Boy Racer Page 5

  An interesting study in the nutritional habits of a leading cyclist it may be, but breakfast is also one of the least interesting parts of the day on Tour. Very early in the race, sleep and rest become an obsession, and any time not spent on the bike or not dedicated to either of those two activities, can seem wasted. Today, the banter was typically subdued. Depending on how bleary-eyed and brain-dead everyone is, and how many column inches are dedicated to the team in the morning papers splayed across the breakfast tables, the highlight of the whole twenty minutes to half an hour is choosing from the array of cereals laid out by our soigneurs – the assistants cum masseurs cum chefs who are an integral part of every team. Three bowls of Choco-mix or Special K, a splash of soya milk, then a croissant or bread roll, two espressos, my laundry bag of freshly washed kit from the soigneurs then usually, like today, I'm ready to roll.

  My race number at the Tour was 43. That's another of my superstitions, this one passed on by Axel Merckx, son of the greatest cyclist of all time, Eddy: never pin your number on your jersey until the morning of the race. That left about twenty minutes after breakfast to inflict four stab-wounds to a square sheet of paper marked '43', change into kit, fasten the number, pack up my suitcase and report to the bus five minutes before the departure time advised by the directeurs sportifs the previous evening. Why five minutes early? Simple – the closer to the advertised stage start time you arrived, the more problems and stress you'd create for your teammates, your mechanics, your soigneurs and your directeurs sportifs – and the more likely you were to get an almighty bollocking, even from our relatively mild-mannered directeurs sportifs.

  Stage two or the second of twenty-one Groundhog Days? For the next two hours, it'd sometimes be hard to tell ...

  Two hours to start:

  Sometimes your hotel's an hour away from the start village, sometimes half an hour, as was the case this morning from the Ibis in Vannes to Auray. Either way, the timetable for the entire morning – when you get up, when you eat, when you leave – is geared towards arriving an hour and ten minutes before the start. Today, like most mornings on Tour, the mood is sleepy and subdued, the conversation muted; everyone jumps on, on time, and the wheels roll.

  One hour fifty-seven minutes to start:

  Give or take a couple of seconds, this is when, in most cases, the iPods go in and the eyes slam shut; sometimes, seen from afar, you'd think the Tour was a sleeping competition, the team bus a mobile dormitory, not a mode of transport. Occasionally, you'll see someone with their head in a book – a novel, a real book – but, really, the only required reading at the Tour is the race manual or 'road book' containing the maps and course profiles of every stage. Last night, like every night, I spent fifteen or twenty minutes poring over the detailed map of the last four kilometres of today's stage, and, this morning, I repeat the revision session as soon as the bus pulls out of the hotel car park.

  One hour fifteen minutes to start:

  The bus groans through streets now lined with fans, banners and tricolore flags and into the area allocated for 'Parking Équipes' or 'Team Parking'. All eyes are now wide open and darting between the riders, journalists, officials and spectators choking the road and pavements on either side. Unseen and unheard behind our bus's tinted windows, this is also where the banter can start. 'Check her out ...' ; ' There's that prat'; 'Cav, in fifteen years, when you've retired and you're a fat bastard, you'll look just like that bloke over there ...'

  It's all in good heart. Honest.

  One hour ten minutes to start:

  The engine stops, the bus rocks to a standstill, and the directeurs sportifs arrive for our ten-minute briefing. No fists on tables; just a few pointers about the route, a brief outline of tactics, perhaps a couple of questions, then everyone's mind on the job. Today, it's: 'We work to bring back the breakaways, for a sprint finish. Couple of bumps in the last kilometre but we try to set up Cav. Okay?'

  Okay. Over and out.

  One hour to start:

  One of the guys disappears into the bathroom. Four minutes later, a foul stench, a deluge of expletives and, finally, laughter fill the air.

  Forty minutes to start:

  Slap on chamois cream. Pick out selection of energy bars and gels from stash replenished every morning by team soigneurs. Tell Bernie Eisel I'm definitely better-looking than him.

  Half an hour to start:

  Ride the 100 metres or so to the sign-on podium. You always know where to go, because, from about 100 miles, never mind 100 metres, you can hear Daniel Mangeas, Tour speaker and institution, reciting some irrelevant statistic about how an obscure Spanish rider once finished twelfth in Stage 4 of the Vuelta a Espana. I arrive, sign the sheet indicating that I'm present, correct and ready to ride, wave to the crowd, retrieve my bike then muscle through more fans, journalists, VIPs and gendarmes back to the team bus while Mangeas rasps his way through a list of my most significant achievements.

  Twenty minutes to start:

  Perhaps pop outside for two or three very short interviews, at request of team press officer. Every day, for fifteen minutes or even half an hour, some riders will camp out in the 'Village Départ' or start village – a sprawling hospitality area where you can read the papers, drink coffee and even get a haircut ... but where you're also besieged by reporters, sponsors, guests or former Tour stars now recycled as chauffeurs or PR men. In 2007, this had all been a novel, pre-stage diversion; now, in 2008, it is much less stressful and much more sensible to count down the last few minutes before a stage start in the calm and comfort of the bus.

  Five minutes to start:

  Down the stairs, out of bus, helmet on, take bike, check radio, right foot in, left foot in and away we go. See you in 164.5 kilometres, in Saint Brieuc, in about three and three-quarter hours' time, on the top step on the podium, with any luck.

  THREE hours, forty-five minutes and thirteen seconds, to be precise. That's how long it took Thor Hushovd – but sadly not me. Those 'bumps' we talked about in the briefing turned out to be somewhat harder than expected, so much so that, on the penultimate rise, a kilometre and a half from the line, my legs suddenly seized up and my chances evaporated. As I dropped backwards, one rider's tumble led to a mass pile-up, which forced me to slam on the breaks and skid to a complete halt. When I finally started moving again, I was in fiftieth position and it was all I could do to reach for the microphone on my intercom radio, press the 'on' button and bleat the order to forget about me and ride for Gerald Ciolek.

  From twenty-seven places back – which was exactly where I would finish – I could just about make out Hushovd's raised arms and both Kim Kirchen and Gerald lunging in vain at his heels.

  Kirchen 2nd. Ciolek 3rd. Cavendish 27th.

  Or, if you like, another day, another defeat.

  'FAT WANKER'. That's what the Guardian called me. Or rather that's what I called myself according to an article by William Fotheringham the day before my Tour de France debut in London in July 2007. William was one of the scores of journalists that my team, T-Mobile, had fixed up phoned interviews with in the run-up to the Tour's Grand Départ, nearly driving me to despair, and I'd been telling him about how my coach at the British Cycling Academy, Rod Ellingworth, had transformed me from a slightly chubby sixteen-year-old into the rider everyone now said was going to be the revelation of the 2007 Tour. The line wasn't the best, but I thought he'd heard okay. There were even faint gurgles of laughter down the phone. Well, you would, wouldn't you? It was one hell of quote – 'Rod turned me from a fat wanker to a world champion in fifteen months.'

  I know I'm not the most lily-tongued twenty-four-year-old on the planet, and I'm not proud of it, but would I really call myself 'a fat wanker'? To the Guardian? I suppose at that point not many people knew that I'd spent a couple of years in my teens working in Barclays Bank in Douglas, trying desperately to raise a few quid for what I expected to be an expensive couple of years when I'd have to travel abroad to race and get myself noticed. From 'fat ba
nker' to world champion; I'll grant you that it's a strange enough concept for one or two people to get their wires crossed.

  I'd known I was going to leave school at sixteen right from when I had to choose my GCSE options two years earlier. You know how it goes: kid tells parents and headmaster that he's going to be a professional sportsman, parent and headmaster roll their eyes, mutter some cliché about 'having qualifications to fall back on', kid shakes his head and sulks, and parents and head-master usually win. In my case the bone of contention was whether I was going to do just French or German; I was passably good at both, and could well understand how French could be useful for my cycling career, at least, but simply didn't see the point of taking German instead of PE, which is what they were advocating. They ended up convincing me, and, for reasons that'll later become clear, it's no bad thing that they did.

  They were an eventful couple of years, 2001 and 2002. There was one event in particular that changed my life for ever, and that was meeting Melissa, my soon-to-be-wife. People still laugh now when I talk about my past life as a teenage ballroom dancing prodigy, but I always tell them not to knock it, because, without it, I would never have met the girl who, eight years on, is the person who's done more for me than anyone else in the world – the girl whom I still call the best thing that ever happened to me.

  THE DATE was sometime early in 2002 – the year of my GCSEs – the occasion a Saturday night when I'd just returned from my first race of the season, the Eddie Soens in Aintree. I was never much of a drinker or a party-animal as a teenager, mainly because those vices aren't compatible with the lifestyle of a budding professional cyclist, but all of my mates were going to a 'Battle of the DJs' at the Villa Marina, on the front in Douglas, so I decided to tag along. Straight away I recognised Melissa. We'd been introduced by my ballroom dance partner Laura at a party a couple of months earlier and I'd been downright snotty with her. We'd spoken for a minute, then I'd pretended to be bored and sloped off to talk to someone else. Now, though, I saw her across the dance floor and turned to my mate. 'That girl has to be mine,' I whispered. To cut a long and fabulous story very, very short – at least for now – eight fabulous, sometimes tempestuous years later, we're still together and due to get married in October 2009.

  Most kids at that age launch themselves into relationships without a moment's thought for where it's all leading, what kind of emotions or practical choices are going to be involved in a few months' time. It shows just how sure I was about Melissa that after a few weeks I'd turned to her with both a warning and the option of quitting while we were ahead: I was going to be a professional cyclist, and chasing that dream would mean trips to the mainland every weekend, to Europe every so often, and pretty soon it might mean spending weeks or months away at time. She nodded, unperturbed, but I'm sure she hadn't grasped the full implications of what I was saying, probably because it did sound a little bit presumptuous coming from a fifteen-year-old. There'd be plenty of tears shed by both parties over the next few years as we realised that, if anything, I'd underestimated the extent of the sacrifices we were both making and the heartache they'd cause.

  Melissa's arrival on the scene coincided with the build-up to my GCSEs, for which I showed a total lack of enthusiasm. Melissa was in the school year above me, which meant she was studying for AS Levels at the same time that I was doing my GCSEs, but she was intent on devoting more time to helping me than to her own revision. Even without doing homework or much revision, I scraped by in the classroom as well. My GCSE results came through that August: five As, six Bs and two Cs.

  Staying on at school and A-Levels was never really an option. Cycling was the axis on which my world now turned and everything else, as far as I was concerned, was a waste of time – especially the ten and a half months per year that weren't summer holiday. 'Holiday' perhaps isn't how other people would describe a strict regimen of six hours on a bike every day, but to me those six hours weren't obligation or drudgery or even training – they were pure, unvarnished fun. Every day, I'd either head out with the group which met in the mornings at the Quarter-Bridge, or on my own, ride for around three hours, then go out for another three with the crowd who trained after work. I loved the company, the piss-taking, the exhilaration and, of course, like every kid, the gratification that comes with praise and success.

  It was around this time, as my obsession grew, that my brother's interest in cycling began to wane. I've said in numerous interviews that Andy was perhaps a more naturally blessed rider than me, and my view on that hasn't changed. One year, for instance, Andy put his bike away in September, dusted it off again the following March, trained for a week then went straight to Liverpool and won the Merseyside Divisional Championships in his age group. I, meanwhile, had ridden all winter but could only finish second to my soon-to-be best mate, the Scouser Matt Brammeier.

  Andy lacked nothing as a cyclist except perhaps a little bit of perseverance and passion. Those, fortunately, were the two commodities I possessed in abundance.

  I OFFICIALLY became a Barclays employee in September 2001. I had the next phase of my life all mapped out: a lot of riders in the 'junior' or Under 18 category are effectively full-time cyclists who live, eat, train and race pretty much like the pros who ride the Tour de France, but to me that seemed senseless. I always knew that the key years, the ones which would determine whether a big pro team was willing to take a punt on me, were the three that came later, when I'd be classed as an 'amateur' or 'Espoir' or 'Under 23' rider. They were years when I'd need discipline, contacts, the right diet, the right results and also a few grand in my pocket to make time off the bike as comfortable, uncomplicated and conducive to good performances as possible. Mike Kelly, my coach, mentor, training partner and mate from the Manx Road Club, recommended Barclays in Douglas; his son, who'd been a really good rider as a junior, had worked there and said they'd been great, always happy to give him the odd day to go and race as well as moral support, and even a bit of sponsorship. I was so keen that I felt compelled to tell a white lie in the Record of Achievement that I had to submit as part of my application: I said that I aspired to a career in professional cycling or banking. It obviously worked, because I got the job.

  Like most people and their banks, over the next two and a half years, Barclays and I developed a love–hate relationship. The job itself was great; I was a cashier, which may not be the most interesting role in itself, but I made it as stimulating as I could by treating it a lot like I treated my cycling, in other words by working hard and fast. There was an unofficial record at the bank for the number of transactions a cashier had completed in a single day, and I soon set about beating it. There was no such record for flirting with the old ladies, but I had a pretty good stab at that as well. It was the only way of making it bearable – learning the customers' names, humouring them, bantering with them. I still go to the bank sometimes, to say hello to one of the women who used to work with me, and she still maintains that I was the best cashier they ever had. It still makes me smile.

  As modest as the wages were, it was a relief to be earning properly for the first time. Up to that point, my only job had been a paper-round, the proceeds of which would inevitably be spent on cycling gear, as would all of my Christmas and birthday money. I think my parents, and my dad, in particular, had exactly the right attitude when it came to buying me equipment for my bike; if, for example, I bought some carbon Campagnolo brake levers, crashed and wrecked one of them, I'd be able to go to my dad to ask for money for a replacement, but he'd always ask me why I needed the carbon ones, which were only five grams lighter than the slightly less fancy, less expensive alloy versions, and he'd buy me those instead. At the time, I'd be slightly miffed, but now I realise that I grew up appreciating good equipment, just as I still appreciate it now, as well as everything else that my team's back-up staff do for me. I can be fairly sure that the pro riders who I see taking their bikes and their masseurs and mechanics for granted now picked up that attitude when they were
kids, when they only had to whistle for a new piece of carbon fibre to fall from the sky.

  You could say that the clue's in the name, but the 'fat banker years' were never intended to be my most productive from a cycling point of view. There were the cream cakes, sure, plus the half-dozen or so kilos of extra blubber they left me carrying, but the real issue was the limited time I had available to dedicate to riding my bike. Fortunately, when I did train and race, I was proving to myself and others that I could compete and win, not just on a domestic level but also against my contemporaries from all over Europe. That had been one of the conclusions I'd taken home from the Assen Youth Tour in Holland, which I'd ridden for the British Schools team in my last year at Ballerkemeen. That race was as memorable for my encouraging performances as for a couple of incidents involving my pal and partner-in-scallydom Matt Brammeier. I'd ordered a LOOK adjustable stem a few days before the race and had it sent to Brammeier's in Liverpool, where I was due to stay before we went over to Holland. Of course when I got off the ferry and arrived at his place the stem – all £150 worth of it – was already on Brammeier's bike, and he was adamant it wasn't coming off, arguing that it was 'payment' for my board and lodgings. We then pitched up in Assen, at a lodge in the woods where all of the other riders and officials were staying, and ran amok. In the race, I won the prologue and finished second on the next stage, a time-trial, despite having to suffer the indignity of watching Brammeier riding to fifth place with the LOOK stem I'd ordered specifically with that stage in mind. I won my second stage the following day, then, in the penultimate, attacked on a cobbled section and escaped with a group of eight. I was convinced I had the general classification sewn up until I glanced back and saw the yellow jersey zigzagging through the team cars, sheltered from the crosswinds. I knew then it was over. My consolation was another win in the final stage, the points jersey and, most importantly, confirmation that I could hold my own against even the best kids in Europe.