RETRO
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Communist Bloc disintegrated in 1989, Russian and East European cyclists arrived en masse into the professional scene. Procycling looks at Alfa Lum, the Italian team of Russian emigrés
Alfa Lum: Italy meets Russia
At the beginning of November 1986 I went for a cycle ride through the outskirts of the city of Voronezh, 300 miles – or 15 hours’ train ride – south of Moscow. It was three years before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, and I was on study leave for three months in a city that, at the time, was largely closed to West Europeans because of its important arms factories.
On the off-chance I might find a bike to ride, I had packed a jersey and shorts – the jersey was a battered Del Tongo one, as worn by Giuseppe Saronni, which I had ripped up badly in a crash – and when I made friends with a lad who owned a racing bike, which was extremely rare for anyone in the Soviet Union, he lent it to me, and I set off for a spin down roads with vast potholes along the tram tracks.
Almost before I had time to get going, I was overtaken by another cyclist, roughly my own age. He took me to where he and his friend kept their bikes, with a few manky pictures of European racing cyclists on the wall. He wanted to buy my jersey. He was desperate to buy my jersey. We arranged to meet near my student hostel the following day to seal the deal; he never turned up, for whatever reason.
Just over two years later, I stood in the crystal clear sunshine of a small Italian Alpine ski resort, San Martino di Castrozza, and watched as 15 Soviet cyclists lined up for a photoshoot in the jerseys of the Italian team Alfa Lum. The jerseys were red, naturally, with white stripes. It was a hell of a long way to that glamorous location from what I’d seen in the depths of the Soviet Union, with its mud, poverty and vague aspiration for things Western.
This was a huge development: the first time since the arrival of the Colombians in 1983 that the cream of a country’s cyclists had transferred en masse to the professional sphere. It also marked the end of over 40 years of sporting history. Once the Iron Curtain had dropped across Europe, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic” as Churchill put it, the athletes of the Eastern bloc had remained strictly amateur, forbidden from competing with Western professionals.
Paradoxically, in cycling at least, the better East Europeans had been more ‘professional’ than many western pros; the Poles, East Germans and Soviets had full time ‘jobs’ in the army or police force, while the common or garden European pro might be on a nine-month contract and had to go back to the farm or the factory for the winter. The East Europeans had dominated amateur cycling to the point of nausea. They would turn up annually to races like the round-Britain Milk Race and win seemingly at will. There had been isolated examples of pros from the Eastern Bloc, notably Poles such as Lech Piasecki, and in the
mid-80s some Soviets had ventured into open races. This, however, was the moment when over the wall the cyclists went. They were a superbly talented group, headed by 32-year-old Sergei Sukhoruchenkov, Olympic champion in Moscow in 1980 and winner of pretty much every major amateur stage race in his time. Sukho was past his best and would never make it as a pro, but he gave the team clout.
Alongside him were the two brightest young talents in Soviet cycling: a relaxed looking 22-year-old from the closed city of Gorki, Dimitri Konychev, and Vladimir Pulnikov, a 23-year-old from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Pulnikov had won a stage of the GP William Tell at 20, and had already finished second twice in the Peace Race; Konychev had won the GP Liberazione. There were also riders who had dominated the Milk Race in previous years: Vasily Zhdanov, Ivan Ivanov and Piotr Ugrumov.
Alfa Lum were not a minor outfit. The aluminium fittings company had been around Italian cycling for several years, and had landed – fortuitously it has to be admitted – the World Championships the previous year when Maurizio Fondriest took full advantage of Steve Bauer and Claude Criquielion’s finishing-straight close encounter at Renaix. Fondriest had found the big money at Del Tongo, but the team’s management remained firmly Italian, under the hands of a seasoned DS, Primo Franchini.
The deal had come about through various intermediaries. Ernesto Colnago, long-time supplier of bikes to the Soviet national team, had been involved, and Alfa Lum were to ride his machines. The main player, as far as I could gather, was an agency called Dorna – which had recently sealed a lucrative deal to take the USSR national goalkeeper Rinat Dasaev from Spartak Moscow to Sevilla. Through Dorna, the Soviet cycling federation had been paid about half a million dollars for the services of its riders.
These contorted deals were typical of the way that Eastern Europe ‘opened for business’ as the Curtain was raised. As perestroika gradually took effect, sports clubs in the USSR were beginning to charge for membership and top soccer clubs such as Dynamo Kiev and Shakhtar Donetsk became self-financing.
It was a time of sporting convergence: the Soviet Boxing Federation signed a deal with US Promoters and, having run a Hungarian Grand Prix in 1988, Bernie Ecclestone began looking into staging a Formula One Grand Prix in Moscow. Western sports like baseball and golf were being exported to the East and ice hockey and soccer stars were ‘sold’ to Western clubs. At the same time, tentative openings were being made in disabled sports and as part of glasnost, there was even discussion of ‘amateur’ status and the greatest taboo of all – doping.
The Alfa Lum riders remained the ‘property’ of the federation, which paid them in roubles, on top of their Red Army salaries. If you’d spent any time behind the Iron Curtain, you realised the catch in the Alfa Lum deal within seconds: the rouble was worth way, way less than the dollar, so the beneficiaries in the deal were the federation and the sponsor. The riders would receive accommodation and living expenses plus pocket money in lire: in other words, peanuts. Which is why the headline on the story I wrote for a Fleet Street paper a few days later was a simple one: Soviets Riding for Roubles.
There was big money in this. When the striker Alexandr Zavarov was sold by Dynamo Kiev to Juventus, the deal was worth $5million and enabled Dynamo to become self-financing. The Alfa Lum riders were not alone: the tennis star Andrei Chesnokov competed under a similar arrangement which he complained earned him $25 a day, not enough to feed his family. It’s why the biggest star in Soviet cycling at the time, Viatcheslav Ekimov, shunned the Alfa Lum deal, bided his time for 12 months, and then signed his own deal with Peter Post’s Panasonic, who had already snapped up the talented East German sprinter Olaf Ludwig.
The new arrivals weren’t greeted with universal acclaim by the cycling
The riders remained the ‘ property’ of the federation, which paid them in roubles, on top of their Red Army salaries
world when they made their debut at the Tour of Sicily. There were those who said that the Soviets had been hyped out of proportion, and those who had very real fears that sponsors would look to spend their budgets on cut-price East Europeans who were hungry for western currency. In the event, Alfa Lum didn’t make waves, though Konyshev came close to winning a stage. But there was no sign that the new arrivals were going to take pro races apart as they had done among the amateurs. And East Europeans did turn up in professional cycling in droves, but it was a gradual process.
That first year was not plain sailing. There were communication difficulties between the riders and team management, in spite of the fact that the riders began learning Italian the minute they arrived in that sunlit ski resort. The principal issues were cultural: as Eastern Bloc sportsmen the cyclists were used to being told what to do and struggled when left to their own devices between races in a foreign country, far from their families in an era when instant communication from West to East was next-toimpossible. The Iron Curtain was still firmly in place. The breakthrough came that August, when Konyshev put in the ride of his life to take the silver medal at the World Championships road race in Chambéry. He made it into the early break with Thierry Claveyrolat among others, survived when the favourites made their moves from behind in pouring rain, and had enough zip to finish second behind Greg LeMond, overhauling Sean Kelly on the line as the Irishman realised to his despair that he had just missed his best chance of taking a rainbow jersey.
The Alfa Lum dream took the Soviets to the Tour de France in 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the road between Lourdes and Pau, over the Col de Marie Blanque, Konychev infiltrated a classic break of strong climbers who weren’t contenders for the overall; at the finish he outsprinted Johan Bruyneel and the former yellow jersey Bauer to take Russia’s first stage win in the Tour.
Alfa Lum shut up shop at the end of the season, but many of its riders had shown enough to go on to long and fruitful careers. A 1990 acquisition, the Uzbek sprinter Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, went to the Carrera team along with young
GC rider Pulnikov, who had won a stage in that year’s Giro. ‘Abdu’ went on to win nine stages and three green jerseys in the Tour and lent his name to a rock band, although less happily, he managed to test positive seven times in 1997.
Ugrumov moved to the Spanish SEUR team, along with former Milk Race winner Ivanov. Ugrumov finished second in the 1993 Giro, and took two mountain stages and second overall in the 1994 Tour riding for the Gewiss team. The most successful Alfa Lum alumnus, although a slow burner, was Andrei Tchmil, not highlighted as a future star in 1989 – he was a relatively mature 26 - but whose career came to fruition after he landed at Belgium’s Lotto team in 1994.
Under the tutelage of the late Jos Braeckevelt, he took a dramatic win in the muddiest Paris-Roubaix of recent years, the 1994 edition. He added Milan-San Remo in 1999 – one of the great victories, a final-kilometre dash that ended with Erik Zabel on his heels on the line – and a year later he landed a hairsbreadth sprint victory ahead of his sworn rival Johan Museeuw in the Tour of Flanders. Tchmil changed nationality multiple times, flying the Belgian, Ukrainian and Russian flags, and that of the little republic of Moldova, where he ended up as minister of sport.
The longest career of all the Alfa Lum debutants was that of Konyshev, who first moved to the TVM team, a loosely organised outfit that suited his erratic talent. His teammate Robert Millar commented on his propensity for going AWOL, then turning up with unshaven legs at a race and managing to win it. Konyshev’s 17 year career – largely with Italian teams after TVM - included nine grand tour stage wins and the points jersey in the 2000 Giro, and gave him around 40 professional wins. The wheel of East-West interface came full circle at the end of 2019, when his son Alexandr, born in 1999 and the owner of an Italian passport, turned professional for Mitchelton-Scott. Now we think nothing of Eastern European and Russian riders winning races - after all, they’ve been doing it for 30 years.