HAPPY NEW YEAR
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David Millar
Rising Star
"I first met David in 1997, at his team's first training camp in France, and was immediately impressed by his professionalism, despite his tender youth. Now four years on, Millar is one of the most exciting prospects in our sport, and is on the verge of breaking through to the very highest level. I believe he will be the successor to today's great riders like Jan Ullrich and Lance Armstrong".
Andre Tchmil
1994 saw Tchmil win a murderously difficult Paris-Roubaix - against Museeuw - and set himself up as a sure-fire winner of more great classics in the coming years. In fact it took more than three years before the best of Tchmil was realized - with victories in Paris-Tours (1997), Milan San Remo (1999), and the Tour of Flanders (2000) establishing Tchmil as possibly the best-ever cycling export from eastern Europe. His rivalry with Museeuw became legendary, with each man determined to out-do the other in any major race that they rode. Whereas Museeuw was both strong and extremely cunning, Tchmil was simply strong. Yet his greatest wins - in San Remo and Flanders - were out of Museeuw's very own repertoire...and fired their competition to higher levels. Tchmil's strength finally started to wane after 2000 - albeit after having won the season-long World Cup competition - and he retired suddenly in the summer of 2002, immediately after an opportunistic stage-win in the Tour of Belgium. The peloton's respect of Tchmil was summed up by the actions of Museeuw himself - who rushed over to congratulate the Russian as soon as he'd heard the news.
Abraham Olano swept to stardom in late-1995 after winning the World Road
Yet Olano's career seemed to suffer, not prosper, because of this un-solicited expectation and inevitable comparison; a factor not helped by the Basque's disability as a climber. 1996 - the year Olano actually wore the Rainbow Jersey - saw him lose the Giro d'Italia in the mountains, and then suffer horribly in the Tour de France, most especially in the Pyrenees, and with an ailing Indurain alongside him... Although Olano finally won a major tour in 1998 - the Vuelta a España - his career was limited to his time-trialing that itself had clashed with other specialists of his era, like Chris Boardman and Jan Ullrich. Olano had come into the sport full of immense promise, and did take some significant victories along the way - yet he was to retire in 2002 as a somewhat sad and disillusioned athlete for whom riding a bike as a living had proved to be too much to bear...
Laurent Jalabert
In almost fourteen years as a professional cyclist, Laurent Jalabert really made a mark on his generation in cycling, winning numerous small stage-races, the Vuelta a Espana, Paris-Nice, Tour de Romandie - as well as one-day classics like the Fleche Wallonne, Milan-San Remo, Giro di Lombardia, Clasica San Sebastian and a World Championship. He twice won the Green Points Jersey in the Tour de France as well as countless stage-wins in the Tour, Giro and Vuelta - in hindsight, Jalabert became the Sean Kelly of the 1990's with a portfolio of wins and performances matched by few others in the modern history of the sport.
I have photographed Jalabert from his early days as a professional right through to his conclusive finale in this year's Clasica San Sebastian - and spent many long hours selecting this tribute of images for you to enjoy.
Salute this Frenchman's palmares - it may be a long time before we see another, so complete, cyclist
When Marco Pantani died on February 14th, the sport of cycling lost one of its most prolific and charismatic personalities, a man who challenged himself to the limits both on and off the bike. We also lost an enormously successful champion who delighted millions of cycling fans with his legendary climbing exploits in the mountains of the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France.
For Pantani to have died the way he did will undoubtedly have cast a shadow over the performances that made him one of the greatest climbers in the history of cycling. So we would like to present this belated tribute in the hope that those of us who really love cycling will remember Marco Pantani the way he should be remembered - as an extremely gifted cyclist whose rise to fame eventually came to overwhelm him.
Johan Museeuw retired on Wednesday, April 14th, 2004, after a 16-year-long career. He takes with him a legacy that may well prove impossible for anyone to beat. Victories in almost all the major one-day classics, a world championship, stages of the Tour de France, winner of the World Cup competition - you name it, Museeuw has probably won it. My tribute to him is based on the years I've been seeing him race, starting way back in 1989.
I've watched Museeuw win mass-sprints. I've seen him win alone after a 50-kilometres breakaway in Paris-Roubaix. And I've seen him suffer the most horrible ill-fortune of anyone I can recall. To me it is a miracle that Museeuw lasted as long as he did - most men would have given up long ago. But Museeuw is no ordinary cyclist, no ordinary man. He is the modern-day version of a stock of Flemish cycling legends - Brik Schotte, RikVan Steenbergen, Rik van Looy, Eric Leman, Frans Verbeek, Roger deVlaeminck, Freddy Maertens and Eddy Merckx - and has earned his nickname, 'The Lion of Flanders', the hard way - I'll really miss him.
Mario Cipollini
Mario Cipollini has retired after one of the most remarkable careers of any cyclist in history. As a sprinter, he won just about every race he possibly could, including a record 42 stages of the Giro d'Italia. He also won the Milan-San Remo and Gent-Wevelgem classics in the same year, and has an endless list of wins in stage-races like the Tirreno-Adriatico, Paris-Nice, Tour of Valencia, Tour de Romandie and Tour Mediterranean. He won a total of 12 Tour de France stages - including four in the same race, 1999. And he won three stages of the 2002 Vuelta a España as well. It was his win in the 2002 World Road Championships that set the seal on Cipollini's glittering career, although in hindsight, becoming World Champion was also the beginning of the end for Mario. His form was never the same again, at 36 years of age it was to be expected one supposes. Cipollini won two stages of the 2003 Giro - equaling then surpassing Alfredo Binda's record at the time - but barely raced much after that time. He started again in 2004 with a new sponsor, and again in 2005 with Liquigas, with whom he managed to win a few smaller races in Qatar and Italy. Cipollini announced his retirement just a few weeks before the start of the 2005 Giro - his honesty quite humbling as he admitted he was no longer the fast-sprinter he used to be.
My own portfolio of Cipollini has a huge amount of space in my archive, one that I will always treasure having built down the years. Cipollini was winning stages of the Giro back in the early 1990's - when I was shooting black and white film! Over the following years, the images kept coming in - sprint-wins, crashes, podium delights like spraying the hostesses with sparkling wine or dressing in Ronaldo's Inter Milan soccer jersey. Cipollini was everything to a photographer that most cyclists are not. Ever smiling, ever serious - but ever so playful - Cipollini played to an audience that only he knew he had. And if ever his ego was at times hard to bear, the results from photographing such a character outweighed any other consideration. I once spent a day at his Tuscan home, actually on a rest-day of the 1997 Giro, and saw another Cipollini altogether. There, under the proud gaze of his grandfather and wife, Cipollini posed with an enviable array of animals, birds, cars, motorbikes and clothing - and showed off a small cabinet that contained over 40 Rolex watches! Cipollini is a man who will never be forgotten, least of all by me. At a time when his colleagues were fast becoming robots on wheels, Cipollini lightened up many a photographer's day - it has been a pleasure putting this tribute together
