‘Monseiur Chaminaud … Charly Wegelius.’
Seeing a look of bemusement on the face of the middle-aged Frenchman who was propped up against the boot of a white Renault team car in front of me, I thrust my hand forward and tried again, this time thickening my well-practised French accent, distorting further the unusual sound of my Finnish surname.
‘Char-lee Weg-he-lee-oos.’
After a brief moment, the look of recognition that I had hoped for finally spread across the face looking back at me, and a cold hand gripped mine and shook it in welcome. Despite the relief that flooded over me when Jean-François Chaminaud realised who I was, it was far from the welcome that I had expected. Behind the smile now being worn on the face of my sole contact at the French amateur team Vendée U, whose doorstep I had just arrived on, was a look that seemed to say with a hint of panic, ‘Oh, fuck – you’re actually here.’ In fairness the moment I arrived in France perhaps hadn’t been the best one. As my mother and I had pulled up from our overnight trip on the ferry and arrived at the designated location, we had found that everyone in the team was already leaving for a training session. Even as I stepped excitedly out of my mother’s red Ford Fiesta and saw the Gitane team bikes on the roof of the Vendée U team car, riders had begun filing out into the morning in ones and twos. Some had glanced at me warily; others simply weren’t interested in the bespectacled blond teenager who had appeared and was waiting for someone to talk to him.
Being deliberately ignored by my teammates was something I would get used to in my amateur years in France, but right there and then it had felt like a strange kind of introduction. As far as I was concerned when I arrived at the accommodation at Le Domaine St Sauveur a few kilometres from La Roche Sur Yon in the Vendée to meet the Vendée U team I was in the right place at the right time, but, as it would soon become apparent, I was the only person there who thought that.
In 1996 professional cycling was a European sport, and being an aspiring young British cyclist meant only one thing: packing up your life in the UK and moving to continental Europe. It was a process that had been the same for generations: cycling was a minority sport in Britain and always had been – there was a sense then that it always would be too. If you were British, Australian or American the challenge of becoming a professional cyclist wasn’t limited to what you could do on the road, but whether or not you could hack it ‘over there’.
At the time, communication was still painfully slow between the UK and Europe. A few months prior to arriving in France I had been tenuously put in touch with the Vendée U trainer, Jean-François Chaminaud, by the British journalist Kenny Pryde. For whatever reason, after a few handwritten letters backwards and forwards between us, Chaminaud agreed to take me on. I didn’t think about it, but it was a strange thing for a team like Vendée U to agree to. I was 17 and still a junior category rider – not even old enough to take part in the same races as the members of the actual team. It was typical of who I was at the time, though, always wanting to be one step in front of where I needed to be, that I had set my sights on Vendée U, the best amateur team in France. And now here I was, only one day after finishing my A levels, ready to start life as a cyclist.
The absurdity of my situation wasn’t the only thing that went over my head, either. Having never been part of any sort of organised team, other than my cycling club VC York, I had no idea of the complicated and often political structures within cycling teams. VC York had been delighted to help me get a racing licence and allow me to ride in one of their jerseys, but they were just a sports club with a committee that organised a road race and a club dinner once a year – that was it. I had been in no way prepared then, when I had gleefully taken up what I thought was a concrete offer to go out to join Vendée U, for the fact that one half of the team didn’t talk to the other, and that Chaminaud, a marginal figure in the team hierarchy, hadn’t told anyone else that I was coming. When I had eventually walked over and introduced myself, the riders, staff and the manager, Jean-René Bernaudeau, seemed to be taken completely by surprise by my arrival.
The team were in the middle of a training camp for the National Team Time Trial Championships, and they had no time or interest in delaying the day’s session because of the unheralded arrival of skinny English kid. Clearly a little embarrassed, Chaminaud had a rushed conversation with Bernaudeau, seemingly formed almost entirely out of grunts. I was told to wait where I was, and that they would be back for me after the training session. By now Mum had gone to catch her boat, so I was left totally alone. I found myself a seat in the reception area of the house that the team was leaving, and I sat down and quietly waited.
My reaction was typical of who I was at the time. I had been told to wait by someone whom I considered could be influential to my cycling career, so I waited, and I thought nothing more of it. There were no questions in my mind, there was no part of me that wondered if I was doing the right thing, nor any doubt about what I was getting myself into. I was so determined I didn’t even pause to think about the possibility of being homesick. I loved my mother and I knew that being away from home would be a challenge, but at the same time I knew that she had already done all that she could to help me towards my goal just by getting me there. Now there were other people to listen to, and the idea of entertaining emotions like missing home was a total waste of time to me. It was as if I had simply carved that part of my mind out with a scalpel and left it behind when I was packing my bags to go to France, reasoning that it was of no use.
I still can’t put my finger on why I had to become a professional cyclist. I was quite smart at school; I didn’t come from a penniless family; I didn’t really need to try to make my living this way. Despite the fact that my parents had separated when I was only two, I was far too young to really know any different, and grew up as contented as only a child can be. I led what I considered to be a perfectly normal life. I grew up with my brother, Eddie, and my mother, Jane, in York but spent my summers and school holidays in Finland. Eddie and I travelled what felt like quite often between the two countries when we were both at a very young age. Being four years older, Eddie took the responsibility of looking after me very seriously when we were young. I was his kid brother, and he always made sure that we were both safe on our travels, and kept me out of trouble.
We both loved to go out to Finland. The whole country felt like a playground to us. The landscape of Finnish countryside was so uncluttered it felt like a world of opportunity. It was quiet and it was safe, we could walk as far as we could in any direction and we could be sure everyone we came across knew my father and who we were. My father, wanting us to be independent and actively look for things to do, allowed us a lot of freedom. Eddie and I were full of adventure, and left to our own devices we roamed like wild dogs, climbing trees in the woods, jumping in lakes, driving the tractors on the farm and messing around in the hay bales in the stables.
Then there were the times that my father would take it upon himself to try to educate us. Doing anything, even the most banal daily tasks, without trying your absolute best was totally out of the question for my father. He wanted us to push ourselves, to constantly want to better ourselves. It was here, perhaps more than anywhere, that my determination to succeed was forged. Summer swims in the Archipelago Sea became quests to find higher and higher rocks from which to jump into the icy water. Family bike rides became longer and longer, until I was riding over 100 km at nine years old.
On one such ride we were caught in a heavy summer rainstorm 20 km from home. The rain was belting down and it became so dark that we lined out into single file for safety, and I, being the youngest, took up position at the front. All I could think of was getting back to the house and having a warm shower. The bike weighed a ton and only had one gear and a back pedal brake, but I hammered on the pedals and started to pick up speed. I rode bent over the ill-fitting bike, feeling the freezing water coming up off the road and filling my trainers. I was squinting at the road ahead and thought of nothing but going as fast as I could to get home as quickly as possible. When I arrived there I was surprised to see that I was completely alone. I hadn’t heard a crash so I thought nothing much of it, and carried on to the house. When my father and Eddie arrived home I was showered and warm. Eddie was incredulous. ‘Where did you fuck off to?’
‘I just rode. I wasn’t trying to lose you. I wanted to get home.’
‘Weren’t you tired? We couldn’t keep up. You just rode off.’
‘Of course I was. I was knackered, and freezing. But I wanted to get back, so I rode hard. I thought you were right behind me.’
‘Well, didn’t you look?’
I realised that I hadn’t. I’d thought that perhaps he would be annoyed that I’d left him behind. But Eddie wasn’t upset that I could ride faster than him; he just didn’t understand how someone could keep going without looking back to check on the others. Eddie might not have had the ruthless attitude of a performance athlete at his core, but I certainly did.
If Eddie was upset, my father, once he had got over the shock of being left behind by his young son, was no doubt impressed.
With my father everything, even affection and attention, was about performance. Because this was all I had ever known, I thought it was normal. Only the shocked expressions of family friends upon hearing of these feats gave me a clue at the time that it was a bit odd.
Like many kids, I took part in all sports at an early age, and through applying myself in this way I found that I was quite good at them. It was just a matter of time until I found a sport that I could dedicate myself to with real purpose. When I first discovered cycling, I instantly realised that I had found the sport for me. There was something different about it – exactly what, I was too young and too excitable to ever question – but unlike other sports, which I would rapidly lose interest in, it caught my attention from the very first moment.
It was 1990 when I really discovered cycling. My mother had taken me to watch a round of the Kellogg’s professional city centre criteriums in York and I saw Malcolm Elliott there. He’d won the points jersey in the Tour of Spain. He looked like a fucking gladiator. He was tanned and his legs were so muscular they looked like they’d been carved out of mahogany. He looked so cool: he had a Teka headband and a posh-looking bird with him. He was shiny in every sense: his bike, his shoes, himself. He made cyclists look like something special. In a way, they didn’t look like people; their bodies were like machines made to ride. I almost couldn’t take my eyes off him; it was as if I was seeing the personification of every hero that I’d had. It wasn’t just seeing an older kid who I thought was cool doing tricks on a BMX, it was as exciting as a movie star stepping out of a movie screen. The impression was lasting but the action in York was all too brief. I wanted more, and later in the summer I went to see the Kellogg’s Tour, which went over White Horse Bank near where I lived. Robert Millar rode for Z and he had the mountain jersey, and I remember vividly the look in his eyes when he was going over that hill. I was exhilarated to see in their faces how hard the riders were all trying.
Cycle racing didn’t really happen on a large scale in England, but seeing those flashy professional races and hearing about riders with foreign-sounding names who rode for exotic-seeming teams made me aspire to become a part of that world. Cycling didn’t come from England like cricket or football; cycling was from another planet entirely. I became obsessed with everything this distant world of professional cycling seemed to promise. I quickly forgot about the one-week Kellogg’s Tour of Britain and the one-hour city centre criteriums. My horizons switched to the biggest race of all: the Tour de France. It was the greatest thing I could imagine. I was totally consumed by it in the way only someone with as much free time as a child could be. I bought regional Michelin maps of the Alps and pored over them. I was young and a daydreamer, but already I knew I was resolving to make those dreams real; in looking at the Col de la Croix de Fer on a map it was as if I was grounding that place in reality. Bourg-d’Oisans, I realised, wasn’t just something out of a Tolkien book: it was a place, and people lived there, went to school and worked there.
I’m sure maps of southern France are not what 11-year-old kids normally spend their pocket money on, but I was closing the gap between the unimaginably exotic world of professional cycling and my own life in York. By buying the maps and trying to plant these places in reality, I was taking the first steps to getting myself across that divide. My very first steps towards a cycling career, though, had to be taken at home.
‘Mum, I need you to write a letter to my headmaster.’
It was late to be eating dinner on a school night, but my training ride that I had set out on had ended up being, as usual, a lot longer than I had promised when I left the house. It was nearly nine o’clock and my mother, who was serving up the portion of shepherd’s pie that had been waiting for me, looked at me.
‘Why is that, Charles?’
‘I am wasting my time at school and I think I can use it better.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
I had always been encouraged to think and express myself as an adult, and now at 15, and with growing confidence, I was beginning to express myself forthrightly. I presented my argument.
‘I want to get out of wasting my time on Wednesday afternoons doing school sports and use the time to go cycling instead. The idea of going to school is to prepare me for my future, and I know I am not going to be playing rugby or football for a career, but I want to be a cyclist and so surely going training is as important as anything else. I wouldn’t be missing any lessons, but I hate training in the dark: it’s dangerous, and it means that by the time I get home I have no time to do homework …’
My mother already knew that I wanted to be a cyclist. Until now there had never been any discussion about whether or not I would be allowed to follow a career path as a professional sportsman. My father had made a career as a professional show-jumper and although a career in professional sport of any kind was bound to be hard to achieve, and be precarious in nature, my mother, more than anyone, had always seemed to unquestionably believe in me. When I had first announced that I wanted to ride the Tour de France as a 10-year-old she had accepted my choice, and had gone to great lengths to get me started racing, driving me all around the country to get to races. She would sit, weekend in and weekend out, in car parks of village halls all across the country, with the Sunday Times and a Thermos flask of tea, waiting patiently for me to get on with whatever race I was doing. It was her way of supporting me. After each race she would leave it up to me whether or not to talk about how it had gone on the way home. Sometimes I would sit in moody silence all the way home and she never once got annoyed or pushed the issue. My race was my race and I did as well as I did, and she never questioned that. Likewise I had never once questioned that I would have to complete my compulsory education – it had always seemed a fair trade-off to me. I went to school and achieved satisfactory results, and I was allowed to spend my spare time either racing or training. Now, though – with this question in the air – I knew if I got my way I would finally be shifting the balance in favour of cycling at a crucial time in my education. Despite the fact that my GCSEs were looming, dedicating more time to cycling made total sense, in my mind at least. It was reasonable and it was practical, and it would give me an advantage over everyone else my age.
My mother looked at the clock on the wall before returning her gaze to me, and replying without even a hint of reluctance: ‘Well, if you think that your time would be better spent going cycling, I will write a letter.’
It was exactly the answer I was gunning for. I knew then that I had the full blessing of my mother to pursue the real goal that I had set myself.
Two weeks later, after wolfing down a quick lunch and hurriedly dressing myself in my cycling kit in the school locker rooms, I picked up my bike from the bike sheds. As I clipped into the pedals and rolled towards the school gates I felt an almost unbelievable thrill. My headteacher at Bootham School had agreed to allow me to skip Wednesday afternoon PE and use the time instead to go cycling. As I passed through the gates and the sound of the school playground disappeared behind me, I felt a sense of freedom and achievement that was unparalleled in my life. I was leaving behind the ordinary life and making my way into the world I dreamed of.
It wasn’t just the physical act of riding a bike that I was obsessed with. I was desperate to understand everything I could about the world of cycling. I absorbed every story I could find on how my predecessors had succeeded. I read every book and magazine I could on the subject. In a way, finding these stories was as much a part of the fun as anything else. There was no internet and no obvious way to go and get this information; professional cycling was drip fed to me through encounters, whisperings, handed-down books and stories.
Naturally I started to look around for people who I felt could help me with my objective. My mother’s support getting me to races had been crucial, but by the time I reached the junior categories I knew I needed people with real knowledge of professional cycling to help me on my way.
I met Mike Taylor for the first time at the Junior Tour of Ireland the previous autumn before I had headed out to France. Mike had recently been appointed as the manager of the GB Junior team that I had been selected to ride the race for. I was instantly drawn to Mike; he had been taking teams to Europe seemingly since the dawn of time. He knew bike riders and he understood the sport; his insight was like no one else’s I’d ever met. Mike wasn’t for the faint-hearted; he was direct, and didn’t take any shit at all. In one week in Ireland I felt like I had suddenly found a key figure in my future. I wanted to know how to become a professional, and I knew that Mike could help me with that. As soon as we returned from Ireland I was picking up the phone to Mike almost every day, hounding him with more and more questions. Soon, through his guidance, I recognised the path that I was going to take.
It became clear to me that the tried and tested method of becoming a professional cyclist was to go to Europe to see if you’d sink or swim. There were no schools or academies; it was just down to individual resolve and a lot of guesswork. It was the only option there was. Little had changed with the whole process since the sixties: to be accepted in the peloton British cyclists had to make themselves fit into a different country. It wasn’t just a matter of moving out of home to go and find work. You had to completely uproot yourself, and be prepared to do whatever you were told by a French or Belgian manager – who had no real duty of care at all – to make yourself that bit better than anyone else. For me, and perhaps for others too, this formed part of the attraction of becoming a European pro – making it there was the ultimate accolade for a British cyclist, because it was so rare that anyone did, and it was so hard to do. By the time I arrived at that Vendée U camp in France there wasn’t really very much that would have overwhelmed me. I knew this in my mind: I was a man on a fucking mission.
• • •
Things didn’t get any easier for me to begin with, in France. After I waited patiently for their return the team eventually came back from their training and drove me to the house in Saint-Maurice-le-Girard. Here I found that once again my timing seemed to be fairly bad. On the drive to the house it was explained to me that the team house was looked after by a Polish guy who had at one stage been a rider, but who now worked in the sports shop across the road that was run by Bernaudeau. He lived there with his wife and the team’s foreign riders: Aidan Duff, Piotr Wadecki (another Pole) and Janek Tombak, an Estonian. Aidan Duff, an Irish rider, was away at a race. I knew Aidan by reputation, and I had presumed that in him I would have at least one English-speaking ally. I wouldn’t meet Aidan for another few days, though.
Clearly quite keen to get home to his dinner, Bernaudeau gave me a thirty-second tour of the house while rooted to the spot, pointing with one flailing arm at the various doorways you could see from where we stood in the hallway. After he poked his head into the kitchen and explained to the surprised gaggle of Eastern Europeans that I would now be living with them, he finally turned and looked at me and said, ‘Make sure you shower before 1 p.m. After that – no hot water.’ Adding, ‘There will be lots of riders coming and going. Make sure you label your food if you don’t want it eaten.’
With that Bernaudeau finished his tour and made for the front door. That was it. The house itself was basic; it had the air of a place lived in by old people, or even someone who was recently deceased, as if the occupants had only enough energy to clean the things that were close to them, and everything else was dusty and forgotten and a little bit out of place. Vendée U might have been the best team in France, but their accommodation was like a fucking terrorist cell.
I looked at my surroundings again, but I didn’t even flinch. I knew there was no other option if I wanted to become a professional cyclist. It was a rite of passage.
In all honesty a part of me even considered myself lucky. The stories of my British predecessors in the sport prepared me to accept the shit things I had to do. I saw those hardships like a process of branding myself with legitimacy. Even when I was looking around at the shitty accommodation that was to be my new home, the only feelings I had were of guilt. I knew deep down, compared to my predecessors, I still had it ‘easy’ because I could always go out and buy a France Télécom phone card and call my mother if I really needed to.
• • •
My first few weeks in France were nothing like I had imagined they would be. Not because I was treated badly, but because I wasn’t really treated like anything at all.
I had to pluck up the courage, but eventually it was time to do something. I went to the office where I knew Jean-René Bernaudeau would be sat, making calls and going through papers, and I knocked and walked in. Jean-René was not surprised to see me; in the few weeks that I’d been in France I had been an almost continual presence at the service course. Apart from when I was out training on my bike, there wasn’t really anywhere else for me to be. My being a junior had caused a bigger problem than just the awkwardness of my arrival. The team had no idea how to get a licence for a junior rider, nor which races I could ride as a foreigner. In short they didn’t really know what to do with me. My first two weeks were spent training, hanging about and doing odd jobs like mowing the lawn. I realised that if I didn’t do something about my situation nobody else would. I had decided to get proactive.
I unfolded my copy of the French Cycling Federation’s magazine France Cycliste on the table and spoke in my GCSE French, ‘Est ce que c’est possible de allez faire cette course?’
Jean-René regarded me with a little surprise and gave me a very noncommittal Gallic shrug while he drew out a lengthy and speculative,
‘Ouais …’
It was the guarded kind of response that I was expecting. While it had been Chaminaud – the team trainer – who had invited me to come and ride with the team, I had little if anything at all to do with him after our initial meeting; instead I soon discovered that it was really Jean-René Bernaudeau who ran it all, and who was now stuck with me.
I explained to him, ‘I went and bought myself a copy of France Cycliste and a map and I’ve looked up which races are close enough for me to get to. I looked and it is fine for me to race on my international licence, so I have sent entries in to all the races that I can do in the next month.’
He looked at me in disbelief and I could see a light bulb go on in his head: ‘Shit! This guy really wants to race.’ The first race was about an hour away from where we lived and, after I’d said my piece, I knew it was up to Jean-René.
‘Well, you’d better take the van from the sports shop and drive yourself there. Bon chance.’
The loan of the van was a clear sign of approval, so on the day of the race I packed it and drove away. The race was a Nationale category race, which is for young riders and men who have jobs and do cycling for fun – a true amateur’s race. Once the start flag dropped I went out, like I went out in every race I did at the time, attacking from the front and riding off when I wanted to. I won all the primes, as well as the race. After picking up my winnings I packed up and drove back to the team house satisfied with the win, but not thinking at all about the process I had been through to get myself to and from the race. It was what I had to do, after all. But everyone else in the team and the staff were astounded: ‘Fuck me, you did that all on your own?’ Winning to them was one thing, but it was my attitude that impressed them. Most riders in the team wouldn’t dream of going to a race without a soigneur or a mechanic, or at the very least someone to drive them there. I had done the whole thing without any assistance at all.
It impressed people but I think it also compounded the inkling I had that everyone thought I was a little bit weird. I suppose I was: other cyclists my age were dedicated, but they still would have found time to have a life; to me it seemed that nothing else mattered. The fact was, for the first time in my life, I was doing nothing but cycling, and I was so into it – the thought that I had the whole day to do nothing but ride my bike was beyond exciting. But they came from a whole different world. In France cycling is a huge mainstream sport, and back then the young guys who showed talent were groomed like princes from the very first races they won. They were vedettes, these little superstars, and they were casual about the world of professional cycling because they had grown up with it.
I was the opposite: cycling was such an obscure sport in the UK that I was used to being treated as a freak. The two cycling cultures were so different that they nurtured completely different people.
The way that we looked after our bikes was a prime example. I washed my bike every single day after training with diesel, and did so until it was spotless. I made sure that my bike was race ready every single morning, every single fucking day. They were all watching this, the other riders and staff, and I was sure they were all laughing at me. The thing was, the riders at Vendée U had been given bikes all through their lives from various clubs and teams, whereas I had always raced on my stuff on parts and frames that I had saved up and bought with my own money. I still dismantled my race bike at the end of the season, cleaned all the parts in Brasso and wrapped them in newspaper so they stayed warm and dry for the winter. My attitude was that these things had to be looked after because they were hard to come by. But the guys in Vendée U didn’t see it like that. When I was professional, years later, I adopted their attitude too. My race bike was a disgrace, it was always filthy and the tyres in my training wheels would be riddled with massive holes. But back in the early 1990s I stood out there each day washing my bike like a maniac, while my teammates laughed at me. I just didn’t care.
• • •
That summer I kept winning, but at some stage in late July everything changed.
Carrying one of my kit bags for me as I wheeled my bike, Jean-René led me up the front path of a typical French suburban house and rang the doorbell. It was a warm summer’s evening, and sprinklers were lazily watering the neat garden outside the front of the house. As I looked about the lawn the front door opened and a man a little older than Jean-René, whom I recognised from a few of the local races, ushered us into the house.
As soon as we walked in I was struck by how dark the place was: to keep the summer heat out all the blinds in the house had been kept shut and not yet opened for the evening air to refresh the house. The house itself was neat and tidy, and, despite the odd stillness created by the darkness, it felt like a home. We walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The man politely offered us a drink. He opened the fridge to pull out a cold French lager for Jean-René and a bottle of sparkling water for me. As he did so the nose-stinging scent of strong French cheese invaded my nostrils. It was the first time I had really been in a French home; I had lived in France with four foreigners; our own refrigerator only smelt of mould and off-milk, and there was nothing at all French about its contents. Here, though, I was hit by the reality that I was in a French home. I should have been contented with the small comforts that the smell of real food gave me, but instead my heart only sank further.
A few days earlier I had been told that I was going to be leaving the team house, as Jean-René had found some accommodation that he thought was more ‘suitable’ for me a few kilometres away in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon. Without my knowledge it had been arranged that I would go to stay at the home of one of the junior riders who rode for the cycling club from the town. La Roche was a club that was loosely attached to Vendée U, and they wore similar jerseys, but they weren’t what you’d call a cycling team by any standards; they were a club full of old men and schoolboys. The school holidays had begun and either Jean-René or the parents of the junior must have decided that it couldn’t have been all that nice for a young guy to be living in the team house without people his own age. Perhaps they thought if I stayed with them I might even do some ‘normal’ activities instead of just riding or cleaning my bike. It was a really warm-hearted gesture, but I was so blinded by determination that instead of being pleased about the comforts of the family environment I was welcomed into I was absolutely gutted; I felt like I was back on school exchange.
In my singularly determined mind Vendée U was the only place I needed to be: Vendée U was the fast track to a cycling career. It was tough in the house; the older Polish couple had left shortly after I’d arrived, and with them had gone any semblance of discipline or cleanliness. At best each of us would clean our own plate and space on the table; anything else (like the shower or toilet) wouldn’t get touched. The place might have been disgusting, but there were two things that made it worth wanting to be there. The first was the fact that, even though I wasn’t doing any races with the team, just my being there was pushing open a crack in the door. The second was that I felt I had a real friend there.
As soon as I met Aidan we had hit it off. When he first came back to the house from a race to find I’d moved in he had no idea who I was or what I was doing there, but he didn’t even seem the slightest bit surprised to see me. I introduced myself and there was no difficulty whatsoever, he just said hello and started chatting to me as if I’d been part of the team all season. That was Aidan; he just accepted whatever came along with a shrug and a smile, and carried right along with things.
Being sent to La Roche really made me feel like I’d fucked up, that I hadn’t done well enough in the races, even though I’d won every race I’d ridden. From the moment that Jean-René stood up and left me still seated at that kitchen table I moped around the house like a surly teenager, beating myself up about the fact that I had been downgraded. I trained alone in the mornings and spent the afternoons lying on my bed reading France Cycliste over and over. Teenage boys are hardly masters of subtlety, and the family quickly seemed to realise that all wasn’t well. After ten or so days the uncomfortable father knocked on my door one evening and came into the room.
‘Charly. We have noticed that you don’t really seem happy here, so I have spoken to Jean-René … If you really want you can go back to the team house …’
As soon as the words left his mouth I couldn’t hide my delight. Without stopping to think about whether this family would feel embarrassed or if perhaps I should, I gleefully ran around the house collecting my things and started packing my bags. When I heard the team car pull up half an hour or so later I virtually ran out of the door to get back to the team house. As soon as I returned to that dirty old hovel full of Polish cyclists that I struggled to communicate with, frenzied with the constant upheaval of riders and team staff coming and going, I was happy as Larry. I was happier in that house full of lonely men than within the comforts of a family.
On my return to the house that summer I carried on winning almost at will, and, as any rider knows, when you are that driven, as long as you are winning it makes everything else in life seem OK. The winning was easy to me then, but I still had a lot to learn.
• • •
Before I went home at the end of that first year in 1996 I had one of my first real lessons in professional cycling. For the first time ever, I was put under pressure from someone other than myself.
After I had soundly beaten the local superstar, Sandy Casar, to win a round of the junior World Cup in Brittany, Jean-René decided to enter me for the GP des Nations – a prestigious professional time trial that is run at the end of the year, which had a junior race as a supporting event. The race was invitation only, put on by the same organisers as the Tour de France. But, for whatever reason, they didn’t accept my entry for the race. Jean-René was furious. When Jean-René had a cause he was a force of nature: nothing would stop him. He called me into the office and told me, ‘Sit down. I will sort this out.’
He rang the Tour organisers there and then and, although I desperately wanted to ride, as I listened I felt like I should tell him that it really didn’t matter that much, that the world wouldn’t actually end if I didn’t ride. I heard the whole thing: he insisted that I would be good, telling them with all the bluster of an insulted Frenchman, ‘You’ve got to take this guy. I promise you he will do well.’
Before this incident the only pressure I’d felt I had piled on to myself. Now the stakes had changed: I – skinny little Charly Wegelius from VC York – was responsible for Jean-René Bernaudeau’s word. The fact that this man – who had a successful career as a pro, and had managed the Castorama professional team – was relying on me made me quake in my team issue blue and yellow Carnac claquettes. Even at that age I understood what I was undertaking. I would find out later that pressure, and the ability to deal with it, was one of the key parts of being a professional bike rider.
After pushing so hard for me to get a start, Jean-René really got behind me. To him, it became a point of honour that I performed, so he put everything he could at my disposal. I was sent to the race with a team car, with three bikes, four disc wheels and the team masseur, Jacques Duchain. Jacques had been around professional cycling for years, and had worked with various French professional teams. He was really good, the best the team had, and he was there just for me.
The race was at the Lac de Madine near Nancy in the north-east of France. I travelled up with Jacques the day before, and watched in amazement as he meticulously planned out my schedule. His presence calmed me, but not enough to rid me of my internal stress. My sleep, usually peaceful and easy, was for one of the first times in my life truly fitful and agitated.
On the morning of the TT my nerves increased. All I wanted to do was to get up on the ramp and get the race underway; until I could get going every second was agony.
As I took to the start ramp and I was held up by the marshal, I tried to block everything out. I focused intently on the countdown; I watched the starter as he looked down at his stopwatch, and as he thrust his hairy hand out in front of me dropping his fingers one by one, ‘Cinq … quatre … trois… deux … un … TOP!!’
I was so eager to get going that I pushed hard on the pedals and my wheel slipped sideways slightly on the surface of the wooden start ramp made wet by the thick morning mist. My heart fluttered momentarily but as I hit the tarmac at the bottom of the ramp still upright I stood up and stamped on the pedals. I went straight up to maximal effort as quickly as I could. As I rounded the first sets of barriers that led out to the open circuit I began hyperventilating. I panted like a dog that was too stupid to stop chasing the rabbit. As I charged out of the centre of town into the countryside I heard the squealing of the team-car tyres behind and I could feel Jacques’ eyes on me. The course undulated but the air was still. All my thoughts focused on the image in my head of Jean-René making that phone call: ‘He will perform, I promise you.’ My lungs burned but I was so desperate to do well that I became angry with myself for suffering. I thrashed myself, I went harder and harder – and even then it wasn’t enough. I kept asking myself for more; when I was at my limit I taunted myself that I had to give more. The 35 km passed in a blurry rush. I focused as far as I could see ahead of me and I willed every fibre in my body to get myself towards that point as quickly as I could.
I shot across the finish line to the excited voice of the announcer, but with the first gasping breath that I took as I crossed the line I instantly wished that I could be allowed to start again. I was sure it wasn’t enough. I swung the bike into the race car park and looked for Jacques. As the pain of the effort eased out of my body, I saw the Vendée U car hastily parked at an angle in a space 50 metres away. Jacques hopped out of the driver’s seat and started gesticulating excitedly at me. Suddenly I saw that it had been worth it. I pulled up at the car and Jacques grabbed me by the shoulders, ‘Fantastic, Charly, fantastic!’ He couldn’t hide his delight; I had smashed the best time. I fulfilled Jean-René’s promise to a T. I won, beating the second-place rider by a minute and twenty seconds, a massive margin over that distance.
In the car on the way home Jacques was still beside himself. It was as if he had just discovered something very special. More than just winning I think he had seen something in my ride that he recognised could take me a long way. Jacques was a part of the tradition of cycling, the kind of soigneur who had a wealth of knowledge acquired through pure dedication to his métier. He knew cycling and how to nurture talent. As we drove home, he tempered his excitement as he spoke very carefully to me, ‘Charly, this is the beginning of something. You have the talent, but you must not get too excited. If you want to be a professional there is a long way to go and you have to remain calm. It is a hard job, you have to faire le métier, you have to work a lot, and hard, and you have to keep your head, but this is a nice beginning. A very nice beginning …’
The GP des Nations was my last race of 1996, and the end of my first experience of racing on the Continent. Before I left to go back home to England, Jean-René told me that the following season I was invited back, and that I would receive a monthly salary of 4,000 francs. The fact that I was going to go straight into one of the best amateur teams in France didn’t seem like a success, it just felt natural. Money, like everything else, was a means to an end. Four thousand francs was a lot of money to me at that time, but in my mind it simply meant that, combined with the prize money I had won throughout the year, I knew I had enough to get me through a winter without working, and I could dedicate my time to the serious business of preparing for my first full senior season. Despite being fully able to concentrate on working on my cycling career, and already becoming a full-time rider at 18, nothing would have been enough to prepare me for my first season as a senior rider.
• • •
In April 1997 I stood on the start line of the Trophée des Grimpeurs and looked around me. Only a few months ago I had still been a junior rider, albeit a very good one; now I looked about and saw that I was surrounded by some of the top French professionals of the day, including triple Tour de France King of the Mountains Richard Virenque and his Festina teammates. I was petrified. In the Nationale races the previous year I had been so superior to the competition that I had been able to do whatever I wanted, and I loved that. In one race I had looked behind me into the eyes of the one grown man left holding my wheel, and almost laughed when he had begged me to ‘please slow down’, because he wanted to finish second. I had been sadistic and cruel, but now I was no longer in the little kids’ playground, and I was about to feel what getting hurt was really like.
By virtue of their status as one of the best amateur teams in France, Vendée U got into a lot of professional races that accepted amateurs in those days, and the Trophée des Grimpeurs was one such race. It might not be well known, but it was a tough bike race, and I was still only 18. As we rolled out of the start line and the race took off, I dived into the wheels hoping that maybe the speed wouldn’t be exaggerated too quickly and I could hide in the bunch for as long as possible. No chance. The race was only 96 km on a circuit outside of Paris that literally went up and down one hill. Once we started I felt like I was slipping into quicksand; riders kept passing by me, and try as I might I just couldn’t match the speed. I couldn’t even make myself hold my position in the bunch. I looked on desperately as rider after rider passed by me. Even before we hit the climb for the first time, the fucking pace was phenomenal; I had never known anything like it. I didn’t even last a lap. When I pulled out I felt totally ashamed of myself. I was so embarrassed with my performance that I braced myself to get shouted at when Jean-René next saw me. I thought he would be angry or disappointed, and that the team would see that I wasn’t as good as they had thought I was. Amazingly, though, no one seemed to be bothered by my woeful performance – at least outwardly. My results the previous year had convinced Bernaudeau that I had talent, and perhaps he believed in me even more than I did, or perhaps the expectations that I had of myself were unrealistically high. Perhaps I wasn’t doing that badly. Either way, Jean-René continued to select me for the first team, and I kept going to all of the biggest races that the team rode.
After the Grimpeurs, we went to the Tour de Vaucluse in Provence, and the demands and suffering were multiplied again. In a stage race you are compelled to stay there suffering through to the next day, because there is a next day. I was consistently the last to finish. As soon as the action started I would be in the convoy, slowly dropping back through the cars and out of the race. I was completely gobsmacked. I was going to breakfast and then going back to sleep in the short gap between breakfast and going to the race because I was just so fucked.
It wasn’t just the racing that was hard to cope with at the time. To my teammates, who were in most cases much older than me, I was another foreigner who was vying to take their spot, and I deserved no quarter. On one stage at the Tour de Vaucluse I found myself caught out in the wind when the bunch had lined out and, as I fought desperately to try to get into the line, even my own teammate Walter Bénéteau wouldn’t let me in. I was incredulous; he only had to ease slightly to save me from being bounced all the way out the back of the race for good, and he just looked at me and shook his head before pushing me back out. That really disappointed me then, and still does now. I don’t think it was a language barrier, or a culture barrier, or a sense of humour barrier. I wanted to become a professional, and my teammates all wanted to become professionals too, and there just aren’t that many places, so in our own way we were all fighting tooth and nail for it. These kinds of rivalries are what make or break so many riders. They force you to either give up or dig in deeper.
In this environment my only saving grace was Aidan. Aidan had been out in France for two seasons before I got there. He already had a little experience of what I was going through, and his understanding meant that we got along like a house on fire.
Money was tight and the two of us decided that we would make ours go a long way. We competed with each other, inventing more and more ways to save every penny. It was an extension of the world that we saw ourselves as being part of: amateur bike riders were supposed to be broke, so we made ourselves live like it. We laughed about it, and we laughed at ourselves doing it, but whenever he put the car out of gear and cruised down a hill to save fuel, or drove us out to the supermarket at 8 p.m. to buy the stale bread because it was cheaper, he’d look at me with a grin and say, ‘We’re doing this so we can drink champagne later.’ It became an obsession in its own right; even getting the free cookies at a Campanile hotel was an enormous triumph. We got so used to finding ways to save money we would often return from hotels with ludicrous hauls of ‘swag’, our suitcases stuffed with toilet rolls, soaps, packets of sugar – anything we could claim would save us money at the supermarket (and could be seen to outdo the efforts of the other).
While the adventures with Aidan were a nice distraction, that was all they were. I knew that deep down, after taking so many kickings and never seemingly once getting to ride races that I could realistically have thought of winning, by mid-1998, my second senior year at the team, things had to change. I was becoming increasingly frustrated in France. Determination and youth are a combination that allows misery to go unnoticed at times and you don’t know how you really feel until one day you make a snap decision to change everything.
I almost caught myself trembling as I rang Jean-René’s doorbell. I forced myself to stand up straight before I pressed it, and as soon as I did I felt the surge of adrenaline that told me there was no going back. When you make a difficult phone call there is always a fraction of a second in that first ring when your heart races and you think, ‘I can still hang up.’ But as soon as I rang that bell I knew I couldn’t run away from Jean-René’s front door. I was going through with it now, no matter what.
As the door unlatched my heart pounded in my chest. Jean-René was a little surprised to see me at 9 o’clock in the morning: ‘Charly?’
‘Jean-René, I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving the team. I’m heading back to the UK as soon as I have organised a flight. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it is time for me to leave.’
He looked genuinely stunned.
‘And l’Avenir?’
The Tour de l’Avenir in September was one of the biggest and most important races of the team’s season and it was only three weeks away. My mind had been made up, though, and I knew there was absolutely no way I could either turn back or carry on with the team. It had taken so much for me to arrive at that moment that I was determined to go through with the decision I had made.
‘I won’t be riding it for Vendée U. I am leaving, I’m sorry, but this is the best thing for my career.’
It was done. Jean-René accepted my decision, but I knew that his pride was hurt. Riders didn’t leave Vendée U of their own accord. It was the best amateur team in France, and Jean-René had a great deal of respect in the circles he moved in. He was a man who could make a young rider’s dream to turn professional a reality, and he was treated as such by everyone around him. My decision to leave must have seemed quite insolent to him, but it made sense to me.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to come to; the flipside of the blinkered determination that allowed me to ignore all the shit was that I couldn’t see I had to take a step back to go forwards. Something had to give, and eventually, on returning from a training camp in the Pyrenees the previous day, it had. Back at the house that evening it transpired that something (I’m still not sure what) had happened while we were away, and someone had broken into my room when they had found it locked. It was a small thing, perhaps insignificant, but I took that invasion of my privacy very seriously and it became the trigger I needed. I had been so angry when I discovered what had happened that a tirade started spewing out, and I feel eternally grateful to Aidan for taking the part he did. Aidan had long since seen my frustrations, when I couldn’t see them clearly for myself. And seizing the opportunity he encouraged me: ‘You can’t go back now, you have to leave.’ It was exactly what I needed.
I had gone to France because I thought that it was the only option I had to turn professional. I was part of a tradition of British bike riders making it through the shit in France, sleeping on a bed held up by bricks, in a house full of cockroaches, getting fucked over time and time again by the people and the system around me. All of that I could deal with. My trouble was that the racing in France didn’t suit me at all, and I wasn’t getting any opportunities to win. I felt that since I had made the step up from junior I had been doing nothing more than failing. I had won eleven races in that first year in France and since then I had barely scored a result. For the first time in my career my confidence had begun to falter. I soon started to doubt everything around me. When I thought about it I saw that I was spending my time grinding away against 35-year-old amateurs in Mavic Cup races, or riding French Cup races with the pros. The latter was way too hard for me, and the former, the typical French races, were on flattish, rolling roads, and were only really suited to riders who could slog away all day or filled themselves full of cortisone and rode everywhere in the 11. There was never any debate about what kind of rider I could develop into; at 60kg with a thin figure and a light frame it was obvious that I was built for climbing. While I could still ride relatively quickly on the flat, because I was strong, my physique was a huge handicap in those flat, windy races.
As I started to think more and more about the reality of becoming a professional, I started to see this as a problem. You need race wins to become a professional, pure and simple. I was getting no results, and Vendée U raced tactically as if they were a pro team, so I was always covering the early moves and getting nowhere near the action. I’d started to think I was shit, but Jean-René understood about racing, he recognised that I had talent, but he didn’t know that I couldn’t see that. I became more disillusioned with what I was doing. I was finishing the races, and that was it. I felt like no one in the world was paying any attention. In reality I was becoming a much better rider, but I couldn’t see the progress, and Jean-René never opened his mouth to explain this to me.
By the time I had vented all of my frustrations, and Aidan had helped coax the real issues out of me, I could see quite clearly what I had to do, and what was going wrong. From that moment I couldn’t bear to stay another day. My mind was made up. I sold my car to Aidan that night, and readied myself to go and tell Jean-René face to face that I was leaving for good.