At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (23 page)

I wondered, though, whether this same pattern of overachievement wasn’t eventually our undoing: Bob seemed to assume that we would maintain the same standards on our frugal salaries and that sponsors would come running to buy into such an uncommon, inspirational
underdog story. As I told a journalist in an interview in 2010, “Bob thinks it’s Hollywood and he’s Steven Spielberg.”

What I saw as his misjudgment and ingratitude—or certainly his failure to understand how uniquely efficient the team had been—had of course soured our relationship in 2010 and 2011.

The lack of a satisfactory pay raise or new contract for me were symptomatic of the same thing: him thinking that we’d happily all carry on getting our arses whipped, with no credible promise of a change or reward at the end of it all.

I realize now that I was unfair in my assessment of Bob. He wasn’t intentionally depriving me or anyone else of the money we deserved; he simply didn’t have it. The signs of our poverty were everywhere you looked, from the fact that our bus was just about the only one without a shower to the team failing to pick up the Swiss franc fine that I had incurred for my V-sign at the 2010 Tour of Romandie, as they had promised.

Scandalized by the doping controversies that had rocked the team in 2006 and 2007, T-Mobile had effectively paid to have its contract with the team rescinded and its name disassociated from us; that money ended up accounting for a large wedge of our budget for the next four seasons. Columbia and then HTC had both chipped in, but they had paid a little for a lot of exposure and success and therefore been spoiled. When Bob later went to them to talk about a contract renewal and upping their investment, I can imagine that they balked. Why would they pay full price for what we’d previously given them at a huge discount?

The other recurring problem with cycling sponsorship was that it was too effective for brand awareness. The exposure was so fantastic
that companies often felt that they had already derived more-than-adequate benefits after only one or two seasons and therefore didn’t need to stick around for the long haul. For this reason and others, the business of cycling sponsorship didn’t follow the same basic logic or patterns as most others, and I wondered if that was something Bob may not have fully grasped. It occurred to me that with the HTC deal running down and the company’s interest in renewing dead, Bob was perhaps approaching big corporations without considering the single most important factor that seemed to predispose companies to sponsor cycling teams: a love of the sport, usually the CEO’s or a marketing director’s, which meant that sponsorship wasn’t only a strategic initiative but also something that they did for fun, a flight of fancy that they could also justify on business grounds. Perhaps I’m presuming too much when I say that maybe Bob wanted to sign the deal, take the money, and go off and run a brilliant team, when a lot of sponsors wanted more engagement and influence than that. Or maybe Bob was just unlucky.

In my final analysis, I’d stand by what I thought at the time: Everyone at HTC was overdelivering in their jobs, except the people or person whose responsibility it was to find backing for the most successful, cosmopolitan, and attractive team in the sport. That person—although it pains me to admit it—was Bob.

On the other hand, I would also admit that I regret the lack of empathy I showed for Bob, and my lack of appreciation. What Bob accomplished by taking an underperforming team riddled with systematic cheating and turning it into the best organization in the sport—and also one of the first to truly combat doping from the inside—makes him worthy of a place among the best managers that professional cycling can ever have seen.

o
n October 11, two days after Paris–Tours, the worst-kept secret in professional cycling ceased to be. After months of speculation and weeks of serious negotiations, it was announced that I had signed a three-year deal with Team Sky.

The deal might have seemed inevitable, but what I hadn’t been prepared for, as the lawyers on both sides hammered out the small print, was the collateral effect on friends and current teammates. I had told Mark Renshaw to wait for me to sign with Team Sky before considering any of the other lucrative offers that he’d had, and I had even said that I would cover lost earnings out of my own pocket if the Team Sky deal didn’t come off. As the days had passed, though, Mark had started to get edgy and couldn’t perceive any real desire on Team Sky’s part to sign him. Meanwhile, on the back of the success that he’d tasted at the Tour of Qatar in February, the Dutch Rabobank team was trying to tempt him with a big salary and the chance to try his hand at being its front-line sprinter rather than a lead-out man. Mark had finally called me to say that he was going with Rabobank, and I’d said that I understood why he made that choice, while deep down thinking that he could have been more loyal and held off for a bit longer.

Brian Holm had been in a similar position. He had my solemn word that I’d find a way in for him at Team Sky, but, like Renshaw, he wasn’t detecting any real will from Team Sky to take him on. Brian also had other options, the best of which seemed to be the Belgian team Omega Pharma–Quick-Step. They were a notoriously old-school outfit, unglamorous and proud, which appealed to the wannabe old rocker in Brian, a man who held Thin Lizzy and Roger De Vlaeminck in equally high esteem. I still didn’t think he’d accept
the offer, and so I was shocked to receive a text from Brian one day in early August announcing that he’d said yes. I texted back, “You’re fucking kidding me.” But, alas, he wasn’t.

There was more to my decision to join Team Sky than just the fact that it was a British team that met my asking price and employed riders and staff whom I had known for years. In signing for Team Sky, I was also buying into a vision for cycling in the UK that I shared. BSkyB, the team owner, wanted to grow the sport on all levels, and its investment reflected that, spanning the track, the road, and recreational riding. While money does matter, it has also always been imperative to me to believe in and like any company with which I associate myself. That’s been the case with Nike, which has sponsored me since the start of my career, and with Oakley; it also applied to Team Sky, now that I was aligning myself with its brand. When I turned pro, I made a vow to myself never to bow to PR bullshit, to never be untrue to myself, and I’m proud to say that I’ve never really deviated from that principle—often with some fairly incendiary results.

Having spent essentially my entire career in the same team up to that point, I couldn’t have been more excited about the change of scenery. Team Sky represented the best of both worlds—the familiarity of many of the riders and staff, and the novelty of a new environment. After the austerity of HTC, I was looking forward to new and well-funded ways of working. Our first get-together was a two-day meeting in Milan at the end of October to discuss the season just passed and plan for the next one. My expectations were high, but this surpassed them. Dave Brailsford made a speech that captivated everyone, about what the team had already achieved and what our targets for 2012 would be. The attention to detail—from the meals we ate to
our clothing fittings for the coming year—was a notch above even what I’d seen at HTC, where we’d always been ahead of the curve.

Team Sky had gained a reputation for professionalism at the expense of enjoyment, but that weekend in Milan suggested that there could be hard play as well as hard work. On the first night, after a formal dinner with team sponsors, we all headed out en masse for a few drinks and ended up in the Just Cavalli nightclub, most of us a little worse for wear. Team-building exercises have become fashionable in cycling in recent years, from survival camps in the forests of Scandinavia to go-karting, but to my mind there aren’t many things better for creating camaraderie than a few drinks, a boogie, and a taxi home in the small hours.

Before the year was out there was time for two more bits of good news. The first one, in truth, I’d known about for a few weeks, but could only now reveal: Peta and I were expecting our first child together. She—because I was already sure that it was a girl—had been conceived during the Tour de France and was due in mid-April, in the week of Milan–San Remo.

If the green jersey, the world championship, and Peta’s pregnancy hadn’t already made 2011 special enough, more was to follow. A fortnight before Christmas, I was voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. As much as recognition of my achievement, it was an eloquent statement about how far the sport had come in the UK, bearing in mind that, four years earlier, four Tour stage victories hadn’t even earned me a nomination. It felt like a culmination but also the start of something even bigger; the plans Team Sky had outlined in Milan went beyond the goal of winning the Tour de France with a clean British rider by 2014, and beyond almost anything ever achieved by a professional cycling team. I was looking forward to going for the
yellow jersey, the green jersey, and world domination. “Believe in better” was the BSkyB corporate slogan. I believed that we could be better than anyone imagined.

t
he almost robotic professionalism that I’d seen only in fleeting glimpses in Milan was more evident at Team Sky’s training camps that winter—not that I was complaining. At HTC, the first of our two training camps per winter, in particular, had served mainly just to get us back on our bikes and clocking up some kilometers. At Team Sky there were drills and specific exercises every day. I’d trained well all winter, partly because I only needed to glance down at the rainbow stripes across my chest to feel an extra kick of motivation, but also because I thrived on the more regimented style of the Team Sky camps.

This single-minded focus on performance was hard to argue with, since the results were there for rival teams to see and envy, even if they were unable to muster the discipline to emulate them. At the same time, such a Spartan existence took some getting used to, having come from a much more relaxed, convivial ambience at HTC. When training was over every day, there was very little socializing and hardly anyone venturing outside the confines of their room; just about the only extracurricular activity to look forward to was the odd game of pool. Light relief at Team Sky came in brief snatches—Brad’s impersonations, or Jez Hunt walking out of one massage, straight across the corridor and into another one, lying to the second masseur that he still hadn’t been seen.

The first races on my 2012 program would be the Tours of Qatar and Oman in February. At our camps in Majorca, former HTC teammates
had all agreed that I looked stronger and leaner than in any winter since 2008–9, and my form was matched by my excitement. On the plane to Qatar, though, I began to feel ill.

I ended up spending 40 of the 48 hours immediately before stage 1 in bed. Antibiotics seemed to have cured me—I went on to win stages 3 and 5 after some incredible work by Bernie Eisel and Juan Antonio Flecha—but lethargy kicked in between Qatar and Oman, and it continued to affect me for the next few weeks. It was always the same with me and antibiotics; the short-term benefits came with long- or at least mid-term costs.

Oman was a much hillier race than Qatar, but under normal circumstances at least four of the six stages lent themselves to sprint finishes. I vaguely contended in only two of them, with our sprint-train as rickety and erratic in Oman as it had been smooth and rapid in Qatar. My assigned lead-out man was the Australian Chris Sutton, who was a decent sprinter in his own right. With him as my last man, though, we just didn’t gel. This early in the year, the lack of any outstanding candidate for this role wasn’t yet a major worry, although I was still disappointed that Mark Renshaw had signed elsewhere. Of the riders on the Team Sky roster, the only one I could envisage doing a comparable job to Renshaw was Geraint Thomas, but his year and road program revolved around the London Olympics and winning a gold in the team pursuit on the track.

I came home from Oman feeling completely drained. It wasn’t only the lingering effects of the antibiotics but something that had nothing to do with racing: My first child was due in a month’s time, and I was scared. The anxiety was making me irritable, the pregnancy was making Peta ratty—especially when I was away at races—and we were starting to get at each other. In Qatar and Oman we’d
argued on the phone on a couple of occasions, and although everything quickly returned to normal, this only added to my apprehension. I wanted the baby to have a perfect life, a perfect family, and perfect parents right from the first day, but we were both trying too hard. Together with aftereffects of the antibiotics, the mental strain had started to wear me down and manifest itself in physical pain, specifically in my stomach.

As was the case the year before at San Remo, stress had left me vomiting a brown, bilious liquid that my HTC team doctor had explained was stomach acid and that he had treated with antacid medication. Twelve months on, I recognized the same symptoms and so made my way to Manchester to see one of the British Cycling doctors, get it checked out, and get some of the same tablets.

When I arrived at the velodrome that day and asked which of the doctors was around, I was told there was no one except the psychiatrist, Steve Peters. Steve and I had known each other for years and got on okay, but our different takes on sports psychology meant that, unlike Vicky Pendleton or Chris Hoy, I was never going to be banging down his door for advice. My views were slightly more nuanced now than in the early part of my career—I no longer just needed “sunshine blown up my arse,” as I wrote in
Boy Racer,
because I got too much of that now and sometimes needed the opposite. Fundamentally, though, I still held the opinion that a lot of what I imagined Steve did was not for me.

These opinions, of course, had no bearing on me seeing Steve quickly to get a prescription for some basic antacid pills. Or so I assumed. Two hours of what felt to me like intensive psychoanalysis later, I was no longer sure of anything.

It had started with what was, for me, an utterly baffling discussion about the exact color of the vomit that I was trying to describe. The conversation progressed from there, eventually, into a full inventory of everything in my life and how it made me feel. At one point, he asked me about Milan–San Remo. We got on to talking about failure there, and suddenly he was questioning whether I should even be taking part. At first my reaction was that he was talking rubbish, but before long he had me doubting San Remo, doubting my ability, doubting everything in my life. At one point I was almost reduced to tears and felt like a basket case.