At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (2 page)

That was the inherent contradiction of the worlds: For one day, arguably the most important of the cycling season, allegiances to trade teams—companies to whom riders owed their livelihoods—were set aside in the name of patriotism. This was why a lot of national federations, though not British Cycling, put up a sizable bonus to be shared among the riders in case of victory; it was compensation for what those guys would have given up.

Before we’d got off the bus, I’d said it one more time: “If we do everything 100 percent right, we’ll win this.”

It was the kind of thing that’s said on every team bus by every team leader or directeur sportif before every race. What we did over the next six hours would determine whether it was cliché or prophecy.

t
he world championships road race generally follows a familiar pattern: A relatively large break of unfancied riders goes up the road early, the speed in the main group settles, and the major cycling nations—Italy, Holland, Spain, Belgium, and so on—share the pacemaking to ensure that the breakaway’s advantage doesn’t become irretrievable. When it’s brought back—which it usually is, with between 20 and 50 km to go—the serious, potentially race-winning attacks begin. It may seem like a counterintuitive way to operate, but no team can control a race from start to finish, and certainly not a world championships road race. Or so everyone had thought.

For the first 28 km from Copenhagen to the circuit in Rudersdal—where we’ll then complete 17 laps of a 14.3-km loop—we don’t lead. We’re also happy to let the usual move—harmless, we hope—clip off the front shortly after reaching Rudersdal and the start of the circuits. By then, though, we’re in complete command, with
Ian Stannard and Geraint Thomas pouncing on any break that’s too strong or too big and could pose a threat to our plan. When we’re finally happy with the group that has formed, our red and blue jerseys mass to the front and Britannia rules. And rules for the next five hours.

The experts have been saying ever since it was unveiled more than a year ago that the Copenhagen course is a simple one, but simplicity and subtlety shouldn’t be confused. There’s no such thing as a bike race whose secrets and nuances I won’t try to understand and master. Here, for instance, every time we approach the biggest hill on the circuit on the first nine laps, I’ll start at the front with my minder for the day, a 37-year-old veteran called Jez Hunt. I’ll drop my chain into the small ring and we’ll drift back into the belly of the bunch as we tap up the slope; that way, I can afford to climb more slowly than everyone else in the bunch, in an easier gear, yet still find myself in the middle of the peloton at the top, when we start the only real headwind section on the circuit. I’ll then move back up and reposition myself, with Jez, behind the puddle of blue and red British jerseys on the front.

For 60 km the gap to the seven out front keeps rising, but it’s rising on our terms, only as much as we’ll allow. At Melbourne a year ago, I knew within a few kilometers of the start that I didn’t have the legs to finish the race, let alone win the jersey. Today, however, I’m floating. I see riders steal a glance at my thighs, humming over the top tube, and I imagine alarm spreading through the peloton:
Cavendish is on one of those days
. Two riders who for the rest of the year are teammates, Lars Bak and Kanstantsin Sivtsov, ride alongside me, look down, and repeat what I have been saying for the last
24 hours, what Brian said and Dave had thought but kept to himself: “Cav, you’re going to win today. You’re going to be world champion.”

The laps tick by. Steve Cummings and Chris Froome are on the front; behind them are Dave, Gee, Brad, Stannard, and Jez, my babysitter. Radio contact with our team cars isn’t allowed at the worlds, so information about time gaps is relayed to us on blackboards twice every lap. Our team staff can communicate with us the same way from the pits, where we can also pick up drinks and food. At one point the blackboard tells me that I’m too far forward and need to move back. I ignore it. If I’m supposed to be my team’s leader, I’m staying with them.

Eight laps to go. Seven. The gap to the early break is shrinking now; Froomey and Steve are slowly reeling them in, two Trojans.

Countermoves are starting to develop, but they’re quickly extinguished, stifled by our pacemaking. Six laps to go and we get our first big scare; the French rider Blel Kadri crashes, others pile into him, and the peloton suddenly splits. This is why you ride at the front, because pretty much everyone behind the bodies, including the defending champion, Thor Hushovd, has to stop. On a fast course like this one, with us driving, they won’t see the front of the race again. Gee—Geraint Thomas—is our only rider caught in the mess, but he manages to untangle himself and miraculously rejoins our train. Like I said, it’s a scare, a warning, and perhaps a sign that today our luck is in.

With five laps to go, a counterattack joins the 7 who went away early on, so now they’re 11 with a two-minute gap. It’s a big group, under normal circumstances a dangerously big group, but we’re still playing this race like a computer game and have got everyone right where we want them. Froomey and Steve have done their work and
will pull off in a minute, and then it’ll be Jez’s turn on the front. Dave will come after Jez, and Brad will come after Dave. On the last lap, Brad will then hand over to Stannard, who’ll come before Gee, whose job it is to position and launch me in the sprint.

The attacks are coming in flurries now, but we’re irresistible, inescapable. On the climbs especially, my heart is pounding against my rib cage and I’m clenching my teeth so hard that I’ll break one of them and need dental surgery in two days. It’s all bearable, though, because I’m being whipped along on a magic current created by my teammates. It’s the perfect microcosm of my life as it stands in September 2011: the ups and downs that I’ve endured over the past two years; more criticism than some riders face in an entire career, some of it deserved; arguments with my team and my manager; personal problems; health problems; historic successes; and intermittent but devastating failures. A lot of it I’ve kept to myself. I’ve ridden the bumps in the same way that I’m surviving this course today, thanks in equal parts to my resilience, or rather my bloody-mindedness, and the support of some exceptional people. If anything is in danger of overwhelming me today, it’s pride.

The same emotion swells when I see Jez pull off and Dave take over with two laps to go. Then, just as we catch the remnants of the early break, the French rider Thomas Voeckler counterattacks and is soon joined by the Dane Nicki Sørensen and the Belgian Klaas Lodewyck in probably the most dangerous move of the day so far. Dave drapes his hands over the middle of his bars and clicks into time trial mode to keep us within striking distance. Voeckler is a top rider, but this is desperate stuff now. Back in the peloton, resignation spreads like gangrene: This race will end in a sprint, just like we said and wanted, and Mark Cavendish is going to win.

o
ne lap to go.

Voeckler and his group are still away, but Brad’s taken over and he’s gunning now, gunning like I’ve never seen. We go through the finish line, take the bell, and Brad’s dropping the peloton. He’s 5 meters ahead, 10 meters.

“Brad!”

One of the lads shouts to him above the crowd noise to slow down. I’ve zoned out from everything—or rather zoned in. Brad has this race by the scruff of the neck, and he’s dragging it around this circuit, yanking it every which way, bullying it, brutalizing it.

I already knew Brad was committed to this, and that when he’s committed there’s no one like him, but I really knew the previous day, in our last big meeting on the bus before race day, when we started discussing contingency plans for if, say, I had a mechanical problem near the end of the race. After a few minutes of ideas pinging back and forth, I finally said, “Look, guys, if I puncture with 3 km to go, Gee, you sprint for yours—”

Brad, who generally keeps his thoughts to himself in this kind of meeting and had barely opened his mouth so far in this one, didn’t let me finish.

“Listen,” he said, “if Cav punctures 50 km from the end, we’re waiting for him. If Cav punctures 3 km from the end, we’re waiting for him. And if Cav punctures 700 meters from the line, we’re fucking waiting for him then, as well.”

To this, no one said a word. Eyes just darted around the bus, from rider to rider, in silent recognition not of what had been said, but of who had said it, what it meant in the present context.

Hearing Brad speak, I felt a cold tingle up my spine. Over the previous couple of years, certainly in the days before and even more so
during the race, there were endless little moments when you could say, with hindsight, that the worlds was won. This was without doubt one of them.

Of course Brad and I have had our problems. Neither of us is what you’d call an “easy” character. Together we’ve had the best of times—like in the Madison at the 2008 track worlds—and we’ve had the worst of them too. At the Beijing Olympics, I simply didn’t feel that his mind was fully in the velodrome after his gold medals in the individual and team pursuits, and our Madison race was an unmitigated, well-documented disaster. That night I called Rod and the British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford into my room in the Olympic Village. I told them that I was disgusted with how I’d effectively been forced to leave the Tour de France to get ready for the Olympics, disgusted with Brad’s attitude in the race, and that their apologies were coming too late. For two months after we rode off the track in Beijing, in different directions, Brad and I didn’t speak. Then he sent me a conciliatory text—“Hi, do you remember me?”—and the ice was broken.

Three years on, my biggest worry for a while hadn’t been
my
relationship with Brad but Dave Millar’s. That had soured pretty badly when Brad left Dave’s team, Garmin, for Sky at the end of 2009.

For a long time, I feared that the tension between them would either keep one of them—probably Brad—from even riding in Denmark, or undermine whatever harmony we were trying to create in the team. The fact was that I needed both of them in order to win. I needed Dave because he is not only a fantastic natural athlete and hugely experienced but also one of the best in-race communicators in the peloton. Plus, Dave’s character is a kaleidoscope of eccentricities
totally at odds with my own ticks and quirks, yet it somehow complements mine perfectly.

Dave and I have roomed together a few times at races and training camps, and we almost invariably find ourselves staying up most of the night, just talking shit that to us at the time seems like the final word on modern civilization.

The reason I needed Brad was even more straightforward: On the bike, he’s an absolute beast. If any doubt about that remained, even after his third place in the 2009 Tour and third in the 2011 Vuelta, he was banishing—obliterating—it now. Just a few weeks earlier, in August 2011, I’d won the Olympic test event in London and got everyone excited about my prospects in the actual Olympic road race a year later. The best thing to come out of that day, though, was a text sent to me by Brad that night. The gist, if not the verbatim message, was “Fuck all the grudges, fuck the issues with Dave, fuck everything. I want to be a part of you winning the rainbow jersey in Copenhagen.”

That had been another big moment.

Our next challenge with Brad before the race had been keeping him back until the last two or three laps, when he could act as our human Hoover—both pulling back breakaways and sucking the peloton along at such a rate that any fresh attacks or counterattacks would be doomed. Brad had initially been reluctant, knowing that this was physically perhaps the hardest role in the team, and potentially the most pressurized. He wanted to get his job out of the way early in the race, but from our point of view, that would have been like using a Formula 1 car for delivering the milk. Brad eventually acknowledged that, too, and it was bad news for everyone riding against us.

This penultimate lap will be the only time in the race that I ride the finishing straight in the big ring. The circuit has been hardwired into my memory for a year now: a right turn 300 meters after the line, past the Rudersdal town hall, down to the foot of the first, 300-meter hill, up and down again to the bottom of Søllerød Slotsvej, at 480 meters the longest and hardest climb on the course. Then it’s a 2-km descent and another 650-meter drag before the relatively straightforward—and straight—second half of the course to the bottom of the 400-meter, steadily rising home straight.

As we come toward the last 10 km, the last time up Søllerød Slotsvej, three guys are up the road, but on borrowed time. That means the shit-fight for positions is about to begin; it’ll no longer be single riders moving up on either side of the road but whole lines, whole teams, creating the conditions for a vortex or “washing-machine effect” that could take me from 4th to 40th wheel in a matter of seconds. It’s paramount that this doesn’t happen, and this is why and where we need Brad. I keep peering over Gee’s shoulder, and Stannard’s, wondering how the hell Brad’s still there, but he keeps drilling—55, 60 kilometers per hour, not only controlling our rivals but hurting them. When I watch the reruns on TV later, the commentator will see Brad swaying left and right across the road, occasionally glancing sideways, and say that he’s suffering and looking for a teammate to come through and take over. In fact, what he’s doing is using the whole width of the road to make it impossible for anyone to dive-bomb us, swooping down on the inside or over on the outside and setting off that vortex, that deadly spiral. Usually, in a long, hard race like the worlds there are a certain number of riders—the thoroughbred finisseurs like Fabian Cancellara or Philippe Gilbert—who
could outride a group over the last 5 or 10 km. With Brad driving, they’re seat-belted into the backseat of the bunch.

Ten to go. The Dutch rider Johnny Hoogerland gets a couple of hundred meters and joins the breakaway trio, but they’re going nowhere. While it’s fast, savagely fast, our secret all day has been the steadiness of our pace; it can be easier to go at a level 50–60 kph than 52 then 54 and back again.