Edition: U.S. / Global

Putting a Happy Face On Cycling Team's Woes

By Samuel Abt
Published: April 20, 1995

His bicycle team is off to a mournful start, his sponsor has threatened to withdraw, his star rider is sick, his shoes are nearly submerged in a pool of rain. What, me worry? Everything is on schedule, says Patrick Valcke, smiling a somewhat beady smile.

Valcke is the directeur sportif of Le Groupement, a new and troubled French team. He is French too but not troubled. No. Valcke has been here before, quite often actually for a person in his mid-30s, and one thing he has learned is that he is a survivor.

He has survived other sinking teams, tumult and insurrection, even a heart attack that later was diagnosed as possibly indigestion. So the smile never left his face as he stood in a cold drizzle before the Liège-Bastogne-Liège race and explained why there was nothing to explain.

"We said this winter that Le Groupement didn't have a rider who could win the Tour of Flanders, that Le Groupement didn't have a rider who could win Paris-Roubaix, that our first objectives were the Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège."

The team fulfilled the first part of the program, placing nobody near the front in Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. Valcke warned his riders that some were not in shape and some were not perhaps dedicated enough. Alas, the Flèche Wallonne was also a washout and the outlook was bleak for Liège-Bastogne-Liège last Sunday.

"The team is having some problems at this moment with a lot of riders sick," he said. "Now, unhappily, Luc Leblanc is sick. So everything's a little set back. Luc Leblanc has a fever and he's out of the race, which is a big handicap."

Formed with great fanfare and a big budget over the winter, Le Groupement is headed by Leblanc, the self-centered French rider who finished fourth in the last Tour de France and then was lured away from the Festina team.

Days after he agreed to his new contract, he won the professionals' world road-race championship in a great coup for the sponsor: The man in the rainbow jersey, the one that's always easy for spectators to pick out in the pack, is wearing Le Groupement's name.

The flip side is the Curse of the Rainbow Jersey, which declares that the world champion is such a marked man that he rarely gets a chance at victory. Leblanc has done nothing this season.

"Everybody talks about that," Valcke affirmed. "I knew it in '88 when Roche was world champion and maybe there is a curse and maybe just luck or bad circumstances."

A mechanic with the Carrera team in Italy in 1987, Valcke helped incite the Irish rider Stephen Roche into challenging his team leader, Roberto Visentini, and riding off to win the Giro d'Italia. To the Italians, this was mutiny; to Roche and Valcke, glory. The Irishman followed with triumphs that season in the Tour de France and then the world championship road race.

The next year, with Valcke and Roche at the Fagor team in Spain, the rider lost the season to a knee injury and Valcke sputtered as the directeur sportif. He and Roche talked about forming their own team, the plan fell through and Valcke moved to the fringes.

He found a job when Le Groupement, a door-to-door sales organization, decided last July to invest 30 million francs ($6 million) in the publicity value of a bicycle team.

The publicity, however, was mainly unfavorable. French newspapers and television channels looked at the Groupement sales system, which is based on motivational sessions and individual investment in the company's retail goods, and decided it had a cultlike aura.

When sales began to decline, the sponsor threatened to pull out of the sport. Why buy trouble when it is so abundantly available free? Suddenly riders who signed two- and three-year contracts last fall were faced with a layoff in April.

The 20-man team had been split into two squads, one racing in Paris-Nice and the other off in Colombia, and the riders spent most of March waiting for a decision to be made whether Le Groupement was finished.

"The trouble was around the team, not in it," said Robert Millar, the Scottish climber and one of those who raced in Colombia. "The trouble doesn't affect you day to day, how you ride.

"I think it affected the Paris-Nice team more than us guys in Colombia and probably the French guys most because they read the papers every day and then you get a lot of people asking what the problem is. There is no problem."

In the end, the sponsor decided to continue.

"The team is here, it exists," Valcke insisted with his fixed smile. "Luc Leblanc has a three- year contract and we'll go to the end of his contract. Period. The discussion is finished. If you know something contrary, tell me. If anybody knows to the contrary, let me know.

"Our goals are the same - the Groupement company sells only in France, so our prime goals are races in France. Our program really begins in May with the Midi Libre."

He didn't know it then but Liège-Bastogne- Liège was to be another blank in the team's record. When the race finished with the hills and dark, dense fir forests of the Ardennes, none of Le Groupement's riders were left.

Valcke has been there before and survived.

"The real problem," he decided, "is that Luc Leblanc is the world champion and everybody notices when he's sick. Today everybody is interested in Luc Leblanc because he's the world champion, but have you seen Miguel Indurain yet this season?


"I haven't either."

Probably it was better not to inform him that, just the day before in Spain, Indurain had won his first race of the season.