WHEN THE STARS DON’T ALIGN
The now defunct magazine Cycle Sport devoted in 1996 an entire issue to a Robert Millar retirement special, guest edited by the great climber, who now has a new identity as Philippa York. York wrote profiles of all the teams for whom she had raced: Peugeot, Z, TVM, Le Groupement… All bar one: there was a blank page given over to Fagor, with whom York had raced in 1988. The experience had been so painful that she didn’t want to recall it, or give those who ran the team any credit.
It’s rare indeed for any team to inspire feelings like these, but York is happy to explain why she felt the way she did. “It was a complete mess as a team. Normally a cycling team is a bunch of individuals who work together. Here, they were all individuals and didn’t work as a team. Everyone was an individual and it stayed that way - all the riders, all the staff, anyone to do with the company. You never knew if you were going to get paid, what your race programme was, and who would turn up at any given race. You ended up looking after yourself, because you couldn’t trust anyone else, even the guys you knew. Everyone had the joie de vivre sucked out of them by the circus,” she says.
There have been many candidates in cycling history for the title of Worst Team Ever, and Fagor’s 1988 vintage would have been at the top of the list with the
