How I Won the Yellow Jumper Page 10

  A thick, rain-heavy thunder cloud rumbled overhead as the miserable man slid past me with a face that reflected its greyness. I noticed a teenager in a huge yellow rain-poncho lurch forward and try to swipe his water bottle. He failed, and McEwen barely noticed. The kid wasn’t alone. A couple of yards to his right, as McEwen sped past, an accomplice in a brightly decorated blue poncho also tried his luck. He was more precise and his grip on the precious plastic flask was more robust. McEwen felt the tug on his frame. Stopping abruptly, he leant over the frame of his bike and lurched towards the offender, snatching the bottle back from the Artful Dodger, who looked suitably humbled. McEwen rounded on him, castigating him in fluent French, before remounting, and, after a couple of pedal turns, noticing that his bottle cage was bent, dismounting again, and unleashing a tirade of Flemish, uncertain clearly as to the provenance of his assailant, before finally settling on the discourse-ending ‘Fucking idiot!’

  I applauded him inwardly, from the comfort of my raincoat, which had been so rained on that the following morning I threw it in a bin outside the Gothic wonder of Amiens cathedral.

  David Millar doesn’t tend to throw things. But he does allow words to tumble out. Mercifully, now that he’s reached his mid-thirties, he’s started to grow out of the post-teenage phase he indulged in, in which every post-ride analysis was peppered with US-based teenisms. ‘Awesome ride, but I’m thinking, like, dude – you’re well maxed out here. Freaky.’ That was pretty standard fare in 2003.

  So too was a bronchitic cough that used to preface each and every interview with him by the side of the road after a stage. Collapsed in the footwell of his team bus, or bent double by the barriers just past the finish line, he would gesture to us on our arrival that he needed a second or two to compose himself, before rattling out the most terrifyingly varied sequence of rasping coughs, spitting two or three times, fake vomiting, retching and then turning towards us with eyes on stalks in anticipation of the question to come. We renamed his team ‘Coughidis’. We were funny like that.

  Spluttering or not spluttering, Millar was in constant demand in those days. Young, gifted and articulate, he was sought after not just by us, who claimed him as the only Brit on the race back then, but by the Americans, too, as well as a host of other nations queuing up for a word. He was often a highly prized guest on the ‘Velo Club’, a live post-race show on France Télévisions, broadcast in front of an enthusiastic audience from a huge collapsible studio erected near the finish line each day. His opinion, even then, was worth hearing.

  These days, for right or wrong, David Millar is the philosopher king of the peloton. The bitter experiences behind him have left their mark, no doubt about it. But they have also knocked the petulance out of him, and made him into a thoughtful, patient correspondent. Few riders during the Tour de France will sit with me and discuss exact types of EPO, its availability, detectibility and effectiveness. Millar will.

  I think back to the moment in 2004 when he took the first tentative steps towards rehabilitation. He had been summoned by magisterial order to the court rooms in Nanterre, in the west of Paris, where an investigation into his case had begun. It was two days before the start of the Tour. Millar would be playing no part. He had confessed to taking EPO and was about to begin a two-year suspension.

  We had set our alarm clocks early and driven down from Liège to be there. Arriving just after the session had begun, we set up shop outside the main entrance to the courtroom, and waited. Five hours later, we were still waiting for Millar to emerge. I decided to take matters into my own hands and went inside the building. Quickly enough I established the exact location of the room in which his hearing was taking place. It was all happening behind an anonymous door leading onto a wide, empty corridor on the fourth floor of a tall building. Every now and again, smartly dressed state functionaries would come and go from room to room. But otherwise I had the corridor to myself. There was a wooden bench outside the magistrate’s office. I sat down, and within minutes I was asleep.

  Some time later, I awoke. The door had opened, Millar and his lawyer were already halfway to the lift. In the seconds before I understood where I was and what was happening, I caught sight of Millar, unfamiliar and curiously young-looking in a suit, glancing back at me, white-faced. I caught him up as he was getting in the lift to go down. His lawyer held the doors open for me. We travelled down the four floors together in silence. Then, as the doors opened, Millar turned smartly on his heels and exited through a pre-arranged back door. His lawyer went outside to hold an impromptu press briefing, sparking panic in Woody, who was still a hundred metres away, on his way back from buying some sandwiches for lunch.

  Millar’s two years in the wilderness cost him his best years. They almost undid him. Yet his honesty has dragged him through to the other side much the better for it. He’s become the archetype of what TV types cynically call ‘good value’. Millar ‘on doping’. Millar ‘on Armstrong’. Millar ‘on time-trialling’. Millar ‘on cheese/Pink Floyd/haemorrhoids’.

  The last time I talked to him at any length, he was hobbling across the restaurant terrace of a Novotel somewhere near the Alps. Mechanical problems early on that day had meant he’d been dropped by the race, and had ridden solo for 160 kilometres just to avoid elimination. He had finished stone last.

  France Télévisions had a new trick up their sleeves. Every evening, back at the riders’ hotel, they would conduct a long interview with the ‘lanterne rouge’ of the day, before bestowing upon the unfortunate rider a red jersey to symbolise his last place in the race. The riders were expected to find it all riotously funny.

  We too were waiting for Millar that evening. From the far side of the terrace we watched on as the preening French reporter conducted his surely-far-too-long interview. He then rounded things off by commandeering two of the Novotel’s receptionists to march out in front of the camera to present Millar with his new red jersey before forcing him to pose podium-style with a girl on either cheek. It was excruciating.

  Yet by the time Millar hobbled over to where we had set up, he had not only shifted gear but language too, ditching his fluent French for his languid English. We sat down for ten minutes with him, with the camera rolling, during which time he gave us as memorable an account of the suffering of a Tour rider as I have ever heard.

  Millar’s travails bookended my first Tour. From his near miss in the Paris Prologue, to a filthy wet time-trial victory in Nantes, his failure and success framed the scales of emotion that the race could elicit. I was impressed. So much greater, then, was my disappointment when I learnt of his doping. It abruptly called into question the veracity of all that I had witnessed. For some time I was left uncertain of what my attitude should be towards David Millar. Instinctively I liked him, yet there was that absolutist voice in my head, which always nagged, ‘Doper!’ But Millar himself has offered up over recent years such a convincing, clean version of himself that it is hard, even for his most obdurate critics, not to feel a little warmth towards his gung-ho approach, and self-awareness. Judgements harden eventually. His solo attack on Stage 1 of the 2007 Tour from London to Canterbury when he stayed away through colossal crowds in Kent was typical of the instinctive, passionate rider he was becoming. ‘Spine tingling’, was how he described that particular suicidal breakaway. It was.

  But it wasn’t until Stage 6 of the 2009 Tour into Barcelona that I realised fully what cycling now meant for him. Part of a breakaway, which seemed doomed to be caught, Millar had decided to attack with twenty-eight kilometres remaining. With ten kilometres to race, it looked fleetingly like he might have cracked them. In fact, he held the race at bay right up until the flamme rouge, and only then was he engulfed. Afterwards I was delighted to hear him tell of his pride and pleasure in the ride, rather than his disappointment.

  ‘Riding into Barcelona, with a million people on the streets. Wow. It was special.’

  Experts at the game, then, Millar and McEwen. They are both men with suffici
ent savvy to remain in firm control of their media images. But they are also men with enough character to warm to the task, and to bring the bike race into people’s front rooms, for which I am forever grateful to both of them. It makes my job a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

  And perhaps, thirty years from now, someone will think back to childhood summer evenings, and Phil Liggett calling home Millar and McEwen.

  GLENN

  I was standing by the side of the pitch in Lyon. The Stade Gerland, the strangely moulded concrete and white-rendered home of Olympique Lyonnais, was slowly filling with fans. The evening had just started to turn chilly after a day spent in spring sunshine checking out Lyon. We’d had lunch in the Brasserie Georges, the converted railway station, which is now a noisy restaurant. A few hours before kick-off, I’d had a perfect coffee outside, in the company of Peter Drury. We’d watched on as songbirds, heading north again from Africa, stopped off to try and snatch biscuits from sports reporters’ tables. It had been a fine day, in a fine city. I was warmly anticipating watching two good football teams tear into each other. It was the quarter-final of the Champions League. It was also 14 April 2005.

  I became aware that my phone was buzzing. I looked down and saw that I’d missed a call. It was from Steve Doherty. His flashing name on the screen puzzled me. I couldn’t imagine what could possibly prompt him to call me at such a time. I normally wouldn’t hear from him until much closer to the Tour. So I rang him straight back.

  He picked up after one ring. ‘I’ve got some very bad news. Glenn Wilkinson is dead.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Steve elaborated.

  ‘He died at home. His funeral is next week. Just to let you know.’

  I stared across the pitch. PSV Eindhoven players were warming up close to me. Guus Hiddink was standing sentinel, watching his charges snapping the ball around in tight groups. Dew was settling on the grass, picked out by the xenon-white wash of the floodlights. The evening was gearing up for its drama.

  Glenn was a cameraman who had worked on my first two Tours, and many, many more before that. He had been a big presence on the production team. And he had just died.

  There is no appropriate place to hear such things. News like this forces itself on you, cramming a certain time and place with meaning it cannot hold.

  The Tour had taken me here before. Two summers previously, I had visited the Stade Gerland. It had been on my birthday, 11 July 2003. Alessandro Petacchi had stormed to his fourth stage win of the centenary Tour on a long, wide avenue right outside the stadium. After the podium ceremonials, Glenn and I made our way to the interview zone. Slightly dreading another meeting with the big Italian and his tendency to deadpan his way in flat-noted Italian through interviews, and tiring of his workmanlike success, we cursed him under our breath. Besides, the Tour was a week old and we were getting irritable. We waited in the heat for our allotted thirty seconds with the big man, me with the microphone poised, Glenn with his camera slung over his back like a rocket launcher in a Rambo film.

  That was the day I discovered that getting bored with Glenn Wilkinson was much better than getting bored without Glenn Wilkinson.

  He was a restless presence with an eye for mischief. For no good reason he started experimenting with pronouncing names of Spanish and Italian riders in a thick and implausible Geordie accent. Marry-Owe Chippowe Lee-Nee. Jo-Sabre Bell-Ockie. Alice-Androwe Pertackie. It became a feature of the rest of that Tour, and the next one. Indefensibly childish, wickedly funny, and typical of Glenn. The joke has stuck, and has broadened out these days to include Wan Antowniowe Fletcher.

  On my second Tour, Glenn had invested in a set of comedy teeth. Not in itself a comic triumph. But the thing is, they were seriously convincing teeth, crooked, yellowed and gnarled. He always kept them stuffed in his pocket for easy access. He’d pop them in at a second’s notice. Instantly, he’d assume the vacant posh smile of Harry Enfield’s ‘Tim-Nice-but-Dim’ character. In this guise, he would introduce himself to complete strangers on the Tour who were never able to work out if the guy was for real or not. German colleagues were most impressed, his mannerisms conformed neatly to their notions of how the inbred British aristocracy should behave.

  A week or so after his funeral I had to get a new photo taken to supply to the Tour for my press accreditation. By way of paying tribute, I too bought some comedy gnashers. Then, feeling a little self-conscious, I sat behind the pull-across blue curtain in a booth in an unloved corner of Boots, staring at my toothy reflection in the glass, trying to recapture the Wilkinson aura. The joke fell flat, really, but for the next three years my ID carried a picture of me sporting a fantastic set of front teeth.

  At the end of a long day, if we made it to a hotel in time for a drink and an evening meal, there would be a great sense of urgency. We would dump our bags, and reconvene seconds later at the bar. All of us, that is except for Glenn. It would take thirty, maybe forty-five minutes before he appeared, a freshly laundered Gap short-sleeved shirt turned up at the collar, his luxuriant wavy hair bouffed up in a style, which would in itself have earned him the guillotine during the French Revolution, and enough aftershave to kill a horse. He’d clap his hands together in elegant delight, and then, mincingly, order a strange aperitif in a too-high voice. We would smile at him. All was well in the world: Glenn was down for dinner.

  To have been there in Lyon with him would have been fine. Instead I was thinking about his death. The football came and went. I went about my work a little unsure of myself, a little off-balance. When the last interview of the night had been concluded, I struck off on foot, opting to walk the half-hour back to our hotel on a ring road outside Lyon centre. I left that stadium behind me.

  Later that summer, Gary Imlach wrote some simple words about him when he put together a short piece reflecting his contribution. The obituary ran during our coverage of the next Tour. Gary said something along the lines of: ‘If you’ve been watching the Tour over the last twenty years, you’ll not know this, but actually you’ve been watching Glenn.’ Those words led into a montage of some of his finest shots and dramatic scenes which he and his camera had captured down the years. It was a rich mix: LeMond, Fignon, Hinault, Roche, Boardman, Indurain, Armstrong. Fields of sunflowers.

  Glenn had been involved as far back as the Channel 4 days. This was clearly a halcyon era, of which I am constantly being reminded. From time to time the rest of the crew break into a nostalgic riff about the old theme tunes and generally the way things were. To this day, I meet people who will wax lyrical. ‘The Tour de France? ITV, you say? I remember when it was on Channel 4. That was a wonderful show.’ We get regular viewers who actually think they’re still watching it on Channel 4. They’ve got every reason to feel tricked though. This is mainly because exactly the same people are still making the show. From the executive producers, Brian Venner and latterly Carolyn Viccari, to the commentators, Phil and Paul, to Gary Imlach. And the cameramen: John must be close to getting a medal for his twenty. Glenn had been approaching that too. His most memorable years were the late eighties and early nineties. British TV, for whatever reason, enjoyed a certain amount of preferential status.

  One of the ways in which this manifested itself was that Channel 4 was given a place for a motorbike on the race. It fell to Glenn and his admirable pilot Patrice Diallo to fill the spot.

  Riding a TV bike in the middle of a race of the size and scale of the Tour de France peloton is a hellishly complex, as well as a dangerous, proposition, requiring a deep understanding for the fluid dynamics of the sport, as well as Kevlar-coated courage.

  There is no equivalent in other sports. Aerodynamics dictate that as soon as you put a motorbike in a race, it will have an effect that can influence the outcome of the event itself. Draughting on the back wheel of a moto is a not uncommon phenomenon, and can lead to anger and accusations of cheating among the peloton. For this reason the motorbikes are watched with exaggerated attention by the commissaires.

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p; But daring is the thing and Glenn had it in abundance. Standing up on the back of a motorbike, facing backwards with a lump on your shoulder that weighs as much as a sack of spuds, while travelling down a rain-soaked alpine pass at seventy or eighty miles an hour takes some doing. On a big descent, the motorbikes have to crown the summit some way ahead of the race, for the simple reason that they cannot go as fast as the men on roadbikes. That’s why you’ll rarely see the close-up head-on shot which Moto 1 would normally offer up with the peloton in full flight down a mountain. Yet just getting ahead of the race takes great skill and courage.

  An understanding had built up between Glenn and Patrice. They trusted each other implicitly. A light tap on Pat’s shoulder from Glenn was all that was needed for complex messages to be passed from one man to the other. It might mean to pull alongside a particular rider struggling up a climb. It might signal that Glenn wanted to pass by the whole peloton to shoot along the line, or pull ahead at speed, gain a couple of kilometres on the race, and jump off to frame up a static shot and allow the Tour de France to rattle across the frame. All this was well understood between the two men, treading always an intuitive line, which meant that they were valued and respected practitioners, liked and trusted by both the race organisers and the riders.

  Patrice is a big long-haired French rider from Orange, with dark skin, deep brown eyes and uniquely convoluted ethnicity, who gets through his day by chuckling and singing to himself good-naturedly. He has little English. Glenn had a similarly sparing lack of French. Despite nearly two decades following the great race through France, Glenn’s French was still infantile. As if stuck on an unending school exchange trip that had started in 1982, he still had the language skills of an O level schoolboy on the lookout for cigarettes and flick-knives to smuggle back on the ferry.