For a stoic Dane who adamantly didn’t wish to make a spectacle of himself with tears when he finally made his public confession to taking drugs, as had Richard Virenque and Erik Zabel and many others, Bjarne Riis, winner of the 1996 Tour de France, cites many instances of having been brought to tears in his memoir “Riis, Stages of Light and Darkness,” published in Danish in 2010 and then two years later in English. He does manage to hold off the tears in his televised confessional press conference in May of 2007, six years before Lance Armstrong caved in with Oprah, but he does admit to tears before going on stage when his wife wishes him well and almost succumbing to them when asked how it felt to tell those close to him that he had been doping after denying it for years.
He had hoped finally admitting to his drug-taking would give him some peace, but it continued to weigh on him. His team press officer, Brian Nygaard, was a close friend and could sense he didn’t feel fully unburdened even months later. When he expressed concern for his well-being Riis wrote, “I couldn’t hold back my feelings, or the tears any more. ‘It has been hard,’ was all I was able to say before I started crying.” He cried when he told his team at the start of The Tour de France in London six weeks after his confession that he thought it best that he not accompany them during the upcoming three weeks of racing even though he was the man in charge, as he didn’t want to be a distraction with the press continuing to make an issue of his drug-taking and the prevalence of drugs in the sport.
Tears accentuate many of the key moments of his life. His parents divorced when he was young. Riis split his time living with his father and grandmother, rarely seeing his mother, who had gone to live on a commune. When his father would spend time with a girl friend, tears would stream down Riis’ face when he’d have to say goodbye to his father. His father was an amateur racer. Riis earned a new bike from him when he won his first race as an eight year old. He brought his father to tears when he won The Tour de France, and his wife too. Riis speaks of tears at the finish of the 1989 Tour when he rode as a domestique for Laurent Fignon, who lost to Greg LeMond by eight seconds after starting the final stage, a time trial from Versailles to Paris, with a seemingly insurmountable advantage of fifty seconds. Fignon’s devastating loss had Fignon in tears and many of his teammates, but not Riis.
Though he remained immune to tears then and succeeded in suppressing them during his drug confession, he lost the battle when his father died. His father’s death affected him so strongly he didn’t feel as if he could compose himself to give a eulogy. His long-time physiotherapist could tell what a state he was in and offered to give him a treatment. As he prodded his body, Riis let out all his pent-up emotions and sobbed for fifteen minutes. His fifteen-year old son was in the room. Riis could see he was in a state of shock never having seen his seemingly stoical father in such a state. But it opened the door to them to express their feelings with one another.
It wasn’t the first time his son had seen him cry, as there were tears when he and his wife told their two sons they were getting divorced a year after he won The Tour de France. Riis had fallen in love with a Danish handball champion he met at the 1996 Olympics. They had tried to avoid each other after establishing a friendship at those Atlanta Games that never went behind a kiss, but their connection was too deep and genuine to keep them apart. When they reconnected several months later, she as a fellow elite athlete could fully commiserate with Riis’ struggles to maintain his Tour-winning form. The year after his win he dropped to seventh, as his young teammate Jan Ullrich won The Race. He was eleventh the following year in the Festina-marred edition. An elbow-injury forced him to miss the 1999 Tour and led to his retirement.
There are tears sprinkled though the ten plus years the book covers of Riis’ career as the owner and director of a team. Two more were drug-related. Both he and Iván Bssso are tearful when Riis has to dismiss him from his team before the start of the 2006 Tour when Basso was linked to the Puerto blood-doping revelations. The wife of Bo Hamburger, another of his riders, is brought to tears when he tested positive for EPO and was suspended. There were tears of happiness all around for his rider Nicki Sørensen when he won a stage in the 2009 Tour.
Unfortunately the book was written before Peter Sagan joined his team and Oleg Tinkov became the owner, two dynamic personalities who would have further enlivened the book. As it is, it was plenty rich in material. When he entered the pro peloton in 1986 he gave no promise that his career would warrant a book. He was fortunate to land a position on a small Luxembourg team. Despite no wins in three years Fignon recognized in him the qualities of a strong domestique and recruited him to his System U team in 1989. He later praised Riis as “the most loyal rider I’ve ever come across. He’s never tried to ‘steal’ anything from anyone, and never tried to trick anyone. Guys like Bjarne are hard to find in this game.”
Riis finished 95th in his first Tour in 1989, which he comsidered “not bad.” He used the same words to describe his 107th place in 1991 after not finishing in 1990. He began taking EPO in 1993 and saw its immediate effect finishing fifth. Until then he’d relied on cortisone and caffeine, which also elevated his performance, but not to the extent of EPO. His wife was aware of his drug-taking and was accustomed to seeing him give himself injections, but she was leery about EPO and thought that was going too far. At that point Riis limited what he let her know.
Besides the drugs Riis had another secret weapon, an herbal green tea that he would swig before the finish of a race, giving him a quick energy boost like taking a caffeine tablet. Occasionally he would open a teabag and swallow its contents. Once the particles went flying in the wind. George Hincapie noticed and blurted, “What the hell was that Bjarne? Gun powder?”
Another of his ploys was outftiing a bike with a large chain ring that was smaller than normal in the 1996 Tour when he ended Miguel Indurain’s five-year reign. He switched to the bike just before the climactic Huatacom climb so he could trick his adversaries into thinking he was much stronger than them being able to ride in his large chain ring when they were all in their small ring. “I could see it in their eyes,” he wrote. “Each time I attacked, it was in the big ring, while they struggled in their small chainrings. It was that “secret gear” that did it for them.”
He rode the last seven kilometers on his own, winning the stage while wearing the Yellow Jersey that had he assumed seven stages earlier in the Alps. He extended his lead over his 22-year old teammate Ullrich and pretty much secured the win. He described the last few kilometers as being “painful. Very painful.” But as a true cyclist is “let the pain be my friend.” Riis traced his relationship to pain on the bike all the way back to his first race as an eight-year old. He said he could ignore the pain in his legs then simply by thinking about the new bike that was awaiting him if he could beat the five others he was competing against in a time trial. He started last and overtook all of them. Bradley Wiggins recently commented on his podcast that pain is okay, but not suffering.
I’ve been hoping this book would turn up at a library that I’ve dropped in on ever since it came out, but could wait no longer when I noticed the ebook available for $4 on Amazon. It was well worth the wait, though he made no mention of Christian Vande Velde who rode for him for three years from 2005-2007 before joining the inaugural Garmin team. The translation by Ellis Bacon, a noted English cycling journalist, flows effortlessly other than a few jarring Englishisms here and there—bloody and sod-all and rubbish.
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