Presented with a fait acccompli, the Castorama worthies presumably believed that we had pulled a fast one on them. It meant that from the very start, even before a wheel had turned in competition, their confidence in us was undermined. From then on the relationship was always an honest one but they were suspicious about us, and whenever they had to decide about something they would look at it twice before giving the go-ahead. Guimard’s lack of transparency perfectly reflected his state of mind at the time. Insidiously, the ties that bound us were being stretched a little more every day. The gaps between conversations became wider and – more worryingly in my view – there was a collapse of the mutual trust that we call ‘friendship’, the curious alchemy between two human beings that allows them to talk about anything at any hour of the day or night, without restraint or calculation. He and I were entering the dark tunnel of disagreement. I still had no idea how far it would go.
Another event led to more upset than might have been expected: Cyrille Guimard got rid of Guy Gallopin, Alain’s brother who had been oiling the cogs of the entire organisation for two years, showing a mix of altruism and competence no matter what arose. As soon as he left, there was a resurgence of the logistical problems that we had experienced in 1986 and 1987, in exactly the same areas. All this annoyed me hugely but as soon as I wanted to pour out my feelings to Guimard he evaded the issue and refused to listen.
We had an excellent start in our new colours, which were easily picked out in the peloton. Gérard Rué won the Tour of the Mediterranean and I finished Paris – Nice in a decent fourth place. The season looked as if it was going to be like the one before: I couldn’t hope for better. The only problem was that my grip on Milan–San Remo didn’t last, unfortunately, in spite of the care I took over my preparation. I trained in exactly the same way as I had in the previous two years but the Italians wanted my domination of the race to end and they cooked up a rather nasty surprise for us at the very start of the race. While I was lurking deep in the back of the bunch as I always did, a vast group escaped at the front of the race. It wasn’t the traditional early suicide break but a mini-peloton in its own right including several major players and race favourites. Our attempts to get back on terms were in vain. I never saw the front of the race again. Gianni Bugno, the young starlet of Italian cycling, was the winner and a whole country breathed a sigh of relief.
And so did I, because a week later I was winning again, at the two-day, three-stage Critérium International, a race I had already dominated as a new professional in 1982. It was a race full of attacks, from every side, and I owed the win to my experience and consistency, because I managed to salvage the overall title in spite of not winning a stage. It was Castorama’s second prestigious win in a few weeks, but it was to be my last victory in a major stage race: how could I have imagined at the time that such a thing could be possible?
Because something was not quite right with me. What was it? For example, at the Tour of Flanders in 1990, the weather was glorious and I was in flying form, so I made a colossal effort to get across to a breakaway group. But no sooner had I come up to them than they all immediately showed me that they had no desire to cooperate in keeping the move going. I didn’t understand their thinking and lost my temper. A few years previously I would have tried to ride them all off my wheel and it wouldn’t have made any difference apart from tiring me out a little. This time I reacted in a different way. I was disgusted by their collective lack of drive, which I perceived as having something to do with a massive change taking place in the sport, and I got off my bike. I just quit. I no longer saw any place for me among colleagues with a code of conduct in which honour and sacrifice were old-fashioned eccentricities. This little episode left its mark on me.
From that day on, there is almost nothing to write about the rest of the 1990 season, so catastrophically did it unfold. I came out of the Classics season completely washed up – twenty-seventh in Paris–Roubaix for example – I came close to coming down with pleurisy, and I set off in the Tour of Italy wearing race number I with a mindset that was nothing like what I might have hoped for. In total contrast to the same period the year before, I was desperately seeking some trace of something to cling to in my own shadow. Things were as bad as they could be. And from the first day, even though I didn’t feel in particularly bad shape – far from it – I still lost ground on the future winner, Gianni Bugno: 29sec in the prologue time trial and all of 47sec on the very first climb, Vesuvius. But worse still, the bad luck that had spared me a little in 1989 was determined to cross my path again and have its merry way with me.
On the fifth stage from Sora to Teramo, after exactly 150km as the race went through the Apennines, many of the bunch were caught by surprise as the race went through a tunnel. It was pitch dark. I could vaguely hear the noise of braking, dull thuds and crashes, then after flying though the void – I could see nothing at all – I landed on the tarmac without any idea what was going on, coming down heavily on one buttock. It was dark and there was shouting from all round me. I got up with my thigh covered in blood and I could tell from the pain that was paralysing the whole of my lower back that I had done some real damage. I got back on the bike and finished the stage but the truth was like a kick in the teeth. I had dislocated my pelvis. The pain never let up and four days later on the ninth stage, I quit in thick fog on the Tyrrhenian coast. The bunch didn’t wait for me: they were already a long way ahead of where I was.
This was a bad injury and the people around me were worried. I remember Alain Gallopin tried to reassure me when I returned to Paris. He kept the world off my back and showed the patience of a saint in trying to stop anything getting on my nerves. But my morale was low. I didn’t say much to anyone. Nothing was working out as I had wanted and after this latest crash my body refused to do what I asked of it for several weeks. Was it ever going to give me any respite after that?
When I arrived at the start of the 1990 Tour at Futuroscope, a theme park entirely devoted to modernity and new technology, that opened three years earlier, I was a tired man, physically and mentally. I had few illusions about what was coming. Thierry Marie gave the team a win in the prologue time trial of course, and I was a decent fifteenth. Then the fun began. There are cycling specialists who expound the theory that the ‘weakest’ cyclists in the Tour ‘fall more often’. They have no idea. All that I remember is that I simply wasn’t strong mentally. And when I ended up on the tarmac again, on the third stage to Nantes, with a nasty knock on the calf this time, I felt as if injustice was singling me out like lightning striking a lone tree. I said nothing. I just pondered my physical misery, and gave short shrift to anyone who wanted to feel sorry for me and expected me to bemoan my fate.
But I still had to face reality. The next day between Nantes and Mont St-Michel I couldn’t avoid getting trapped when the bunch split after a massive crash. I lost another 20sec and any chance of winning the Tour was now just a distant illusion. Then came the coup de grâce: I admit it was more mental than physical. Between Avranches and Rouen a dreary rain was falling, the kind that dulls all your hopes. The bunch, for some bizarre reason, was going like hell, going faster all the time, one attack after another. I wasn’t really there. The pain in my calf was getting worse and worse. My body was suffocating, my mind wandering vaguely. Why did I find it so hard to be what I had been? Why did cycling suddenly turn against me? Why did bad luck and setbacks hound me whatever I did? Yes, why did fate torment me in this way, singling me out above all the others?
My act of rebellion was a silent one. At kilometre 124 as we approached the feeding station at Villers-Bocage, I was already in limbo, a footnote in the story of the 1990 Tour and I let myself slip behind a small group that was trying to regain contact with the bunch. I pulled on the brakes and got off the bike. I unpinned my race numbers. I said nothing, just made this one proud gesture. Unpinning my race numbers. It wasn’t a normal abandon and it certainly didn’t feel like capitulation. No, it was a gesture born of
disillusionment and pride, a way of sticking up two fingers at fate. You must never disdain a symbolic gesture when you get the chance, even if it’s done in infinite sadness. Otherwise you end up looking for them everywhere, constantly seeking compensation or reparation to boost your soul. It’s like an eternal time trial, and the contre la montre is a lonely affair.
I remember that evening, in a state of utter depression, I thought back to what I had told Alain Gallopin more than a year before: ‘1989 will be the last year I can win the Tour.’ The 1990 Tour had gone elsewhere, without me, and I could not escape from the notion that my premonition was coming true. It was a devastating idea. Soul-destroying and yet so completely real.
The end of the season was like going through a desert. I don’t remember much about it: there wasn’t a great deal of any interest.
Things were so bad that at the start of 1991 I forced myself to make one single resolution: not to go through another year of hell. That was all that mattered. I now entered a time filled with strange doubts. Wondering about what I wanted to do next with my life – and not just my cycling career – I began to question whether I really still wanted to suffer desperately on a bike. I knew that I was no longer the cyclist I had been in 1983 and that it was now time to stop kidding myself. It was no longer a matter of courage, but whether or not. I still had a burning desire to keep living the life of a professional cyclist with all the personal sacrifice that goes with it. I can still see myself, a few weeks earlier, saying to Cyrille Guimard just how worn out with it all I was and – more seriously than anything else in the world – explaining how I saw our work at Maxi-Sports developing in the future.
I was thirty years old. He was thirteen years older. I never for an instant imagined that I could cause him the slightest concern, but with hindsight I believe that Guimard thought I wanted to edge him out. The idea of having two managers in our business was not something he could envisage. That was a mistake on his part. There was no reason why we should tread on each other’s toes and we knew each other inside out. The trouble was that I felt rapidly that something was going against the grain with him. Day after day, he didn’t seem to see me in the same way as he had in the past. He did not approve of my wish to become more involved in running the team. Deep down, Guimard did not agree but he refrained from admitting it to me face to face. As for me, after ten years as a professional bike rider I was at the end of my natural cycle. I have noticed since that every ten years I seem to want to change something fundamental.
A new co-leader, Luc Leblanc, had signed with the team and I could clearly see from the outset that Guimard was trying to turn his ambition against me. Guimard manipulated him and that was all Leblanc needed. He showed few scruples, in contrast to what he claimed as soon as a microphone was shoved under his nose. He set to this perverse game with astonishing gusto. Guimard was no longer like he used to be. The man I had been so fond of was drifting away from me, irretrievably, with some added impetus from the Castorama directors. As opposed to what we had expected, these guys were beginning to push Guimard over the edge by racking up the pressure on him. Not only did they want to know every detail of our accounts, such as how much we paid the riders, but more seriously they began to ask for something more than results: they wanted me to be a television ‘presence’.
It was part of a bigger picture. The reaper was sharpening his scythe. He was about to cut a swathe through the cycling I had known. This was new territory for me, and also for Guimard. Even if he didn’t let me in on everything, I am personally convinced that never before had he been under the slightest pressure either from Renault or from Système U. So now we were being influenced by the need for a return on our sponsor’s investment not merely through the image of the team, but also through our results. Our world was undergoing a radical change, and I didn’t like it. Never had I envisaged a sponsor wanting to interfere in the sporting side of the team to that extent. I felt that it was scandalous and degrading for our integrity. But Guimard had clearly got off on the wrong footing with them or else had lost any bargaining power that might have enabled him to resist in some way. He refused to be disturbed by it.
I felt I was heading into uncharted territory. I was the co-owner of the team but Guimard was becoming more distant from me and was deciding a huge number of things without consulting me. The sponsor was putting a gun to our heads and was exerting power over the team that I felt to be damaging and possibly fatal. And amidst all this I was searching in vain for my old power on the bike and for the motivation without which it was meaningless to imagine better days.
I finished Paris-Nice in tenth place, which barely matched what I’d hoped for, and during the race I had a massive row with Guimard. During a stage where we were supposed to keep our cards to our chests and save our strength, all of a sudden I saw several members of the team get to the head of the peloton and begin riding hard as if they were defending the leader’s jersey. I had no idea what was going on and rode up to find out. I had a grumble and asked what they were up to. One of them shouted, ‘Cyrille asked us to get riding.’ There was a simple explanation: Guimard had decided to implement a cunning manoeuvre to defeat the Toshiba team, but without telling me. Guimard had not warned me, not even a hint! It was unthinkable: until then we had always discussed race tactics together, exchanged our views and then decided on the line to follow. It was the first time that he had acted in this way. I felt betrayed.
That evening at the hotel, Cyrille and I exchanged words. Swear words. It amounted to mutually assured destruction. For the first time in our life together we didn’t like each other any more.
An incredible thing happened a few weeks later at Paris–Roubaix. Guimard came up alongside me in the car and, at a completely pointless moment in strategic terms, he asked me to get up to the front of the race because we didn’t have anyone from the team showing his face. I didn’t really understand at the time why he was asking us to take this precaution but I assumed that he must know what he was doing so I blindly went along with the tactic. I only learned the truth a little later. It was a grim truth that I had not dared admit to myself beforehand, because I knew how I would react. The Castorama directors had put pressure on Guimard to ensure an ‘on camera presence’. They wanted ‘television time’ so that at the start of live coverage the cameras could show their colours. I was disgusted by the idea. The important thing on Paris–Roubaix was to be in the front in the final phases, rather than grinning at the television pretending to put on a show. It was the first time I had been asked to ‘do it for the cameras’.
I need hardly say that I made my feelings clear to Guimard after I learned about his dealings with the sponsor. This latest violent verbal altercation left me shocked and depressed. Our differences had become irreparable. We both decided, without anything being said, that we were not going to talk to each other any more. We even avoided meeting.
I have no idea how far the breakdown in my relationship with the man who had shared my whole life as an elite sportsman – in other words, most of my adult life – had a knock-on effect on my general behaviour and on my private life. But it just so happened that at the same time I began to experience serious difficulties in my relationship with my wife Nathalie. It was more and more of a struggle to go back home with a carefree, joyful heart. The lack of care and of the haven of peace that I felt I should be waiting when I returned home had turned into a furnace of tension as well. Nothing was working out there either.
These are painful memories of multiple doubts that invaded every area of my life. My whole environment seemed to be falling apart and the more time passed the more everything around me seemed destined to failure, personal failure. Without feeling completely responsible for all this, apart from my lack of success on the bike, I believe that I was ground down by everything, by the pace of a life lived at a hundred kilometres per hour and the humdrum routine that I had got into over the years. I did the same work. I rode for the same team. The same people looked after me.
I came home to the same woman. It was a hard thing to admit but I needed change. I needed a revolution.
The inevitable duly happened. Cyrille Guimard didn’t content himself with keeping me at arm’s length but ended up working against me. At the time Guimard had a vast amount of personal credit among the press and the wider public and he had no trouble exerting his influence. So for the journalists, for example, to explain away my repeated lack of results, he dreamed up imaginary injuries that were all equally grotesque. There were some hacks who weren’t fooled, which simply added to the breakdown in the relationship.
I had no notion how difficult Guimard would be. At the Giro di Puglia, not long before the 1991 Tour de France, I actually managed to win the penultimate stage. I was happy, but not my manager, who looked pretty ill at ease. Guess why. If I had not managed to win a single race before the start of the Tour, Guimard might well have dropped me from the Tour squad. Unfortunately for him not only did I manage to raise my arms in a victory salute but it actually looked as if I might be coming into some kind of form for the Tour. His plans were going awry. Up to a certain point, anyway.
Before the French road race championship I was called to a meeting with Guimard and Jean-Hugues Loyez. During the season I had been calling Loyez to explain to him in no uncertain terms that I was having trouble working with Guimard and that I would no longer be in the team in 1992, whatever happened and however I decided to continue my career. I was far from having any notion of what was going to happen in this meeting which, to begin with, seemed more like a trial to me. I had barely sat down before Guimard began laying into me, accusing me of ‘failing to do my job properly’ and ‘disrupting the harmony of the team’ by ‘failing to make proper allowances for the demands of the press and other media’. Then he added: ‘You have to make a public statement that you are not riding the Tour.’
We Were Young and Carefree Page 21