How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  None of that bore even a passing resemblance to the slopes of Verbier: pocked and scored tarmac, crumbling in places from last winter’s frost, with its accelerations and slacking-off of pace, the road unsettled and unsettling, as sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes violently, the mountain lifted and lowered its gradient like a treadmill set madly to shuffle. It was the sharp end of a Grand Tour in the high mountains and Wiggins was looking at the finishing line.

  Suddenly, and with the thrill of recognition, I got it. The noise of the race flying up the mountain was the breaking of a barrier. I had seen, of course, with bewilderment and delight, the emerging domination of Mark Cavendish. I had watched, in Armstrong, the most systematic winner come and go, but this was different. It was possible to identify with this elongated figure suffering his way up into Switzerland. Wiggins spoke a language we understood.

  So I stared at the finish line, and closed my eyes briefly as I listened to the commentary. I had a notion of what it might be like back at home, among those who care for the sport, watching on in the front rooms of Mansfield and Morecambe, Welwyn Garden City and Dundee, as ponderous midsummer, post-Wimbledon weather scudded over rows of houses.

  We invested, that summer, a little of our pent-up Britishness in Wiggins. A kindling of frustration, a maggot of self-doubt, a chip on the shoulder with a dab of HP Sauce. This was the baggage he bore on our behalf. He carried with him decades of our pressing noses against the shop window of the Tour de France, watching a perfectly oiled, deeply tanned procession of the more-or-less trustworthy step hard upon their pedals and accelerate away from the rest. The Basques, the Belgians, the Americans, the Italians, the Spanish and even, now and again, the French. They were all players in a game to which we had been invited, but knew from the outset we had not a chance of winning. But now suddenly, and from nowhere, we had Wiggins.

  I peered harder still to get a glimpse of the action on the screens. A trio of riders were now closing in on the finish line: Sastre, Evans, Wiggins.

  He’d dropped Armstrong.

  Suddenly the pictures on the TV cut to a shot of a French reporter starting to conduct an interview with Nicolas Sarkozy. There were howls of anguish from the truck, as Steve realised that we were about to miss the moment we’d been waiting for. In the confusion that followed, the Wiggins group crossed the finish line together, without anyone even bothering to show them.

  It had been an astonishing arrogance, a remarkably ill-judged decision. French television had assumed that an interview with their premier would trump anything offered up by the Tour. The most extraordinary part of all of this was that they flicked the switch not just for their own viewers, but across all the networks around the world taking live pictures. Broadcasters who host an event are obliged to supply what is known as a ‘world feed’, in which items of parochial interest are excluded and the action is covered in a neutral and non-editorialised way. By and large this is diligently observed by France Télévisions for the duration of the Tour. But this was an unprecedented breach in their code of conduct. It had probably been a mistake, but the fact that it had happened to a Brit flung us onto a moral high horse, from which it took us days to dismount.

  The run-out zone in Verbier was tiny. Barely a hundred yards of tarmac. Wiggins came over the line, rode to the side, almost fell off his bike, but just managed to step off it before collapsing to the ground.

  There he sat, while all hell broke loose around him. Eventually he was offered a drink, a towel and a way out. He got to his feet again, like Bambi on ice, and clambered over a railing into an enclosure reserved entirely for Vittel, the mineral water company. He stumbled towards a patch of tarmac in the shadow of their truck. There was an industrial fridge, full of cold water bottles, and two French students on a summer job handing them out. But, rather than making sure that Wiggins was offered a bottle, they started berating him instead for simply being there. I gazed at the scene, wondering if they even knew who he was.

  We got ready to do a live interview as soon as he had composed himself. While he sat wrapped in towels and slumped in a canvas fold-out chair, Woody started rethreading hundreds of metres of cable from the truck through all the chaos to the tiny corner of Switzerland where Bradley Wiggins sat, after the greatest ride of his life.

  To recall in detail what he said wouldn’t do it justice. I held the microphone and he spoke. It was as simple as that. I prompted, and he spoke again, fully, frankly, and with great pride. He managed, even at that rarefied height and so close to the event, to make clear his understanding of his achievement. Of all the interviews I’ve ever been fortunate enough to conduct, this gripped me the most. It was a rare privilege.

  ‘Just wait for the time trial in Annecy. It’s Wiggo-Time!’

  The tone of his voice, the look in his eye. That all came back to me when I found that crumpled-up piece of paper, still grimy from the finish line in Verbier.

  However, third place overall was to be his high-water mark. A week later, he spoke to us again, on the cobbles of the Champs-Elysées. This time it was a matter of seconds after finishing the Tour in fourth place in Paris. He was reunited with his wife Cath and his two young children and, after the briefest of hugs with them, he did his duty once more to ITV. His face was lined with smuts from the exhaust pipes of the Parisian streets.

  He looked, more than anything else, knackered.

  ‘I am aware of what I’ve achieved. To equal the great Robert Millar. To go better than the even greater Tom Simpson. I know what I’ve done.’

  His words came slowly. I imagined that the eight victorious laps of the cobbled Champs-Elysées had given him time enough to judge the sentiment correctly.

  It was life-changing for Wiggins. Even if he did know what he had achieved, I doubt very much if he knew what was about to happen to him.

  The following year was another story altogether, whose telling would contrast in every imaginable way from the innocent pleasure of 2009. That’s for another day.

  Those three weeks are the ones I choose to remember. They made him a millionaire. They gave him considerable fame. They bestowed on him a pressure, that proved to be a bit corrosive. And they gave me my finest memories of the Tour. Remember what the piece of paper said.

  Contador. Armstrong. Wiggins.

  REST DAYS

  There are two rest days on the Tour de France. The first comes after nine straight days of racing and travelling. The second, seven days later. They are loved, craved and abused; the Tour’s release valves. Never mind the riders: rest days are sacred for all of us.

  Sometimes they can catch you unawares. The pace and the intensity of the Tour carries you blindly and unknowingly over a precipice of work and into the thin air of a day off, like a cartoon character chased off the edge of a cliff to find his legs still whirring madly beneath him. It can be odd adjusting to the sudden need to do nothing much.

  Generally speaking, rest days are for strolling, chatting, drinking and sweating in a launderette. They are characterised by one consistent feature, no matter whether they happen to take place up a mountain or in an industrial estate: you can take your accreditation off.

  It comes as a shock to realise that it is possible to walk the planet, drink coffee, go shopping, and converse with other members of the human race without the need to be accredited. Anyone who has ever needed to be accredited for any length of time longer than a week will never again vote for a politician who believes in the introduction of compulsory ID cards. It is the slow death of the soul, brought about by a small square of laminated card with a blurred photo.

  Unencumbered, then, by the need to prove the validity of your existence at every turn, the day stretches before you, unruffled, peaceful, empty. Empty, that is, except for the need to find a launderette. This is as much a part of our Tour de France as a ride up the Champs-Elysées is to the real one. Although we are pretty well versed nowadays in how to operate the machines, dispense soap powder and fold the tumble-dried clothes, it is still vi
tal to get there early. A sizeable town, like Tarbes, for example, at the feet of the Pyrenees, may have 80,000 inhabitants, but it might only boast three or four launderettes. Not enough for the armies of Tour people about to descend on them, each with a black bin bag full of malodorous clothing slung over their back like a sack of coal.

  The best part of a morning can sometimes pass while you wait for the staff of the PMU caravan float to wash their green jumpsuits. And while you wait, you have to sit tight in the sauna of the launderette for fear of losing your place in the queue. The hours pass with idle chat among the international hodge-podge of half-familiar faces. People pop in, who you know you should know, but know equally well that you don’t. After bantering briefly about the hilariously long nature of the Tour de France, and cracking the usual half-serious joke about the riders having it easy, an uneasy silence often settles on the surroundings. Gradually you become aware that the only thing you really have in common is the fact of your accreditation. Take that away, and a strange disconnection takes over. It’s like seeing your workmates naked. It can be a little awkward.

  Sometimes, though, it works differently. I remember once sitting on the terrace of a very humble little bar in Grenoble while my laundry gyrated itself into health. I was sharing a mid-morning beer with one of the army of Tour de France media officials who police our activities on the Tour. Yet, he was off duty. It was one of those situations where the beer, the sunshine and the soothing realisation that no finish line had been drawn anywhere on the tarmac that day plunged us instantly into a conversation far deeper and more intimate than the situation warranted. The act of non-accreditation-wearing released us both from our regular professional inhibitions.

  He confided in me his distaste for the Tour, his loathing of cycling, his passion for music and desire to travel to Africa to escape from the general spiritual decay of modern France. A virtual stranger to me before I set down a pression in front of him, he was now opening up in unexpected ways. A glance at his watch halfway through our second beer, as he was showing me photos of his girlfriend who was at art school in Rome, told him that his spin cycle was through. And that was that.

  We were soldiers from opposing trenches of the First World War playing football at Christmas. The next day, he was back in his uniform, looking angrily at me and signalling to me that I could ask just one question in the interview zone.

  The next year, he never reappeared. Perhaps now he’s propping up a bar in Mozambique. But without the rest day’s spiritual blessing, I might never have known that he was just a thoughtful young lad doing a job. And now I have totally forgotten his name.

  Drying requires extreme ingenuity, since the passage of the clothes through the launderette invariably bottlenecks after the washing machines. It astonishes me every year how long it can take to dry a pair of denim jeans. The simplest option is sometimes to spread them out in the sunshine, although this can get a little edgy at times. Once in a run-down area of Toulouse, we commandeered the street furniture outside the washing salon, and when that wasn’t enough, our pants and socks and shorts started to spread down the street until they almost completely eclipsed the front of the café next door, which was still closed. Sadly for us, the patron’s brother owned the tabac across the road, and got on the phone straight away. We watched him, as he reported our disrespectful drying.

  ‘Hey listen up. Some English journalists have hidden your café from view with their pants . . . yes, you heard me correctly, their pants. I think it will reflect badly on your establishment for years to come, and may affect your turnover in the long-term. Shall I have them shot?’

  And with that, he threatened to have us shot. And the pants.

  Another time, on a ridiculously long transfer on the 2009 Tour, we stopped to enjoy a rest day in the middle of nowhere. It was a tidy little guest house in a miniature village somewhere not that far from Brive. It was run by a fussy Yorkshire couple who made us laugh by barking angry instructions at their staff in the kind of French that sounds as if it’s a very specific dialect of Wetherby. With no launderette within a thousand kilometres in any direction, our host offered us the chance to use the guest house’s own facility, a snip at ten euros per wash per head.

  The problem was, once again, drying. So for a while his sunny little breakfast terrace drew admiring glances from all passing motorists as it lay festooned with a kind of sock-based bunting. It gave the impression that a colossal marital dispute had taken place, which had only been resolved when the husband’s entire wardrobe had been tipped out of a first-floor window.

  People passed by on foot and stared. We shrugged apologetically, and pointed at the shadowy figures inside of the man from Yorkshire and his wife going about their business of snapping at each other.

  Eventually, and to protect the good name of his establishment, our host lent us a drying rack. We disappeared soon after that, our jeans still damp around the waistline, and beginning to poach in our suitcases as we drove.

  Nonetheless, the washing of clothes is a ritual I have come to love. This is partly because it brings me into contact with a different France: one which is not putting on a show for tourists. Launderettes, in common with railway stations and kebab shops, seem to be a kind of town-planner’s shorthand for Crap Part of Town. Once the machines are loaded up, there is often a thirty-two-minute wait, perfectly designed for a stroll around the local amenities. Occasionally, for a heavier soil, or an older model of washing machine, this can be as much as a forty-six-minute wait. This represents an ideal opportunity to have a nose around the dodgy-looking betting shop next door. Or perhaps to get your hair cut by friendly Algerian barbers who delight in burning off ear hair with cigarette lighters. You can even be a little more adventurous, and, as Liam once did, buy a ukelele.

  Sometimes, there is nothing to admire in a place. Instead of kebab shops we are served up a panorama of wild, jagged Alpine peaks. Of what possible use are they?

  Disappointingly, in 2009, we spent the second rest day in a high-altitude cluster of wooden hotels and silly clothes shops, known to people who like that sort of thing as Verbier. After Monaco and Andorra it was the third tax haven we visited that year. If we’d hopped over to Jersey, we’d have had the full set, and could have started developing it with houses and hotels of our own.

  Verbier is the kind of place that makes you want to pay high levels of taxation as a simple gesture of open defiance at the prevailing culture. I call it a ‘place’, although it’s not actually a place, except in the most narrow, GPS, Google Earth sort of a way. It is located in Switzerland, but that’s about it. Neither the place nor the people seem to be genuine, in any conventional sense.

  The Swiss may boast Italian, French and German as their national languages, yet in Verbier, a weird hybrid of English holds sway. From one minute to the next, as we wandered around the pine-clad hell-hole, we seemed to confront a wall of Hilfiger-clad clones who spoke the kind of English that doesn’t differentiate between idiocy and marketing.

  We were staying in a huge chalet, which was run by a Swedish family. The staff consisted of about seven generations of ostensibly bohemian Swedes, loosely affiliated to the same family, and all with serious investment portfolios. They seemed to hover around every corner, merrily swapping advice in a plethora of different languages on which restaurants served the best melted cheese. That’s about all it is possible to eat in the Alps, it seems. A smell of paraffin and dairy farming hangs gloomily in the air.

  The place was so booked out that parking was the biggest issue of the evening. With so many cars trying to squeeze onto such a small stretch of alp, risks were being taken. Some other French residents of our chalet, in their desperation, had dropped the front wheels of their car over the edge of the road, so that they hung uselessly in mid-air. The car was propped on its underbelly. This was adventurous parking indeed, even by Tour standards.

  In the morning, miraculously, the car was gone. I guess it must have been towed away. Or they just let it
drop.

  Crash!

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The Mercedes. We’ll get another one.’

  We weren’t the only ones staying in Verbier that evening. Large sections of the fund management and banking communities of Western Europe and the USA had fled there too. Presumably on the run from the chaos they had left behind them on Wall Street. Team Saxo Bank were in their corporate element, annexing a posh chalet into which they had packed as many white, middle-aged, middle managers as they could fit. They stood in tight clumps juggling finger food and talking to each other in braying hybrid English about their heroic attempts to ride up to the summit on their team replica bikes. They were wearing out their iPhones as they flicked through souvenir photos of their deeds. I saw Fabian Cancellara, in his après-ski leisurewear, riding down to do his PR bit at the party on his bike. It can’t have been more than 200 yards from their hotel, yet he felt the need to ride there. Perhaps he’d simply forgotten how to walk.

  Columbia, along with Mark Cavendish, two-thirds of the way through his six-stage haul of 2009, were lodged just opposite. Their hotel was a jagged wooden cliff face staring across a car park at more timber-clad nightmare constructions in the charmless ski resort. Outside the front entrance, where the team vehicles were parked up, a swarm of the curious and the obsessive were gazing with loving, jealous eyes at Columbia’s team of German mechanics hosing down the riders’ bikes. One fan stooped to take a picture of a track pump, and then picked up an empty water bottle to assess its weight.