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“Rouleur accomplishes something more
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Instead of glossy, well-lit portraits and
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that drive deep narratives.”
Wired magazine
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Eye Magazine | 77 |
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SAMPLE EDITION
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ROULEUR
ANATOMY OF A BIKE RACE
THE RACE CONVOY
JOURNALISTS
GUESTS/VIPS
COMMISSAIRES
NEUTRAL
SUPPORT
DOCTOR
illustration Tom Jay
POLICE
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ORGANISATION/
PHOTOGRAPHERS
24/05/2013 09:35
Rouleur n. m. Fr. – a cyclist who ‘rolls’, a rider for the flatter races and
often the team’s captain.
Rouleur is unique in the world of road cycling magazine publishing as
it truly reaches the heart of the sport’s great characters and classic races.
Rouleur’s contributors are always seeking new perspectives on the sport
we all love with incisive, insightful reportage from the best writers in
cycling and photographers from a diverse professional background –
all with an alternative view and an inquisitive eye.
Each 250-page plus edition is a labour of love, with an emphasis
on design that presents the untold stories and stunning arenas of
professional cycling past and present – Rouleur provides unmatched
content that you won’t see anywhere else.
This is your free taste of Rouleur, a slimmed-down version featuring
extracts from issue 39, our current Tour de France-flavoured edition,
printed on the same heavy Italian paper with the same attention to
detail we place in the magazine.
If you want more, please see the subscription offer inside the back cover
of this sample edition, or check our website – rouleur.cc
We hope you enjoy your mini Rouleur.
6
100
34
Corsica
38
The Watchmaker of Ávila
44
Paul Fournel and Jo Burt
12
Ian Cleverly and Daniel Sharp
Colin O’Brien and Paolo Ciaberta
18
Carlos Arribas and Timm Kölln
26
Speedplay
Froome Dog
Ned Boulting and Taz Darling
The Ones
Robert Millar
The First Time
Ian Cleverly and Robert Wyatt
Rouleur magazine is published eight times a year by Gruppo Media Limited.
© 2013. Copyright remains with the Publishers. No part of this journal may
be copied or reproduced without the written consent of both the publisher
and the contributor.
Cover: Speedplay by Daniel Sharp
This page: The Watchmaker of Ávila by Timm Kölln
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100
words Paul Fournel translation Graeme Fife illustrations Jo Burt
ONE HUNDRED TOURS DE FRANCE
IN FIFTEEN NUMBERS
~0~
~5~
It is assuredly one of the greatest injustices in the history of
the Tour de France, that Raymond Poulidor, beloved Poupou of
popular fame, never wore the yellow jersey. It enraged millions
of his admirers and hundreds of thousands of them are still
furious. It’s said that, in the course of bibulous dinners, after
they had both retired, Poulidor used to pull on the yellow jersey
and his friend, Anquetil, the rainbow jersey – which he’d never
worn – to avert fate and to drop a splurge of laughter into the
champagne. You can’t pedal up a new palmarès.
Several men have won five Tours: Jacques Anquetil was
the first, Bernard Hinault came next, but Miguel Indurain
was the first to win five in a row, between 1991 and 1995.
Sure, Armstrong did better since then, taking seven victories
in succession, but he was stripped of them in a sorry history
of stimulants. He won seven jerseys, sure enough, but he can’t
wear them any more or boast about them.
Yellow jersey… zero
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Five Tours
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ROULEUR
~7~
~35~
The magic number of beautiful wins
Against the clock
For several years, the record of victories in the Tour de France
has been 7. This prodigious and unequalled tally was the work
of the very overbearing, very powerful and very fast, Lance
Armstrong. The handsome Texan, who beat cancer, could not,
however, beat the anti-doping agencies. Convicted of cheating,
he confessed and found himself stripped of his victories. The
authorities, whose role in this fine accumulation of victories
appears to have been short-sighted, have shied away from
awarding the jersey to the second-placed riders and have decided
to leave seven entries in the Tour’s palmarès blank. A silent and
inglorious first. The famous number 7 does not lose its aura
completely because, in 1979, Bernard Hinault won seven stages
in the same Tour and the bold Richard Virenque took the best
climber’s jersey seven times.
After the stage finish, the riders are still racing. They have
only 35 minutes from the time they crossed the line to present
themselves at the doping control and urinate in front of their
assessors. The riders have had to pee in view of the controllers
ever since the time when a number of riders used a small rubber
bulb filled with clean urine. One rider, who took some of his
wife’s urine in the morning, discovered, following the drug test
in the afternoon that – joy – he was pregnant.
~9~
Minor crash-landing
Robic broke a bone on nine occasions: twice his skull (despite
his leather helmet), two collarbones, a thigh, vertebrae, shoulder
blade. But that’s behind me, we can hear him say. “Fall nine times,
get up ten” should have been his motto. No wonder they called
him “Death Dodger”. Easier to understand why, on the evening
after his victory in the 1947 Tour de France, he went straight off
to deposit his yellow jersey among the relics in the basilica of
Sainte-Anne-d’Auray…
~24~
Non-stop
The Tour de France never stops. It works 24 out of every 24 hours,
even if the riders are pedalling for only a few hours in the sun
each day. Hardly has the last man crossed the finish line than the
workmen are dismantling the podiums, taking down the barriers,
sweeping the roads and rubbing out the finish line, so as to leave the
town as clean as they found it. Then they climb into their lorries
to drive to the next day’s stage town where they hastily reconstruct
the podium, draw another finish line, set up the timekeepers’
cabins and the départ village. They work in tandem with the
radio and television technicians who spend all night preparing
the following day’s live transmissions. So it’s an entire town which,
for three weeks, never sleeps and is constantly on the move.
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~111~
What to do with all those jerseys?
The organisers of the Tour presented Eddy Merckx with 111
yellow jerseys over his career. That’s a record which is not close
to being beaten. History does not relate what the great Eddy did
with them. One thing is sure, he doesn’t wear them any more…
at least not in public.
~121~
Planetary
The Tour de France is the most viewed annual sporting event in
the world. Only the Olympic Games and the football World Cup
exceed it but only every four years. Nowadays, 121 television
channels report on the Tour. They transmit to 188 countries,
60 of them with live coverage, relaying the images from FranceTélévision. In addition, 72 radio stations broadcast live and 400
newspapers and magazines are accredited. Hard to forget that
the original Tour de France was created to promote sales of the
newspaper L’Auto.
~130~
Randonnée
To get to see the riders from the side of the road, spectators
travel, on average, 130km. While the majority of them travel by
car, causing unbelievable parking problems, many do it by bike
in a spirit of solidarity with the riders. This spirit of cycling
is so lively that, since 1993, the organisers have offered every
cyclotourist and sportif rider a stage of the Tour exclusively for
them. They follow the race route with car support and they are
timed. In 2012, they covered the Pau-Bagnères-de-Luchon stage;
in 2013, they’ll ride from Annecy to Semnoz. A week after entry
opened, there were already in excess of 10,000 riders signed up.
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ONE HUNDRED TOURS DE FRANCE IN FIFTEEN NUMBERS
~488~
Heavy legs
We never cease to argue about the suffering imposed on the
riders. If the stages are long, we exclaim ‘Murderers!’ but if
they are shorter, the riders devour them faster and faster and
suffer for it...Where to strike the right balance? Really nowhere,
because it’s not the race route which makes the riders suffer but
the riders themselves. That didn’t stop the organisers from doing
things on a grand scale between 1919 and 1924 by proposing that
the men of valour should ride a stage from Sables d’Olonne to
Bayonne, covering 488km in a single day, making it the longest
ever stage on the programme of the Tour de France.
~1903~
Promotion of genius
It was because his newspaper L’Auto faced more and more
vigorous competition from its rival, Le Vélo that Henri
Desgrange (or his assistant Géo Lefèvre to be precise) had the
idea of creating the Tour de France in 1903. It was, therefore,
in the name of the automobile that the bicycle came to greater
prominence. What began as a race to get publicity quickly
became a social phenomenon. The idea of making a circuit of
the country immediately grabbed the public imagination, first
because France is a country which lends itself to a tour,
then because the landscape changes abruptly and is varied,
but also because the idea of the Tour de France dug its roots
deep into working class solidarity and a job well done.
Once launched, the Tour proved unstoppable and has not
ceased to grow. It took huge upheavals of history to halt it but,
as soon as peace was restored, it set out again as a symbol of
peace, of holidays and of sunshine. The Tour de France is bigger
than the race itself. On this score, no other sporting event on
the calendar can rival it. It celebrates much besides competition
and remains, without doubt, the most beautiful window on the
whole of France.
~1910~
The broom wagon
For the first seven Tours, those who abandoned had to sort
out and pay for a return home any way they could. In effect,
a double misery: “You’re knackered? You’re on your own.”
Doubtless inspired by a proper sense of compassion, in 1910, the
organisers introduced the broom wagon. This small lorry drove
along behind the last rider on the road, towards the end of the
stage finish, and scooped up all those who did not want, or were
not able, to continue pedalling. Their number was removed,
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they were sat down in the vehicle, their bikes loaded up and they
finished the course at the pace of the back markers. With all the
back up available these days, the broom wagon often remains
empty. Exhausted riders prefer their directeur sportif’s car.
Some star riders even disappear from the race in a helicopter…
leaving by the top floor, so to speak.
~1919~
Yellow Jersey
The yellow jersey was not born with the Tour. We had to wait
until 1919 to note its appearance. The public needed to be able to
spot their champion at a glance. Yellow was chosen not because
of the summer sun but from the colour of the pages of L’Auto,
which brought the race into being. The daily was actually printed
on yellow paper. The yellow jersey very quickly became the dream
of every professional racing cyclist, but not, at first, unanimously.
Eugène Christophe, for example, did not like it because a sneering
joke at his expense went round: “Christophe the Canary”.
~450,000~
The handsome prize
For years, the riders had the look of proletarians in the sporting
world: worn out and ill-paid. That is not the case today when
the top men are on a par with the top men in a number of other
sports. Today, the winner of the Tour collects a prize of 450,000
Euros (the last-placed man gets only 400). As a general rule, the
winner, whose market value is about to make a huge leap up,
gives his prize money to his team-mates. He knows he will earn
a lot more elsewhere.
~15,000,000~
Generous result
Crowds of up to 15 million spectators have been reckoned
to amass by the roadside along the Tour’s route. Of them,
70 per cent are men, 80 per cent French. On certain mountain
stages, there can be 500,000 packed tight along the sidewalls
or on the edge of the slopes. The crowds sometimes hem the
riders in so close that they can hardly find any road through.
The motorcyclists have to work very hard to clear the way as
well as to hold back the crazier fans who run along beside their
champions at risk of tipping them over. It is a superb spectacle,
it’s free and nobody would dream of forgoing it.
Paul Fournel is the author of Vélo, with illustrations by Jo Burt,
published by Rouleur. This is an extract from Rouleur issue 39.
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words Colin O’Brien
photographs Paolo Ciaberta
E
arlier in the day we’d perched ourselves on top
of a craggy precipice. It was the perfect spot for a
photograph and to hell with the strange looks we
got from the passing motorists. Eventually, one car
stopped. The police, we thought. Or a race official. It was
neither. It was a shameless French photographer who thought
that our idea was so good he’d just steal it for himself. So much
for professional courtesy.
The landscape had been different then, the weather too. Glorious
sunshine illuminated the island’s southern, coastal terrain: great
open stretches of rugged and primordial rock, sandy, almost
cadmium yellow in colour and interrupted by nothing but for
the winding, empty blackness of a tarmac ribbon and the border
of a spotless, blue-green sea. Messrs Voeckler and Schleck were
still in control; their spirited break not yet exposed as unformed
juvenilia. From up there, it was hard to understand what took
the Tour so long. Even the dismal conditions later in the day
couldn’t take from the island’s savage beauty.
In the end, Froome’s solo attack was magnificent. Fresh as
a daisy after 170km, five-and-a-bit from the line, every bit
the champion, Sky’s heir apparent for the Tour drove himself
forward determined and focused, powered by unstoppable legs
and lungs that sucked in huge, visceral fills of the cold forest air.
The gathered fans banged furiously on the advertising hoardings
and his victory echoed out into the darkness. Behind him, Porte
held off the chasing pack before making his own break for
second with two to go. It almost looked... easy. When they come
back to Corsican shores for the Tour de France’s grand départ,
with the full weight of the year’s meticulous planning and the
black-and-blue colossus behind them, it should look staggering.
But we knew how good Sky were already. What came next
was an illustration of just how far others had fallen. Twentytwo minutes after Froome crossed the line, a wretched figure
materialised like the ghost of Tours past from the grey,
damp gloom that was smothering the mountain. Eyes to the
covered heavens in a vague and desperate supplication, he
trundled on in hopelessness, burdened by the heavy load of
expectation and his own potential. Was it for this that Andy
Schleck was born?
Viscid clouds of fog clawed at him as he heaved his gaunt shell
up l’Ospedale one strained pedal stroke at a time. It was a long
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CORSICA
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24/05/2013 09:36
“Eyes to the covered
heavens in a vague and
desperate supplication, he
trundled on in hopelessness,
burdened by the heavy load
of expectation and his own
potential. Was it for this that
Andy Schleck was born?”
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day in the saddle for the former maillot blanc, and a longer
season, though we’d not yet reached April.
A cautionary tale to the sport’s current luminaries. The next big
thing that never was.
Schleck’s drawn-out comeback from injury has been fraught
with problems. A doping conviction for his brother at the Tour;
aborted races and questions about his own professionalism; the
ex-team boss caught up in the ‘Reasoned Decision’; a French
MP who claims to have seen the Luxembourger too drunk to
stand up in a Munich hotel; and a sponsor sick to the back teeth
of cycling and pulling the plug as soon as it can. Far from ideal
conditions for one of the sport’s most high-profile riders trying
to rediscover the form that once excited us so.
Who knows what’s happened to the Schleck of old?
The rider once tipped as a multiple Grand Tour winner,
who was on the tongue of every Tour fan at the turn of the
last decade, has disappeared. That memorable win at 2009’s
Liège-Bastogne-Liège seems an age ago. His breakaway
that day was breathless, his future full of almost limitless
potential. Now we wonder if he has a future at all. Behind
Schleck, burly men packed barriers and signage into grubby
vans. Other riders chatted as they sped past him unaware,
downhill to the warm reward of the team bus. Fans making
tracks to their cars wore confused faces when they saw the
cyclist battling on. They thought the race was over. It was.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Colin O’Brien is a freelance journalist based in Rome. This is an
extract from Rouleur issue 39.
Photo : Getty Images - Laurent Fabry-A.S.O.
As Fabian Cancellara raged against the dying of the light
in Belgium’s hinterlands, he gave a perverted impression of
RadioShack. It’s a miracle they’re still in existence, let alone
winning Classics. On that melancholy Corsican slope, Andy
painted a much more honest picture: a haunting spectre of what
might have been, suffering towards its own end in dragged-out
slow motion, savaged by the exertions of impotent endeavour.
/¶e7$3('87285
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24/05/2013
09:36
words Carlos Arribas
photographs Timm Kölln
The
Watchmaker
of Ávila
W often, Julio Jiménez lives in the
hen he’s in Ávila, which isn’t very
depths of a dark house which has a
small living room and a large bedroom
with a sizeable bed. The trophy heads
of three chamois from the Oisans stare
out somewhat perplexed and glassy-eyed
from dusty corners. This is the house in
which he lived with his mother, Doña
Goya Muñoz, until she died recently at
the age of 90; and in which his life and
his memories are preserved along with
a yellow Bartali brand bike held up by a
couple of old rusty rollers gripping the
finest Reynolds tubes almost too tightly.
It was a lightweight bike made for him
by Géminiani to tackle the vast mountain
stages during his time at Bic.
Almost 50 years later Julio Jiménez
still has that look, his bright eyes are
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24/05/2013 09:36
ROULEUR
THE WATCHMAKER OF ÁVILA
mischievous yet strangely innocent; the
reflection of a life which already seems to
be fading into that ethereal territory where
memory merges with myth. But let’s not
get ahead of ourselves. His memory is still
as sharp, precise and as clearly defined
as the innate driving force that guided
his years as a cyclist, not to mention his
relentless optimism and survival instinct;
abilities that have endured to this day and
still surprise him. On a cold winter’s day,
as sad and gloomy as a winter’s day can
be in Ávila, dirty snowflakes fly loose in
the air and at four in the afternoon the city
is deserted, austere and stony, populated
mainly by priests and officials. It’s already
getting dark and Julio, or Julito, as he’s
affectionately known around here when he
goes to the local bar for wine and patatas
revolconas (a potato dish with bacon,
paprika, peppers and onions) returns to
his home, a ground-floor flat opposite a
petrol station, alone.
“I’ll get the dinner on now, grilled steak,”
he remarks as he says goodbye, and in
doing so provides the finishing touch to a
portrait of loneliness, old age (Julio lives
alone and is 78 years old) and melancholy
in which the ageing, almost forgotten
champion’s only remnants of the glory
days are a selection of ceramic plates with
naïve art motifs (seven in total, one for
each stage won on the Tour), yellowing
photos that only the very old or the very
wise know how to unravel, three stuffed
chamois, one for each time he was King of
the Mountains on the Tour, and sacks of
press clippings sorted by year, including the
announcement that appeared in L’Équipe
on Saturday July 13, 1964: “Mrs Gregoria
Muñoz, as the mother of the winner of
the Puy-de-Dôme stage, Julio Jiménez,
shall receive a bouquet of flowers courtesy
of Interflora at her home in Avila”.
And that was life. Or was it?
The following morning at our second
interview and photo session, one feels
obliged to ask how his night was; mainly
out of pity (because the one asking
the question feels young and free in his
mediocre life with no past of which to
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ROULEUR
THE WATCHMAKER OF ÁVILA
speak), as if to comfort him. He begins
to roll those orbiting oval eyes, allowing
a mischievous smile to creep onto his face
and responds: “Alone? No, not at all, I
called a friend, a girl I know. We had a good
time...” Come again? By girl you mean, 50
or 60 years old? The ensuing relief from
the question provides a moment of respite.
“What are you talking about? She can’t be
more than 30 years old, a real cutie...”
It’s a revelation that bursts open the
floodgates, momentarily submerging us in
truths as we begin to understand – apart
from why the bed is so big and cosy – his
true personality, the character of a cyclist
about whom one could say was always
there in the most memorable moments
of the Tour during the ’60s, though not
many people have heard of him. On the
other hand you have to admit that old age
doesn’t always mean surrendering and that
women are most certainly the spice of life.
Julito was a womaniser who never
married because according to him his
mother never would have approved of the
women with whom he enjoyed spending
the nights. He was one of the privileged
few in Franco’s sad and repressed Spain
that could enjoy a fulfilling sex life, as
did most cyclists, being on the road and
always moving on. He experienced sexual
repression at a very young age before
becoming a cyclist and a watchmaker,
the job that nicknamed him ‘The
Watchmaker of Ávila’ for eternity. Before
putting together and taking apart watches
in his cousin’s workshop (so as not to get
out of shape, he wouldn’t stop moving
his legs as if he were pedalling under
the watchmaker’s table), Julio worked in
an army clothes shop where dozens of
women sewed military uniforms.
“My job was to oil the sewing machine
motors,” remembers Julio. “And I loved
it because the motors were almost on the
floor and while I lubricated them I got a
good look at the seamstresses’ legs.”
Carlos Arribas is a sports writer for El País.
This is an extract from Rouleur issue 39.
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THE FIRST TIME
words Ian Cleverly photographs Robert Wyatt
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S normally as chipper as chipper can be, is decidedly out of
omething is not right. The man sat across the table from me,
sorts. If SRM added a chipometer to its range to sit alongside its
power cranks, this rider would normally be nudging the upper
reaches of its capabilities – somewhere between ten and a Spinal
Tap-esque 11. Now he is downright grumpy.
Russell Downing, an easy-going man from Yorkshire, is feeling
dicky for the second day running of the Three Days of De
Panne, a race run for the last 37 years in Belgium as a warm-up
for the impending and rather more serious matters of the Tour
of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.
VDK-Driedaagse De Panne-Koksijde, to give the race its
proper Belgian title, is a decent enough event in its own
right, but its proximity to the Belgian big two of the Classics
season lends a slightly underwhelming air to proceedings.
As a journalist – or bike fan – there’s a lot to be said for
races like De Panne, where a lack of pressure allows access
to teams and riders ordinarily off limits. But when the star
riders start bailing after a couple of days, keeping their
powder dry for the following Sunday’s Ronde, you can’t
help but feel slightly cheated. Who’s going to win? Who cares!
The big boys went home already.
One man who won’t be going home quite yet is Downing,
sitting in a hotel bar wrestling with the Speedplay cleats on
his shoes, determined to find a solution to his poor form in recent
weeks. Four crashes since the start of the season have left him
scratching his head and wondering when Lady Luck will smile
his way. Crashes for a pro cyclist may well be part and parcel of
the job, but for an experienced bike handler like Downing, two or
three a year might be par for the course. Four in as many weeks
was beyond a joke.
“I was good two weeks ago, but not now,” he says dejectedly.
“I didn’t take any skin off in the last crash, but something is not
quite firing.”
So this joker in the pack, who along with older brother Dean
is a popular and seemingly ever-present fixture on the UK
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24/05/2013 09:37
racing scene, is down but not out, convinced there must be a
simple solution to his bad run. That morning in Oudenaarde’s
beautiful town square, across the road from the Ronde Museum,
Downing had hassled the mechanics for Allen keys and adjusted
his saddle height a tad, wondering if that might be the cause of
the strange sensations in his legs.
The answer, when it came, was both unexpected and bizarre.
The cleat on Downing’s left shoe was 25mm further back than on
the right, presumably shifting during one of the aforementioned
crashes in the weeks prior to De Panne.
Now, in this world of professional cycling where the top bananas
are supposed to notice if so much as a pea has been placed
beneath their mattress of an evening, you may wonder why
Downing didn’t figure that one out previously. I certainly did.
Twenty-five millimetres is no typo: we are not talking 2.5
millimetres here. That’s a whole inch, near as damn it.
“It just didn’t feel right and I couldn’t work out what it was,”
he says. “I couldn’t get any power out. I was so pissed off, then
I went to change my cleats and one of them was out by 25mm.
You never know, it might have done me good in the long run and
strengthened my left leg.”
That’s an upbeat appraisal of what might, just might, have
benefitted Downing’s marginally weaker left leg for however
long he’s been riding with this positional imbalance, as we joke
about the pedalling triangles motion he has endured for several
weeks. Imagine if he’d been using those Osymetric chainrings that
Wiggins used to use. He’d have been pedalling octagons...
New cleats correctly fitted, the transformation was immediate.
Downing placed himself in the early five-man break the following
day for a good old- fashioned blow out prior to Flanders. With the
oldest man in the race (and possibly professional cycling, for that
matter), 42-year-old Niko Eeckhout, driving the younger men
along, the quintet pressed on promisingly, until that unwelcome
symbol of many a cursed Belgian breakaway, the train crossing,
intervened.
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Thirty seconds or so spent jiggling around behind a barrier and the
not- so-famous five resumed their mission,but the impetus was
gone. Truth be told, the sprinter’s teams would have reeled them
in at a time of their choosing, but that extra half a minute would
have added a little extra spice to the morning’s racing.
As the bunch split apart on the final finishing laps of the town of
De Panne, Downing lost the best part of a minute in the closing
kilometres. He had done enough, however, to make the 120-man
cut for the afternoon’s time-trial. If NetApp-Endura directeur
sportif Enrico Poitschke was happy with his man’s performance,
it was hard to tell.
“He didn’t say a word, to be honest,” says Downing, nonplussed.
“I came back, gave him my bike and said: ‘That’s more like it’.
He didn’t say a word. A couple of the lads afterwards had no
idea I was in the break...”
I’m detecting a hint of things being less than rosy in
the garden following the merger this year between the
German NetApp squad and Scotland’s Endura. Despite some
sniffing around in various quarters, nobody is forthcoming
with the juice, apart from the occasional mention of “initial
teething problems”.
This marriage of convenience between the two squads made
good business sense and gave Endura access to a Pro Continental
licence, a step in the right direction after a very satisfying 2012.
Wins from the likes of Jonathan Tiernan- Locke, Ian Wilkinson,
Erick Rowsell and, of course, Russell Downing, put the Brits at
the head of the UCI’s EuropeTour ranking by the end of March.
Tiernan-Locke’s Tour of Britain victory was the icing on the cake
at the other end of the season. Endura backed their Sky-bound
Devonian to the hilt to claim the first British winner of the modern
era race, no mean feat.
“To finish off the season by winning the Tour of Britain – that
was amazing,” says Downing, a man with a reputation for
winning, equally satisfied in his support role. “Sat on the front,
day in, day out, and still sprinting at the end. It was a good
feeling. I need to find shape like that again...”
Ian Cleverly is Managing Editor of Rouleur. This is an extract from
Rouleur issue 39.
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words Ian Cleverly photographs Daniel Sharp
SPEEDPLAY
R
ichard Byrne came up with a home trainer that held
the bike in position and offered resistance using fans,
a major departure from old school rollers. He called
it the Turbo Trainer. You might have heard of the
generic term. He didn’t have the patent in place for that one...
One great idea lost to others.
gaping technological hole, in so much as they were all singlesided. The other thing with them at the time is that they had a
design flaw: the harder you pull on them, the more likely you are
to pull out of the pedal.
How about tri-bars? Five years in advance of Greg LeMond
blasting down the Champs-Élysées in 1989 tucked down on his
Scott clip-on aero bars, Byrne had come up with a not dissimilar
design, again without patenting. There’s a theme developing here...
“I thought of it like a door handle. You can pull on it as
hard as you want and nothing will happen until you reach the
release point. I also wanted it to float. That was my goal, so I
started playing around with designs and drawing, and figured
the only way I could do it was with the lollipop shape with a true
locking mechanism.
When he finally arrived at the pedal and decided he could
do better, Byrne made sure everything was in order with the
paperwork before laying his ideas in front of the major players
in manufacturing.
“We took it to 22 companies and said: ‘We got this new design:
half the weight of the competition, much better cornering
clearance, much better stack height, far superior locking
mechanism, and it’s double-sided. You’re gonna love it!’
“I had been looking at pedals and other things in the market and
decided I wanted to make a better pedal. There seemed to be a
“And they looked at it and said: ‘That’s a radical departure...
No thanks!’
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SPEEDPLAY
“It performs like a bicycle pedal, but doesn’t look like anything
that had preceded it. So we started out with the legacy of what
had come before us, which now became an impediment to our
potential.”
a longhaired autograph hunter lurking in the vicinity of
Raymond Poulidor – suggest a hippie doing a cyclist’s version of
a Jack Kerouac road trip that continued once he had landed back
home in Florida.
That could well have been the end of the story, except that
Sharon Worman, who happens to be Byrne’s wife, and whom
he credits unconditionally with being the business brains behind
the operation, agreed to throw her eggs in the Speedplay basket.
“Sharon was an attorney at the time, but suggested we start a
company ourselves. She said she’d give it two years and then go
back to work, and that was 21 years ago...”
“I got more and more into cycling and I wanted to race but there
wasn’t much going on in Florida so I drove around until I ended
up in San Diego.”
Byrne’s early years in the sport, as he relates tales of first
seeing the Tour de France in 1972, chatting to Barry Hoban
(who was amazed to see an American race fan in France),
ending up on the front page of L’Equipe by accident –
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Track racing was Byrne’s bag and the San Diego velodrome turned
out to be the perfect place. When an inventor came looking for
a pilot for his super-sleek recumbent, Byrne won the audition
and was duly crowned winner of the Human Powered Speed
Championships in ’83. Two years later, in a coaching capacity,
Byrne helped Jim Elliott to fourth position in the Race Across
America, then a fledgling event for extreme distance nutcases, now
an established event for extreme distance nutcases. Those aero
bar extensions I mentioned earlier featured on Elliott’s machine,
developed further by Pete Penseyres, winner of the ’86 edition and
still holder of the highest average speed for the RAAM.
“My latest hobby is teaching bike handling skills,” says
Byrne, who never seems to sit still for long, as you may have
gathered by now. “It came from teaching the same thing on
the track. It came about after Dave Zabriskie crashed on the
Tour. I had breakfast with him the following morning and
said if he came to San Diego I would teach him some skills,
which I did in one day. The next time I saw Bjarne he said
‘What did you do with Dave? He is like a totally different rider.
We need you to do the same with my guys’.
“It was basically parking lot skills. Zabriskie was scared to ride
next to somebody, to ride at close quarters. Riis’ skills were
much better than most of the guys on his team.”
You are probably building up a mental picture of Richard Byrne
that suggests he is a little bit flaky, in a good-natured, whackedout kind of way; that the Californian sun has turned his head to
mush and all of these side projects are minor distractions from
the business in hand.
But you’d be wrong. He’s always thinking, always looking
for ways to improve, whether that be Zabriskie’s handling,
aerodynamic riding positions or the humble pedal. It’s all
relevant. If I were to cook an omelette in the company of Byrne,
I’m thinking he’d have some marginal amendments – maybe
even wholesale sweeping changes – to the recipe the rest of us
use. No butter perhaps. Heating it under the grill possibly.
Ian Cleverly is Managing Editor of Rouleur. This is an extract from
Rouleur issue 39.
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words Ned Boulting photographs Taz Darling
FROOME
DOG
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E
very now and then, when he’s got nothing better to
do, Chris Froome leaves his Monte Carlo apartment,
shouts to his fiancée Michelle that he’ll be back soon,
and heads off to the beach. This is a normal enough
situation, I suppose. We’re talking about Monaco, where loafing
around in sunshine is part of the residency requirements. But the
rest of the trip to the beach is less typical.
When he gets to the water, he dives in and hunts around the
sand and stones on the seabed, feeling for life, looking for
octopus. When he finds one, he harpoons the holy crap out of it,
retrieves his prey from his spear, and if it’s still alive, ‘flips its
head inside out’ and bashes its brains out on a rock. Dripping
water, and carrying the deceased cephalopod back upstairs to
his wife-to-be, he returns home. Lunch is sorted.
He then thumps his chest, and heads for the shower. (All right,
I made that bit up.)
This story is relevant, somehow. I feel certain there must be
some justification for leading this feature with the octopus
story, other than its fleshy shock value. Maybe it’s a metaphor.
Perhaps because it serves as a reminder that Chris Froome’s
particular kind of British upbringing involved him spending
precious little time in Britain. If he’d been from, let’s say,
Kilburn, for example, he might have developed a passion for fly
fishing tiddlers in the canals at Maida Vale, instead of circling
submarine life forms in warmer waters with murder on his
mind. Or perhaps I like the story because he told me that he’s
been trying to teach Philippe Gilbert (a fellow Monégasque)
how to harpoon sea bream. The Belgian world champion is, by
all accounts, an eager student, but has much to learn. Heaven
help the fish when he’s mastered that.
Are there flippers involved? Speedos? Is the octopus trying to
escape, or has Team Sky’s Chris Froome caught him unawares,
and with devilish stealth? Come to that, how do you flip an
octopus’s head inside out? I can’t picture it.
The truth is this: I just can’t see Chris Froome killing a giant,
bilaterally symmetrical, waterborne mollusc. But then again, a
year or two ago, I couldn’t see him winning the Tour de France.
Doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. Stranger things have
happened, as I hope I’ve just proved.
I’ll be honest, as my deadline now ticks down to the final few
hours. This hasn’t been the easiest feature to write. No sooner
had I rattled out some sort of first draft, than the whole thing
needed an instant reworking, in the light of the ever-changing
power struggle within Team Sky. The story, as I understood
it, had aged within an hour. In Monaco, I had been struck by
how little Chris Froome had seemed interested in stoking the
smouldering embers of La Toussuire, that Alpine climb of the
famous 2012 “attack” There is, in my mind, little doubt that
his publicly semi-functional relationship with Bradley Wiggins,
is also privately, well, semi-functional. Yet, sitting in the
springtime Riviera sunshine, Froome was painting me a picture
of a man who appeared to be widely misunderstood. He was
casting Bradley Wiggins in a different light.
“I don’t think he likes the limelight. I don’t think he enjoys fame.
I think he’d be a lot happier having a quieter life, away from the
buzz, the whole circus.”
But, thinking about it, I think I do know why this simple story
of Côte d’Azur leisure time strikes a chord: it doesn’t seem
very likely.
The problem was, that a week or so later, as I sat at my desk in
London, listening back to my recording of Froome’s carefully
chosen words about his team-mate, Wiggins himself was
indeed caught temporarily in the limelight (at a pre-Giro press
conference), creating a buzz, and whipping up a circus all of
his own. Suddenly, Bradley Wiggins wanted to lead the Tour
team again.
I close my eyes and try to imagine it. But the details prove
elusive. Has he got a scuba tank? Does he carry a knife?
I stopped typing. I had to. This ran directly counter to the specific
account that Chris Froome had only just given me.
“I don’t think he likes the limelight. I don’t
think he enjoys fame. I think he’d be a lot
happier having a quieter life”
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ROULEUR
“I was in my own little world. I came back
down with a huge grin on my face, thinking,
this is what I ride for.”
“Will you seek Brad out, face to face, and have that discussion?”
I had asked him, as we perched on the steps of the Port de
Fontvieille.
“We already had that discussion. He told me that he would ride
for me at the Tour.” He had looked certain, sounded emphatic.
“We don’t need to have that discussion. I think it’s pretty
clean cut.”
They were there to see Bradley Wiggins. Chris Froome wasn’t at
the race at all.
After a text message saying they were running a little late (his
training ride had been a bit longer than planned) Chris and
Michelle pitch up. We shake hands, and since it is a beautiful
spring afternoon, head for the sea front, to do battle with the
noise of the helicopters taking off and landing en route to Nice
airport. There’s a lot going on in Froome World just now.
Perhaps not as clean cut as he might wish.
*
*
*
Taz, Rouleur’s photographer, and I had checked into the
Columbus hotel in Monaco for our appointment with Chris
Froome and his girlfriend Michelle Cound. We had both been to
that establishment before. I mention this only because in 2009,
I sat in its foyer on the eve of the Tour de France listening to
the Garmin-clad Brad Wiggins telling me how he was pretty
certain he had a top 20 finish in him, “maybe even top ten”. It
seemed a bit of an empty claim at the time, and I’m not sure
we even bothered running the interview on our TV coverage the
next day when the Tour got underway. Of course, three weeks
later, he had announced himself as a genuine GC rider with his
fourth place (third if you discount Lance Armstrong, which you
absolutely must). Back then, we had no idea what he was about
to reveal about his potential.
Monaco was crawling with Team Sky operatives that
weekend, I recall. Some were covert, others more visibly
sporting their three-lettered allegiance to the Master Dish
Sellers of Osterley – Sky. Plain old Dave Brailsford, in his
pre-knighted days, was also staying at the Columbus, along with
Shane Sutton. Fran Millar was looking after the marketing types
from BSkyB in the Fairmont hotel on the other side of town,
overlooking the famous F1 hairpin. They were busily putting
together their plans for the launch in six months time. Brailsford
was privately, as well as publicly, repeating his mantra to anyone
who would listen: “Our aim is to produce a British Tour winner
within five years.”
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He has to be at the height of all his powers, both mental and
physical, to zone in on what matters and to disregard the rest.
“Yesterday the penny dropped.” Froome is talking slowly, as is
his way. Sometimes he thinks for a while before he speaks, and
occasionally bites his bottom lip. He’s faultlessly polite. He’s
always been faultlessly polite.
“It was a recovery ride. I went out for two-and-a-half hours
just over the Col de la Madone and I had that feeling that
I had completely switched off.” It must be nice, that. To rise
13 kilometres above the chaos and the clamour, and let it all
evaporate. From up there Monaco must look very small. “I was
in my own little world. Just came back down with a huge grin on
my face, thinking, this is what I ride for.”
There have surely been times when that bit, that fundamental
pleasure, has been easily forgotten. Entering the sharp end of
the most important season of your life, hitting July face-first
as the favourite to win the Tour, with the defending champion
shadowboxing you from afar: this is the stuff which might
threaten to break you, a pressure that will turn cracks into
fissures and blow the whole project apart if you let it.
Yet Chris Froome takes ‘level-headed’ and stamps it onto every
waking minute of his life.
Ned Boulting is the author of On The Road Bike published by Yellow
Jersey Press. This is an extract from Rouleur issue 39.
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THE ONES
Stage 3
Maastricht – Charleville-Mézières
1 July 1969
words Robert Millar
photographs Offside L’Équipe
T
he team leader’s pressure
starts long before that first
roll call. Depending on
the situation it’ll usually
commence anywhere between 9 and
12 months before and there are two
options: there’s the good Tour and there’s
the bad Tour, but don’t be tempted to
think the middle is no man’s land. In
the professional cycling world there is
no such thing. Pro cycling doesn’t see
things as bad, average or acceptable;
it’s a black and white world where you
are only as good as your last race, and
this psychology is the brutal reality for all
the ones.
If the team had a good Tour the previous
year there’s a little bit of slack before the
questions start getting asked. How are
you feeling? Are you going to do better?
Will there be more wins? Will you be
faster?
Have a bad Tour and the same questions
start instantly though this time it’s the
management not the media or fans
asking, and the grilling comes without
the niceties and pre-interview small talk
that success brings.
Any new teams and newly promoted
ones are given the benefit of the doubt
and typically come to their first Tour
with new relationship enthusiasm, their
sights set high or higher depending
on their form. They may like to think
they are under less pressure to win,
but they aren’t.
The ones learn quickly of the fickleness
of their situation. They are there to win,
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Stage 12
Bourg-de-Péage – Mende
16 July 2010
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Stage 6
Merlin Plage – Merlin Plage (ITT)
2 July 1975
or at the very least to be competitive.
They are expected to be seen and that
doesn’t include slipping out the back or
being at the bottom of a pile-up, though
quite how you avoid the second scenario
often depends more on luck than it does
on anything else.
At some point during the process of
becoming a one you grow to be painfully
aware that your form, or the lack of it,
concerns not only your direct future but
probably that of the 40, 50 or 60 other
people employed by the team. It may
even impact on the sponsor companies
depending on their size, markets and
monetary commitment because a good
Tour can mean more exposure, more
sales and more employment for them
too. All it takes is to catch a snippet of
conversation that you weren’t supposed
to hear – probably from a couple of
members of the team staff – for the
reality to smack you between the eyes that
there could be more at stake than just the
bike race. They might even be guys that
you like who were doing the gossiping, but
all the same it’s one of the truths you don’t
need to hear when the pressure is on.
Your job as a one at the Tour de France
is to be at the front when you need to
be. That means all day during the first
week and if you don’t do it naturally then
you have to get used to being dragged
up to the head of affairs on a regular
basis. Later on, once the race has a bit
of structure it’s slightly easier to keep a
decent position, but during the opening
stages having a one on your dossard
doesn’t earn you any more respect when
the fighting really gets going near the
stage finishes. You can’t afford to fall off
and the desperadoes know that, so unless
you are a sprinter you get bumped and
barged, lose the place and end up in the
wind or further back.
You have to get used to being surrounded
by team-mates too; some riders like this
and some don’t, but for most ones the
choice is made for them at the morning
meeting. Flat days and it’s the big burly
team-mates looking after your needs;
mountain stages it’s the climbers; for the
in-between days it’s anybody who is still
fresh. There are no real days off as a one.
The best you can hope for is an invisible
day where you take no wind, make no
significant efforts and everyone forgets
about you. Those days do exist, and they
are almost as pleasurable as the days
when everything goes right.
Robert Millar was King of the Mountains
at the 1984 Tour de France. This is an
extract from Rouleur issue 39.
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