The Mercenary

It turned out that working the Christmas Tree harvest for Francis Blanc was a rite of passage for French and Swiss amateurs from the Geneva region before turning professional. Tour de France stage winner and BMC Director Sportif Jacques Michaud, my Swiss Amateur-Elite (forerunner of UCI Continental) Adal teammates Gerald Oberson and Michel Guillet – who’d both turned pro for Mercier- and myself, all went through Francis’s seven-day boot camp held in France, just to the west of Geneva in the small, Vuache mountains that rise up from the Rhône River valley. 

Francis, who’d been Swiss Amateur Road Champion and ridden three Tour de France’s, one with Salvarani alongside Felice Gimondi during his triumphant 1965 Tour, and another with Molteni, worked as a horticulturist after finishing his racing career. I was in France on my third and final attempt to make it in Europe, determined not to go home. The season was over, I’d worked the vendage (grape harvest) and was still trying to come up with funds to pay the pension (room and board) and get through the winter. My racing friends, somewhat cautiously it seems in retrospect, told me that to go work with Francis, that he’d house, feed me pay me.

My French was still almost null at that point (1979) as Jean Paul - aka Chef de la Mafia, but that’s another story- who’d invited me to France, spoke very good English which infallibly curtails any new language absorption, so I really didn’t understand who Francis was or what he had done in his career, knowing only that an old racing cyclist had a cash job for me. Leaving Jean Paul’s at five am with work clothes in a bundle on my back, sneaking across (I was basically a double-illegal alien) Geneva then back into France, I arrived at Francis’s at 7:30 am, ready to work. It was only when I saw the orange Molteni jersey under his coverall jump suit and the gleam in his eyes, that it dawned on me that I was in deep trouble. 

The trees were all planted on the steep, southern exposure of the Vuache and my job was simple. Francis, who was clearly reliving glory days, would run up the slope with his chainsaw and cut the pines. I would grab a tree, haul it down the to the fire road and his trailer before running back up for the next one, while Francis cried “faster, faster!”. Eight hours later, back at in his restored farmhouse in a state of exhaustion never before achieved, Francis put what was left of me into a 17th century canopied bed. He counseled me in the candlelit room: “You’ve done really well but are much, much too tired to eat. Here’s a bowl of beef bouillon, it’s the best thing you can do for yourself: it’ll enter your system quickly and you’ll better recover for tomorrow.” With that, he snuffed out the candles and I went out right with them. 

The next days passed through a haze of exhaustion. There were breakfasts, but I somehow dimly remember musette bags hung from trees on the mid-day runs back up the mountain. The harvest finally ended and, with a much-improved knowledge of French, a much stronger body and a wad of Francs in my pocket, I thanked Francis and rode back through the night towards home. 

I hit a wall in Geneva. Exhaustion caught up and overcame me. The idea of riding the final 20 kilometers up from the lake to the Voiron mountain and Jean Paul’s café was unthinkable so I rolled over to my friend Daniel Girard’s center city apartment and knocked on the door. Now, you must realize that the Swiss rank with the Japanese in terms of dedication to cleanliness. Even the Germans make fun of how obsessed the Swiss are with neat and tidy. The door opened and Daniel’s family stared at me in shock. There I was, the refugee from the mountain pine forest, covered in sap with pine needles stuck everywhere, my wool riding clothes hanging off my now emaciated frame, the sagging chamois bottom making me look like a baby with a full diaper. To this day Daniel collapses in tears of laughter whenever the story comes up. 

There was a quick flitting of eyes over the parquet floors and perfect walls, a millisecond of calculation, and then, being the wonderful people they are, the Girard’s burst into laughter and brought me in, firmly pinned my arms to my sides and marched me down the middle of the hallway to the bathroom where a glorious hot tub awaited. Dinner, mercifully, was something more than bouillon.

That week with Francis was transformative for me. I’d always sensed on my previous trips to Europe that I, a child of cities and suburbs, was missing that deep, inner physical strength of the European racers who were, generally, much closer to hard agricultural work. Because what is cycling really except hard labor? Francis pushed me to my limits every day – testing me to see how far I could go. I believe he was pleased by the end and do know that we’d developed a simpatico for one another. A new level of confidence in my physical resistance came out of Francis’s boot camp, one that aided me greatly as I moved on to the international arena the following season.

It was only some years later, with my French to a reasonable level, that who and what Francis is came clear to me. Part Two of the Mercenary to follow.