At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (10 page)

When we arrived back at the hotel that night, my new roommate, Bernie Eisel, nearly had to haul me into the lift and into our room. I got undressed and doddered off into the shower without closing the door. Ten minutes later, Bernie wondered why he hadn’t heard the water running. He promptly stuck his head around the door, exploded into laughter, and reached for his phone to take a picture: I was sitting cross-legged, fast asleep in the bottom of the shower.

t
he “rest day” is one of the great misnomers of professional cycling, given that it’s standard practice for most guys to ride anywhere between 50 and 100 km. For me, though, this one lived up to its name. I stayed in bed the whole day and had food and drink brought up to my room. It was hardly ideal preparation for the next day’s final Pyrenean extravaganza, finishing on top of the Tourmalet, but by now I was lurching mindlessly from one ritual pummeling to the next. As it happened, the configuration of this last mountain stage—with large portions of valley road between the three climbs on the route—was always going to make for a generous time limit, and I got through without too much difficulty. Whatever the bug or illness was that I’d caught, however, it appeared to be staying for the duration; I got onto the bus parked a couple of kilometers on the other side of the
Tourmalet summit that day, pulled on a woolly hat, and found a corner to curl up in a ball.

That night, Aldis told me that I was too ill to even go to my massage, and the next morning Brian Holm said he was forbidding me from starting the stage. I argued for a while, Brian held firm, then I argued a bit more, and he finally relented.

“Come on, Brian, it’s a flat day,” I said. “I’m not even thinking about sprinting, I just want to recover and make it to the Champs Elysées.”

My first memory of the stage, 198 km from Salies-de-Béarn to Bordeaux, was of coughing and seeing a bullet of brown phlegm launch itself out of my mouth and onto a groove in my handlebar stem, where it stayed. That, and a withering pace that, bizarrely, seemed to be blowing away cobwebs in my aching body.

To my astonishment, my legs were starting to feel light, elastic, powerful, so I went back to see Brian in the car.

“I actually feel okay, you know,” I said.

Brian nodded and reached for his intercom. “Guys, Cav thinks he can do it, so we’ll ride for the sprint.”

My team duly delivered another master class to get me into a good position with 1,500 meters to go, and from there, without Renshaw, I just surfed the wheels. Having had a miserable first Tour, the Sky riders were desperately trying to salvage something, and they led into the final straight. This was interpreted by some as a sign that there was already a deal in place for me to join Sky the following season. In reality, I was just flitting between wheels like a bee buzzes between flowers, looking for the sweetest nectar, the best slipstream. From Bernie’s wheel, I’d jumped behind Julian Dean, then Thor Hushovd, before seeing Petacchi swing across the road as he wound it up, and then following him, passing him, and winning by four bike lengths.

The podium presentation that day was one of the more memorable ones of my Tour de France career. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz were in town promoting their new film,
Knight and Day,
and were guests of the Tour de France organizers.

Naturally, I gave Cameron Diaz my winner’s bouquet.

There were now just two stages left. First, there was a long time trial that would act as the decider in what had been a close-fought battle for the yellow jersey between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck. That was an irrelevance for me, unlike, of course, the grand finale on the Champs Elysées. Contador held off Schleck in the time trial, as expected, and now it was left to me to fill in the other expected outcome on the Champs.

A lot of people will remember the side-on film of that sprint—of Thor Hushovd entering the frame, then Petacchi, and then me suddenly appearing like an Exocet on the other side of the road and tearing toward the Arc de Triomphe and my fifth win of the Tour. Three months later, they would play the clip in a montage of the best moments of the 2010 Tour at the official presentation of the 2011 race. At the very instant when I roared into the shot, the audience laughed as one. Sitting beside me, Thor Hushovd glanced in my direction and shook his head, smiling.

What people didn’t necessarily see or hear at the time was me momentarily losing my position as we entered the last 2 km, and a voice over my shoulder saying, “Come on, Cav!”

Only Tony Martin could have towed me back to fourth wheel, with the peloton already in one line, as we swung off the Rue de Rivoli, into the Place de la Concorde, and onto the Champs.

I’d ended the Tour with five stages: one fewer than in 2009, five more than I probably feared when I sat sobbing under that towel in
Reims after the fourth stage. Having insinuated that I was finished, that the fame had gone to my head, that I was too preoccupied with girls and fast cars to train, the press was now drooling.

My own single regret was that, once again, I’d come up tantalizingly short in the green jersey competition—232 points to the winner Alessandro Petacchi’s 243. If I’d carried on sprinting that day in Reims and not stopped pedaling the second I knew I couldn’t win, eventually coming in 12th, that would have been enough. Hindsight, of course, can be a bastard.

After everything I’d been through over the previous seven months, I was certainly in no mood to complain that night in Paris, not about the race anyway. Our team’s post-Tour party, however, I wasn’t too enamored with. As usual, it had all been arranged at the last minute, with our logistics manager being asked to find and reserve a venue with 48 hours’ notice on the night of the biggest event in the Parisian sporting calendar. She’d done the best she could, but we’d ended up in a pretty mediocre restaurant, not even sitting around tables but all packed in around a buffet table. To me, at the time, this was yet more evidence that the way we were overperforming and overdelivering on a budget that shouldn’t have entitled us to half of that success wasn’t being appreciated, in both senses of the word. It also showed a lack of recognition for something else, something more fundamental: We’d just completed the Tour de France.

I went to bed early, just after midnight. The founder of the race, Henri Desgrange, once said the Tour was “a crusade, a pilgrimage, a lesson and an example.” For me, this one had certainly been one hell of a journey.

m
y last fight with Bernie Eisel had happened a month earlier, on the Col du Tourmalet during the Tour, and for us had been pretty standard stuff. As stragglers in the gruppetto flicked around a bend and out of sight, like a cat’s tail through the crack of a pantry door, Bernie and I had known that it was time to start doing some sums.

“Cav, I know you’re ill, mate, but we can’t fuck around here. We have to go faster than this. Come on.”

Bernie’s accent—like an Austrian loudly impersonating an Australian, which in some ways he was, or vice versa—could usually be guaranteed to make me smile, even if only internally. Hearing this, though, I had glared at him.

“Bernie, we can lose ten seconds a kilometer if we get two and a half minutes back on the descent, which we will. Don’t nag. Just let me fucking ride.”

“Cav, I’m telling you, mate—”

“Bernie, no. It’s under control. Ten seconds per kilometer.”

And so it had gone, until I’d ended the argument by stroppily pedaling over to the other side of the road. The fans on the climb must have been scratching their heads: Why were two teammates battling to beat the time cut riding up the mountain parallel to each other but 3 meters apart, both with faces like smacked backsides?

That had been the Tour. As usual, we’d soon put it behind us—before the summit, as I remember. Now, at the Vuelta, Bernie and I were at it again. Toys were flying out of prams and the Seville roads were peppered with expletives. Our teammates could only look on, silently wincing behind their sunglasses.

“Look,” I said one last time, “if you listen and we get this right, we will definitely win this today. But if anyone doesn’t want to listen, they can fuck off now.”

With a “Fuck you, I’m off then,” Bernie swung his bike around and rode off.

This wasn’t, I’ll grant you, the most auspicious note on which to start my first Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain). After the Tour de France, I’d skipped the beach, skipped the lucrative post-Tour criterium races, where I could now easily command five-figure appearance fees. I had raced just twice, at the Tre Valli Varesine and the Coppa Bernocchi in Italy, before arriving in Spain. My goal over the next two, maybe three weeks, if I decided to do the whole Vuelta, wasn’t stage wins or the points jersey but to fine-tune my form ahead of the world championships road race in Australia. That would take place on October 3, exactly a fortnight after the end of the Vuelta. Here I was, though, on the morning of the team time trial that would open the final Grand Tour of the 2010 season, contemplating Bernie’s one-man mutiny. As he clipped shoes into pedals, swung his front wheel around, and set off in the direction of the team hotel,
I turned to face my other seven teammates, still rooted to the spot and speechless.

“Right, anyone want to join him?”

o
n this occasion at the Vuelta, as on others with me, Bernie thought that there was a point where helpful advice and encouragement ended and verbal bombardment began, and that I didn’t know where to draw the line. He had done team time trials with me before, seen me perform the same General Eisenhower impersonation, but this time he reckoned that I was going too far. I disagreed. On the eve of the race, we’d done a ragged first run-through, not on the race route but just to practice the rotation and cornering, after which I’d reminded everyone—admittedly in my usual, forthright manner—of the importance of holding a steady speed. We then repeated the effort, putting what I’d said into practice, and smashed it.

“Right, if we all do that tomorrow, we’ll win the team time trial,” I’d announced as we all grabbed drinks and cooled down.

The TTT itself had been scheduled for the evening—sensible, given that the temperature in the day was edging 40 degrees Celsius (close to 105 degrees Fahrenheit). This also gave us time for a proper practice run, this one on the route itself in the morning. And that was when Bernie started to lose patience. Now, admittedly, I’d taken my
i
-dotting and
t
-crossing to a new level of fastidiousness by sketching the corners on pieces of paper before we set out, but as I kept telling my teammates, “If we get 80 percent of the technical aspects of this time trial right, we won’t win. If we get 90 percent right, we might win but we might not, and if we get 100 percent right, we’ll definitely win.” Having labored this point, it then annoyed me
when we began our morning reconnoiter and I could hear Kanstantsin Sivtsov and Lars Bak yammering at the back of the line as we approached one key bend.

“Right,” I said, slamming on my brakes. “You’re not paying attention, so we’ll go back and do it again.”

This was when Bernie kicked off.

“No, I’m not doing it again. No way. You need to chill out.”

At this point, insults flew back and forth across the road, with neither of us giving an inch. So Bernie went back to the hotel.

When I asked, no one else wanted—or dared—to join him, and we finished the practice lap with eight men.

An hour or so later, I got back to the hotel and the room that I was sharing with Bernie. I pushed open the door, walked in, and there he was.

“You’re a dickhead,” were his first words.

“No, you’re a dickhead,” was my reply.

And that was it; within 30 seconds, we were best mates again. Not only that, but when we got onto the course for one very last practice lap that night, it was poetry in motion. We’d intended to take it easy—and it felt like a breeze because we were technically perfect—but our time on that practice lap would almost have put us on the podium in the race proper. When we finally did roll off the start-ramp, only this time holding nothing back, we replicated the same fluid turns and clockwork rotation and went on to win by a relatively comfortable margin of 10 seconds. The team had decided that I would cross the line first and so take the red leader’s jersey in the event of victory. It was one of the best wins of my career to date. I was ecstatic, but I also felt slightly guilty that the rider in red at
the end of it wasn’t Matt Goss. Gossy was so strong that day that he could have ridden away from us.

The three weeks in Spain started as they were set to continue. I loved the Vuelta. The loneliness, the lack of any real anchor in my life, the restlessness that had gnawed at me all year, they were still there under the surface, but racing a Grand Tour was the best way to keep my mind occupied, purely by virtue of the fact that I was on my bike and among friends. I was single at the time, but in Bernie I had a fairly convincing substitute spouse, minus the romance; we slept in the same room, spent more time with each other than with anyone else, and bickered constantly, but just like our row over the time trial, the arguments would be explosive and quickly resolved.