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      JULES LE GRAND AND TEAM SYSTEME VIPERE

      Swarthy, handsome, smelling of Calvin Klein scent and looking very much like someone who might well advertise their wares if he weren’t a professional cyclist, Fabian Ducasse strolled through his luxurious Brittany apartment and put a George Michael CD into his Système Vipère mega micro hi-fi station.

      ‘If I rode for the Casino team, ha! I would have only a discount in the sponsor’s supermarket chain!’ he laughed out loud. ‘Or a new vacuum cleaner if I was with Team Polti. If I was with Riso Scotti, I could have all the rice I could eat – so, Système Vipère suits me.’ He turned up the volume, reclined his six-foot and twenty-nine-year-old frame on to a leather sofa and listened to George Michael singing about Faith.

      Faith. That’s what I got to have. Got to win the race or no more super hi-fi for Fabian. Must win. Must conquer. Must blast away any challenge. The maillot jaune must be mine.

      ‘Hey, but if I ride for O.N.C.E. or Banesto, I could open accounts with the banks themselves and they could invest all my money and make it even bigger!’ He slipped his hand down his tracksuit trousers and grabbed his cock. ‘Jawlensky? What can Zucca MV give him but building materials? He has a house, so what can he do with more bricks? You can’t listen to a brick. A brick doesn’t look cool in the lounge.’

      With his hand coaxing and rewarding his erection, Fabian walked over to the window and gazed down on the women sipping coffee in the terrace cafés below.

      ‘In four days, the Tour starts. I must win it this year. I should not have let it go last year. I do not like it that this year I am to be categorized “The Pretender”. In four days, my future starts again.’

      Jawlensky? He took yellow last year only because I wasn’t at 100 per cent after that bug. This year is pay back. No one has the maillot jaune but Fabian.

      One of the women looked up from her café au lait. She was blonde and beautiful and he’d seen her before.

      ‘Four days until the Tour. Bien. I need coffee. Caffeine is good. And it tastes better when sipped alongside a beautiful woman.’

      He made a phone call. ‘Hélène? You can get away? Coffee?’ His girlfriend of three weeks reminded him that she was at work, in the next town, so he would have to be content that she was having to be content with coffee from the vending machine. Fabian shrugged as he hung up. He went down in to the square and had coffee and an ego-massage by the blonde woman whose name he asked but forgot immediately. He felt incredibly horny. But he forgot that too because he wanted to do 80 kilometres on his bike. Fast.

      ‘Fabian?’ Jules Le Grand, Système Vipère’s directeur sportif, phones his team leader from his mobile phone whilst walking across town from appointment to appointment. A suave man of forty-seven, with an impressive shock of well-styled grey hair, a pair of fabulously expensive gold-rimmed spectacles, a discerning penchant for meticulously designed suits and an almost uncontrollable fondness for exquisite calf-skin loafers, Jules Le Grand would almost look more at home in the offices of a Parisian couturier than amongst the chain grease, muscle embrocation and general blood and sweat that accompanies his job on a daily basis.

      Cyclisme is my life, my passion – but why compromise on style? It is not necessary. Only lazy. Laziness is anathema, the enemy, in all to do with cycling, in all to do with life. In that order – compris?

      With a phenomenal amount to organize, check and double-check in the rapidly diminishing days, hours, prior to the Tour, the mobile phone, in Jules’s mind, is as great an invention of the modern age as the carbon-fibre bicycle frame.

      ‘Fabian?’ Jules checks his watch and allows himself the rare luxury of making the call at a standstill.

      With a white towel, shorter than necessary (but that was the point entirely) wrapped around his waist, Fabian crooks the phone under his neck whilst trying to figure out the lesser of two evils – to drip on his cream rug or on his fine wood floor. He is going to have to do one or the other because he couldn’t possibly tell his directeur that now isn’t a convenient time.

       The Tour de France is not just about cycling your way to Paris, but to the next season also. It’s where contracts are confirmed. I must behave on and off my bike, before and during the race.

      ‘Jules,’ Fabian says warmly, ‘ça va? I have just done a good ride. I have pasta boiling.’

       Shit! I made it sound like he is inconveniencing me.

      ‘I wanted to talk to you before team dinner tonight,’ Jules continues. ‘About next year. About you and Système Vipère. How is your stereo?’

      As head of this company, negotiation is my forte. Or one of my many. As directeur sportif, it is my business to know what makes my riders click.

      Fabian hops lightly from rug to floorboard, grins at his stereo and grimaces at the two damp indentations of his feet that appear to be indelibly imprinted on his luxurious rug.

      ‘My stereo is great – I hardly ever have it off. Listen.’ Fabian holds the telephone receiver out into the centre of the room, presuming his directeur can hear Prince. Jules can’t but he holds his receiver patiently, checking the battery level and signal strength, until Fabian decides to return to his. ‘Did you hear?’ Fabian asks. ‘Système Vipère is my life – on the bike and off. At all times, I am a Viper Boy.’

       That’s good – yeah! Jules will like that – a strong commitment that is far more than just a job for me.

      ‘If you like,’ Jules says, ‘you can have a new stereo. That is, if you stay with us next year.’

      The stereo was tempting enough, but Fabian knows it is worthless without a salary to echo, in his mind anyway, his value for the team.

       I’ll stay silent.

      ‘Plus, of course,’ Jules furthers with elaborate sincerity, Fabian’s unsophisticated business strategy making him smile, ‘a substantial increase in salary. How would it feel to be the highest paid rider in the peloton?’

      How does it feel? Fabian pondered moments later, staring at the replaced handset, glowering at his footprints on wood, glaring at the marks still defiant on the rug. It feels fucking great. I feel like fucking. See, it has made me hard.

      But the Tour de France starts in four days. Shouldn’t you save your energy? Celibacy is team policy. Jules is fairly firm on where he stands on sex.

       Fairly firm – ha! From where I stand, I am downright hard. I know my body. In bed. On a bike. No problem.

      ‘Fabian, Fabian,’ Jules cooed triumphantly, checking his messages and finding four were left during the call to his key rider. Before responding to any of them, he phoned the team’s sponsors.

      ‘Bien,’ Jules told them, ‘no problem with Fabian – unless Zucca MV try to sabotage him with a hundred blow jobs.’

      ‘And Jesper Lomers?’ they demanded to know. ‘Has he signed?’