as physically. The prospect of finishing the first big mountain stage of the race was not appealing.
I was lying seventh overall and I knew if I went on I was going to get a pasting on the climb to Hautacam. I wanted to stop before that happened. I struggled to hold wheels, as much because I had now lost the desire to fight as through fatigue, and languished at the rear of the field. I dropped back to the car to tell Roger I was going to stop and he continued to try to persuade me to fight on to the end of the day. I was angry. At the time I told myself it was with him, for breaking our contract, for making me feel bad, but in reality it wasn’t Roger I was annoyed at. At half distance, I took the unilateral decision to climb off the bike and into the team car at the feed zone. Roger was right: it didn’t feel good.
A race commissaire stopped alongside me as I got to Michel Decock’s car and insisted I remove my race numbers. This was the end of a brilliant Tour debut and yet it tasted like failure. The logical execution of a long-agreed plan had been recast as something shameful, a cowardly way to exit the race. Ah well, shame was one of the few emotions I hadn’t experienced on this Tour: might as well add it to the collection. The inside of Michel’s car was quiet after the noise of the race, and when I got back to the hotel it was just a hotel. Normal. Well, apart from the TV crew waiting outside. After days of intense pressure, clamour, attention, it was a jarring way to finish.
It would be the end of the season before I understood just how much the 1994 Tour had changed things for me, specifically those first 7.2 km on the streets of Lille. It was then that performance-plan potential became reality, and benign scepticism turned to acceptance of our methods. The Keen/Boardman approach worked in the professional world. At least it had so far.
CHAPTER 9
The Worlds
Six days after leaving the Tour and
still deeply tired, I was back on the bike and back in France, in Lyon. There were still two world titles to worry about if I wanted to make good on my hotel room prediction to Roger of 12 months earlier.
In 1994, both Road and Track World Championships were to be held on the island of Sicily. The location and the timing, August, all but guaranteed that they’d be the hottest for years. First would be the track competition, staged outdoors on the bumpy concrete of the Velodromo Paolo Borsellino in Palermo. Less than a week later, 210 km away to the east, the inaugural individual time trial would be run off around the streets of Catania. The circuit, according to a British Cycling reconnaissance trip, would be a rolling, sinuous affair, all on poorly surfaced roads.
To ensure I was properly acclimatised, especially for the near hour-long time trial effort, hot weather training was going to be essential. Lyon had the perfect combination of high temperatures and low quality riding surfaces. I’d competed there at the velodrome of the Parc de la Tête d’Or in the 1989 world championships and the concrete bowl was possibly the slowest track I’d ever ridden, like cycling in a sandpit. When I saw pictures of the Sicilian venue it sprang immediately to mind.
A small team of us flew out to set up camp: the two Petes, my training partner Simon Lillistone and Ann McAllister, a family friend and fluent French speaker. Since I’d barely seen them for the best part of a month, Sally also flew out with Ed, Harriet and George. The summer days fell into a comfortable pattern: riding around the hilly roads of Lyon with Simon, napping, training on the track and swimming in the quiet hotel pool with the kids.
It took most of that two-week trip to fully recover from the fatigue left over from the Tour, but by the time we got back to the UK to perform the unpack and repack for Sicily I was ready for the final phase of the season.
Sally’s presence at major events was becoming the norm, although she usually stayed in a separate hotel, allowing me to focus solely on my job. It was especially necessary in this case as she had seven-month-old George with her, who wasn’t keen on the idea of sleeping for eight hours at a time, particularly not with night-time temperatures in the mid thirties. In fact at no time during our stay in Sicily did the temperature drop below 34 degrees, often rising above 40 in mid afternoon, which was when I would be riding the time trial.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 12