At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (31 page)

Fu—

I tried, but as I’d feared, it was too late to rejoin the bunch and move into a sprinting position. Marcel Kittel, the young German who had beaten me once at the ZLM Toer in June, took the win in what turned out to be a heavily diluted sprint finish, in terms of both numbers and quality.

Even when I’d lost out in circumstances beyond my control, the frustration, the self-flagellation, the regret would usually have kicked in within a minute or two of me climbing onto the bus.

In Bastia there was further reason to rue what the press would describe the next day as a “
débâcle
,” a “fiasco,” even “a farce” of a finale: With no prologue on the Tour route this year, it had been a very rare opportunity for a sprinter to take the yellow jersey.

Reminding myself of this would usually have been an exercise in pure masochism, but back on the bus, where I sat down, unbuckled my helmet, and silently stared into space, the anguish subsided as soon as I glanced out of the window. Standing there, with Delilah in her arms, was Peta, and that was enough for everything else to fade into insignificance. Minutes later, what was now the familiar post-race commotion of Velcro shoe straps being unfastened and the race relived through my teammates’ breathless post-mortems was interrupted by the shocking appearance of Tony Martin at the top of the steps. You could have said that he’d spent the last hours wrestling sharks, not riding a bike. For a few minutes he seemed woozy but okay, then Helge went to start cleaning his wounds, and Tony simply passed out. Soon Helge and the Tour doctor would be unloading him into a stretcher and taking him to the hospital. That night it was already being reported—because most right-minded people had assumed—that Tony had been taken back home to Germany and was out of the Tour. In fact, when he’d woken up in the hospital, more
or less the first thing he’d said to Helge was, “I can ride tomorrow, right?” Sure enough, the next day in Bastia he’d be on the start line, wrapped like a mummy in bandages, swathed in pain. It was nuts when you thought about it: The Tour de France was probably the only sporting event on earth where you could sustain injuries like that and have completely healed by the end.

I’d finished my course of antibiotics and thought I was improving, but even a small, easy, uncategorized climb as the route turned inland on stage 2 gave me a very abrupt reality check. It was Jérôme Pineau’s job throughout the Tour to keep things ticking over at the front and ensure any breakaway was kept within a safe, catchable distance—which was what he was doing, only I couldn’t stand the pace.

“Jérôme! Slow!”

It was an instruction that Jérôme would hear a few times that day. I looked down at the digital display of my power meter and noticed to my dismay that I was barely nudging above 300 watts, the sort of power I’d usually put out without breaking a sweat, yet here I was laboring. I didn’t so much fear as expect the worst on the Col de Vizzavona, the first 1,000-meter climb of the Tour, and the worst was pretty bad. As I sunk through and out of the peloton like a lead weight, other riders glanced across and gawped, almost quizzically, as if to say, “Are you taking the piss?” If only!

My team stuck with me, but even with me sitting up and pootling along taking sips from their bottles, they were nearly leaving me behind. We finally caught and finished with a large gruppetto, 17 minutes behind the stage winner, Jan Bakelants.

The next day was another hilly, sinuous one along the cliffs on the west coast of Corsica, and even fully fit it would have been a push for me to contend. The good news was that I had started to feel
better and that we were about to leave Corsica for the French mainland. The island had never hosted the Tour, so it had made a highly symbolic venue for the Grand Départ, and its beauty had also taken my breath away. At the same time, between the flights to get onto and off the island and the yacht we took from the finish on day two to our hotel, it all felt a bit gimmicky.

I’ll always be the biggest advocate of both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, which is why I don’t think the Tour needs any bells and whistles—the history, the reputation, the difficulty, and the riders are enough.

Three stages in, despite the missed opportunity of taking yellow on the first day, I wasn’t alarmed. I was inching back toward full health and, I had no reason to doubt, the first of several stage wins. On the morning of stage 4, the team time trial, I ribbed Tony Martin, who still looked as though he’d spent our time in Corsica swimming with Jaws, about my brilliant record in team time trials in the Giro d’Italia, pointing out that I’d done two with him at the Tour and never won. I don’t know whether this galvanized him, or for that matter how he was still managing to ride through the pain of his injuries, but when we did practice laps that morning, Tony did a passable and out-of-character impersonation of Mark Cavendish; while I stayed fairly quiet, silently purring at the smoothness of our riding and our rotations, Tony barked instructions and encouragement. I loved watching him in that mood. I also knew that, in spite of the Panzerwagen’s injuries, we’d blitz it and either win or get very close. We went out and set the fastest time—25 minutes and 57 seconds—then spent a tense hour and a half in the hot seat beside the finish line, watching 17 teams fail to beat our mark.

At ten to four, still glued to the TV monitor, we held our breath as Orica-GreenEDGE whipped around the last corner into the finishing straight, came over the line, and stopped the clock on … 25 minutes and 56 seconds. They had beaten us by 75 hundredths of a second—or the difference between me being fully recovered or only 90 percent, Tony having one less nasty wound, or one of us nailing a corner or going wide. And people wonder why marginal gains are so important.

m
ost riders would agree that you can do as many Tours de France as you like, but it’s not necessarily going to qualify you as an authority on major French tourist attractions or areas of outstanding natural beauty. The stages become numbers, or days of the week, and the 27 regions and 96
départements
get lumped either into one of the main mountain ranges or the paradise, at least in my mind, that is any landscape without a major mountain. Years later, you realize that your memory retains a full, pin-sharp film reel of certain stages and their setting, but discards others to the cutting room floor.

It’s the same with all races. We remember what’s marked us, marked our career or perhaps even changed its course. Stage 5, rolling west out of Cagnes-sur-Mer toward Marseille 228 km away, appeared to represent nothing more complicated or nostalgia-inducing than an opportunity to win my stage. Instead, it turned into an odd sort of journey down memory lane. First, after 140 km we bowled into a town whose name I vaguely recognized and through streets that were also vaguely familiar. Then I finally twigged: We were approaching
and about to ride through what had been the finish line of stage 2 in 2009, the first of the six stages I’d won that year. As we did, a broad grin spread across my face as I announced to everyone within earshot, “2009 Tour de France. Stage 2. I won here.” Good job that it was a hot day and everyone was wearing shades so that I couldn’t see the rolling eyes.

The next attack of déjà vu came a bit later and was more significant. I’d seen the name of the last climb of the day, the Col de la Gineste, in the roadbook and thought nothing of it, even when Jérôme Pineau talked about how it was a travesty that it wasn’t classified, how it was much harder than the preceding category-4 climb. As we saw the road swirling up the cliffs above us, like smoke out of a chimney, it all came back: I’d done this climb on my very first day as a fully fledged pro, in GP La Marseillaise in 2007. Not only that, but I could remember being absolutely mystified as to how one of the Brits in the race, Jez Hunt, was up the road, on the attack, on such rugged terrain. I’d put this to another British rider, my teammate at the time, Roger Hammond.

“Cav,” he’d chuckled, “this is nothing. Not for professional racing, anyway.”

I think at that point, in 2007, I started to panic. Six years on, my team swarmed around me, as per our plan, and practically carried me over and down the other side, until the break was absorbed, and we bombed down into the boulevards of Marseille.

Trentin went early, so early that I thought we’d blown it, but he held on into the last corner, where Gert took over. Gert is a huge hulk of a man, very fast and very explosive, the combination of which had provided some spectacular lead-outs but had also posed me a fair few problems since the start of the year. Here, with 200 to go, he
was moving so fast that it was tricky to even move around and kick past him. Finally, my nose was in front, I unglued everyone from my wheel and took a relatively easy win, despite not having brilliant legs.

So far, so good. One sprint, one win. Two more back-to-back opportunities now awaited us, but, unbeknownst to me at the time, so did one of my hardest weeks to date as a Tour de France rider. By the end of it,
L’Équipe
would be running a sort of obituary of my sprint domination with the headline CAVENDISH NO LONGER REIGNS. The worst of it was that, deep down, without even really admitting it myself, and maybe for the first time in my career, I’d started to wonder whether they might be right.

i
don’t like excuses and have never had much time for people or bike riders who make them. Yet as that hardest week unfolded, I could find and point to factors that in some way mitigated the near misses that, it being me, were now invariably described as “failures.”

In Montpellier on stage 6 there were undoubtedly a couple of issues. One was my bike—or “that fucking bike!” as I referred to it on the bus after the stage, my booming voice easily audible to the scores of fans and journalists huddled around the bus. I had four or five bikes at the Tour, and I’d sensed that something might be wrong with this one on the second day in Corsica. Yes, my legs had felt heavy, lifeless, but that still didn’t seem to fully explain why I was struggling so badly. I’d wondered whether someone had shunted me on the first day and slightly damaged the bike, cracking the frame or a wheel and making them feel spongy. I’d asked the mechanics to strip it down and check it out. Meanwhile, I had ridden stages 3 and 5 and was 40 km from the end of stage 6 on a spare when I came down at a roundabout. The
team car stopped, the mechanic handed me a new machine … or so I thought, until, our radios having let us down and left me chasing without any teammates, I realized to my horror that I’d been given the same spongy bike from stage 2. It either hadn’t been changed or hadn’t been fixed, hence the “that fucking bike!” diatribe.

My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that we had gone too early again, duped by the stampede of general classification contenders and their teams that was now a daily occurrence. The conventional wisdom was that they would avoid crashes by staying at the front. In reality, it was more dangerous than ever up there, with more and better sprint teams sniffing around than in all of my previous Tours. Our problem was getting sucked into the frantic, stop-start chaos of it, losing patience and confidence in the timings we’d discussed before the stages. If one guy went too early or too hard, that could compromise everything. I wouldn’t ever criticize the guys if I felt that they were committed, and they had certainly been that in Montpellier. At the same time, I could also tell myself that the combination of the damaged bike, the chase after my crash, and the imperfect lead-out had contributed as much to my defeat as the bloke who had beaten me—in this instance, André Greipel.

It’s rare for me to be beaten in a sprint and not immediately atone the next day. In Albi, on stage 7, I didn’t even get the opportunity: Peter Sagan and Cannondale unleashed hell on a category 2 climb midway through another blisteringly hot and fast stage, and that was me kaput. Sagan duly won the stage and left me looking at an already daunting 105-point deficit on the points classification.

Two days in the Pyrenees took my mind off my sprinting and onto the fight for survival. And on stage 9 to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, it was quite literally a fight. Early in the stage, an Euskaltel rider swerved in
in front of me, so I locked on the brakes, stalled, and shunted Geraint Thomas. I apologized and Gee didn’t make any fuss, but from over my shoulder I could hear, even with my limited Spanish, what I knew was an expletive-laden tirade. I looked around. It was Juan José Lobato, another Euskaltel rider. Further angry words were exchanged, his again in Spanish, then Lobato decided to communicate in a more universal language: physical violence. He slapped me, sending my glasses flying off my face, and I swung back. All this was going on while we were still on our bikes, still moving: We were a couple more lusty blows away from having a punch-up in the middle of the peloton. Luckily, there were no commissaires watching and no TV cameras. We were probably fortunate, too, that one of the elder statesmen in the peloton, Stuart O’Grady, stepped in to break us up.

That night, after the stage, buses were waiting to take the riders to Tarbes airport, where we’d catch a plane to Nantes for the first rest day of the race. And which team was sharing our bus? Euskaltel, of course. I took the chance to explain to their directeur sportif, Igor González de Galdeano, who said Lobato was young and naive but that he’d have a word. He also mumbled something about how it was in everyone’s best interest to get on, because we’d be in trouble if the commissaires saw us fighting.

“Hang on, you’re forgetting something,” I said. “He punched me, totally unprovoked.” Usually when I’m in the wrong, I’m the first to admit it, even if hours and days might have to pass before I do, but I wasn’t going to apologize for retaliating when someone slapped me in the face at 40 kph.

The first rest day, and the chance to spend time with Peta, Finn, and Delilah, was the best possible distraction for 24 all-too-short hours. Then we were straight into some of the most challenging days
of my Tour de France career. When the route had been unveiled nine months earlier, my eyes had lit up on seeing the second week, with three probable sprint finishes in four days.