At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (26 page)

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hroughout the 2012 Tour de France, two things had kept me going amid all of the angst: my family and the Olympics. Whenever I felt snubbed, wounded, or sorry for myself, an image of Peta, Delilah, and Finn would blink into my thoughts and suddenly I had some perspective. Every time I had to hold back on the bike, every day I felt I was wasting some of the best form of my life, I only needed to tell myself that it would all be worth it when I stood on top of a podium with an Olympic gold medal around my neck and “God Save the Queen” ringing out over the Mall.

The Olympic road race in London had been an integral part of Project Rainbow Jersey: the last and probably hardest of its aims to achieve. In Copenhagen we had controlled, dominated, and monopolized the race with eight riders, but in London we’d only have five to attempt the same job. Not only that, but at Copenhagen we had fired a warning shot that no one would forget; if the other countries had previously thought that it was impossible for a single team to dictate terms as we had in Denmark, they knew now that it was not, at least
not for us. They would come to London knowing our winning formula and determined this time round to put a fly in the ointment. Moreover, although the course had been relocated and tweaked to potentially lend itself to a sprint finish, a 250-km route that included nine climbs of Surrey’s Box Hill was an intimidating challenge.

As had been the case in Copenhagen, we at least knew that no one would be better prepared than the British team. Rod and I had made several trips to Box Hill, in addition to the Olympic test event on a watered-down version of the same course that I’d won in 2011. By professional road race standards, Box Hill wasn’t difficult when taken in isolation: 2.5 km long with an average gradient of just 4.9 percent. The repetition of the nine laps, however, followed by what would no doubt be a breakneck 25-km run-in to the finish on the Mall, would demand one of my best ever rides in a one-day race to take gold.

On seeing and riding the course for the first time, we had known that unless I was climbing as well as I’d ever done, victory would be out of the question. Ending only a week before the Olympic road race, the Tour would take care of my form, but I needed even more than just good legs. I needed a specific regime starting months earlier, one designed to get my weight down and raise my capacity for suffering on repeat ascents of a climb like Box Hill. That was why Rod and Team Sky’s head of performance science, a 40-year-old former swimming coach from Queensland named Tim Kerrison, had put their heads together at the start of the year to come up with a plan.

Given the precedents, most people would have expected Tim Kerrison and me to go together like oil and water. Tim had only been in the sport since 2010, but in his two and a half years with Team Sky, he had forged a reputation as one of the brightest brains in cycling.
He was a scientist, an academic, a physiologist—and this was what theoretically put us on a collision course. During my time at the Academy, one of the coaches, Simon Jones, had driven me round the bend with his sniffy insistence that I “wasn’t hitting the numbers” and would therefore never make it as a pro rider. I had proved him wrong and established myself in possibly the strongest team in the sport, T-Mobile, where I’d immediately locked horns with another physiologist, Sebastian Weber, who had similar ideas about my aptitude for elite cycling. After my first tests in my first winter, Weber had also suggested that I was out of my depth. We continued to clash until I started winning races and a mutual understanding set in: I had a hunger and a race-craft in a competitive context that made me unrecognizable from the bastard sibling who flapped and floundered aboard a stationary bike in an exercise lab. Sebastian was a great coach—just one who didn’t really speak my language in cycling terms.

Tim Kerrison was, in the nicest possible way, even more of an egghead than Simon and Sebastian. A meeting of minds seemed fairly improbable, but right from our first conversations I was pleasantly surprised. I could see that Tim was not only incredibly knowledgeable and innovative, but that he was also doing something that no physiologist that I’d come across had ever managed before: He bridged the divide between the theoretical and the practical, taking numbers out of their abstract context and applying them to what was really happening on the bike and on the road. It’s become fashionable among amateur and professional cyclists over the past few years to obsess over power output—the number of watts generated by each pedal stroke—which can now quite easily be measured and displayed on a handlebar-mounted device. For some, monitoring and comparing
these figures is a sport unto itself, but Tim could relate the numbers directly to what really mattered—who crossed the line first.

Instead of saying to me, “Cav, you’re at 430 watts, that’s much better than last week,” or “Cav, 410 isn’t enough,” Tim laid out in detail exactly what would be required to win the Olympic road race, and therefore what was required in training.

“This is how much you’ll weigh on the day of the Olympic road race,” Tim explained, “and this is the number of watts that you’ll have to produce over this many minutes on Box Hill to win.”

The words that resonated with me were the last two:
to win
.

Rather than just dismiss me as a physiological ugly duckling, Tim was intelligent enough to frame the science within something that, he knew, was impossible to quantify: my ability to suffer. Even in his work in rowing and swimming before he joined Team Sky, Tim said, he’d rarely seen an athlete who could squeeze as much out of his or her innate capabilities. He said it astounded him that I could even finish the Tour de France.

I’m not the greatest trainer, not when it’s training for training’s sake. Whereas other riders can pick out a circuit and do lap after lap, or work through prescribed, specific exercises focusing only on their heart rate or power output, I need different and much more varied stimuli. If I have to train alone, I’ll never take the same road twice on the same ride, even if it means exploring new terrain and potentially getting lost. The idea, then, of simulating the Olympic road race course and the laps of Box Hill by finding an equivalent climb and repeating it seven, eight, nine times would normally have horrified me. Tim, though, made it bearable by planting a vision, a conviction in my mind: I wasn’t training to improve, I wasn’t training to hit a number, I was training to win the Olympic road race. Thus,
a Tuscan climb known locally as La Riola became a slice of Surrey transplanted to Italy for an intensive block of training after the Giro in June. With Rod pacing me, baiting me, torturing me on the moped, the sessions were brutal. They exhausted but also, somehow, invigorated me. I could feel myself improving by the day, by the hour, or even with every repetition of the climb. Weight, of course, was a vital part of the equation, and I was helped hugely in this regard by the British Cycling and Team Sky nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell, who was sent to live with and cook for me in key training phases in both Italy and the UK.

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he Olympics, then, had been at the forefront of my mind throughout the year and throughout the Tour. They became my sole preoccupation from the moment I crossed the line in Paris as a stage winner and a member of the first team to guide a British rider to victory in the Tour de France.

That evening we attended a short reception hosted by our sponsors before being whisked off to the airport and a plane that would take us directly back to London. Our holding camp was at Foxhills hotel and golf course in Surrey, where we spent five days resting and recovering, with a couple of fairly intensive training sessions on Box Hill on Wednesday and Thursday. Brad had gone home for a couple of days, which left the other four members of the team—me, Dave Millar, Chris Froome, and Ian Stannard—to enjoy some downtime with our families. When Brad joined us on Wednesday, he was relaxed, funny, and an altogether different beast from the tense, introverted, hyperfocused rider we’d seen at the Tour. He and Chris seemed to be getting on fine, and the atmosphere was, on the whole, a lot more
jovial than it had been in France. I was much happier, too, having been able to spend some time with my family, and also having opened up to Dave Brailsford about my intention to leave Team Sky. In fairness to Dave, he understood and the conversation was amicable.

The night before the road race, Brad left us for a couple of hours to go into the Olympic Village and officially open the Games, no less. When he arrived back at the hotel, we all sat down for our final meeting to go over what were, in truth, fairly simple tactics. As we had in Copenhagen, we would ride together throughout and look to bring the race back together, ready for a bunch sprint, in the final 20 km.

All week I had had that special feeling—a magic in my legs and an unswerving belief that gold was my destiny. On the morning of the race, right up until the starter’s flag going down, the five of us joked and laughed in a way that suggested we all shared the same confidence. We were all kitted out with aero helmets and high-tech skinsuits and were quite an intimidating unit—at least when we started riding. The guys were absolutely flying. At one point, after around 50 km, the Italian rider Luca Paolini rode off the front of the bunch and up to a TV motorbike to berate the pilot for riding too close and sucking us along. The motorbike had actually been nowhere near us. We were just going that fast.

One of my teammates would lead into Box Hill on every lap, and I’d be safely tucked in behind, just floating up the slope. The road was so narrow that we could almost block it to prevent attacks, although one large group had already broken away early in the stage, and there would be sporadic counterattacks throughout.

As we came to the bottom of Box Hill for the last time, though, we were still very satisfied with how the race was panning out. One more ascent, another 2.5 km of climbing, then we’d be over the top
and, if not quite home and dry, then certainly very difficult to escape on the fast, mainly downhill roads into London.

We expected a flurry of last-ditch efforts from riders who would have no chance in a sprint, and they duly came. Fabian Cancellara’s acceleration, in particular, set my alarm bells ringing, but I resisted the urge coming from my legs that seemed to want nothing more than to jump across to Cancellara’s wheel. The night before, we’d accurately predicted and discussed precisely this scenario—a blizzard of attacks on the last lap of Box Hill—and finally agreed with Dave Millar that we were strongest as a unit and should stick to our own pace. As we crested Box Hill, I shouted to Brad to go faster, to suffocate a large group now opening clear airspace between themselves and us at the front of the peloton, but Brad couldn’t hear me over the din of the crowd.

It was in these moments that our race unraveled. The guys had already butchered themselves to get me here, and the tiredness now started to tell, especially as teams that had been expected to help us were showing no interest in collaborating. The Aussies had Stuart O’Grady down the road in what was in danger of being the winning break, but where were the Germans? With 15 km to go and our chances still alive but hanging by a thread, one German rider, John Degenkolb, moved onto my shoulder to find out what I knew about the time gap, since race radios weren’t allowed at the Olympics and information was scarce.

“So is it still a minute, eh? Fuck, it’s gonna be tough …”

“Yeah,” I said, “it is, so you guys had better start riding.”

Degenkolb replied that he couldn’t: He was André Greipel’s lead-out man, and if he worked now, he’d have nothing left for the last kilometer.

“Lead-out man?” I said. “There’s not even going to be a sprint if you don’t hurry up and start helping, so I don’t know why you’re worried about that.”

Degenkolb either didn’t listen, didn’t care, or his hands were tied. Germany didn’t work, we were on our last legs, and, sure enough, the break stayed away. Alexandre Vinokourov took gold, my Sky teammate Rigoberto Urán silver, and the Norwegian Alexander Kristoff bronze. Having punctured 2 km from the finish, I was the third rider in a large second group to cross the line, in 29th position, 40 seconds adrift of Vinokourov.

I’d be lying if I said the reaction to my second “failure” at an Olympics didn’t irk me, and it started to get under my skin as soon as I made my way through the mixed zone to do my first post-race interviews. The BBC’s sports editor, David Bond, asked whether I’d paid for and was still weary after my exertions at the Tour de France.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” I snapped, without hanging around to give him an answer.

The press coverage the next morning reflected the same lack of understanding. The
Sun’
s headline was FROM BRAD TO WORST. It was clearly too much to expect the press to understand the irony of hailing Brad and denigrating me: It could be argued, could it not, that Brad hadn’t fulfilled his brief if the bunch hadn’t come back together for a sprint, whereas I hadn’t even been given the opportunity to do my job. I would never have made this argument, because the guys had been fantastic, but it was no more ridiculous than any attempt to pin the blame on me.

While cycling in Britain has grown rapidly and my public profile has followed the same curve, the casual viewer still had a fairly loose grasp on the intricacies of the sport and didn’t understand how a rider
could be the favorite for a race, perform admirably, yet still “only” finish 29th. In 2008 I’d started to earn some recognition in the UK for my four Tour de France stage wins but was equally well known as the single British cyclist who had come home from the Beijing Olympics without a medal. I’d even had to borrow track sprinter Jason Kenny’s silver medal and pretend that it was mine to get an upgrade to first class on my flight back! In the autumn of that year, when I’d told Bernie Eisel that I wasn’t among the 10 nominees for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, Bernie had thought it was some kind of joke—either mine or on the part of whoever had drawn up the shortlist.