This book begins at almost the very moment I met Charly Wegelius for the first time – the 1999 World Road Race Championships, in Verona.
I was fascinated by Charly when I first met him in Mike Taylor’s room of the Hotel Antico Termine. I knew that on that very day Charly had signed his first professional contract, and when I looked at him all I could do was wonder, ‘How did you do that?’
When I saw Charly in the flesh that day, I was seeing him the way that thousands of people have seen him from the roadside over the years: as an object of wonder, of athleticism and of professionalism on the racing bike. My mind at the time – like his once had been – was obsessed with the idea of being a professional cyclist. I aspired to being a racer so much and, through growing up in the UK in the eighties, I had been so far removed from that world that professional cyclists seemed like gods to me.
Here was a man who saw cycling the same way I did, who came from where I came from, and who somehow had made it all work.
He had crossed the divide from where I was to where I dreamed of being. Four years my senior and with his professional contract in his back pocket, Charly Wegelius seemed like a man who had achieved the near impossible.
I followed Charly’s footsteps into the professional peloton in my own ragged time, and over the years we became friends. Our paths diverged abruptly, however, when, after only three years in the peloton, I upped and walked away from the world of European professional cycling. I had found that it was nothing like I imagined it would be, and the shock of that realisation sent me reeling.
We remained friends, though, as Charly carried on with his increasingly successful racing career and I went off to learn how to write, and our paths crossed professionally again, but in a vastly different way: the opportunity eventually arose to write this story together. It was a story I knew well because, just like Kurt Vonnegut sitting next to Billy Pilgrim in the latrines in his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five, at many times during the events in this book I too was right there.
I was there in Verona when Charly was the toast of British Cycling, and witnessed the awkwardness when he arrived at the Worlds in Plouay a year later. I was quite often there staying in his spare room when he came home to his inhospitable apartment and empty fridge while he rode for De Nardi, and I was right there, too, swapping turns when he made the biggest mistake he would make in his racing career.
I knew exactly what it was to feel average in that peloton, and to try so hard to be a decent human being in amongst all of the cutthroat realities of the sport.
And yet, at the same time, I wasn’t entirely sure that his was the book that I wanted to write. The fact was, no matter how frankly he spoke of his life at the time we were both riders, I had never truly shaken the belief that Charly Wegelius had always had it all figured out.
It wasn’t until I first sat down with Charly over a couple of mid-morning Negronis in December 2011 to discuss the book that I saw just how precarious life as a cyclist had been for Charly, too. I knew then this was the book I wanted to write, for I realised his was a story about cycling that hadn’t been told.
This was a story that we both wanted the world to know – the story of the middle of the bunch, the story of the riders who go to work each day having sacrificed everything in their lives – girlfriends, jobs, wives and even their precious youth – to be there and to turn themselves inside out for little more than an average salary and the chance to do it all again the next day.
Charly lived the life he set out to – all the way to its conclusion, despite what it took to do it, and how many scars he picked up along the way. Charly lived a life the rest of us didn’t, or couldn’t, and getting him to pass on the story wasn’t always easy for either of us, but it needed doing.
The purpose of this book, I thought, was in part to dispel the glorious myth that the professional cyclist is anything more than a normal person – albeit one with some physical talent. But, ironically, once I had seen the facts of Charly’s life laid bare – the things that he dealt with to have the career that he did – I again marvelled at his achievement. It was a life that required the strength and determination of the most committed character to see it through. But it was also nothing like the life Charly had imagined either.
Through the experience that I’ve had of writing this book, and after knowing Charly for all these years, I have the answers as to why and how he got to where he did. But, even with all of that right in front of me, strewn through piles of papers, recorded interviews and the many hundreds of conversations we’ve had throughout the process of writing this book, there is a part of me that still thinks, ‘How did you do that?’
Tom Southam
December 2012