Boy Racer Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Introduction

  STAGE: 1 Saturday, 5 July 2008 BREST—PLUMELEC, 197.5 KM

  STAGE 2: Sunday, 6 July 2008 AURAY—SAINT BRIEUC, 164.5 KM

  STAGE 3: Monday, 7 July 2008 SAINT-MALO—NANTES, 208 KM

  STAGE 4: Tuesday, 8 July 2008 CHOLET—CHOLET (INDIVIDUAL TIME-TRIAL), 29.5 KM

  STAGE 5: Wednesday, 9 July 2008 CHOLET—CHTEAUROUX, 232 KM

  STAGE 6: Thursday, 10 July 2008 AIGURANDE—SUPER BESSE, 195.5 KM

  Picture Section

  STAGE 7: Friday, 11 July 2008 BRIOUDE—AURILLAC, 159 KM

  STAGE 8: Saturday, 12 July 2008 FIGEAC—TOULOUSE, 172.5 KM

  STAGE 9: Sunday, 13 July 2008 TOULOUSE—BAGNÈRES DE BIGORRE, 224 KM

  STAGE 10: Monday, 14 July 2008 PAU—HAUTACAM, 156 KM

  STAGE 11: Wednesday, 16 July 2008 LANNEMEZAN—FOIX, 167.5 KM

  STAGE 12: Thursday, 17 July 2008 LAVELANET—NARBONNE, 168.5 KM

  STAGE 13: Friday, 18 July 2008 NARBONNE—NÎMES, 182 KM

  STAGE 14: Saturday, 19 July 2008 NÎMES—DIGNE LES BAINS, 194.5 KM

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  BOY RACER

  To Lissie

  BOY RACER

  Mark Cavendish

  My journey to Tour de France record-breaker

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  Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

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  Copyright © Mark Cavendish 2009

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  PROLOGUE

  'BRIAN, I need you to do me a favour. I need you to call Unibet.'

  Brian was Brian Holm, my Columbia Sportswear team's Danish directeur sportif, and Unibet was an online betting company. Brian knew what I meant. I could tell from the way he was smirking; but sitting next to him, my other directeur, Rolf Aldag, thought he'd either misheard or that I'd gone insane. He leaned over Brian in the passenger seat to get a clearer view and asked me to repeat what I'd just said.

  'I need you to call Unibet and put a grand on Mark Cavendish to win today's stage. Got it?'

  Now Rolf was laughing ...

  A HUNDRED kilometres to go. A hundred kilometres and not much more than two hours until the most important ten seconds of my life. Hopefully. I spotted the huge bundle of varicose veins that belongs to my teammate George Hincapie and I kicked through a little window of daylight between the bodies and on to his shoulder. 'Hey, George, I just went back to the car and told them I needed them to call Unibet for me ...' By the time I'd finished the story, he was laughing so much he nearly fell off his bike.

  Ninety kilometres, 80, 70, 60 to go. It was hot – the first really warm day of the Tour, and the sun happened to have showed up on a day when there was precious little shelter, just endless wheat fields acting like giant solar panels. Drink, Cav, gotta keep drinking. Four riders were still off the front but now wasn't the time to start fretting. Not yet. At the 50 kilometres to go mark, I'd start picking my way through the maze and into the top twenty or thirty positions, close to my teammates and as far as possible from danger. My teammates might not see me but they'd see my long white socks – the long white socks I wore deliberately so they could pick me out in the melee – I'd drift on to a wheel, maybe George's, maybe Bernie's, maybe Kosta's, then the thinking, the planning, the wondering would all stop and the focusing would start. Nothing would count except the next turn of the pedals, the next shift of the gear lever, the next tweak of the handlebars, the next inch of tarmac.

  As far as I was concerned, you could psychoanalyse a bike race as much as you liked, but it basically boiled down to just that: you, the bike and the road. The British Cycling team's full-time psychiatrist, Steve Peters, had earned a lot of praise for his work with track stars like Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton and, rightly so, because I could see how much Steve had helped them. I could see Steve helped them think logically, override emotion and doubt – but I didn't need any of that. I'd been to see Steve once, before becoming world Madison champion in Los Angeles in 2005, but nothing he said really helped me to conquer my nerves. What I needed was the approach favoured by another one of the staff at the British Federation, Shane Sutton: basically, I needed sunshine blown up my arse.

  A lot of professional athletes have performance anxiety or whatever psychology wants to call it, but winners, born winners like me, they just want sunshine blown up their arse. Or if you prefer a slightly less vulgar translation, I don't want the truth – I just want to be told I'm the best. Logic states that a sprinter can't win the Tour de France overall. That's because it's written in the laws of nature that the same muscles that allow me to touch speeds of 70 kilometres an hour on the flat make me a liability in the mountains, which is invariably where the Tour is won and lost. But that's only logic; if you could wire up Shane Sutton to blow sunshine up my arse, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, forget a thousand pounds on me winning a sprint stage, you could do worse than putting a few grand on me winning the whole bloody Tour.

  I've told Steve Peters my views on sports psychology and he's not offended. We get on fine. I just don't think I'm like most other athletes, not even the Olympic medal-winners in the British team, and Steve accepts that. The other thing to consider is that a lot of people whom Steve has helped are doing timed events on the track, where the variables can be controlled and performances quantified in terms of minutes, seconds and milliseconds. What I was doing here was different, and that's why I loved it. It was pointless telling me 'you've done your best, everything you can do'; it was pointless showing me a line on a graph which told me how much I was improving; the only line I looked for was the finish line.

  Fifty kilometres. An hour, hour and ten minutes at this speed. We weren't going to make the same mistake as two days ago and let the break stay away. I wasn't going through that again: the anger at having let down my teammates, the self-loathing, the regrets, the silence on the team bus, the dumb questions from journalists ... Fortunately the gap was now down to two minutes and falling fast. Our jerseys had flooded the front of the bunch – seven of us in blue, then Kim
Kirchen in the green that denotes the leader of the points competition and Thomas Lövkvist in the white worn by the best rider the age of twenty-five on the general classification. Marcus Burghardt and Adam Hansen were on the front; over the next two and a half weeks, Marcus Burghardt and Adam Hansen would rarely be anywhere else but on the front, riding themselves to a pulp to keep me, my team and everyone else in the race exactly where we wanted them.

  Stay there, Cav, stay there. And on the intercom radio with Brian and Rolf: 'Cav, how are you feeling?'

  'Fucking amazing ...'

  I was cruising right in the sweetspot – that magical place, like a magic carpet, right at the base of the arrowhead, maybe twenty positions behind the point of the triangle, where your energy spend – and risk – is minimised. Fifteen kilometres to go. Come on, Cav. nothing silly now.

  At the Giro, I'd locked my radio to 'on' with 10 kilometres to go, so that my teammates and directeurs could only hear me and couldn't relay any information or instructions back. Here, in France, I'd asked if we could do the same and been outvoted. I'm not sure which approach is better, but I do know that when I heard a crackle in my ear, and the words 'George has punctured, George has punctured', I was absolutely sure that I'd seen George Hincapie for the last time on stage five of the Tour de France.

  I'd ridden enough Tour stages now to know that if I've dropped out of the top thirty positions anywhere in the final 30 kilometres, when the pace never drops below 50kph, I've also dropped out of contention to win the stage. Lose touch with the peloton, be it because of a crash or a puncture, and you can forget about it altogether ... except, apparently, if your name's George Hincapie. No sooner had I written him off completely than, with 7 kilometres to go, suddenly, there was that varicose spaghetti again, and George was back in the game. To get there, he'd had to stop, wait for the team car, change wheels, almost rip the cranks of his bike to get back to the bunch, accelerate again, up the gutter, overtaking around 150 of the best cyclists in the world riding at full bore, give his life insurers a nasty fright in the process, then compose himself to slot back into my sprint train and start the real hard work. And people ask me what I mean when I say I've got the best teammates in the world.

  There's a clip on YouTube which shows us 5 kilometres out – Adam Hansen on the front, Marcus Burghardt on his wheel, then Tommy Lövkvist talking on his radio, with me in his shadow – all set to the Safri Duo track 'Rise'. It still gives me goose pimples. I could sense the other sprinters' teams – Liquigas, Quick-Step and Crédit Agricole – trying to move up and muscle in, but today it was our turn to dictate. All day we'd been dictating.

  Four kilometres. Three. Ideally, you'd want at least four men at this point. Ideally. Adam had just popped and so had Tommy. That left two – Bernie Eisel and Gerald Ciolek. In our eagerness, in the excitement, we'd committed too early.

  Come on, Cav, stay calm. Just hold the wheels. Remember the tight right-hander with 2 kilometres to go – then the last kilometre's straight and wide. Don't think about Hushovd or McEwen or Steegmans. You're the quickest today. Focus. Watch the wheels. And remember that right-hander ...

  The right-hander, Cav, the right-hander! Too wide. Blown it. Now you're going backwards. Boxed in. Five back, ten back ... Where's Gerald? There. Legend. He's taking me round the outside. 'I'm with you, Gerald.' There's the red flag: a kilometre to go. A kilo—?! Gerald's already in the wind and he can't hold a kilometre. No way. Just do what you can, Gerald. I'm here. Stay calm, Cav.

  Everyone who's never been there wants to know what's going through your mind in the last kilometre of a sprint. The answer may be a disappointment: it's nothing, except what's needed to process precisely what's flashing in front of your eyes at any given moment. There's no reflection, no calculation, no speculation – just endless, split-second decisions and gambles. It's 'Left or right?'; 'This wheel or that wheel?'; 'Wait or go?'. It takes hundreds of these decisions to win a sprint but it might take only one to lose it.

  If it's not instinct, it's the closest thing to to it.

  How long is a Tour de France sprint? Two hundred and fifty metres? Three hundred? Are we talking the whole drum-roll or just the climax? The 50-kilometre, hour-long, 600-watt test of collective power, endurance and concentration or the ten-second, 1200-watt, 70kph drag race that everyone sees and remembers?

  A great sprinter doesn't need to be a great strategist. When you're on that finishing straight, timing trumps tactics every time. At the Tour, the black distance markers at the side of the road act as your countdown: one every 100 metres in the penultimate 500 metres, one every 50 in the last 500; 300 might be too soon to go, 200 too late. Sometimes, it's someone else who takes the initiative and you simply don't have any option but to open the gas.

  Seven hundred. Six hundred. What's that jersey up the road? Fuck me! We even haven't caught the break yet! One of them's still up the road. How did that happen?! How the fuck did he ... No, forget it, Cav. Focus. You'll catch him. Focus on the sprint.

  We're on the outside of the swarm and suddenly there's a surge. I don't see it but I feel it. I can always just feel it. It's too early and Gerald's already had to do too much but I need one last effort. I scream: 'Gerald, you've got to go!' So he goes, like an Exocet, right into the wind, and he goes and goes and goes. Last 500, last 450, he's still going, last 400, 375, and is he still ... no he's not, he's seizing up, starting to swing. He's gonna blow any second ... and I can feel someone coming on my right. It's a green jersey, it's Crédit Agricole, it's Mark Renshaw, with Hushovd on his wheel, and I wait for Hushovd to appear on my right shoulder then I swing across Gerald and suddenly level with Hushovd's back wheel.

  The most important ten seconds of my life. The next ten ...

  INTRODUCTION

  'HI EVERYONE ...'

  Well, at least I nailed the first two words ...

  If only they taught you this at school. You're twenty-two years old, less than six months into a first season that began with your team's coach saying you were fat and useless, in a sport where the hierarchies are steeper and harder to climb than any mountain – a sport where nothing comes at a price that isn't blood, sweat and often tears – and here you are writing to ask for a place in the 2007 Tour de France.

  My two wins in the spring Tour of Catalunya were fresh in my mind and those of my T-Mobile team managers. I'd barely got back at my teammate Roger Hammond's place in Belgium, barely had time to put down my suitcase before I'd gone into the living room, turned on the computer on and started typing. I'd spoken to my coach from the British Federation, Rod Ellingworth, to untangle my thoughts and smooth out my arguments. I was ready to make my case ... yet I was hesitating. I never hesitated.

  Finally, the words started flowing.

  Hi everyone,

  I am sorry to drop this on you all, considering you all have other things to think of, but I'd appreciate it if you took this request seriously.

  Simply – I would like to start the Tour de France.

  I know I am only in my neo-season, so I am still naive to how hard the Tour actually is, and this is why I have left it until now to ask. After Dunkirk, I started to wonder whether to ask you all, but I wanted to see how I could handle the ProTour first, which is why I waited until after Catalunya. I wanted to be confident in myself before I asked you all, and not just jump in with my head in the clouds.

  I have really thought long and hard about this, and discussed it in depth with various people, with mixed reactions ranging from 'completely push for it' to 'definitely way too early, leave it a few years', but I have come to the decision that I would like to try one week to ten days.

  If even the first week is way too deep for me, I still think this is a positive thing, as I will know exactly what my current level is so I can work towards the race in the next years. I know I have good form at the moment, but I also know I have more to come in the next month, and I truly don't think there are many riders at all faster than me in world cycling at the moment.r />
  Thank you all for considering this, and please let me know your thoughts on it.

  Regards

  Mark

  TWELVE months separated the start of the 2007 and 2008 Tours de France, but it could have been light years as far as I was concerned. The Grand Départ in London in 2007 should have told the world that a British sprinter was about to embark upon a brilliant Tour de France career. Instead, it started and ended in tears.