Francis Lafargue hugs Indurain (left) and Delgado last May.
The memory of cycling, which is at its core, the substance from which it is made and which gives it meaning, is not the books, but the spoken word, the lives of those who tell the stories. They, their lived memories, weave the past and feed us all, they feed us generously, as Francis Lafargue did in the morning on the tour excursions or at dusk while drinking wine. That was at the end of the last few years, when only passion brought him closer to racing and friendship and he generously worked in cycling to help the small Spanish teams, Jon Odriozola’s Euskadi Murias, Juanjos Kern Oroz, to keep up with the French Organizers sought a place in the races, and the Tour, so gigantic, welcomed him and signed him up, because without him, without the lives of those who built it, the great race would be worthless.
Before that, until a dozen years ago, until modern people began to be allergic to memories and words, Francis was one of the protagonists of the great Spanish adventure of the Tour.
In mid-1983, a young man, almost a child, approached José Miguel Echávarri, who was walking in his Pamplona across the Plaza del Castillo. “I found out that the tour has invited you to join,” he told the Reynolds director in perfect Spanish with a thick French accent. “Rely on me for anything you need. I’ll help you with everything.” It was Francis, a Basque from Biarritz, a French social security official who was passionate about cycling. Almost as crazy as Echávarri, who enthusiastically took him on as a jack-of-all-trades, as an assistant to masseuses, as a mechanic, as a negotiator with the police, with the hotel managers, with the race organizers, as a press officer, as a public relations officer, as a shadow for cyclists, as Umbrella and as a protective shield. As Monsieur Non, Impossible, Mon Ami, and as Monsieur Oui, Bien Sur, of course.
At that time, Perico Delgado, who had just finished his military service, a pledge, and Miguel Indurain, an 18-year-old youth, and José Miguel Echávarri and his Reynolds, were courageous men who, guided by passion and desire, began the dream Tour against the advice of all the old men of Spanish cycling, who saw the Grande Boucle as nothing more than a human-destroying race. When Ángel Arroyo devoured clouds of mosquitoes with his large, open mouth, quickly conquered the Puy de Dôme, the Reynolds, so much passion, so much daring showed everyone that the tour was not a destroyer of people, but definitely a builder of legends , and Francis, his ambassador, able to transform Indurain’s monosyllabic Spanish words into long French tirades at press conferences to the delight of journalists, both material for their chronicles and a quick forgetting of the irritation and respect he always felt he provoked them when he acted more than just as a communicator but as a gendarme for Perico Delgado or the Navarrese in their tours. Bodyguards of their holy figures. The character in the shadow of his successes.
When a Spanish cyclist riding for a French team needed help collecting his pension for his years spent in France, Francis took care of the paperwork. If a youngster wanted to look for a team in Spain, Francis would help him. When the tour reached Bayonne or Espelette or Cambo les Bains, so close to his little house in Larresore, where he lived with Nanda, his wife, a stone’s throw from Ainhoa, the Roland pass and the Dantxarinea customs office, his provost, Leblanc, Pescheux , Prudhomme, asked Francis to coordinate people and actions so that the organization was perfect, the one who chose the paths, the goals, the exits. Traveling with Francis through Iparralde, through its towns and its coquetry, the novice who turned gray like his own hairs, who suffered from alopecia from a young age that he had left, was the adventure of knowing when he broke I never knew , where or when it would end, nor how many stories there would be about the old men of cycling, about Labadie, importer of Zeus on the other side of the Pyrenees, manager of Super Ser, owner of memories of Luis Ocaña and Jesús Aranzabal, who also died recently and who, at the age of 90, I cried with my head bowed and wished I had died sooner; of Cescutti, protector of Ocaña; by Manuel Manzano, always a republican, by the mechanics who had a friend who worked at Airbus in Toulouse and gave them foreign titanium screws to make the Marotías de Ocaña lighter …
Suddenly, at the age of 68, recently turned 68, Francis died in his bed in Larresore at dawn on Thursday, without making a sound or notifying anyone, discreetly, as he did everything. His voice has sometimes become a book of compilations and biographies of local cyclists, and recently, in July, he gave friends his latest work, a beauty, l’histoire du Cyclisme en Pays Basque Nord, but with it goes life, the word, that makes it hit is gone.
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