French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  Poli says that he ‘loves’ riding in hot weather. ‘The first part of the stage was flat, rolling road, so it was fine for me. I’d calculated that I needed 25 minutes at the bottom of the climb. I knew I’d lose about one minute a kilometre.’

  Nonetheless, when he got to Bédoin and began climbing, Poli started to worry. ‘It was very bad. I was too slow.’ Worse was to come at St Estève, when any lingering optimism quickly evaporated. ‘For the first time in my life, I saw my speed drop to single figures. That was the worst moment. I was thinking: “I’m going to die; I can’t climb the Ventoux like this. This is impossible.” But I tried to keep calm.’

  Another limitation was his weight combined with the archaic gearing ratios. ‘The cassette on my gears was a big problem. The maximum gear was 24 sprockets – now they come with 27, or 28, but at the time everybody was riding 39 at the front, 24 at the back.’

  For a couple of kilometres, Poli recalled, his speed was eight or nine kilometres an hour – ‘a very low speed. Then I found a rhythm. They kept reminding me how big the gap was and telling me that it would get better further up. But I was very tired and the change of rhythm was so hard. I needed time to recover, but on Ventoux there is no place to recover.

  ‘I knew I had a lot of power, though. Every time I watch it again I think: “OK, I’m suffering but I’m looking good. For a guy my size, it’s not so bad.” ’

  For the biggest rider in that year’s peloton it wasn’t bad at all, but the clock was ticking. Poli, riding at half the speed of the pursuing group, knew he had to keep going. ‘The flatter part just before Chalet Reynard gave me a little confidence because it was easier. Then when I got to that last bend, the switchback before the top, well, it was uh-ma-zing!’

  As he rounded that final bend, Poli almost stalled, but, hunched over the bike, he ground his way to the summit and, protecting a four-and-a-half-minute lead, headed back down the other side towards Malaucène. From the top to the finish line in Carpentras, in the usual location, the Allée des Platanes, was about 42 kilometres.

  ‘It was a great feeling to get over the top. I knew I needed more than two minutes to make sure that, in case I had a puncture, or if they were able to see me in the distance, they wouldn’t catch me.’

  Far behind Poli, the gruppetto, or the bus – the group of domestiques and sprinters who band together and pool resources during each mountain stage – was making its way up the lower slopes. Phil Anderson, Max Sciandri and Raul Alcala of the Motorola team, exhausted after an afternoon working for their Colombian leader Alvaro Meija, were riding in the gruppetto when a dispute broke out between Alcala and Australian rider Neil Stephens.

  According to Anderson, his compatriot was so anxious about the time cut – the point at which the prospect of elimination loomed large – that he went to the front of the gruppetto and upped the pace. ‘Stephens lifted the tempo and you could see the group start to splinter,’ Anderson recalled. Alcala was less than pleased and rebuked Stephens, but he and the Australian ended up standing in the road, halfway up the Ventoux, fists flying in the baking heat. Luckily for them, no race commissaires or TV motorbikes spotted the brawl and they went unpunished.

  Poli meanwhile, with the Alps on the horizon and the Drôme laid out far below, had launched himself into the descent. ‘It was very fast. And, with me, plus the bike, I was heavy – well over 100 kilos . . . I think I was doing nearly 100 kilometres an hour, maybe about 95, 97 was my top speed.’

  Not for a minute did he think to take it easy. ‘No, no – I had no fear. I didn’t need a helmet! I was racing my bike – doing my job.’ Winning in Carpentras was, he says, ‘the best’.

  ‘I was usually the last one over the line on a mountain stage. So it was great to be first, to have the fans there for me, waiting for the winner.’ As he crossed the line, Eros had time for one last grand gesture, spreading his arms theatrically and bowing to the crowd.

  ‘It was a spontaneous thing – like I was on the stage at La Scala in Milano.’

  Eros Poli is in his early fifties now, and divides his time between his home in Verona and acting as a guide for upmarket holiday brand, InGamba, in locations such as California, Arizona and Vancouver. Cycling remains at the heart of his existence. ‘I ride a bike every day,’ he says, ‘even when it’s below freezing. I ride for fun and to keep healthy, because I love to eat and drink.’

  There are no 170-kilometre lone breaks involved, though. ‘No,’ he laughs. ‘My maximum is two or three hours, no more.’

  He rode the Ventoux twice in 2015, on both occasions with guests from InGamba. ‘Both times it was from Bédoin, but once I came up from Sault. But Bédoin is the one – for me, the climb of Mont Ventoux is from Bédoin. I’m not bothered about climbing up from Malaucène.’

  These days he’s planning other spectacular sorties, including three days riding from San Francisco to Santa Barbara on the Pacific Coast Highway. ‘I spend some time in Arizona working for InGamba, and sometimes we go to Santa Monica. I design the trips and guide with the guests.’

  There are two critical dates in Poli’s career, a decade apart. He cherishes his gold medal from the team time trial in the 1984 Olympic Games and his victory ten years later, on Ventoux. ‘They’re the two biggest days in my career.’

  Poli and his team-mates had just one glass of champagne that night. ‘We still had to get through the Alps. The next stage was over 200 kilometres, to Alpe d’Huez,’ he smiles.

  ‘My legs felt like a piece of wood the next morning. They gave me a team-mate to look after me for that stage but I was still the last rider to arrive at Alpe d’Huez. But all the fans had waited for me, to clap and cheer. That was really nice.’

  After his win on Ventoux, Poli – the Giant’s giant-killer – became something of a people’s favourite. ‘Every day after the Ventoux, I had a TV motorbike following me over each mountain. ‘Eros Poli has passed the top of the Galibier, Eros Poli has crossed the top of the Glandon . . .’

  Until America came calling, Poli had been thinking about moving to the Vaucluse, maybe to set up a small bed and breakfast in Malaucène, and ride the Ventoux with his guests. ‘Now I’m too busy with InGamba, but maybe I’ll go back one day,’ he says, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Maybe when I retire.’

  While always keen to remind people of his Olympic success, Poli says he enjoys talking about the most famous moment in his road racing career. But he might not have had his chance had it not been for the absence of Mario Cipollini, the flamboyant leader of his Mercatone Uno team, not that he of the hundred nicknames and smutty jokes would have had any interest at all in the Ventoux. Cipollini played up to his playboy image throughout his career. There were the endless boorish boasts of mid-race sexual conquests – don’t come a-knockin’ when this team bus is a-rockin’! – and an arrogance that was more suited to a prize fighter. ‘Super Mario’ was cycling’s Tyson Fury.

  ‘An orgasm lasts a few seconds, a victory lasts for ever,’ he once said, a motif which is perhaps the lothario’s response to Lance Armstrong’s ‘pain is temporary – quitting lasts for ever’.

  Cipollini’s total disdain for mountain stages also ensured that he never finished the Tour de France, much to the irritation of the race organisers, although he did manage to complete the Giro d’Italia. It also guaranteed that, unlike Poli, he managed to spend a significant amount of July, oiled up and ready for action, on the beaches of Tuscany.

  The Americans

  It’s autumn 2015. Jet-lagged, I’m wide awake in a Texas hotel room, long before dawn. I shave, take a shower and surf the TV stations, pausing at the Weather Channel. It may be cold in the hill country, the rooftops outside flecked with dew, but it’s already snowing up north, in Utah, icing up the canyons and the buttes. I peer out at downtown Austin through the curtains, and lean against the window frame, staring red-eyed at stop signs towering over empty streets.

  Across South Congress Avenue, a shapeless figure shuffles slowly up the sidewalk,
pushing his possessions in a shopping trolley. Slowly, the world turns, until the familiar pale light emerges, the rays hit the mirrored glass and the cityscape comes into relief. By the time I get out, heading downtown, the Texan sun is up and firing.

  I walk a few blocks. There’s a vast shop selling boots and only boots. ‘God Bless Our Drones’, says a sticker in the window. Further on, there are hip slacker cafés, with Talk Talk playing, where I sit and drink flat whites and kill time. Just like 20 years earlier, when I first went to Austin to interview Lance Armstrong, there’s a lot of waiting around. I keep on walking until I cross the Colorado river and arrive in the streets near the Texan Capitol, where they held a ticker-tape parade when Armstrong won his first Tour de France. That, however, was a lifetime ago, in a different reality.

  Since his prime-time confession to doping, Armstrong and I have been back in contact. For a long time there was a wall between us. A lot had been said, most of it uncomplimentary. I was a Judas, who had once, as he endured chemo, been a trusted confidant, but who later became the snake with arms, blacklisted, mocked, reviled.

  My sense of betrayal was no less acute. I’d believed in his comeback for the first Tour win, but lost faith absolutely during the second. I grew to loathe the dumb myth and the grating denials, the sight of him and his entourage inducing a churning frustration in my guts.

  His confession broke the dam. I no longer saw a duplicitous, bullying fake. I had witnessed that for long enough to have wearied of it. Instead, I saw him lost in self-justification, scrambling, desperate and damaged. Lance had been the king of a sham world; his new one, however, was all too real.

  I carry on walking, a little aimlessly, before heading over to West 4th Street, to Mellow Johnny’s – maillot jaune, you see? – the Armstrong-owned high-end bike shop. This is where they still sell you the dream – and where it doesn’t matter whose version they’re peddling. It’s a ground-floor warehouse building wrapped around the street corner. There, hanging on the wall, are seven yellow jerseys. There, in the racks of clothing, bikes and accessories, are all the key brands.

  In Lance’s shop, you can buy products from Trek, Nike and Oakley – all of whom washed their hands of him after his confession – and Rapha, sponsors of Team Sky, those champions of zero tolerance. These are uneasy bedfellows at the best of times, but their presence, and a poster of a jubilant yellow-clad Lance, ten foot high, looking down on them all from a nearby wall, perfectly sums up cycling’s dysfunctional history.

  Downstairs, his former US Postal team-mate Kevin Livingston runs a training and fitness practice. On display are a lot of the famous bikes – the World Championship-winning bike, the Flèche Wallonne bike, the first Tour win bike, the Alpe d’Huez-winning bike and so on. But there is no Mont Ventoux bike. That’s because Lance never won there. For all his determination, for all his firepower and for all his doping, he never really ‘got’ the Ventoux.

  Ironically – and the more you think about this the odder it becomes – the one time he could have conquered the Giant, sentiment got in the way and he ‘let’ somebody else – Marco Pantani – win.

  Lance Armstrong – the bully, the win-at-all-costs alpha male, the über-competitive, Mister Stop-at-Nothing Lance – decided to let another rider win. How the hell did that happen?

  The cab driver who picks me up from South Congress, to drive me across Austin to Lance Armstrong’s house, hates cyclists. ‘Look at this guy,’ he says in disgust as a crusty teenager on a BMX weaves around in front of us. ‘Do you get this in England?’

  We cross the Colorado river and make a left. ‘There’s a lot of mansions where you’re going,’ he says. ‘Better make sure we get the right one.’

  Ten minutes later, I’m standing in front of a grand house, set back from a leafy avenue, three, maybe four cars, SUVs, jeeps, parked in front. If these are reduced circumstances, it doesn’t look that painful.

  This, then, is Lance’s house. I have a realisation that, given our shared history, knocking on this particular front door seems a very odd idea. But then life is short and people can change – surely you have to believe that? And I have come a long way to do this. Still, I hesitate for a moment, mulling over the past.

  There is a rush of memories that makes my head spin – of everything and everyone from Willy Voet to that duel with Pantani on the windswept Giant; from every dope-addled rider and protestation of innocence to Floyd Landis and Riccardo Riccò, and every circular conversation and think-piece and libel meeting and dinner table argument.

  I steady myself and then knock. Seconds later, grinning as if nothing ever happened between us, Lance Armstrong snatches open his front door.

  ‘Hey – where’d you get all that grey hair from?’ he drawls, his own salt-and-pepper crop clear to see.

  ‘Writing about you,’ I say as we shake hands.

  He’s trim, even gaunt, in baseball cap, body warmer, track pants and trainers. Just like in 1996, only back then his cap hid the baldness from chemotherapy and the scars on his head from surgery. We walk through to an open-plan lounge and kitchen, kids’ shoes scattered around, an NFL game on a big screen in the background. There’s some art on the walls, maybe not as much as there once might have been, but he’s clearly still a collector.

  ‘Peace offering,’ I say, as I hand him a coffee table book on links golf. He’s just back from playing in the desert near Phoenix. Lance Armstrong, golf nut.

  We sit and he leafs through the book. His hair is flecked with grey, his eyes lined and tired. He seems diminished. Later, though, when we talk in depth, the jaw still juts defensively and he bristles with the same defiance. I prattle on, edgily, about playing backwards out of pot bunkers, and tackling blind tee shots on the wild, impossible courses on the west coast of Ireland.

  ‘Let’s go get a drink,’ he says and then we’re out the door on foot, heading to a local bar, no minder, no agents, no bodyguards, no entourage. So we walk and we talk, but I am struggling to match the Lance Armstrong I knew from Tour de France finish lines, tense press conferences and angry exchanges in confrontational interviews, with the grey-haired, laid-back, middle-aged man walking beside me.

  It’s a ten-minute stroll, past grand houses, some grander, even, than his. He can walk here, untroubled. Nobody accosts him, no passing cars screech to a halt. There is no lynch mob.

  ‘Look at these hipsters,’ he whispers slyly, as some typical Austinites, head to toe in seventies vintage, smiling beatifically, walk towards us.

  ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’ they say as they pass.

  Do they recognise him? Does everybody recognise him, but just not flag up the obvious?

  ‘People are really nice, you know,’ he says a little later, as if surprised. ‘I’ve learned that.’

  Since The Fall he says he’s seen the best and worst of human nature. Some people who he thought would always be his friends ostracised him, while others, some of whom he didn’t expect much of, hung around.

  ‘People lean in or lean out,’ he shrugs.

  I tell him I went to Mellow Johnny’s, and ask why his shop is selling the brands – Oakley, Trek and Nike – that championed him but then dropped him.

  ‘I don’t have any choice,’ he says.

  We reach a restaurant, with an upmarket bar attached. They know him here. ‘Hi’s’ are exchanged, hands shaken, as he walks in. He’s reserved two seats at the bar. While he does the rounds, I slip onto the furthest of the pair of bar stools, set aside in the darkest corner. After a couple of minutes he joins me.

  ‘C’mon – don’t do that to me, Jeremy,’ he says and moves me aside. We swap places and he settles down, hidden in the shadows. The baseball cap stays on.

  We order margaritas and, in my jet-lagged state, they slide down easily and hit my head pretty quickly.

  There are times when Lance Armstrong’s whole history reads like that of a character from a James Ellroy novel of modern Americana, a great sweeping romance of dysfunction, washed-up dreams, battered
beauty, and lost last chances. Lance is now a mythical figure, a two-wheeled Icarus. But he’s also a survivor. He hates any philosophising, any metaphysics or semantics, any intellectualisation of his downfall.

  ‘Sanctimonious bullshit,’ he will say if you veer into this territory. He has time for defiance but little for self-pity.

  Ultimately, it is his fault, nobody else’s – he did it, he fucked up. Shoulder the blame, be a man. Don’t get cute. There are winners and losers in life. This time he lost. He knew the stakes; he knew the form. They all did.

  Apologise yes, but, for fuck’s sake, get up. Have some self-respect. Don’t mope. Don’t be a pussy. Don’t crawl around crying, begging forgiveness.

  And after all the hand-wringing self-justification I have had to listen to from dopers over the years, I respect him for that.

  So we catch up, ending a 15-year sulk, free of any animosity, talking about having kids, the state of the US bike industry compared to the boom time in Britain, rising rents killing the art scene on Austin’s East Side. We talk about the meetings he’s had – with former soigneur Emma O’Reilly, whistleblower Christophe Bassons, and ex-professional Filippo Simeoni – ‘Simeoni said that every day somebody came into his café and mentioned my name to him – every day! I feel so bad about that.

  ‘But at some point I have to stop saying sorry,’ he shrugs. ‘How many times is enough?’

  It will never be enough, I think.

  We order more margaritas.

  He has many pet gripes: those in the press who’ve profited from his downfall, the ongoing negotiations with USADA over his lifetime ban, and the 2009 Tour, in which he insists his third place was clean and that retrospective tests will prove it, but, he says, ‘Nobody wants that proven . . .’

  His phone flashes and, suddenly, it’s time to go: the family’s calling. We head out to the street. Out of nowhere a car appears, to drive him home and then take me back to my hotel. After Armstrong is dropped off, the car heads across town and the driver, a young guy, starts chatting. ‘I’m still a real fan,’ he says. ‘I just didn’t want to say anything.