Basically I think I had trouble adapting to the way they raced. As far as organisation went, everything was superb, there were no criticisms to be made and I couldn’t have hoped for better. But tactically it just didn’t suit me at all. When we decided we would do something it was often the wrong moment, but, above all, most of the time we didn’t actually do anything. Worst of all the plan was to do nothing. With my new team I was guaranteed selection for the biggest events as ‘back-up leader’, but the modest way they raced and their lack of ambition took a lot of the pleasure out of it.
CHAPTER 32
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A LONG, LUNATIC RIDE
As a cyclist gets older he believes that age has made him totally aware of all the information his body gives him. He imagines that this is a vital advantage, a science in its own right that gives him an extra edge. But during the 1992 season I gradually noticed an indisputable change in myself: I had lost my aggression and my ability to act spontaneously. I was less daring when I needed to push myself, even though I knew that I was as talented as before, and I may still have had all my physical ability.
I felt that I was coming into really fine form when I arrived in San Sebastián for the start of the 1992 Tour de France. It was rightly called the ‘European Tour’ because to celebrate the year of the Maastricht treaty the organisers made us visit no fewer than seven countries. I had just finished fourth in the French national championship and it wasn’t unreasonable to have a few hopes. But was there once again a difference between what I thought I could do and what was physically possible? During the first few stages it was all as I had expected: my health was good; it didn’t feel particularly tough. There were no grounds for aspiring to overall victory, of course, but no reason to feel anything was going to spoil the party. Reality hit me like a slap in the face. I was humiliated. The backdrop to this was Luxembourg. The stage was the celebrated individual time trial over sixty-five kilometres, during which Miguel Indurain pushed back the frontiers of the discipline. He put me to shame: I was caught and overtaken after he had started six minutes behind me. It was an incredible exploit, which was not in any way down to a lack of fitness on my part. Far from it: the Spaniard annihilated the opposition that day by putting more than three minutes into all his rivals. These were terrifying margins at the time. I was wounded to the quick. I didn’t like this kind of thing.
Although most of the time I was officially working for Gianni Bugno, who would eventually finish third in Paris, more than ten minutes behind Indurain, the eleventh stage between Strasbourg and Mulhouse provided a perfect opportunity to show everyone that I was still called Laurent Fignon. It was a stage through ‘medium’ mountains and was of a length that suited me perfectly – 249.5km. We had already reconnoitred this stage, which went over a fair few hills and the Grand Ballon.
That morning, before the start at the pre-stage meeting, I stood up and said, ‘We have to try something today.’ Although overall victory seemed to be slipping away from Bugno due to Indurain’s dominance, we had to try and secure his place on the podium and to do that we needed to get rid of Greg LeMond, who was already showing signs of fatigue. I thought that during this stage we could at least get rid of this one threat to Bugno so I said: ‘When I give the word, we all start to attack.’ They all agreed and then, of course, they all refused to stand up and be counted. A hundred kilometres from the finish I went and found them. I said: ‘This is the moment.’ It was a joke: they all slipped away for some reason which again eluded me. But this time I lost my temper. Big-time. I went to see Stanga and warned him: ‘If they won’t go, I’m going anyway.’ And I set off on a long ride which must have seemed crazy. First of all I rode across to the break which had gone away early in the stage; none of them were willing to share the pace, but it wasn’t a problem. One-by-one, using brute strength, I got rid of them all on the Grand Ballon. On the hilly roads of the Vosges my willpower was what counted.
Behind, Indurain’s team, Banesto, never stopped chasing: I ended up riding what amounted to a hundred-kilometre time trial. At the summit of the Grand Ballon I had a two-minute lead over the bunch but Anselmo Fuerte, who I had dropped on the final part of the climb, was not far behind, just thirty seconds. My team’s assistant directeur sportif, Claudio Corti, drove up to tell me: ‘Wait for him.’ I refused. The gap over the bunch was not big enough and there were still fifty-three kilometres to ride before the finish. It was a headwind all the way to Mulhouse, but I did it in less than an hour. The peloton chased furiously but I managed to hang on to a few seconds’ lead at the finish, so I had time to raise my arms. This one exploit justified my transfer to the team: they were delighted. It was their first stage win in the Tour.
I didn’t learn about the background to the win until that evening; and what I found out confirmed that I had needed to be pretty strong to keep the peloton at bay; Cyrille Guimard had devised a plan which he had hoped would prevent me from winning the stage. Castorama placed four riders in counter-attacks which formed on the Grand Ballon, something which brought knowing smiles to the faces of everyone who was watching. Luc Leblanc was the last stage of the rocket Guimard had fired and he was unable to conceal what the strategy had been when he spoke to television after the stage: ‘It was Cyrille who told us to attack,’ he said, passing the buck. Then a journalist who found it quite funny asked the Castorama boss: ‘Well, Cyrille Guimard, were you riding against Fignon?’ Guimard’s answer was, ‘You know where you can stick that question.’ No one was fooled. He had put all the weapons he had into an attempt to foil me and everyone knew it.
Having won a prestigious stage I felt a weight had been lifted from my shoulders and I wanted to put all I had into helping Gianni Bugno turn the Tour around. After all, it wasn’t totally impossible. During the famous stage to Sestriere where Claudio Chiappucci became a national hero after an incredible exploit, I had concocted an anti-Indurain plan. I had noticed that when he was put under pressure he never made an effort to pull back the attackers at once. He always waited for his assailants to slow slightly to get their second wind and at that precise moment he would lift the pace to come up to them. I gave up a lot of time to explaining this to Bugno, in great detail. Then I suggested: ‘At a given moment I’ll warn you and I’ll begin to ride fast, but not at one hundred per cent of what I’ve got. Then, you attack once, without going too deep; you need to have a little bit in reserve.’ He was listening like a schoolboy with his teacher. I continued: ‘At the moment when you see Indurain lifting the pace to bridge the gap, then, at that precise moment, you attack for real. And you repeat the whole thing again as many times as you need to.’ He ended up saying vaguely, ‘Sounds good.’ But I could see a total lack of conviction on his face. He was saying ‘Yes’ but I felt that he was probably thinking the opposite. I ended up convincing him, or so I thought, by saying: ‘What are you risking? Honestly? Do you think you’ll crack before he does? Do you think you’ll lose the Tour? But if you do nothing the Tour is lost anyway, so go for it.’
On the climb that we had singled out beforehand, as agreed, I lifted the pace. And Bugno attacked just as we had envisaged. After a little while Indurain got going and I watched what happened next with horror. Not only did Bugno fail to attack again, but he put up the white flag without even challenging the Spaniard. He simply slipped on to Indurain’s back wheel. I was devastated by the Italian’s conduct. The role of team leader was just too big for him. To make the tactical fiasco complete, Stanga ordered us to attack on the Galibier the following day. We both got away, Bugno and I. Was it a ‘royal escape’, where the big names go for glory? Not in the slightest. Pushing Bugno to his limits was a fruitless task. He kept complaining, saying we were going too hard; it was an amazing thing to watch this exceptional champion committing sporting suicide in front of me. I was worn out by all the stupidity and finished the Tour in rather low spirits.
I am ashamed to tell the story of what nearly happened to me on the final stage to the Champs-Elysées.
I was demoralised, ground down by the three weeks and opted to sleep in my own bed rather than at the team’s hotel. But when I went to my car to go to the stage start at La Défense, it wouldn’t fire. The battery was flat. Panic set in. It was Sunday of course, so there was no way I could get a taxi. No one was answering the phone. I could see the next day’s headlines: ‘Fignon, the non-starter’. Miraculously I ended up locating Alain Gallopin who jumped into a car and got me to the start in extremis. It goes to show that experience is no guard at all against sheer stupidity. My nonchalance might have been refreshing and somehow joyful, but it was unforgivable. You don’t abandon ship before you drop anchor in harbour.
CHAPTER 33
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DOPING EVERYWHERE
How do you describe a trend? One that you can only detect by sniffing the air, by vaguely following a mere nothing at all as if you have put your finger up to sense the wind direction? I understood what was happening – but I didn’t want to see. I could see – but I refused to understand. Then it all became obvious. So obvious that it became part of my thinking almost on a daily basis. Drug taking? It had always gone on. Even I had seen it close-up on a few occasions. Drug taking was rife? I didn’t really understand what that meant in practice. New undetectable drugs? The craziest rumours would often be contradicted when the facts emerged and I was well placed to know that.
But there it was. Something completely out of the ordinary was going on and, incredible as it may seem, I had to work it out for myself. No one came to see me to explain: ‘This is what is going on at the moment.’ No one stuck their neck out and declared: ‘This time, it’s going to be very serious.’
As it happened my transfer to an Italian team speeded up the process of discovery for me. Part of the culture of Italian sport is the way they look after the health of athletes: it sometimes pushes the boundaries in unacceptable ways. I’m not necessarily talking about doping here, but the use of medicine in all kinds of situations. However, the 1990s would illustrate to the point of absurdity that the boundary between legality and illegality was a very porous one. For example, after my stage win at Mulhouse in the 1992 Tour de France I had great difficulty recovering and so, to avoid a disastrous backlash, the following day the doctors were determined to make me gobble up a heap of recovery products based on vitamins and minerals and so on. Some were clearly very good. Others were not safe.
When I had first gone to see them, they were completely flabbergasted by my lack of knowledge in this area and my refusal to contemplate this sort of medical backup. ‘But what do you do in France?’ they asked in astonishment. When I explained to them that I only took vitamin C because psychologically I needed to feel how my body reacted to training and racing, there was a massive silence. They didn’t understand. Or perhaps they didn’t believe me.
As far as the recuperation stuff went, I ended up letting the doctors have their way, but it was done on my terms. I wanted to be on the spot whenever the soigneurs were opening the packets. I wanted to check everything to make sure that it was really vitamins and not God knows what. Honestly, I can’t say I had boundless confidence. No. I had no confidence at all. Zero.
The years when everything was transformed were 1991, 1992 and 1993. From then on, nothing was the same again. They were also my last years racing a bike. You could see me as a witness with unique access, but paradoxically I was at one remove from what was actually going on. It was the way I wanted it and it took prodigious stubbornness.
I was aware of the availability of EPO without actually knowing. There were vague rumours reaching my ears, but nothing more. Let’s be clear: when I was still at Castorama in 1991 I was able to work a few things out by mere deduction, or sometimes just intuition. For example, I talk today about EPO, but I only found out much later that this was the name of the ‘miracle’ drug which was spoken about in confidence. Growth hormone has to be added to the list.
During the 1992 season I believe that these forms of doping – which bore little relation to what we had experienced in the 1980s – were not yet widespread. There were some of the team leaders who clearly seemed to have access to EPO, maybe one or two others in each team. I really don’t know.
Then at the end of 1992, I was approached, I can see the scene as if it were yesterday. He began by talking in metaphors to give me a hint of what was going on. The process never got out into the open. He didn’t say: ‘I’ve got some EPO, do you want some?’ It was more insidious than that. Roughly speaking, what he said was this: ‘Laurent, you know that there is a super preparation product out there at present, we could perhaps have a look and see what we can do to have a go with you.’ But there was no chance of me taking anything that was against the rules: and EPO was clearly forbidden.
Before taking any medicine to cure any ailment I always took medical advice. During my career, whenever the opinions of the doctors seemed reliable and legitimate, I knew exactly what I was doing, what I was taking and I knew down to the last detail that I was taking no risks with my health or with my career as a sportsman. But this was about EPO. Not a great deal was known about it except that it was a way of manipulating the red cells in your blood. And as far as I was concerned, just thinking about doing anything to my blood scared the living daylights out of me. I do recall, however, that haematologists of the time were confident that if EPO was used carefully, there was no risk to health. That was of course the argument that was favoured by the dopers, even if I was perfectly well aware that certain forms of ‘doping’ were only dangerous in excessive quantities. But as far as excesses went, I had seen nothing yet.
Let’s go back to 1993, when everything became distorted and debased. As time passed, I noticed that some of my teammates were beginning to perform in a rather surprising way. Up to then, these same riders hadn’t shown any sign of talent that had impressed me in any way. But then there was a complete change in cyclists who I had seen pedalling alongside me every day. They improved without training any more than before, sometimes while doing less. It was blatant. I wasn’t fooled.
I eventually observed the same phenomenon throughout the peloton. The way riders behaved changed rapidly. There were guys I barely knew coming more often to the head of the bunch and setting a crazy pace, way beyond what you would expect. After a few months some of them ended up talking to me and letting me know what was going on. People came and told me: ‘This is how it is in every team.’ It was a way of encouraging me to do it too. I was astonished, because I had never seen this in Guimard’s teams.
I stood firm. I didn’t want to have anything to do with EPO and even less to do with Human Growth Hormone, which horrified me. But I have to admit that I was in a position where I could permit myself to do this. I already had a reputation that was worth a good deal. My contract was set in stone. I had won the Tour de France twice, the Giro, Milan–San Remo and so on. On the one hand my status gave me freedom to do as I wanted. And on the other, my character allowed to me to stick to my guns: I was not afraid of any one.
But looking back, there is one question that is worth asking: how would I have acted if I had been five or six years younger, and had yet to build up my palmarès?
There is no doubt that it took considerable courage to resist the crooked stuff that was going on. I didn’t lack courage. But I was thirty-one years old. Until that point I had always felt that I ‘did the job right’ to the best of my ability. What needs to be understood is that in my day, at least in the 1980s, there were riders who could ‘cheat’ without really feeling that they were doing so, because everyone was behaving in the same way, more or less, and using the same drugs. In addition, there is one thing that we have to bear in mind. Back then there was no drug, whatever it might have been, that could turn a donkey into a thoroughbred. Never. From Coppi to Hinault, passing through the eras of Anquetil and Merckx, there was no magic that could dose up lesser riders to compete on equal terms with the greats. Exceptional human beings, like their extraordinary exploits, were authenti
c. I can testify that until about 1989 drug taking in cycling was an unsophisticated affair.
Day after day, cycling no longer seemed to have a place for me. The metamorphosis in the cyclists around me, the sport’s clinical lack of humanity, meant that individuals were being turned into mere pedalling machines. What kind of a machine might I have become if I had given way to the pressures to take drugs? It became even more intense when, before the 1993 tour, someone went to see Alain Gallopin to tell him: ‘Laurent has to do something now!’
It was insidious and so typical of those years. It didn’t rattle me; rather the opposite. I’ve never taken fright when it comes to a show of force. But I can just imagine the damage that kind of thing could cause to riders who were psychologically weaker or less secure, or simply more desperate to get on in life.
And once it was done, obviously, if the cops caught up with a bike rider, he would end up being the ultimate ‘cheating bastard’ and his team would send him packing, screaming scandal and accusing him of every crime under the sun.
We Were Young and Carefree Page 23