ACBB - 1980

by Rupert Guinness, The Foreign Legion (1993)

With Anderson and Millar out in the wider and cut-throat territory of professional life, Wiegant and Escalon once more plundered the store of English-speaking talent. And when Irishman Stephen Roche came along, they found a diamond amongst this apparent treasure chest. Lucien Bailly, the French Cycling Federation’s technical director, brought Roche to Wiegant’s attention. To this day, Bailly still regards it as his best deed. Roche went on to win the amateur Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Reims, the Tour du Haut Languedoc, the Grand Prix de France, the Chrono Madelainois and the Tour de l'Ile de France.

Having won the 1979 Rás Tailteann stage race in Ireland the year before, Roche left Dublin on February 11, 1980, with two big suitcases and a shoulder bag, bound for Paris. He had the idea, as had Anderson, that ACBB would provide the top-line preparation he needed for th Olympic Games later in the year. There would also be a full-time job offer to consider from his employers Premier Dairies, who had supported his cycling while he worked as a fitter up until 1979.

There was no sign of how his life would change, certainly not of the fortunes that would come. Rather the nine-hour delay of his scheduled 8:05am flight was a sign of the struggles ahead. Unlike Sherwen, Jones, Anderson and Millar who flitted in and out of the ACBB ranks with little resentment of their presence, by the time Roche arrived the French riders were starting to get a little fidgety about foreign newcomers who kept stealing the limelight.

Typically when Roche eventually arrived in Paris there was no one to meet him at the airport. And when he got to the ACBB office at 10:30 pm, there was not a soul to be found, no message or even a door left open for him to shelter from the biting Parisian night air! He slept on the cold concrete steps until he was awakened at 4am by a group of young cyclist sent to collect and drive him down to the ACBB training camp in the south of France.

It was there that he met tha ACBB ‘family’ including experienced Anglophile Parker. It was also his first encounter with Escalon and more significantly Wiegant. With Wiegant, Roche made the big mistake of trying to be too familiar with him. ‘In one of my first attempts at conversation with him,’ recalls Roche in his biography, The Agony And the Ecstasy, ‘I referred to him as tu. He replied sternly, “Mr Stephen Roche, Mr Wiegant isa colleague to you. When you speak to a colleague you say “vous”, you say “tu” when you speak with a friend. Mr Wiegant is not friend.”’

That put Roche in his place, for the most part, but he still lapsed into periods of over-familiarity, even up until Wiegant’s death in 1991. Behind Wiegants’s verbal armoury came punishing and selfless tacing demands of Roche, as if to remind the Irishman of the seriousness in which ACBB approached racing. As he discovered in his first race, the Grand Prix de St Maxime, there were pecking orders to be respected in the team.And as a newcomer he was way down on the list of ‘protected’ riders.

Wiegant made that doubly clear in the St Maxime race when, as Roche alleges, he rode the Irishman off the road with his car after Roche chased down a protected ACBB team-mate, named [Loubé] Blagojevic, even though circumstances would have seen the two away and racing for firts and second place. ‘After the race I was in shock, total shock,’ said Roche.

The Dubliner, unsurprisingly, laid low for several races until the Grand Prix of Les Issambres – Wiegant’s home town race. Roche badly wanted to win. Just for the sake of making his boss happy. And while he did win from a break of five riders, which included three other ACBB members, he discovered hat his greatest opposition was his team-mates. For the three ACBB riders in the break had worked in a combine with the other two to try and ctch him. ‘I could not believe that all three of my ACBB team-mates were riding against me. To them I was nobody. I didn’t exist. I was so innocent. I didn’t even know what a combine was,’ said Roche. He would not be the first to be educated on the meaning of a combine. Nevertheless, that win did chnge things. Suddenly he didexist. Overnight his innocence was gone. He knew what a combine was. Furthermore he was now a protected rider with the very team-mtes who had previously stood in his way.

Roche was not prepared for the bout of depression tht would strike him upon returning to Paris for the classics – all caused by Wiegant’s order that he use ACBB’s Le Coq Sportif shoes rather than his old and trusted Colnago pair. The change from a leather to plastic sole resulted ina severe tendon strain during the opening Paris-Ezy race where he was third. At the time he did’t know what had caused the injury and doctors continued to tell him to ‘take another week off’. It was not until he resumed riding three weeks later that he realised the real cause.

In his autobiography Roche says he ‘went back to zero when there was no problem with my knee’. He put his own saddle and handlebars on the bike and went back to riding with his Colnago shoes. Voilà! His tendon didn’t even hint at a strain. And soon enough, he was back to top form and thankful for having heeded the advice of his Irish mentor, Peter Crinnion, a former cyclist who had plenty of experience of racing in France, and kept badgering Roche to at last ‘stick out the year’. Since then, the pair have been inseparable and Crinnion has stayed as Roche’s manager throughout his career.

Despite Crinnion’s attempts to calm Roche, the Dubliner questioned the fact that Weignant didn’t provide an income whereas other French riders got about 2,000 francs a month. Roche did not. Even after he followed up Weignant’s explanation that only winners were paid, he still didn’t even after scoring an impressive tally of victories in the season.

Finally, Roche adapted to this, and narly every aspect of French club racing – including the cramped living arrangements in ACBB’s two-bedroomed apartment in Boulogne-Billancourt, where he slept in the living room. In the years to come as a professional oche always kept in close touch with Wiegant, staying at his house before the Grand Prix des Nations. ‘It os a good house for the cyclist. You eat at the same time each day, the routine is never broken. He knows when to talk cycling and knows not to talk cycling all the time,’ says Roche.

Whatever the frustrations of that first year in France, Roche knew that the secret of survival was to get along with the others. He didn’t balk at trying to make friends even though his French was non-existent at the time. François Hervo, the local butcher, was one handy ally. He always saved Roche a prime piece of meat each day and charged the same ten francs. Roche, in turn, would bring in more Anglophiles who would be treated similarly. And before he knew it, Hervo’s backroom was filled, on a regular basis, with tea-drinking English-speaking cyclists watching television.

Once on the road and heading from race to race, Roche learned the serious side of his job. The ACBB might have been an amateur club, but it was professionally run. And no day was more serious than that of the amateur edition of Paris-Roubaix, the notorious cobblestoned classic in northern France. Roche won his first encounter with the pavé, outsprinting Belgian Dirk Demol whose name would hardly be heard of again until he won the professional edition in 1988.

Roche had never seen cobbles or pavébefore. And he still wonders how he raced his first Paris-Roubaix so well. ‘I rode in the gutter at the side of the pavé, on the actual pavé itself. I went from left to right to the middle as if I’d been on pavé all through my career,’ he said.

Roche has a vivid memory of Wiegant that day, his bulky torso leaning out from the bouncing and rattling ACBB tam car with a smashed front window. Wearing a thick black jacket and a Peugeot cap, the ACBB ptron roared abuse at Roche for letting Demol sit on his wheel. ‘Wiegant told me that if I did not win I was going home.’ Quickly, Roche tried to get Demol to ride in front, but to no avail. As the closing kilomteres approached all he heard was Wiegant yelling: ‘You are going home!’ Fearing that Wiegant would carry out his threat more than the disappointment of defeat itself, Roche had no choice but to win. And he did.

Like Anderson six months earlier, Roche’s Olympic dreams were starting to fade. Before Paris-Roubaix he had already calculated the odds of getting a professional contract. And while initially rebuffed by Wiegant, his win at paris-Roubaix and then in Paris-Reims in a solo break over the last 40km turned the tables.

Roche still went to Moscow but his efforts fell short of expectation. His desire to join the professional peloton had overridden his Olympic ambition. Upon his return, Peugeot offered him a contract of 4,500 francs a month for the 1981 season, 500 rancs less than what he would have earned working as a fitter at Premier Dairies. Sensing his own worth early, Roche asked Peugeot for 5,000 francs. He got what he wanted. His spirit continued to show: he still raced hard for the remainder of 1980. His team, ACBB, was rewarded with time trial wins in the Chrono Madelainois and the Grand Prix de France and second place in the Grand Prix des Nations.