Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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‘I carried on and my lead kept increasing.’ When it went past nine and a half minutes, Pelier was yellow jersey on the road. But it kept growing, to ten, fifteen, eighteen minutes … ’It was twenty-five minutes at one point,’ Pelier says. ‘But even then, your mood is changing all the time. You believe, you don’t believe, you believe, you don’t believe. I tried to concentrate on managing my effort, and I did that quite well. I wasn’t a young rider; I was experienced.’

Pelier was a typical équipier, or domestique. A team man who, if he ever had individual goals, had learned that if he wanted a professional career he had to forget them. His career had been shaped by such hard lessons. In his first year, 1985, he was riding the Tour de France; they were in the Alps, on the 269km stretch between Morzine and Lans-en-Vercors, and he felt strong. So, in a moment of impulse, he attacked. ‘There were eight cols, and I attacked on the second one. What I didn’t know was that the leaders had decided to neutralise the race until the seventh climb.’