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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A vegetarian pro athlete. Awesome. I'm not against eating meat, I just strongly oppose the way animals are treated, at least in the U.S., to get that meat. Two things I ponder:
1) How much pollution, livestock suffering, and petroleum are involved in making sure the NFL has enough 275-350 pound humans to smash into one another, causing permanent brain damage, so that bored Americans can be entertained every week from August until February?
2) When will we see a pro athlete who eats only what he raises and culls? Despite my exasperation, I'm waiting for the day...
Yates also features in the odd amusing anecdote in John Deering's "Team On The Run" book, about the Linda McCartney team. That's well worth a read too.
Ha, I just bought the Yates bio and, as an addendum to my post above, seems that Deering was Sean's co-author.
@Gianni
Does he talk about Motoman? Why he and Sky parted ways? Lance?
@Ron
There are heaps of veg/vegan athletes at the top of their sports.
It's one or the other.
@Steve Trice
Definitely, amusing and along with Wide and Legless (also very amusing) gives an insight as to how far British professional cycling has come.
@Beers
Yes please. Had the scooter but not the parka. Was part of the revival in the 80s/90s. Happy days
@brett
Unfortunately not. Like the Kelly effort it is distinctly light on any insight into doping as I recall.
On the other hand it is a very good read about life as a domestique and what motivates people in that role.
I once asked Jens Voigt who he thought was the best DS around and he nominated Yates. I could imagine those two would work well together.
@MangoDave
You won't be disappointed. I will be when my commission shows up.
@ChrisO
ChrisO is correct, no discussion of doping. The Motorola years are discussed and Yates stayed on riding another year to help Lance when he first came to Europe but retired before Lance made his post-cancer comeback. He did eventually DS for Discovery team, maybe for a year. He and Lance are still friends.
He does discuss being forced to quit at Sky and how much it pissed him off. I'd have to reread that part but he does intimate the Sky thing was doping related, which it obviously was despite the public statement Sky put out.
Well worth reading if you can get your hands on this book.
@ChrisO
Those two were cut from the same bolt. They would have done some damage if they were racing on the same team.