Like most normal human beings I didn’t set out in life thinking that one day I would be writing about it in a book. Some people might, but not me. Even when the possibility of writing a book came my way I didn’t know at first if I was the person to do it. I didn’t have anything to confess, but I had things to say. The book had to be right.
By July 2011, when this book first started to come to life, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to write about: life inside the professional peloton. However, the events of the past two years have made this vision very hard to stick to without devoting a disproportionate amount of space to a topic that played a very marginal part in my life.
As a professional cyclist whose career ran from 2000 to 2011 I lived through a turbulent time for the sport – full to bursting with scandals, drug raids, confessions, accusations, revelations and all the difficulties that came with a doping culture that was deeply embedded in the sport.
It is therefore a bitter-sweet taste to know that in 2013 there is enough interest in the sport that I love that a guy like me can write a book for an enthusiastic audience, yet at the same time have to be at pains to explain that the book – like my career – does not contain any exciting doping stories, nor does it attempt to.
It’s not to say that a fair amount of doping wasn’t going on around me, I’m sure. Anyone who feels the need can go and look up the names of the people I rode for and with and find numerous doping violations against their names. I am not trying to deny that. I have, however, chosen not to focus on those facts.
I have remained true to my vision of the book. This book, the one that I wanted to write, is focused on something else: an entire cycling career. Yes, doping makes an appearance or two, there is no way it couldn’t, but I would like to feel that its small appearances in this book reflect just how minor a part it really played in my life as a cyclist. There was simply much more to be getting on with, so much more to the job and so much other stuff for me to be worrying about.
The role that I played, that of a domestique, a foot soldier in the sport, was often a thankless task that kept me perched precariously between the gutter and the stars for eleven long working years. It is this story alone that I feel I am qualified to tell, through the life experiences that I have had.
I can tell you that I have spared some people in telling this story in this form. Some of them I have no doubt unwittingly protected in small ways. If I have done so, their absence only serves to somehow repay some act of human decency that they themselves have shown to me. There are others who showed the opposite of decency to me, whom I have been forced to protect by the lawyers-who-know-what’s-good-for-me, and to them I say: You got lucky, bastards.
Whatever the case, I can tell you in all honesty that I spared very little of myself in telling this story, and that, after all, is all I can really do.
Charly Wegelius, February 2013