How Cav Won the Green Jersey (9 page)

Some background is perhaps necessary. Vacansoleil, for those who don’t know, are a Dutch campsite/mobile home-type holiday thing. I’m sure their advertising people have a snappier way of summing up their business than that, and indeed if you were to visit their gloriously blue and yellow website (no, I’m not on commission) you will get the gist straight way. Their main image is this: distant mountains, blue skies, birds a-flutter, kites a-flying, kids a-frolicking and
young,
beautiful couples lounging around in front of their sun-dappled wooden chalets.

But look beneath the surface. All is not what it seems. The beating heart of Hoogerland Holidays is very different. There is, if you listen hard, Lou Reed blaring from a distorting beatbox across the road, where the parents have collapsed on half-deflated lilos in the pool with a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bong and a bargain bucket of fried chicken. This is what I fondly imagine to be the real Vacansoleil experience. Book now to avoid disappointment.

I have reached this balanced conclusion not because I have ever had the great good fortune to experience a Vacansoleil holiday (as I said, I am not yet on commission), but because I have observed at close quarters their raucous rise through cycling’s ranks to the dizzy heights of the Tour de France.

I was certain that they’d try something at the Tour. Part of the reason for my certainty was their liberating lack of a leader. They had no ‘A’ list sprinter (unless you count Romain Feillu, or Borut Božic, which you mustn’t feel obliged to). They had no ‘captain on the road’, and they certainly didn’t dream of being so pompous as to protect a ‘GC rider’. No, they just had a bunch of blokes with a propensity for unfettered aggression. They wound them up, they clad them in campervan-related logos, and they let them go.

Sadly, it didn’t really work. The irrepressibly attack-minded Belgian Thomas De Gendt fell at the first possible opportunity, smashing himself up, and hauling his overdeveloped quads unconvincingly around the rest of France. Borut Božic and Romain Feillu weren’t good enough to mix it with the rest of the sprinters. Wout Poels, who I erroneously tipped for every Gilbert-like uphill finish, had
brought
the wrong pair of legs to the party. He abandoned after hitting the tarmac once too often, and then getting sick.

So it fell to Hoogerland to fall. Sponsors, naturally, only have the best interest of the riders at heart. But I wonder if there’s not a Hoogerland chart hanging on a wall in Vacansoleil’s dark blue and yellow headquarters somewhere uninspiring in Holland, with an arrow of interest in the brand rising stratospherically from the instant that Hoogerland unclips his right foot, wobbles, and then shoots over his handlebars and into a barbed-wire fence, tearing his arse to shreds.

‘Ouch’ doesn’t do it justice. Have you ever slipped while cutting a tomato, and nicked a little slice into your finger? That’s ‘ouch’. This was beyond description, but I should try, for the benefit of those who are too squeamish to look it up on Google Images, as I just have.

The impression it left, to return to the tomato slicing metaphor, was this: Imagine Johnny Hoogerland lying face down on the kitchen counter. You rip open his shorts to reveal his left thigh and buttock (bear with me, I’m just illustrating a point). You sharpen the knife, and then you draw at least ten deep slices across his flesh. But your devilish work is not yet quite complete, and so you take a rolling pin and smack him on the head, the shoulder, the elbow, and probably just for good measure, the arse. Then he jumps down from your kitchen work surface, and hops onto a bike. After all, there’s a race on.

I’m exaggerating. Actually, no I’m not. It was worse than that.

Hours later, Johnny, swabbed, bandaged, perhaps in a heightened state of pain relief (I hope for his sake he was), and clad in his blood-drop red polka-dot jersey, hobbled over to say his piece to my colleague from a rival network.

Normally I would have had an unseemly fight with them about this act of rank-pulling. Especially with this particular Italian colleague who sported hair oil, reflective shades and an unencumbered ability to kiss ladies on both cheeks without looking flustered, stopping inappropriately at just one kiss, going for an unwanted third, or bumping noses on the exit manoeuvre. Yes, he was that good. The Silvio Berlusconi of the Mixed Zone, turning the simplest post-race interview into a potential Bunga Bunga party. He wore a gold bracelet. He was the continental’s continental TV reporter, and needed a smack, frankly (which Matt Rendell offered to provide a few days later, I forget why).

But on this occasion, I am reluctant to confess, he got it right. He had a bit of kit with him, attached to the front of his camera, which could play back footage to the interviewee. And so it was that Johnny Hoogerland, with the cameras rolling live on his reaction, watched back the moment that had nearly ended his career, and very possibly his life.

Hoogerland was visibly horrified. I have no doubt that it shocked him to see the violence of the incident. He looked genuinely scared for the rider he saw tumbling through the air like a rag doll. It must have been hard to believe that he was looking at himself. But when he spoke, he was calm, dignified, and resisted calls for punishment. He let us play the role of lynch mob on his behalf. We readily obliged.

That evening, at our hotel in Aurillac, a France Télévisions car, identical to the one that had done the damage, pulled up. They were staying in the same place!

We scowled at each of their team over breakfast the next day, working out which one we were going to dob in. Was it the pasty youth in the crumpled polo shirt or the brunette with the shades, who took too long spreading the butter? Was it the overly cheerful chubby bloke in the cheap supermarket jeans and the Greenpeace T-shirt who set everyone’s teeth on edge by whistling Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’? It was none of them. It was, in fact, the wrong car. The actual vehicle, complete with the actual culprit, had been successfully spirited away. They disappeared from the race, and were never heard of again.

I will never look at those France Télévisions Citroëns in the same light. They have always been driven recklessly. This year’s Tour, despite the appalling incident with Flecha and Hoogerland, featured a definite, and marked return to the bad old (good old) days of driving at 100 kph down the wrong side of a road. Recent Tours had seen this desperately dangerous practice phased out by the police. But for some reason, this year, it returned, and the TV Citroëns led the
charge,
in particular from Bourg d’Oisans to Grenoble on the penultimate transfer. A thirty-mile stretch of occasional dual carriageway turned into a massive game of chicken with oncoming caravans and the sudden appearance of central reservations. My palms grow sweaty at the memory of that awful drive. Sitting in stationary traffic, you would suddenly become aware of blue flashing lights in your wing-mirror. Three or four police cars would come charging down the (almost empty) wrong side of the road. The trick was to pull out and slipstream them. It wasn’t particularly legal. But it got you to your final destination fast, which, after three weeks on the road, was pretty much all that mattered to any of us.

The French TV cars, needless to say were the most fearless. They instinctively took their place at the front of the convoy, just behind the police vehicles, as a matter of national pride. I once had the temerity to position myself at the sharp end of the race in a spot that was rightfully theirs. I was nearly deliberately rammed. It was like being a Saunier Duval rider trying to mix it with Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Big Blue Train. Not a good idea.

We waged war on them last summer, just as they seemed intent on waging war with the rest of the world. On the descent of the Plateau de Beille, stuck in an immobile snake of traffic, I opted to pull on my running shoes and see if I could get to the bottom of the mountain quicker than Woody and Liam in the Espace. Most of the time, I was running past stationary cars. But sometimes the line of traffic would move, and cars would overtake me slowly. On one such an occasion, I was passed by a France Télévisions Citroën, whose driver saw fit to spray me, quite deliberately, with windscreen wiper fluid. Already running on frayed nerves, I was instantly incensed. But the traffic came shuddering to a halt round the next
corner,
and at once I was granted the opportunity to make my feelings felt. I caught up with the offending vehicle.

There were four lads in the car, in their early twenties. They looked like production juniors. I tapped on the window. They wound it down. With exaggerated calmness, but with clunky French I asked them whether or not they would agree that France Télévisions had had an excellent Tour behind the wheel, when taken as a whole, and that their minor act of hooliganism just added a slight blemish to the impression of considerate driving which had so typified their corporate approach.

I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I asked them. They looked sheepish enough. I asked them if they wouldn’t mind me noting down their registration. They looked worried. I told them that I would take the matter further the next day. They looked genuinely petrified. Or I imagined that they did. But on reflection, perhaps they were just upset at the sight of my puffy red face dripping detergent and runner’s snot from the end of my imperious nose onto their upholstery.

I withdrew my righteous head, and felt as if I had planted a blue and yellow Vacansoleil flag on the moral high ground of the Plateau de Beille.

I’d done it for Johnny. We’d all done it for Johnny.

The day of his slicing, he stood on the podium and wept, as much in pain as in shock. I think the pride would have come later, if it came at all. That night he had thirty-three stitches to his wounds. But still he rode on. He carried the claret-spattered polka-dot jersey on his shoulders through the next two stages, then lost it, only to regain it again for a further three days. Sometimes he would become detached, suffering on his own at the back of the bunch. But mostly he held his
own.
Slowly he healed, and as Paris neared, he even featured in the occasional attack.

I wonder to this day if he realises the effect he had on people all across the world, watching the race. Within days an enterprising American website was knocking out T-shirts that declared ‘Welcome to Hoogerland! Population: Heroes.’

I bought one.

* * *

Hoogerland’s story summed it all up. His bravery told us what we all longed to hear about the courage of the riders. It rose above the noise of the race, and it drowned out the dopers, it crowded out the also-rans. The battle for the podium places, at times seemed second best. Yes, even the winner.

That isn’t to say that Evans’ victory won’t be remembered. It was a victory rightfully greeted with joy by Mike Tomalaris and his Australian colleagues, who must occasionally have succumbed to the feeling that they were broadcasting only to drunks and insomniacs still awake at 3 a.m. in Canberra.

The winner was warmly applauded by most of the peloton. Despite his quirks and tics and occasional threats to decapitate journalists who threaten to touch his little toy dog, Evans is respected and liked; a man who has squeezed every drop of talent out of his bony frame. His valour on the climb to the Galibier won him the Tour. In some ways, it would have been wrong had he won the stage itself. That would have been uncharacteristic. Evans wins by limiting losses, by boundless grit and by quick thinking. A man at the limit of himself.

If only the same could have been said of Andy Schleck, whose frailties seemed to have turned in on him. They are attacking him from within. The ill-considered complaints about descending may have lost him PR points, which his
hollow-sounding
claim that the fifty-seven second advantage he held over Evans would be defendable in the time trial did little to recapture. In the end, I stood talking to him in Paris, worried that I might accidentally let slip his nickname, Andy Schleckond.

‘I’m very proud to have finished second in the Tour de France.’

I looked quizzically at him. He should be furious to finish second, especially in a year when Contador’s challenge went AWOL. He should have been enraged that he had squandered such obvious talent once again. He is a nice man, and has never been anything other than polite in his dealings with us. But that’s not the point, is it? He is the most fluent, most obviously talented climber on the radar. Or at least, he should be.

Maybe he will win it one day. But maybe he simply won’t. Either way it was Evans who took the 2011 win, his dimpled chin wobbling at the enormity of it all.

* * *

And Cavendish?

He roared up the Champs-Elysées. He made it three wins in three years in Paris. But this time, he did it in the green jersey that had so far eluded him.

I was waiting for him at the interview zone, already poised. I knew he’d win.

After the towelling and talking and smiling, he stepped away. I thanked him, shook his hand one last time. For the twentieth time after a Tour de France stage win.

A hurricane of noise was blowing in through the flaps of a white marquee designed to hide the riders from the crowds gathered out on the cobbles, waiting for the podium presentations to begin.