It was gray and wet when I arrived in Saint-Quentin in the middle of February 1996. The roadsides were dusted with the remnants of the previous night’s snowfall, and it was a miserable winter’s day. The team had a small house, used to lodge foreign riders, in the little village of Morcourt, only a kilometer away from the massive MBK factory (the team’s bike sponsor). The factory’s canteen was my lunch stop through most of that year.
I arrived at the house and was greeted by the team’s other foreign rider, who, luckily for me, was an Englishman—not some oddball Eastern bloc desperado, as might have easily been the case. Andy Naylor was a few years older than me and had raced the final couple of months of the previous season with VC Saint-Quentin, so he knew the ins and outs. He did his best to give me the lowdown.
We were, Andy told me, the only foreigners on the club. They’d decided that British talent was best after Jeremy Hunt had raced for them the season before and cleaned up across the French amateur scene. In fact, Jez, who later became a firm friend, won so many times that he turned professional for Banesto—Miguel Indurain’s team—at the end of the year.
British riders were en vogue, and great things were expected of us, or so it seemed. In reality, we just happened to be infinitely cheaper and far less trouble than a good French amateur. If we did turn out well, then that would be a wonderful bonus for the club and the powers that be would be credited with great savoir faire in talent spotting.
The club had increased its budget in the off-season and recruited some of the biggest names on the French amateur scene. I had no idea of this at the time. Unwittingly, I had found myself on the strongest amateur team in France, yet neither Andy nor I had an inkling of this because neither of us spoke a word of French.
Despite that, I was keen to impress. On our first group training rides I was one of the last to get dropped when we tackled motor-paced interval sessions behind a team car. Coming into the first race, just north of Paris, I was confident I could make a good showing, although the long distance made me nervous.
It may sound odd now, given that I regularly race for well over 100 miles as a professional, but at that point I’d never even ridden 100 miles—let alone raced that far. For years afterward, I remained convinced that I had abandoned my first race with VC Saint-Quentin, so bad were my memories of it.
It was only when I bumped into one of my amateur teammates at a pro race years later that he reminded me that I had been in every break from the start, that we were caught about 20 kilometers from the finish, and that I was literally weaving around in the road, delirious with exhaustion. Then I remembered crawling to the finish line, ages after the winner.
The next race followed a similar pattern. But it must have been worse because that evening I made a trip to the village phone box to call Mike Taylor and tell him that I thought I’d made a mistake—maybe everyone who’d told me I was too young was right. But as I’d been there only three weeks and had raced twice, Mike wisely told me to hang on till the next weekend and see how I fared.
“Make a decision after that,” he told me.
The next event was a two-day race, with a road stage on the first day and, on the second day, another road stage in the morning and a time trial in the afternoon.
On the first day, I found myself in a breakaway group of about fifteen riders with two guys from my team. With my basic French, I’d picked up that there was a steep and crucial climb about 25 kilometers from the finish. The behavior of the breakaway riders was also a clear giveaway that a crunch moment was approaching. Everybody was drinking, eating, and soft-pedaling in preparation for the “finale.”
As this lull continued, one of my teammates dropped back to the VC Saint-Quentin team car to speak to directeur sportif, Martial Gayant. A few moments later, he rode back alongside and indicated that Martial wanted to speak to me; I went back to the car wondering what the hell he was going to say that I could understand.
“You!” Martial bellowed at me. “Attaque! D’accord?!”
Well, no—I wasn’t exactly d’accord. Up to that point, I’d been trying to figure out how I was going to survive when the others started attacking. But Martial—my boss—had given the order, so attack was what I would do.
Coming into the next village we turned a corner and were confronted with a dead straight, very steep road. Without a thought, I followed orders, attacking at the foot of the climb as hard as I could. Halfway up I could sense nobody was with me, and near the top I was hurting, but as it leveled out I dared to look back over my shoulder. There were a couple of guys weaving around behind me, but they were no threat, and the rest of the group was in pieces behind them.
On seeing this, the pain faded into the background. I changed into high gear, got out of the saddle, and accelerated once more. I rode the last 20 or so kilometers on my own with ten guys pursuing as a chain gang behind me. I finished a minute and a half ahead of them and so won my first amateur race in France. The next day I won the morning time trial with ease, but nearly lost the race in the afternoon when my bike broke and I was forced to borrow a teammate’s bike and endure a long chase back on—the local press loved the drama.
I called Mike that evening.
“Hi, Mike,” I said. “I felt better this weekend.”
“Ahhh, there you go, David, I told you it’d get better. How did you get on?” he asked.
I recounted the story of the race as Mike listened. “So I got two stages and the overall,” I concluded. “Anyway, Mike—does that count as three wins?”
“Fuckin’ ’ell, David!” Mike bellowed joyfully, shouting down his hall. “Pat! PAT! David just won three races at the weekend!”
And that was it. I’d cracked it. After that, I was unstoppable.
In forty-six days of racing I was in the top three twenty-three times, and barely outside the top ten in the other twenty-three. I loved the racing and embraced the hurting. I would turn myself inside out at every opportunity. I was learning to push myself physically much further than I had ever done before.
While the racing enthralled me, life off the bike was mind-numbingly boring. The social high point for Andy and me was to hang out at the big Cora supermarket on the edge of Saint-Quentin. This was as close as we ever got to actually seeing girls. We would walk the aisles grazing off the shelves. I’d always eat a chocolate chip baguette, and Andy would just take bits of it from me, as he’d be trying to “watch” what he ate.
Our only pressing daily engagement—other than training—was Star Trek Next Generation, at six p.m. on Sky One. Somehow—and I still wonder how it came to be there—we had a very dodgy satellite dish set up. It was lying on the floor on the terrace and was haphazardly connected to our TV.
Miraculously, it worked most of the time, and was our happy place. Sadly, Andy lasted only a couple of months before heading back to the UK, and it was a shame to see him go as we’d got on really well. But it also meant that somebody else would be moved in, and probably not an English speaker. This I was not looking forward to.
I was paid a very nominal allowance by the team. That, and the support of the Dave Rayner Fund, allowed me to eat properly and fuel my car, which was all I needed. Eating “properly” was nonetheless fairly basic. These days, I’d probably have been given a shelf full of books by Jamie Oliver or Nigel Slater and gone foraging in French farmers’ markets. Back then, however, it was Cooking in a Bedsit, volume 1. Rice and pasta, made a bit more enticing with cheap tins of Aldi’s finest bolognese sauce, were my staple diet.
I’d never cooked before, so it was a bit of a steep learning curve, although the curve didn’t rise very far before I’d learned enough to survive, and that was all that mattered.
Ruggero was my only friend from Hong Kong whom I stayed in touch with, and, as he was at the university in Manchester, contact was rare. Hearing about his new life as a student made our old world feel even farther away.
I imagined that they were having the time of their lives at the university, working but mainly playing very hard. In contrast, I had an incredible amount of time on my own, and that meant a lot of time—perhaps too much time—to think. The only thing that mattered to me was the racing, so if that wasn’t going well, then my morale plummeted and self-doubt and self-pity took root.
The biggest challenge to overcome was loneliness. I think I was surprisingly good at coping with this and more resilient than most. There’s no doubt that most of the young Brits who made the move to the continent cracked mentally before physically. For some of them, it was a little too easy to head up to the Channel and nip home. But I felt my home was in Hong Kong—that was where I missed. I also knew I wasn’t going back there. In that sense, giving up on France wasn’t really an option.
I was steadily becoming accustomed to the increasing demands that racing at this level put on my mind and body. In junior racing I had been so strong that I controlled the race, and, effectively, I could do what I wanted. On the highly competitive French amateur scene, this was not the case. I had to learn how to manage the longer distances, more astute tactics, and greater intensity of racing. I couldn’t just rely on being stronger than everybody else.
I couldn’t count on doing what I wanted, when I wanted, with relative ease. Often my body would be telling me to stop for much of the race, and this was something I didn’t understand at first. It was only after pushing myself farther and harder that I learned to ignore what my body was telling me. My psychological strength was increasing, and I was getting tougher and more capable of managing the suffering.
This didn’t mean, however, that I wasn’t scared shitless of the race distances. Because of that, I became increasingly obsessive about eating enough, carbo-loading furiously, right up to the last minute. I would take homemade rice pudding with me to the race, sitting in the team car at the start, eating as much of this as I could without being sick. I just couldn’t fathom how it was possible to race close to 200 kilometers when you stopped eating three hours before the race, as was recommended by all the coaches and magazines. I was still very skinny, almost ten kilograms lighter than I would be a few years later, and was built like a fragile junior.
I think this was one of the reasons that Martial Gayant took me under his wing. He could see that I had a lot of progress to make physically, and yet, despite that, I was already a dominant force on the French amateur scene. Unknown to me, Martial was also protecting me from what was already a dirty culture.
—
Martial Gayant had been a very solid professional rider. He had ridden the Tour de France and even, one year, enjoyed a few hours of glory in the yellow jersey. He’d also, unusually for a French rider, worn the pink leader’s jersey in the Giro d’Italia. At that point, he was the first person I’d met who’d had such success as a pro.
We had a fairly up-and-down relationship, but he took good care of me. I was very demanding and intense as, unlike Martial, for me VC Saint-Quentin was my life. He would sometimes disappear for days at a time and be completely out of contact. I’d want to go out motor pacing or know what my race schedule was or just ask his advice, and yet he was nowhere to be found. This would drive me crazy, but I’m sure that sometimes his disappearing acts were primarily to get away from me. This never crossed my mind at the time, though.
As well as ambitious kids, the team also included several seasoned campaigners. The majority were career amateurs, guys who had never made it as professionals and so raced at the top level for as long as they could as amateurs. In rural France, they could make more money doing this than in the job that awaited them—taxi driving, bartending, working the land—if they were to retire from the sport.
So deep-seated in French life was the culture of cycling that even being an amateur carried a certain amount of prestige. As the year went on, I learned that it was one of the moments in their lives when they would be respected by their community. To me, amateur status was simply a stepping-stone to a professional career, and if you were still an amateur when you were in your late twenties or thirties, then you hadn’t made it. I didn’t realize that for many of them they had made it—this was as good as it got for them.
There was one teammate in particular, Eric Frutoso, who took great care of me. Eric had won the Mavic Cup, the most prestigious prize in French amateur cycling. He rallied the rest of the team to ride for me, the nineteen-year-old foreign kid, and he inspired me to start learning French, so that I could express the respect that I had for him. Eric was twenty-seven and from Biarritz. He would fly to the races, which was unheard of back then (the rest of us were crammed into the team’s Peugeot station wagons and driven far and wide across the country).
From May onward, these never-ending trawls across France were made even more horrible by the lack of air-conditioning, and we would arrive twisted and tormented at the hostels (or whatever rudimentary accommodation had been arranged for us). This was part and parcel of amateur racing, the rites of passage—and journeys to and fro sometimes matched the races themselves as a test of endurance.
Eric sheltered me from the doping that was already going on within the team. Years later he told me that he had made it clear to the others that I was not to see anything. Eric himself was one of the good guys, on a long-term sabbatical from his job as a postman. But this was coming to an end, and he had to decide whether to accept the pro contract that was offered to him or race one more year as an amateur before returning to his job in Biarritz.
Because of Eric, I was totally naive with regard to any doping going on within the team, and I was 100 percent sure that any whining from the amateurs about widespread doping in the pro scene was only to excuse their shortcomings in not making it as pros—either that, or simple jealousy.
It was at our team sponsor’s summer barbecue, at Pascal Cordier’s house, just outside Saint-Quentin on a perfect June afternoon, that I spoke to Eric about it for the first and only time. I had received a fax with my detailed training program and full nutritional plan for the upcoming weeks and was sitting going through it in the garden with the English-speaking Pascal. Eric wandered over and asked what we were looking at. As Pascal explained, Eric turned his nose up.
“Paf, that’s not cycling to me,” Eric said. “All too scientific and complicated.”
His stance didn’t surprise me. At first, I just considered it to be one more reason why he was still an amateur at twenty-seven. I just shrugged and said to Pascal that I thought it was the difference between us, why I would turn professional and Eric wouldn’t.
Pascal looked at me: “Oh, Eric can turn pro if he wants. Gan has been in touch with him—he just doesn’t want to.”
I was stunned. Why would he not want to ride for Gan, one of cycling’s biggest pro teams? I didn’t fully understand Eric’s response until later, when I had entered the professional arena.
“That’s not cycling to me, either,” Eric explained. “David, if you turn professional, you will understand.
“I have my job in Biarritz waiting for me, and a life that goes with it. I’m not willing to sacrifice that to be part of the professional cycling world.”
He knew he couldn’t help or look after me, if and when I turned pro. He knew I had my heart set on it and also the talent and drive to achieve it, so he let me keep my perfect world for as long as I could. I’m thankful in a way, because I would have judged him jealous and thought of him differently if he’d told me what he knew. And back then, I wouldn’t have believed him.
In August there was my one and only Great Britain National Team race of the year. As usual it was run on a volunteer basis, and, on this occasion, Jimmy Rutherford was the team manager for the trip. The race itself was a big one, the Tour of the Wallonie region in Belgium. It was a professional race and had some of the top teams competing—Mapei and Lotto being two of them. The rest of the peloton was made up of national teams and lower-level pro teams. It was the biggest race of the year for me, and a massive opportunity to show myself in front of the pro teams.
It went well. I was second in the prologue to the late Frank Vandenbroucke—or VDB, of whom more later—and then second in the individual time trial as well, again behind VDB. A strong showing in the road stages only reinforced my status. I was already on the radar, thanks to all my results in France. Confirming my talent on a bigger stage meant that I was offered two contracts immediately.
August 1996, Tour of the Wallonie Region. The days when Team GB meant borrowed jerseys, a decrepit car, and volunteer help.
The ball was now rolling. Before I knew it, four pro teams were interested in me. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. It wasn’t about money, because bidding wars over neo-pros never happened. It was about choosing the team that was going to be the best for my future development. There was also talk of a big new French team starting up with Cyrille Guimard as directeur sportif.
Guimard was a legendary figure in the sport and had been one of the main characters in a lot of my reading material in Hong Kong. He was a kingmaker. He had discovered Bernard Hinault, Greg LeMond, and Laurent Fignon, and guided all three of them from neo-pros to Tour de France winners.
Now he wanted me. Within a couple of weeks he had come to Saint-Quentin to take me out to lunch with the manager of his new “superteam,” Alain Bondue, another ex-pro.
Bondue had been the final link in the chain of contacts that had culminated in my getting a place at VC Saint-Quentin at the beginning of the year. When the Breton team fell through, Mike Taylor had called his old friend Paul Sherwen, an ex-pro turned TV commentator. Paul had then called Bondue, one of his ex-teammates and a very good friend. Alain had then called Pascal Cordier, sponsor of VC Saint-Quentin and called in a favor—the favor being me. Now it had come full circle, and Bondue and I were sitting at a table together discussing my future as a professional cyclist.
My spoken French was getting better, but during that meeting I relied on Alain translating between Cyrille and myself. I’d already met with two other directeurs before Guimard, so I was starting to know what questions to ask.
Guimard told me that he’d like to sign me for three years. I’d remain amateur for one more year until I’d matured physically. He planned to place me in the top amateur team in Brittany so I’d be closer to him. At the end of that year I would turn professional and ride some of the smaller pro races so that I would go into the winter with a better understanding of what awaited me. I would start 1998 as a full professional and begin my buildup to my first Tour de France in 2000, when I’d be twenty-three. None of the other directeurs I had met had even mentioned the Tour de France, let alone had a plan for when I’d make my debut. That was enough to convince me, and I agreed to join Cofidis, Guimard’s new team.
Martial invited me over to his house to discuss it all. He, too, had turned professional with Guimard and had enjoyed his biggest successes with him. Gayant and I communicated as best we could, which was surprisingly well, considering my still rudimentary French. The evening finished with my asking Martial if I could see his yellow jersey from the Tour—his maillot jaune.
I’d never seen one before, but instead of having it framed or mounted on the wall, Martial hung it among the rest of his clothes in his wardrobe. I thought that was funny, and it revealed the sort of unflashy person Martial was. He said I could try the yellow jersey on, but I refused, as I thought it would be disrespectful.
“I’d only deserve to wear it if I was leading the Tour,” I said. Martial laughed at that.
“But it’s only a matter of time, David.” He smiled.
—
Latvian rider Romans Vainsteins moved in with me for the final two months of the year. I was thankful for this as the house had become simply a stopover for French riders coming and going, and I’d had things taken from my room more than once. After that, a rider from the Eastern bloc seemed like a wonderful option. Romans spoke good English and was as driven as I was. He had the old-school Eastern bloc work ethic. I was blown away that he would do thirty minutes of training on the rollers every morning before breakfast. I’d never heard of such a thing, and his energy made me feel like a lazy teenager. We got on well, especially when we raced together, and for almost a month straight we would alternate first and second place between us. Racing with Romans was a lot of fun.
My final objective of the year was the World Championships. For the first time, the new Under-23 category had replaced the Amateur category. I fancied my chances as I’d done only one U-23 race all year, and it had felt like a junior race, but I came down with bronchitis and my season was over. So was my career as an amateur. The pro contract with Cofidis was ready to be signed, so Sherwen, Bondue, and I met in a café in a nearby village in what was an extremely French scene. After signing, I returned home to England a professional cyclist, with no intention of ever going to art school.
Signing the contract was a relief, but it didn’t even cross my mind that I was at the very beginning of the journey. Becoming a professional cyclist had never been an obvious career path, and, in truth, I’d always felt a bit timid in admitting my ambitions to people. I felt like a bit of a dreamer; I was embarrassed to say I wanted to become a professional cyclist. So for a long time, I stuck to what everyone else at school was doing: finding somewhere to continue my education.
Art was the obvious choice, as it was where I actually stood out, and it was the only thing I had really enjoyed at school. I was offered an unconditional place at art college, but my heart wasn’t in it—I loved cycling too much.
At school, I’d only ever talked openly about cycling with one teacher, Charlie Riding, at an end-of-year dance.
“So, David—are you really going to do it?” he asked with a smile.
I was baffled. “Do what?” I replied.
“Become a professional cyclist.” He was grinning this time.
With just as big a smile, I told him yes, I was going to do it. I’ve never forgotten that exchange. It was the first time I acknowledged that my dream could become a reality.
Years later, while living in the Peak District, serving my doping ban, Nicole—now my wife and a keen cyclist herself—came back from a ride one afternoon to tell me she’d bumped into one of my old schoolteachers from Hong Kong, out on the road.
She didn’t catch the surname—“Charlie something,” she said. She’d given him my number, as she was sure I wouldn’t mind. He called later on that day, and Nicole and I went and met Mr. Riding in a pub in nearby Hazel Grove.
Charlie’s parents lived there, and he was over visiting them from Hong Kong. We reminisced, and he helped me to remember a time when it was all a lot simpler. He was very proud that I had admitted to my mistakes and that I had decided to return to the sport I loved.
Since I returned to racing from my doping ban, Charlie Riding has been at every Tour de France I’ve raced in. I rarely see him for long, but every now and then at a stage start, someone working for the team will step aboard the team bus to tell me I have an old friend outside from Hong Kong who sends his regards.
I’ll emerge into the sunlight and there, hand outstretched, smiling his big smile, I’ll find Charlie Riding, telling me how well I’m doing.