‘I popped a Berocca tab while everyone else injected’

Colin Sturgess, who was 1989 world pursuit champion and 1990 British road race champion, remembers obeying a long list of bizarre rules as a young rider in Europe

As soon as I got into a European pro team, I got the talk: “This is your job now, you have to look after yourself medically.” Immediately you start thinking about the darker side of that. But it wasn’t all about doping.

I remember being given 11 syringes and told when to use them. I didn’t use them; I was doing races like Paris-nice in freezing cold and taking a Berocca tablet, while the others were having vitamin injections. Anyway, later in the year I asked British Cycling to test the syringes, and 10 of them were legitimate, vitamins and minerals. There was only one they weren’t sure about.

You picked up the knowledge by listening to the older guys around the meal table. When guys like Fons De Wolf and Frank Hoste, who both won Classics and stages in Grand Tours, are talking, you listen. I remember them discussing how Hennie Kuiper [another Grand Tour stage and Classics winner] lost weight by eating salad first at dinner and drinking Vichy water so he was full and wouldn’t overeat pasta. That probably worked, as you are starving on a big stage race and can overeat the wrong stuff. Some of it was crazy, though.

Butter was banned, but you could eat half a kilo of brie. Another was, ‘Don’t eat tomatoes the day before a race’. I mean, why? How were you supposed to avoid tomatoes in Italy? We took the middle out of bread to cut calories, and I still do that, I can’t help it. But the daftest was ‘no swimming’. It could be 35ºc and there was a swimming pool at the hotel, but nobody went in. I mean, what harm would it have done?