At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (25 page)

I didn’t count on getting much support from Sean at the Tour, but even these low expectations were dashed. In our briefing on the bus before stage 2 to Tournai, I waited for him to talk about our plan
for what was surely going to be a sprint … and waited. Sean didn’t even mention it; instead, his instructions for the last 50 km were all to do with Brad. Again, I think one or two teammates felt sorry for me; Edvald Boasson Hagen had a job to do for Brad, but he very kindly asked me whether he could somehow help. Eddy and Bernie did what they could, but two men were never going to be enough to set me up for the sprint, especially when Michael Rogers, Brad’s in-race “bodyguard,” tried to budge me off Bernie’s wheel. I ended up improvising, hopping from one opponent’s wheel to the next in the final 2 km—surfing, as we call it in track racing. Finally, I came out of André Greipel’s shadow to take an improbable stage win, and one unlike any of my others in previous Tours. On the bus after the finish I wasn’t particularly jubilant or even vocal in thanking my teammates; frankly, it would have embarrassed them, because only Bernie and Edvald had helped me.

In Tournai I’d somehow muddled through, winged it to win, but I knew that wouldn’t work every day. With no team to surround, protect, and escort him, a sprinter is left sailing in troubled waters, in the danger zone behind the arrowhead of the peloton, where the big sprinters and their flotillas cruise toward the finish line relatively unimpeded. This is where the real risks are being taken, where guys have to gamble, and consequently where the majority of crashes happen. In Rouen on stage 4, this was where I was, and the pileup that ensued was a beauty. I wasn’t too badly hurt, fortunately, but it was abundantly clear to me not only that it could have been much worse but also that it had happened because I’d been left with only Bernie to pilot and look after me. On the bus that afternoon, the most shell-shocked of us all was Brad: 12 months earlier he’d seen months of hard work jeopardized by one innocuous crash in the first
week of the Tour, and the pileup in Rouen had clearly brought back a nasty memory.

By this point, five days into the race, team staff and other riders were beginning to notice and remark on how quiet I was. In Rouen, the management asked me why it was, and I responded that there wasn’t a lot for me to say about how we raced, since I wasn’t the leader. This was slightly disingenuous, because I did have very strong views not only on how I was being left exposed but also how tentative the other guys were in the closing kilometers of stages. Urged to speak up at our briefing the next day, I said that it was in everyone’s interest to at least commit more, perhaps even just riding a couple of hundred meters on the front each. That would keep them out of trouble while also doing me a favor. Tim Kerrison, the team coach, also thought that one big effort like this at the end of stages would ultimately help our general classification riders to maintain and sharpen their form. Everyone agreed to give it a go, and the improvement was huge that day into Saint-Quentin. We still didn’t have quite enough firepower to put me in a winning position, but the team had looked far more decisive and far less vulnerable. The contrast between Brad’s mood that afternoon and his reaction the previous day was stark: “That’s how we fucking do it!” he roared as he climbed onto the bus.

My optimism that night, unfortunately, didn’t even last 24 hours. On stage 6, another sprinter-friendly one to Metz, a huge crash 26 km from the finish left dozens of riders injured, and even more riders delayed behind the pileup were now out of contention for the win. I had made it around the wreckage but to do so had skidded on my rear wheel, causing the tire to explode. I immediately reached for my radio and announced that I’d punctured. I heard nothing, so I
repeated what I’d just said, all the time trying to cling on to the back of the lead group while riding on a flat. For a few hundred meters I was hanging in there, until the road began to descend and I could no longer stand the pace with no air in my tire.

Finally, having remained silent in the radio the whole time, Sean Yates arrived in our first team car, waited while the mechanic swapped my wheel, then immediately drove off without even giving me a push, as is standard practice for the directeur sportif after a mechanical. Bernie had heard a muffled message in his ear a minute or two after my puncture, asked Sean to repeat it, but heard nothing back. Understandably, he had carried on, and I was left to claw my way back to the bunch alone. It’s normal—officially illegal but roundly tolerated—for riders to draft in their team cars’ slipstream after a mechanical, but Yates hadn’t stuck around to allow me this luxury. Needless to say, I finished in a group of stragglers, some six minutes behind the stage winner, Peter Sagan, and I was not in good spirits when I arrived back at the bus. I had never been left stranded like that after a mechanical, not even as a 22-year-old neo-pro in a tiny one-day race in France. Here we were at the Tour de France, on a stage that I was the favorite to win, and I was the world champion. I was heartbroken. My manager, Simon Bayliff, had been following the Tour in his camper and came to see me after the finish that afternoon. I sat on the steps of the bus, out of earshot of my teammates and directeurs a few meters above me, and told Simon what had happened.

“Sean fucking ignored me,” I said. “He just left me. It was horrible.”

It was July 6. This was the date when I realized this could be my first and last Tour de France with Team Sky. It was also the date of my last conversation with Sean Yates.

w
hile I’d continue to do my best, offering Brad as much assistance as I could both on and off the bike, from Metz onward it was sometimes hard to reconcile my own frustration with the team’s rampant success. First Chris Froome won the first big mountain stage in the Vosges, with Brad taking the yellow jersey on the same day. Then that pair finished first and second in the next big general classification showdown, a time trial in Besançon.

After the first big Alpine stage to La Toussuire, the press would forget the murmurs about my dissatisfaction, forget even that a Briton had a realistic chance of winning the biggest race on earth for the first time, and shift their attention instead to a perceived rift between Brad and Chris. Chris had been selected for the Tour as Brad’s domestique deluxe in the mountains, yet had briefly accelerated away from his leader on the climb to La Toussuire, embarrassing and briefly isolating Brad, and also sparking debate about who should be leading Team Sky.

My own view from inside the team was that Chris had acted in good faith, just a little clumsily. If he’d wanted to betray Brad, he would have attacked on the penultimate climb that day, not the final one, and he wouldn’t have waited when he got the order to stop his effort over the radio. It was easy to see it as evidence of Chris’s naïveté, which could make you either laugh or wince, both on and off the bike. It may also, however, have been that Chris, like me, felt that we had gone from having the opportunity to aim for the moon and the stars to a risk-averse strategy with the sole aim of securing the yellow jersey for Brad. To my way of thinking, we could have been leaving Paris 10 days later with yellow, green, and nine of the cuddly lions given to the stage winner every day.

Brad didn’t say a lot that night, but it was obvious that he was upset or angry. Usually, when he was the next in line after me for a massage, he’d swagger into the room cracking jokes or taking the piss. That evening he sat on the adjacent bed waiting for me to finish without saying a word. I could see that he probably wasn’t in the mood for talking, but as I got up to go I told him that I just had one thing to say—that in my opinion Chris hadn’t meant any harm and that, if he had, he wouldn’t have waited on the climb. I’m still not certain what was weighing more heavily on Brad’s mind—the idea that Chris was out to flick him or the fact that Brad had shown a chink in his armor for the first time since the start of the season.

There was no doubt that the story of a civil war was being blown out of proportion in the press, and Chris continued to do a sterling job on the road. I helped the team where I could in the Alps, hopeful that stage 15 to Pau, at least, would give me another shot at a stage win. Although classified as a flat stage, the course that day was anything but, with incessant short climbs and the race taking two hours to settle into the usual format of a break gaining time then slowly being reeled in. I had fire in my legs, so when Greipel’s Lotto teammates asked Bernie whether we would help them to bring it back together for a sprint, and Bernie asked me over the radio whether I was up for it, I didn’t hesitate.

“Do I want a sprint? Fucking right I want a sprint.”

And so Bernie and Lotto rode. The guys in the breakaway were quality riders and specialists in this kind of exercise, so it was tough going, but we began to eat inexorably into the gap. Or we did for a while. It was a hot day; Mick Rogers was on bottle duty, and with around 50 km to go he went back to the team car to fetch drinks.
A few minutes later, when Mick reappeared close to us, we heard Sean’s voice in the radio: “Guys, stop riding. We’re not going for a sprint. We’ll just control it today.”

It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened. Mick was knackered and, even in the last stage before a rest day, wasn’t required to exert himself for the sake of me possibly winning a second stage. Once again I was disgusted, and once again I reacted by remaining silent and doing what was required of me to help Brad for the remainder of the stage.

There had been hints in the press throughout the Tour—and they would continue in the final week—that I was unhappy about not being the center of attention in the team. In fact, the opposite was true—that was one of the few things I was enjoying.

In Pau on that second rest day, the whole team was herded onto a sun-blasted hotel terrace for a press conference attended by hundreds of journalists and dozens of TV crews, but nearly all of the questions were for or about Brad and Chris. When the end of the conference degenerated into the usual free-for-all, Brad and Chris struggled to extricate themselves, while I slipped back to my room almost unnoticed.

By now, Simon and I were clear in our minds that I could never race another Tour like this one. This would clearly hold implications for Team Sky, but for the moment, they had much more pressing matters to deal with. Brad and Chris continued to dominate in the Pyrenees, with Chris flexing his muscles and pulling away from Brad again on the climb to Peyragudes. Brad manifestly wasn’t impressed, but he reacted in much the same way as I did to my frustrations: He kept his emotions to himself. He was closing in on Tour victory, the dream for any cyclist. That, surely, was the most important thing.

I perhaps didn’t always show it, but in those last few days I felt immense pride at what we were in the process of achieving, even if we could have been doing much more. Two days from the end, in Brive-la-Gaillarde, I listened, openmouthed, as Sean outlined his plan for the day in our pre-stage briefing on the bus: we’d let the break go and have a quiet day. Fortunately, the other directeur, Servais Knaven, questioned this, and then Brad also chipped in that, in his opinion, we should ride for a sprint. Dave Brailsford had the final say.

“Cav’s been fantastic for Brad, he’s been patient, and he deserves a chance today,” Dave said.

Six hours later, after a superbly committed performance from the whole team, Brad even led me and the peloton into the final kilometer, with a break still a few seconds ahead of us. It was going to take a very long sprint and a remarkable comeback to catch them, but my form was now superb and there were riders all over the road whose wheels I could surf. It turned out to be one of the most spectacular and emphatic stage wins of my Tour career.

After a penultimate-day time trial won by Brad, sealing his overall victory, it was on to the formality of a final-day stage win for me, given that I’d never lost on the Champs Elysées. For a few hours I was able to put the disappointments and regrets of the previous three weeks and concerns about my future to one side and revel in the moment. Brad, in the yellow jersey, led me down the Rue de Rivoli, under the kilometer kite. Edvald came next, then I bolted as we swung out of the Place de la Concorde and was never seriously challenged.

Throughout the stage I had beamed with pride at the guys’ dedication right to the end. It’s common for most of the riders at the Tour to, if not completely let their hair down, at least treat themselves to,
say, a beer and a pizza on the penultimate evening. But Brad, in particular, had insisted on us remaining fully focused.

He had done it for me, not himself, and the guys responded with a performance that compelled me to thank them all individually in e-mails the following week.

All wasn’t quite well that ended well, at least not as far as I was concerned, but I was delighted for Brad and thrilled to have contributed to such a historic moment for British cycling. It had been a very long journey, one that, like Project Rainbow Jersey, had started years earlier, with a vision that through hard work had been molded into a plan. This had then come to fruition only thanks to some hugely talented and dedicated individuals.

Everyone at Team Sky deserved immense credit for that. At the same time, I knew that I deserved better. Prioritizing yellow over green was of course logical, of course the right thing to do. Ignoring the points competition and near enough ignoring me altogether, though, was not something I could accept.