We Were Young and Carefree

by Laurent Fignon

  That is what you call buying in. Without Jaunait perhaps we would never have had the chance to show the cycling world that such a system was viable and efficient. As soon as the contract had been signed Cyrille and I began receiving our monthly salaries: between 100,000 and 200,000 francs depending on what we needed. Maxi-Sports was making money and everyone was happy.

  At Jaunait’s request, I personally worked on the design of the jersey using the same colours as the Renault kit, with the logo resembling a wheatsheaf pointing upwards. My idea was to make the rider look a bit more slender and maybe more muscular. It worked: the logo was clearly visible with the famous ‘U’ in red. Looking down from a television helicopter, it was all you could see.

  When we officially presented the team in November 1985, all keyed up in our new jerseys, we all felt that this was a new beginning. It felt as if there was a creative soul behind the venture. We now had incredible peace of mind. But someone was missing from my happy state. Pascal Jules was no longer riding at my side. In spite of my repeated attempts to reconcile him with Guimard, I failed: Guimard no longer wanted even to talk about him.

  It was a setback for me as well. By signing with a Spanish team, Julot would wreck his career, and he would soon go completely off the rails.

  I had to relearn how it all felt. I had to get back in touch with the little signs that were coming from my body, which had been left to itself for too long. I had to grit my teeth and then struggle to get where I wanted. And if I made it, the price was high.

  A few weeks after my operation, about the time of the French national championship at the end of June, I got back on the bike. My problem was not how I would go back to being a champion but just becoming a simple cyclist again. I had to learn how to turn the legs again, stay upright and last through the kilometres. It was a seemingly impossible task.

  I don’t have many memories of the 1985 Tour. I did follow one stage, from Autrans to Saint-Étienne. That July, Bernard Hinault joined cycling’s most legendary names. He had come second in 1984, won in 1985: what more could you say? His life force was still there, virtually intact. He was a great competitor: powerful, unstinting, aggressive. In those two brief years, 1984 and 1985, cycling would experience, without knowing it, a high point, a zenith of beauty. It was the pinnacle on a building that was about to crumble; the last great gasp of a golden age that would not return.

  When I got home from the Tour, I began training again. Or a sort of training. My first real ride was a nightmare. Twenty kilometres, no more. It was hell. It felt as if I was riding the bike for the first time. My legs didn’t work. I had no muscles. I was just a dismembered carcass sitting on a machine that wouldn’t move forwards.

  After having my shower I touched the place where they had operated. Where the scar was, I felt a kind of waterfilled ball. When I put my finger on it, the muscle did nothing. I thought that it was all over for me. I couldn’t put any weight on the leg, not even to walk or do the movements you make in everyday life. Everything was difficult. And the slightest effort tired me out; I was so exhausted. But I had to get on with it, find the courage to deal with the pain. This is the desperate moment when you find out what lies underneath, where you have to look deep inside to find reasons to keep believing, to discover some purpose in the pain. You have to get through it, no matter the cost. You almost want to go under, but to stay in the game you have to survive.

  I went to look for the sun in Nîmes to gather my strength and have a change. I took my bike. With the wind that blows around there, I could hardly move. Cycle tourists – the ones who didn’t work out who I was – just sped past without noticing I was there. But little by little the kilometres built up. I just took each day as it came without asking too many questions. Was I afraid of what the future might hold? I don’t know, I don’t think so. I remember going to do exercises with Armand Mégret, the team doctor. I spent a lot of time doing rehabilitation work. As my ankle had gone a long time without taking any weight, making it flex again in a normal way was a long, long process. To begin with I was made to do walking exercises in a swimming pool and do floor exercises. Should I now admit something? Well, I never regained the flexibility I had before. Never. I was never able to bend my ankle normally. It was always a few degrees short. There is no need to point out that it would have consequences for the rest of my career.

  I have to confess to something else. While I was convalescing I came down with a staphylococcal infection at precisely the same point where the blow from the pedal had left a permanent mark. During the early weeks of pain I had had a large number of injections which had ended up damaging the skin. It was so bad that when Saillant did the operation the scar tissue took a long time to form. For a good while, when the wound was cleaned out, you could see the bare tendon inside. It was asking for infection.

  And this too is something that no one ever knew at the time: Professor Saillant had to operate again to clean out the wound. This second surgery gave me my morale back, in fact. Saillant said to me at the time: ‘Now, it’s down to you.’ And that instilled confidence in me, making me believe that if I could regain control of my body everything would be fine. One day, out training, feeling that my body was responding well, I said to myself, ‘There you are, you are the man you were.’ I spoke too soon. In terms of muscle mass my legs looked just like they had been in the past. There was no problem. But when it came to power, I realised very rapidly that I had lost a good part of the strength that I had had. I felt it less when I was in my best form, but the rest of the time it was blindingly obvious; my left leg was not strong enough. Now we would say the watts weren’t there. Right up to the end of my career it remained a handicap which I never really discussed publicly: getting the former muscle power back was an unattainable dream.

  After training on the track at the Paris sports academy, INSEP, well away from the public eye and the bad weather, I rode my first official race in January 1986: the Madrid Six Day. There should have been nothing better for spinning the legs and working on the fast-twitch muscles. The organisers had asked me to ride an invitation pursuit race against José-Luis Navarro, the Spanish champion. I beat him, but as he rode up to congratulate me he crashed and made me fall as he slipped down the track. The medical bill: head injuries and a broken collarbone, but fortunately not a compound fracture. It was a bizarre way to come back to racing.

  So I then fluctuated between bad times (which helped to make me stronger) and hopeful spells (I’m an optimist by nature). My real comeback race was the Tour of the Mediterranean where, to the surprise of everyone, including myself, I came fifth in the time trial up the Mont Faron climb. It was something to smile about.

  The start of 1986 was not like any usual fresh start. Not at all. In a confused way something else was burgeoning within me, something that was more basic and which coloured my attitude to everything. It was like being recast. I felt perfectly calm, but – this is hard to express – I had aged overnight. I had matured. I felt older and more serious. The cyclists who fluttered around me seemed sometimes to have come from another country. They spoke to me, I listened, and it was as if what they were saying was insignificant, uninteresting. I can’t really explain what was going on inside me, but it was a key moment of transition.

  Doors are either open or closed. They cannot remain ajar for long. You have to make things happen. That was the kind of state I was in, waiting in front of the door that opened on to life. It was partly open, and I had a dilemma: push it open or slam it shut. Looking at the long term, I decided I would live with whatever became of me. I was not someone else. I was just far more serious. Was it down to me? Was it the injury opening up a whole new chapter in my life? Or was it that cycling itself had just begun to change abruptly?

  In the Système U team we had at least had the chance to retain the bulk of the structure that had come from Renault. It was good to be able to build on firm foundations, good to work with the same back-room staff. I returned to ‘acceptable’ form, but I rap
idly became aware that I felt unable to do the same things as before. I was also in a hurry, a huge hurry. The people around me quite rightly warned me against forming expectations which weren’t rooted in reality, and then I understood the inevitable truth. It was going to take at least six or perhaps eight months before I began to feel as good as before. I remember imagining a blank season: it was terrifying.

  Compared to the other guys, I’d returned to being a ‘decent’ rider, but that was all. The exceptional champion, the one who could engage a higher gear with the outrageous ease I’d felt at the start of 1985: that champion had taken French leave. There were optimists who were delighted to see me everywhere I went, although I was going nowhere.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  REJOICE!

  One day dragged into another. I couldn’t take much more of it. My physical weakness was having an adverse effect on my mental state, which was decidedly shaky, and that was not something I was used to.

  Ironically the weak little flame burst into life on 1 April 1986, believe it or not. Riding Paris–Camembert on April Fool’s day might have seemed a cheesy old joke but something prodigious happened. It was not something I wanted to boast about, to say the least. The photos of the time sum it up: you can see the Dane Kim Andersen winning the race with me not far behind, beside myself with rage, banging on the handlebars. My hand hurt terribly.

  I had got into the winning move with Andersen, a solid character built like a lumberjack, a fine rider but not a quick sprinter because of his chunky physique. And here I was, at last. This was going to be my first win since the operation. The end of my Road to the Cross, the first shout of joy after almost a year of drawn-out agony. Getting rid of Andersen in the sprint? A formality for me, even after all those spells on the operating table.

  As we went under the kilometre-to-go flag, he stopped working. I positioned myself at the front and without my being aware of it, my brain began to wander. This is the truth: it was as if I fled away from reality, from the race. Who knows why. I remember so clearly that at one point I began to wonder what kind of victory salute I would make. In my mind, I went over the gesture. Once, twice, three times. There I was, I’d done it. I have to say that a massive feeling of joy suffused through my entire being. I celebrated like a kid, like I used to in the good old days. All that pain was forgotten. All those races I’d missed were forgotten, so was the Tour that had started without me. I was glad. I was satisfied.

  And then, without telling me first of course, Andersen put in a sudden, brutal acceleration. It was about 300m to the line. Time has passed but the shame still lingers: I had completely forgotten that he was there. I was somewhere else entirely. I remember as if it were yesterday: he spurted off my wheel, I saw him coming past me and I thought: ‘What on earth is that guy doing there?’

  I paid the price for my premature euphoria. Although I reacted, I never pulled back the thirty metres which he had gained at once. He won. I couldn’t even call it a beginner’s error because not even a beginner forgets his opponent. No, this little accident called for psychoanalysis.

  To recover from such a grotesque episode, there was nothing to equal a fine Classic like Flèche Wallonne, which in those days actually resembled a major race. It was over 240km whereas today it’s no more than 200km. ‘We need an end to such horrendous demands,’ they say today. That’s bonkers. Long distances in themselves have never forced riders to take drugs. That is proved by the fact that in the last fifteen years races have been pared back like never before but this has been the time in which we have seen drug taking at its worst. Personally I liked long, selective races. There are plenty of champions who can get past 200 kilometres without falling by the wayside, but 240 kilometres or more is a different story and a genuine ‘natural’ process of elimination can take place. So the Flèche Wallonne that I dominated head and shoulders that year was not quite the same event as today.

  On that occasion I rode a race that was tactically almost perfect. There was a ‘royal’ lead group including most of the big names: Sean Kelly, Moreno Argentin, Joop Zoetemelk, Rolf Gölz, Steven Rooks, Johan Van der Velde, Jean-Claude Leclerc, Greg LeMond, Jan Nevens, Charly Mottet, Claude Criquielion, Andersen. I ended up in a chasing group with Hinault, Delgado, Yvon Madiot and Urs Zimmerman. We joined the leaders and then on the Côte de Gives my old friend Andersen – the winner in 1984 – made an even better attack than the one at Paris–Camembert. The group seemed unsure how to react: I seized the moment, put it in the big ring and followed him. No one got on my wheel. So the two of us were out front for about sixty kilometres. I need hardly say that the last thing I was going to do was drag him all the way to the finish for the sprint again, so at the foot of the Côte de Ben-Ahin, about ten kilometres from the finish, I put all my strength together for one big attack. Andersen was unable to stay with me and I climbed alone up the final hill, the Mur de Huy.

  So on 16 April 1986 I brought a fallow period of 386 days to a close. The last time I had smelled the perfume of a winner’s bouquet was at the prologue time trial at the Tour de Midi-Pyrénées more than a year earlier. It was a whole world away. That evening I said to myself: ‘That’s it, I’m back.’ With hindsight, however, I can see that I wasn’t honest with myself, because deep down inside in spite of the win I could sense that something was missing. But I didn’t want to think about it. I pushed myself into believing.

  When I left for the Tour of Spain, I thought I was ready to conquer the world again. My heart was full; my hopes were high. The Spanish press singled me out as ‘the logical favourite’. It didn’t take a lot for me to believe that as well, and the prologue, won by my teammate Thierry Marie, made my cosy assumptions that bit more comfortable. I came fifth, just behind Alain Bondue: up with the best guys. But during the fourth stage, when I was already lying second overall, it all fell apart. I had a heavy crash and injured my knees but, more seriously, cracked a rib, and dislocated a bone in my chest. Then, I made a major mistake: I decided to go on, because to my mind it seemed a useful way to get in some kilometres to regain my form. I was on the Vuelta, so what was the point in going home when I could ride my bike every day? Guimard should not have given way to my stubbornness: I was incapable of riding within myself in a major race. I hung on, no matter what it cost, in order to help Charly Mottet, who was well placed overall. I didn’t think about my own fate.

  I should have gone home to permit my injuries to settle down in peace. At the finish in Madrid I still managed to finish seventh overall, first Frenchman in the standings, which was an unlikely outcome given the circumstances. I had fought hard for it, every day. And I went back to France completely in pieces, even though I was not yet fully aware of it. My physical power – which was just coming back after months away from racing – was seriously affected.

  It was the point in the season when I no longer had any real idea who I was and what I was doing. To what did the name Laurent Fignon refer now? I went through the motions of daily life like a machine, like a good professional, like a puppet propelled by habit. Do this, do that. Do it again. Ride the bike. Sleep. Have a massage. All these daily activities slid over me, without my ever feeling completely involved. This was the lowest blow of all: I was no longer in charge of my own existence. Clearly, I had driven myself too hard. My brain had overlooked the operation but my body made sure I remembered it.

  As the leader of a team that was completely centred around me, I had to lead by example whatever the circumstances, on the bike, and in daily life. However, I was struggling. So I was almost amazed to see my result in the prologue of the 1986 Tour de France at Boulogne-Billancourt. Everyone was agog at my ‘return to the Tour’: I came seventh. For many people this was not merely a respectable result but ‘definitely’ was the harbinger of good things from the ‘comeback man’. Some people were even excited, but I knew what was going on. In the prologue I was riding on natural talent and nothing else. It was all going wrong. I felt terrible physically. All I felt
was determination and courage and that was serious. My body – and perhaps my mind as well – was registering deep fatigue rather than an urge to get on with it.

  Any illusions were removed by the team time trial between Meudon and Saint-Quentin, which Système U won. Thierry Marie was in the yellow jersey, I moved up to third overall. Everything seemed to be fair, but I had had to make myself suffer horribly to hang on and contribute to the team’s effort, and that was not normal. My teammates weren’t fooled, although L’Equipe predicted ‘A fine battle looms between Fignon, Hinault and LeMond’, adding, ‘Everything depends on Fignon. If he is back to his old self, the search for a winner will be brief.’ As you can see, there weren’t many people who were in on the secret and even Guimard – to whom I could not lie – only partly believed me when I said my legs were ‘cotton wool’. He was certain that I would come round. It was bound to happen.

  We came down violently to earth. In the individual time trial at Nantes over 61.5km, I had a bellyful. I couldn’t breathe, I hurt all over, and couldn’t get moving. I was placed thirty-second, unworthy of my status. My body couldn’t take any more. I was going under: you can’t rebuild Rome in a day. During the stage between Bayonne and Pau, where Hinault and Delgado performed a merry little duet at the front, I chased behind them, berating myself to limit my losses, with no sense of how my body felt. I didn’t want to believe that my muscles could refuse to obey me when I asked them to go faster. That evening, I fell asleep on the massage table for the first time in my life. I had good reason: the next morning when the race pulled out of Pau I had a temperature of thirty-nine degrees and stayed in bed. In the village-départ, Hinault was sympathetic: ‘I hope it goes better for him soon. When a cyclist has more than six months away from racing at the highest level, it takes him a year and a half to get back to full strength. I know what I’m talking about. To get back in order on a permanent basis, Fignon will have to wait until 1987.’