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slightest bit of stupidity for my father to lose his temper. One day he decided to punish me for a week and whacked my backside the minute he got in every evening. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t make a sound. When he stopped, I looked him in the eye and said: ‘Is that it?’ Then I pulled my breeches up in silence. No tears. Not a drop of sweat on my face. I knew how to hurt.
    The way someone looks is often merely a facade, but your image sticks even if it is a long way from reality. I’ve always worn spectacles. That’s how I’ve always looked. I’ve always stuck out from the crowd. In everyone’s minds my face never changes and my eyes are always surrounded by the metal rings. You can’t miss them. Everyone knows that for a cyclist this is quite a big thing. You’d hear the same thing from all the little group who had no choice but to wear glasses at a time when contact lenses did not exist: it was a handicap.
    From the age of six, my glasses have been part of me, my physical make-up, the first impression everyone gets when they set eyes on me. As a kid, I would lose them all the time, especially in the woods around where we lived. How many times did I see my father set off with a torch late in the evening in search of my specs, busting a gut to get them back? Amazingly, he always came across them somewhere.
    I played football a lot with a little group of friends: it was actually the only sport I was mad about. The thing was that some of them – and this was fate taking a hand – also rode bikes, guys like Rosario Scolaro, Olivier Audebert, the Olivier brothers, Bernard Chancrin, Stéphane Calbou. I don’t really remember how it happened, but they made me want to have a go. I could see how a bloke like Rosario came into his own on two wheels.
    It was 1975 and I was fifteen: until then I’d never dreamed of getting on a bike in anger. I can’t tell you why that was. But down in the cellar the old ‘gate’ that belonged to my father, a ‘Vigneron’, was waiting just for me. He meticulously restored it to working order. And I was lucky: it was a superlight bike with thin tubing and elegantly curved forks. I loved this slightly old-fashioned machine, which was pretty quick and gave me a certain status. Some guys laughed at me, and I have to confess: there were still two bottle cages on the handlebars like they had in the 1940s. It was an antique, but I didn’t care about the sneers. Nothing fazed me.
    The first time I went out with the lads, my eyes were opened. It wasn’t just that I loved it straight away but from the word go – to my great surprise and the amazement of everyone else – I was able to keep up with the others. I wasn’t stylish, I was a bit clumsy, but when you needed to push on the pedals I wasn’t the first guy to suffer. One day, they decided to test me: no one could leave me behind. In the little sprints we organised among ourselves I could compete more and more often, sometimes zipping past for the win.
    ‘Why don’t you get a racing licence?’ Rosario asked after a little while. He hung out in the next village, Gretz, and was already wearing the green and white jersey of the local club: La Pédale of Combs-la-Ville. On the day I got my licence, in 1976, the club president, Dumahut, told me: ‘This is a tough sport, very tough. You are sixteen, which is already old, and other guys have begun a long time before you. If you want to do cycling, there can be no more messing around. Are you sure you want to do it?’ He wanted to make an impression. It was as if he wanted to put me off. Not a chance. Other guys might have taken a step back on hearing what he had to say, but it just made me even keener than before. So down I went to Combs-la-Ville with Rosario and a trainer, Monsieur Lhomme, who has left an indelible mark on my memory. Would my love of cycling have grown without him?
    Pretty soon, it was obvious that I wanted to race. My parents were against it. It would have been too