At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (21 page)

The next day the team controlled the race for most of the first three hours, again in savage temperatures, but there had been no miracle recovery: Gossy had nearly fainted as he stepped off the team bus in the morning and didn’t make it to the finish in Petrer. I completed
the stage, but I didn’t have the punch or power or legs to stay with the peloton in the closing kilometers, let alone sprint for the win. Stage 3, taking us even farther south to Totana in Murcia, was even hotter, hillier, and more disconcerting. Again, I pretty much crawled over the line, this time 13 minutes behind the stage winner.

Even in milder conditions and good health, stage 4 in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Spain’s deep south would have been a terrifying proposition. With my legs mysteriously empty, it was pure hell: a breathless, sweat-drenched inferno for the 120 km that I lasted before pulling over at the side of the road, gingerly putting one foot onto the tarmac, then two, and climbing into our team car. No sooner had I closed the door than a small swarm of photographers was buzzing around the car. I ducked and turned away to hide my face, then, realizing that wasn’t working, hid under a rain cape. The pictures of me trying in vain to shield my face were all over the Internet within hours.

As we drove off down the route in the team car, whatever poison had flushed the feeling from my legs now started to seep into my thoughts. The worlds might now be in jeopardy. There was, though, an even more immediate, practical issue to resolve: Peta and her son, Finn, had flown out from London that morning and were due to see me at the end of the stage. Not only would they now not see me racing but they also would be hoping I would go back to the UK with them, which would mean disaster for my worlds preparation.

Even as I tried to recover from whatever it was that had made me ill, I didn’t want any home comforts. It was a question of focus and concentration as much as it was the lack of suitable training in the UK, the weather, or the risk of putting on weight. Not that this was easy to explain to Peta. As most riders will tell you, we make a
lot of sacrifices in a career as professional cyclists, but our partners make even more. The faint look of disappointment in their eyes as we break the news that the team has planned another training camp, or that another one of our teammates is injured and needs to be replaced in a stage race, is one that might become all too familiar, yet can still cut like a dagger.

The question that Peta, the team, and Rod were now asking was where I could go to train, if not at home in the UK or my place in Italy. Luckily, Dave Millar, who wasn’t riding the Vuelta, had already come up with the perfect solution: His friend and neighbor, Garmin rider Christian Vande Velde, was away, so I could stay at his place in Girona, Spain, and train with Dave.

Another one of the guys who would be riding for me and Great Britain at the worlds, Jez Hunt, was also going to be there, and Rob Hayles would also fly out. We could therefore make it our own mini-, preworlds training camp. It sounded perfect—and the even better news was that Peta and Finn could come with me.

That was one problem at least half resolved. But there were others. I could train as much as I wanted, but since 2001, every single worlds winner had also competed in the Vuelta—and without exception got a lot further than stage 4. That was one worry. Another, which essentially stemmed from the same issue of my premature withdrawal, was that UCI rules forbade a rider to pull out of one sanctioned race and, before that event had finished, enter another one. This meant that I would not have raced for a whole month when I took my place on the start line in Copenhagen and would near enough have ruined my chances of winning the worlds.

In the heat and panic of the moment, Rod and my team had at first just wanted to know what was going on, why I’d pulled out.
From the moment that I’d started losing teammates’ wheels in the second or third kilometer of the team time trial in Benidorm, the media had launched into their usual game of Cavendish controversy bingo. What was it to be this time? The girlfriend? His weight? The money? Or that he couldn’t be bothered? Rolf, Brian, and the others knew better than anyone that it was all pretty much always total nonsense, but they might still have wondered for a second whether there wasn’t an ulterior motive, perhaps linked to this being HTC-Highroad’s last ever major tour. Some of the phone calls exchanged between the directeurs that night, and between them and Rod, were by all accounts pretty fraught.

They, too, though, soon had to focus on practical matters. Providing that I could recover and get back on my bike again within a few days, Rod would come down to Girona and oversee my training with Dave and Jez, but that still didn’t address our fears about my lack of racing. The Tour of Britain, eight days long and finishing the weekend before the worlds, would be ideal, but of course the rules wouldn’t allow me to take part.

Or would they? Rod and Brian knew that there were precedents where riders had pulled out of one race and obtained permission from the UCI and the organizer of the abandoned race to start another. They came to an agreement: Brian said that he would try to find a place for me on HTC’s Tour of Britain team, which already had been selected and was full of riders also desperate for competitive action before the worlds, while Rod dealt with the race organizer and the UCI.

In the space of three or four days in Girona, the toxins in my muscles started to gradually drain away, and I discovered on my first two
or three training rides that the fitness built up before the Vuelta was still largely intact. Rob Hayles had arrived with his family and joined Dave, Jez, and me on the rides. Rob was training for what would be his last ever road race, the British National Hill Climb Championships, and we butchered him. Christian’s house is perched at the top of a tough, 1-km climb, and every day I’d whiz up and wait to take the piss out of Rob as he zigzagged, barely still moving, over the brow.

I was flying, not that I realized it at the time. On every ride or after it, I’d be pestering the guys to reassure me about my form: “I’m going okay, aren’t I? You think I’m pretty strong on the climbs … ?” Rob said later that the only thing more stressful than having to constantly put my mind at ease was maintaining my standards of cleanliness in Christian’s house. Rob thought that I might suffer from OCD. To be fair, he wasn’t the first to say it. While we rode in the mornings and rested in the afternoons, Brian and Rod set about their respective tasks. Brian needed to persuade one of my teammates to vacate his place in the Tour of Britain, just in case I got the green light to start the race. The first person he tried was my old chum from the Academy, Matt Brammeier—good old, amiable, unselfish Brammy. There was just one problem: Brammy, who wasn’t exactly earning a king’s ransom with HTC, not only needed the racing before the Tour but also could earn some cash in bonuses from the Irish Cycling Federation if he rode well at the Tour of Britain. From Brammy, then, it was a “sorry, but no.”

Brian looked down the list for another name to try: Peter Velits. Peter is a nice guy and was riding in the worlds but not expecting or expected to be in the shake-up on such a flat course. Brian punched in his number and this time tried a different tactic.

“So, Peter,” he said after the initial niceties, “you’re doing the Tour of Britain, are you? Ach, that bloody race. The transfers in that race are a nightmare, aren’t they? And the hotels?”

By this point, Peter may just have sensed that there was a hidden agenda. But Brian went on to explain our dilemma, and because he understood and was a nice guy, Peter said that it was okay; he would just train at home in Slovakia instead. I later called Peter to check that he was sure, and even said that I’d give him some money as compensation. He told me not to be silly, that it was fine.

I now only needed permission from the UCI and the Vuelta organizers. Which Rod duly secured.

All that was left for me to do was concentrate on riding my bike. In Spain, the combination of Dave and Jez, fantastic roads, and great weather meant that motivation was never going to be a problem. We had smashed ourselves, possibly clocking up more high-quality kilometers than I would have at the Vuelta. I then returned to the UK, to Peta’s house in Essex, slate skies, and torrential rain. But it didn’t faze me; Rod stayed with me, and I got myself back up to race speed on mammoth rides behind his moped, with another British pro, Alex Dowsett, keeping me company. We’d do 260 km, the exact length of the race in Copenhagen, the last 100 of which would be following Rod at 50, 60 kph. I had rarely, if ever, trained so hard. And I was now about to start the Tour of Britain in supreme, crank-wrenching, chain-buckling form.

The race rolled out from Peebles in Scotland, and right from the off I could sense that friends, teammates, and rivals could see that I was flying. I won that first stage to Dumfries, with Renshaw in second place. The stages ended early in the Tour of Britain and weren’t particularly long, unlike the distances between one day’s finish and
the next day’s start. For most of the riders this meant tiresome transfers in team buses … but Rod and I were using alternative means of transport for at least part of the journeys. I’d wipe myself down, attend to my media duties, then get back on my bike and prepare to follow Rod for 50 or 60 km on his moped. Stage 2, incredibly, was canceled due to hurricane-force winds, which meant that I still led the race. Twenty-four hours later, I’d relinquished the race leader’s yellow jersey but impressed everyone on a difficult, uphill finale in Stoke-on-Trent. At the hotel that night, Bernie Eisel added his voice to the growing chorus picking me for the rainbow jersey in Denmark. In fact, he did more than just pick me—he said that it was in the bag.

If there really could be no such certainty, I did strengthen my claims and shorten my odds by easing to my second stage win of the race on the last day in London, a week almost to the hour before I’d hopefully be doing the same in Copenhagen.

The secret in that week, Rod and I knew, would be avoiding the mistakes of the previous year in Melbourne. Project Rainbow Jersey had been over 2 years in the making—nearly 10 years if you traced it back to the birth of the Academy—yet its success would now depend on tiny details. There was the choice of kit—in my case a British cycling track skinsuit, cut off three-quarters of the way down the sleeves not for aerodynamic reasons but to keep my wrists cool, which in turn helped to keep my core body temperature down. This was something that I had first learned when I was a junior, bombing around sweaty indoor velodromes.

Then there was my bike—the Specialized Venge designed in conjunction with the McLaren Formula 1 team, with a custom paint job and specially stiffened at the bottom bracket for extra zip in a sprint. The wheels we would agonize over for days, hesitating between a
deep-section carbon wheel, more aerodynamic but not as reactive, and a narrow-section wheel that gave me more jump out of the corners but had a higher drag factor and therefore wasn’t as effective at high speeds. Having trained on the circuit throughout the week and paid particular attention to that crucial, right-angle right-hander with 900 to go, I eventually opted for the latter. My positioning from that bend to the finish line—and the scope for correcting mistakes—would be more decisive, I thought, than my straight-line speed.

My tires were also the source of some concern and a lot of discussion right up to the eve of the race. I adored the Continentals that we used at HTC, especially in the rain; Mark Renshaw and I still talked fondly about a descent we’d done in damp conditions at the 2009 Giro, on a day when the Spanish rider Pedro Horrillo had suffered a career-ending crash into a ravine, and we reckoned that we’d caught and overtaken five groups. They were the only tires I wanted on my wheels in Copenhagen, especially if there was any chance of wet weather, but Rod insisted the forecast was for fair skies and that the Continentals were the wrong option. He pointed out that at the Tour of Denmark that year, on Danish roads surfaced with the same kind of tarmac we’d see at the worlds, HTC riders had suffered numerous punctures. Still skeptical, I agreed to train on the Veloflex tires that Rod was recommending … and punctured on that very first ride. That settled it: I was going with my trusty Continentals.

Another of my equipment choices in Copenhagen would be the subject of scrutiny and debate, but not until weeks and months after the race. My helmet was a regulation road one that Rob Hayles had helped the manufacturer, Specialized, to adapt and make more aerodynamic. In the effort to save every watt of power, the helmet had been encased in a transparent carbon bubble covering the air
vents. No one said anything at the time, and questions were only raised when the Lotto team’s riders were prevented from wearing a similar helmet, this one with a removable cover, at the Tour Down Under the following January. The discrepancy stemmed from a rule change that the UCI hadn’t publicized, and from the fact that their equipment regulations in general tended to be a movable feast. They could have spared themselves and me some embarrassment, it has to be said, by not using a photo of me crossing the line in the now offending helmet quite so prominently in the documentation that they finally released explaining the rule in March 2012.

t
hese, then, had been the finishing touches to Project Rainbow Jersey, the last effort to second-guess the explosion of variables that would occur on the sound of that gun on the Sunday morning. It would be easy and perhaps tempting amid this eruption of imponderables to cling to faith, to trust in luck and natural talent, but Rod had begun this quest precisely because he knew that wasn’t the way to win any bike race, least of all the world championships. The advantages procured by what the press now delightedly bracketed among my “marginal gains” might have amounted to tens, maybe hundreds of meters over a 266-km race. I ended up beating Matt Goss by less than 1 meter: he was also riding a Specialized bike, but a less aerodynamic model, and was also wearing a vented helmet and a normal jersey and shorts.