Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Page 15

  There was a danger to the trio’s on-the-road advantage, though. It came from another protest group using the profile of the Tour to advance their cause. This time, the road was strewn with tree branches and homemade banners, the handiwork of ecologists registering their opposition to a planned waste dump. When Tebaldi, Perini and Arnaud reached the impasse, 16 miles from home, they were forced to pick a delicate path through the dumped foliage before heading back on their way towards Montpellier. Not that the demonstration was entirely peaceful and benign; the French TV host Jacques Chancel had his nose broken when tangling with protesters.

  It was, though, rather fortunate for the rest of the field that the three riders had such an advantage. The margin of their lead allowed the police time to clear away both the branches and the protesters before the peloton, now escorted by half a dozen police motorbikes, surged through. (In fact, the lead car at the front of the race now carries chainsaws in order to swiftly undermine any tree-based blockade.)

  The ecologists’ protest was simply the latest in a series of demonstrations that had affected the Tour that decade. The increased globalisation of the event, with even more eyes watching on television from Brisbane to Bogotá, offered a very public platform on which protesters could air their grievances. The most serious of these protests came in 1982 on the team time trial near the France-Belgium border. When they reached the town of Denain after 20 or so miles, the first team on the road, the Wickes-Splendor squad, encountered the various trucks and vans of the publicity caravan blocking the road. The advance party, usually entertaining and distracting the roadside spectators ahead of the race itself, could progress no further. There was a blockade constructed by a few hundred local steelworkers, protesting at the planned closure of Denain steelworks. The plans had been announced just the day before, plans that included the loss of more than 1,100 jobs.

  Police outriders turned back to warn the teams behind Wickes-Splendor on the road. Very soon, the organisers realised that, such was the scale of the protest, that day’s racing would have to be abandoned. As the writer Geoffrey Nicholson reported: ‘Some riders reacted with disbelief and annoyance, and a few of those already feeling the strain with evident relief’. It was the first time, in 80 years of rich Tour history, that a stage had been cancelled after it had begun.

  In 1987, what might have been an even more serious protest was avoided when two members of the Basque paramilitary group Iparretarrak were arrested. Unlike the more familiar Basque separatists ETA, Iparretarrak focused their activities on the French side of the border and police believed the race to have been targeted as the Pyrenees prepared for its arrival.

  In 1990, another protest was sidestepped by the race. On the third stage between Poitiers and Nantes, reports were coming in of several felled trees lying by the roadside at one particular location. A number of sheep farmers were, apparently, also in the immediate area, causing race director Jean-Marie Leblanc to halt the race around seven miles shy of the trouble spot. Maps were consulted and an impromptu diversion decided upon. The farmers, who had already held a demonstration on the first stage, had been thwarted. Legend has it that a local moped-riding teenager led the peloton through the country lanes and back onto the official route.

  The Tour wasn’t the only French race to be affected by protests. The most famous example of this was the fifth stage of the 1984 edition of Paris-Nice. Shipyard workers from nearby La Ciotat were blocking the route, but they didn’t get a sympathetic ear from one Bernard Hinault, at that point leading a break of around 20 riders as he sought to take Robert Millar’s lead in the race. When The Badger saw the demonstration spread out across the road, he wasn’t exactly diligent in applying his brakes, crashing into the blockade. Then the fists started flying, Hinault wading in and striking the nearest protester before the gendarmes intervened. That evening’s news on French TV opened rather pointedly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening. A lively stage in the Paris-Nice race. We were waiting for sport and got a boxing match.’

  Although protests could offer a profitable photo opportunity for a Tour photographer, Graham Watson didn’t welcome them. ’1989 had its fair share of demonstrations, and one or two turned ugly once the protesters saw the TV cameras on them and the gendarmes drawing their coshes. Only in my youngest days did I actually take images of such events. I quickly realised the best way to deal with such people is to not take pictures, to not give them any publicity, no matter what their grievance is. Perhaps that’s the purist in me.

  ‘I suppose one of the attractions of the Tour is that it is a free show on free roads, and as such is exposed to all kinds of attention. The cyclists have a fairly laid-back approach to such strikes: on some occasions it allowed them to rest longer, or to find an excuse to pedal more slowly towards the finish.

  ‘It’s said that, at a strike in one Tour of that period, farmers blocked the roads with their tractors, forcing the race to grind to a halt during an important Alpine stage. What they didn’t know was that Sean Kelly was a farmer’s son who knew how to turn an engine on and then open the muck-spreader, scattering both strikers and cyclists all over the road. The strike soon dispersed and the peloton moved off.

  ‘Basically, you can stop a bike race as long as it’s not an important stage – the cyclists think it’s fun. But don’t block a race on an important stage or else…’

  With the three leading riders in 1989 having safely negotiated the ecologists’ demonstration, the small matter of who was to take the stage win could now be considered. But, little more than a mile later, there were only two contenders left. Arnaud, who had earlier punctured and been forced to catch the other two up, found his bad luck continuing. He took a bend without due care and attention, and ended up in a ditch.

  It wasn’t the last crash of the day. The pace of the peloton had been steadily increasing, thanks to – for a second successive day – the aggressive riding of Super U’s Christophe Lavainne. Fignon had commanded him to up the speed, not because the leaders on the road represented any kind of threat overall; for all three, any GC aspirations were a distant dream. Instead, Fignon simply wanted to stretch his main rivals, those riders glued to his back wheel.

  But with the pace came increased danger. In the village of Clermont-l’Hérault, 30 or so miles from the stage finish in Montpellier, a huge crash caused carnage in the peloton, with around 30 riders hitting the floor. There were some high-profile casualties among them. Gert-Jan Theunisse, who had started the race with bruised ribs after falling in the Tour of Switzerland, looked the most dramatic, his forehead streaked with red stripes of blood and which required stitching. His King of the Mountains rival Robert Millar also came down, but the pair eventually remounted and rejoined the race; Millar, though, was seen by a specialist chiropractor that evening, one who flew in from Paris to assess his neck. A couple of team leaders were affected, too. Carrera’s Urs Zimmermann suffered a suspected broken wrist, while Z-Peugeot’s Éric Boyer had to have a plate fitted to protect an injured hand.

  Up at the front, though, one man looked worth backing. Valerio Tebaldi had previous. The winner of a stage into Reims the previous year, where he also shared a lengthy break with one other rider, he certainly knew what was needed to secure victory. Perini, conversely, had little experience of the sharp end of a stage race and was indeed pipped to the win by his tall, dark compatriot.

  Arnaud, after making his acquaintance with that ditch, rode alone for the last 15 or so miles and took a comfortable third place. But the day belonged to Tebaldi, whose 21-minute win was the third biggest margin of victory over the main bunch in Tour history. Despite this, he was still almost 48 minutes adrift of Fignon and the elite riders.

  Tomorrow, he would be back in the anonymity of the bunch. The nowhere man. But after several hours in front of the cameras, a few more people might just recognise Number 175 from now on.

  Stage 12

  1. Valerio Tebaldi (Chateau d’Ax/Italy) 5:40:54

  2. Giancarlo Perini (C
arrera/Italy) same time

  3. Dominique Arnaud (Reynolds/France) +2’09”

  4. Thomas Wegmüller (Domex/Switzerland) +21’24”

  5. Jan Goessens (Domex/Belgium) +21’40”

  General classification

  1. Laurent Fignon (Super U/France) 55:52:12

  2. Greg LeMond (ADR/USA) +7”

  3. Charly Mottet (RMO/France) +57”

  4. Pedro Delgado (Reynolds/Spain) +2’53”

  5. Andy Hampsten (7-Eleven/USA) +5’18”

  ELEVEN

  NATIONAL SERVICE

  ‘We could just see them there, hanging out in front’ – Sean Kelly

  14 July

  Stage 13, Montpellier – Marseille, 110 miles

  IT’S SOMETHING OF a myth, albeit one that seems to be both widely spread and widely held, that French riders pull out the stops whenever a Tour stage falls on Bastille Day. The common suggestion is that this is a chance to boost national pride, to unite the country, an opportunity enthusiastically grasped by home riders. The record books tell otherwise. By 1989, no Frenchman had claimed a stage win on 14 July for years. The last time had been almost a decade earlier when, in 1980, Mariano Martinez took victory at Morzine. Furthermore, since 1989, there have been only five French winners on Bastille Day. And none since 2005. In that time, British riders have claimed three victories on that supposedly red-letter date.

  The fourteenth day of July 1989, however – exactly 200 years since the revolutionaries stormed the Bastille and kick-started the downfall of the French monarchy – would see a home victory. It was surely preordained, a foregone conclusion, written in the stars. But which French rider would claim it?

  The stage left Montpellier at midday, when the temperatures were already steaming. The riders were in no hurry, happy to clown about when Thierry Marie produced a trumpet and serenaded the peloton with a few blasts. The slow early miles then became even slower when yet another protest, this time in the small town of Lunel, delayed the peloton by three minutes. Imbued with the public-holiday spirit, the riders didn’t seem to mind.

  But, after a couple of hours and 60-odd miles of benign, relatively uncommitted riding, the race suddenly exploded in the lunchtime heat. The PDM team, against the wishes of many of their number, had been commanded by their bosses to think the unthinkable and do the undoable. They had instructed their charges to commit the cardinal sin of the peloton: to launch an attack as the field took on supplies at a feed station. A reluctant Sean Kelly led the charge, grabbing his feed bag at full tilt rather than the customary half-pace.

  ‘This wasn’t something that went down well in the peloton,’ he remembers. ‘We did attack, but the wind conditions weren’t what we were expecting. It wasn’t a side-wind; it was more of a headwind. We rode for a bit, but then realised it wasn’t doing anything, so we knocked off our effort.’ Kelly then received both barrels from Fignon, ‘an awful bollocking’ in which the bespectacled one utilised the full gamut of vernacular at his disposal. The Irishman absorbed the rant, in return offering scant justification as he knew he deserved it.

  PDM’s attack, though, had had a strong effect, causing a fissure in the peloton. The field was split in two, with ten riders in the top 20 of the GC stranded in the second group, among them Robert Millar. But then almost immediately came a second move, one that splintered the race even more – and it came from the unlikeliest of sources.

  It’s very rare that the incumbent of the yellow jersey chooses to attack on a flat, relatively straight stage. But that’s exactly what Fignon, in the company of third-placed Charly Mottet, did. To the astonishment of riders, commentators and spectators, the pair flew off the front of this first group. Just what was Fignon thinking? That he could launch and sustain an attack more than 40 miles from the finish that would claim the stage victory? That he could genuinely take some significant time out of his main challengers? That he wouldn’t be weakened by such an effort and thus vulnerable to a counterattack from any number of his rivals? It looked for all the world, on this searingly hot day, that the yellow jersey was committing hari-kari.

  ‘The reason that Fignon went on the attack,’ explains Kelly, ‘was because he was really pissed off about us guys in PDM. We had broken the code, the rules. Fignon, when he got upset, could get very, very upset.’ Did he feel that he was the big cheese of the race, the person who had the power to mete out such punishment? ‘He probably did, but that was a stage where he had a claim to do that. At the end of the day, and into the following day, we weren’t too popular with quite a number of the riders. I said, “Look, that was the team tactics. That was the way it was called on the morning of the stage.” Team orders. That was the only excuse I could come up with.’

  Mottet was surprised, and a little reluctant, to be keeping the attack going. ‘I wasn’t keen to carry on, but Laurent urged me to. Of course we worked together, even though we were a long way from the finish. There was some wind when we went and Laurent was keen to attack everywhere and anywhere. It was a chance to take some time off Delgado and LeMond, so worth a go. It had nothing to do with Bastille Day.’

  Pedro Delgado agrees that the attack was more to do with securing the leadership of the overall race rather than a tilt at glory based on whatever the date was on the calendar. ‘You can control your rival,’ he explains of such a tactic. ‘You don’t want to stay in his pocket.’

  It wasn’t as if Mottet and Fignon were moving out of sight of those behind them. For sun-kissed mile after sun-kissed mile, the gap remained around 20 seconds. Infuriating for the chasers. It was like they were being taunted. And all they could do was match the pair’s pace. Damage limitation.

  ‘The French television motorbike also played his card,’ claims Delgado. ‘Fignon and Mottet took its slipstream. It was only a little bit, but enough to go ahead. On a bike, you can go 60 or 61kph with a tailwind. Behind a motorbike, you can maybe go 63kph. Fignon made a difference of 20 seconds, but we couldn’t catch him because our speeds were very similar. Sometimes the bike was going in front of Fignon and we were very angry about it. And we were nervous because we couldn’t do anything about it. Only push, push, push.

  ‘But you need to stay calm. Maybe you’ll catch him, maybe you won’t. But you want to lose as little time as possible. You have to maintain your speed. If you try to catch him straightaway, you might lose your strength and then lose two or three minutes.’

  Fignon and Mottet – team-mates at Super U the season before – made an excellent tandem. They relayed each other perfectly, barrelling along the flat, melting Côte d’Azur roads. Whether it was still-simmering anger or simply the heat, Fignon appeared rather red in the face, squinting through those scholarly spectacles into the sun. Mottet, on the other hand, looked a little more at ease; his cap and ever-present shades ensured he rode with comfort.

  Still tantalisingly just out of reach of the chasing group, the duo had been out in front nearly 30 miles. Fignon, red-faced or not, was still ridiculously strong, completely in his element. ‘That was the kind of racing he liked,’ says his then team-mate Bjarne Riis. And it’s the kind of racing I like. And it’s the kind of racing the public likes. They want to see that. Fignon had good legs, he was confident and he was there. If you’re a real racer, you look for opportunities. Maybe it’s not planned, but it just occurs and you take it and go. I think that is what happened there. And when you do stuff like that, it’s always a message.’

  The message wasn’t being received very warmly within the chase group. They were being powered along by fury as much as anything. ‘We could just see them there,’ says Kelly, ‘hanging out in front. It was so difficult to close Fignon and Mottet down that it got heated in the front of the peloton.’

  The main heat seemed to be within Kelly’s PDM team. ‘There was a bit of ‘discussion’ between Alcalá and Theunisse,’ he confirms. ‘One said to the other that he wasn’t doing enough, that he wasn’t putting in 100% effort. I remember I had to calm the situation down.’ In the
absence of a single team leader whom everyone had to obey, elder statesman Kelly was forced to play peacemaker. Alcalá was aggrieved by Theunisse’s accusation that his turns on the front of the pack weren’t of a sufficient intensity. He, in fact, felt that it was the Dutchman who wasn’t pulling his weight. ‘I didn’t understand. I said to him, “You must ride like everyone.”’ The absence of a hierarchy within the PDM riders – a curious arrangement to many observers before the race – had led to a little local difficulty. Alcalá shakes his head. ‘Many bosses and no warriors. You need warriors to be working 100 per cent. We had warriors in that team, but less than in others. Too many chiefs…’

  Fignon and Mottet were eventually caught shortly after the modest climb of the Côte de Rove, following an hour of furious effort from LeMond, his first lieutenant/room-mate Johan Lammerts, Delgado, Hampsten and (at least some of) the PDM boys. There had been a shared sense of duty; they’d ridden as if on some kind of multi-team time trial. As LeMond pulled level with Fignon, there was a glance across that seemed to ask ‘What the hell was that all about?’. The Frenchman would have loved every second of the break, knowing that he was stretching his bitter rival both physically and mentally.

  LeMond then put an arm around Theunisse, presumably thanking him for the effort in bridging the gap to the front two. Perhaps this was a deliberate psychological counter-punch. Fignon was always a little suspicious that PDM had an unwritten pact with LeMond, a rider of theirs, of course, until just seven months previously. Seeing a fraternal arm round a PDM rider’s shoulders would have firmed up those suspicions in Fignon’s head, tightening the paranoia. (For the record, both the Kelly and LeMond camps pour a vatful of scorn over the notion that LeMond and PDM were in any kind of cahoots.)