Three Weeks, Eight Seconds Read online

  Naquet-Radiguet was by no means – and by his own admission – a man of cycling. What he was, though, was a salesman. Not a used car fast talker or an insurance policy hustler, but a man whose trade was concepts. He thought big. With an MBA from Harvard tucked under his arm, plus experience on the top floor of various food corporations (most notably cognac producers Martell), Naquet-Radiguet was something of a surprise choice for the role when his appointment was announced in May 1987. ‘No one wanted to direct the Tour,’ he later told the journalist Daniel Friebe. ‘It took a poor idiot like me to say yes.’

  He had big boots to fill and a tough double act to follow. Jacques Goddet, the founder of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe, had been at the helm of the Tour since 1936. In 1965, Goddet began sharing power with the journalist Félix Lévitan. They made a formidable pairing, their work largely divided up between business (the province of Lévitan) and sporting affairs (Goddet’s domain). In 1987, Lévitan left the Tour under his own personal black cloud following allegations of creative accounting. Goddet retired at the same time, although he was awarded the ill-defined role of race-director-at-large. The main benefit of this assignment appeared to be the freedom to criticise the methods of whomever his successor was.

  In his mid-40s, Naquet-Radiguet was practically half the age of the octogenarian Goddet, but didn’t baulk at revolutionising the structure underpinning the Tour. ‘I came into a completely archaic world,’ he told Friebe, ‘a completely dictatorial world.’ His first experience of the Tour at close quarters – the 1987 edition won by Stephen Roche – was supposed to be purely observational, a crash course in soaking up the culture of the race he knew so little about. But his grand plans were already taking shape in his head.

  Like a stuck-in-the-mud, on-the-eve-of-retirement editor unwilling to relinquish his publication to a thrusting young buck with ideas, Goddet was protective of his legacy and regularly sniped about the new man’s lack of cycling credentials. Naquet-Radiguet adroitly countered by appointing the recently retired Bernard Hinault as his cycling adviser. Who better to learn from – and who better to provide credibility by association – than the five-time Tour winner?

  While his programme of reform dealt with obvious, long-overdue changes close to home (for instance, upgrading the decidedly parochial-looking finish-line banner and winners’ podium), Naquet-Radiguet was mainly driven by a desire to globalise the Tour, to maximising its worldwide audience. This would be not only on TV but also in the flesh. Indeed, Grands Départs as far afield as Tokyo and Québec were mooted, plans that even the more liberal elements in cycling might have regarded a step too far.

  The pace of intended reform was speedy. Goddet and Lévitan had a combined 73 years at the helm, during which time the race’s progress and development was nowhere near as swift as it was in other sports. Perhaps Naquet-Radiguet’s dreams were too big and came too soon for the traditionalist quarters. Certainly they weren’t ready for a Tour director conducting interviews in English. Unheard of. Sacrilegious. As Daniel Friebe observes, his ‘laconic self-assessment is that he merely “went into a stuffy environment and opened the windows and doors”. More impartial judges maintain that he dragged the Tour kicking and screaming towards the 21st century.’

  Naquet-Radiguet had long gone by the time the 1989 Tour de France course was unveiled in the October of 1988. Those two additional mountain stages reduced the overall distance to be covered over the three weeks; at 3,285 kilometres long, it was the shortest Tour for more than 80 years. The design generally met with riders’ approval. ‘It was a good, all-round, competitive course,’ remembers Andy Hampsten, nearly 30 years on. ‘When I won at Alpe d’Huez in 1992, it was one of only three mountain stages. During the Miguel Induráin years, there were what I thought to be a lot of dud, flat stages – not many mountains and long, too long, time trials. There were some uncreative courses in the 1990s, but 1989 was fantastic. And a mountain time trial was a gift to me that I had to make the most of.’

  While Hampsten had earmarked that particular Alpine stage in the race’s last week, it was a different time trial that was grabbing imaginations and scorn in equal measure. During his 12-month tenure, Naquet-Radiguet had privately declared that the final stage, that supposedly blue riband mass parade up and down the Champs-Élysées, would now take the form of an individual time trial every year. It wasn’t possible in 1988, but the idea was made flesh for the following summer, despite its author’s departure long before then. Rather remarkably, his final-day plan remained intact in his absence. It became his legacy, albeit one in place for just a single year and albeit thanks to the closeness of the general classification. It was helped by circumstances beyond his control.

  The concept of a final-day time trial had been taken up before. In the 1968 Tour, the Dutch rider Jan Janssen overhauled a 16-second deficit to beat Belgian Herman Van Springel to take the yellow jersey and the overall title. The time difference – 38 seconds – was the shortest in Tour history. Yet, despite the cliffhanging conclusion, the format was never adopted again for the last stage of a race. Not until 1989, that is.

  In a sense, Naquet-Radiguet’s idea was simply the next evolutionary step for the race’s final day. In 1975, Lévitan had been equally radical, bringing the Parisian finish into the city centre by relocating it from the Vélodrome de Vincennes, out beyond the Périphérique ring road, to the undeniably more photogenic Champs-Élysées.

  It was something of a gamble, one that raised plenty of eyebrows and a few hackles. This was a race that didn’t discard tradition lightly, after all. The race always signed off with a semi-competitive parade into the French capital, one that, in not affecting the general classification, offered the sprinters a moment in the Parisian sun. There was also the danger that – with every chance of the overall winner having already been decided before the final day – this new time trial format could become an even less consequential parade. One without, even, the excitement of a mass sprint finish. The dampest of damp squibs, the deadest of dead rubbers.

  For every excited time trialist in 1989, there was a non-plussed sprinter. Other mildly dissenting voices could be heard too. Graham Watson was on his third of what would be 30 Tours as one of the photographers gamely balancing himself and his camera on the back of a speeding, weaving motorbike. For him, and his art, the notion of a final-day time trial wasn’t a cause for celebration. ‘The thought of a last-stage time trial filled me with dread. It took away the fun and colour of a peloton racing up and down the Champs-Élysées – the most important images for a seasoned Tour photographer. It was almost certainly going to be a bore, a simple coronation parade for the overall winner. At least, that’s what I and most people thought. Indeed, many journalists would go on to bypass the Paris finish and get home a day early in the belief that the race was over.’

  Praise be it was anything but.

  TWO

  LAZARUS RISING

  ‘There was a ten-second pause as we reflected on the American’s chances.

  The whole table erupted with laughter’ – Paul Kimmage

  GREG AND KATHY LeMond live in Tennessee these days. For 30 years, they endured Minnesota’s bone-shaking winters, those months when the landscape slides into a deep, deep hibernation. It’s a time when there’s little to do other than strap on a pair of cross-country skis and head out onto frozen Lake Minnetonka, just across the street from the LeMonds’ home in the Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. It can be bleak round those parts. Indeed, the film-making siblings Joel and Ethan Coen, who grew up in the neighbouring suburb of St Louis Park, once referred to midwinter Minnesota as ‘resembling Siberia, except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants’.

  The LeMonds will freeze no more; the first tenet of that legendary Southern hospitality is its clement weather. Today is the opening day of March and while Minnesota’s temperatures remain below zero, the mercury in mid-morning Knoxville has already reached a very agreeable 26° Celsius. The couple recently moved sou
th to be closer to the base of their carbon fibre company, LeMond Composites.

  In short, life is good for the LeMonds. Such buoyancy is in deep contrast to the state of affairs the couple found themselves in the spring of 1987. Yes, the arrival of baby Scott undoubtedly brought joy, but father Greg, post-accident, faced a difficult and uncertain future, a journey that would be undertaken while his physical and psychological scars slowly healed. ‘We were so lucky,’ Kathy says of the helicopter rescue, three decades later. ‘That was the silver lining of Sacramento being the murder capital. Those ER docs had a lot of experience with shootings. And they had an amazing female trauma surgeon. She saved him. She was extraordinary.’

  Not that there wasn’t more distress on the immediate horizon. Toshiba, the team with whom LeMond had won the Tour de France with the previous summer when they were known as La Vie Claire, had shown themselves to be both impatient and callous. With their flamboyant owner Bernard Tapie now having eyes for the young French rider Jean-François Bernard, LeMond was deemed surplus to requirements. Barely a month after the shooting accident, he received a letter giving him his marching orders.

  ‘Oh yeah, we got that right away,’ confirms Kathy. ‘We were really pissed off. Greg had just won the Tour for them. But, honestly, we always felt that we were just grateful that he was alive, so we didn’t dwell on it that much. Compared to not being alive, it really wasn’t that big a deal.’

  Tapie and Toshiba had obviously thought that the severity of the accident meant LeMond would never again be the rider he had been before the events of Easter Monday, 1987. But, due to his extraordinary physiology, and his resolve, his recovery was the speediest it could have been. ‘That’s because he’s Greg,’ says Kathy. ‘If he were a normal person, it would have been months and months. He was better on his bike than he was walking. The bike was a good support. But he was skin and bones. Absolute skin and bones. He was 120 pounds. When he won the Tour in 1986, he was 145 or something. But he was back on the bike.’

  As well as building those muscles back up, LeMond needed to restore his levels of blood. He hadn’t been given any transfusions out of his doctors’ fear that donated blood might be contaminated with the AIDS virus, and it took a full two months for his levels to be back to normal. But then, three months after the shooting, LeMond had to undergo an emergency appendectomy, one made difficult because of the scar from his shooting operation. ‘It was a picnic in comparison to the accident…’

  Not only did LeMond appear to be physiologically different from other riders, his outlook on life was decidedly more relaxed than that of more intense types in the professional ranks. This often brought criticism from conservative quarters within the sport; the writer Edward Pickering neatly compared LeMond to the outsider chess player Bobby Fischer, ‘coming in from America to beat the established countries at their own game’. Simply substitute Russian grandmasters with the cycling traditionalists of northern Europe.

  LeMond’s motivation and commitment seemed to come under constant scrutiny, as he later told Procycling magazine. ‘I’ll never forget reading a Belgian newspaper story that said I got what I’d deserved in ’87, because I was eating ice cream and hunting when I ought to have been racing and training. And yet they knew that I was back in the States because I’d fallen in Tirreno-Adriatico and wouldn’t be able to race for six months. After the accident, there were some mean-ass letters and negative articles. Even today, you still hear the myth that I didn’t train properly and that I was only interested in the Tour. The reality was that, physically, I wasn’t the same after the accident. Before that, I raced balls-to-walls from February to September.’

  Hope – elation, probably – came in the shape of PDM, the Dutch team who were arguably the strongest outfit in world cycling. They signed LeMond for the 1988 season, although the contract stipulated that he had to appear in PDM colours during 1987, presumably to measure the progress of his recovery. That September, five months after all that emergency surgery, he entered a criterium race in Belgium, just to honour this legal requirement. ‘One lap, and I pretended to have a flat tyre.’

  While his injuries denied him the chance of wearing the prestigious number 1 on his back at the ’87 Tour as defending champion, LeMond didn’t make the start the following year, either. A crash in a minor springtime race in Belgium prompted an enforced lay-off, the premature return from which brought about a case of tendinitis in his shin. ‘Because I started riding on it too soon,’ he later explained to the American writer Samuel Abt, ‘it got irritated and then inflamed … After two weeks off my bike, I was really ambitious and did four races in the first week. I didn’t finish any of them.’ While the Tour was well under way, across the Atlantic, LeMond was under the surgeon’s knife in his new home state of Minnesota. Another frustrating summer. The title he’d been so desperate to reclaim was instead pocketed by the first-time-winning Spaniard, Pedro Delgado.

  One incident during that Tour, though, angered LeMond from afar: the positive drugs test of his PDM team-mate Gert-Jan Theunisse. ‘My reaction was to tell the management that whoever had given him the drugs should be fired,’ he told Daniel Friebe, ‘and the same applied to Theunisse. I liked Gert, but I didn’t want to be associated with any kind of doping. Of course, this was never made public, which gave them the licence to start rumours about me bad-mouthing the other riders and asking for a pay raise. They were all saying “How dare he ask for a pay raise when he’s had no results and he never trains?”.’

  The relationship had soured and both parties welcomed his departure. ‘They had lost total confidence in me,’ he said at the time. ‘They were trying to claim that maybe my liver was bad, my lung was shot up, maybe I had lead poisoning. They said, “Maybe you’re not going to ever come back”.’

  ‘We felt that his training was not concentrated,’ offered Harrie Jansen, the PDM team manager. ‘His whole career, he has eaten hamburgers, not worrying about what he drank or how he rested. He has so much talent that he can live like ordinary people. He was too fat, and he was still eating his hamburgers, his pizzas, his beers, his everything.’

  The Bobby Fischer figure certainly wrote his own rules, and much was often made of his less-than-saintly refuelling. L’Equipe was particularly dismissive of his diet. ‘He could unearth a Mexican restaurant in the depths of the Auvergne,’ the paper grumbled. Andy Hampsten, his team-mate during the La Vie Claire years, admires his compatriot’s rebellious streak. ‘He really loved to go to Italy and fret about his weight over two or three big plates of pasta,’ he laughs, ‘as we all would.’ Another American rider, Joe Parkin, once noted how this kind of preparation didn’t really affect LeMond’s performances. ‘He could climb off the couch and win races. He could come back from the off-season soft and doughy, and within a week he’d be ripped.’

  With an exit from PDM looking imminent, LeMond put the feelers out for an alternative team for the 1989 season. He tested for the Fagor squad, before putting in a call to Johan Lammerts, a former team-mate at Toshiba. Lammerts, a Dutch rider with whom LeMond had struck up a firm friendship, was now riding for the small Belgian ADR team. The American had been offered a slot on their roster the previous year before he hooked up with PDM; at the time he had been dismissive of them, denouncing them as ‘one of the weakest teams around’ who could never help deliver a Grand Tour victory.

  But now, having fallen from number two in the world rankings right down to number 345 in the space of two years, this beggar couldn’t be a chooser. ADR owner François Lambert and directeur sportif José De Cauwer were enthusiastic about a former Tour winner joining their roster, and a salary, significantly lower than that which LeMond was on at PDM, was agreed. It was based on a comparatively meagre basic pay, with a $500,000 bonus should he confound the critics and win the Tour in ADR colours. The deal went down to the wire, with LeMond’s father Bob finalising it a couple of hours short of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Had the contract remained unsigned as the clock struck 12, another sea
son at PDM awaited – and one on a much-reduced wage, to boot.

  ‘ADR was a really crummy team,’ Kathy LeMond remembers. ‘They weren’t paying him that much – and in the end they didn’t pay at all. Going into the Tour, we hadn’t been paid yet. But he had some freedom there. You really don’t have to listen to the team owner if he’s seven months late paying you.’ ADR – the vehicle-hire firm All Drive Renting – had a Flemish nickname. It was suggested that its initials stood for Al De Restjes, or the Good-For-Nothings.

  In order to cover LeMond’s salary, ADR had entered into an agreement with the American Coors Light team, whereby he would race for them at events in the US. The arrangement gave Coors team boss Len Pettyjohn front-row insight into how the unscrupulous François Lambert operated. ‘Very quickly, Lambert was running into money problems,’ he explains. ‘He wasn’t paying the riders. He wasn’t following through on his contract obligations. He had a huge fight with Greg, because Greg’s contract required that he got a Mercedes as a personal car. He ended up getting some piece-of-shit Fiat or something like that. A Punto, or whatever. Greg was just furious and Bob LeMond was out-of-control mad about it.’

  As Kathy LeMond clarifies, the couple didn’t even get some piece-of-shit Fiat. ‘We never got anything! He made us go up to Antwerp where we picked out a nice Mercedes and he took us to dinner. He kept saying “Yeah, yeah. Your car will be in next week, next week”. He was a total, total conman.’ LeMond even had to sign up, through a criterium organiser, a new co-sponsor, the lubrication gel manufacturer Agrigel. In return for cash to cover administrative fees, Agrigel received advertising space on the team jerseys. ‘ADR didn’t even have the $50,000 to enter the Tour de France. We came up with the money from Agrigel. And we didn’t have the money either. We hadn’t been paid.’