Back in June of 2002, during the Tour of Switzerland, those of us Mapei riders at the race had gathered together in a soulless, nondescript hotel room for a team meeting. It wasn’t unusual at Mapei for there to be a meeting called on the evening of a stage race like this, but, as staff started to file into the room after the riders, it struck me something was up. ‘This must be serious,’ I thought to myself. Serge Parsani stood up and called for quiet. The room turned silent and looked to him as he leant back slightly on the desk in the corner.
‘Mapei have announced that they will be stopping their sponsorship of the team at the end of the season. We are looking at various options, but it looks like the team will be disbanding.’
No one spoke a word. It was like a bomb had gone off. People were in utter shock. After a moment of quiet a sense of panic filled the room and at first whispers and then chatter and questions started up. In no time at all we were in a rowdy classroom that a teacher had lost control of. There were so many of us in the team, riders and staff alike, who like me had been fixated on keeping our jobs. All we had been thinking from the moment we arrived at Mapei was, ‘If I keep my bosses here happy, then everything will be OK.’
There were forty-two riders employed by the Mapei professional cycling team in 2002. We were the cream of the world’s élite. The announcement may have been made in June, but we knew straight away that the sheer size of Mapei’s investment, and the costs of the organisation, meant the likelihood of another sponsor stepping in was almost non-existent.
After the years of dominance there were a lot of people who were very satisfied when Mapei announced it was disbanding, and many of those people put it down to the fact we’d spent too much money. Mapei had been generous to its riders, sometimes overly so. It had led to all sorts of stories of excess: rumours circulated that our riders would apparently ring up the team travel agent to get them to buy entirely new plane tickets because they wanted to arrive home twenty minutes earlier from races. Despite the absurdity and the waste (I could well believe that these instances may have occurred) they weren’t the reason why the team stopped.
The truth was that over three years the team had unwound. In our history we had won 653 races, but it was always supposed to be about more than that; the sponsor and the management had big ideas and a real passion for the sport, they really wanted to change things and create a new generation of riders who raced free from doping. The team was perhaps too far ahead of its time, as well as ahead of the general public in their attitudes towards the sport. In that last season Mapei paid an advertising agency to do a poll amongst people in the street, asking which cycling team was doing the most to fight doping. Inexplicably, the majority answered Mercatone Uno, the team of disgraced former Tour de France winner Marco Pantani. Perhaps people thought that because the team had sanctioned Pantani they were fighting doping – but in reality that couldn’t have been further from the truth. These were minor things, but they began to add up for Mapei.
The same month, June 2002, the team was dealt a much more serious blow when Stefano Garzelli was expelled from the Giro for testing positive for an outdated steroid masking agent, Probenecid. The whole affair was rather odd, and as riders we received very little information other than what we picked up in the press. But whatever had gone on, with the negative publicity that followed, it seemed that Squinzi had just had enough: he decided it was time to pull the plug on sponsorship.
Over the ensuing weeks and months, following the definitive announcement that Mapei would be pulling out at the end of the year, there were countless meetings and discussions in hotel rooms, at races and in the back of the team bus, about what we were going to do. A cycling team of Mapei’s size closing its doors was going to create more than just a ripple in the riders market – more like a deluge of people looking for work. A lot of the team really wanted to stay together, so the organisation initially thought that it was doing the right thing by trying to find sponsors to take over the whole infrastructure and keep everyone together. In the long run this proved a waste of energy. By spending so much time trying to find a sponsor to take on a gigantic team full of expensive stars like Garzelli and Paolo Bettini, they didn’t seem to realise that for a fraction of the price they could have kept the wonder team of the younger riders. They would have had the crème de la crème of future cycling: Fabian Cancellara, Filippo Pozzato, Bernhard Eisel, Michael Rogers, Evgeni Petrov – the list of talent they had and the riders they had to let go was eye watering, with hindsight.
It dawned on me slowly that I was one of the riders in the worst position of all. I had worked so hard to be a useful part of the system at Mapei that I hadn’t realised that in the outside world people didn’t really understand the value of my performances. Mapei had made sure that I had raced clean, and in the climate of 2002 this was no small thing: I was managing to perform in the midst of a peloton full of riders chemically enhancing themselves. However, that was only going to be of value to team managers who saw things in a certain way, and at the time those types of managers were very thin on the ground. Prospective team managers wanted to see results, and that was it. I knew that if I went into a meeting and tried telling most managers that everything I had done had been done clean, at best that would have raised an eyebrow while they thought, ‘Well, what the fuck are you telling me for?’ At worst they could have seen me as ‘unprofessional’ for trying to race clean in the first place.
Typically, my salvation came by way of chance. Seeing an opportunity to pick up some quality riders at a bargain price, Gianluigi Stanga called Aldo Sassi that August and asked what crumbs were left over from the Mapei table. Sassi immediately called me into his office and said that Stanga was looking for young, strong riders. He explained that it wasn’t a big team, but it was well organised and got into all the top Italian races. Stanga had been in charge of high-profile teams for quite a few years, the last of which, Polti, had just lost its sponsor, so he ended up with Colpack – a much smaller sponsor who could only fund a second division team.
I went to the team service course in Bergamo just before I left for my first Vuelta and spoke to Stanga and the other general manager, Antonio Bevilacqua. Stanga’s appearance was not too dissimilar to any other 50-something Italian businessman, but he had an impressive, deep voice and an imposing personality. It wasn’t just his size that I made a note of; he was adept at using his whole demeanour to gain the upper hand. After he had welcomed me into his office above the garage that held the team’s bikes, I sat down opposite him. The office was classically Italian: immaculately clean, marble him, a sturdy wooden desk and a smattering of beautifully designed furniture. A signed and framed rainbow jersey that had once belonged to the double World Champion Gianni Bugno hung on the wall behind the desk.
Stanga boomed at me in his Bergamasco dialect, ‘We have signed Serhiy Honchar from Fassa Bortolo and we need to build a team around him for the Giro. You come highly recommended from Aldo. He tells me that you are a quality rider.’
It was strange that Stanga was speaking dialect in a business meeting, and despite the fact that I could speak it I kept my responses in classic Italian. I was sure that it was some sort of negotiation trick, so I stuck to what I knew.
‘That works well for me. Obviously I have had a few years at Mapei to learn the trade and I’ve been very happy in that role.’
‘Well, for now I think we can offer you one year. Our budget isn’t huge; this isn’t Mapei … We can offer you 30,000 Euro.’
Stanga was part businessman and part politician. €30,000 was just above the minimum salary he could legally pay me. He was direct about it and I was in no position to bargain. It was less than I had been earning at Mapei, and less even than I would have expected to be offered after three years at one of the best teams in the world, but I knew it was more than likely my only chance to be a professional cyclist next year. We made a verbal agreement that Stanga would draw up the contracts and I would sign when I returned from the upcoming Tour of Spain, and left it at that. After the brief meeting concluded and I left the office, Stanga’s voice echoed behind me: ‘Call me when you get back from the Vuelta.’
As I made my way down the stairs to the courtyard where my car was parked my relief was still underpinned by a deep hollow feeling. It had gone well, but I knew that leaving there without anything written on paper was far from an ideal situation to be in at that stage of the year. But I had no other choice.
• • •
Once the Vuelta had started, and I’d been delivered the letter of intent by Algeri, I didn’t have the mental energy to think or worry about anything else, and while I was engrossed in getting my arse through the race, Stanga, looking to increase his budget, signed a deal to merge with the existing De Nardi-Pasta Montegrappa team. The team changed from Colpack to De Nardi-Colpack, a subtle difference on the outside, but one that had catastrophic repercussions for me. With the merger, the team was obliged to take on a number of riders already contracted to the De Nardi team. There was suddenly no space for me, and I had no idea.
News of the merger wasn’t released immediately, so I was totally unaware of the situation when I called Stanga soon after I’d dragged myself home from Spain, and asked to arrange a meeting. When he answered, it suddenly seemed as though in three weeks he had forgotten all about me. Acting a little surprised, he enquired, ‘You don’t have another team, do you?’
I could not believe my ears; he said it so casually it was as if he assumed I would have reserve teams lined up! It was suddenly all off: my little letter I’d been carrying around Spain like a party membership was worthless. There were three weeks of the season left and I was high and dry.
I was crestfallen. This was not meant to be happening. My only option was to take another trip to Aldo Sassi’s office in the hope there was something he could do. Despite being so exhausted from the Vuelta – the effort of even getting dressed was physically distressing – I hopped into my car and headed to the Mapei centre. Aldo welcomed me into his office immediately; he must have known I was desperate. I explained the situation, and showed him the letter. Aldo went straight into action and called Johnny Carera (an agent and lawyer) to pull in a favour. There I was – the dependent employee – once again sat in an office listening to my fate as a cyclist being debated by others, as Aldo spoke down the receiver telling Carera, ‘Listen, Johnny, even though he’s not your rider you have to fix this.’
And just like Bernaudeau previously, I witnessed the influence of a respected name in the world of cycling. Johnny agreed to help me out, and the next day I drove to an anonymous McDonald’s in Cormano, near Milan, and met him. Over a coffee I showed him the letter. He looked at it briefly before folding it away in his jacket pocket, saying, ‘OK, I’ll take care of it.’
After three days of pacing around my apartment my phone eventually rang. It was Stanga.
‘So, when are you going to come and sign the contract?’
When I eventually put pen to paper a few days later, officially becoming part of the new De Nardi-Colpack team, I noticed Stanga had knocked €5,000 from my original price. It felt like it was his way of letting me know he called the shots. It was typical for a rider like me to get treated like that: even to a small team €5,000 was nothing, but to me it was a noteworthy amount of money – not enough that I would complain or go back to the lawyers, but enough to wind me, like the jab in a boxing match designed to let you know that your opponent is still there. It was enough for Stanga: he never again referred to the situation and he certainly never held a grudge. The fact that I went on to prove to be his best mountain domestique never seemed to provoke any irony in him either. That’s how it seemed to be in that world: ‘If I have to flick you, I will, without a second thought, but if things work out OK, then … no hard feelings.’ I took it on the chin, like I knew I would have to while my back was against the wall. I would accept these little defeats now, because when I first put pen to paper with Stanga for my reduced fee I promised myself that within two years I would be back at a bigger team. It was that or I would have to stop cycling completely. It was either up, or out.
By the time all this stress had been sorted out and the deal with Stanga was set in stone, it was already mid-October, and I returned wearied to the Mapei apartments to start getting my life on track for the following season. Stanga had offered me a flat in Bergamo when I signed my contract, but I didn’t want to go there because I was paranoid about going back to an amateur-type lifestyle again, with other riders constantly coming and going from the place. I wanted my own life. I didn’t have much to hold on to in Varese – a few friends that I had met through other Mapei riders – but it was all I had, and I wasn’t about to give that all up.
When I started to enquire about apartments in Varese that month, I had a shock. I realised that it wasn’t just in Mapei that I had been taken care of. From the day that my mother had dropped me off in France, my dedication and my obsessive approach to cycling had somehow kept me protected from a lot of things in the outside world. For a young athlete complete dedication is encouraged, while other people take it upon themselves to take care of the other details of life. I was only 24, and I had no idea how to deal with rental contracts and all the other kinds of bureaucracy that came along with being independent. It was a harsh awakening. It is something that can be a big issue for many young bike riders, as most are young men who are kept in a closeted world as they grow up, and when they arrive at a professional level they are suddenly exposed to all sorts of new and tricky situations. What made it harder for me was that Italy is so full of dishonest people that I had to learn to be wary. Instead of relaxing or taking a holiday my whole off-season was spent totally at sea, trying to work out the logistics of my newly independent life in a foreign country.
The only way to survive in Italy, it seemed, was to get by through personal connections. Knowing the right person can change everything, and in Stefano Zanini it turned out I knew exactly the right man. ‘Zaza’ had always been helpful in the past; he’d previously helped me find a car, and then came out with me when I went to buy it to make sure that I wasn’t getting ripped off. We got on well, and knowing my situation he’d quietly gone about making a few enquiries. A couple of quiet words from Zaza and suddenly the whole Italian system started moving in my favour. Sure enough, he found me an apartment in the very same unit that he lived in with his family in Olgiate Olona, just a few kilometres from Varese. A friend of Zaza’s had a spare apartment under his own and he didn’t mind the idea of renting because he could do with a bit of extra money. He didn’t, however, want to be stuck with someone who he couldn’t chuck out at a moment’s notice, so they gave me a very casual rental contract and explained to me that if someone in their family suddenly needed the apartment I would be out on my ear without a word of warning. I was getting desperate, and the apartment was furnished and ready to go, so I took it without hesitation. It was a bloody lifesaver.
• • •
After getting my own place, I trained hard through what was left of the grey Italian winter in order to prepare myself for the change I was about to undergo. I continued to work with Aldo Sassi, and my training remained much the same. The first gentle rides in December slowly built up to long steady rides through the mountains surrounding Varese, with our star-studded training group remaining tightly knit. The influence of Mapei was still evident in the number of pros who now lived in the area and I trained most days with a very select group: Mick Rogers, Daniele Nardello, Ivan Basso, Dario Andriotto, Andrea Peron, Zaza and others. It made me feel quite special to be a professional there, and after my difficulties getting into the team I felt relieved to be racing for Stanga.
I noticed a distinction between his team and the other smaller Italian teams of the time. Stanga was a serious team manager and, although he hadn’t found a big sponsor for that year, the structure of his team was still very professional, so I knew we’d be guaranteed places at the biggest Italian races like the Giro. Even though we didn’t have any really big stars signed, if Honchar could perform, all the riders in the team were decent enough to at least support him cohesively and give the impression that the team had a focus and some ambition, instead of just being a bunch of chancers wearing the same colour jersey. Furthermore, Stanga had a good image, and that was very important. It was the small details that could be easily missed: the jersey, for example, wasn’t splattered with various cousins’ businesses and hydraulics companies. This perhaps wasn’t a sign of how good things were to be with Stanga – rather, how badly other teams were run: some were more like second-hand car dealerships than professional sports teams.
In fact, although Italy was the best cycling nation in the world, Italian teams were still remarkably shakily run. Stanga, however, was well respected in UCI and, more impressively than anything else, he actually paid his riders pensions. This was a sure sign that he was above board, unlike many other team managers at the time, who were out to make money for themselves any way they could.
I had been shocked by this kind of thing at first when, in my first year as a pro, an amateur rider with an immaculately styled quiff approached me in our training bunch in Varese, and asked, ‘How much did you pay?’
‘I beg your pardon? Pay for what?’
‘To turn pro. The standard is about 40,000 Euros, but you must have paid a lot to get in to Mapei?’
It turned out it was quite well known in the Italian amateur ranks that you had to pay to turn professional. It was a simple arrangement: the rider brought a sponsor with them who put roughly €40,000 in to the team to cover the rider’s salary plus a bit more to sweeten the deal, and the sponsor’s name would appear on the side of the bus. (Sometimes the individual’s ‘sponsorship’ was the donation of the bus, as was the case at another high-profile Italian team of the time.) It was desperate madness, which proved how hard I had worked and how well I had done to get a contract that paid me, instead of the other way around.
So many teams were run by other kinds of dubious means. It was chaotic. It was quite standard procedure for riders to sign contracts for the minimum wage and then have to give half of it back to the team in a bag of cash. Italian cycling teams could also be good places to launder money – not difficult in the pretty much unregulated world of cycling finance, a world where teams were willing to cut as many corners as they could to operate on the minimum expenditure.
The Italian cycling world was like the Italian economy: the guys at the very top were OK, but life amongst the working class was shambolic, segregated and insecure. The knock-on effect of this kind of unscrupulous behaviour was that, as far as I could see, it actually encouraged the doping culture. It was the complete reverse of the philosophy that Mapei had been trying to employ: the pressures were so enormous, and the foundations so shaky, it seemed to make it a difficult decision for a lot of riders not to dope.
For me it was like getting thrown out of your mother’s womb into the big wide world where, suddenly, the fact that I had my pension paid was seen as a big bonus, not a given. It was madness. The only thing that kept my head above water was the fact that Stanga, despite often seeming to want to do things on the cheap, was a fair man. In my experience, if there was nothing in writing then he was likely to find a way to tighten the screw on the deal if he could – that was just business to him – but once it was on paper you could be guaranteed to receive every cent he said he would pay. If I’m honest, anything less would have broken me.
• • •
If Mapei had been DHL, De Nardi was the Post Office. Technically De Nardi did everything right – everything was functional, everything was working – but it was trimmed down to the absolute bare minimum with no concession to anything bar keeping the costs down.
Even our very first training camp was something of a cost-cutting exercise: the team gathered together to train in early January like everyone else, but instead of flying somewhere warm (and expensive) we all had to hop in our own cars and drive down to Cesenatico, near Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. Rimini is the workingman’s holiday destination in Italy, and for one month of the year, in August, when the factories close down, the place is heaving with nightclub-goers and sun-worshippers trying to get the most out of their holiday. In winter the place was completely deserted, and had that awful eerie sadness of an out-of-season holiday town. Almost everywhere was closed at that time of year, but Stanga had managed to convince one of the many privately run hotels to open its doors just for us (at a discounted rate, of course). The hotel and location served its purpose of allowing us to train together for two weeks, but as with everything in my new team it couldn’t help but seem just a little bit crap, after Mapei.
I was sharing with Serhiy Honchar, our soft-spoken Ukrainian team leader. Honchar was a different kind of leader to what I was used to at Mapei. He never gave any orders, or felt the need to show he was a leader in any way other than on the bike, and even, on the bike his philosophy seemed to be: ‘Look, I am quite strong, and if you can help me we might do well.’ On the first day, as we’d walked into the hotel room, I had immediately gone for the smaller fold-out bed as he was the senior rider – but to my amazement he asked if I was sure that I wanted that bed because he didn’t care where he slept. Given that the previous year Andrea Tafi had tried ordering me to handwash his shorts for him after a stage of the Vuelta Burgos, I was quite content to have a leader with a quieter approach. I did, however, start to wish that I hadn’t so readily accepted the fold-out as it clearly wasn’t meant to be there and was positioned on an indoor balcony that stuck out of the front of the building. I slept surrounded by windows on three sides, with no curtains. The wind blew so strongly in the night that I awoke several times and looked at the ceiling light swaying around above my head and thought I must be on a boat. But the biggest problem was that the kit we were training in simply wouldn’t dry, and there wasn’t enough of it. There was a tumble dryer in the team truck, but it kept breaking down, so each night our washing was handed back to us wet. We would hang the kit all over the room, but it was no use. We were supposed to be wearing the correct kit each day, but we’d only been given one thermal jacket each at this point, and while De Nardi had dutifully provided us with kit and someone to wash it, getting it dry was clearly down to us.
After three years at Mapei it was a shock to find myself in this situation. There were so many things at Mapei that, even though I wasn’t a spoilt idiot, I took for granted. In many ways Mapei was what Team Sky are in 2013; that bit more thought and effort goes into the team, which puts it far ahead of its contemporaries. It was a really different environment for me and I found that it wasn’t only my ‘upbringing’ in my previous team that separated me from my new teammates.
While Honchar was off getting a massage on one of the long afternoons during the camp, one of my new teammates, a talented young rider by the name of Matteo Carrara, came swaggering into my room. Carrara was from Bergamo and he’d already been with Colpack for two years. Being new myself I welcomed him in for a chat, as I knew he would be a good yardstick by which to measure the general attitude of the rest of the team riders.
He walked in and sat on Honchar’s bed and started talking to me, until suddenly he caught sight of himself in the mirror. To my amazement he broke off the conversation he’d started and jumped up to look at his stomach in the mirror. Impressed by what he saw as he pinched the skin, he said to me, ‘See how skinny I am, Charly? You know the secret to how I get skinny?’
I had a feeling he was going to tell me regardless of my response. ‘Er, no.’
‘When I go home between races in the season, I don’t eat food.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. I don’t eat. No food at all. Nothing. I drink water and that’s it. I get so ripped in the season, you should see me: I fly on the climbs.’
As the conversation continued along the same lines, with Matteo telling me things that were most likely exaggerated or simply of no interest to me whatsoever, about himself, the girls he’d slept with, the cars he’d driven and the haircuts he’d had, my heart sank.
Mapei had been a genuinely international team: there were riders from Australia, America and Russia as well as half a dozen different European nations. Interacting in that kind of multicultural environment was in itself interesting, but at Colpack the only non-Italians were a few Eastern Europeans who had come through the Italian amateur system anyway – and me, the outsider, changing my character to fit in once again. As Matteo babbled on about himself, I realised that De Nardi just wasn’t the sort of environment where any of my colleagues were ever going to think, ‘Fuck me, this guy is English. This could be an interesting cultural experience,’ or ask me, ‘What’s it like in England?’ Instead they would be looking at me and thinking, ‘Cazzo! He doesn’t put enough gel in his hair.’ They weren’t bad kids, but they were the most basic bum-bag wearing, mobile-phone wielding Italian bike riders. They were the equivalent of third division footballers in the UK. They didn’t really have the kind of money to be flash, but they tried hard at it. One of them had some sort of tiny 1.2 litre hairdresser’s car in which he had installed a sound system so loud he could be heard 10 kilometres away. When he arrived at training camp in it the whole team had run out excitedly to look at it – and for the rest of the camp they talked endlessly about that bloody car. One of them ended up in prison a few years later for credit-card fraud. He was an OK guy – they all were – but they were the simplest kind of Italian riders.
In a team like De Nardi there was only one rider who was earning good money, and that was Honchar. The rest of the riders were just like me: expendable bodies, paid the bare minimum and expected to do the best we could with that. I was just different to the rest of them in so many ways; I wasn’t overly concerned with my appearance, I regarded a good haircut to be one that required the minimum amount of attention – not a work of art that made you look like a peacock and took hours of preparation each morning. I had a crappy mobile phone that was two years out of date, and I drove a sensible car that I chose because of how economical it was. I couldn’t dream of living beyond my means, nor for that matter would I consider getting a giant tattoo of the Colosseum on my calf (as one of my teammates did). The rest of the team probably regarded me as a bloody idiot to start with, but I knew that I had to fit in. I worked hard on the bike, but I went further than that. I laughed at all the dumb jokes that flew around, and acted interested in people’s exaggerated tales of their prowess. I even went to the hairdresser’s and sat there for hours making conversation with housewives with bits of fucking tinfoil in my hair to get highlights put in. It was an attitude that would, throughout the year, gain me a reputation for being a good rider, but it made me feel really shitty about myself. I was really selling myself, and I hated myself for it. People I knew started saying to me, ‘So, you’re practically Italian now!’ and I despised that. I hated it, but it felt it was an inescapable part of being a bike rider. British riders had no credibility at that time, and I wasn’t a good enough rider to be allowed to be weird. You have to remember I was just a bumpkin to them, and if I didn’t adopt their ways it could all be over. I had to eat shit. I had to prove myself to get to the Giro more than any other Italian rider would and I couldn’t put a foot wrong; if the Italian riders were expendable, then so was I – a thousand times more so.
Throughout the year, I suffered. Mapei was an Italian team, but it was also very progressive in its outlook. De Nardi, however, were a basic Italian team who wanted to stick to their very simple traditional methods of getting their riders to go faster. Italians were crazy about being light, and they believed the only way to do it was to not eat. There was little room for real science, no room for accommodating the possibility of people having a metabolism that demanded more fuel than others. The team philosophy was simple: everyone eats as little as possible.
The real issue for me was that Italian riders were used to being treated like children to the point that they expected to be told when to stop eating. In another environment I could have got away with quietly eating a bit more, but at De Nardi (and many other teams) when we ate there would always be a masseur standing at the head of the table, watching everything, ready to go and tell the directeur sportif if anyone ate the wrong thing or, even worse, ate too much.
I am quite sure I underperformed a lot of my career because I was living to these standards, and I had a physical make-up that needed so much more fuel. It got to a dangerous level, where even on a rest day in a major stage race I would be starving, but I would just be given water or a 17g energy bar and told not to eat too much. Never mind EPO, I could have gone much, much faster if I was just fed properly.
The feeling of being increasingly enveloped in Italy was exacerbated in that first year by our race programme: De Nardi was one of a number of Italian teams that raced almost exclusively in Italy. In Italy there existed a self-sustaining cycling world, mainly because the Italian media don’t report on races outside of Italy; or at least they didn’t bother to back then. But, that said, the Italian cycling calendar didn’t lack anything; there was a logical programme that went through the whole season. We started with all the early season races – Giro di Liguria, Trofeo Laigueglia, Giro di Lucca – and went on to the Settimana Coppie Bartali before the final Giro warm-up began at Settimana Bergamasca and the Giro del Trentino.
There was so much racing, even just in the build-up to the season’s centrepiece, the Giro d’Italia, that despite the names of the races being largely unknown in the rest of Europe, we raced extremely hard consistently through the year. It made me a better rider, but it made my average salary and desperate existence even harder to swallow.
• • •
As I swung the gate open and dragged my bike and kit bag into the courtyard, I saw the window of Zaza’s apartment open and the familiar face of Rossana smiling at me. Using the affectionate nickname that the family had given to me, she shouted down: ‘Ben tornato, Bagai. Everything went OK with the race?’
‘Hello. Thanks, Rossana. It was OK.’
‘Are you hungry? Throw your things in and come up for some dinner. We’ll wait for you.’
I was relieved that they were in. Coming back from a race was a challenge for me, especially after a stage race, but this time after yet another build-up race for that year’s Giro d’Italia I felt that things were getting tough living on my own, and they were about to get a lot tougher.
When I finally walked through the front door of my apartment after packing my bike away in the garage, my situation hit me like a cartoon anvil. The loose ends that were my life had been frozen there in time. The apartment was exactly how I had left it: nothing had moved, my bed sheets were still open and crumpled where I’d left them in a hurry to head off to the start of the race. Until that moment I had seen the apartment as my salvation, a place where I could hide between races. Now, suddenly, I noticed what a strange place it was: the antique furniture was completely mismatched with the modern interior; the only evidence of my existence was a few unframed photographs stuffed into the doors of the wall cabinet. Nothing about the space was right: it wasn’t a family home, it wasn’t a bachelor pad, it wasn’t even the amateur accommodation I’d lived in in France – it was just nothing. I sat alone at the kitchen table and wept the tears of a lonely, exhausted young man. I had spent all of the last week waiting for the race to be over and to get home, only to find I had no home. I was just a bike rider in transit, waiting for the next race.
I knew that Zaza and his wife Rossana were upstairs with their two sons, Marco and Lucca, patiently waiting for me, as they often were. It would have been generous enough of them to have me up for dinner once or twice a week, but they had me up there eating with them every single day. But what if for once they had been out with friends? I had been worried all the way home that these two adults and their children might not have been home that night, and that I would have been left to fend for myself – even worse, left alone. I had become utterly reliant on their generosity. They had practically adopted me. I became known as Bagai, an affectionate term for ‘kid’ in the local dialect. They were so good to me, but that same warm-hearted generosity that was saving my existence was also, in a profound way, highlighting my loneliness, and made me even sadder. I was a grown man, or so I thought, but I felt like a sad case, adopted by kind strangers. I was 25 years old and I was sat each night having dinner with two grown-ups and their family, and I felt like their third, awkward child.
The thing that really pulled at my heartstrings as I sat there and delayed my inevitable trip upstairs to eat the food that Zaza had paid for was the thought that not all riders lived this way. Most of the Europeans I had been racing with all week were returning to their home towns and the welcoming bosom of what I imagined to be an adoring family. The following day would be even worse. The day after returning from a race is when you are at your most tired; it is the day when you can really benefit from doing absolutely nothing – slowing right down, having a soak in the bath, emptying your mind and filling your legs with good food. For me, these days were spent trying to turn the capsized ship of my life back on to an even keel, something made all the more difficult by my imaginings of the warm and cosy families that others were being welcomed home to. Stefano and Rossana were family to me, but I still felt that they were too kind to risk offending by trying to explain how I felt. I didn’t want them to feel that they were in any way inhospitable, but the truth was I hated myself for demanding so much of them, and I had no one to tell.
Many times I felt on the edge of having an irrational outburst. At the supermarket on a Monday morning, for instance. Often there would be no food when I arrived home, so I would have to drive to the shops still in massive calorie deficit from the previous day’s superhuman race effort, and feeling like my body was trying to eat itself from the inside out. Once I was there I would desperately try to get enough stuff from the shelves to have a decent breakfast, but it was exactly the same each time: my muddled mind, clouded by the lack of blood sugar, couldn’t think straight. Instead of getting in and out quickly and efficiently I would find myself wandering up and down the aisles, bumping clumsily into other shoppers, forgetting what I wanted, forgetting what I was even doing there. I often felt like just falling to my knees, right there in the aisle, and screaming for help.
I dealt with it because I had to, but getting back from a race and sitting in my mismatched and desolate flat felt like the moment the bubble burst. The protection of the Mapei years, and the excitement at being a professional cyclist, were stripped away, and my new existence forced me to realise that, after seven years dedicated to nothing but racing, it was time that I found a life outside of cycling, and outside of the family that I had come to rely on. I had my contract and I was racing at the level I had dreamed of, but the horrible thought was lurking: ‘Now what?’ I was yet to become a man; I was still just a kid. At Mapei it had been all too easy to avoid reality; we were removed from social interaction and there had always been something to be busy with. At De Nardi I had a mere existence and nothing more. I looked around at my teammates and realised that cyclists seemed to have two ways of dealing with the reality that they have sacrificed most of their youth to do something that is, ultimately, just a job: they either started making babies at a furious rate, or spent their time going from training camp to training camp, avoiding reality at altitude in some out-of-season skiing hotel. I had lived enough of my life as an assassin, and finally, as a reaction against it, I dived into the bachelor life. From then on I knew I had to I busy myself with being in the flat as little as possible.
I still couldn’t fully let go, though. I stayed in Italy year round because I still felt that by going ‘home’ and back to England I was inviting a sort of weakness in. It was a really easy trip to go to the UK and see my family, but I wouldn’t consider the idea, because that would have been like admitting defeat. Instead I allowed myself a social life, and Italy became a new world. I discovered that I could go out and have a few beers and still go and do my job at the weekend. I let real life into my life and saw for the first time since I was 17 that I could be a bit more ‘normal’ than just obsessing about getting an extra 3 per cent out of my performance.
Slowly, I’d started letting the air out of the dreams I had grown up chasing with such fervour. I told myself I didn’t care that much about anything; it wasn’t who I wanted to be. It was easier than saying, ‘This is so fucking hard and it makes me want to cry.’ The ruthless person I’d been as an amateur, and the eager bike rider that I’d been at Mapei, was, through a few beers at the weekend, modified a little. Inch by inch, I worked towards regaining some of the balance I had completely abandoned for seven years, spurred by the haunting emptiness I had felt for those few months at my desolate flat. It may have been a massive avoidance exercise, but for a time it was a great feeling.
• • •
And so it was that De Nardi became the place where I let go of my dreams. It was the Post Office and I developed a Post Office mentality. They paid me minimum wage, and they treated me in endless little ways that I never imagined performance athletes would be treated. They dressed us in tracksuits that made us look like the 1972 Scottish football team, and used something that smelt like lighter fluid to clean our legs after races, but they were never dishonest, which was a relative rarety in Italy. And they paid my pension. So I did what they asked of me, but not more. They didn’t give me anything extra and I didn’t give them anything extra. That desire to make the superhuman efforts – that which had left me clinging to the barriers short of the finish line when racing for Mapei – was completely absent at De Nardi. I’d started stamping in and stamping out. It was a dangerous attitude to have, and if I didn’t do something about it I could spend the rest of my career earning the minimum wage for my efforts.