A Peiper's Tale

Allan Peiper, with Chris Sidwells. Mousehold Press, 2005. 180 pages paperback, £12.95. ISBN 1-874739-39-0.

Most of us will remember Alan Peiper as a typical gutsy, attacking Australian roadman with an impressive professional palmarés accumulated over the ten years from 1981 to 1991, and a career, usually in a subsidiary role, in half a dozen big teams: Raleigh, Panasonic, Peugeot, Tulip. Like most pros of note, his amateur victories would fill pages, but we don't bother with those now.

Today Peiper is a manager with Davitamon-Lotto, and it's from this perspective that he looks back at his career: the tough kid upbringing, with the drunken and violent father, the mother who worked herself to exhaustion to make ends meet, a dislike for school and any kind of formal education (sign the register, skip off and go training), the former bike-champion grandfather, and the discovery that on a bike he could beat all the other kids and didn't have to rely on anyone else. When the other juniors talked about how their legs hurt, Peiper just didn't get it – what pain? He won the national junior pursuit title. Suffering while enjoying not feeling the pain seems to have been the divine recipe for his life – if you believe in a divinity, and Peiper does.

Why are Australian cyclists so successful in Europe? Because they can't afford to go home if they don't make it. Peiper saved his factory wages to make the trip at 16, headed for Ghent (where else?), lived in the corner of the Plume Vainqueur bike shop, trained like a pro, and raced with the best, especially Eddy Planckaert. They gathered sugar beet tops in the fields and boiled them up with potatoes. Lots of carbohydrate and vitamins, at least. Then he went to live with the Planckaerts, and at least got fed.

On a trip home Peter Brotherton coached him and he began to make good. Soon he was a pro and from here on in his story each chapter is headed with the names of his friends, acquaintances and team-mates. And managers. Peiper's unsuccessful attempts to make Peter Post seem like anything other than the biggest bastard on earth are (I suppose unintentionally) hilarious. Post's impressive armoury of devices for making you loathe and fear him must have been genetic: no one could have learned or invented them. – life's too short.

The writing's a mixed bag, but it improves as we go on. Sometimes it sounds like whingeing: Peiper was clearly treated badly by a number of people in the sport, and there's a note of abiding bitterness. He feels he sees the best in everyone, which made him an easy victim – chicanery robbed him of victory in the Tour of Belgium, for instance. It's clear that he never sucked up to anyone, and the promised jobs and careers in TV, PR work, journalism, all disappeared the day he retired. People love dishing out patronage, especially if they don't have to deliver on it. It massages their egos.

Life after he left the sport in 1992 was an unhappy time for Peiper. Sportsmen are defined by performance: one day a star, the next ‘Who am I?' At one time the former Giro stage winner was making a living selling hamburgers from a street stall. Most of the twelve years were spent in ‘a search to find peace with myself and find out who I am.' All this is covered in no more than four pages.

Like many pros Peiper is confused (‘ambivalent' would suggest too great a degree of self-examination) about his own position on drugs in cycling. There's a strong sense that those who are trying to stamp them out are the villains. Willy Voet was ‘irresponsible' to publish his book – it would be much better if we all kept stumm and shut out the busybodies who can't be expected to understand. So the book will probably be described as ‘controversial'.

Ramin Minovi