At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (17 page)

Ours was a fickle existence, and I was reminded of that moments after stepping off the podium in Châteauroux. In an interview with ITV’s Ned Boulting, I discovered that Brad had crashed around 40 km from the finish and was out of the race with a broken collarbone. The joy drained from me. I was crushed for him. Before the Tour, the excitement and curiosity among all of the British riders had been palpable. Now he was out of the race, and a deep respect for the hard work that he’d done and the sacrifices that he’d made accentuated our sympathy.

If a British rider wasn’t going to be wearing yellow in Paris, I could at least now make sure that one was wearing green. My second win in Châteauroux perhaps hadn’t changed my life, but it had caused a major shift in momentum in the points competition. Rojas still led with 167, but I now trailed by only 17.

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he next two days after my Châteauroux victory would bring back more memories of my 2008 Tour, but this time ones that were not especially welcome. Familiar roads stirred up familiar thoughts and sensations, but this time they were not about victory but tiredness, pain, and—when it was over in the evening—relief. In 2008 we’d also finished the first mountain stage of the race at Super Besse in the Massif Central, and I was at the point in the race when pain had taken up permanent residence in my legs. The 2008 stage that followed the one to Super Besse ranked among the most traumatic days I’ve ever spent on a bike, but with age I’d grown stronger, and now it was a faint, dull discomfort rather than the chorus of aches that I remembered from 2008.

The second stage in the Massif Central in 2011 had a lot in common with that one in 2008, including the winner, Luis León Sánchez. At the back, Bernie, Mark Renshaw, Lars Bak, and I toiled all day just to keep pace with the gruppetto. This was a stage that didn’t even register with most pundits as difficult or mountainous, and it was taken for granted that we would finish without too many problems.
Little would the fan who looked at the results that night know that the whole day had been a battle with the terrain and with the voice in my head that told me this was ridiculous and inhumane, that the Tour de France was barbaric.

The day featured seven classified climbs, including the highest pass in the Massif Central, the Col du Pas de Peyrol, and descents like skydives. That was challenge enough, and not helped by the knowledge that Bernie’s descending tactics were weirdly incompatible with my own. Bernie takes strange, shallow lines, killing his speed on the way into corners and then bursting out of them, whereas I use my low center of gravity to go in low and tight, feathering the brakes, and then flicking my back wheel around at the last moment. If we ignore each other and do our own thing, we both go down equally fast, just in very different ways.

Now, as so many times before, Bernie and I rode the line between what was safe and what was possible just to stay close to the gruppetto and in the race. Others weren’t so lucky; rain early in the stage had made the corners treacherous, causing crashes that put both Dave Zabriskie of Garmin and Alexandre Vinokourov out of the Tour. Later on, two of the five riders clear of the peloton, Juan Antonio Flecha and Johnny Hoogerland, demonstrated that bad weather was just one of the endless hazards at the Tour. Both had been riding toward a shot at one of those life-changing stage wins when a VIP car belonging to the French state broadcaster went to overtake them, swung into the middle of the road to avoid a tree and knocked Flecha to the tarmac and Hoogerland into a barbed wire fence off the opposite side of the road. Hoogerland’s shredded bib shorts, the 33 stitches in his left leg, and his tears that night were among the lasting images of the Tour.

I felt desperately sorry for them. Neither Johnny nor Juan Antonio were among the most popular guys in the peloton, but I liked and admired them both. It was often the same: Guys who never gave an inch, who would see a gap and go for it before anyone else got there first, who rode with the commitment that Juan Antonio in particular showed every day, were considered by other riders to be nuisances or often much worse. At the Tour, especially, the combination of everyone’s frayed nerves and the way that a pack mentality could develop in the peloton over the three weeks could make a villain out of a guy like Flecha. I’d been misjudged in the same way, partly because of things I’d said in the press, partly for the way my team and I moved around the peloton.

As feared and predicted, my green jersey challenge had been somewhat stalled by the stages in the Massif Central, while Philippe Gilbert, a superior climber, forged ahead. Gilbert had reclaimed the lead in the competition with 217 points to Rojas’s 172 and my 153. The next two stages, though, would see a return to less rugged terrain and another shift back in my favor. I was disappointed to lose to André Greipel in Carmaux on stage 10, particularly with a noisy contingent of Manx fans waiting to celebrate my victory alongside the finish line, but at least my second place cut into Gilbert’s green jersey lead.

Even when I say that now—that I was “disappointed” to lose to Greipel—it somehow jars. Not because it was André and because of our history together, but because early in my career there had always been a perverse sort of comfort in the agony of losing. If I didn’t win back then, it could only ever be because I’d fucked up, and the self-flagellation that came next was my corrective device, the inner censor that demanded the same thing would never happen twice.
The mechanism still functioned, as anyone unfortunate enough to be on the team bus with me after the majority of my defeats could have attested, but there had also been times when it was hard to be angry with myself because I’d been beaten by something special. In Carmaux on stage 10 Greipel had executed a perfect sprint, whereas I had also been handicapped slightly by Renshaw’s absence from my lead-out train. We’d had precious little help from other teams since leaving the Vendée, the fatigue was starting to bite, plus Mark had been on a bad day. Consequently, I’d had to improvise on a technical, twisting finish, slotting in between Greipel and his lead-out man, Marcel Sieberg. I had also made a tiny mistake, but one that I could almost forgive myself for; finishes where you couldn’t see the line at the moment when you launched your sprint had always caused me a few problems, adding fractions of a second of hesitation, shaving a handful of watts off my kick.

That night, Renshaw gave it to me straight. “Tomorrow, when it’s time to kick, you go. Okay? No fucking around,” he said. While I balked at the notion that I couldn’t win without him—and the 2010 Vuelta had quashed that idea anyway—the next day’s stage to Lavaur emphasized Renshaw’s importance. The last hour of the race had been ridden in a deluge, and the plane trees lining the road blocked what little light was coming from overhead. I tried taking off my glasses, but the spray from the road only made it harder to see. I decided then that I would wear my glasses and make this sprint the ultimate, literal testament to the blind faith in Renshaw that I’d talked about in interviews: I’d simply lock my eyes onto his back wheel and kick, this time holding nothing back, as soon as he started to slow or pulled off. The outcome this time was a win by bike lengths.

If it felt good to reacquaint myself with that winning feeling, there was better news to come. My victory in the rematch with Greipel ended with me collecting two prizes on the podium: the stage winner’s bouquet and the green jersey itself. With 11 stages gone, the order from two days earlier had been reversed; Gilbert was now third with 231, Rojas second with 235, and I had 251. It was the first time I’d had the green jersey on my shoulders since stage 13 of the 2009 Tour.

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s far as I could make out, there were now only three things that could stop me winning green: Gilbert, Rojas, and the time limits in the Alps and Pyrenees. Gilbert and Rojas, I knew, would climb better than me and pick up points in the medium, or
moyenne,
mountain stages, but would almost certainly lose ground to me on the two remaining stages that were expected to finish in bunch sprints, in Montpellier and in Paris on the Champs Elysées.

The time limit was a more predictable enemy and one that had come close but so far never beaten me in the Tour. Critics thought they knew why: It could only be because I hung on to cars or relied on pushes from spectators in the mountains. These were accusations that had followed me throughout my pro career and become more and more insistent as I became more successful. There had been whispers from other riders, one or two more or less veiled allegations that made it into the press, and these had then been seized upon by the public.

I knew exactly where the accusations had started: the Giro in 2008. That year, one form of cheating led to another, with a few rogue desperados at the front—most notably Emanuele Sella—making a
farce out of the stages in the Alps and Dolomites. That Sella was doped to the gills was obvious at the time, but without any proof, all we could do was try to hold on—quite literally in dozens of riders’ cases. I would admit to you that I did it, and so would many, many other riders in that race. My crime was merely made worse, the riders who had survived the drug-fueled rampage legitimately argued, because I went home from that Giro with two stage wins.

At the 2011 Tour, I knew that another incident at this year’s Giro would bring these accusations back to the fore again. On the first mountain stage of the Giro, finishing on Mount Etna, I’d come in just 25 seconds inside the time cut. Such a narrow escape was in itself suspicious, the pundits had said, and even riders who had been minutes up the mountain agreed. The Movistar rider Fran Ventoso was particularly scathing and said that I should have been thrown out, with the Italian sprinter, Manuel Belletti, making a similar comment. Rod Ellingworth wasn’t at the race, but he’d called me that night and put me on the spot.

“Did you do it, honestly?”

I told him the truth: We’d ridden like our lives depended on it, but we hadn’t hung on to the car. The next day I said more or less the same thing to journalists, albeit in more colorful terms: “If I piss, if I stop, if I crash, if I get a wheel change … I have the TV camera with me, I have motorbikes, I have helicopters, I have the ice cream truck with me. If it’s possible for me to cheat, then I am doing a David Copperfield.”

As the Tour entered the Pyrenees, these sorts of accusations were bound to resurface. On stage 12 to Luz Ardiden I finished safely tucked into the gruppetto, with Rojas wrongly claiming that I’d been
pushed by spectators on the final climb. The 13th stage to Lourdes was a slightly easier one, and there had been no complaints. On the third and toughest day in the Pyrenees, to Plateau de Beille, however, the familiar sniping started again. Tyler Farrar typified it, remarking in an innuendo-laden interview on American TV that I’d made a “remarkable comeback” to rejoin the gruppetto late in the stage.

My comeback was remarkable, just not in the way that Tyler was implying. I’d been dropped on the third of six major climbs on the route, recovered thanks to Bernie and some more breakneck descending, but then had crashed as we started the plunge off the Port de Lers toward the foot of Plateau de Beille. The fall had cost us a minute, and with the gruppetto now bombing toward a valley where it would be impossible for the two of us to claw back any time, we radioed ahead to Lars Bak and Danny Pate to say that we needed them to drop back. They followed the instruction and were soon joining Bernie in a three-man time trial, while I hung at the back saving energy for the last climb. We’d seen our Emerald City—the silhouette of the gruppetto—halfway up Plateau de Beille, the day’s final climb.

Tyler thinking that legs and willpower alone couldn’t have saved me was understandable in one sense. I’d jumped to the same conclusions in the past; when you’ve only scraped through and done it on fumes but a guy who’s a worse climber or in worse condition than you also somehow makes it, you can’t help but wonder.

Anyone accusing me, though, hadn’t seen or had to put up with the special treatment that the commissaires had reserved for me on this Tour. Partly because of the controversy at the Giro, partly because the TV cameras always zoomed in on me when there were 30 riders dropped on any given climb, so giving the impression that I was the
only one, and partly because Rojas and his Movistar team had been in their ear, the race jury had seemingly deployed one commissaire solely to watch me. That would have been okay if the gentleman in question had applied the same rules to me as to everyone else, but in the Pyrenees there had already been inexplicable discrepancies. There were “Barrages” whenever I stopped for toilet breaks—the cycling equivalent of Formula 1’s safety car, meaning that no car in the convoy behind was allowed to overtake and help draft you back to the bunch. I was also told that I couldn’t take bottles in the last 20 km of mountain stages while other riders were merrily going back to their car for gels, bars, and drinks. It made me paranoid to the extent that I wouldn’t even go back to the car for my drinks at all, in case the commissaire accused me of taking “sticky bottles”—holding onto the
bidons
as the directeur sportif handed them to me out of the car window and allowing myself to be dragged along.