Boy Racer Read online

  My first bike was a Christmas present when I was three – a little red thing with a white saddle which, now I think about it, may have been a girl's bike. I have a clear image of Dad running up and down the garden, holding my saddle until finally, one day, I made it to the other end without falling off. They then bought me a black BMX for my birthday, which I absolutely adored. We had the same yellow and red Early Learning Centre slide that every other kid on the Island seemed to have – only Andy and I had reinvented ours as a BMX ramp sloping down from the garden on to a paved terrace. We spent hour after hour, day after day zooming down that thing. That slide brought me endless fun and my first major crash – an unrehearsed, unintentional Superman-dive which ended in a face-plant on the patio and a chipped tooth.

  My parents weren't especially sporty, but that was offset by one considerable advantage: they never put any pressure on us. Some of the pushy parents I used to see at our football matches or, later, bike-races, made me wince. As for me watching sport, I was, like every kid, mad about football, especially as Leeds United, my mum's team, were in the middle of a renaissance. It was the era of Eric Cantona, Gary Speed, the Premiership title. The halcyon days.

  As a player, I was strong, fast and two-footed, best deployed as a left wing back. That was when I was deployed at all, before the headmaster at my infant school had decreed that football might interfere with my academic performance, and therefore I shouldn't be picked. My reputation as a budding Einstein was later enhanced when I took the entrance exam for King William's, a private school with optional boarding near the only airport on the Island in Ballasalla. There was a choice of three questions: write a poem, tell us about a musical instrument you play or write a short story. I did all three – a feat that earned me the only scholarship up for grabs. Given my level of application and interest in schoolwork – and also my appetite for mischief – King William's should probably count themselves lucky that I opted to follow my friends and go to the Ballerkemeen comprehensive in Douglas.

  HAVE you ever noticed how, in interviews, sportsmen will often refer to a single day or incident in their childhood as the 'moment that shaped their future' or the 'turning point in their lives'? As if, say, a professional golfer would now be working in a butcher's shop or a call centre if his dad hadn't bought him those plastic clubs when he was four years old. They see their life and careers a lot like Sliding Doors, the nineties chick-flick starring Gwyneth Paltrow, whose character's life takes two completely different paths according to whether or not she squeezes inside the closing doors on a London Tube train.

  If I had to choose my Sliding Doors moment, one day in 1995 stands out quite clearly – the afternoon when Andy came home from school and announced that he wanted to go along to cycling league for kids which took place every Tuesday night at the National Sports Centre – the NSC – on the road out of Douglas. When I piped up that I'd like to give it a go as well, my mum said 'Why not?' so after school the next Tuesday, she rounded us up and off we trooped to the NSC.

  One thing I can say quite emphatically about that evening is that I could hardly have looked less like someone poised to embark on a journey towards a career in professional sport, least of all in cycling. My chosen battle gear that and every other Tuesday for the next few months was more Lee Chapman than Lance Armstrong, what with my Leeds United home shirt and oversized red helmet. Not that I'd have been fazed as I took my place on the start line, glancing left and right, sizing up the opposition. There were maybe twenty kids, and me, the smallest of the lot. I gripped tighter on the handlebars of my BMX and listened out for the signal to send all that adrenalin rushing to those pudgy little legs. One second, two seconds, ready, steady, GO! and two minutes later, I'd finished the course – a single lap of the NSC car park – in last place. Dead last. In my first race.

  I was gutted, but also, somehow, sufficiently exhilarated to want to come back for more. And I would keep coming back, keep finishing last or, on a good day, second-from-last, and keep drawing both motivation and humiliation from the experience. One Tuesday night that summer, I was in my customary position, somewhere at the back, when I caught sight of Mum at the edge of the track, smirking. At the end of the race, I rode over and asked her what she'd been smiling about. Her answer was mortifying: 'You look like you're out for a Sunday stroll.' I blurted out that maybe if I had a bike with gears like all the other kids, I might have a chance one day – a notion she found even funnier.

  My next birthday, Mum and Dad finally caved in and allowed themselves to be dragged to the bike shop, Castletown Cycles. I picked out a purple mountain bike, bigger than its red predecessor, and with gears. Crushingly, the next Tuesday's 'race' was cancelled due to rain, but all that meant was a delay to the start of what was soon to become a rampant winning spree. After the first win came a second and a third, and, pretty soon, partly thanks to the gears and partly thanks to my mum's unwittingly goading remarks, I'd become nigh on invincible. It seemed that defeat and ridicule were the best bait for whatever low-lurking talent needed coaxing out; thus, the same year, when I competed in a mountain bike league off Douglas Head, I ended race one sobbing in a gorse bush and vowing never to go back, only to go on later to dominate there as well. At around the same time, I entered a British Cycling Federation 'Challenge' consisting of a short time-trial and an obstacle course, with the winner going through to a national final in Manchester. I thought I'd done pretty well in both, and said so to Mum and Dad as we stood waiting for the results. I was rabbiting away, 'I'd absolutely love it if it was me.'

  Mum sniggered, 'Ha. Don't be silly, it's not going to be you.'

  The next voice was the one we all heard over the tannoy – 'And the winner is ... Mark Cavendish.' I was on my way to Manchester for the national final.

  If I was pleased with myself then I'd be even more delighted and amazed when, a few weeks later, on a course that consisted of a 'road race' and a 'time-trial', both effectively laps of the Manchester velodrome car park, I won the 'Challenge' overall. My prize was a Raleigh mountain bike; it had been tipping it down with rain that whole day, but as I sat on the ferry that night, sopping wet, you could have toasted bread on my cheeks.

  Winning an event organised by British Cycling meant that I was now on the national federation's radar, and so started off a period of several years where you'd have seen me down the Ferry Port in Douglas of a Saturday morning, bike slung over my shoulder, off to some race or event. It was also around that time that my life took a completely unexpected and unwelcome twist: my parents announced that they were splitting up. I automatically connect the two things simply because the day that Mum, without warning or preamble, told us the news, I was due to go over to the mainland for a race, this time with the Island athletics team.

  An hour or so later, I was on the ferry with all of the other kids, but I was the only one sitting on his own crying his eyes out. That whole weekend I was crestfallen. There'd been none of the warning signs you expect – the constant, blazing rows, the silences, the simmering tension. Okay, our parents had the odd argument, but nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe we were just too preoccupied with whizzing around on our bikes, or maybe I've it shut out. I never really dwelled on it in the years following, but now when I think about it, the rawness of the emotion takes me by surprise.

  For a while, at first, Dad carried on living with us, but there was never any question that they weren't going to get a divorce. Thinking back, it was surreal; the first time it really dawned on us that Dad really was gone for good was when Andy and I were riding around Douglas on our BMXes one day, weeks or maybe months after Mum broke the news, and we saw his car parked in a drive that wasn't our own. There were no tears, just a stark realisation, 'Oh, okay, so that's where Dad's living now.' After that we pretty much got on with things. If we misbehaved, which wasn't that often, or if we were hyperactive, which was pretty much all the time, Mum would blame it on the divorce, but that was just her fretting and perhaps feeling guilty. When it wasn't
the divorce, she was blaming Coco-Pops or apple juice, and banning them from the kitchen cupboard.

  I don't know if Andy would agree, but in general, I think Mum and Dad breaking up made us grow up quite quickly and recognise that, even as a pair of kids, we had to take some responsibility. The hardest part was Christmases, as I suppose it is for a lot of kids with divorced parents. At school, I'd be aware of the other kids looking forward to Christmas, while I'd be quietly dreading it. We were lucky in that Dad still wanted to be a part of our lives, but the flip side of this was that we'd spend Christmas Day getting ferried from one family to another. It's only in the last few years, since I've been with Melissa, that I've started to like Christmas and even love it.

  I don't think the divorce changed me particularly – it just happened to come at a time when I was changing a fair bit anyway. I'd been gobby at infant school, and now I started puberty before everyone else and became even more confident. Headmasters' comments spanned the gamut from 'bone idle' to 'too smart for his own good'.

  THERE are many common misconceptions about the Isle of Man – one of them being that an Island measuring 50 kilometres in length couldn't possibly offer the variety of roads and terrain that are the spice of a cyclist's life and training. The misconception is, in fact, almost as vast as the 400-kilometre road network that zigzags the Island, and which, by the age of thirteen, I knew by name, number, gradient and texture of tarmac.

  I'll always maintain that the roads are one of the main reasons why the Island has produced so many decent riders. One of the best known before me was probably Steve Joughin, who won national titles and stages of the Milk Race in the 1980s. Mike Doyle was another one who turned pro in that era. Going back further, Peter Buckley won the Commonwealth Games gold medal in 1966, but was tragically killed when he was out training three years later. Over the past few years it's quite amazing how many riders from the Island have represented Great Britain at some level or ridden for pro teams either in the UK or abroad: Mark Kelly, Christian Varley, Andrew Roche, Johnny Bellis, Peter Kennaugh, Timmy Kennaugh, Mark Christian, and me.

  It's hard to explain if you're not a cyclist and you haven't been to the Island, but take it from me, there are two prerequisites for riding a bike here: you have to be tough and you have to be passionate. Without those two key requirements, there's just too much wind, too much cold, too many hills and too many excuses to do something else – something that doesn't feel suspiciously like self-harm.

  By the time I was thirteen, cycling was still a game, but one that I was taking increasingly seriously, and with increasing success. The Manchester Youth Tour gave me my first experience of racing against the best in my age group from all around Europe and a couple of sprint wins proved that I was far from out of my depth. At home, I was a member of one of the two main clubs on the Island, the Manx Viking Wheelers, and at the club dinner that winter I can remember asking the guest of honour for the evening, Shane Sutton, for a few training tips. Shane would later become one of my best and most influential coaches at the British Cycling Federation – a good road racer in the eighties and nineties, a brilliant man manager and your original, straight-shooting, straight-talking Aussie. His advice to me that night was typical Shane – simple and brilliant. He said, 'It doesn't matter what you do, just do sixteen hours a week.'

  My bullshit radar had always been a finely tuned instrument, and I recognised straight away that this advice was coming from someone with the right credentials to give it, so I went straight home and started drawing up a training plan with my mate, training partner and sometime nemesis Christian Varley. Sixteen hours a week, every week, all winter, come rain or shine. And we stuck to it. Religiously. It was the first time that I'd trained properly, rather than just riding my bike with fitness as a collateral benefit – and the results were incredible. Once upon a time in cycling circles, training was considered no less an outrageous and unethical shortcut to better performance than anabolic steroids or EPO today, and now I could see why: I attacked 200 metres into the first race of the next season in Saltayre, lapped the field twice, and could have stopped for a light picnic and still won. That was also the year of the Youth Olympics. We turned up at the trial in Cleveland and I asked if I could ride in the Under 16s, rather than the Under 14s, where the competition would no doubt be less challenging and the gears were restricted – the theory being that younger and less-developed riders could damage joints and muscles by pushing too hard on the pedals. The organiser pointed me in the direction of the Under 16s, and I swear to this day that I would have won and not come second had Christian not told me to launch my sprint too late. The races kept coming, and so did the improvements – and the wins. Every Wednesday night back on the Island meant a ten-mile time-trial, and pretty much every week I'd take a big chunk of time off my personal best. I'd started off doing 29 minutes, then it was 28, then 27, until one week one of the lads from Bikestyle, the shop in Douglas, lent me his lo-pro – a bike whose frame slopes down from the saddle towards the handlebars for a lower and more aerodynamic position. That night I went under what time-triallists refer to as the 'magical' 24 minutes for the first time. I was thirteen years old.

  I had become 'The Manx Express'. Pretty soon, I'd also be a double British champion. The road race was in Hillingdon, near London, and I attacked incessantly before settling into the main pack and comfortably winning in a sprint. The race was omnium, the track cycling equivalent of the decathlon: a series of different events of varying number and type – with points added up in an overall league table based on your finishing position in each event. I'd never really ridden on a track before, so Mike Kelly, the coach from the Manx Road Club, and Andrea Ingham, a friend of Mike's, had given me a bit of a crash course a week before the championships. Mike had also lent me a rear disc wheel and an aerodynamic helmet. They had the desired effect: I stopped the clock in 12.3 for the flying 200 – 200 metres with a rolling start – which was about two seconds faster than anyone else, then in under two minutes for the 1500 metres individual pursuit – 16 seconds better than second place.

  I left the velodrome that day with my second British title and a new certainty, more meaningful than any trophy or medal, or any amount of bluster or bravado: I was bloody good at this.

  Stage 1: Brest–Plumelec, 197.5 km

  * * *

  1. Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Spa)

  Caisse d'Epargne 4.36.07 (42.91 km/h)

  120. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 2.00

  General classification

  * * *

  1. Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Spa)

  Caisse d'Epargne 4.36.07

  120. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 2.00

  STAGE 2

  Sunday, 6 July 2008

  AURAY—SAINT BRIEUC, 164.5 KM

  I'M SURE someone must have said it before, but, for three weeks, the life of a Tour de France rider bears a strong resemblance to the recurring, twenty-four-hour nightmare faced by Bill Murray's character in the film Groundhog Day.

  It's not as though the daily grind on the Tour is necessarily very different to any other race. The average pro bike rider races seventy to a hundred days a year. That's potentially a hundred days of chain hotels, chain hotel breakfasts, chain hotel dinners and chain hotel beds. It's a hundred alarms and a hundred times the same kaleidoscope of excitement, tiredness and sometimes dread that accompanies the same waking thought: 'Here we go again.' All that changes at the Tour is that everything gets magnified as though for every extra spectator, every extra ounce of prestige and pressure, every extra day in the hottest, harshest cauldron in professional cycling or perhaps any other endurance sport, the emotional hangover gets heavier – heavier than at any other race, and heavier than it was the day before.

  Some riders will tell you they know what kind of day it'll be as soon as they open their eyes and feel the dull aches and pains in their legs which will multiply as the race goes on. Not me; que sera, sera is my philosophy. Now, on the second morn
ing of the race, I rubbed away the sleep, rolled gingerly off the bed, no differently to billions of adults on every working day all over the world, pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt and shambled down to the nondescript dining room du jour.

  The breakfast table's one of the best places to observe the other rituals, superstitions and dietary eccentricities that are as much a part of cycling lore as the Tour itself. Some are grounded in science, others in personal experience, others in nothing more than myth and legend. One of my more irrational superstitions is my refusal to take a shower on the morning of a race; I also steer clear of cow's milk, having once read something in a magazine about dairy products encouraging the build-up of lactic acid in the muscles, and I'll never eat meat because proteins are hard to digest. You'd think everyone would abide by the same principles, but, on the morning of some of her most important races, I've seen the British Olympic and World Champion Nicole Cooke drinking a pint of milk to wash down a dirty big fry-up. It goes without saying that my team coaches and nutritionists will take some convincing before they're frogmarching us to the nearest greasy spoon.