Boy Racer Read online

  Gerald Ciolek. German. Twenty-two years old. Tommy's roommate. A freak: freakishly good on a bike, freakishly selfless. We are the same age, are both sprinters, yet I was the one who was winning more and bigger races and had been picked for the Tour the previous year at his expense. Now he was the one being told to literally act as my water-carrier, then launch me in the closing straight before peeling off to let me take the glory. He could have resented my success. But I'd realised very early on that Gerald was special. We'd ridden against each other as amateurs in Germany, then in 2007 joined T-Mobile at the same time. He was the German wunderkind, the youngest-ever national champion; we should have been at each other like a pair of pecking hens, but we bonded straight away, partly because neither of us had hit it off with the team's coach. Now, a year and a half later, we were the Starsky and Hutch of sprinting – me, Starsky, the curly-topped tearaway, and him the floppy, flaxen-haired straight man, Hutch. We had such a good partnership that we'd even discussed marketing and selling ourselves as a two-man package, then spending our entire career working for each other in different races. We also had a feeling that this was going to be our Tour.

  Marcus Burghardt. German. East German, in case you hadn't guessed from the ear-stud or the blond highlights in his straggly, shoulder-length hair. As tall and strong as an oak. Twenty-five years old. I didn't like the guy ... or rather, I hadn't the previous year. One issue was the language: I'd picked up enough German in my season with the amateur team Sparkasse in 2006 to understand most of the banter between the German lads and directeurs on our team but, because of his accent, when Marcus spoke I didn't understand a word. Then there was the 2007 Tour, when he was supposed to be one of the guys working for me in the sprints. I'd got the impression he didn't fancy wasting precious energy for the sake of a rookie who wasn't yet looking the part, especially when Marcus had already won Ghent–Wevelgem, one of the biggest one-day races on the calendar earlier that spring. It became so tense between us that I think we both realised that we had no choice but to make an effort to get on. The outcome was that we gradually started to respect each other, then, at the team training camp in January 2008, suddenly we were like best mates. Partly because of that, partly because I knew I'd earned his respect as a rider, and partly because he was fresh after a nasty knee injury that spring, in this Tour, Marcus was exactly the kind of guy I needed on my side.

  Bernhard Eisel, twenty-seven years old. Big Austrian beefcake ... or so he'd like to think. Bernhard and I have a running joke about who's the best-looking guy in the team. If we ever let you into our bathroom when we're sharing at a race, and you saw the array of aftershaves, creams and hair products, you'd say we were just a pair of tarts. Bernie's like the laughing gas in the team; I've almost never seen the guy with anything but a big grin on his face. And yet he's also the ultimate pro, the ultimate team-man – the bloke who, when I won my first pro race at the Grote Scheldeprijs in Belgium in April 2007, had been under orders to bury himself for the team's other sprinter, Andre Greipel, which Bernie did ... but then he saw me in trouble and buried himself again to pilot me back through the peloton with a kilometre to go. If you can imagine a 400-metre runner doing one race, then stopping a few seconds and doing it all over again, all out of pure selflessness, you get the idea. Bernie was like Ciolek: they'd both been signed as big-name sprinters, yet here they were, selected for the Tour team on the understanding that they'd spend most of the race sacrificing their own chances for mine. And not only did they never complain, they gave more for me than I'd give for myself. Their devotion left me speechless and, if ever I lost, frankly embarrassed.

  George Hincapie. New Yorker of Colombian origin. At thirty-five years of age the grand old man of the team and the only one allowed his own room. Thirteen Tours and counting. He's perhaps best known as Lance Armstrong's friend and teammate at the Motorola, US Postal and Discovery Channel teams. I'd grown up watching US Postal in the Armstrong years – this relentless blue train, rattling along at the front of the Tour peloton every day, their eyes shielded by Oakley sunglasses, their emotions hidden behind a rigid game-face – and I'd assumed that every one was probably a real bastard. I was wrong. George Hincapie is the nicest man in the world. I'd never spoken to him in my life, then, in one stage of the 2007 Tour, when he was still riding for Discovery, we were trundling along in the pack, and I hear a voice, and I look round and there's George. 'Hi,' he says. 'Good to meet you. You're fucking fast ...' I think I was too starstruck to carry on the conversation, but it didn't matter – I'd met George Hincapie, veteran of seven victorious Tour de France campaigns, peloton legend and the nicest man in the world. Actually, correction – the second nicest man in the world, because I've since met his brother and business partner, Rich, who's even nicer. George had joined the team at the start of the 2008 season and had been rejuvenated. At the Tour of California in February he was practically skipping to the start line; he'd spent years grinding away on the front for Armstrong, under intense pressure, intense scrutiny, then he comes to us and we're like a bunch of kids let out of school for the afternoon. He was loving every second. It actually pained me to think that the second nicest man in the world and one of the best riders in the sport had never had this much fun in his whole career.

  And finally we came to me: Mark Cavendish. A twenty-three-year-old from the Isle of Man. Joker, firebrand, self-acknowledged sometime bastard, immature, emotional, generous, recovering scally, team leader and the fastest man in the world. Maybe.

  As the man said, we had three weeks, twenty-one stages and 3559 kilometres to find out.

  STAGE 1

  Saturday, 5 July 2008

  BREST—PLUMELEC, 197.5 KM

  I HAVE a mate, Dools, my best friend from the Isle of Man, who often asks me what it's like to ride a stage of the Tour de France. Dools, like most amateur cyclists, is curious to know how long he'd last in one of the Tour's first half-dozen, routinely quite flat stages as the race makes its way towards the mountains. He wants to find out whether he'd be able to last the pace for ten, fifty or maybe even a hundred kilometres.

  'Dools,' I tell him, 'you wouldn't even make it through the neutralised zone. I can only think of about three people on the Isle of Man who would.'

  The Tour de France starts in the neutralised zone on the first stage, but I swear that for most even competent amateurs that's also where it would end. The 'neutralised zone' is the stretch between one and ten kilometres used by the race organisers to take the peloton safely and slowly out of the high street or town square where the stages inevitably begin, and at the same time give the public at the side of the road a decent view of the race. In theory, it's the Tour's no-fly zone, 'neutralised' in so much as all racing and attacks are off until its end-point – or 'kilometre zero' of the race proper. In practice it's like sharing a tightrope with a herd of buffalos.

  Danger is a topic you're often asked about as a sprinter. The common perception is that the final 200 metres of a Tour stage are the most dangerous and the most frightening. That might be half right because while it may hold true that the final few seconds of a bike-race are fastest and apparently chaotic, at 70 kilometres per hour and 200 heartbeats per minute, there's simply no time for anxiety. Adrenalin, yes. Instinct, sure. But fear, no. The day I begin to be afraid of taking risks, afraid of crashing, afraid of my own fearlessness, will be the day that I also start worrying about my future as a top sprinter.

  We were scoobying along at no more than 30kph, yet I meant what I told Dools – he wouldn't even have made it to the start line, not because he wasn't fast or fit enough but because of the feats of bike-handling required just to stay upright. At any one time, you could have laid a hand on about six different riders, so closely were the bikes and bodies huddled together. I was climbing up kerbs and bunny-hopping over grass verges. It was chaos, absolute, utter chaos – the kind that leaves you mentally drained after five minutes ... and we still had 197.5 kilometres to ride just to earn the right to do it all again the
next day.

  We passed the 'kilometre zero' mark. The Tour director Christian Prudhomme's flag came down to indicate the start of the race, and it was as though someone standing at the side of the road had turned on a giant hairdryer. On a bridge immediately after the start line, wind whipped in from the estuary and slanted across the road at 90 degrees, almost taking the entire peloton with it. 'Everyone sitting uncomfortably?' it seemed to say. 'Okay, then bienvenu au Tour ...'

  Not many people knew it, but I wasn't even supposed to be here. Selected the previous year at Gerald Ciolek's expense, the plan at the beginning of the 2008 season had been that I'd skip the Tour to concentrate on preparing for my shot at gold in the Madison at the Olympics. In my absence, Gerald would be the team's sprinter at the Tour. But then came the Giro d'Italia or Tour of Italy in May, when my two stage wins forced a rapid reassessment of how Gerald and I would now be spending the month of July. Gerald and his sprinting would have been the fulcrum of almost any other team and their objectives for the Tour; now he accepted the role of my understudy with a grace and professionalism that both humbled and amazed me.

  On today's stage, at least, Gerald would have his chance. The finish line was at the top of a nasty one-kilometre climb, the Côte de Cadoual, that would scatter the pure sprinters like me or Robbie McEwen, but might suit a rider like Gerald, whose finishing kick relied more on power than leg-speed. Most mornings, in our pre-stage briefing, Brian Holm's instructions could be condensed into some variation on 'Have fun!' – and today he didn't need to tell us that a break would go early in the stage. A break always went early in the stage. There'd be attacks, counter-attacks, full-blooded accelerations, half-hearted ones, then, five or six riders would open up a gap of 100 metres, 200, 300, before, finally, the main peloton would hand them the rope with which to hang themselves, before scooping up the suicide victims somewhere in the final ten kilometres. It was one of those accepted clichés of cycle racing and especially stages in the first week of the race.

  Even by Tour standards, this was a tense, fast, nervous opening stage. Sure enough, the break was reeled in before the final climb up the Côte de Cadoual, but the pace proved too hot and the slope too steep for me and for Gerald, who was spat out three-quarters of the way up the hill. At around the same time, at the front of the bunch and the race, 'Little Kim' kicked hard around the penultimate bend, leaving a chasm behind him. Unfortunately, the Spaniard, Valverde, had timed his move perfectly, and swept past Kim in the final few hundred metres. Kim lived up to his other nickname by hanging on grimly for fourth.

  The landscapes in Brittany had reminded me of the Isle of Man. The roads, too, were similar to those on which I'd grown up – narrow, gnarly and constantly undulating, with coarse, grey tarmac that gripped your tyres like a fifth brake-pad, and wind that seemed to gust in every direction except at your back.

  If the Tour really was to be the journey of a lifetime, my life-time, then this certainly seemed like a fitting place to start.

  THE HOME of Manx cats, the Bee Gees, the TT motorbike race and Mark Cavendish is a green, windy island in the middle of the Irish Sea, two and three-quarter hours' ferry-ride from Belfast to the west, a bit less from Liverpool to the south-east, about 32 miles long and 15 miles across at its widest point.

  It is also, you often hear, a 'strange place'.

  The Island is what's called a Crown dependency, which means it's not strictly part of the United Kingdom, although we do share a head of state – the Queen. The contradictions begin, not end there: it says 'British Citizen' on our passports but we have our own parliament, Tynwald, which is supposedly the oldest parliament in continuous existence in the world, dating back to the first Norse invasions just over a thousand years ago; we have the same dialling code as the UK but our own mobile phone networks, and, bizarrely, international tariffs for calls to the UK. While to many people our accent sounds Scouse – a legacy of the fact that, historically, most people came here on the ferry from Liverpool – Islanders can easily make the distinction; we use the same currency units as the mainland but different notes and coins; English and Manx Gaelic are our official languages, though the last native speaker of the latter died in 1974, and only 2 per cent of people on the Island claim to know any Manx Gaelic; we have the same awful trends and fashions only they arrive here later and take even longer to shift; and finally, there's the local delicacy – chips, cheese and gravy, which, as far as I know, hasn't yet made it over the water.

  Perhaps because of these idiosyncrasies, for some people on the Isle of Man, going over to England is a bit like travelling to another planet. The Island has its own quirks and folklore which are a pretty minor part of Manx life but they do give people who live here a strong sense of identity. Dutch, Belgian and even British journalists who come to see me at home in Laxey lap up local 'colour' like the legend of the Fairy Bridge – a road bridge on the way from the airport to Douglas where it's unlucky not to say hello to the fairies as you cross, preferably in Manx Gaelic. Even people who aren't particularly superstitious won't dream of breaking that rule. Then there's the law which says a Manxman is allowed to shoot a Scot, as long as he's on the beach and wearing tartan – though don't ask me if anyone's ever taken advantage of that particular loophole.

  I'd love to tell you that the Cavendish family is just as much of an institution as the Island myths and folklore which people find so fascinating, although I somehow doubt it. My gran on my dad's side does claim to have a family tree that goes back to the 1600s, although I don't have a clue what it says. That's the Manx side of the family. My mum Adele hails from Harrogate in Yorkshire. She met David, my dad, when she came over to the Island on holiday with her mum's cousin, whom we always knew as Auntie Ruth. My parents fell in love and, pretty soon, were married with two kids. I was first and, fifteen months later, along came my brother Andy.

  I was born in Douglas on 21 May 1985. With a population of just over 25,000, which equates to just under a third of the Manx population, Douglas is the largest town on the Island and its capital. With a two-mile promenade that loops around a beautiful, windswept bay, some have compared the seafront to the famous, palm-flanked Promenade des Anglais in Nice, historically the setting for the final stage of the Paris–Nice stage race. Others disagree; they reckon it's a bit like Blackpool.

  I inherited my physique from my mum's side of the family. The short, muscular legs, the ample backside – sorry, Mum, but you know what I mean. My dad's the total opposite – small and skinny. My parents both have passionate natures, though that passion expresses itself in very different ways. My mum is either blessed or cursed with the same heart-on-the-sleeve attitude to life that many see in me. She's spontaneous, fiery, transparent – an emotional volcano. My dad is every bit as whole-hearted but in a completely opposite, very studious and occasionally slightly obsessive way. As a couple, their personalities both clashed and complemented each other; as a legacy to my fledgling career as a sportsman, you could say that Mum supplied the fire and Dad the ice.

  My mum will tell you that I always was a headstrong little so-and-so. Whenever she tried to breast-feed me, I'd push her away, and it was always the same later when she tried to choose what I was going to wear. I always wanted be ahead with everything – whether it was potty-training or maths lessons at school. My first ever memory is of lining all the other kids up and racing them across the room at the nursery, Knotfield, where Mum used to take Andy and me when she was at the work in the bridal-wear shop that's been in the family for decades.

  I hated Knotfield. I obviously had a pretty sharp sense of injustice even then, because I couldn't fathom why the women who ran that place acted as though they were doing us a favour, even though Mum and Dad were paying a fortune for us to go there. One day Andy and I decided to take matters into our own hands. I was about ten at the time, at primary school, but we'd still get taken to Knotfield after school, to wait there for Mum to finish work. One afternoon we decided to attempt our first 'breakaway' – wai
ting until the monitors went into the kitchen to prepare dinner at ten to five, then bombing up the stairs and out of the front door, having left our bags behind to add to the panic and confusion. The next day, we went into the nursery to discuss what had happened but, instead of showing concern and trying to find out why we were so unhappy there, the lady in charge, Val, blew her top. 'What would have happened if there'd been a fire?' she shrieked. If my mum hadn't already made up her mind about us never going back she did when she witnessed Val's reaction.

  It's another cliché, but Mum and Dad made sure that we never went short of anything. We weren't wealthy but between the bridal shop, which later diversified to sell dancewear, and Dad's job in the IT department of an accountancy firm, we had a comfortable life in a comfortable 1930s, four-bedroom semi-detached house on the outskirts of Douglas. Mum and Dad gave us every opportunity to pursue our interests, whether it was playing the cornet or the euphonium, or football or ballroom dancing. We'd go on family holidays to Tenerife or Florida or to see Mum's family in Yorkshire. In almost every photo from those years we're smiling and so, usually, were Mum and Dad.