Born to Ride: The Autobiography of Stephen Roche by Roche Stephen

Author:Roche, Stephen [Roche, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781448129669
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

* * *

‘WELCOME HOME, OUR HERO’

MY PRIMARY AIM going into the Tour’s final mountain stage was to undermine Delgado’s confidence totally. We thought his morale might have taken a knock after he had failed to finish off my Tour hopes at La Plagne and now I wanted him thinking: ‘This guy is superhuman. He can’t be beaten.’ Even if I only gained one second on him at the finish in Morzine, I knew it would be enough to ensure that Delgado would have a very uncomfortable night. I wanted him to go to bed asking himself whether the Tour had slipped from his grasp, sowing doubt in his mind as we got closer to the time trial in Dijon.

I talked it all through with Eddy after we’d had dinner at La Plagne. Our plan was to ride close to the front to show everyone that I was still there and still fighting, and then attack Delgado on the Joux Plane, the final brute of a climb before the descent into Morzine. Eddy was particularly determined to do all he could because he felt that he’d let me down by not being with me on the climb to La Plagne. He promised he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

The odd thing about the day to Morzine is that it has become overshadowed by the mountain stages that came before it, perhaps because on the face of it not much happened until the final few kilometres. However, don’t be in any doubt about the severity of this test, especially given what we’d all gone through before. It featured more climbs than any other stage, with the Cormet de Roselend, the Saisies, Aravis, Colombière and then the Joux Plane all on the agenda, before the steep descent into Morzine. Although they were not quite of the magnitude of the passes of the previous two days, they were all tough climbs.

Before we got going, I sought out Tour director Jacques Goddet to see if I could make a final appeal against the decision to impose a 10-second penalty on me, which had pushed Delgado’s lead out to 39 seconds. I was furious the previous evening when I had found out what had happened. I was told that the ten-second penalty was imposed on me because I’d taken a bottle that wasn’t Coca-Cola-branded – the Perform I drank before the ascent to La Plagne – from a team car. Coca-Cola was the sole provider of bottles on the Tour that year and we were obliged to use them.

Goddet told me that a commissaire had seen me take a non-Coca-Cola-branded bottle and added that someone in my team car should have emptied the contents of the Perform bottle into an empty Coca-Cola one and handed that up to me, but no one thought of it. He confirmed there was no chance of getting the penalty overturned because I was one of the most high-profile riders in the race and the commissaires had instructions to watch us all closely and come down on us if they saw anything untoward.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.