How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  There were two occasions when he did speak to ITV but I was there at neither of them. The first of these came when quite unexpectedly, a day before the start of the 2005 Tour, Jan Ullrich sat down in front of Matt to do an interview. To this day, no one knows why.

  With the realisation of his mistake beginning to dawn, Jan stared at Matt. And Matt stared back, both men trying to establish who was the more surprised to find themselves in that position. Not one to shirk a linguistic challenge, Matt embarked on an interview in German, one of the few languages he hasn’t mastered. He emitted a few words, judiciously sprinkled with occasional coherent meaning.

  ‘Jan. Wie ist das Problem mit Ihrem Knie?’ [How is the problem with your knee?] This was a perfectly reasonable start. Except that Matt faited to pronounce the hard K at the beginning of ‘Knie’, coming out instead with the English sounding ‘Nee’. A minor mistake, but one that rendered his accent ridiculous, just as it would be if a German asked in English, ‘How iz ze problem viz your K-Nee?’

  To give him his due, Ullrich did well not to laugh.

  On another occasion, on a finish line of a transitional stage in the 2005 Tour, Matt grasped the nettle and, with the camera rolling, posed the almost-intelligible question, ‘Jan. Was ist gepassiert?’ Which would have sounded like this to Ullrich: ‘Jan. What gehappened?’

  Don’t geknow. Now gebugger off.

  But what of Alessandro Petacchi? Well, to my great disappointment, he has learnt how to speak a little English. In 2010, when he had a month-long flirtation with the green jersey, eventually winning it, we came face to face often enough. Although some of the mystery had gone, both from his answers, as well as from my questions.

  ‘Alessandro. Congratulations. Are. You. Confident. That. You. Can. Win. The. Green. Jersey?’

  ‘I don’t know. It will be very difficult, I think. Cavendish is very strong. So is Hushovd. But I try. It’s normal, no?’

  It may be normal. But it’s not half as fun.

  FLOYD LANDIS

  The winner of the 2006 Tour de France was Oscar Pereiro*.

  He will, sadly for him, always be known as Oscar Pereiro-Asterisk. The other man in the race that year, the man who crossed the finish line in Paris quicker than anyone else, was Floyd Landis.

  Do you remember Scooby Doo? There’s a visual headstart. The wildly twitchy eyes, the peculiar little smile, and the crazed attempts at facial hair and the screechy voice. Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers clearly shares some genetic material with Floyd Landis.

  I often think about him, now he’s made it his fate-bound mission to bring Lance Armstrong to his knees. I recall the day of his downfall. My memories are sharp, high-definition pictures. They are worth revisiting.

  It was Thursday 20 July 2006. I ambushed him in the morning outside a modest chalet in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. We hadn’t actively chosen the ambush mission, you understand. There was no great sea of hands volunteering to doorstep the man who had tossed away the Tour de France when he had cracked and haemorrhaged time the previous day. In fact, it was only a sense of duty, an obligation to the narrative of the race, that led me there. There was that and the fact that Steve Doherty had told me to go and do it.

  No, this was going to be hard. I had to interview an unhappy millionaire cyclist dressed in a tight-fitting nylon leotard emblazoned with the name of a Swiss hearing-aid manufacturer. That much I knew. But what I didn’t know was that he was about to rip the race apart, and then himself.

  The crazy thing that morning, as we pulled our dusty, battered Espace into the gravelled car park, was that the Caisse D’Epargne team was billeted in the same hotel. In other words, Oscar Pereiro, the heir apparent to the 2006 Tour de France, was sleeping no more than few yards away from the man who had gifted it to him. Who knows, they might have passed each other the previous evening, in the carpeted corridors en route to the dining room, massaged and tired and wearing flip-flops. Would they have exchanged a glance? Would they have said hello?

  There was a larger-than-average media throng present, as well as a good smattering of interested members of the public. They had made their way there to anoint Pereiro. Pereiro’s movie-star good looks, rich, dark eyes and admirably chiselled sideburns were just the tonic for a Tour that was adjusting to the vacuum of life after Armstrong. Here was a rider who had some talent, but also immense good fortune on his side. His lead had been granted to him when the peloton failed to take him seriously enough to warrant chasing down. He held on for two days, before ceding the lead to Floyd Landis. But that wasn’t the end of it. On Stage 16 to La Toussuire, Landis cracked spectacularly under the strain of defending his yellow jersey. He lost eight minutes as Pereiro held firm and reclaimed the race lead. It was a thrillingly unexpected turn. Here we had a story to tell that was forged from fallibility – the polar opposite to the calculated successes of Armstrong’s domination.

  It was one of those mornings when we timed our arrival to perfection. In other words, we were very nearly too late. Just as Woody and John were plugging in and fumbling around with their kit in the back of the car, Pereiro emerged from an inauspicious side door, to whoops, cheers and whistles from the largely French crowd. He looked cool. He looked measured. He looked every inch a man in command.

  We stopped him in his tracks as he tried to board his team’s black bus. He had one foot on, and one foot off the steps. I can’t remember much of what he said to us, because, to be absolutely honest, I wasn’t remotely interested. I was practising the time-honoured journalistic technique of only pretending to listen, while all the time my senses were sharpened for the arrival of Landis. I was aware that at any second he would appear. Icarus on a bike.

  Success is so much less attractive as a story than failure, especially when the failure had been so emphatic, the humiliation so public. What had taken place the previous day had been a very complete form of dethroning. Yellow jerseys are seen as an invitation to attack, but the wearer normally has it in him to respond. Prior to Landis’s collapse, I had only ever seen riders hurl themselves at the edifice of Armstrong’s unbreakable will, and achieve nothing. Moths to a flame. So, at least for me, this was new.

  After such a loss, in what frame of mind could Landis possibly be?

  A flash of Team Phonak green. Unnoticed by almost everyone, Landis had emerged blinking into the bright alpine sunshine, and was already hobbling his way towards the privacy of the team bus. I thanked Pereiro for his time, politely cutting short one of his answers as I did, and sped off to intercept our man.

  He’d wanted to avoid attention by slipping out the back door inconspicuously, but as he crossed the sunlit court, we cast a sudden shadow. Having conceded the yellow jersey, he looked stripped of greatness in his lime green and yellow Phonak kit. Apart from the odd clutch of cycling’s more informed rubber-neckers, we were the only people to show any interest in him that morning.

  The rider spoke in his high-pitched, almost-charismatic voice, explaining what he had in mind for the coming day.

  ‘I’ll attack I guess.’ He looked to the left, and he looked to the right. He looked at the sky and he looked at the gravel. He looked anywhere but at his interrogator. Me.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll have to attack. There’s not much else I can do. So we’ll see.’

  At that point, he did finally turn to look at me, with the twitch of a smile and a truncated nod of the head. It was the kind of perfunctory gesture which is shorthand for, ‘That’s it. You’ve got your answer. Now leave me alone.’

  But that flicker of a look had been strangely revealing. Would it be revisionist of me to suggest that deep down I knew something was up? Can I be sure that the subsequent years of disgrace and cover-up and deceit haven’t led me to think I remember something that wasn’t there? Have I fabricated my suspicions in retrospect? I don’t think so.

  We made our way to the finish line, travelling across the valley floor and up onto the mountainside upon which Morzine perches. We weaved our way through the usual crowds
of innocents who had made their wide-eyed way to race day on the Tour. The American cycling groups were out in force still, though not in the great numbers of the previous year, where they’d lined the roadsides with their yellow bracelets and yellow Nike ‘Magnificent Seven’ T-shirts. We used to wind down the window whenever we spotted a particularly thick clump of them and bellow ‘Go Lance!’ in as thick an American accent as we could. Often they would whoop and holler their love and support back. This amused us no end.

  We sped past a gathering of Discovery Channel-clad Americans, each one dressed perfectly in all the trimmings, and all riding identical Trek bikes. I wondered if their support was transferable. I wondered also if they had invested even half of their passion for Armstrong in Landis. If Lance was bigger than the sport, then now that he was gone, where did that leave any of us really?

  I thought idly about the contents of my tape. It was a decent little sound bite, and would sit well at the front of the show, setting up the emerging narrative of the day and moving the story on from last night’s programme, which had ended with a shot of a distraught Landis being jostled into his car and driven off wordlessly from La Toussuire. I was pleased to have got in on tape: it satisfied my journalistic brief but, frankly, I didn’t believe a word of it. Landis might attack, but there was no way that he would be able to make it stick. The Tour didn’t work like that.

  It was only when I arrived at the finish line in Morzine several hours later and fought my way to the tiny little sideyard where the Tour had decided our truck should be parked that I realised something was up. I prised open the back door, and peered into the gloom. Gary and Steve were absorbed in what was unfolding in front of them on the monitors.

  ‘He’s attacked,’ Steve said, ‘on the first climb of the day.’ He glanced down to see that I had the tape with me.

  I’d rung ahead to let Steve know what Landis had said. He afforded himself a rare little grin. It was satisfying that the opening to our show would prove prescient when the big story of the day unfolded. What we didn’t realise right then was that it was going to become not only the story of the day, but arguably one of the most extraordinary stories of the hundred-plus years of the Tour itself.

  I dropped off the tape, and went outside again to compose my thoughts and write my opening voice-over script. We had a monitor. I kept my eye on the race as I worked.

  Landis was on the lower slopes now of La Colombière. He was six minutes ahead of the chasing group, including Carlos Sastre, Denis Menchov and the yellow jersey Pereiro. But still there were some brutal climbs to come, including the Col de Joux-Plane.

  Steve, meanwhile, had been online. He popped his head out of the truck. ‘You can get 28–1 on Betfair against Landis to win the Tour de France. It was 80–1 this morning.’ He grinned. Then he went back in.

  I waited a matter of seconds, and then charged after him. I had ten euros in my pocket and gave it to Steve. Would he put in on for me? I didn’t have an online account. Steve accepted the money.

  ‘I won’t put it on. But I’ll offer you those odds myself: 28–1. Against Landis winning this year’s Tour de France.’ He wasn’t smiling now. This was business. Steve’s cautious attitude to spending money in France was legendary. And here he was talking about the possibility of losing two hundred and eighty euros. This was no time for flippancy.

  I made some ground rules, with Chris Boardman and Gary Imlach as witnesses. ‘OK, ten euros at 28–1. But there’ll be no Rule 4 on this one. No stewards’ inquiry. You’ll have to pay first past the post, should you lose.’

  We shook. He took my tenner. It was a momentous occasion.

  Up in the Alps, Landis was roaring back. His solo attack lasted all day. Neither Pereiro nor any of the rest of the peloton could respond.

  After watching Landis winning the stage to return to within thirty seconds of the yellow jersey – a time gap he would surely wipe out on the penultimate stage, the individual time trial – the media assembled en masse in the mixed zone. This was not a day to go AWOL. It was an obligation for each and every outlet that day to get their moment with Landis. The barricaded section, set underneath a plane tree off the main street in Morzine, was stuffed full of expectant microphones, necks craned, and faces turned anxiously in the direction from which it was expected the winner would be chaperoned.

  I wasn’t among them. For some reason, I had been given special dispensation that day to hurdle the barriers and enter the sacred area just behind the podium. This is normally the preserve of the national broadcaster of the rider who has just won. That day, amazingly, the Americans didn’t have a crew to hand. Perhaps their man had got stuck coming up the mountain. It can happen.

  Either way, the result was that I was lurking around with my camera crew just where I needed to be, because Landis had been hiding. He’d given a rather sheepish grin from the podium, and then vanished into doping control, swerving his obligations to the international media. In short, he simply hadn’t showed up. After an interminable delay, a hundred or so members of the press realised that they weren’t going to get anything and turned tetchily on their heels. It was, at the very least, slightly bizarre behaviour.

  I, too, had almost given up hope, when I virtually bumped into him. He had come careering down the three little steps that led from the anti-doping caravan, and was on his way out of there.

  ‘Floyd. Just a quick word.’ His ASO chaperone seemed not to object, but Landis was having none of it. He reached for his bike that was propped up by a tree. There had been perhaps a million people on the Alps that afternoon, and tens of thousands thronging the streets of Morzine. In fact, outside that penned-off area, you could barely move. But right there, at that moment, it was unnaturally quiet. ‘Seriously, Floyd. Just one question. It won’t take a second.’

  He relented. And squared up for the interview. ‘Better be quick, man. One question. I mean it.’ A little wrong-footed, I ploughed on.

  There is always a hiatus, when the TV reporter has to wait for the cameraman to shoulder arms, adjust the contrast, white balance, focus up and make sure the picture is stable. The sound recordist too must be sure he is getting what he wants. There is simply no point in starting with the questions unless all this is in place. I often look at newspaper journalists with their notebooks and envy them their fleet-footedness. These are big, heavy complex cameras, and the cacophony of noise at the Tour makes capturing clean sound a perpetual challenge. Sometimes it takes as much as seven or eight seconds. Those seconds can feel like for ever when faced with a reluctant athlete who wants to get away.

  I call this the Dead Time.

  There are occasions when you fill it with a little small talk. I tend to favour blurting something out; a blast of non sequitur far removed from the matter at hand. ‘Russell Brand’s really irritating, isn’t he?’ ‘What was your first car?’ ‘I reckon I’ve got a wart on my thumb. Do think that looks like a wart?’

  This was not such an occasion, however. Even in the heat of a French July afternoon, the ice was thickening with each passing second. Landis was almost twitching with discomfort. And so, frankly, was I. We were all stood there, the unhappy members of our reluctant quartet, simply because we had to. At that given moment, and for a multiplicity of reasons, none of us wanted to be standing on that little square of dusty Alpine earth.

  ‘OK, mate.’ John let me know I could start.

  ‘Floyd, an amazing fightback. Has it sunk in with you yet that you’ve probably won the Tour de France?’

  Landis looked away at an oblique angle to both me and the camera lens.

  His answer was concise. Something like: ‘Oh well, you know, it was an OK day. I’ve not won anything yet. There’s plenty of racing still to come, but I guess I can be pretty happy.’ Full stop.

  He turned abruptly, hopped on the bike, which had been his sole companion over nearly two hundred kilometres, and was gone.

  It was an odd sort of interview for a winner to give. Of course, with the judiciou
s application of hindsight, it is simple enough to interpret. Just yards from where we stood, he had just provided a specimen sample of urine that contained enough synthetic testosterone to ruin his career and his reputation for ever. He was already fretting, dreading perhaps that one day the world would be made aware. There are pictures of his celebratory wave to the crowds. What must he have been thinking?

  Later on that day, in the dying heat of a blistering afternoon, I paused to take a swig of water from a bottle and reflect upon a strange day. I had stopped by the side of the road. Here the barriers to keep the public out pushed all the way across the width of the narrow streets. The Tour had engulfed Morzine, swallowed it whole. I was looking vaguely along the line of a side street. In the middle distance, an ornate stone fountain gurgled alpine water. Some kids in the ubiquitous T-Mobile shirts of the era were splashing each other and swearing in treacly Bavarian.

  I became aware that Paul Sherwen was standing next to me. He looked his normal clean-cut self, in his US liveried freshly laundered polo shirt, razor-sharp parting separating his faintly oiled hair, and his signature imperial trousers: all beige and crisp.

  It is worth explaining that Paul lives in some splendour in Uganda. I imagine fondly that somewhere in the very heart of his house there is a Trouser Gallery. It is almost certainly an oak-panelled room containing hundreds of pairs of perfectly pressed trousers, each pair subtly different from the next, but all conforming to a narrow colour range that starts at magnolia and ends with taupe. His mornings are spent patrolling these lines of hanging garments, his long shirt-tails covering his modesty, and regimental socks drawn high to the knee, with an enamel mug of redbush tea in his hand, choosing the slacks which would best suit the mood and tenor of the day. Since Paul’s mood only has a margin for variation of 0.003 per cent, the need to branch out as far as mustard or ochre is remote.