Roule Britannia by William Fotheringham

Author:William Fotheringham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448161171
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER TEN

A Man Called Horse

THE SCENE IS a roadside store not far from the Californian town of Santa Rosa. The date is January 1992. The Motorola professional cycling team, at training camp in the area, stop off briefly during their six-hour training ride to stock up on food. An up-and-coming amateur star who has been invited to ride with the team – indeed he is contracted to turn professional with them after the Barcelona Olympics – begins to ‘goof around’. A grizzled senior pro with the team growls: ‘You won’t be laughing when you’re a pro, boy.’ Our youngster is all of twenty years old and quite a legend in his own Dallas backyard, but he quails and says little for the rest of the time the team is in camp: two weeks.

Lance Armstrong admitted he was ‘terrified, no, petrified’ of Sean Yates and remained that way for some time. This is an intriguing thought, given their characters. Armstrong would become cycling’s undisputed number one, an intimidating, prickly man respected and feared in equal measure by most within the sport. Yates is quiet, never one to blow his own trumpet, a man who communicates in understatements. If the brash youngster who would go on to dominate cycling in the early twenty-first century was running scared of Yates, that says much for the uncompromising aura that the silent man from Sussex had acquired by the early 1990s.

His reputation proves all the adages about actions speaking louder than words. By the time Armstrong made his acquaintance, Yates was legendary for several things. He had won a time-trial stage in the 1988 Tour de France at record speed, but that was now in the past. By the early 1990s, the big man specialised in dragging Motorola at colossal speed in the team time-trial stage of the Tour. This is a nightmarish leg for weaker elements, who have to maintain the pace set by the stronger men in the team. Yates’s teammates would speculate beforehand how much pain he was going to give them, and ask him how hard he was going to ride. This was a mistake, as it merely motivated him to ride harder.

There were other celebrated Yates fetishes. He had learned to use his size where it was most appropriate, on the high-speed descents from mountain passes, where he would line the peloton out at 60mph, defying death – usually bareheaded – to set a pace that far outstripped any accompanying motorcycles and cars. Soon after Armstrong made his acquaintance, Yates began targeting the Paris –Roubaix classic, held over a network of cobbled lanes in northern France in April. It is the most feared race on the calendar. The cobbles, nicknamed the ‘Hell of the North’, are nightmarish to race on: slippery in the wet, throwing up clouds of dust in the dry. Many pros simply avoid the race, knowing that getting through the 160 miles without at least one crash is highly unlikely. Each year produces a crop of broken legs, splintered collarbones, shattered dreams and ruined seasons.

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