Boy Racer Page 2
The reaction to my letter surpassed even my expectations. Within minutes of me clicking 'send', replies were pinging back to my inbox and my phone. 'Bloody hell, you've got balls,' said one email, the first of several with the same message. The next day the phone rang and I heard the familiar Australian drawl of Allan Peiper, one of the directeurs, on the end of the line. 'You're in like Flynn, mate!' he said. 'Keep it on the low but, yeah, it's pretty unanimous.'
I was buzzing. I called Rod. Called my dad. Called Melissa. 'Keep this to yourself ... but I think, I think I'm doing the Tour de France.'
It wouldn't be long before I was wishing that it'd all remained a secret until the moment I rolled off the start-ramp opposite Downing Street forty days later on 7 July 2007. Or at least until the posh do to introduce our nine-strong Tour team at Fifteen, Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Shoreditch, the day before. Hardly ever before and never since has pressure or expectation or scrutiny affected me, but there came a point, or rather one interview, when I couldn't bear it any more and the emotional wheels came off completely.
It was all the more infuriating because I'd trained so hard. Three weeks before the Tour, I was flying ... then it started. The phone calls, the interviews. The endless bloody interviews. Cycling's rare – if not unique – among modern, mainstream sports as journalists will regularly call top riders for a quote or a quick chat, and it generally works because there's a mutual understanding – between the riders, the team's press officers and journalists – of what's reasonable and what's not. These unwritten rules only break down when the company that sponsors the team gets involved, which is what happened with T-Mobile. I would get home from seven-hour training sessions then find that T-Mobile had scheduled two hours of interviews, one every fifteen minutes, almost all of which would end up running over time. Some days, I'd end up doing four hours of interviews, most of them with journalists whose lack of even the most basic knowledge about cycling should have made me laugh, but which at the time I just found maddening. Finally, one day, I dissolved into tears; I then turned off my mobile and vowed not to speak to another journalist or PR person until I arrived in London.
I arrived in London and the pressure hit me like a tidal wave. Where was the little upstart who'd had the audacity to write to his team managers explaining exactly why they should pick him for the Tour team and not one of the dozen or so other squad members with more experience and, you'd think, far better prospects? Lost – that's where. As they are at every race, my teammates were my sanctuary – their banter, their advice, their confidence in me – but stepping outside was like going from comfort zone to war zone. 'The easiest mistake Mark could make would be thinking too much about the sprint finish on Sunday,' my roommate Kim Kirchen said in the press on the Saturday morning. He might as well have been pissing in the wind.
The prologue time-trial in London was never likely to be my cup of tea. I finished 69th. The next day – the first stage from Tower Bridge to Canterbury, the last before the race went back to France, and surely the first sprint finish of the Tour – was going to be the Big One.
We've since found out that more than one rider in that Tour was doped up on one thing or another, whether it was testosterone, EPO or their own transfused blood. If you saw me riding that day, you'd have said that if anyone was high, it had to me, not because I was so fast, but because of the way I was bouncing off bodies as soon as the Tour director's flag went down to indicate the start of the stage. My thoughts were racing faster than I was, from all the people who'd been telling me for days that they had money on me for the first stage to exactly how I was going to get them their money. I don't remember the sights so much as the sounds: the constant, white noise, the screams – 'Cavendish! Cavendish!' – and then a voice over my shoulder belonging to the Spanish rider from the Rabobank team, Juan Antonio Flecha. He was imploring me to calm down. But I couldn't. I punctured at a time when the peloton was just pootling along, slow enough to make changing wheels and regaining touch no more an inconvenience than retying your shoelaces, yet I was screaming into my intercom radio as if not just the stage, but also my life depended on it. I was manic, drowning in the deep end.
The race was the only thing that wasn't moving too fast. Then it happened: the Rush. The Tour was the one major race that my teammate Roger Hammond hadn't ridden in a career spanning over a decade, but he'd tried to put my mind at rest. After all, he said, it was the same riders I'd already been racing against and often beaten since the start of the season, often when I wasn't nearly as fit as now. Right? Sorry, Roger, wrong: it was faster, a lot faster, 5 kilometres an hour faster – and it didn't matter whether it was uphill, downhill, round corners, on narrow roads or wide ones. Yes, they were the same riders, the 189 best in the world and yeah, I'd already beaten most if not all of them at some point or another, but not all in the same race. In no other race had every bloke in the peloton trained to peak for precisely the second they rolled off that start-ramp in the prologue. In no other race could a good ride, any day out of twenty-one, change a fella's life. The stakes, the noise, the hype, the adrenalin – it was all just more. Five kilometres an hour more.
Fifty kilometres to go. They said make sure you're in the top twenty or thirty positions with 50 kilometres to go. I did what I was told. Twenty-five kilometres later I was in the perfect spot, near the front but on the side of the peloton, which is exactly where you should be; stay in the centre and you can soon get vortexed – as teams and riders rotate at the front, you start spiralling backwards. So, I'm right there, fine, comfortable, calming down, feeling good ... and then boom, I've hit something. I'm on the ground. I look around and see my bike mangled, my glasses on the tarmac, and I'm screaming: 'Who the fuck was that?' But really I just want my bike. My directeurs are telling me to keep my cool and get back to the peloton but now I'm screaming at them: 'I can't! My bike's fucked.' I see the whole peloton flash past me, then finally the team car with my replacement bike. I hop on and start pounding on the pedals, weaving through the race convoy, my speedometer showing 50kph, heart hammering in my ribcage, then one of the race officials, the commissaires, rides alongside me, wagging his finger; he's telling me that if I keep riding in the team cars' slipstream, I'll be demoted and fined. Usually, if the rider loses his place in the bunch because of a crash or mechanical problem, the commissaires will let you get shelter behind the bumpers until you bridge the gap. Not this time. Now it was my Italian directeur sportif Valerio Piva's turn to raise his voice, not that it made any difference to the commissaire. I looked in vain for a coloured jersey in the distance, a body, a hope. Nothing. Just tears. So many tears that I lost sight of where I was going and crashed into the back of the Barloworld team car.
I rode alone, crying, all the way to the finish line. I got there two minutes after the main pack, as replays of Robbie McEwan's winning sprint flickered on the giant video screen. I bustled through the journalists and the photographers to my team bus, which was parked on a playing field next to those of all the other teams. I leant my bike against the side of the bus, climbed aboard and sat at the back sobbing for another half an hour.
It had started in tears and ended in tears.
WEDNESDAY, 2 July 2008. What a difference a year makes.
I looked around at Brest, its grey skies, buildings and streets and thought ... well, to put it politely, I thought it wasn't London. Grand Départ, they were still calling it, but, from where I was standing, there was nothing grand about it. London had been spectacular, memorable, monumental in every sense; this was the Tour going back to its earthy, home-grown roots. The people here didn't need billboards or hype or a photogenic backdrop; even now, three days before the action was due to start, the man in the street took one look at my Columbia race jersey and doffed his beret or waved or shouted a few words of encouragement. Contrast this with the previous year, when one team went out training in the lanes of Essex and got hounded back to their hotel by White Van Man.
I felt relaxed, confident; nothin
g like the previous year. OK, after winning two stages in the Giro d'Italia in May, the first Briton ever to do so, I would have liked to have savoured that achievement, gathered my forces and focused squarely on the Tour; instead, two weeks before leaving for the Tour, I was still in Manchester, at the request of the British Federation, trying to divide my time, my concentration and a daily quota of around 200 kilometres between practising on the track for the Olympics and training for the Tour on the road. At least this time I'd put my foot down about the media commitments – it was an hour a day, fifteen minutes per journalist, and when those fifteen minutes were up, so was the interview. I spent the last week before the Tour in our new house on the Isle of Man, relaxing, and training just like I always had, the way that suited me: no structures, no worrying about heart-rates or power outputs, just simple, hard rides of three, four or sometimes five hours with a couple of long-sprints thrown in at the end. Proper old-school.
My flight was on the Tuesday morning before the Tour. Melissa took me to the airport, just like for any other race. I flew to Birmingham, then took a connecting flight to Brest the next morning and, from there, made my way to the team hotel, which just happened to be directly opposite the start line. None of my teammates was arriving until the evening, so I unpacked my stuff, put my kit on and headed out for a spin.
After a couple of hours, I rode back via the high street. I had some shopping to do: my roommate for the Tour was going to be the Australian Adam Hansen, and, before he arrived, I wanted to buy him a token to say thanks for all of the incredible, lung-exploding, ego-burying work he'd done for me at the Giro. I located Brest's best jeweller's, brought my bike inside and started scouring the display cabinets for something to suit Adam – something classy but also techy and with a bit of an edge. I saw a Breitling Chronomat with a red strap. Perfect. I had it gift-wrapped, handed over my credit card, then went straight back to the hotel, straight back to the room and placed it on Adam's pillow.
I was in a massage in another room when Adam arrived. I went back to the room and noticed right away that he hadn't seen the box on his pillow. I played dumb. He had one look at me, one look at the box, then walked over and started unwrapping. He opened the box and beamed at me.
People might think that it's just false appreciation or some kind of formality when I thank my teammates after a race win. It's not. There are two aspects to it: one is genuine recognition. My guys aren't just any old teammates, they're special athletes, special individuals with whom I have a special bond and without whom I'd never win a race. The other reason is that I know what warmth and satisfaction I get when someone thanks me for the work I've done, like Adam did that day. Without wanting to sound too soppy, it's not about politeness or protocol – it's about sharing a moment. When I win a race and struggle through the crowd to get to my teammates, it's not because I want to be congratulated or even say thanks; it's because I want to be with the people who have made that win possible, who have worked for it with me. It's because I want to see the joy on their faces.
That first night was great. The whole team had arrived, the pisstaking was rampant and everyone was excited. Most of all we were confident: in 2007, the spring had been dominated by doping scandals, this year we'd dominated full stop. The mood was one of a band of mates about to set off on one great big adventure.
The next two days flew by. Partly thanks to our brilliant results in the spring, our manager, Bob Stapleton, had finally found a sponsor to replace T-Mobile, the German telecommunications giant that had pulled out at the end of the previous year when the team's leader, Jan Ullrich, was involved in a major doping scandal and more details started trickling out of ugly medical practices which involved not only T-Mobile riders but several other big names. The new name on the jersey – the new name of our team – was Columbia Sportswear, the California-based outdoor clothing and footwear company. Our new jerseys were electric blue.
In those last forty-eight hours, there were meetings with people from Columbia, the usual glut of interviews and photo shoots, a couple of fairly gentle training rides ... and a first brush with the opposition. The size of the Tour and every team's entourage is such that the Tour organisers can never squeeze more than a couple of teams into any one hotel, and for the few days before the Tour we'd been paired with the Italian squad Liquigas. This made no odds to me but it did mean that I'd be under the same roof as probably my least favourite rider in the peloton: Filippo Pozzato, the self-styled playboy of Italian cycling.
My beef with Pozzato dated back to the Tour of Catalunya the previous year. In Stage 1, the whole peloton had been slipping and sliding down a wet, dangerous descent and Pozzato singled out me, the first-year pro, as an easy target. 'Amatore!' – amateur – I kept hearing and I didn't need to turn around and see his over-moisturised smug mug to work out that it was him. We finished the descent, the road kicked up steeply towards the finish, and I ended up winning. This was despite the fact that the run-in really shouldn't have suited me, it was my first ProTour race and, on top of all of that, I'd lost a couple of seconds when I bumped into the Australian Aaron Kemps and my foot unclipped from my pedal with 200 metres to go. I crossed the line, spent but elated, then almost immediately felt a hand on my back. It was Pozzato again. 'Amatore, amatore ...'
He'd set me up perfectly. 'Not bad for an amateur, am I? Now fuck off!' I hissed. And with that I rode away.
Since that incident over a year ago he'd had several digs at me through the media, so when, on one of those last nights before the Tour's start in Brest, my teammates Gerald Ciolek, Bernard Eisel and I walked into the lift and saw Pozzato, I took one look at him and walked back out of the lift. It was petty, I know, but I was being deliberately melodramatic to make my point. One day maybe I'll tell Pozzato what his problem is: I think he fancies me!
The following evening, we all sat behind a huge stage in a packed main square in Brest and waited to be unveiled to the public in the official team presentation. The cue came from the Tour's official speaker, Daniel Mangeas, and out we marched. 'Messieurs, nous vous présentons, les neuf coureurs de l'équipe Columbia ...'
And here we were ...
Adam Hansen. Age twenty-seven. Hailing from Queensland, Australia. A former mountain biker who'd come to road racing late but, in the season and a half that he'd been on our team, had built a reputation for his incredible horsepower on every terrain. Top man, top rider and my roommate. We were yin and yang, him the quiet studious type, me all heart and mouth. Adam wasn't even supposed to be here, but his performances in the Giro in May made it a no-brainer. He'd been twitchy in the peloton the previous year, but now, in his second season, he was the archetype of the perfect domestique – a French term literally meaning 'servant', but actually synonymous with a tireless, strong, unstintingly loyal teammate. Adam put more into me winning a sprint than I'd put in myself.
Kanstantin Sivtsov, or 'Kosta' as we call him. A twenty-five-year-old Belorussian. Didn't speak a word of English when he joined the team at the start of 2008, didn't smile ... then, one day at the Giro d'Italia in May, someone teased a little grin out of him and now he's a changed man. In fact, he's become a sarcastic bastard, but he cracks us up. And he loves being on the team, loves being part of something successful. Kosta will be on the front working for you on the flat, he'll work for you on the mountains, where he's absolutely brilliant, and with him, it's because he loves that euphoria of the team winning. His English has even improved. Not everyone understands it, but then many don't understand me, either.
Kim Kirchen. Kosta's roommate. Little Kim to us, Grim Kim to the press, since the phrase 'hangdog expression' could have been invented for him. The Jack Dee of cycling, because he's actually hilarious. Biscuit-dry but hilarious. Born in Luxembourg and speaks seven languages, all more or less fluently. One of the best riders in the world, certainly one of the men of the 2008 season before the Tour, and our man for stage wins in time trials and mountains and for the general classification. An über pro, who could
fill an encyclopaedia with all the wisdom he's picked up from working with some of the most famous and successful directeurs in cycling. Thirty years old as of two days before the Tour, team leader, top bloke and top rider.
Thomas Lövkvist. Swedish. Self-confessed eccentric Scandinavian with boy-band looks. Tommy's the guy whose elbow you'll feel in your ribs when some egghead from an equipment supplier comes in to do a seminar at our pre-season training camp, then you'll see his arm go up, and, innocent as you like, he'll ask the most intricate, complex, unanswerable question you could possibly imagine, just for his own and the other riders' amusement. Face of an angel; devil's sense of humour. On his bike, he's proper hardcore. At training camps in the winter, he's always on the front, always going hard, always doing more than everyone else, then he goes back to Sweden, puts spikes on his tyres and goes out training in the snow for four hours a day. He's twenty-four but he's been a pro for years. A super, super talent, and another one who just loves being on our team.