The moment that I found out my ambition of riding a Grand Tour was about to become a reality, I was lying on a hotel bed in France with seeping wounds all over the left side of my body.
I had that morning abandoned the Tour du Poitou et Charentes, a grotty four-day stage race in the Vendée. It was a race that I knew quite well, having been taken along to watch by Jean-René Bernaudeau when I was still a junior. But unlike when I was an impressionable 17-year-old, by 2002, in my third year as a professional, I was no longer happy just to be there. The style of racing and the terrain at Poitou–Charentes didn’t suit me at all. I had struggled my way through the first day of crosswinds and rain, and my morale dropped down into my shoes by the start of stage two in Saintes, where I was expecting more of the same. I knew the roads in the area well and I dreaded what was coming: less than half an hour later, sure enough, I was tucked up behind another rider, millimetres from the gutter, as the bunch was being torn apart in the crosswinds. Whoever it was in front of me started to lose the wheel and put his hand back to offer me a sling. In desperation I grabbed it, but he lost balance. I went straight over the top of him and went skidding on my arse across the tarmac, tearing up the left side of my body. My race was over – there was no way I was getting back on the bike. Lying there, bleeding on the floor, I wished that I could just finish up the season there and then. As it would turn out, I had much further to go.
That night, as I lay on my hotel bed, half naked and swathed in sticky bandages like a leprosy victim, Eric Vanderaerden, one of our Belgian managers, strolled into my room to ask how I was. I gave my standard response that I was doing OK. Eric, like many Belgians I knew, could be quite direct when he spoke English, but what he said next felt like a one-inch punch from Bruce Lee: ‘Good, because you’re going to the Vuelta.’ I couldn’t believe it. The entire lefthand side of my body was a freshly torn wound and I was being told that I had seven days to get my head around riding a three-week stage race. Racing a Grand Tour was something that I desperately wanted to do, but I didn’t want to go into it like this.
I had imagined that I would be given at least a month’s warning before I was thrown into riding a Grand Tour. It had always seemed like such a momentous task that I had perhaps naïvely assumed proper preparation time would be granted; I thought that was what being a professional was about. This was like telling a 400m runner at the Olympics that they were doing the marathon the next day. I was shell-shocked. When I picked up the phone and called Sassi he confirmed my selection. My participation in the biggest event of my life so far had come down to one simple factor – there was no one else. Sassi told me, ‘Senti, Charly. I know that it is short notice … It is far from ideal, but there is no one else who can go. We can’t be sending someone who is going to get off in three days because they have a contract in their back pocket. This will be good for you, I am sure.’
Mapei was stopping sponsorship at the end of the season and the team was full of unmotivated riders who had already signed contracts for the following season, meaning that no one was really all that keen on three more weeks of suffering. I was working hard to find my own contract, but that was a drama that I knew I couldn’t let interfere with the challenge ahead. Óscar Freire, Mapei’s reigning World Champion, wanted to ride in preparation for his World Championship defence, but due to the proximity of the Vuelta to the Worlds he would be abandoning after ten days, leaving whoever was left to steer the Mapei ship to the finish. I was the ideal rider to call on in this situation: I was dependable because I was so desperate to please. The team knew I would go to the Vuelta (or anywhere) no matter how short the notice, and they also knew with a well-calculated certainty that I would be desperate to finish my first Grand Tour.
This kind of incident wasn’t an isolated one in my career. I had already worked out in my three years as a pro that a lot of being a professional cyclist was down to a rider’s ability to just manage: to be able to go to races when you were tired, and to be able to keep yourself in a good enough condition to perform; that you’d often be starting races with far from ideal preparation, perhaps already tired, sick or injured. No matter how nicely a year would look laid out on a spreadsheet at training camp in January, a professional cycling season was a series of blows that knocked you down; blows that you had to keep getting up and coming back from. Without doubt throughout the year the phone would ring just when I least expected it, and I’d know by the overtly friendly tone of the manager’s voice what was going to come. ‘I need you to be at this race. There is no pressure – I just want you to ride.’ This was always a glaring half-truth on the manager’s part: of course, I could never ‘just ride’. I always knew I’d be judged if I rode badly, not least by my own relentless high standards.
The Vuelta is a classic example of a race full of riders who have been cornered this way. Since switching its place on the calendar from May to September, the race has suffered from the weariest and most unmotivated peloton that the cycling year could gather together. The Vuelta field was like the crew of a pirate ship. It was cobbled together with unmotivated riders who’d been pressganged into racing, riders who’d been injured earlier in the year, and a decent smattering of desperadoes and mercenaries to boot.
There was no middle ground; either riders didn’t want to be there, or they were desperate to perform. The rate of rider abandons was staggering as teams sent troupes of exhausted riders to compete with Spaniards who wanted to plunder the race as quickly and violently as they could. For the riders like me who had been forced to face this fierce armada against their will, this was a frantic and often dangerous place to be. And, indeed, in this situation many riders reacted differently to me: they would turn up when they were forced to, but then fake an injury or just abandon in the first few days. Dario Pieri, a man who liked his food and the good life considerably more than riding his bike, turned up to that 2002 Vuelta with just a rucksack on his back and no suitcase or luggage. He did the team time trial prologue and then stopped on the first stage after 1km. It was all quite amusing to us, but it was probably less amusing to the Alessio team that paid his wages. Abandoning was simply never an option for a rider like me. My job security relied on an absolute toeing of the line, and doing what no one else would do. Showing resistance wasn’t an option. I was going to the Vuelta, ill prepared and injured, whether I liked it or not.
• • •
One week later I lay on yet another hotel bed, this time in Valencia, in a new pair of pyjamas waiting for the doctor to come and re-dress my wounds. In the few days that I had at home after Poitou et Charentes, hobbling along to the shops to buy a new set of pyjamas had been a high priority. In the scant time that I had it was the most important bit of preparation I could think of doing. I knew I would be staying in at least twenty different beds; my environment would be changing nightly and I knew that I had to try whatever I could to make each of those alien beds a little bit more accommodating. Lounging about a hotel room in a tracksuit is comfortable, but for real comfort the only way to go is to wear pyjamas at all times that you are not outside of the room. New pyjamas were hardly the most rock ’n’ roll accessory, but they were vital to me. From that race on I brought a new pair for every Grand Tour I rode; it became my one ritual and, while it hardly made the difference between winning and losing, it did go a long way to keeping my mental health in check.
It was unbearably hot when I arrived in Valencia. Most of the Spanish guys were used to the heat, but their reactions to it went from the sublime to the ridiculous. In our team we had two Spaniards: Óscar Freire and Pedro Horrillo. They were both good guys who I got along well with; Pedro had been a philosophy student before he was a cyclist and Óscar continued to fascinate me, as I wondered how any man could be so relaxed and yet achieve so much. I think their time in foreign teams had helped tone down some of the eccentricities that the Spanish guys normally displayed. Three years living in Italy had thankfully taught me that the habit of deliberately over-dressing on the bike to stop myself getting sick or injured (or whatever it was said to do) was nonsense, and that as soon as the hot weather arrived the sensible thing to do was to try to stay cool. But the Spanish still did the opposite: they have an obsession with wrapping up in the heat that borders on absolute insanity. It was so hot that year that the day before the Vuelta began, on our last pre-race ride, Óscar stopped a few kilometres short of the hotel to strip down to his bib shorts and get into the sea for a swim to cool down (much to the delight of the occupants of the gay beach that he had unwittingly chosen to stop at). If Óscar’s impulsive dip was a little amusing – the sight of the World Champion stripping off his rainbow jersey mid-ride to swim in front of a delighted male audience was the stuff of tabloid dreams – it was at least, I suppose, a normal human reaction in those conditions. When we returned to the hotel to find one of the Spanish teams riding the rollers with woolly hats and legwarmers on it was simply ludicrous. I still have no idea what the hell they were up to, and if it was supposed to freak the non-Spanish riders out it certainly succeeded.
Whatever the locals were up to, I didn’t allow myself to worry about it. In the days preceding the race my entire mind was fixated on getting to grips with the magnitude of the Vuelta. The longest race I had embarked on up until that point was twelve days. Knowing how hard that was … then adding another nine stages on top seemed unfathomable. I wasn’t just worried; I was petrified. I tried everything I could to break the race down into sizeable chunks in my head. I played mental games; I counted out the time-trial stages, and tried to assess which would be the easier ‘flat’ or transitional stages and removed them too. I tried to persuade myself that it was in fact a three-day stage race, followed by a couple of training days, and then another eight-day stage race straight after. No matter how much I managed to delude myself that the Vuelta wouldn’t be that much harder than what I was used to I’d soon remember the reality of the situation and trepidation would resume its normal place in my psyche.
Things actually seemed to start well when, before the first stage, Vittorio Algeri, a close friend of Gianluigi Stanga’s and the directeur sportif of the Vini Caldirola team, came and found me and thrust a letter in a Colpack-stamped envelope into my hand: ‘This is something to keep you tranquillo.’
I had negotiated a verbal contract with Stanga before I’d left for the race so I opened it immediately and found it was a letter of intent, stating that I had agreed to a contract for the following season. I felt so relieved. The letter was my guarantee of a future, or so I thought. No matter how hard that Vuelta would get, I knew that I was safe because I had that letter. I put all thoughts of my team situation to the back of my mind.
• • •
The sound of a tinny drum machine tapping out a pop rhythm and the opening strains of a Latin-tinged Europop number sent a frozen chill down my spine. I opened my eyes again and heard it kick in; the voice of a female singer came blasting out over the music:
Que el ritmo no pare, no pare no
Que el ritmo no pare
Que el ritmo no pare, no pare no
Que el ritmo no pare
Acércate un poquito, acércate un poquito
Dame un besito nene que esto esta muy rico
Por qué yo quiero que, que
El amor sincero vuelva ya ya ya
In the start village of the Vuelta the organisers played the race official theme song, seemingly incessantly. Every time I heard the opening bars of that jangly saccharine pop song my heart filled with dread. It was a jaunty song that for the spectators who came down to the stage starts would have been harmless fun; to me it was the chimes of a Eurotrash death march. As the singer piped up again, belting out another chorus of laughable sexual innuendo around bike racing, I cowered in the back seat of the team car in my kit, ready but not wanting to go to the start.
Once the race had finally got under way with the team time trial, my focus switched solely to my survival. On the first stage I lost a massive 7 minutes; on the second stage I was dead last – 5 minutes 30 seconds behind the winner. By the finish of stage five I had already lost over half an hour to the race leaders. The anticipation of pain is the worst kind of torture imaginable, and after only a few days of the Vuelta I was finding each start village a terrifying place, not to mention the roads that led out of it.
The starts were particularly terrifying because some genius in the organisation had decided to experiment with shorter stages. The concept behind it was that, because almost no one watched a long stage in its entirety, the organisers could pack more action into a shorter space of time (plus there were a few vague notions kicked around about the shorter distances playing a role in the battle against doping). The problem was that with a shorter distance the riders fought twice as hard to make a difference. Riders were no doubt also still doping left, right and centre, but now they were in a rush to make good their advantage as soon as they could. There was no gentle warm-up to the stage, no time to roll your legs out and get a little bit of blood flowing again to allow you to feel even the slightest bit recovered. As soon as the flag had been dropped (to the sound of the fucking Vuelta theme song) the race was flat out, and the speed was incredible: by the time we left the neutral zone the bunch was already doing 60 km/h. If you are suffering in a stage race, every kilometre that you can manage to stay in the group without too much effort is a bonus. When races start so quickly it can feel like you are caught in a rip tide. In amongst the speeding peloton even my best efforts left me feeling almost motionless. The harder that I thrashed away, the more my legs seemed to turn to stone. The average speed of one of the stages in the first week was a staggering 51.6 km/h, and the only reason it wasn’t faster was because there was a bloody great 6 km climb near the finish that brought the speed down a bit! At times it felt like madness; on one occasion we were doing 77 km/h on a flat road and I looked down at my 53.11 and wished I had bigger gears because I simply couldn’t pedal it fast enough.
The Vuelta was characterised by these high speeds: the fastest road stage of all time was clocked only a year later in the 2003 edition; that day the race winner averaged an astonishing 55 km/h. It would be naïve to say that the Spanish were just motivated; the rumours were widespread in the peloton of how lackadaisical Spanish authorities were when it came to doping. I saw this for myself when I went for a doping test during the race. I sealed the sample bottle lid and, as I always used to do, turned it upside down to check that it wasn’t leaking. This time it was, so the doctor said, ‘Well, that’s null and void then. Off you go.’ He simply cancelled the test instead of making me wait there to piss again! This kind of attitude would have been practically criminal in any other country. So it was evident that there was a different attitude to doping in Spain, but I refused to let myself be fixated by this knowledge. Once you started worrying about who was taking what you only had two choices: to admit you’re beaten, or to dope yourself. I was racing the Vuelta clean and I was determined to do so because that was what the people who were helping to build my career expected of me, and that was all I cared about. I told myself that if riders wanted to dope they could always do it: I was sure Belgians took EPO, the French took EPO, and plenty of Americans were taking EPO too, and for lots of races other than the Vuelta. The way I saw it my problem wasn’t drugs or the Spanish attitudes to doping, my problem was just how fucking fast the riders in front of me were going.
• • •
At times in that first Vuelta it felt like the organisers had put every possible obstacle in my way. That year, on top of the shorter stages, the organisers were making some quite radical changes in order to boost viewing figures for their struggling race. For example, they moved the weekday stage starts to 2 p.m. so that the finish would be on at prime time in the evening, which was a big change in routine for those of us who were used to racing in the mornings in Italy and France. The Spanish were OK with it because they went to bed so late they could sleep in until the very last minute, but I awoke early in the morning, only to have to hang around killing time until we could go to the start. Then, on the weekend, the organisers started the stages at 9 a.m. so the television audience would get the best part of the race for peak viewing on Saturday afternoon. It was like racing in another time zone entirely.
The flat stages had been fast, but the mountain stages were brutal. We raced the Angliru for the first time that year, a gruelling 12 km climb in Asturias, with a 10 per cent average gradient and sections as steep as 20 or 25 per cent. It was so hard most of us considered it a gimmick that had no place in a bike race. Compact gears were yet to be adopted by road riders, so the lowest possible gear that was available was 39.27. The climb was so steep that if I rode sitting down I would lift my front wheel off the floor when I pulled back on the bars, and if I rode out of the saddle my back wheel would spin around hopelessly, costing me yet more energy. It was savage; Dave Millar was so appalled by it he ended up abandoning the race 150 m before the line. The press was delirious about it, but for many of us the Angliru was only the tip of the iceberg. I was dropped long before it on a climb that was just as hard, and although Dave’s outburst at the summit was dramatic (and the kind of thing only a rider with his talent could get away with) he was just doing what a lot of us wanted to do.
Besides the high speeds of the first week and the severity of the mountains the Vuelta also had a strange emptiness to it. The race quickly passed into the middle of the country, and it troubled me for some reason to discover that there was nothing there. Spain seemed to empty out in the middle. The Vuelta still had all the parts for a big bike race – a gigantic noisy start village adorned in advertising for household products, for example – but in the middle of the country it felt like nobody was watching. The towns appeared straight out of a John Wayne movie, with tumbleweed rolling about the place. We would set off and go charging down the road with all noise and drama going on and we’d pass through villages that were fast asleep. I would imagine people sat there in their houses in total silence sitting up after we’d passed and saying, ‘Did you hear that?’ before listening to the sound of the wind again, and going back to their silent business. The hotels were basic, and when we were crawling back to our temporary home after the race each night I knew exactly what I would be facing on my plate that evening: pollo. On eighteen out of the twenty-one days we were fed chicken with asparagus and half a boiled egg for dinner. It was exactly the same every day. Night after night I felt like weeping into my watery salad when the same awful food was dropped on to my table – at a time of day I’d normally expect to be asleep.
The harder things were off the bike, the more attention I had to pay in the race to make sure that I could survive. My desire to finish the race was so strong that on many days it even slowed me down. Even when my legs were strong enough for me to feel encouraged, my desire to make it all the way to Madrid kept me in defensive mode. I thought to myself, ‘Why would I try to get in a break today, when tomorrow I could be suffering again? It’s safer to stay where I am, and save something.’ Whether I liked it or not, my philosophy for that first Grand Tour became my byword for the rest of my career: a calculated distribution of resources. As I saw it, I had a certain amount of energy and that had to get me to Madrid; if every day I could save one tiny amount of energy that would be able to help me through the following day, it was a bonus. I was so tired, each night I would look at the route for the following stage in the race book and work out exactly where and how I could distribute my resources. On some stages I knew that I would have to hang on to get as close as possible to the finish; on others I knew that finding the gruppetto – the group of sprinters, non-climbers, as well as the weak and the exhausted who huddle together to try to battle through the climbs – as quickly as I could was my best option for survival. Throughout the race I started to feel like I was so focused on my own goal of survival that I wasn’t even really there. I was oblivious to everything else. I kept up to date with what was actually happening in the race by reading La Marca each morning, and often I was genuinely surprised to see the results. I was so far from being in the action that I had no idea what was going on in the actual race.
• • •
‘Go on, you’re doing well!’
‘Venga, venga!’
‘Keep going. You’re nearly there.’
I heard these encouragements from fans throughout the race each day, but they sounded like nothing more than pieties to me at that Vuelta. I wasn’t doing well and I knew it. Being so far out of the back of the race was new to me. Deep down it felt like humiliation. It made me harden my attitude to the fans by the side of the road; no matter their intention I couldn’t help but feel that their encouragement was more like rocks of pity being lumped in my face.
There is no manual for surviving a three-week tour, but I learnt a lot about survival in that race. Cycling was still a craft – if a brutish one at times – and in these desperate times I gleaned knowledge and wisdom from those around me. It was Davide Bramati who taught me the knack of letting go at just the right time. His theory was that if you are not riding for the general classification, then you didn’t need to finish in the bunch on the flat stages. When we were strung out at 65 km/h. on the run in, and I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, he would just ride alongside and say, ‘Charly, let go.’
Getting inside the time cut can be no easy feat, and making sure you got into the right grupetto wasn’t about what you knew, it was who you knew. Life in the grupetto was something completely new to me. The term many cyclists and fans use to describe the grupetto is the ‘laughing group’, which is a cruel irony, as no one there is laughing.
In each generation there are certain riders who are practically walking mathematicians when it comes to calculating time cuts and average speeds. The German sprinter Erik Zabel was one such rider. At the Vuelta Zabel knew at the start of the stage when they would be able to let go of the front bunch; he would plan it the night before with the race book. You could see each day which rider was preparing themselves for the grupetto, because they would swarm around Zabel all day, and as soon as he decided it was time to let go there would be a collective sigh of relief from what felt like half the bunch. There was a world of organisation that I had to learn to be good in the grupetto; I had to be sure that I didn’t end up in a group that was too small, or that was made up of riders who were unlikely to make the time cut. I had to know that I had taken on enough food and liquid before I was left behind by the team car for the day, and that crucially I had at least one friendly face that I really knew I could rely on for a little help, if I needed it. Not being a regular, I was well out of my depth in 2002.
Over the course of the race, though, I became quite expert at seeing who was smart in the group and who wasn’t, and it wasn’t only when I was getting dropped that I realised I could save myself any undue stress or effort. There were riders, for example, who would never get caught out pissing at the wrong time, and I worked out who they were. When I saw one of them stop for a piss I would know that it would be a good time to stop myself. Even the energy wasted by chasing to get back on to the bunch when they were riding at a hard tempo instead of a slightly easier one was crucial. There were other guys who it was worth keeping an eye on, too, who had an informed sense for what was coming: old dogs, so to speak. There wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky, but if I saw one of those riders with a rain jacket in his pocket I knew the smart thing to do was to go and get mine straight away. Experience in those long races is invaluable, and there was always a lot of sense behind what they were up to. In Spain we could find that we’d pass over one mountain and suddenly it would start pissing with rain, and the old pro would already be prepared with his rain jacket because he had known that in those particular mountains showers always come at a certain time in the afternoon.
The other crucial factor for survival in a three-week tour was the way you conduct yourself in the group. Being with the same group of riders day in and day out for three weeks makes for a prison-yard mentality: there was a process of building up favours around the place, making the right friends quickly through whatever few little things I could do. I stopped throwing away unwanted food from my musette, as it was much better to give it to someone else … someone who might be in a position to help me out on another day. In this particular prison yard I quickly found I was at a major advantage: I spoke French and Italian fluently and had picked up enough Spanish that I could talk to everyone in the group, and so I worked hard at being on good terms with everybody. It was essential to talk to as many people as possible. I didn’t ever really say a lot, just a hello or a quick word as I passed by in the bunch, but it was enough. The Vuelta is such a Spanish affair that if you go there and never talk to the Spanish riders then you never get the information that helps you plan the distribution of your resources. You need to know that the race might be going down a really dangerous road in three days’ time, or that the wind will be really strong in a certain region, or that one of the Spanish teams will be getting ready for their big attack later in the week. If the first week of the Vuelta had taught me a lesson in speed, the second and third weeks taught me how to hang on.
On the 13th stage I crossed the line at the very back of the peloton. The ride from Burgos to Santander had been a relatively quiet one in the bunch, and the group drifted in almost nine minutes behind the break, which had taken off after only the second kilometre of the stage. The stage might have been relaxed, but once I was over the line I made a rush towards the team bus. I was desperate for news of the stage result; our race radios had gone out of range when the break’s advantage had got too large and we hadn’t been able to listen in to the action in the front. We knew that Davide Bramati had been on the break and was one of six riders who had fought out the finish. I dropped my bike by the side of the bus and clambered up the steps. As soon as I arrived inside, though, I knew that things had not gone well. ‘Brama’ was sat with his head in his hands, quietly cursing, and no one else said a word. Even Elio Aggiano, a man who could barely go ten seconds without cracking an obscene joke, was silent. I quietly asked Dario Cioni what had happened; Bramati had made a huge effort to get across to the four leaders inside the last 500 m and had immediately attacked, only to be caught and beaten by Giovanni Lombardi of Mario Cipollini’s Aqua & Sapone team.
It was devastating. Aqua & Sapone had already taken three stages through Cipollini, and we had done nothing at all of note. Second place was so close, but it was worth nothing in cycling. With it being Mapei’s last ever Grand Tour we had wanted to do something, but once Óscar had abandoned we knew that our chances of doing anything were impossibly slim. Bramati, though, had refused to lie down and die. He’d talked incessantly about that stage, because he knew it was the best chance for a breakaway to succeed and for him to salvage something for the team – for all of us. Bramati hadn’t needed to try to win a stage; he already had a big contract with a new team for the next year, and so he could easily have just ridden around. He wasn’t even a race winner – he was a domestique and it wasn’t his job to win – but he was proud. We were the biggest team in the world; it was embarrassing for us to be seen to be going through the motions. It struck me then that Mapei had indeed been something special, and I’d been privileged to be part of a team that inspired riders to race for more than just their pay cheque.
The setting for the climactic final stage was unspeakably grand: 60,000 people awaited our arrival in the Bernabéu stadium, and yet to me it felt like an insult, rather than a celebration. As the final days of that Vuelta approached, it seemed that, through either simple exhaustion or a desire to move on, everybody was increasingly desperate to leave the sinking Mapei ship. Our sole highlight in the race was Bramati’s second place, but the rest of us had just been battling through, a state of affairs that hardly served to raise the morale amongst the riders or the staff. By the time we reached the last stage, a time trial that finished in the Bernabéu in Madrid, the team had completely fallen apart.
The team staff were so eager to get home that the team bus left early for Milan, leaving us to get changed in a crappy Fiat Doblò, and to warm up on the pavement like juniors. It should have been a big moment for me but I was absolutely finished, totally used up. I eventually finished the time trial 5 minutes down on the winner, Aitor González, and ended my first three-week stage race in a lowly 109th place out of the 132 finishers.
I flew home to Milan after the time trial, harbouring a huge feeling of anti-climax. I had built up the idea of doing a three-week tour so much in my mind that when I finally reached the end I didn’t really know what to do. I felt like the world should have stopped, or at least paused while I was there, but it hadn’t. What was more I had done nothing in the race but survive – there was no hero’s welcome for a good performance; it felt more like I’d come home from three weeks of doing the nightshift than anything special. At home, I caught up with the news I’d missed, and the bills that were waiting to be paid, and the rest of the time I just slept. Finishing your first Grand Tour is a rite of passage amongst professional cyclists. It is confirmation that you are a real professional. I was desperate for a deep sense of satisfaction somewhere inside me, but after being so daunted by the task itself, when I was finally home I found myself lying there in my bed in the middle of the afternoon like a grumpy teenager thinking, ‘Fuck me, how am I ever going to do that again?’
Getting home from that Vuelta was made doubly hard by the circumstances that now came careering into focus on my return to reality: the fact was that in finishing that 2002 Vuelta I had just completed one of the last races the great Mapei team would ever take part in.