Our Man, Sean Yates
It’s been awhile since a book has been reviewed on Velominati. Who has time to read books? I needed some background on Sean Yates and was surprised to know he had written an autobiography back in 2013. This book is a real beauty. The book is stitched together with his own accounts of life and accounts from friends and fellow racers. He was a record keeping maniac so he has a lot of good detail of his early cycling days. His friend’s accounts all tell tales of a big friendly guy with huge capacity to put everyone in the hurt locker, including himself.
Interestingly all his family were vegetarians and he had never eaten meat until he moved to France. It certainly dispels any myths about vegetarians not being able to be super athletes as Sean was most certainly that. He was a natural rouler, easily going under an hour on his very first attempt at a 40km time trial (bastard!). Luckily his family was very supportive of a lad who chose to ride rather than go to college.
Back in his day the riders were coach-less and often clueless. Yates was doing hundreds of push ups everyday; keeping the physique more rugby player than cyclist. Young pros would show up at races, get hammered, go home. And repeat. Here is an excerpt of Sean in Paris as a neo-pro, now eating meat and everything else.
In Paris, we’d go for a ride in the morning then laze around. My favorite trick was to go to the patisserie along the road and buy a huge family butter cake. It’s sort of a white cake, made of absolute pure fat. I’d mush it all up, dump the lot into a salad bowl and sit there eating it with a spoon like it was a bowl of muesli. -Sean Yates
Preparing [the cake] was a total ritual for him, like a heroin addict cooking up, says John Herety [fellow racer and flatmate], The cake would be divided into squares, then the whole lot would go in the sort of bowl reserved for family fruit salads. Then a large pot of fromage blanc would go over the lot. That gave him the excuse to call it “yogurt cake’ like it was some kind of health food.
The book is full of these great stories. Sean Kelly tells a few tales of Sean’s descending abilities that are pure gold. Early on, Yates’s Merckx-like natural talent kept him in the professional ranks despite his lack of the race savvy those who grew up on the continent may have already had. He rode for Peugeot with mentors like Phil Anderson and Stephen Roche, then eventually joined the 7-Eleven team, which turned into Motorola. It was quite an amazing career.
I’ll spare you any further details because they are much better when read right from the book, available used and maybe even new from your local book seller or library. This is the best rider autobiography I’ve read in many years and highly recommend it. It gets the V-bunker’s five cogs rating.
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@ChrisO
Yeah, Kelly does address the PDM fuck up with the intravenous "rehydration bags" being improperly stored, but that's about it. Kimmage is much more forthcoming on the subject.
@Gianni
I've read and listened (WhisperSync for Kindle is great) to about a third of the book today. The way Yates tells it, he quit Sky because Brailsford was telling him how difficult it was getting to defend his position in the team given his association with dopers (i.e. Armstrong). It would be great to hear DB's version of how that conversation panned out. Personally I can live with "I didn't dope" comments, but I struggle to believe his assertions of obliviousness to it going on around him.
Two books I've read recently. The Kelly book is his original bio, published in 1986. Very cool old school info and really illustrates Kelly's root as a poor farm boy.
Alpe D'huez is simply a great book. I bought this after seeing the Tour on L'Alpe, but wondered how Cossins could fill a whole book about one summit finish. He uses the mountain's 1976 edition as a framework (think a non-fiction version of The Rider) to hit on a number of stories. Fast reading.
He still looks impressive, but he clearly is not eating that cake/yogurt/heartattackinabowl thingy anymore.
It's rumoured that he had to quit Sky as a result of the hear attack in a baguette thing...
@wiscot
Thanks for posting this, @wiscot. Gents, in the Wikipedia article that @wiscot has linked to, there's a fine description (under the 'Jacques Anquetil' subheader) about Altig's Trofeo Baracchi win, together with monsieur Chrono himself. (There are some beautiful musings on the same race in 'The Rider', too, as most of you will know...)
So what do you do when you're teamed up with Jacques Anquetil in a time trial? You give him a push, that's what...
And what do you do when you're riding the 1967 edition of Paris-Roubaix with the Prophet on your wheel? You give him a guided tour of the pain cave, that's what...
RIP Rudi. Truly one of the greats.
Speaking of wikipedia - on the entry for Sean Yates -
Still reads "For a rouleur Yates climbed very well for his weight."
Is anyone from this parish responsible? Respect, if so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Yates
@wiscot
Stumbled across this: I'd actually never seen this footage before:
The sound track is ludicrous and the commentary is in Italian (so no clue; perhaps Pedale Forchetta will chip in at some point...), but the footage, while grainy, is amazing. Altig pushing Anquetil hard and losing his own speed in the process, then sprinting to come ahead of him again to put him out of the wind, then pushing him some more, etc... He looks indefatigable.
@ErikdR
Thanks, that was amazing!
@Oli
Cheers - and yes, what an incredibly strong rider Rudi Altig must have been in his day. You may already have read it (in which case, my apologies), but this quote from the Wikipedia article mentioned by @Wiscot could almost serve as narrated voice-over for the clip (author: Rene deLatour):
"Generally, in a race of the Barrachi type, the changes are very rapid, with stints of no more than 300 yards. Altig was at the front when I started the check - and he was still there a minute later. Something must be wrong. Altig wasn't even swinging aside to invite Anquetil through... Suddenly, on a flat road, Anquetil lost contact and a gap of three lengths appeared between the two partners. There followed one of the most sensational things I have ever seen in any form of cycle racing during my 35 years' association with the sport - something which I consider as great a physical performance as a world hour record or a classic road race win.
Altig was riding at 30mph at the front - and had been doing so for 15 minutes. When Anquetil lost contact, he had to ease the pace, wait for his partner to go by, push him powerfully in the back, sprint to the front again after losing 10 yards in the process, and again settle down to a 30mph stint at the front. Altig did not do this just once, but dozens of times... "