At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (6 page)

Would I do it again today? As a 24-year-old, yes. As a 28-year-old, no.

By way of a footnote, if you’re wondering whether the “Agincourt excuse” ever made it into the public domain, naturally I took the first good opportunity: a press event in Soho the week before the Tour de France. Richard Williams was sitting in the front row. I made sure that I caught his eye.

Once the embarrassment and anger had passed, leaving Romandie early gave me yet another problem: I’d lost two more race days. Fortunately, the next week I was due to set off for the States, where I’d do a mini–training camp before competing in the Tour of California. Another issue that had set tongues wagging at the start of the year had been Bob “insisting” that I race in California rather than the parallel-running Giro d’Italia, which on numerous occasions I’d called my favorite race alongside the Tour de France. I was apparently “furious” about this, so much so that it was another reason for
me agitating to move to Team Sky. The reality was quite different. Yes, I would have liked to do the Giro, but I could also see why the team, which had its headquarters in San Luis Obispo, California, wanted me in the United States. I’d enjoyed California when I’d ridden there in 2008, had a good relationship with the organizers, and was in fact quite happy with the decision.

In those few days before the race, though, as I trained and got ready, the loneliness really started to wear me down again.

Probably the single worst antidote I could have chosen was looking at the Internet, but of course that was what I did. Having signed off from my last race with a V-sign, a lot of what was being written on cycling sites and forums didn’t make for comfortable reading. Most nights I was so wound up that I couldn’t sleep.

I’d lie there, staring at the stars, waiting for the world to wake up again and get back on my case. I kept thinking about something Rolf Aldag had said to me in Romandie: “Mark, remember that the pen is mightier than the sword—you can’t win.” That may have been, but I also just wished that they’d stop writing about me and leave me alone. It was a weird paradox; as my results and fortunes had dipped, some of the “new friends” that had appeared from nowhere over the previous couple of years had started to drift away, all of which contributed to my sense of isolation, and yet here I was also yearning to be left in peace.

At the same time, though, I’d never been so grateful for the support of the people who had stayed close to me throughout, especially Max Sciandri and the “Italian family” that had formed around Max and me in Tuscany.

At least the Tour of California itself gave me some respite for a few days. On stage 1 to Sacramento, I resumed normal service to win
the sprint and take the race leader’s yellow jersey. My victory salute had been more, shall we say, traditional, and consequently my press conference was rather more lighthearted than had been the case in Romandie. As I walked into the room, I was handed a first edition of the U.S. version of my book
Boy Racer,
which I proceeded to hold up to the journalists and cameramen, grinning cheesily for the entire duration of the conference.

Losing the jersey on a tougher stage was no real surprise or disappointment. Two days later, though, the curse was back. It was the “queen stage,” the one that the pundits had picked out as the hardest of the race, and after battling in sweltering heat through the mountains of Southern California, I, Mark Renshaw, and nine others chugged in 48 minutes behind the winner, Peter Sagan. We were out of the time limit and out of the race. That was another two days of racing gone.

It was back to Italy and back to the drawing board. My next race was the Tour of Switzerland, a weeklong tour that might be the single least sprinter-friendly race on the calendar. Yet, in a certain sense, it was also perfect preparation for the Tour de France and its mountains. There might be one, two opportunities at most for me to pick up a stage win in Switzerland, but there would be 2,000-meter peaks galore to crawl over in readiness for the Alps and Pyrenees.

One time trial and two lumpy road stages in, we were still awaiting the first real bunch sprint. Stage 3 to Wettingen, though, looked destined to be my day, with only a couple of category 3 climbs in the final 50 km potentially complicating matters—that and the fact that we had Tony Martin leading the race and needing protection. After a few skirmishes among the overall contenders on the last hill, it all
came back together, and I safely sat on Mark Renshaw’s wheel as we headed into the home straight.

With 200 meters to go, Mark was still thrashing down the middle of the road, but guys were now launching their sprints on either side of us. The first and fastest to go was my old teammate Gerald Ciolek. I jumped, took his wheel for no more than 10 or 20 meters, then swung to the right to come around him on the outside. Another German sprinter, Heinrich Haussler, had gone around the left of Ciolek, who was fading in the middle of the road, leaving Haussler and me to contest a straight drag race.

From 150 meters in, I didn’t swerve, I didn’t swing, I didn’t veer—I simply maintained a trajectory slanting gently from the right to the middle of the road. I’ll admit that on one of my best days, I would have taken a straighter line and beaten Haussler comfortably. But relying solely on my speed, as I usually did, was a luxury; nowhere in the rules did it say that I wasn’t also allowed to use tactics to close off lines. Other sprinters had turned this into an art form and been celebrated for it. Now I was just doing the same.

The line I took was dangerous for one reason only: Haussler was sprinting up the middle of the road with his head down, not looking where he was going. As I moved across, ahead of Ciolek and toward Haussler, I expected him to see me coming and also start to edge toward the left-hand side of the road.

Instead, he went straight on, his eyes fixed not on the road ahead of him but on the tarmac under his wheels. With 100 meters to go, when I kicked down with my left leg and my front wheel jagged that way, Haussler seemed to sense that a collision was inevitable, imminent, and he leaned as he braced himself. When it came, the smash
was spectacular, with my front wheel snapping under Haussler’s, my bike collapsing under me, and me falling to my side onto the asphalt like someone testing the springiness of a mattress. This bed, I’m afraid to say, was not very comfortable.

The five riders who plowed into me, including Ciolek, didn’t work too well as pillows, either.

As is always the case after a crash, shock and total bewilderment set in before the pain. I sat surveying what was left of my bike, totally flummoxed for a second. I then took a quick look at the damage: road rash on my right shoulder, right hip, and right knee. Nothing seemed to be broken except my bike. Haussler was sitting in the middle of another pile of rubble a few meters away.

I honestly can’t remember what he said, or whether he even spoke, but it was pretty obvious at the time and from his comments later that he was furious and thought I was to blame. A story went around that I’d spat at him as I lifted myself up and wiped myself down; if I did do that—and, again, I swear I don’t remember—it certainly wasn’t deliberate. I’m only mentioning it here to give the truest possible account of what actually happened. What I do definitely recall is Mark Renshaw having to ride me over the finish line on the back of his bike, like a kid on his mate’s BMX, because mine was a write-off. Maybe because that was an image that made a few people chuckle, maybe because I’d got up and on my way while Haussler was still down, but I think that Haussler and others assumed that I didn’t care whether anyone else was hurt.

It was weird with Heinrich; even before the crash and ever since I’d beaten him by millimeters to win Milan–San Remo in 2009, I’d had the feeling that he was harboring some sort of grudge. We’d
been friends, but then it just flipped, and I don’t really know why. We’d never discussed it, and in 18 months we’d barely even spoken.

If Romandie had been a shitstorm, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was going to be a shit-cyclone. I had been given a 30-second penalty on general classification, a 25-point deduction in that competition, plus a token fine of 200 Swiss francs. The clear message was that I had been at fault; in the public relations stakes, the fact that Haussler and two other riders, Lloyd Mondory and Arnaud Coyot, had had to pull out with their injuries further cemented me in the role of the villain. Haussler would also end up missing the Tour de France with a knee injury that he’d aggravated in the crash.

Like at Romandie, I assumed that it would all have blown over by the next morning. I realized how wrong I was when we got to the start line, again in Wettingen. The flag went down, but nobody could move because there were riders blocking the road on the front row. I asked what was going on and was told that it was Haussler’s team, Cervélo, and maybe one or two riders from Caisse d’Epargne and AG2R—Coyot’s and Mondory’s teams—who were staging some kind of protest. I asked what it was about. “You,” I was told.

Some of the guys causing aggro were ones I’d have expected to be there. The riders who had been consistently the most hostile toward me ever since I’d started winning in 2007 were the grizzled, world-weary journeymen, often sprinters who I felt would always look for and find an excuse for their own lack of success. There were a few of them in there. Mainly, though, it was senior pros from Haussler’s Cervélo team, including Thor Hushovd. Thor, of course, had complained about me before; at the Tour de France in 2009, the pressure
that he put on the race commissaires to disqualify me on stage 14 effectively won him the green jersey.

Thor, Klier, and the others were telling me that they weren’t going to start the race unless I went home. I, in turn, was spelling out to them that I had no intention of pulling out and that their own sprinter, Heinrich, had been at least as culpable for what had happened the previous afternoon. This went on for no more than a minute or so, during which time other riders—Lance Armstrong among them—were getting impatient and wanting to start. Someone, I think Tom Boonen or Fabian Cancellara, finally forced themselves through the “picket line,” and that was that. The race was on, leaving the Cervélo riders standing on the line looking sheepish.

As it turned out, if the Cervélo guys really did want me out of the race, they wouldn’t have to wait very long; having finished that fifth stage 11 minutes off the pace, with my wounds still weeping into bandages and the fabric of my jersey all down my back and the left side of my body, I decided with the team doctor that I wouldn’t start the next day. It was partly a physical thing, partly mental; on the way to Switzerland I’d got the news that my gran, my dad’s mum, had died, and that had been on my mind all week.

Between that, the crash, and everything else dragging me down, I couldn’t summon the motivation to suffer through the pain. And so continued an unblemished record of failing to finish races that now dated back to Milan–San Remo in March.

The following year, when we were riding for the same Great Britain team at the world championships in Copenhagen, I asked Jez Hunt, one of the Cervélo riders lobbying for me to be kicked out that day in Switzerland, why they’d done it.

Jez smiled coyly.

“Go on,” I said. “Why did you do it?”

“It was to fuck with you before the Tour,” he said. “Get in your head. We couldn’t see any other way of beating you.”

Now, suddenly, it all made sense, but September 2011 was too late to find any comfort in Jez’s explanation. This was June 2010. The Tour de France was three weeks away and I was a mess.

Lonely, miserable, out of form, unpopular with journalists, fellow riders, and even fans, after the highs of the previous two years, I’d somehow fallen into a pit of despair.

I had three weeks to crawl out. Three weeks to go from a version of hell to the Champs Elysées, the Elysian Fields, resting place of the virtuous.

c
lunk, clunk, clunk
.

Although I had my head in my hands, I heard the noise just like the TV cameras saw the result. It was reported later that I’d thrown my helmet in a fit of fury, and that it had ricocheted around the inside of the bus, then down the stairs and onto the asphalt where journalists, TV crews, and fans had gathered like wolves around a kill. Alessandro Petacchi had won stage 4 of the 2010 Tour de France to Reims, but as far as they were concerned, I was the story. The truth was that I’d just placed my helmet on a chair; it had fallen off and toppled down the staircase. But the image, I’ll admit, was a neat summation of my year and my Tour de France so far.

I sat with my head hidden under a towel, staring at the carpet through tears. Our team press officer, Kristy, put her arm around me.

“What’s fucking happened? I don’t know what’s happened,” I blubbered.

The emptiness and silence of the bus were amplifying the tumult in my mind, creating a loud, almost visceral echo. Kristy had gone down to pick up my helmet, leaving just me and Bob Stapleton,
who sat speechless at the other end of the bus. As the seconds passed, Bob’s unwillingness or inability to say anything, to offer any words of consolation, began to annoy me even more than what had just happened on the road. With 200 meters to go, when Renshaw had peeled off, I’d risen off my saddle and kicked—one, two, three, four, five revs—and then felt the muscles in my legs lock up. There was probably nothing that Bob could have said to make it better—he certainly couldn’t explain what I couldn’t explain to myself—but his silence riled me.