Richard Moore - Etape

COPYRIGHT

HarperSport

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperSport 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Richard Moore 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014 Cover photograph © Gilbert Uzan/Gamma-Photo via Getty Images

All photographs © AFP/Getty Images, except: Image 2 © REX/John Pierce;

Image 3 © Reuters; Image 4 © Graham Watson; Images 7, 8, 15 © Offside/ L’Equipe ; Image 9 © L’Equipe ; Image 10 © Offside/Pressesports; Image 13 © Christopher Catchpole; Image 14 © Alasdair Fotheringham; Images 17, 20 © Getty Images

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Richard Moore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780007500109

Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007500123

Version: 2014-06-30

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Outsider

Chris Boardman, 1994

Chapter 2 Beware of the Badger

Bernard Hinault, 1980

Chapter 3 The Bulldog

Wilfried Nelissen, 1994

Chapter 4 The Sculptor

Joël Pelier, 1989

Chapter 5 The Boy with Fire in His Eyes

Mark Cavendish, 2009

Chapter 6 For Fabio

Lance Armstrong, 1995

Chapter 7 Dutch Cold War

Marc Sergeant, Frans Maassen, 1992

Chapter 8 Trilogy

Eddy Merckx, 1971

Chapter 9 Guerrilla Warfare

Luis Herrera, Bernard Hinault, Laurent Fignon, 1984

Chapter 10 Anarchy

Stephen Roche, Jean-François Bernard, Andy Hampsten, 1987

Chapter 11 The Devil

Claudio Chiappucci, 1992

Chapter 12 Shock and Awe

Bobby Julich, Jörg Jaksche, Marco Pantani, Jan Ullrich, 1998

Chapter 13 What about Zimmy?

Urs Zimmermann, 1991

Chapter 14 The Unknown Warrior

José Luis Viejo, 1976

Chapter 15 Champagne Freddy

Freddy Maertens, 1981

Chapter 16 Honour Among Thieves

Lance Armstrong, Iban Mayo, 2003

Chapter 17 Untold Stories

Mark Cavendish, Bernhard Eisel, David Millar, 2010

Chapter 18 Playstation Cycling

Andy Schleck, 2011

Chapter 19 Redemption

David Millar, 2012

Chapter 20 La Résurrection

Greg LeMond, 1989

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Also by Richard Moore ...

About the publisher

Étape is the result of a simple idea: to tell the stories of selected stages of the Tour de France through the recollections of the protagonists. I wanted to capture and convey the mystery, beauty and madness of the great race. But new interviews were key; I didn’t want to recycle already published and in some cases familiar stories. And so I sought out the heroes and villains, the stars, journeymen and one-hit wonders. I spoke to two five-time Tour winners, a three-time winner, a one-time winner, and a former seven-time winner.

On the following pages are the fruits of this labour: a collection of notable stages, some great, some obscure. They encompass extraordinary feats and diabolical deeds, heroism and deceit, farce and tragedy. Each chapter stands alone but they are interconnected since, inevitably, there are characters who reappear. One, Bernard Hinault, even manages to have a crucial influence on a stage, and a Tour, in which he wasn’t riding.

The featured stages are personal favourites, drawn mainly from the Tours I have watched since my first glimpse on television in 1984. But I couldn’t resist others that piqued my interest: a trilogy of remarkable stages involving Eddy Merckx and Luis Ocaña in 1971; a curious win by José Luis Viejo in 1976, which I had read about in an out-of-print cycling book; any one of the sixteen stages won by one of the sport’s most endearing figures, Freddy Maertens, in the course of his bizarre career.

There were mysteries to investigate and myths to debunk – the feud between two team directors that distorted the outcome of a stage in 1992; a rest day disqualification in 1991; the untold stories of the gruppetto ; and some classics: l’Alpe d’Huez in 1984, Paris in 1989, Sestriere in 1992, Les Deux Alpes in 1998.

There are a number of premature deaths – Ocaña, Marco Pantani, Jose María Jiménez, Laurent Fignon – but only one occurred during the Tour. That was Fabio Casartelli in 1995 and I can vividly remember the room and sofa where I sat, and how I felt, when television pictures showed him curled up on the road, a pool of blood forming by his head. One chapter focuses on an emotionally charged stage three days later, won by Casartelli’s team-mate, a young American called Lance Armstrong.

The older Armstrong reappears in a later chapter, from 2003: a stage and a Tour that now have an asterisk against them and a line through the winner’s name. Despite his disgrace, I wanted to include Armstrong, partly because he is difficult to ignore, partly because nobody could argue that some of his Tours (the stage I chose in particular) were not dramatic. I didn’t know if he’d agree to an interview, but when I explained the project by email he responded within minutes: ‘You bet.’ Then I wasn’t sure what he wanted out of it, other than to talk about the 2003 stage to Luz Ardiden as though it was still in the record books; as though it still mattered. ‘Those Tours happened,’ he said, ‘despite what a bunch of dickheads say.’ Of course, you might disagree ...

Mention of Armstrong raises the spectre of doping, which, as Armstrong himself is quick to point out, he did not invent, even if he has done more damage to the sport’s reputation than any other rider. But doping, cheating, skulduggery: for better or worse, all are woven deeply into the fabric of the Tour.

I thought of doping in cycling as I read the American writer Roger Kahn’s book, The Boys of Summer , in which he recalls his early days as a cub reporter in New York. His first job was to cover high school sports at a time when the coaches were striking over pay. Consequently, there was little sport. ‘But if this mess doesn’t get settled, what will there be to write about?’ he asked his editor.

‘As you say, the mess.’

Perhaps in recent years ‘the mess’ of doping has overshadowed the sport to an unhealthy degree. Of course it is an important, dare I say interesting, subject. But there is so much more: the deeply fascinating – often fascinatingly deep – people who make up the peloton; the complexity of road racing, with its teamwork and tactics; the courage and skill of a stage winner, whether a journeyman like Joël Pelier, a winner in 1989 (and now a sculptor), or Mark Cavendish, arguably the greatest sprinter of all time. I hope that the following tales illustrate all of this, and do convey at least some of the mystery, the beauty and the madness.