The Puncher “Do you have any idea who he might have been?”
“No, not at all. Whenever I thought of him since, I just referred to him as “The Puncher”. I never talked about him with anyone. Not my family, not my friends, not my team mates, and certainly not journalists. But I know you. I know you won't make a fuss about it.”
“Yes, yes, I won't. But still, I'd like to know more about this mysterious man. Did he have any distinguishing features? How old was he? What sort of an accent did he have?”
“No, there was absolutely nothing distinguished about him. Now, after all those years, I couldn't even describe his face anymore. The one thing I do remember about him, is that he always seemed a bit, I don't know, I don't think there's a word to describe it, but a little blurry. Like as if he wasn't fully there.”
“Blurry? Not fully there? Like a ghost, or what??”
“No, not like that. I can't describe it. His speech was also a little strange, a bit old fashioned, and kind of rusty, like as if he didn't talk very often.”
What is going on here? The most successful Russian cyclist in years was trained by a Ghost?! He surely must be joking, he does have a queer sense of humour.
But something about the way he says it makes me hesitant. I'll ask him about this again after he's got some sleep, digested his victory. I'll ask him what happened when he started work now, we don't have all night after all. This special needs to be out tomorrow.
A working Man “So, Ivan, tell me, what happened when you started work?”
“Well, as was to be expected, I got a job logging. Going out in that battered old pick-up, shaking through potholes, through the wild Siberian forest, I felt worse than I ever had. No more cycling. No more training.
After 45 minutes, we arrived at last. The landscape there was nothing like anything I had ever seen. On my rides of course I didn't come out here, out of fear that my dad would see me, so what I saw came as a shock.
It looked like the moon, or something. No trees to be seen within kilometres of the camp, just dead stumps. I was shocked. I was brought in to the boss' office, in a makeshift building that vaguely reminded me of a shipping container.
As I was too young to work cutting down the trees, I was given a job as a gruzovój mál’čik, as most of the young boys were. Our main job was carrying equipment from A to Z. That was hard work, but it was simple, so I didn't complain.”
Spoiler
This is the official half way point in the prologue, although I think I'm about 2/3 through it already. It just seems to be a turning point.
So fear not, the racing action will come soon enough.
@Dusen Thanks, and I hope we should be in to the cycling before October. Though I haven't fully written the prologue yet, so I'm not sure how many updates are to come before that.
Back on a Bike “One day, the boss came out. He came to all the boys, saying that the bike courier was out sick, and who could bring this letter to Mr Malkin? I didn't even know we had a job like that, but I knew this was my chance. Of course everyone was shouting for the job, but there was no way I wouldn't get that job. I just kept shouting and shouting, until I got chosen.
I jumped on to the bike he gave me, raced out the few kilometres to the actual tree cutting site, gave Mr Malkin the letter, and raced back. As I went in to the office to give back the bike, the boss asked me if there was a problem.
'No, why should there be?'
'Well, you can hardly have given Mr Malkin that letter in only 30 minutes, can you?'
'It took me about five minutes to find him, I'm sorry for the delay'
'You're serious, are you? If you're back here by three with the reply, you'll get the job permanently.'
I looked at the clock. Twentyfive to three. I ran out, jumped on the bike, sprinted out, and pushed as hard as I could. I knew where I could find Mr Malkin, got the reply, and rushed back as fast as I could. I nearly collapsed upon delivering the answer. I looked at the clock.
Nice job, but it's gonna be another week of "reading" the story. Ugh.
baseballlover312, 06-03-14 : "Nuke Moscow...Don't worry Russia, we've got plenty of love to go around your cities"
Sarah Palin, 08-03-14 (CPAC, on Russian aggression) : "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke"
Big thanks to jdog for making this AMAZING userbar!
A new job “From that day on, I was no more a gruzovój mál’čik, but a bicycle courier. I might not have been training anymore, but I got to spend my days cycling, and I even got paid to do it. I quickly became the best bike courier, though that wasn't very tricky, since there were only three.
I believe it's from those days that I got the strength to ride alone, though not for very long, which makes me such a good prologue rider.
It also payed a little better than what I was doing before, which was a nice bonus for our family. I had made friends with the two other riders, Vladimir and Alexej, both about ten years older than me. Sometimes, when we didn't have much to do, we did short races, like mini-criteriums, which was great fun too. Vlad was a real powerhouse of a man, a bit like Cancellara, while Alex would rely on his sprint to take the win.
I was somewhere in between, having a good kick, but also the ability to win by attacking. Still, I wasn't as specialised as the other two, so I often missed out. It was on one of those races that I fell and broke my leg. My parents were furious with me, we had to go to a hospital in Novokuznetsk to get it fixed, I couldn't work for a few months, but in the end, I recovered. By the time I was back working again, it was early spring.”
A big Day “And then, one day in April, life as I had known it changed forever. I still remember it clearly, it was a Saturday, on which we only had to work till midday. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were slowly being pushed away.
By the time the manager called me to his office, my shift was pretty much over. I had been doing oddly pointless jobs all morning, but was told to take it easy due to the conditions. Only in retrospect do I realize that I was warming up. But at the time, I was surprised when I entered the office, to see two men standing there.
One of them looked vaguely familiar from the TV, the other one was fully unknown to me. Then my boss introduced us. My jaw dropped. It was Viatcheslav Ekimov, double Olympic gold medalist turned DS at Itera-Katusha. The other didn't really speak the language, it turned out to be his assistant Harry Morscher from Austria.
Turns out my boss has a few contacts there from his student days in Moscow, and that he had tipped them off about a 'great talent they couldn't miss out on'. They weren't fully convinced, but in the end, he managed to persuade them to take a look at me. So here they were, in the middle of the Siberian wilderness, waiting to see the alleged wonderkid – me. I knew none of that, and yet, I knew, I had to perform. It was the biggest afternoon of my life, and I knew it.”
A big Day II/III “They had brought a real racing bike with them, of course the first time I ever rode one. I got up on it, and paraded it around the camp. I could see the disbelief in Vlad and Alex's eyes as I slowly rode past them. The idea was that I would go on a one hour ride, and they'd evaluate the data the GPS collected on the bike afterwards. After that I'd do short sprints, and after that I would do what I suggested, and what I hoped to excel the most at: The hill.
The ride and the sprint both went okay, Eki said I was pretty good for my age, but I could see they had expected more. That changed at the hill. They took position about half way up, while I set off for the first time. I didn't want to give it my all, to have energy left for another few attempts, but as I passed them, I could see the surprise. This was repeated a few times, until my last try, where I completely emptied myself.
Eki just said two words after that: 'You're signed.'”
So, I think it's time for an announcement. Partly down to the low interest in this, but also because Ivan just didn't seem to work out for me personally, I've decided to call it a day on this. Thanks for following to those who did, you've been a great motivation when you have commented.
i hope to be back soon enough with an old aquaintance, TMM-Hammarling - style.
![imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg](https://imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg)
