A Few Shades Darker
Sometimes the deals are a bit on the shady side. After stage one of a South American race, my teammate and I were both in the top 10. 9th and 4th if I remember correctly. Before the start of stage 2 my teammate, I'll call him Mark, came to us with an offer from the G.C. leader.
He had offered us each $100 if we would work for him for the remainder of the stage race. We were pretty quick to turn down the offer but apparently Mark had already accepted. For the rest of the week he quite obviously was riding for the other team.
It created an interesting situation because although I was our second placed G.C. rider, the team rode for me and not for Mark who was a few places ahead. This was in part because we didn't know how deep a sacrifice he was going to make for the leader but also because we were pissed.
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In the end, despite riding for this other fellow, Mark still ended up as our top placed rider. Of course the ultimate joke was that we never saw a penny of his prize money, which like mine was supposed to be split evenly amongst the eight of us.
Deals are made every day in cycling, on and off the race-course. Most of the time these are just handshakes during a pass in a pace line or even just implied consent during the more obvious strategic accords, but sometimes they are written in ink days or weeks before the actual event and sometimes money, even large amounts of money, changes hands.
Love it or leave it, that's bike racing.
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