How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  Simon was wallowing in the waves, a little way out. I turned to my left and told the astounding news to the first person I could find. This person turned out to be Jim Beglin, ITV’s football co-commentator and former Liverpool full-back. The politest man in television wasn’t about to tell me he couldn’t have cared less. But I could tell he couldn’t have cared less.

  I jogged down the beach, and swam out to where Simon was, unable to contain myself. I gabbled my news at him. He chose his words carefully.

  ‘Well, if it’s true, it’s not good. In fact, it’s probably the end of our summers. Cycling is the Tour de France and the Tour is Armstrong.’ He stood up to reveal that the sea was actually only waist high.

  Then, he concluded. ‘He’ll say it’s not true, though. You know that he reckons the French would do anything to ruin him.’

  And so it came to pass. The L’Equipe warhead fell short, dropped into the sea detonating somewhere off the coast of Spain, and only splashed its intended target. Armstrong’s denials stood up in court and against the scrutiny of public opinion, although that depends on which side of the Atlantic you draw your poll sample.

  His defence seemed to amount, just as Simon Brotherton has presaged, to ‘probably not true, you know the French’. He accused the French laboratories of tampering with his samples. Armstrong’s image remained intact, and international reaction amounted to little more than a raised eyebrow. What seemed at first a devastating accusation just melted away.

  Besides, back in America, the man was about to file his application for sainthood. It was an application that had some merit. I do not have the facts and figures to hand, but the monies raised in his name, or rather, its catchily adapted cousin ‘Livestrong’, are truly vast. His name and his cause now constitute a global phenomenon.

  More pertinently, the inspiration (and that is not a word one uses lightly) of Armstrong’s personal battle has helped countless cancer sufferers to fight their illness. That is a remarkable achievement, which, in the eyes of many, constricts the room for criticism.

  I think of Geoff Thomas, the footballer, who I met briefly in 2001 at the fag end of his long and very accomplished playing career. A couple of years later I met him again, this time as he was recovering from leukaemia. His discovery was Armstrong’s book. His passion became cycling. He rode the route of the Tour de France twice. He went on to set up his own charity, which in turn has raised millions of pounds. Wonderfully, Geoff is now in roaring good health. Such things are not there to be sniffed at.

  Yet, here’s the thing, and it has to do with Venn diagrams.

  For me, Armstrong has two sets. Set A: Lance, Seven Times Tour de France Winner. Set B: Lance, Cancer Survivor, Cancer Research Fundraiser.

  In the minds of marketing men, the two sit on top of each other, to the extent that you are no longer sure which is a subset of which. They are inseparable.

  Yet, that is not how it should be. While Set B can be enhanced and aided by Set A, the same should not apply in reverse. Armstrong’s record as an athlete stands and falls by the things he did on a bike, and the things he did to win bike races. There is no subset. They exist independently of one another.

  I was honing in now on what I wanted. I scrutinised the box. Audio cable. Mini-jack to mini-jack. Three-foot long. Perfect.

  At the cash desk a man in his early sixties was already smiling as I approached from the far end of the store, and extending his hand to receive the goods.

  ‘How’re you going?’ he asked, with a pleasant, shy grin.

  ‘I’m very well, thanks’ – I glanced at his name badge – ‘Mike.’

  Then I was seized by a sudden idea. Perhaps Mike could help me clarify my thoughts about Armstrong. He might be able to sum it all up, to put an end to my feelings of ambivalence with a pithy one-liner.

  ‘Did you watch the Tour de France?’ He looked up from the till. ‘I mean, you’ve got loads of TV sets here. Were you showing the cycling? Did you watch Team Radio Shack?’

  ‘Sure. We had it on most days. I guess I watched it pretty much all.’

  ‘And Armstrong?’

  ‘Well.’ He handed me my cable. ‘He’s kinda done, I guess. He looks cooked to me.’

  I had to agree. I said goodbye to Mike, and walked back to my car, clutching my Radio Shack receipt.

  BLOKES ON BIKES

  There’s a strange thing going on with cycling. It permeates the sport at all levels. And despite the best efforts of the big-brand, big-time marketers, it’s never managed to shake off the inconvenient truth: it’s actually just a bunch of blokes on their bikes. That’s all.

  There’s no getting away from it. Despite the valour, and the mythology. Despite the global media frenzy, the heroism and the Wagnerian settings, cycling remains a sport which is contested by a bunch of blokes riding bikes really fast.

  I used to ride my bike really fast, too. Well, ish. I think back to my blue Raleigh Olympus on which I used to trundle around Bedford, from the park to the school to the swimming pool. I am painfully reminded of my awkward twelve-year-old alter-ego. Pudding-bowled, in a blue zip-up pacamac, I was as dull and predictable as an episode of Wogan on a wet Tuesday night. But on my bike, I enacted a wordless and naïve narrative, which involved heroes and villains and derring-do, as well as plenty of kerb-jumping and the odd half-arsed wheelie. I was King. A Man among Men.

  There was a particular fantasy, which I enacted, where I imagined that, in some bizarre and unspecified way, I was chauffeuring the Prime Minister around, on my Raleigh Olympus. I had been handpicked for the job clearly on the understanding that I was the best, the very best there was at negotiating the smoothest passage through the suburban streets of Bedford. I could provide a seamlessly gentle ride along Stanley Street, avoiding all the well-known potholes, as well as the more subtle variations in road surface of which a lesser rider might fail to be aware. I could negotiate passage through the pedestrianised area that linked Tavistock Road to Chandos Court. I drew praise for this ability from the highest quarters of government. I drew on the personal gratitude of the imaginary statesmen. I would chastise myself remorselessly for any unnecessary jolting, however accidental. At the end of each ride, I awarded myself points out of ten. It was never a perfect ten, but it was never much worse than a seven, either.

  Of course this all neatly avoided the fact that actually it was the early eighties and I was an average sort of boy in an average sort of town. But my bike, at least to me, gave me my otherness. It bore me in vertiginous repeating figures of eight around the bandstand in the middle of the Bedford park. It fed my imagination, and gave me the space to lose myself in fiercely real trains of thought, mind games for the mild-mannered.

  When I rediscovered the desire to hop on a bike and push off on my own, I was in my mid-thirties, and had started to grow a little soft around the edges. It was on returning from covering the 2003 Tour de France that I went to the nearest bike shop and got myself a second-hand road bike. To my amazement though, the act of pedalling and feeling the tarmac skitter along underneath you instantly flicked on a switch that had been dormant for decades. Straight away, I was off again. I was not so much lost in thought as not quite there, somewhere else. A connection had been made across fields of my life, which I never thought possible. I was riding in a paceline with my twelve-year-old self, taking turns to pull at the front.

  I am, in this respect, making no claims to uniqueness. In fact, I would suggest that cycling’s huge appeal to the middle-aged man is based on precisely this desire, whether witting or unconscious, to connect with a time in which his life seemed a simpler, more harmless kind of existence. The MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man In Lycra) leaves it so late in life to hop back on his bike because he first of all has to build up enough things in his life that he needs to escape. And that can take time.

  Sadly, now, I cannot fully engage with the chauffering game. Something has clearly withered within me, possibly my soul. But that hasn’t stopped the recessive twelve-year-ol
d gene inside me from inventing more age-appropriate nonsense to lend my cycling a meaning and a purpose and a pleasure, which still makes even the most banal ride a private thrill.

  Can I maintain an average of 15 mph even on a commute through central London, with its many red lights? A glance at my computer tells me I’ve dipped to 14.7 mph. This is a disaster.

  Can I beat the number 180 bus from Woolwich to Greenwich? (Easy.) Shall I deliberately ride on the thick white lines even when it’s drizzling? (Not a safe thing to do, but quite exhilarating.) Shall I stick to the inside of the traffic as they queue through Deptford, or shall I be Mr Outside, the fearless firebrand of the middle of the road?

  There it is. I am just a Bloke on a Bike.

  Which brings me back to professional bike racing. However much it is obscured by the scale of the event, there is something a little bit ridiculous about it all. We have constructed a pedestal on which we place the finest Twelve-Year-Old Boy that humanity can produce. Even Lance Armstrong at the age of thirty-eight, standing on this pedestal that we have called the podium, cannot be immune from the nagging feeling, very, very deeply hidden, that he too is just a small boy in black socks with his knees showing.

  Can I beat Jan Ullrich from Bourg d’Oisans to Alpe d’Huez? (Easy.) Shall I pick up my bike and run across the fields on the descent into Gap? (Not a safe thing to do, but quite exhilarating.)

  So it is then that cycling occupies two different spaces in our understanding. It is both the realm of the incredible, and the ordinary. And in this respect it is unique.

  Football is a sport that offends many a cycling purist. Do not listen to such prejudice. At best, it is born of jealousy, and at worst, class snobbery. Football, even at a very ‘average’ level, is a game of tremendous skill and courage. It works emotionally and aesthetically as a game because of the tension between the controllable and the chaotic which runs through it.

  It is founded on a flawed premise, which lends it the beauty and the passion it can inspire, and that premise is simple: it’s almost impossible to master a ball without using your hands. A foot coming into controlled contact with a ball is fundamentally a nonsense. Like using a carrot for a chisel, or a sock as a bucket, it’s designed to madden. That’s why those rare moments when a player connects cleanly with the ball thrill in the way they do. Wayne Rooney’s overhead kick in the Manchester Derby will only happen once in his career.

  I have never been anything other than awful at football. And not once have I either sat in the press box, or stood on the terrace, and even fleetingly thought to myself, ‘I could do that.’

  But here’s the difference. We can all ride a bike. And, to the untutored eye, the way that I ride a bike, and that you ride a bike, and Andy Schleck rides a bike, is much of a muchness. He might just be a bit quicker.

  So when we watch these acts of greatness from the Tour, for all our chapeau-doffing deification of the riders, there is in all of us a little voice, muffled into muteness for the most part, which is wondering, ‘What if, instead of Contador, that was me? How would I have reacted when Schleck attacked? I would have gone with him, I reckon. Then, as I caught him, I would have accelerated again, just where the gradient gets steeper. Then I would have time-trialled to the finish, and gained fifty seconds on him. That’s what I would have done.’

  How many times, rooting for the underdog perhaps, or simply hoping for a more competitive spectacle, have we railed against a rider who has reached the limits of his power and can respond no more when a rider attacks? If it had been us, we’d have been up on our pedals and back at ’em. It’s the equivalent of shouting ‘Slog out!’ from the margins of a tedious cricket match.

  Watching the Tour from afar is one thing. Working alongside the riders allows for this sense of ambiguity to breed and replicate: the slightly destabilising perception of unremarkable men doing remarkable things. Or even remarkable men doing unremarkable things. This is the confusion, which arises from the fact that we come face to face with these extraordinary men, in all their perplexing ordinariness.

  And so it is, that I take you, rather bumpily, to Stage 10 of the 2003 Tour. It was one of those breathless days in Marseille when the thermometer threatens forty, and the humidity means that any effort of more than token exertion brings about a beading of the forehead.

  It was the middle eight of the Tour. The week between mountain ranges, when the race leaders hide in the pack. Normally, of course, this is a chance for the sprinters to reach for more stage wins, but occasionally a breakaway will form which gets away. On this particular day, they left it late. It wasn’t until the race was blasting along the shimmering Marseille seafront that two riders broke clear. There was Fabio Sacchi, riding for Mario Cipollini’s Saeco team. And there was a Dane called Jakob Piil.

  He and I were about to be brought into very close proximity. But first of all he had to win the race.

  Once that pair realised that they were clear of the bunch, and that one or other of them was going to win the stage, their cooperation turned to competition. They briefly sat up and shook hands. Sacchi said something to Piil, who later confessed, ‘I don’t speak Italian. I have no idea what he said. I guess he wished me luck, but who knows.’

  I often suspect that the Italian took the opportunity, like the dastardly Marco Materazzi to Zidane, to curse Piil, Piil’s sister and Mrs Piil, his mother.

  After the handshake, the serious cat-and-mouse game started. Both riders eyed each other closely, unwilling to be the first to go, trying to time their effort. In the end, it was Piil’s track nous that won the day, as he picked his moment perfectly and out-sprinted Sacchi to the line.

  And there he met me.

  I was suffering the blurred vision and fatigued thinking of a man who’s been squinting down the Avenue du Prado for half an hour, trying to pick out any sign of a bike race, as the sweat trickled into my eyes. And I was finding it hard to concentrate on anything at all, especially the race.

  This was still my first Tour. In fact, my entire cycling experience was less than a fortnight old. I was still giddy with Alpine drama, gulping in deep lungfuls of Tour history with each passing day: Alpe d’Huez, Armstrong, Ullrich. Only a matter of hours before, I had been doorstepping a distraught Manuel Saiz, the directeur sportif of Team Once, the morning after his prize asset Joseba Beloki had smashed himself to pieces on a patch of melting asphalt.

  There was more drama in a day of this great race than I had known in some entire football seasons.

  Now, though, I was confronted with this. A stalemate. A day of sleepy nothing. Armstrong and Ullrich invisible, and the race so uninterested in expending effort that it allowed these two nobodies to bore us all with their footling little victory. A marginal achievement, surely.

  I didn’t know then what I know now. There is great emotion attached to these days. They are moments of grace, really, when an individual’s efforts, instead of vanishing into an uninterested peloton, are rewarded with the defining second in a decade-long career. I don’t know Jakob Piil, but I suspect, somewhere in his house, maybe upstairs in his study, or in a games room in the cellar, he has hung a framed photograph. Piil, riding to the right of Sacchi, his arms bent to the task, the skin on his knuckles stretched taut. There is a look on his face of the most complete delight, given its potency by a wide-eyed surprise that has forced his mouth open as he screams into the cacophonous Marseille air.

  Me? I’d never heard of him.

  The two men were riding at seventy kilometres per hour towards us. We were positioned, along with the whole of the rest of the vast press pack, at a minimum safety distance of some 150 metres away. So it would have taken 7.71 seconds before he arrived at my feet.

  He flew at me, as if guided by the some PR-conscious God, as if he had no choice. He might have aimed for my impeccably turned-out Danish counterpart. He might have ridden right past us all and vanished to leave us chasing along behind him. He might have done any number of things, but instead, at the zenith
of his chosen profession, at the moment of his greatest triumph, where all things came together for him and he scored his name in the history of the sport, he came to rest inches from Ned Boulting, ITV Sport’s bewildered and unprepared reporter, whose eyebrows were bleaching in the sun, and whose sunburnt ears were now beginning to pulse.

  As Piil fumbled for the clasp of his helmet dangling under his chin and fell dizzily onto his crossbars, I had time to note the fevered rise and fall of his ribcage. Each breath in, seen from his back, forced the bumps of his vertebrae apart. They collapsed back together again. You could almost hear them clattering. I felt a pressure building behind me. Within seconds, within the space of half a dozen shudders from the gasping athlete, the bundle had begun. A hundred people perhaps, dozens of microphones, cameramen, sound recordists, journalists, the usual madness of men and women. All of us now crowded into Jakob Piil’s private world. I leant hard back on my heels pushing against the encroaching wall of hardware and flesh to avoid being spreadeagled across the diminutive Dane.

  And then, equally suddenly, the realisation hit me that everyone was waiting for me to speak. Even Piil. I was the chosen one. The fates had thrown me to his feet, or rather he to mine, and now I would have to oblige them. The code of honour, such as it exists among the press corps, held firm: this was my interview, I must lead the way.

  I looked at Piil, and cleared my throat. He had his helmet off now, and turned to face me with bloodshot, staring pie-eyes. They were wild with his triumph.

  I drew the microphone towards me and fired. ‘Jakob,’ I said. ‘You won!’

  To this day I have no idea what he replied. For in that instant I realised the complete inadequacy of my effort, and I felt keenly the absurdity of our position. Leaning back at sixty degrees, with arms and wires and poles jabbing through me and across me and under me, I wore the simpleton journalist’s expression of smiling absorption as Piil provided us with the sound bite we required. A sizeable chunk of the world’s media had descended on this man and this spot on this Marseille street to gather this information. And yet, I swear, none of us could have cared less. We weren’t even listening to what he was saying. I started to suppress a terrible desire to giggle.