After I got back to Britain, I gave myself a break. I visited Ruggero in Manchester for the first time and hung out, pretending to be a student for a weekend or two. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol in almost eighteen months, so I was easily amused. Rog “lived”—I use the term loosely—in a dirty student apartment of five boys that looked like it had been created by the set designers on Withnail and I.
Contrary to what I’d imagined, they didn’t receive endless invitations to amazing parties populated by cool people and hot girls. As for their education, that seemed to be fairly low down on the agenda. It left me feeling a lot older and further ahead of the game than my peers, although I remained a little envious of their fun-loving life.
After a month or so off the bike I began to train again, realizing at the same time that I wouldn’t be able to endure the life of an amateur for one more year. I knew, now that I had effectively turned pro, I would lack the motivation to train alone through another winter.
I called Bondue and told him I couldn’t face going to Brittany and spending another year doing what I’d worked so hard to leave behind. All I could see ahead of me was the loneliness and boredom of living in another little village, doing the same shitty amateur races. That wasn’t what I’d dreamed about.
At the time, I was the least of his worries. The team had fallen into turmoil with the news that its number one signing, Lance Armstrong, had been diagnosed with cancer. The team had effectively been built around Lance, taking many of the ex-Motorola team riders to Cofidis with him. They were now trying to work out what to do and before long had signed up two of the biggest names in the sport, Tony Rominger and Maurizio Fondriest, both in the twilight of their careers but still forces to be reckoned with.
Maurizio was an Italian superstar and had long been one of my heroes. I’d had posters of him on my bedroom walls in Hong Kong when I was younger. Rominger—“Swiss Tony,” some called him—was as much of a star and had been Miguel Indurain’s rival in the Tours de France of the early 1990s.
Guimard didn’t object to my change of plan. I think it was a small matter to him, and he didn’t have the energy or desire to defend his original plan. So the date came forward, and I would turn pro on January 1, 1997.
I carried on training but, in the middle of December, returned to Hong Kong for the first time since leaving the year before. I flew my bike out with me but didn’t touch it once in the three weeks I was there.
I was too busy partying in HK, enjoying a final hurrah. My dad was living the life of a bachelor, sharing his house with another pilot. The pair of them could outdrink me, Rog, or any of my friends, with ease. We had a lot of fun, the highlight being a night out that led to my dad meeting his future wife. Colette’s a Yorkshire lass and about the best thing that’s ever happened to Gordon, and all because I forced the old man to join us for a drink or two in Tsim Sha Tsui. We had a lot of fun; I forgot about my life as a cyclist, considering it an obligation to be as sociable as I could be before I returned to France. It didn’t even cross my mind that I was only weeks away from meeting my new team in France as a full-blown professional rider.
—
I arrived in Lille in northeastern France for the first Cofidis get-together, fresh from Hong Kong and shit-scared. It was incredibly cold, and I was disgustingly underprepared. We spent the first few days meeting sponsors, shooting photos, and getting to know one another. Our grand team presentation was scheduled to take place in Paris, before we headed south to the training camp.
For two days we hung around a freezing warehouse for the photo shoot, during which I befriended the Americans. There were four of them—Lance, Bobby Julich, Kevin Livingston, and Frankie Andreu—all ex-Motorola riders. Despite his testicular cancer diagnosis, Lance was very much the leader, and the others were, undoubtedly, his troops.
The only thing we seemed to have in common was spoken English. As it was their first time on a non-English-speaking team, I was the bridge between them and the Frenchies. I remember Lance having the biggest pack of chewing gum I’d ever seen. I didn’t like chewing gum, but I took a stick when Lance offered me some.
Lance was battered from chemo treatment, sporting no hair and with a skinnier, gaunter look. He was far from the awesome athlete he had been until recently. Even so, his clear physical degradation had barely dented his personality, and he radiated a brashness that only American sports stars can get away with. Yet the more time I spent with him, the more I glimpsed a darker and more thoughtful side.
I didn’t know if this had always been there, but it seemed to me it was something new, as it was incongruous in relation to the rest of his persona. Even so, you wouldn’t have imagined that he was a man who’d just escaped death by a whisker.
We went out on the bikes and did a couple of pointless rides on icy roads around Lille. Even though he didn’t know when or if he would race again, to our amazement, Lance came out with us. Not only did he join us, but he was determined to show that he was still one of the strongest. Everybody thought he was a bit crazy; looking back, maybe he was—and perhaps a little scared, too.
The Cofidis presentation in Paris, in a beautiful hall not far from the Champs-Élysées, was grandiose. A decade later I found myself back there, celebrating the completion of another Tour de France. I wasn’t with my Saunier Duval team at the time but had gatecrashed the CSC team party. We went on to the Team Discovery party in the penthouse of the Hotel Crillon, where I was to bump into Lance, me no longer the gauche neo-pro, him no longer the gaunt cowboy, teetering on the abyss.
As a rookie, I wasn’t exactly in high demand at the Cofidis presentation. Bobby Julich, unknown at the time, was in the same boat. We slowly and deliberately ate our way through tray after tray of canapés while sipping champagne, hardly a bad way to spend the afternoon. There was a small clique of British journalists there, and, after a few drinks, I wandered across to pick their brains, in what was probably quite a provocative and confrontational way.
“I don’t suppose you guys know Stephen Farrand?” I demanded. They nodded their heads hesitantly.
“Yeah? Well,” I said, “you can tell him I haven’t forgotten about the slagging he gave us after the Junior Worlds in San Marino. The bastard. I hope he remembers, because I won’t forget.”
The man on my right extended his hand and smiled: “I’m Stephen,” he said. “Nice to meet you, David.”
Typical.
From Paris, we returned to Lille for yet another Cofidis jolly, the company’s annual soirée. This was a professionally produced event in the largest auditorium in Lille, which included a bum-numbing three-hour presentation and then a circus-like extravaganza in the adjacent hall. There were half a dozen free bars, and the team’s riders were left to mingle with Cofidis employees, all eight hundred of them, while performers of all sorts entertained us. It was debauched.
The next morning we finally set off for the training camp. Some of the riders had not slept, were still drunk, and stank of cigarettes. The Americans were in a state of shock, having left early the previous evening in pursuit of a good night’s sleep, much to the derision of the French.
Lance was flying back to the States while the rest of us were heading down to Amélie-les-Bains, in the eastern Pyrenees for ten days of hard riding. I was still quietly confident that I’d be okay, thinking I’d probably be put in an easy group and allowed to build up slowly, given that I was so young.
An hour and a half into the first ride and I was nearly exploding. All twenty of us were in one group, and it would soon be my turn to hit the front. There was no easing into it, and our first ride was going to be five hours of hilly riding. I’d tricked myself into thinking that even with my appalling lack of training I wouldn’t be in too much trouble. But every time the road went uphill my heart rate would be in the 180s, the level I would expect to hit on the hills in amateur races.
I took my turn setting the pace at the front, watching the clock obsessively, begging for my ten-minute stint to come to its end. The clock ticked down as my heart rate steadily rose. By the time we were in the ninth minute, I was peaking out, using all my concentration to project a facade of tranquillity. I didn’t dare look to the side or behind, or betray any weakness. At nine minutes fifty-nine seconds, I indicated, a little too eagerly, that my turn on the front was done, a faux pas that revealed how uncomfortable I really was.
It is the done thing always to impress upon your teammates that you are within yourself. At least that’s how I see it and on the slide from the front to the back of the group, I checked out my teammates, convinced they’d all be blowing hard. To my absolute horror they all looked genuinely fine—all of them.
Being the best amateur in the world guaranteed you nothing when it came to racing against the pros. Up to that point I’d always raised my game, from mountain biking to road riding, from riding for fun to racing as a junior, from racing regionally to nationally and then internationally. Even the graduation from the junior to amateur ranks had been relatively painless. It had been an upward, linear path of progress with very few hiccups.
This was different. I was standing at the bottom of a sheer cliff face, my past achievements dwarfed by the mountain I had to climb. It was a big wake-up call, and after a few days of the camp I was broken. My lack of fitness had taken my body beyond its capabilities, and it had thrown in the towel. It was something I would get used to in that first year as a professional.
—
Cofidis founded its business on selling credit by telephone. Almost anybody could call the free number on our racing jerseys and get a loan. That was the easy part—the comparatively high interest rates made it expensive to pay off. Cofidis had a significant budget to spend on marketing, and it was through a marketing study that it concluded that cycling was the best sport to use as a publicity vehicle. Effectively, those interest rates paid for the team.
Cofidis’s sponsorship was different from most pro teams. It’s PDG, or CEO, François Migraine, had built the team from the ground up, and the company owned the team outright as a subsidiary of its principal business.
Cyrille Guimard was the biggest name in French cycling, and an appropriate leader for the wealthiest team in France. A directeur sportif extraordinaire and French sporting legend, he was a proud Breton.
Physically, he was not a big man. He was a wiry ex-pro and built as such, and although he’d retired twenty years earlier, he had not let himself go as much as some others. He always sported glasses that would have been fashionable in his heyday, the mid-1980s, around the time of Footloose. They seemed perfectly in character, and by persisting with them, they’d become almost classic when worn by Cyrille.
I remember the first time I saw him stroll into breakfast, sporting a tracksuit with the zip at half-mast, revealing a bare chest and gold chain, the finishing touches being bare feet with open-toed beach sandals and his ever-present pseudo-aviator glasses.
My initial shock soon turned to amusement at the complete insouciance with which he wore his “look.” He had clearly decided that fashion had stopped progressing to his taste in the mid-1980s and opted to single-handedly carry the flame. One day, no doubt, everybody would see the light. I guess there was a deep-seated psychological reason for this, as it was during the early 1980s that he reached his zenith.
Guimard had been a successful pro, but he became an even more successful directeur sportif. After retiring at the relatively young age of twenty-nine, he moved straight into team management and immediately tasted success at the highest level, winning the 1976 Tour de France with the Belgian rider Lucien Van Impe. This was just the beginning. Soon after, he took Hinault to his first Tour de France victory, then coached Fignon to two Tour wins, and signed LeMond, who went on to win three Tours. He also discovered two of the biggest names in French cycling during the 1980s, Charly Mottet and Marc Madiot.
But Guimard’s intransigent personality was not predisposed to building long-term relationships. Each one of the stars he discovered and guided to the top would fall out with him not long after reaching his peak. Typically, the French would blame Guimard’s Breton personality. In fact, I think it probably has more to do with the personality of the newly successful sportsman.
It is very easy to forget how you got to the top once you’ve arrived. The transition from being an unknown to a star is not gradual. Sometimes it happens overnight, in the space of a few hours. One exploit can make your name; repeated successes can make you famous. That’s particularly true of the Tour de France, and particularly true if you’re French.
I am certain that Guimard made many cyclists much more successful than they would have been if they hadn’t worked with him. But once you were successful he still treated you in exactly the same manner as he had before. He didn’t indulge any prima donnas. This went against how everybody else acted around the new star and would hasten the beginning of the end between Cyrille and his latest vedette.
Away from the racing, it was possible to have constructive discussions with him. He was a great motivator and always saw the big picture, just as he had done with me when mapping out my next five years at lunch that day in Saint-Quentin. There’s no doubt that he knew the psychology of a professional cyclist better than many other directeurs.
During the races, however, it was a different matter. He gave the orders; his style wasn’t that of co-collaborator but that of a tactical savant who knew what was right and wasn’t interested in a debate. This was something he had from day one.
At his first Tour, in his first year as a directeur, he ordered Van Impe to attack rival Joop Zoetemelk.
But Van Impe refused, or at least he did until Guimard, at the wheel of the team car, drove up alongside and told him that if he didn’t follow orders, he would drive him off the road. Van Impe quickly learned to do what he was told.
And Guimard was right. Van Impe rode so hard that he put half the field outside the time limit, took three minutes from Zoetemelk, and then went on to win the Tour. Even the great Hinault, one of the most feared men in professional cycling and perhaps the greatest-ever French cyclist (who twenty-five years after retiring is still a physical force to be reckoned with), agreed.
“You don’t argue with Guimard,” Hinault said.
Cyrille brought his support staff with him to Cofidis, an old guard of colleagues who had been with him for close to twenty years. These were the stalwarts of French professional cycling, the men you would see in old black-and-white photos massaging a young Hinault or hanging out of an old Peugeot team car having a cigarette. They had seen it all and were not to be questioned; it was their way or the highway.
But I chose my allies. The soigneurs—soigneur is the French word for the carer of an athlete—were definitely the real deal. Their principal job was to massage the riders, but in fact they did much more. They would do everything: pick us up at the airport, transport our suitcases between hotels, organize the kitchens at the hotels, and become maître d’ of any restaurant that wasn’t up to the high standards of service they deemed necessary. They were also our medical advisers—our nurse and often our doctor—prescribing whatever they thought was needed.
It was with the soigneurs that we would have the quietest, most intimate moment of every day. After the frenzy of racing, lying on the massage table for forty-five minutes of relaxation, peace, and quiet was the time when concerns would be voiced and anxieties aired. That was often the case for me during that first year.
—
My first pro race was programmed to be Étoile de Bessèges, the opening stage race on the French calendar. It is only five days long and not exactly tough, but a shock to the system nonetheless, even if you are in a good state of fitness. It’s almost impossible to prepare for racing fully in training. No matter how hard you try, what race simulations you attempt, you cannot push yourself as hard and as deep as you can in a race. You need competition that will push you psychologically and physically beyond a level that you or your training partners can attain while training at home on your local roads.
The ultimate training partner is a motorbike, ideally a Derny. Riding behind these motorized bicycles comes about as close as is possible to racing in the slipstream of a professional cyclist in full flight. Behind a Derny, you can ride a bigger gear at a higher cadence and experience fluctuations in pace that are nigh on impossible to generate on your own. Of course, the Derny needs a good driver, preferably an ex-cyclist who knows you very well so that he can read your suffering from a glimpse of your poise on the bike and the look in your eye. If he knows you well enough, he can keep you on the edge of collapse and, in doing so, make you race-ready.
But I didn’t have a Derny, and my training had been further compromised between the end of that miserable training camp and my first race, after I had moved to Nice, to share an apartment with Bobby Julich.
I had heard about Nice, but I’d never been there before. When the Americans were discussing their planned move from their previous base in Lake Como to the Côte d’Azur, I chose to join them. After chilly Saint-Quentin, the balmy Côte d’Azur sounded much more like my idea of France.
Soon after my arrival in Nice, Bobby rented a van and we set off to pick up his final bits and pieces from the apartment in Como. I could see why they’d decamped to Nice. Como is a beautiful place, but it’s not ideal for a cyclist. The weather can be quite miserable in winter, and there isn’t a vast selection of roads to choose from. The Americans had made it their European base principally because their coach lived nearby.
There wasn’t much to pick up in Como, but it was worth going if only to visit the storage room they had in the basement. There were bags of Motorola cycling clothing lying around, kit I would have died for only months before. When I was younger, I’d been given an old Motorola plastic rain cape, with a rider’s name on it, by Mike Taylor. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Bobby was busy looking for something that he couldn’t find, so I tried to contain my excitement as I had a nose through some of the Motorola kit bags.
There wasn’t any question of my “taking” anything, but it was weird to think that all this kit was to be discarded. I treasured every single bit of cycling gear I owned, and here, at my feet, were piles of kit worn by some of the best-known pros in the sport. I opened a bin bag filled with white jerseys and, to my weak-kneed astonishment, realized that they were Lance Armstrong’s unused world champion jerseys.
Bobby must have heard me mutter, “Oh man, oh shit.” Pausing from what he was doing, he glanced across to see me reverentially clasping a pristine Motorola-branded rainbow jersey.
“Oh yeah,” he said with a shrug. “Lance is always leaving shit around. God knows what else there is here.”
“But they’re his rainbow jerseys,” I spluttered, still such a fan. “There’s a whole bag of them …”
Bobby was unimpressed. “You should just take one; he’ll never know. He’s probably never coming back here to get his stuff.”
I was still clinging to the jersey, but I couldn’t take it, even though I wanted to so bloody much. I put it gingerly back in the bag and tried my hardest to forget about it. Soon after our visit, the very same storage room flooded and everything was thrown away.
As Bessèges loomed, training was going better. I was able to go out with Bobby and not get killed, and although I was getting the bejesus scared out of me by everybody about how hard the racing was going to be, I felt a little more confident. Although not as good as I could have been physically, I was fresh and fearless psychologically. Shockingly, Bessèges was even harder than I expected; hills that would have ripped a race to pieces with the amateurs didn’t even require the professionals to change out of the big ring. The sprinters, who I’d presumed couldn’t climb, would have been able to win hilly amateur races. With the amateurs I barely needed to get out of the saddle to win races; with the professionals I was having to get out of the saddle so much just to stay in the bunch that my arms would lactate and give up before my legs. It was a different sport—I was soon to learn why it was quite so different.
My blissful ignorance about the “demands” of the European scene was swept away at Bessèges, my first pro race. I was rooming with Jim van de Laer, a Belgian rider and formerly a great hope, who hadn’t fulfilled the potential that was expected of him. Jim was a great guy, and we got on very well. He told me that the team wanted him to get a result in that very first race of the year and that he’d been offered cortisone in pill form to “help” him.
He didn’t want to do it, and was really pissed off that the team was already panicking about results and acting in such a way when the season had barely begun. I wasn’t stupid enough to think the sport was squeaky clean, but I didn’t expect my team to be condoning it. Crazily though, the French didn’t really think of cortisone as being “proper” doping.
I learned over the years to come that cortisone was the drug of choice in French cycling. Back then, it was undetectable in doping controls, and although it was on the banned list, its use was permitted if a medical situation required it. Cortisone wasn’t exactly hard to get ahold of—the local doctor would prescribe it if you had bronchitis.
But there’s no doubt it was something of a wonder drug. Boosting the natural levels with a pill or injection can decrease pain and increase strength in the short term. If the stronger forms of it are used, it will reduce weight by making your body go catabolic. That’s not a bad combo for a professional cyclist but, equally, not good if abused. The very muscles you rely upon are slowly eaten away by your own body as fuel; that’s just one of the downsides.
I was devastated by what Jim told me, by the fact that the team was asking—no, telling—one of its riders to dope. Already the choice was there, working on me. After only a few weeks as a pro, I’d been confronted by it. There was no more protecting the young guy: Jim, bless him, was taking me into his confidence, asking my opinion. I told him I didn’t even know what cortisone was or what it did.
“Jim, I don’t want to know about this shit,” I said to him, a little desperately.
I called my mum later that night.
“Mum, they’ve asked my roommate to take this pill,” I told her. “I don’t think it’s that bad, but it’s not that good, either. He’s refusing to take it, but it’s clear the team is panicking. He’s asking me what I think. It’s just stupid—why’s he asking me?”
“Oh, David,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t think it was like this. From what Jim says, there’s a lot of it going on. I don’t know what to do, Mum, I don’t know what I’ve got myself into.”
“Well, has anybody approached you about taking anything?”
“No, I don’t think they ask neo-pros to do anything.”
“No? Well, good,” she said. “Just make sure you stand by what you believe in, and remember, you can pack it in tomorrow and come home and go to art college.
“You have options, David—don’t forget that. It’s your dream, I know, but it shouldn’t make you unhappy, and it shouldn’t make you do things you don’t want to do,” she said.
“Remember that—and to hell with the rest of them.”