How Cav Won the Green Jersey

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Twitter Dedications

Title Page

How Cav Won the Green Jersey

Copyright

About the Book

This is not a 100,000-word, minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow account of the 2011 Tour de France.

This is not the story of Cadel Evans.

This is not the story of Alberto Contador, Andy Schleck, or Bradley Wiggins.

And it’s not even the story of Mark Cavendish.

(Although he is in it quite a lot.)

This is the story of the lesser-known heroes; the Johnny Hoogerlands, the Thomas Voecklers, the hitchhikers, the maniac press drivers, Norbert Dentressangle and the greatest ever Tour de France*.

I was there. And this is what I saw. That is all.

In this 20,000-word digital short, ITV’s Ned Boulting, author of
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
, takes an honest and idiosyncratic look at the unforgettable 2011 Tour de France, when Mark Cavendish won the Green Jersey.

*probably

About the Author

Ned Boulting started his broadcasting career at Sky in 1997, working as a reporter alongside Jeff Stelling on the now legendary show Soccer Saturday. In 2006 he was given the Royal Television Society’s Sports Reporter of the Year Award. He has presented three Tours of Britain for ITV, as well as the inaugural Tour Series, and contributed features and live reports on eight Tours de France. He is the author of the much-loved
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
.

Twitter Dedications

Thanks to all those who entered the Twitter signing competition to have your dedications included in the ebook. Here they are:

Amy O’Halloran / @amyling

For all the riders. Especially those with gigantic thighs.

Iain Smith / @smit1872

To next yrs book. How Wiggo & Cav won yellow & green in TDF 2012 & made Ned more cash! #fingerscrossed #WATP #GoWiggo #mod #GoCav

Vicky Higham / @higgumsmythe

To Cav&Wiggo saw u on podium in Madrid. In Paris 4 TdF final stage, 2012 here’s to a @TeamSky yellow&green in July #keepthefaith

Kai Muxlow / @kaimux73

For Kai and all the other everyday cyclists for whom Highgate Hill is the Alpe d’Huez.

Andrew Smith / @andyspex

To Hannah. Thanks for putting up with the books and still wanting to marry me.

Greythorne / @greythorne

I would like to thank Ned for introducing me to Paul Sherwen’s oak-panelled Trouser Gallery.

Phil Cramp / @phil_cramp

For the bike riders who always dreamed the dream, and those who brought that dream to life.

Mark Silcox / @msilcox

To everyone who cycles – keep riding and smiling!

Joe McTaggart / @joemctag

To Joey Halloran and Tom Turner who really got me into cycling in the first place :)

Michael Brader / @mike_brader

To everyone who rode clean. Chapeau.

Gareth / @designbyjack

To Gareth’s wife Jo (@mrsdesignbyjack), for constantly putting up with his two wheel obsession.

Chris Ethchingham / @theboyetch

To Charlotte, Georgie & Poppy as they have to put up with cycling on TV & dominating our lives every July.

Andy Dawson / @sonylite

To Mark and Phil for getting me into this cycling malarkey and Rosa who has to deal with/put up with my obsession! Love you all.

Stevie Dexter / @steviedexter

To Steve Wynn, as inspirational as he is fast at replying to Tweets. Keep the rubber side down!
http://bit.ly/AqIFgz

Josh Owen Morris / @joshowenmorris

I like riding bikes and reading books when I’m not talking on the radio or releasing records, so thanks everyone.

Jeff Marshall / @jeffmarshall

To Jeff and all the Vita cycles team

Holly Blades / @lifeofholly

To Matt (@realstephens), who makes me want to actually start riding a bike just to spend more time with him. Love you. Holly x

MARK CAVENDISH WAS UNDER
pressure, as I had witnessed a couple of weeks before I left for France. There was nothing new in this. After all, he always was. But it was with some irritation that he challenged a roomful of journalists.

‘Who won the last three green jerseys? Don’t think about it. Just tell me.’

There had been an uncomfortable shuffling noise. It reminded me of those awful moments in echoing classrooms at school when it becomes apparent that absolutely no one has the answer. I looked at my notepad and pretended to be deep in
thought.
In fact, I was drawing a picture of a swordfish piercing a football, for some reason.

Silhouetted against the bright Soho Street beyond the window behind him, Mark Cavendish sat forward in his chair, injecting a little urgency into his enquiry. For years, he’d been besieged by hapless hacks asking him if he was frustrated never to have won the green jersey.

‘See?’ He leant towards the cluster of microphones, when it became obvious that no one could answer him straight away. ‘You can’t remember, can you? That’s the point.’

As points go, it was quite sharp.

* * *

I have a confession to make. Covering the Tour, I run and I eat. The running is fine, nothing more than a protracted mid-life crisis. But the eating is more of an issue. Philippe and Odette, who cater extravagantly for the ITV crew, have an on-going love affair with butter and olive oil. Because of their exquisite cooking, and because I run myself most days into a state of insatiable hunger, I tend to overeat at lunchtime. It’s no longer something I can control.

There are consequences. Being forty-two years old, and consequently a bit crapper than I was at the age of forty-one, I have a propensity to fall asleep. When it’s 30 degrees in the shade, and there’s cycling on the telly, I don’t just
tend
to fall asleep, I
always
fall asleep. Dozing off after a full-fat French lunch is as inevitable as a Michael Rasmussen time trial crash. I’m not the only one to succumb, I hasten to add. Chris Boardman, a year my senior, has been known to drift off, his chin heading south with his masterful head supported by the palm of his left
hand.
But, being a freak of nature, he is capable of maintaining full 360 degrees sensory perception even while he’s dreaming of scuba diving in the Mersey, setting new hour records, selling more bikes, or whatever it is that he dreams of nowadays. That means it’s very difficult to get a clandestine snap of him snoring. Just as you’re framing up your camera phone, one eye will snap open. ‘Oi!’

On most days, on most Tours, I fashion for myself a restorative ten-minute window in which to nod off. The morning’s scripts have been written, the voiceover sent back to London, and all that remains for the working day is to watch the race and mop up the interviews afterwards. Normally the peloton is something like seventy-three kilometres out from the finish line, holding the breakaway at 4’26’. Or they are still rumbling along the valley floor, thirty-two kilometres from the foot of the final climb of the day. This is just the perfect time for a power nap, drifting off while Paul talks about Huguenot castles and Phil
chunters
along with lines like ‘Leopard Trek then, tapping out a rhythm. There’s Big Jens Voigt…’

I mention this by way of admitting that not everything about the Tour de France is always thrilling. Except 2011. Last summer, I remember falling asleep only once. In Montpellier. For about five minutes.

The race was that good.

How do you calibrate Tours? How, empirically, do you separate the good from the great? The humdrum from the heroic? By what measure can we determine the place each annual chapter will occupy in the century-long heritage of the Tour de France?

The statistics alone will only tell you a fraction of the story. Average speeds on the 2011 Tour, in this increasingly clean era, were nothing to write home about. The lead changed hands an unremarkable number of times. The overall winner himself, Cadel Evans, failed either to win a mountain stage or a time trial. He defended his way to the win. Brilliantly, arguably, but demonstrably short of panache.

So why are we all left with the memory of an immense race?

Here are a few reasons: Jérémy Roy, Thomas Voeckler, Thor Hushovd, Geraint Thomas, Pierre Rolland, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Mark Cavendish, Philippe Gilbert, Juan Antonio Flecha, Johnny Hoogerland. Stick a pin in the list of names and draw out a hero.

* * *

Even my convoluted journey to the start line in the Vendée felt epic. It wasn’t, of course, but to me these days, any car journey of over 200 miles feels epic. Again, I
suspect
this may have something to do with being forty-two. A journey feels especially awe-inspiring if it involves driving onto a boat.

My trip would start by driving from my home in London down to Plymouth, where I would catch the overnight ferry to Roscoff. Then I would pass by my friend Judi’s campsite near Morlaix, in Brittany, where I would disconnect the battery and leave the car to go gradually rusty under a beech tree in the corner of a field (I planned to return a month later to start a camping holiday with my family). Having dropped off the motor, I then needed to catch a series of progressively smaller and sillier district trains, till Woody and Liam would pick me up from a railway station at a location near somewhere I’d never heard of in the west of France. That was the plan, at least.

What a pilgrimage! I packed a book to read.

I didn’t have to wait long, either, for my first sniff of Tour de Franceness. Amid the humming engines and seagulls of Plymouth docks, a flash of red, and the familiar curves of their deliciously eighties’ logo. The cycling bit of my heart skipped a beat. It was a truck, yes, but so much more than that. It was a Norbert Dentressangle lorry. Contracted by the Tour to carry out its daily grind, these beasts are the oily soul of the race. And as such they are dear.