This is the absolute worst thing to happen to you in a breakaway
When a great day becomes a brutal one
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Being in a breakaway can make for a tough race–unless your teammate has the yellow jersey, giving you a free ride to the finish. That’s exactly what happened to Andrew Randell and Uncle Matt at a stage of Tour de Beauce in 1997. He and I were riding for the super-stacked Espoirs de Laval team. That year, the amateur squad would go against the pros. Beauce had been upgraded to a 2.4 ranking so there were lots of big names ready to win some UCI points. The team had current national champion Czeslaw Lukascewicz, former national champ Mat Anand, future national champion Randell, as well as u-23 champ, Alexander Lavallée and all-rounder Gino Beauchamps.
Future WorldTour rider Michael Barry and I were ringers for the team, riding a few stage races that summer as guest riders. The team had been home to many star riders, like two-time world champion Roland Green and multiple national champion Peter Wedge, and Beauce was a big race for the Montreal-based team.
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The dreaded stage three would finish atop the tough Mont-Mégantic, a 5.6 km climb with an average grade of 9 per cent (with some spots at 15 per cent) and our team was defending the yellow jersey of Lukascewicz. The plan was to keep the jersey, either with the tough-as-nails Polish Canadian or through Anand or Barry, both terrific climbers. That meant riders like Randell and me had the task of marking early breaks. The race was spicy from the start, but Randell and made the move, and it quickly gained minutes and minutes on the pack.
Huzzah! I thought. We get a free ride to the bottom of the hill! Great! We weren’t expected to work in the 10-man break, since we had the yellow jersey. What a fabulous day this will be, I figured. I can skip the death lines of those long, never-ending roads in Quebec, and maybe even make it to the bottom of Mégantic in the lead and even carve out a nice little top-ten result.
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That dream eventually melted when I could hear some crackling in my earphone of the team radio. I could hear the late Antoine Bedwani, who ran the team, screaming at us in French. I couldn’t quite make it all out as the break was so far ahead and we were out of radio range. “Tu…dois…attendre! Arret!”
Randell and I, rolling at the back of the break, were dumbfounded. Did he just tell us to…stop? We kept riding, hoping we’d misunderstood the French. A few minutes later, we saw the team car pull up, with a furious Bedwani telling us we had to wait. There were too many dangerous men in the break and we had to go back to the pack and help bring the break back.
Of course, I’m pretty sure you’re not even allowed to turn around and ride backwards in a race, but we definitely had to wait. One famous American pro laughed at us both and said, “yeah, that sucks bud.”
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So there we were, circling on the road and track standing, cussing under our breath, in front of bewildered spectators for what felt like hours. (It was probably a few minutes.) We both drank some water and a feeling of foreboding came over us. What was going to be a (relatively) easy day now just become a terrible one. We knew as soon as we were “caught” we’d have to immediately go to the front and pull all day, and eventually run out of steam, get dropped and try to not lose too much time.
And that’s what we did. We dropped out of the break. Only to go back to the pack. To then help chase the break…we were just in.
Ultimately Anand would finish second overall to Tour de France stage winner, Jonathan Vaughters. Lukascewicz and Barry both finished in the top-ten which gave Espoirs de Laval the overall team win, in front of all the pro teams. Most of the riders on the team that year would ultimately turn pro, but to beat the big guys as an amateur team was a coup. (I was also one of the rare times I personally got to stand on a podium at Beauce, apart from sign-on.)
I’ll never forget the feeling of waiting with my good pal Andrew, as the lactic acid filled our legs, watching the break disappear up the road, and seeing the peloton slowly come into view.
