At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (18 page)

The team spoke to the chief commissaire, Philippe Marién—who is one of the fairest around—and explained that, in our opinion, certain rules weren’t being applied evenly. He ultimately agreed and spoke to the commissaire who had been on my case since we left the Vendée. This guy had been a constant, irritating presence at my side, but at least his being there was good in one respect: It made a mockery of insinuations like Tyler’s.

m
y only real objective in the Pyrenees had been survival. I’d not only accomplished that but also was heading north and east toward the Alps with an unexpected souvenir: the green jersey that I’d managed to defend from Rojas and Gilbert thanks to some canny and
productive riding at the intermediate sprints. The scoreboard now read Cavendish 264, Rojas 251, Gilbert 240.

Despite the bigger gap back to Gilbert, I was now possibly more concerned about him than Rojas, and stage 15 to Montpellier showed why. In 2011, Gilbert had been without too much doubt the best all-round rider in the world, potentially deadly on almost any kind of terrain and at any moment of a race. On the road in to Montpellier, all it had taken was a few hundred meters of gently rising road to lure him onto the attack 3 km from the line. The secret to reeling in this kind of attack was resisting the temptation to panic and instead maintaining a high but steady speed. Gilbert may have been the best all-round rider, but Tony Martin was peerless in this particular exercise. Gilbert was swept up 2 km from the line, and Peter Velits, Gossy, Renshaw, and I did the rest. It was my fourth stage win of the Tour and extended my green jersey lead. I was now at 319 points, Rojas at 282, and Gilbert at 248. Now we were talking.

With one week to go, albeit one predominantly spent in the Alps, I was confident but wary. Peta had come out for the second rest day after my Montpellier win, for which our team had been billeted in a large, bland three-star hotel just outside a town called Loriol-sur-Drôme in the Rhone Valley. The scene in the hotel garden that afternoon showed two worlds momentarily overlapping—the bubble that we inhabited for the duration of the Tour, and the normality that we’d left behind two weeks before: ordinary folk on their holidays discussing current affairs or the minutiae of everyday life, people who couldn’t care less about the Tour. Then there were our partners and families, who had a foot in both realities, unsure of how to bridge the divide. We were protagonists in maybe the greatest show in sport,
and yet for many of us, it was the last thing we wanted to discuss. This, admittedly, was the paradox that those closest to us had to reconcile on a daily basis, and not only at the Tour.

For me, it was especially hard to completely switch off on rest days, even with Peta around. There were press conferences, interviews, and team meetings. On this particular rest day, Bob, who had arrived at the Tour a few days earlier, and Rolf had asked me whether we could have “a chat” in the afternoon. There was no need for them to tell me what it was going to be about.

I wanted Peta with me, as per my new policy with Bob and Rolf. They had no problem with that, so the four of us sat down in a quiet, secluded corner of the hotel garden, well out of the earshot of the agents, journalists, and fans who always find their way into the team hotels on rest days. Bob and I had barely spoken since I’d given him the cold shoulder at our training camp in California in January, but we’d at least been civil to each other in the limited and brief conversations that we’d had over the previous week in France. If he had a new sponsor, if the CEO or sponsorship director of whoever that company was had come to France and was going to talk to us, and if my teammates were keen, I knew that it would be hard for me to walk away.

“Now,” Bob said, “you’ll have guessed why we’ve asked to talk to you. It’s about your future and the team’s …”

What followed wasn’t a short discussion, but it can be quickly summarized: Bob said they had found a new, long-term partner but that the investment hinged on me committing to the project. As far as I could tell, it was exactly what we had been hearing for the previous two years. Too vague, too familiar. Perhaps it really was all different this time, perhaps it all could and would have worked out, but by
now I’d lost patience. I wanted certainties, a concrete proposal, not another version of the promise that had been playing on repeat since the end of 2009. Having made my decision, I had now set aside the frustration with Bob and could answer him politely, even graciously, but also emphatically.

“Look, Bob, I’m really sorry,” I said, “but it’s a no.”

With that and a few more failed attempts to talk me around, we shook hands, got up, and went our separate ways. With no hard feelings.

One by one, Bob and Rolf had spoken to everyone else on the team that afternoon. The impression that I got, though, was that nearly everyone, like me, had given up hope without yet making arrangements for 2012.

Our disappointment and sadness at the realization that this was our last Tour together could have overwhelmed us in that last week, but my green jersey quest gave us the perfect distraction. It was the way we had always dealt with the same uncertainties: by immersing ourselves in the job. The first stage after the rest day took us to Gap, in the foothills of the Alps, and was one of the most dangerous, from my perspective. With the second category Col de Manse 11 km from the finish, the likelihood was that Gilbert would finish inside the top 15 on the stage and therefore collect at least some points, as could Rojas. The nightmare scenario was a Gilbert win, but it didn’t materialize thanks, ironically, to the man who had pipped me to the green jersey in 2009, Thor Hushovd. While Thor romped away to the stage win and Rojas and Gilbert could only pick up a measly three and two points, respectively, I surprised myself on the last climb and for a moment even thought I could sneak inside that top 15 and add to my tally.

Unfortunately, as we neared the summit of the Col de Manse, a rider in front of me—a climber, in fact—let a wheel go in front of him, creating a gap that I wasn’t able to bridge. Whereas usually in these circumstances I might have lost my rag, I was under strict instructions from Rod not to waste any energy in the last week, whether physical or emotional. I ended up finishing almost 30 places and two minutes outside the scoring positions, but I was still relieved that both Gilbert and Rojas had missed a major opportunity to eat into my lead. As soon as they were available, I loaded the latest standings onto my phone and sat on the bus studying the numbers:

Cavendish: 319 points

Rojas: 285 points

Gilbert: 250 points

After another
moyenne montagne
stage in which I was the only one of the three of us to score—a single point at the intermediate sprint—the Alps and the final hurdles in the race for green loomed. For the next 48 hours, that third opponent—not Gilbert or Rojas but the time limit—would present the biggest danger. It was the guillotine poised above all of our heads, but especially mine as the weakest climber of the trio, with the potential to end not only my green jersey bid but also my race. Riders finishing outside the time limit might conceivably stay in the race, at the commissaires’ discretion, but lose 20 points. You only had to open the roadbook, cast your eyes over the route profiles, and consider the names of the climbs and what they represented in Tour folklore to realize that points might be easier to lose than to gain between here and Paris.

The 2010 Tour had celebrated the 100th anniversary of the race’s first foray into the Pyrenees; this year, the organizers had decided
to pay special homage to the Alps and their most emblematic climb, the 2,645-meter Col du Galibier. We would be going up the Galibier twice, first from the south and finishing at the summit on stage 18, and then from the north en route to Alpe d’Huez on stage 19.

The night before each of the mountain stages, I did my usual homework, studying maps and videos, paying particular attention to the last 2 km. It was fair to assume that a stage finishing at the top of the highest mountain in the Tour wasn’t going to be decided in a bunch sprint, but many times in the past I had been racing the clock in the last 2 or 3 km and found it useful, if not essential, to know the lay of the land. In readiness for those squeaky-bum scenarios, it is also vital to know the formula for calculating time cuts. This is too complicated to detail in full here, but in basic terms, it amounts to the winner’s time plus anywhere between 9 and 20 percent on top of that, depending on the winner’s average speed, the type of terrain, and the length of the stage. Crudely put, the percentages and time cuts are more generous in the mountains and increase in step with average speeds. Paradoxically, then, fast stages often suited us.

In my early years at the Tour, Bernie had always taken on the role of timekeeper, not only for me but for the whole gruppetto as well. His was that voice you’d hear, an unmistakable, booming, Austro-Australian foghorn filling the valleys as you climbed: “Guys, 32 minutes with 20 to go. Got to move now.
Allez
!” There was a science, a special intuition to gruppetto riding, and with time I had become almost as adept as Bernie at both the calculations themselves and judging the efforts required to squeeze in. With the directeurs in the team car also keeping track and relaying time gaps, we had at least three different brains on the job. Nothing could ever go wrong. Or could it?

f
ucking hell, guys, you’ve fucked us over here.”

These were my bitter first words, hissed into the mouthpiece of my intercom radio, as I collapsed over my handlebars. They were directed at Allan Peiper and Valerio Piva in our second team car. All the way up the Galibier, Allan and Valerio had assured us that they had done their sums and that we and the rest of the gruppetto were easily going to make the time limit. We could coast in with no fear of missing the cut and thereby incurring a 20-point penalty. Hearing this news and the confidence with which it was delivered, we had relaxed and given up the mental arithmetic. But then a panicked message arrived in our ears around a kilometer from the summit of the Galibier.

“Guys, we’ve made a mistake! You’re in trouble here. You’re going to be outside …”

To everyone else in the group except Gilbert, of course, this made no difference; they didn’t care about losing points, and there was no chance that an entire gruppetto would be dumped out of the race for finishing
hors délais
. This was also why no one on other teams had thought to warn us that we were in danger. Why bother, when they were perfectly content with the present, leisurely pace, except perhaps Gilbert, who languished with us? This was also typical of the unwritten code governing the gruppetto: While it was mutually understood that all of the riders would share the workload (and hence keep the pace higher on the flat than it would be in an average peloton being driven by a limited number of riders and teams), they would only do so in the pursuit of a common interest. As soon as individual agendas encroached, in this instance our need to get me to the finish inside the time limit, it was no good looking to others for assistance. Ninety-nine percent of the time—in other words, when he doesn’t happen to be in contention to win a points jersey—the
gruppetto rider has only two overlapping aims: avoid elimination by finishing in a group too large for the organizer to want to cull, for fear of “decapitating” the race, and do it while riding as slowly and economically as possible, to conserve energy for the challenges ahead.

Needless to say, then, the atmosphere in the team hotel had noticeably deteriorated after my 20-point penalty on the Galibier had been confirmed, as had my prospects of keeping the jersey. Allan and Valerio, usually our two most meticulous directeurs, were no doubt mortified, but they also made the point that it was stressful for them directing the team from the car. Whoever was in the wrong or right, one certain outcome of the whole fiasco was that, in the future, I’d do my own arithmetic.

There was now a real danger that I would lose the green jersey at Alpe d’Huez. The stage was unusually short, at 109 km, and designed for maximum thrills, with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe beginning after just 14 km, to be followed by the Galibier and then Alpe d’Huez. With the day consisting entirely of climbs and descents, it was going to be a back-breaking limbo dance to make it under the limit and avoid another 20-point penalty.

As soon as we hit the foot of the Télégraphe that day, I at least already knew that my doomsday scenario, elimination, wouldn’t come to pass; I was going like a rocket. Bernie wished he could say the same. He, like Dave Millar, was having a shocker, a textbook
jour sans,
or “day without”—both had fallen out of the back of the gruppetto and were already in a fight for survival on the lower slopes of the Galibier. With every update from the team car, my guilt at having left Bernie behind tugged a little harder on my jersey, until I finally turned to Tejay Van Garderen, my chaperone for the day in the gruppetto, and announced that I was going back for Bernie.

“I’m not going to Paris and winning the green jersey without him,” I said. “If he gets eliminated, I go too.”

Fortunately for all concerned, Bernie needed not martyrs but just a long, not particularly technical descent like the one of the Galibier to rejoin me in the gruppetto. Now the message from the directeurs, this time verified by us, was that we were heading toward another 20-point deduction. This time, though, it caused me no great alarm, since Rojas was paying for his efforts on the Galibier the previous day and also laboring in the gruppetto. We would therefore remain as we were—unless I did something totally unexpected and attacked on Alpe d’Huez to distance Rojas, beat the time cut, and save my 20 points. The idea was good and so were my legs, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. Having picked my spot to accelerate, where the gradient eased 2 km from the line, it took a kilometer to move through the gruppetto and off the front. That effort had cost me too much, and Rojas was alive to the danger. We crossed the line together, and together with 82 other riders, 25 minutes and 27 seconds behind the stage winner Pierre Rolland. And 18 seconds outside the time limit.