Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage Page B

accent. By moving to Grenoble at the start of the year he got to know the other French riders in the area much better than me. But this was a double-edged sword, for they also got to know him. He wasn't liked. I learnt this from Thierry Claveyrolat and Patrick Clerc. Thierry was a former team-mate of Stephen Roche's at La Redoute. He lived in the village of Vizille, twelve kilometres outside Grenoble. Patrick had raced with Sean Kelly at Sem; he lived at Brignoud, north of the city. Both had trained regularly and had travelled to races with Ribeiro since the start of the season and complained that he was always the last to put his hand in his pocket when it came to paying for coffee on the way to a race. When I told them I was sharing a room with him they gave me an awful slagging and, wanting desperately to be accepted, I abandoned any notion of defending him and decided to play along. I didn't like him anyway. When I saw him taking a vitamin injection after the Haut-Var race in February, I instantly branded him a junkie even though this was unfair. He was, however, tight with his money. It's funny but because he never spent much, I assumed he didn't have much. And because I was a better rider, I assumed I was better paid; so I was always prepared to pick up the tab when it came to buying papers, cakes and coffee. But I was wrong; he was just tight.
    I learnt this in a conversation with Marc Mingat. Marc informed me that Ribeiro was paid £500 a month more than I was and had two return flights to Brazil paid for by Braillon each year. Braillon had an office in Rio de Janeiro and it was good PR to have a Brazilian on the team, so when Ribeiro came on the market he was snapped up. This revelation turned me completely against Ribeiro, and I told the others the news – which turned them against him also. This was a mistake and very petty of me, but survival was the name of the game and the revelation would gain me some extra points.
    A week after moving to Grenoble we flew to Holland for the Amstel Gold Race. It was a bit like Liège-Bastogne–Liège and I rode really well, finishing as the top rider on the team, in twenty-first place. Two important stage races were approaching, the Quatre Jours de Dunkirk and the Tour de Romandie. I knew I was starting to find good form and I desperately wanted to ride in the Romandie. Dunkirk would be cobbles and crosswinds and I knew I would be much more suited to the hard climbs and more sheltered roads of Switzerland. In stage races teams were limited in the number of riders they could enter. At Dunkirk it was eight and at Romandie six. There were eighteen riders on the team, but places for only fourteen, which meant four would remain at home without racing. Not racing meant having to train each day alone. There was no way of simulating racing so inevitably the rider's condition would drop, making it hard for him to impress when he raced again. I didn't want to ride in Dunkirk but it was better than being at home. Thevenet explained he was sending all his pure climbers to Switzerland and that I should be grateful to ride in Dunkirk, as four riders would ride in neither race. I wanted to argue that I was a pure climber, for I felt I was, but decided to say nothing. Dunkirk was better than nothing.
    I rode poorly all week except for the last day, when we had a hilly circuit race around the town of Cassel. Here, I was given instructions to go up the climb as hard as possible. My teammate Regis Simon was lying second overall to the Belgian Dirk de Wolf and we thought the heavily built Fleming might crack on the steep but short slopes of Cassel. I gave it everything I had and split the bunch to bits, but we could not get rid of De Wolf, and Regis finished second.
    A week later we were in Bordeaux for the marathon Bordeaux-Paris where the format had been changed since my debut the year before. The old tradition of the twenty-minute break at Poitiers where we had stopped to link up with our