Easy Rider: My Life on a Bike by Hayles Rob

Author:Hayles, Rob [Hayles, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2013-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

10

First Day at Big School

14 February 2001. St Valentine’s Day. The perfect day for a massacre. My first day as a professional cyclist in Europe; and nine years to the day since I’d packed in my job at Gales brewery.

Early spring races like the Tour of the Mediterranean are supposed to be a way to ease into the season, a chance to get into the groove of the racing and test how effective the winter’s training has been. Sure, they are important and plenty of guys want to win, but these races are like pre-season friendlies compared to the Champions League of the Classics and major tours.

The opening stage of the Tour of the Med is starting in Antibes this year and heading towards Mont Faron, on a steep road that rises from the coast at Toulon up through the woods for about 5.5 kilometres until the sea is 500 metres below you. The stage is only 140 kilometres long and it will take even the slowest riders about three and a half hours to complete. This looks like one of those easy stages they’re always telling you about, the perfect place to blow away the cobwebs and get my feet under the table.

Mont Faron is still a long way off. We’ve been racing just under an hour but already we’ve covered almost 50 kilometres. For the third time in five minutes I’m apologizing in two languages for bumping into someone. ‘Sorry. Désolé.’ My French is coming on. I’ve learned a whole bunch of swear words this morning.

I’m down at the back of the peloton; the long, thin rope of riders has slipped through my palms until I’m right at the end of it, bouncing around, feeling the full whiplash effect. I’m stuck in a knot of riders that has flared out at the back of the line. Way up in front of me I can just about see the head of the snake. There are more than a hundred riders ahead of me, all in single file, before it gets to us desperate few who are trying in vain to move up the line.

I can see where I want to be – slotted comfortably in the first third of the field – I just can’t get there. As soon as I reach the front of our little knot of riders and try to go past a couple of the men at the back of the line, I have to ride in the wind, unprotected from their slipstream. Immediately it causes my heart rate to rise and my breathing to gallop out of control. So I ease off ever so slightly and in the blink of an eye the half a dozen riders it’s taken two minutes to scrabble past swamp round me and I’m at the back of the knot again. I feel like the odd sock in a washing machine full of clothes. I just hope everyone else back here feels the same.

I glance across at some poor sod a few metres to our left.

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