Boy Racer Page 6

  Later that summer, Dad started taking me away to track races on the mainland. I loved those trips – just me, my dad and my bike in the back of our Citroën AX, buzzing up and down the motorways. After my first winter at Barclays, I trained for no more than a fortnight before the British junior track championships, yet still won the Scratch race, and was the fastest qualifier in the flying 200 metres (in 11.1 seconds) and the kilometre time-trial ahead of Matt Crampton, who sometimes gives Chris Hoy a run for his money in the sprint events these days.

  On the track, I could get away with a bit of calorific overindulgence. There were no hills in the velodrome, no gravity to defy, and my finishing speed was intact. On the road, alas, it was a different story. In 2002, my first full year at Barclays, I'd very much hoped to ride and, if possible, win the junior world championship road race on what was said to be an unusually flat and sprinter-friendly route in Zolder, Belgium, but had been badly penalised by a series of hilly routes in the 'Peter Buckley Trophy'. The 'Buckleys' were the most coveted, hard-fought junior races on the domestic calendar, not to mention the British Cycling Federation's main measuring post when it came to selecting teams for the Worlds. In 2002, the climbers had flourished while I flattered to deceive ... the result being that Great Britain went to Zolder with a team full of climbers who were desperately ill-equipped for such a flat course. A Frenchman won; the Brits ended medal-less while I sat at home ruing what might have been.

  My last year at the bank, 2003, was also going to be my last as an 'Under 18' or 'junior'. Mike Kelly had set me up with Dataphonics, a junior team based in Cambridge, and Barclays allowed me to have much of that summer off on a short sabbatical. Having missed out the previous year in Zolder, I set my sights on the 2003 Worlds in Hamilton, Canada, but was left fuming again as the selectors snubbed me for the second straight year. The day after the team was announced minus my name, luckily, I had the opportunity to make amends in what was to be the final 'Buckley' of the season. My rivals that day had the Federation to thank for a performance that was as angry as it was dominant and, most importantly, triumphant.

  Stage 2: Auray–Saint Brieuc, 164.5 km

  * * *

  1. Thor Hushovd (Nor) Crédit Agricole 3.45.13 (43.84 km/h)

  27. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 3.45.13

  General classification

  * * *

  1. Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Spa)

  Caisse d'Epargne 8.21.20

  100. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 2.00

  STAGE 3

  Monday, 7 July 2008

  SAINT-MALO—NANTES, 208 KM

  THERE are many things you'd like to do when you've just blown your chance in a stage of a Tour de France, but trust me when I say that giving a television interview is a fair way down your list of priorities.

  We were now three stages and three missed opportunities into the Tour. Admittedly, with its hilltop finish, Stage 1 had almost been written off in advance. Stage 2 was hardly the kind of pure test of sprinting speed I expected, either. Today, though, ought to have been The Day.

  Instead, I crossed the line in tenth place, two minutes behind the four-man breakaway group we'd mystifyingly failed to catch. I had lots of questions of my own but no answers.

  Unfortunately, answers were exactly what the man with the microphone wanted, and he didn't care that my mood was as dark or wet as the weather.

  'Mark, Mark, can we have a word?'

  He must have seen from the look on my face that the prospect didn't exactly fill me with glee, but the guy had a job to do. Anyway, as soon as the camera starts rolling, you're trapped; tell him to stick his microphone where there's never any sun on the forecast, or even put it more politely, and you've just starred in your own version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

  I shrugged and mumbled okay.

  First question: 'What happened there?'

  I glared at him. Did he want a comprehensive analysis, from the start of the stage until the end, all six hours of it, while I was standing here in the pissing rain, having just risked my life? Did he want me to run through how I'd effectively sacrificed three teammates – Marcus Burghardt, Bernard Eisel and Adam Hansen – ridden them into the floor, all for nothing, because, for some reason that escaped my understanding, no other team wanted to chase? Did he want me to spell it out to everyone at home that the six or seven stages on the route that weren't time-trials, or didn't feature major climbs, equated to my six or seven shots at a stage win at best – and that I'd not so much missed the target as fired a blank.

  I looked at him through narrowed eyes. 'What do you mean?'

  'Well, you didn't catch the break, did you?'

  'Well, no—'

  'So when did you decide to chase the break?'

  'Er, as soon as it went ...'

  Translation: You always know you're going to chase a break as soon as it goes. No, forget that, on a day like today, when the route was predominantly flat, the stars seemed aligned and everything set up for me to take my first Tour stage win, we knew even before the stage that we would chase any break. Of course that doesn't mean that, when four blokes attacked right from the gun this morning – two Frenchmen, Romain Feillu and the eventual stage winner Samuel Dumoulin, the Italian Paolo Longo Borghini and the American William Frischkorn – we were going to mobilise straight away; it was only when the gap immediately went out to ten minutes after fifteen kilometres that we sent Adam, Burghi and Bernie to the front, just to keep things ticking over, to keep a handle on the situation.

  Next question ... actually, no, the same one as before.

  'So when did you decide to start chasing the break?'

  'When the break went ...'

  'Who made the decision to start chasing the break?'

  'The directeurs, as always ...'

  Translation: With 100 kilometres to go, the gap was still ten or eleven minutes, but we assumed, and the directeurs assumed, that a) the guys in the break would start tiring and their advantage start plummeting, as per usual and b) we'd get some help from a couple of other sprinters' teams and maybe the yellow jersey, Alejandro Valverde's, team. We were wrong: everyone could how see motivated I was, purely from how active my team was at the front of the bunch, and they decided we could do all the work on our own. In normal circumstances, we'd still have caught the breakaway quite comfortably, but, today, the further we rode, the more we felt like we were the victims of some cruel practical joke. With 30 kilometres to go, Adam Hansen was drilling on the front and I was in the sweetspot and absolutely flying yet somehow the gap was refusing to budge. It was still five minutes. Then we turned left into crosswinds with 20 km to go, the peloton split and we knew it was bonsoir.

  'So what have you learnt from today?'

  'Nothing.'

  Translation: Mate, I respect that you have to do your job but not now – not after that stage. I know that everyone watching will think I'm a petulant little sod, and they'll be rushing to say so on message boards and blogs about two minutes from now, but that's my problem, not yours. With me, I'm afraid that what you see is what you're going to get. On a day like this don't expect a charm offensive.

  To give the guy credit, it took him a while but he finally took the hint. I then rode off in the direction of my team bus even angrier than I'd been when I crossed the line.

  Usually for twenty minutes after everyone's cleaned up and washed down and before we've all flaked out on the seats, the chat in the bus revolves around the race. Not today: no doubt fortunately for all concerned, only as I told my teammates about the interview did I come up with what would have been a good answer to that final question, albeit one that would have had repercussions way beyond the Internet forums which would be humming with talk of my 'antics' the following day.

  Interviewer: 'Mark, so what have learnt from today?'

  Me: 'That journalists sometimes ask some stupid fucking questions.'

  'I WANT to win stages of the Tour de France ... oh, and be Olymp
ic champion.'

  That was my answer to a better question: 'What do you want to achieve as a cyclist?'

  A yard or two away, on the other side of the table, sat John Herety, Simon Lillistone and Rod Ellingworth – all former professionals and members of what was rapidly becoming the most highly regarded coaching team in UK or perhaps even world cycling. Herety: small and bald, in his mid-forties. Lillistone: younger, medium build, mousey hair. Rod, in his midthirties, taller, stockier, with spiky ginger hair and a cherubic, friendly face that, you sensed, hid a ruthless streak. They nodded sceptically at my reply.

  This wasn't your usual interview. But then I suppose it wasn't your usual job. I'd always intended to leave Barclays at the end of 2003 to dedicate myself full-time to cycling, hoping that a pro contract would be waiting for me at the end of two or three seasons in the 'Under 23' or 'amateur' category. Belgium, Holland, Italy, France – they all had a sprawling network of amateur clubs, many with six-figure budgets, top-notch bikes and backup, international race programmes and often feeder agreements with the best pro teams in the world. Soon enough, I'd decided, one of these teams would also have me on their books.

  All that had changed when, late in 2003, the British Cycling Federation announced they were launching a two-year, residential 'Academy' for six Under 23 riders to be selected in interviews at the end of November. The programme was to be lottery-funded and aimed to produce future Olympic champions – which meant a clear emphasis on the track, where there were far more medals available. Although I was far more interested in the romance, the history and the prestige of the road, I none the less knew a good opportunity when I saw one.

  There was only one potential glitch: I wasn't sure how much some of the coaches at the British Federation rated me. I got the impression that one, Marshall Thomas, thought I was downright useless. That year, I'd been entering Nations Cup events with the British junior track team and regularly winning Madisons with Tom White, another of the lads who was applying for the Academy, yet we'd gone to the European track championships in Düsseldorf that summer and Marshall Thomas wanted to leave me out of the team pursuit. It was lucky for me that another British coach, the German Heiko Salzwedel, had been one of my biggest admirers ever since he'd first seen me ride at sixteen years of age and immediately compared me to Robbie McEwen, who at the time was just about the best road sprinter in the world. In Düsseldorf, Heiko laid down the law; he told Marshall that I had to be in the team pursuit, no questions asked.

  Now I scanned their expressions. Herety's, Lillistone's, then Rod's. I got the impression – later confirmed to me – that Lillistone wasn't a fan. Rod was hard to read, but he at least knew that I respected him as a coach. Earlier that year, I'd been invited for a weekend of 'coach-led' racing at the Manchester velodrome – a two-day, multi-discipline crash course with Rod providing technical advice and feedback at the end of every session. At the end of the weekend, on my way out of the car park, I'd seen Rod and wandered over to tell him, quietly and sincerely, that it had been the best two days I'd ever spent on my bike. Now, Rod and Herety both seemed impressed with my answers, especially the ones about racing. 'You're in a group of twelve, ten kilometres from the finish, and people are starting to attack. What do you do?' Herety asked.

  I said that I'd start by sussing out who were the strongest riders and mark them, because I knew that could use up a lot of energy, finish tired but still win in a sprint. He nodded. 'Good answer.'

  There were more unusual questions. Like, 'How did you get here today?'

  Apparently they weren't just looking for athletic or even tactical ability, but also for quick wits, street smarts. I knew the road names and exactly how long it had taken, probably because I'd been used to finding my own way off the Isle of Man and to all kinds of race venues for years. Apparently some of the other lads were clueless; they'd just sat in the back seat, with their parents driving, and they could barely work out which country they'd come from, let alone the name of the motorway. Rod later said they'd drawn up a matrix, plotting our scores in every different department – from motivation to passion to the number of watts we could produce on the bike – and that, overall, Ed Clancy and I had been comfortably the best.

  For all my bravado, though, and despite the fact that only eight of us were up for six places, I left that interview room without the merest inkling of whether I could expect good news.

  A week went by, then two, then three. I carried on training, waiting, hoping. Finally, in December, the phone call arrived. It was Lillistone. I held my breath. I'd been quite open in the interview about how little riding I'd done over the previous two years when I'd been at Barclays, and I'd also told them that I was about to have my wisdom teeth out, which would set me back another couple of weeks. I now wondered whether honesty had been the best policy.

  Lillistone paused. 'Mark,' he said, 'er ... congratulations. You've made it. We want you in Manchester for your induction on the eighth of January.'

  My heart leapt. I was buzzing. I got off the phone to Lillistone and immediately called Christian Varley – the other lad from the Island who'd applied for a place. He hadn't heard anything; I feigned sympathy while privately congratulating myself.

  But Varley was soon the least of my worries. The next person who needed to know was Melissa. When I told her, she threw open her arms and whispered words of congratulations. It was only five minutes later, when I found her sobbing silently in her sister's bedroom, that the impact of what was about to happen struck us. We'd known this day was coming but that didn't make it any easier.

  'OH ... MY ... GOD.'

  The say a picture's worth a thousand words, but, if that's true, there are certain facial expressions that are worth a million.

  Rod Ellingworth's face was that picture. He worked in Manchester, he'd seen a scally before – I just don't think he expected to see a pair of them piling out of a bright gold, souped-up Vauxhaull Corsa in the car park of the Manchester velodrome. Not today, anyway. Not when he was here to meet the six teenagers who were meant to form the next generation of Olympic medal-winning cyclists. Not in Lacoste tracksuits in that chav-mobile, with that stereo pumping, and that '007 Man' numberplate, and the 'Goldfinger (no. 007)' sticker on the front windscreen.

  Matt Brammeier and I had made quite an entrance. I'd stuffed the Corsa full of my gear, cranked up the sound system, rolled off the ferry in Liverpool and gone straight to Brammy's place to pick him up. We'd then bombed down the M62, into Manchester, across the city and into the velodrome car park with a skid, a wheelspin and more sparks and sound effects than your average firework display.

  Having taken several seconds to catch his breath, Rod told us to go and fetch our pedals to put on the new Trek road bikes that were the first big perk of being on the Academy. Christian Varley turned to his parents. 'Mum,' he said. 'Can you go and get my pedals out of the car for me?'