CQ22-Digital

ace meal at 11.30. The hotel kitchens buzzed
with soigneurs filling musettes and bidons for
the day ahead. 15 riders lined up in the predawn
gloom to ride the 2 km of the départ
fictif along the quays of Bordeaux before
the flag dropped at 1.58am. Like a gang of
narcoleptics out on a spree, the peloton of the
62 nd Bordeaux-Paris headed sleepily towards
Châtellerault where the trainers were poised
to pace their charges the remaining 299 km to
the Parc des Princes.
Attacking effectively in a Dernypaced
race is all about the symbiosis
between trainer and rider, the almost
imperceptible upping of the revolutions
until your rear wheel has disappeared down
the road as if you simply teleported from
here to there. Wambst sees the twin
Gothic spires of Chartres cathedral, one
of the most recognisable landmarks
in the race, and imperceptibly ups the
pace, turning the pedals of the Derny
just a little faster.
It’s nothing and everything. His turn of speed proves
devastating with just over 60 km left to race. He is
careful in the way he turns the screw not to blow
Simpson’s legs out from under him. Both men and
their machines move away towards Paris in perfect tandem.
When Wayne Hildred raced the 1982 Bordeaux-Paris alongside
Paul Sherwen and Sean Kelly he wasn’t so lucky. His pacer was an
ambitious Belgian wheeler-dealer and sometime agent called Staf
Boone, who decided to make the race hard from the start. Hildred
remembered “screaming out at Staf ‘Ease up! Easy, easy! Slow
down, Staf!’ and he wouldn’t listen.” By 8am Hildred’s legs were
shredded and he was vomiting at the roadside. Gradually, trainer
and rider were forced to reverse places: “After a while I would just
sit up and refuse to keep the pace and eventually I gained some
control over him.” Hildred finished an hour down on the winner,
Frenchman Marcel Tinazzi, and lost 6 kg in the process.
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