How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  Eventually, after climbing to within about 3km of the finish line, we rounded a sharp left-handed bend, and I signalled, with the assuredness of a water-diviner, that this was indeed the spot. It was a grassy slope on the inside of the switchback, with a scattering of tents. It was a little exposed, but boasted an extraordinary view of the mountains opposite. They were swathed in a menacing-looking purple cloud against which the dipping sun was fighting a losing battle.

  Liam and Woody started filming my preparations, overseen by Chris. I suddenly felt like one of his six children, watching Dad take control of the family holiday. Chris scouted a location for my pitch, flattened the grass, considered the lie of the land and prodded the turf for tent-peg-purchase with scientific intensity. Satisfied with his findings, he pointed to the spot.

  He unpopped the tent. It kind of flopped onto the mountainside, looking much like one of those tiny ‘fortune-telling’ fish you place in the palm of your hand. It curled up at the edges as if it had died from exposure.

  Chris cackled with delight. This now genuinely seemed to amuse the former Olympic Champion. ‘You going to sleep in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s funny,’ the former world record holder concluded.

  But the jealous fuss he made over my box of provisions was completely unnecessary. It was as if Philippe and Odette, in providing me with a few bits and pieces for dinner, had actively denied him something, which was rightly his. He was outraged that I had been given a bottle of Côtes de Bourg. He felt a personal sense of indignation, that I had been given a thick slice of Camembert.

  The time came at last for them to leave me on my own. They retreated, filming me as they went; a forlorn figure on a darkening mountainside, clutching a camcorder, with which I filmed them as they went. In the final edited piece, this is the moment when the professionally shot footage hands over to the much shakier and more amateur video-diary footage, which I shot myself.

  They drove off back down the mountain, beeping their horn with unconcealed glee. I gazed across at my surroundings. There was a brief break in the traffic, a temporary respite from the noise of the road. Time enough to register the tiny sound of a thousand different souls putting kids to bed and uncorking bottles in a dozen different languages. Their voices melted into the void against the chill of the evening sky that was beginning to bear down on the landscape.

  I unpacked my stuff and laid it out as best I could. I fiddled with the camera, and began to grapple with the peculiar demands of the video-diary format. Filming myself going about my ordinary business struck me as a peculiar vanity. Especially when conducted within the privacy of my own one-man tent. I was embarrassed for myself. But as soon as I stepped outside, clutching the damn thing at arm’s length, pointing it back at me, my sense of foolishness grew until it bordered on shame. Nevertherless, it had to be done. To go through this experience and not return with anything like a cogent piece of telly would be adding pointlessness to futility.

  Armed with my bottle of wine and my video camera, I yomped down the ten yards of sloping mountainside to meet the neighbours. Within seconds, and without even taking off my shoes, I was standing in their ‘front room’, balancing a plate of spaghetti, a cup of pastis and a camcorder. They were a warm, kind family from somewhere in France that I had never heard of. Not that I let on. I am sure that I nodded with enthusiastic familiarity as they told me about their journey from Saint-Jean-de-Wherever to find their plot of land next to mine on the side of Hautacam.

  They asked me where I was from. Londres. ‘Ah oui, oui.’ They had a cousin who’d been to a language school in Eastbourne. Most French people do.

  Then they asked me what I thought I was doing. This was trickier. ‘Je travaille pour une chaine de télé anglaise.’

  Really? They looked me up and down, a little sceptically. ‘BBC?’

  ‘Oui,’ I lied.

  ‘Ah, très bon ça. BBC verrry goood. Ha ha ha.’ No one abroad has ever said to me ‘Ah, ITV! Ant and Dec! Very good.’

  So it was that, with their daughter-in-law now acting as the official BBC camera operator, I passed a very fine hour in their company as the pastis flowed and the night got gradually colder and colder. We talked about the nationalities, the numbers of different countries represented in the tented settlement. We aired prejudices, shared stereotypes. We talked about the racing, the riders, the route. They metaphorically raised their chapeaux to Armstrong; not something I was used to seeing the French do. But this was the 2008 Tour, led for a long time by Cadel Evans. It had been uninspiring so far, and even the French were now yearning for a dash of the swashbuckling Texan. If you’re going to win the race, then ride like a winner, we generally agreed.

  I left them to it, and with darkness now settled on the Hautacam, carried on my rounds of the neighbours, the pastis now emboldening me, and easing my embarrassment with the camera.

  I passed by a few grizzly old veterans gathered around a recalcitrant TV set which they were trying to tune in to the Tour highlights show. These two old boys had seen every Tour together for the last twelve years. I suspect that this is what swathes of French middle-aged manhood do to get away from home life. Every nation seems to create a mass participation event for men of a certain age, which involves canvas and flasks. For the British it’s fishing. In France it’s Le Tour. They planned to drive over to the Alps and climb Alpe D’Huez in a week’s time. In 2003, they’d been there the day Armstrong assumed control of the race. We remembered the day. We shared the Côtes de Bourg. And then I stumbled on.

  I was down on the road now, strolling past campfires and gas stoves, singing kettles and singing people. But the rural idyll was shortlived. For, as the clock ticked towards midnight, the Tour Proper had started to hit the mountainside. The convoy of articulated trucks containing thousands of tons of metal barriers as well as all the broadcast equipment, the catering, the podium, the commentary tribune, the VIP stand, etc., etc., etc., had begun to grind its way up to the finish line. They flashed their lights and sat on their horns, blasting their way to the top. They roared past tents, missing guy-ropes by inches. On narrow stretches of the road, I had to squash myself flat against the cliff-side while the trucks hammered past me, or hop up precariously onto the parapet on the outside of the road to let them pass, dicing with the bottomless drop on the other side. There seemed no end to the convoy. I was amazed to witness its passage from this perspective. Violent, noisy, triumphant. A terrifying game of chicken had begun. The fittest, boldest and drunkest took turns dashing across the road just in front of the lorries, risking everything for the sake of a pastis-soaked thrill.

  Andy, our driver that year, edged our truck past, picking me out in a blast of recognition. I saluted him.

  By now I had reached another long switchback. Here, where the road widened slightly to allow for a passing bay, was a temporary nightclub. Lights, dance floor, DJ, bar, everything. There was even a bar-room fight, although it was a pretty half-arsed affair which ended in two Basque students missing each other repeatedly with wide, rangy left hooks before swapping hats and collapsing on the floor convulsed with laughter. All this took place, while their friends were baring their backsides at the passing convoy.

  I stopped for a beer, chatted to a couple of Dutch kids who had got the Rabobank team from 2007 to sign their team-issue shirts. They showed me Michael Rasmussen’s signature and made the universal sign of the syringe before crying with drunken laughter, draining their beers and turning to order more. I wished them well, and turned for ‘home’, the lure of my canvas tomb now proving irresistible. As I left the nightclub behind me, I wondered at the logistics of it all. There was a ten-mile stretch of the same scene endlessly self-replicating. Diesel generators discharging into the mountain air, powering the noise, light and beer, and oiling the wheels of mayhem.

  Trudging back up the grassy slope towards my tent, I stopped off one last time, drawn to a scene of painterly beauty. A group of a dozen young Basqu
e students had a campfire roaring, kept burning by a constant supply of aromatic bush wood from their well-organised colleagues on a foraging rota. I asked them if I could join them, and then concentrated on filming them as they began to sing. I had no idea what songs they were, but they sounded perfect; the alien, ancient language bellowed with throaty sincerity across the bowl of warm light, which flickered across their faces.

  They could have been singing anything. It was wonderful to hear.

  I suppose they must have asked themselves who I was and what on earth I thought I was doing filming them. But if they did, they hid their suspicions well. I listened for a while longer, politely declined their offer of a swig from their shared bottle of Metaxa, and then headed home to the wilting dew-speckled accommodation Chris had sorted for me. I opened my front door with that trademark zipping sound, which more than any other noise evokes the chilly privations of the campsite, and clambered in. Climbing into my sleeping bag and chewing on a salami, I lay awake for a while enjoying the mixture of sounds outside.

  The holy trinity of a summer’s night on Tour in the high Pyrenees: Basque singing, diesel engines and French laughter. I fell sound asleep, and dreamt with frightful intensity that I was in a tent on my own on a mountain.

  I awoke an hour or two later to find that I had dissolved into a crumpled heap at the bottom end of the tent. It is one of the great hardships of mountainside camping, a phenomenon that deprives all but the comatose of a decent night’s sleep, and I was just about to make its acquaintance.

  Because mountains rise steadily, there is an entire absence of anywhere flat. This may sound fairly obvious, but until you’ve felt the resultant effect, you’re in no position to judge its seriousness. Forced to sleep with my head higher than my feet, which faced down the mountain, I had been unaware of what might happen to me. But it is a clear physiological impossibility to gain restful sleep with your calf and thigh muscles gently bracing you against gravity. Eventually they will simply give in, and you’ll wake to find yourself curled up in a ball at the foot of your tent. Using a baguette as an improvised ice-pick, I scaled back up the mountain, to the rolled-up ball of jumpers and socks that was making do as a pillow. I lay my head down and closed my eyes again, feeling the gentle insistence of the inevitable crumpling process beginning to take hold even as I drifted off. Outside, it was cold and quiet, the revellers now dotted all across the hillside in their own cocoons, waging their own private wars against the laws of physics.

  After what seemed like six hours and thirteen minutes, I gave up pretending to myself that I was sleeping. It was 6.13. I deemed that a respectable-enough time to unzip my tent and get going. Coyly, and with the camera self-consciously nosing through the opening first to get the shot for real, I blinked into the morning air.

  Overnight everything had changed. Still, clear air stood high in the valley, and reached from the grass to the stratosphere. Far away, the sun had just burst over the crested ridge of mountaintops that stood guard to the east, making the colours of the various tents on our side glow. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  For now, I had the mountain to myself. The various victims of pastis, beer and Metaxa were still sleeping it off, somehow. I filmed a little, turned the camera on myself to complain about the terrible night’s sleep, and then set off for a high point on a rock 100 yards further uphill. Here, with the help of a bottle of water to prop the camera against, and a quite inspired eye for cinematography, I framed up a breathtakingly beautiful shot of the Pyrenees. It would have been breathtaking had it not been spoilt a little by the sight of me in silhouette, gargling Evian mixed with Colgate and spitting repeatedly into the fine mountain grasses on an otherwise perfect day for the Tour de France.

  After years of pussyfooting around the issue, I had finally seen life from both sides. My night on the Hautacam had taught me a little of what the mountain means to the Tour.

  And what the Tour means to the mountain.

  WIGGINS AND THE TAX-HAVEN TOUR

  I have in my hand a piece of paper. It is yellow and grubby and it used to be folded up so that it would fit snugly into the back pocket of my jeans. Indeed, that’s where I found it, nestling shamefully at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket. That’s where I had flung the jeans along with other filthy souvenirs from a month on the roads of France. There it had stayed: in the bedrock, deep below the surface, as the shifting sands of soiled socks, shorts and shirts came and went above it. Down at these depths, the jeans kept their secret locked up in their denim tomb, cocooned from the ravages of passing time.

  Until now. Gripped by an appalling trouser shortage, I was recently forced to prospect further and further afield. My search unearthed the jeans, and the jeans offered up the yellow piece of paper among other Tour junk: a cracked biro from a hotel room, a two-euro coin, a plastic-wrapped badge from the tourism office of some obscure French town.

  These are the provisional results from Stage 15 of the 2009 Tour, produced before the various splintered gruppettos have even crossed the line. They are rushed off the press and distributed to the media by hand. There are, beneath the Tour de France logo and the various sponsors’ headers, eleven riders listed, in order of their position in the General Classification.

  Carlos Sastre, the defending champion is in eleventh place, three minutes and fifty-two seconds off the pace. Andy Schleck’s in fifth. Andreas Klöeden is one place better than him. But the top three names belong to Contador, Armstrong and Wiggins.

  In third place: Bradley Wiggins. Three-quarters of the way around only his second full Tour, poised on the shoulders of the seven-time winner and the astonishing Spaniard who, back in 2009, looked destined to eclipse even Armstrong’s status. Wiggins, the unlikely lad with the long limbs and the crooked smile.

  I look at the typeface and still find it hard to take in.

  It’s 2009. I am back in the thin air of Verbier, on the Swiss mountaintop. As I fold the paper and tuck it away in its time-vault pocket, I consider with growing excitement the scale of his achievement. I am heading down the slope away from the finish line. The TV trucks have grunted their way up the mountain and into their precarious summit-side parking grid. Massive vehicles are jacked up sideways along the vertiginous mountainside. Dropping down through the tangle of power cables and leaving the metallic blare of the PA system behind me, I head back towards our truck, my earpiece still wirelessly relaying Gary Imlach’s closing words as we head towards our off-air time. Soon the programme will be closed off and another defining chapter in British Tour history will, like the sheet of paper in my pocket, be folded away and placed into the past.

  He’d warned us, of course. He’d told me a couple of weeks before.

  The Columbus Hotel in Monte Carlo had a modern marble-and-leather interior with soft lighting. In a lobby overlooking the entry staircase, Wiggins had sloped over to ‘share his thoughts with us’ ahead of the 2009 Tour. It was the eve of the race. I leant across the vast expanse of a smoked-glass tabletop towards the sardonic figure of Wiggins, slumped in the Barcelona chair opposite me, his nylon Garmin team tracksuit offered no resistance against the shiny upholstery. He seemed to slip lower and lower, melting downwards to the floor. His Princess Diana eyes were doing their downcast thing and a curious smile played across his mouth. He spoke thoughtfully, softly.

  ‘I’m in the form of my life. I’ve never felt this good.’ This wasn’t boastfulness, I thought to myself, but quiet honesty. ‘I’m aiming for a top twenty finish. Who knows, maybe even higher.’

  It’s worth putting this in context. Here was a man who had finished the Tour on only one previous occasion. In 2006, he’d managed 124th place, three hours, twenty-four minutes and thirty-five seconds slower than winner Oscar Pereiro. On the first mountain stage that year Wiggins straight away lost forty minutes on the leaders.

  Three years later, even though we had glimpsed him riding alongside the climbing elite in places during that spring’s Giro d’Italia, his ambition still seem
ed preposterous. The target he had set himself from that hotel chair in Monaco was at odds with the formbook.

  It is unusual for an athlete to post such a specific, let alone ambitious, target. The fear of falling short normally modifies outward shows of bravado, distilling any act of prediction to the equivalent of the footballer’s ‘take each game as it comes’.

  The next day the 2009 Tour started. We had rigged up our set and, unusually for us, had such a fine view of Monaco harbour behind us that we were able to dispose of the central panel, which is normally used to mask the sight of a row of generators or the likes of a German catering truck. This time Gary Imlach, in his finest Monte Carlo polo shirt, and Chris Boardman, standing alongside him wearing his best pair of Rohan slacks, were framed by a ghastly forest of masts in the Port Hercule. The ensigns of a hundred tax havens fluttered bad-temperedly in the sultry air.

  Woody and Liam and I lugged our heavy kit around in sapping humidity, meandering up and down the clogged-up embankment of Quai Antoine, ducking and diving through crowds of Americans and Brits and the occasional Frenchman. We stood for a while, waiting for Fabian Cancellara to appear outside the Saxobank Team bus, all three of us absorbed by the sight of a vast gin palace shamelessly emptying litre after litre of human excrement from its septic tank straight into the port.

  It stank. In fact, Monaco stank. In the cool of his team’s bus, Wiggins was probably listening to The Jam. Not long now before the 2009 Tour would get under way.

  The Prologue route ran from the port up into the hills, then turned sharply and steeply and headed back down the Avenue Princess Grace to the waterfront again. Fifteen and a half kilometres, but featuring some sharp climbs, and some technical descending to rejoin the Formula One circuit.

  It was not, in other words, a circuit designed with Bradley Wiggins’s long frame in mind. But, as was widely predicted, it suited Cancellara. He tore into it, and into the yellow jersey. He put eighteen seconds into Alberto Contador, who in turn edged out Wiggins by just a single second; the Londoner managing a third place finish to improve on the fourth place he’d ridden in London two years previously.