How Cav Won the Green Jersey (2 page)

O canvas awning of blood red! O humble truck, workhorse of the French motorway network! What dormant longing your sudden presence quickens on this damp evening dockside!
Mon semblable, mon frère!

I was quoting Baudelaire to myself. I was feeling pompous. I was off to cover the Tour de France. I think I should be forgiven.

The 2011 race looked great on paper. At least that’s the impression it made as I gazed at its curves and contours. They lurched and jumped across the folded creases of the official Tour map, spread flat against the plastic table top of the ferry’s bistro. The channel was in full swell.

The features swayed in and out of vision; those teasing uphill finishes, and the prospect of a well-proportioned wind in the north-west to blow holes in the
race.
Then there was the surprising scale and dangerous potential of the mountains of the Massif Central, before the Tour would throw itself at the mercy of the Plateau de Beille, the Galibier (twice!), Alpe d’Huez, and then a final time trial to seal everybody’s fates.

And after that, Paris, perhaps with Cavendish in green? That seemed a long way off. Water to be crossed.

With a black marker pen, I ringed the stages I believed he could win. There were seven of them. Then I pushed the map to one side and wolfed down a ferry meal, made palatable only because of the wine decanted from a series of plastic mini-bottles. I found my cabin in the windowless bowels of the ferry, took off my shoes, dropped onto the bunk and fell sound asleep.

* * *

It was strange how his story unfolded over the summer. Mark Cavendish, I have always understood, feels closest to those targets that are, well, closest to him. There is a certain remorseless pragmatism to his assembly line of honours. For a long time, I had known only his thirst for stage wins. It was absorbing to watch the growing dominance of the outstanding HTC team that had been assembled around him: their one stated aim being to shepherd the purest, most explosive sprinter in the history of the sport to his launch point. And time and time and time and time again, he had repaid their faith.

The bunch sprint had become his signature. The Tour de France, his parchment. Or if that sounds too precious, his spread sheet, for he understood well the fiscal relationship between winning and reward, between celebrating and sponsorship.

But what of his relationship with the green jersey? That was less clear-cut. He had ridden recent Tours with self-evident irritation in the face of an evolving Thor Hushovd, who had the presence of mind to throw his hands up in defeat when it came to outsprinting Cavendish, and decided to reset his targets by attacking the sorts of intermediate sprints where riders who looked only for stage wins dared not tread their pedals. Hushovd had become a marauding, opportunistic, classy attacker. Behind him, in 2010, Alessandro Petacchi, another grisly veteran, slipstreamed his way into green. And Cavendish, wisely, offered only meagre opposition. The green jersey, we read into his apparent ambivalence, was some sort of weird, and somewhat arbitrary, consolation prize for sprinters, who were one pedal turn away from obsolescence. The fastest man had no need for such fool’s gold.

But he could only convince us, or indeed himself, of his indifference for so long. In 2011 the points competition was reconfigured, reducing the number of intermediate sprints to just one, while loading more points onto them as an incentive. It had been carried out with Cavendish in mind. It was, I was given to understand, a mark of respect from the race itself. Christian Prudhomme confirmed as much when, to my great surprise, he told me, ‘Mark Cavendish had been the starting point in our considerations. To imagine a rider of his exceptional talent going through his career without ever once winning the green jersey – that would have been unthinkable.’ At least, I think that’s what he said. He was speaking to me in French, as was his wont. So he might have been talking about lawn maintenance or home baking.

There was also the question of legacy. Cavendish knew very well his place in the developing history of the sport. After fifteen stage wins, and with another
clutch
on the way, there was a sense that new targets should be set, the green jersey being the next in line. And so it was that he found himself being asked the question again.

In retrospect, that pre-Tour press conference had been very revealing. We’d all made our way to the downstairs restaurant area of the Bar Italia in Soho, which Cavendish now chooses on an annual basis for his pre-Tour de France press day, in homage to his breakthrough successes on the Giro.

I arrived at exactly the appointed time, imagining that it would be easy to grab a seat at the last minute. I was wrong. The attendance was big. Bigger, by far, than in previous years. I had to push my way back through the seated ranks, nodding in surprise as I noted how many general (and very senior) sports journalists had shown up. It was packed. The PA system, such as it was, seemed woefully inadequate. When Cavendish began to speak we struggled to hear him, his quiet voice dying into the cluster of Dictaphones on the table in front of him.

With the press conference underway, he seemed to be conducting a guided tour of his disparate personality traits. One by one, he dished them out. And we ticked them off. There was the bullishness, the bratishness, the short shrift. There was the self-effacing charm, the humility, the respect, and the humour.

And then there was the surprising thoughtfulness. He took so long thinking about his answer to one particularly innocuous question from a Norwegian journalist that I genuinely thought he’d slipped into some kind of state of deep meditative trance. His gaze wasn’t so much ‘faraway’ as utterly absent. He appeared to be mouthing his response, preparing it for broadcast, seeing how it felt on the tongue, before allowing it to pass into record. Fascinated, I craned forward to catch his extremely well-prepared words.

‘No. Not really,’ he said, finally.

We all scribbled down his answer, unable to remember what the question had been.

At one point, he stopped abruptly, mid-answer. He appeared to be looking over the tops of all our heads at something behind us.

‘Look, it’s me.’

We craned our necks around. On the back wall of the restaurant hung a plasma TV. The screen was filled with a two-dimensional, digital Mark Cavendish lounging across a television studio couch on some pre-recorded daytime show.

‘He’s good, he is.’ Cavendish said of himself. He was goofing around now. And so we laughed along with him.

It had been a very Mark Cavendish affair.

* * *

On arrival at my final destination, Liam and Woody, my colleagues of numerous Tours, swung by to pick me up from the railway station. I greeted my old friends with the awkward palm-slapping shoulder-hug thing that we British blokes tend to use in lieu of any natural ability to express ourselves. I rounded on them for being late (‘Don’t you know who I am?), flung my bag in the boot (the same red and black bag I had used for the last four Tours, so still a relative novelty on board our car) and climbed in to my usual seat in the rear, my hand reaching unconsciously but with infinite precision to the seat belt. It was telling how the hand knew exactly where to find the belt.

The job got underway in earnest with the filming of the Riders’ Presentation. We stopped to drink a coffee en route to the absurd medieval theme park that had paid the Tour a vast sum of money to host the ceremonials. We took
our
seats at a Routiers café in the middle of a network of slip roads and dual carriageways, and settled down to our first act of menu perusal of the 2011 Tour. Moules-frites, and glaces artisanales. There, we were up and running.

Then, to my great delight, the top button on Liam’s trousers pinged off. It was as funny as anything I have ever seen. For the rest of the day, he had to operate the camera with one hand and keep his trousers up with the other. One set of slacks down into a three-week Tour, he was in trouble. We took a great deal of pleasure in this.

Although Liam’s primary concern was to replace his useless trousers, our first proper target before the start of the race was to sit down with Bradley Wiggins and get his thoughts on digital video tape. Big things were expected of him. He’d ridden all season as if freed from the arduous, if self-inflicted, pressures of the previous campaign. A few weeks previously Wiggins had won the 2011 Dauphiné, a prestigious race in its own right, and a significant form guide for the
tour,
as the Queens Club is to Wimbledon. He had beaten Cadel Evans into second place. His preparation had been exceptional, his ambitions were privately high, but his public utterances, muted. After the hyperbole of Team Sky’s launch and his 2010 capitulation, he wisely chose the course of expectation management.

‘You should never forget that I’m a track rider, really, who can time trial a bit. Or a time triallist who can climb a little. You won’t seem me attacking in the mountains. That’s not going to happen.’ A shy grin, but earnest eyes. I twiddled my biro and listened. How well riders talk about their sport. Is it simply a result of the solitary hours in the saddle? Is philosophy at one remove from chamois cream?

We sat opposite one another, in a corridor next to the huge, busy Salle de Presse. Wiggins talking so fluently, that I could hardly get the question out before he jumped in with his answer, typically a fraction before the question was finished.

I was very aware that ITV’s long-serving Producer/Director, Steve Docherty, was sitting behind me, rather disconcertingly, as I conducted the interview. It was a rare public appearance for a man who spends every July with his hands welded to the control panel inside a TV truck. This was probably because the vehicle, which was to be his home for the rest of the month, hadn’t yet been fully booted up and plugged in, so he was effectively officeless and had nowhere else to sit. But equally, I suspect he just wanted to see for himself what shape Wiggins was in. Literally. Wiggins was thin, even more so than usual, if that was possible.

As soon as the interview was finished, Steve jumped up very suddenly from behind me and ambushed Wiggins.

‘How much do you weigh then?’ He growled, almost accusingly, without introducing himself. I thought about butting in to make the introductions (just the basics, really: ‘Brad, this is Steve. Steve this is Brad’) but already the conversation had moved on.

‘Well, I’m six kilos lighter than I was at the start in 2009.’ Wiggins looked understandably disarmed by Steve’s tall frame standing inches from him, and demanding answers. It can be an intimidating sight, and one that I have had cause to be very familiar with over the years.

‘Bloody hell. Six kilos?’ I could see him calculating virtual odds in his bookmaker’s brain. ‘Right ho. Well, good luck.’ And with that Steve turned away. So too did Bradley Wiggins. They went their separate ways, leaving me on my own scratching my metaphorical head at the strangeness of the encounter. It was the first time in nearly a decade covering the Tour that I’d ever seen Steve actually talking to an actual rider.

I ran after Wiggins, and gave him a copy of my book,
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
, which had just been published. He looked suitably nonplussed. He had approached France with his targets intact, but he would leave with an unread paperback and his collarbone in bits.

* * *

I had also given Mark Cavendish a copy, too, back at that faltering press conference in Soho. The book contained a reasonably (and perhaps riskily) frank unpicking of the occasional difficulty of working with Cavendish’s unpredictable moods. I figured that, cycling being a fairly narrow gene pool, it was inevitable he would get wind of what I had written. So, in an attempt to head off his reaction at the pass, I decided to pre-empt any issues by confronting them directly.

‘Mark, you know I’ve written a book? Can I give you a copy?’ I slid the offending article across the table in his direction.

‘Oh yeah! I’ve heard about this. I want to read this.’ He picked it up and started to read the quotes on the back. I think I saw him smile at the point where he got to ‘evidently he was clueless’, the quote that David Millar had provided.