LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
CW pays tribute to the former yellow jersey and Tour de France-winning DS, who was feared and admired in equal measure
Within five years of turning up for his first club ride with East Grinstead CC, Sean Yates had become a top-flight pro. From haring around the Ashdown Forest with his brother and his mates to sharing wheelspace with the likes of Bernard Hinault, he’d come a long way in a short time.
As a rider he won Grand Tour stages and wore the yellow jersey; as a DS he helped Bradley Wiggins to the first ever British Tour de France win. But there was never any grand plan – Yates always just took it as it came. Still does.
“Straight away I was one of the fastest,” he says of those first club 10 time trials he rode in 1977. Still just a junior, before the season was out, he was down to 21, 22 minutes for the distance.
“Soon I was travelling all over the country racing, and trying to climb up the ladder as fast as possible,” says Yates, who was riding road races and open time trials.
He made the GB squad for the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and, after riding a few time trials in France, caught the eye of the renowned Athletic Club Boulogne-Billancourt team. “They said, ‘Do you want to come next year?’ And I said yes. And that was it,” Yates recalls.
ACBB was a feeder squad for Peugeot, one of France’s most prestigious teams. The following year he signed on the dotted line. Quite a feat back then. “It was hard for Brits back in the day to break into the pro scene,” Yates says. “I never had a problem with being away from home. I just got on with it. No telephones, no mobile phones, no emails. You’re just out there writing letters to your family once in a while.
“I went from riding local club events to riding against some of the best riders in history within five years,” he says. Taking on the likes of Tour champion Bernard Hinault, he says, was a scary prospect for a new pro. “Not that I had much to do with him – Iwas swinging round the back most of the time. He was an absolute beast of a rider.”
It’s fair to say Yates was an absolute beast of a rider too, renowned for his ability to absorb huge training loads. There were, however, times he pushed himself too far. “In 1982, I’d made my mind up to try and win the World Championship pursuit. Basically I did two months of intervals, solid. Seven days a week. Four hours a day. My stress scores must have been off the scale.”
For the first month he was flying, Yates says. But his mistake was to keep on pushing. He rode the pursuit champs and came fifth. But, Yates says, “I was on my knees. I was so pissed off with myself – and this was my mentality – that the following week I did three eight-hour rides culminating with the road World Champs at
