Chapter 4
Leesa
My old team manager was a spindly, weathered type with a perpetual salesman’s smile and an excess of energy that made younger people look bad, so his hug was less like comforting squishiness and more like a cottonwood tree wrapping its branches around me.
But I respected him. He was a real champion for women’s cycling – not least because his own daughter stood to gain – and I had missed his crooked pep talks and wonky sense of humour.
‘It’s a pleasure to see you back so soon!’
He meant it too, which made me feel like bursting into tears.
I was supposed to be happy to have left all this behind, but grief and guilt were real.
This had been my team, even though it had sometimes felt I’d given more than I’d received in return.
I forced a smile I hoped didn’t look as watery as it felt, desperately hoping my professionalism would be strong enough for this.
It had used to bother me that my parents – especially my mom – had never taken the time to understand why I loved cycling but, right now, I was glad she couldn’t see me like this.
‘Sit down, sit down. Alan will be here in a minute – and Wil. I just wanted to say before we get started that I’m really glad you’re here.
I wasn’t too sure about this arrangement with PowerFuel.
Alan will go over the sensitive bits. Colin’s not as…
solid as he looks and I wouldn’t have been able to trust anyone else. But you’re one of us.’
The renewed tears pricking my eyes disagreed with him. Quitters weren’t part of the team.
‘You understand the kind of pressure he’s under,’ Tony continued.
That dragged my attention off my miserable self. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s on form this year. He’s got a real chance at the maillot blanc, if he can drop the tomfoolery and perform. It’s his big chance to step up.’
Tony’s Irish-Australian mangling of the French maillot blanc, the white jersey for the fastest young rider at the Tour de France, would have amused me if it hadn’t made my insides squeeze. That was a lot of pressure to put on Colin the Clown.
‘Okay,’ I responded thoughtfully, trying to reconcile impishly flirtatious Colin from yesterday afternoon with Tony’s expectations of a young lead rider.
‘The client has set out in a lot of detail what they want from the coverage, which is basically captivating content with a lot of footage of Colin’s butt. ’
I nearly choked when Tony’s gaze swerved to me in alarm.
‘The logo on his shorts,’ I said, swallowing a wheeze. ‘I meant the logo.’
‘Of course ya did,’ Tony said with a doubtful smile.
My cheeks were hot, but I prayed Tony wouldn’t think I was blushing for any reason other than my verbal faux pas. It was a fact of life as a rider that we were stamped with logos all over our bodies and the butt-sponsor was one of the most visible.
‘I just meant I won’t need anything hard-hitting. It’s supposed to be entertaining.’
‘Being entertaining isn’t his problem – it’s keeping his head down for a win. We have the chance to attract more lucrative sponsorships for next year, but only if he doesn’t flip out before he’s secured a good finish in the Tour.’
I wanted to clarify what he meant by ‘flip out’, but that was unfortunately clear, especially after Morgan and I had compiled the challenges-and-pitfalls document for this project, containing a meticulous list of Colin’s bad behaviour.
After he’d missed out on first in the Australian Nationals this year, he’d stomped onto the team bus and let loose a string of profanities.
Of course, the clip had gone viral. His tantrum after a series of mechanicals during his first Paris-Roubaix two years ago had also become legendary – and not in a good way for the sponsors.
It was one of the only times I’d seen a viral video actually censored in order to be shared and ‘Colin Gallagher outburst’ was now the most common search term featuring his name.
‘He puts on a brave face, but he’s not tenacious,’ Tony continued, his voice surprisingly steady, given he was discussing his own son.
‘I’ve seen his power stats. The boy can do it this year – if he wants to, and that’s what worries me.
Creating entertainment for a sponsor… I know we have to do this stuff but, if you distract him… ’
My hair stood on end as I pictured him sprawling in the chair yesterday, a lazy, teasing grin on his face.
Could I distract him as much as he could distract me?
Everyone kept saying how well all of this worked out to have me embedded in the team, but I could only see complications, the foremost of which was that I suddenly found him inexplicably attractive.
If Bill had known Colin had come to my hospital room pretending to be my boyfriend, he would never have sent me and Tony certainly would be giving me a much sterner lecture right now if he knew everything that had happened that day.
‘We all want Colin to do well,’ I said diplomatically.
‘Except the boy himself,’ Tony grumbled under his breath.
‘We want him to win. He’s got by being a larrikin all these years and I know the sponsors love the attention, but he’s not Peter Fucking Pan.
He’s got to grow up now and take some responsibility.
The other riders are working for him and we need to see results.
Whatever you post, it can’t endanger that. ’
With a gulp, I faced the fact that this job was a lot more complex than I’d expected and I was a green intern with more education than expertise. To top it off, I was a quitter who’d never had the psychology to succeed at this sport and I couldn’t afford to let that rub off on Colin.
This was all before I considered what was best for my own career, although I wasn’t feeling much spark for my future in that moment.
‘I understand,’ I assured him solemnly.
His face broke into a grin. ‘Thanks, pet. You always were one we could rely on.’
I forced a smile, although his words were another blow. Sensible. Reliable. A team rider always sacrificing for someone more talented than me. I should have just become a damn doctor, like my parents.
I’d never had much to do with Alan Hargreaves, the men’s DS – directeur sportif, and God forbid anyone said ‘sports director’ instead, even though we were an English-speaking team. I suspected he didn’t even recognise me when he came through the conference room doors, his hand extended.
Wil squeezed my arm in greeting and, before I knew what was happening, Alan thrust a piece of paper and a pen at me, Non-Disclosure Agreement written in big letters at the top. I glanced up in alarm.
‘Has this been agreed with the client? I’m supposed to have access.’
Tony’s gentle gaze dimmed. ‘You will have access. This is about certain information you can’t post. It was a condition of the arrangement.’
Alan picked up where he left off. ‘While you’re shadowing his preparation and the competition, you’ll naturally come across sensitive information, so we’ve set out here all the things that are off limits: Colin’s training stats, FTP, watts and all strategy discussions are strictly embargoed.
We don’t want the other teams to know how good he’s punching right now.
They’ll suspect, but we want to be the underdogs, keep the pressure off him until he can cope. ’
Cope was an ominous word.
After signing the rather daunting NDA, I could finally rush to the breakfast room to grab a coffee before the team meeting, where I’d be officially introduced – or re-introduced. But by then my stomach was churning with nerves and the biting Italian coffee jangled straight into my blood.
I’d known some of these guys for years, spending several weeks a year on team training camp together, but it was different now that my career was officially over.
Coming through the doors into the hall in that state of distraction, a nudge to my shoulder made me jump.
Turning reflexively, I started again at the image assaulting my eyeballs: miles of pasty skin, lightly freckled, over tight muscle and bone; a tattoo of a compass pointing northwest decorating his body on the left, just below his ribs; soft tracksuit pants that clung precariously to his taut waist; tan lines on both arms that were more clearly demarcated than the North Korean border.
I dropped my gaze, muttering to myself about Colin’s inability to put a shirt on.
‘There you are. We’re all waitin’.’ His deep voice was rich and rough, like nougat chocolate, and I was distracted by the scent of him – clean and soapy, like that day in the hospital. He was wearing the branded slides all of the riders wore at the hotel, his feet bare, toes a little crooked.
Nobody has sexy toes. I focused on the toes and not the easy movement of his body, or the way he seemed to set the molecules in the air fizzing.
When I’d finally gathered my composure to look at his face, the view of his stupid moustache – even bushier today, I imagined – got rid of the last few sparks.
‘I hope you’re not waiting for moustaches to become sexy again, because that one is more “little dirtbag” than “Tom Selleck”.’
‘I still secretly think you like this little dirtbag – moustache,’ he added with a wink. ‘But it took me four weeks to grow this. I can’t shave it off until Derek admits mine is better than his.’
‘Why am I not surprised it was for a bet? If you’re trying to remind me how juvenile you can be, it’s working.’
He grinned, the bright curve of his mouth acting on me like an amphetamine. ‘I can be a jerk for a good cause.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if that’s your calling in life.’ And there was my first angle. If I couldn’t get him to behave, maybe I could turn him into a loveable idiot at least.
‘It isn’t enough that Derek sacrifices his own chances of winning for you?’ Derek was a support rider, like I had been. Lead riders like Colin used the slipstream of support riders to conserve energy for an attack later in the race.
‘Is this a chip on your shoulder?’ he said, pretending to pick something up from my upper arm. ‘Looks like a big one.’
‘Well, thank you for removing it,’ I said sweetly in reply.
‘The ’tache isn’t a competition, you know.’ He made that ‘pfft’ sound that he must have learned from living half the year in France for nearly a decade.
‘You just told me it’s a competition. I might be a bit strung out on coffee and jetlag, but you can’t pull that on me.’
‘That’s rough.’ He shoved a hand in the pocket of his tracksuit and sauntered ahead of me, unfortunately giving me an irresistible opportunity to admire the ripples in his back, the glimpses of his tattoos: the Southern Cross and Olympic rings on one forearm; a simple, but fascinating dragon across his shoulders.
‘Are all you guys allergic to clothes?’
‘I’m not allergic to clothes,’ he insisted, shooting me a pout over his shoulder. ‘It’s doctor’s orders. Gotta air the road rash.’
With a flourish worthy of a 1950s Hollywood musical, he gestured to the ugly red patch down his side and my stomach turned.
‘You’re familiar with road rash, right?’
My gaze snapped back up to find him peering at me with a glint in his eye.
He had the unnerving ability to speak directly into my bloodstream when he continued, ‘I seem to remember a pic from the Vuelta a few years ago. You crossed the finish line with a rip from your ribcage to your thigh – via the back.’
The lump in my throat grew unbearable as I tried to interpret his tone.
There was a hitch in his voice. Or perhaps I was just terribly susceptible to it.
I had been certain he’d never spared a thought for me during the years we were on the same team – including that year when I’d crashed at the Vuelta.
‘What, you never looked me up?’ he said with another pout.
‘I haven’t needed to know how to swear like an Australian,’ I quipped.
His response was a swagger. ‘You have looked me up.’
‘Colin, I’m using you to create content for my client. Of course I looked you up.’
He bit his lip, sending a jolt through my veins, although hopefully that was just the coffee. ‘I kind of like that you want to use me.’
Before I could splutter a response, he disappeared into the conference room, where the DS and coaching staff were waiting to give the day’s briefing, and I stumbled in after him, my skin too tight.
Everything he said shot straight to my gut – or a little lower – and I had to struggle to pull myself together.
Rather than a sleek, white-painted, glass-panelled space, at this family-run hotel tucked into the middle of nowhere in a place called Lüsen in the back corner of Italy, the wood-panelled conference room looked more like the place where hunters used to meet up to smoke pipes and play cards while plotting each other’s deaths.
It still reminded me of the times when I’d sat with the team like this, Bonnie and Doortje next to me, and Lori being Lori – rushing in late.
The pressure for results had always clouded our friendships, especially with Lori, who I’d never truly called a friend, but I missed those girls now.
I wished I’d made more of our camaraderie.
After the NDA I’d just signed, nothing was clearer to me than the fact that I was no longer on this team. I’d never been on this team, but the women’s equivalent – ‘just’ the women. And I’d never made enough of an impact to be remembered for anything – except maybe crashing out of my last race.
Slumping into a seat at the back, I took a few moments just to breathe, feeling the air in my lungs the way I’d been taught to while pushing my body at high intensity.
God damn it, there had been a good reason I’d asked to distance myself from cycling in my new job.
I had enough to deal with before I even added the adrenaline hit of verbally sparring with Colin.
I paid attention to the opening of the session with only half an ear but, when Alan looked over at me, Colin leaped to his feet.
‘Ahhh-hm,’ he began, something alarmingly like a smile on his face as he scratched the back of his neck. ‘Because she’s a friend of my sister’s, I thought I’d… introduce our special guest from PowerFuel.’
I peered at him through narrowed eyes. He must have known Lori and I had never been close.
After a pointed look from Colin, Amir leaned over the laptop at the side of the room, connected to the projector, and Nelson jumped up to tap off the lights and slowly – way too late – I realised Colin was up to something.