How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  ‘What can you tell me, Ned? Some fucking bike race that. Some fucking balls.’ Paul likes to swear, harmlessly, aimlessly and often.

  In this case, it was understandable too. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen are primarily engaged to commentate for whichever US network happens to own the rights to the Tour de France in the North American territories. ITV takes the same feed of their commentary. But Paul was acutely conscious that he was broadcasting the first ‘Post-Lance’ Tour to an American public, many millions of whom had only become familiar with the race because the Texan kept winning the damn thing. To that extent then, the epic events of Stage 17 were manna from TV heaven. Landis promised to be a new all-American hero. And, unlike the never-in-doubt Rambo certainty of the Armstrong years, he’d done it Rocky Balboa style: he’d been down on the canvas, with the referee counting as far as ‘Nine!’ and had sprung back up to land the knockout blow.

  I don’t know what it was that Phil and Paul said in their commentary that day, but they would have been ‘digging deep into their suitcases of imagery’ to convey the drama of that one. So as we stood in the glow, watching the water splash and listening to the German profanities, Paul’s ears must still have been singing with the words and feelings the narrative of the day had forced out of him. He must have been buzzing at Landis’s success.

  No commentator likes to impart bad news. They like to be able to fulfil the dreams and wishes of their audience, imagined or not.

  But a germ, a kernel of a thought had already wheedled its way into my thinking. As yet undefined, but gathering shape and form as I replayed the day’s events. The problem was, back in 2006, I had no previous experience of doping on the Tour. Sure, I’d heard Gary and Matt and Steve, as well as a host of others, tut-tutting over certain individuals about whom they had their doubts. But nothing I had seen or heard first hand had ever looked or sounded or tasted like cheating.

  I didn’t really know what to look for, but I was fairly sure that when I did see it I would know.

  What I had just witnessed seemed too gauche to be true. Its very obviousness implied that it couldn’t possibly have been achieved by doping. Surely if you cheat, you cheat within the margins of credibility, you don’t stretch a point by asking Getafix to sling you a gourd of magic potion under the counter and then stroll through the village gates and start bashing Roman centurions together. That would be ridiculous. It would be to invite scrutiny, to implore detection. Yet, everything I had observed from Landis that day both on and off the bike struck me as unnatural. Not knowing then whether I would be shot down in flames for even suggesting it, I went out on a limb.

  ‘Paul, was that, you know . . . should we take that at face value?’ My vocabulary was failing me. ‘Or was it, um, bent?’

  He looked genuinely affronted. At once I wished I hadn’t spoken; I’d clearly misjudged the moment.

  ‘It was just a great ride, you know. Sometimes that’s all there is. Just a brilliant ride.’ He looked serious enough.

  ‘Fucking brilliant,’ he added for extra fucking emphasis.

  Paul, of course, has ridden the Tour. He understands the dynamics of the race, is alive to the nuances of the professional peloton, and, most importantly perhaps, was still very closely in touch with a good number of the riders, notably the American contingent. I was just a football hack winging it in a world beyond my ken. So I bowed to his greater knowledge. Nothing that Paul had told me wasn’t spoken from the heart. He loved the sport, and I felt bad for having besmirched it.

  On 25 July 2006, within a day of our return to England, I received a beautifully hand-written cheque for the sterling equivalent of my winnings. I was amused to discover that Steve writes out cheques in the same orderly fashion that he composes shot-lists or running orders. My name was underlined in red. Being busy with other things, I smiled at my good judgement, dropped it in my in-tray and forgot to cash it.

  Two days later, on 27 July, within minutes of the breaking news of Landis’s positive ‘A’ sample, I got a phone call. Literally within minutes.

  ‘Have you cashed it?’ The unmistakable tone of a man reprieved. Steve’s voice. ‘Rip it up. Don’t cash it. I’m not paying. He’s a bloody cheat. Floyd Bloody Landis.’

  For the record, this case is still hugely contentious. Not the Landis one, that’s clear-cut. I mean the dispute over the cheque; the foundation of our disagreement still quite unresolved. I maintain that I struck the bet on the basis of ‘first past the post’, regardless of any retrospective rulings. At some point it may get litigious. And at that point I will be fancying my chances, given that I have Sir Gary Imlach and Chris Boardman MBE as my witnesses for the prosecution.

  Suffice it to say, though as I write this, I still haven’t had my money.

  Even though I won the bet*.

  LEWISHAM HOSPITAL: PART TWO, AUGUST 2003

  They’d already tried a different question, but it had proved to be useless.

  ‘Which member of the Royal Family has just got married?’

  Charles? Andrew? The other one? Princess Michael? Before my eyes a procession of generic Windsors swam, some tethering horses and dressed in Barbours and headscarves, some galumphing around in helicopter pilot gear, maps visible in see-through pouches over the knees. Bald spots, ears and grins. Harry, Marry, Wills and Testaments. No idea.

  ‘No idea.’ I shook my head. More to confirm to myself than anyone else that I had no idea . . . feeling that a visual cue like a shake of the head would help my sliding cognitive powers understand that I could no longer understand what was being asked of me or why it might be being asked.

  ‘I’m sorry’, I said. I was.

  My hands kept moving to my bike helmet. Flat-spotted at the front, and split. Grazed through to the polystyrene all along the left-hand side. It lay upturned like a condemned turtle on the trolley next to me.

  My hands knew too where the Piece of Paper was kept. It lay on the counter, alongside the jug of water with the flip-top lid. They picked it up and held it before my eyes.

  The Piece of Paper was read to me. Not for the first time, but for the hundredth, I absorbed its drifting hymn, aware that this was no longer news, but stuff that I did know, but now no longer knew and will need to know again.

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything to him. He wouldn’t know the answer anyway. Ask him something else.’

  ‘When did you get married?’

  On the face of it, this should have been an easy one, too. The trouble is that even now I can’t say confidently that I would be able to answer it. Kath and I did indeed get married, after a good decade or so together and with two kids already to show for it. But we’d sloped off to the register office early one autumn afternoon, grilled some sausages back at home for lunch with our witnesses, and then taken off our twenty-pounds-the-pair matching H. Samuel rings, never to be worn again. It wasn’t romantic, it was tax-efficient. But it wasn’t memorable.

  I squinted at my interrogator. A young doctor – Specsaver glasses, striped shirt, white coat, and the inevitable stethoscope draped round her shoulders. Like an extra in Holby City, I was beginning to become aware that I was conforming to an increasingly daft litany of hackneyed one-liners. I closed my eyes, scrunched them shut, as if to summon up more thinking power.

  ‘How did I get here?’ I asked, aware by now of the absurdity of the question, yet powerless to avoid asking it. There are few things that impart more anxiety than not understanding why you are where you are. And I didn’t.

  I looked up. The Holby City doctor was in deep conversation with Kath, who kept a solicitous hold of my grubby palm as I sat cross-legged, like a bruised Buddha on the trolley.

  ‘It sounds daft, but he wouldn’t know that either. You see, nor would I. The wedding was nothing special, and we don’t celebrate anniversaries,’ Kath was explaining. She turned to me. ‘This is Lewisham Hospital, Ned. You’ve had an accident, and you’re confused. The doctors are just trying to find out what’s going on.’

 
‘Who put these on me?’ I looked down at my Lycra shorts.

  If Holby City was real, then it would have flashed back to the accident. The pelican crossing. The girl in the road. Me approaching. The green light.

  As it was, my memory wasn’t quite that good. It stuttered back into life every now and again, but flashed back to the wrong bits. Pedalling fast past Dulwich College and turning my head to the left to see someone running up to bowl. Crossing over Tower Bridge, avoiding the strangely corrugated edges of the carriageway where the tarmac has melted and buckled up, its slow-sapping gradient and wind from the west.

  A paramedic leaning over me. The white ceiling of the ambulance, and sway of its suspension.

  Then nothing more.

  ‘How did I get here?’

  CAVENDISH – BEGINNINGS

  Châteauroux: 9 July 2008. The sun beats hard on the tarmac. A heat haze rises vertically from the Skoda-sponsored finish line. I squint back along the home straight. Black-and-white signs mark the distances left: 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, at intervals along the strung-out line of straining faces and flag-waving kids. From this piece of asphalt where I stand rooted, the shimmering of the heat curtain looks like the opposite of refreshing rain – a shower of oven-ready air to greet the first across the line.

  A fly lands on my ankle, drawn to the drying sweat. I glance down at him. He’s waiting too. We are somewhere in the middle of France, and it’s time once again to call home the winner. Only this time, it could be different.

  In one hand, I clutch my microphone. I’m breathing a bit like Darth Vader, as the race draws closer. With my thumb I worry the braille-like raised print that spells out the word Sennhiesser. Woody stands next to me, inscrutable behind the summer’s latest designer shades, fingers poised above the mixer strapped round his waist in the style of a cinema usherette, sweat pouring off him. My other hand hovers over the radio-talkback control. I tweak the volume higher in a vain effort to hear Phil and Paul’s words.

  With just 5km left, and the speed tipping 30mph, I am trying to decipher the turn of events. Has the break been caught?

  Of course it has. This is HTC-Columbia. Their train hits the front. From this point, as I loosen the elbow on the microphone arm, there is little room left for doubt.

  Mark Cavendish was about to unleash his extraordinary talent on the Tour. And we would be right there to see him do it. Heady days.

  In the spring of the previous year, I had asked a simple, innocent question: ‘Mark Cavendish, this kid on T-Mobile. Is he actually going to be as good as everyone reckons?’

  To the initiated this was an insultingly simple question. But on the radar screen of my understanding, he’d only just shown up. Other great sprinters were there: Tom Boonen and McEwen, with Petacchi and Hushovd, stacked-up slow-moving dots homing in ever closer to their targets. And then suddenly, there was this new blip. A fragment of something greater, perhaps. A UFO that originated from the Isle of Man. To give it an abbreviated name, we called it ‘Cav’.

  The signs had been there throughout his development and, to those in the know, Cavendish was a loaded bullet ready to be fired. But I dispute that anyone, except the rider himself (for his self-belief is astounding), knew what the next couple of years would bring. This was before the records and the stunning serial successes, the petulance, the feuds, the daring and the doing of the man. The day on which I asked about Cavendish for the first time dates back to an altogether different age.

  In fact, it was a cloudy Thursday in London, two days before the start of the 2007 Tour. We parked up outside the Ramada Jarvis hotel in London’s Excel centre, which is the sort of place that defies description. So I won’t try.

  Careful negotiations had brought us to the position where we had an appointment with T-Mobile’s Mark Cavendish. I remember being surprised that things had been that difficult to set up. Fran Millar (Dave’s sister and sometime cycling agent) had assisted us, as well as an army of PR people from T-Mobile whose job seemed to be predicated on the understanding that the media, in all their guises, are an untrustworthy rabble, and should be hindered at every opportunity. In the end, though, we’d been given a time and a place when we could sit down to meet Mark Cavendish, face to face. It would be our first encounter.

  We had done the usual thing: arriving at a hotel, we had scoured the echoing lobby area for a suitable nook to set up some lights and conduct the interview with sufficient intimacy, protected as much as possible from the off-white noise of bags being dropped, phones ringing, and music playing.

  I went off in search of the relevant PR bloke. I think his name was Michael Wagner, but that may be my version of what he should have been called. He had that generic corporate German look, which is best suited to airport departure lounges and trade fairs: grey-suited, with a mobile in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other, he had a face which was loosely based on Michael Stich, but with less identifiable character. Unsmilingly, he greeted me, and told me that I should wait there, and that he would bring in Mark as and when Mark deemed it appropriate for Mark to appear. And with that he disappeared back into the main body of the hotel complex without so much as being nice. It was the first of many such encounters with ‘Wagner’ that summer. They were uniquely life-sapping experiences, which made me vow never to buy a phone from T-Mobile.

  I had a picture of Cavendish in my pocket, which I had printed off the Internet so that I could recognise him when he showed up, but in the end there was no need. It was obvious that the short figure in the regulation Adidas tracksuit coming towards me was the main man. He had a restrained swagger: short-striding and purposeful. As he drew close, he looked shyly at me. I noted his long lashes, plump cheeks and full lips. This man looks nothing like a racer, I remember thinking.

  When the interview got under way, though, I was struck by his thoughtfulness and his self-belief. Those twin tracks define the margins of every subsequent interview I have conducted with him, and there have been many. He spoke quietly of his own achievements that spring, of winning the Scheldeprijs by a whisker from the great Robbie McEwen to claim his maiden Pro-tour win. This, he recalled, was vindication of his form and ability. It delighted him, but it surprised him not a bit.

  Now the Tour loomed. He was frank about the limits of his ambitions, freely admitting that he would ride no further than the foot of the Alps before stepping off. But at the same time he declared firmly his intention of winning a stage or two. He could see no reason why he shouldn’t be mixing it with the world’s greatest sprinters. After all, he told me, he was one of them.

  What you think about Cavendish is ultimately a matter of personal taste. For some, his candour, coupled with unusually high-functioning self-esteem, is a source of genuine irritation. His readiness to acknowledge the efforts of his teammates when celebrating a win is one thing, but the scratchiness of his complaints when fate deals him a slighter hand has caused a few to write the man off as cycling’s superbrat. Others may just accept this as part of the necessary psychological landscape of the winner, and celebrate it. After all, there is much to celebrate.

  I shook his hand, and gave him my pre-prepared speech with which I assail every British Tour rider on meeting them for the first time. I spoke to him about the need to bring him close to the audience back home, and apologised in advance for the inevitable badgering that would characterise the end of most stages. Would he please be patient enough to cooperate with my daily attempts to illicit a sound bite from him, however much he may find this to be a dreadful imposition? I thanked him very much in advance and impressed on him that his compliance would make my life a whole lot easier.

  Cavendish looked understandably unimpressed, and from his lofty height of several inches shorter than me, cast up a somewhat wary look, then with the faintest of perfunctory smiles, he was off. Loping along at a distance of exactly two paces behind him went ‘Wagner’. I watched them round a corner, my broadcaster’s grin welded to my face. Then I let it drop, and turned to Woody and Liam to see w
hat they made of it. But they were already busily packing down their kit, and hadn’t listened to single word of what was actually being said.

  ‘Weird voice,’ offered Woody. ‘Needed to boost the levels a bit. But then it all got a bit Billy Joel on the hotel PA system, so I couldn’t push it any further. Hope you can hear him OK when you play it back.’

  I was left with the vague feeling that talking to Cavendish wasn’t going to be the easiest job I’d ever have.

  Three days later he skidded on his backside over a stretch of Kent tarmac, and by the time he’d dusted himself down and got back on his bike, Robbie McEwen had claimed the stage. I chased after him along the drab stretch of Canterbury road that Le Tour had decided would be part of this year’s route, until there was no longer any point. He wasn’t going to stop for me that day.

  A day later, on a foul and blustery afternoon on the road to Ghent, he fell off again. Using all the intuitive journalistic brilliance of a Pulitzer Prize winner, we deemed it necessary to interview Cavendish once more. This time, we had to involve ‘Wagner’. There followed painstaking negotiations over the phone, which bordered on the baffling:

  ‘He fell off.’

  ‘We know. That’s why we want to talk to him.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll want to talk to you.’

  ‘Well, could you please ask him?’

  ‘I could ask him.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I think he won’t want to talk to you because he fell off.’

  And so it was finally that the matter-of-fact German curtly instructed us (by T-Mobile text message, naturally) to get to the team hotel and then to wait outside on the balcony. When we arrived at the venue after some circuitous navigation, the Belgian hotel staff barely disguised their suspicion. To make matters worse, it was just beginning to spit with rain. It was nearly nine o’clock at night, and frankly we were fed up. Fed up with the chasing the unfortunate and so far spectacularly unsuccessful Mark Cavendish. Fed up with the raining Belgian days of a Tour that had begun in glorious sunshine and wonderful London crowds. And the prospect of continually hassling the elusive Cavendish wasn’t improving our mood much.