How I Won the Yellow Jumper Page 23

  Back in the truck, Gary and Steve had no need to hide their mirth. They were watching a locked-off aerial shot of the finish line provided by France Télévisions. They could see it all unfolding before them on their monitors. It was a bizarre sight: all these people, a hurricane of press and me and Jakob at the eye.

  I can’t remember how it all dispersed. I suspect that Piil was manhandled away from all of us by the Tour heavies so that he could ready himself for presentation on the podium. Or perhaps the main field came in, and drew friendly fire. Yes, that would have been in it, I suspect. As the yellow jersey and the rest crossed the line, the perfect storm of pressmen would have dissolved as quickly as it formed, leaving Jakob talking into thin air, his moment of glory already, even now, starting to wear thin. A straw fire.

  I saw him a few days later, and we spoke again, briefly. I was at Jan Ullrich’s T-Mobile hotel, waiting for the surly German to come out and not give me an interview. It just so happened that CSC, Piil’s team, were billeted in the same Campanile hotel. The door to one of the first-floor rooms opened onto a wooden balcony overlooking the central courtyard. A small, blond figure emerged in a CSC tracksuit, and began to make his way downstairs to the dining room.

  I couldn’t quite place him. Nor, I could tell, could the few dozen cycling fans who were stalking the T-Mobile team. Only when he approached where we were lurking with a meek smile of recognition playing over his lips, did I realise it was Piil. I said hello and congratulated him again. He thanked me and went in for dinner, passing lines of autograph hunters who paid no attention to him.

  He had been the centre of the cycling world some three days prior. Now, no one knew him. He was thirty years old then. He rode on for a year or two more before packing it in. He had a good, but ordinary sort of career.

  He seemed like an ordinary sort of man; a bloke on a bike, in fact, who, on 15 July 2003, did something extraordinary.

  I wish I’d had a better question lined up for him.

  ABOVE US ONLY SKY

  When I first found out about the birth of Team Sky, I was out on a run with Chris Boardman. It was during the Tour of 2008. We had absented ourselves from the rest of the production team one morning, and set off in search of ten kilometres of release.

  But it was one of those frustrating routes, and we never quite got going. We were forever running into cul-de-sacs, into roundabouts, or up dual carriageway slip roads. The conversation was much more fluent.

  Chris was only working with us at the weekends that year, and had just flown back in to join us. During the week, he had been party to the ongoing negotiations between Dave Brailsford, the head of British Cycling, and a few potential sponsors, as the idea for the British pro team began to take concrete shape. I was fascinated, and wanted to find out more.

  ‘Go on, Chris. Where’s the money coming from? What’s the team going to be called?’ I tried to persuade him to give me the inside track as we vaulted a central reservation and dashed across the fast lane of a dual carriageway.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you. I’d have to shoot you. And I don’t have a firearms licence.’

  ‘You could tell me and then just break my neck,’ I panted. ‘Or you could just carry on running at this bloody pace. That’ll probably get the job done.’ Chris had run the London Marathon that year, and was still racing fit.

  ‘Well. One’s a supermarket . . .’

  ‘Londis?’ I quipped, simply because it was a short word and I didn’t have enough puff to get ‘Morrisons’ out.

  ‘. . . and the other one isn’t,’ Chris added, cryptically.

  I waited. It’s often the best way with Chris. He may tell you stuff. In fact he probably will. But sometimes you have to wait. We ran on, aware of the sound our trainers made slapping against the tarmac.

  ‘I’m not sure how much longer the Tour will be shown on ITV,’ he continued mysteriously.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I shouted at his back as he put in an unaccountable little injection of pace.

  ‘Someone else will want to show it. Because they will want to show their own team.’ He slowed a fraction. I caught up. ‘Let me just say, a leading supplier of satellite dishes,’ Chris revealed.

  ‘Sky?’ I deduced, brilliantly.

  Sky! It almost stopped me in my tracks. My first thought, I am ashamed to say, was selfish. It suddenly occurred to me that Chris might be right. I might be working on my penultimate Tour de France. The TV rights, as of 2010, were up for renewal, and it was by no means certain that ITV would retain them. The prospect of losing the gig was unsettling. I gazed at Boardman’s briskly retreating form, and put in a middle-aged sprint to try and catch him up. He was loping along the hard shoulder towards a motorway bridge.

  For the next twelve months, through to the following summer, I was disturbed by the introduction of Team Sky. TV is a fiercely parochial business sometimes, and I was proud and protective of the little fiefdom that ITV4 had annexed for the Tour de France. Frankly I didn’t want the big boys muscling in. After all, I knew a little about Sky.

  From 1997 to 2001, I was training up as a reporter for Sky Sports, working with Jeff Stelling on the iconic ‘men-watching-football-on-a-telly’ show Soccer Saturday. It was a good place to learn. I owe my career to the people there who encouraged me.

  But it was also a brash, tough environment and, good though my grounding was, I was pleased in the end to move on. Sky, as a corporation, can be a lean, mean place. A former member of the BSkyB board, whom I have got to know very well down the years, has often told me that the reason for their success is that they are a retailer, first and foremost. Not a broadcaster. They sell satellite dishes. They are extremely good at it, too.

  I considered it to be inevitable that they would acquire the TV rights to the Tour. It would not be uncomplicated, but I was sure that they would find a way of pushing aside both British Eurosport and ITV, the subscription and free-to-air rights holders respectively. The cost of buying the race would be piffling compared to the investment they were about to make in Dave Brailsford’s team.

  Yet some months later, and much to my amazement, ITV re-signed the Tour de France for another four years, from 2010 through to and including the 2013 Tour. While I was delighted, I was also puzzled, and curious to see how it would feel to be ‘calling home’ a British team that bore the name of a rival broadcaster.

  I decided from the outset to try and get as involved as I could with the new team. I met with a delegation from Sky in Monaco for the start of the 2009 Tour. I shook hands with the marketing men who were the financial engine room of the whole project, and we agreed that I would start to make a film about the birth of the team.

  It was not without its complications. My intention was to shoot a fly-on-the-wall documentary. But the problem was access. Too often, we found ourselves on the exterior wall, while all the interesting stuff was happening inside. All autumn, and into the winter, Sky were negotiating with Garmin to liberate Bradley Wiggins from his contract. All along, I knew that they were close to signing him, and yet I couldn’t get any of the main players in the drama to talk frankly about the situation in front of rolling cameras, such was their fear of litigation and counter-litigation.

  Instead, I was steered towards expending valuable filming days shooting the design elements of the team, from their Pinarello bikes and the endless quest for the right kit, to the all-important team bus. It was interesting, glossy stuff, but it didn’t make for great drama. Finally, we politely agreed to go our separate ways and forget the project. I believe, in the end, that Dave Brailsford had gone cool on the idea, and it was quietly shelved.

  Along the way, though, I got a good feel for how the team might work. We were privy to the first team meet-up in Manchester in November 2009. All the riders (minus Wiggins, who was still a matter of weeks away from signing) were there. It was a big ‘get-to-know-you’ session, really. And it was a little overwhelming for some of the riders. The team was just showered with stuff.

>   Beautiful new Pinarellos, MacBooks and iPhones (the Apple image chimes in perfectly with Dave Brailsford’s minimalist aesthetic), Adidas kits and leisurewear, and Marks & Spencer suits. I listened to Geraint Thomas in the foyer wondering aloud what he was supposed to do with two iPhones. The management team was equipped with crisp white shirts and dark tank tops.

  Overnight more goodies would appear in the riders’ bedrooms. On their first night they found a little bag of bespoke M&M’s on their pillows, bright blue and printed perfectly with the Sky logo. They’d been imported from somewhere in Canada, at undisclosed expense. The next evening they found their pillowcases had been swapped for special custom-made designs featuring a thin blue embroidered line; the same one that adorned their kits and their bikes. They were now to rest their sleeping heads on Sky’s branded embroidery. Corporate dreams. Another evening they found especially acquired toothpaste in their rooms. Blue stripes, naturally.

  Downstairs, the team had taken over the hotel. Two rooms had been converted into photo studios where moody mugshots were being banked up for future use by the website. Another room was occupied by a TV crew. It was the same one that Sky Sports use to film their team line-up graphics on their football coverage. Shot against a green-screen background, which would later be cut out, the riders were each asked to take three or four portentous steps towards the camera and then come to a halt, arms folded and staring edgily into the lens.

  Nigel, the team’s ebullient nutritionist, was floating around the place, pulling riders to one side, one by one, and talking to them about the science of eating right. I watched him patiently explaining the word ‘mitochondria’ to an attentive Kurt Asle Arvesen.

  Brailsford and his management team occupied the most important area of all. A dozen of them in their identical tank tops sat all day for two days in a conference room, around a big table surrounded by notes. Each rider was called in to discuss their season’s targets, and how the coaching staff might best help to achieve them. We were allowed in briefly to witness Edvald Boasson Hagen shyly suggest that he wanted to concentrate on winning Paris–Roubaix and then secure his place on the team for the Tour de France.

  No cycling team had ever been prepared in this way. The riders who had joined from more conventional continental set-ups, such as the Frenchman Nicolas Portal, could scarcely believe what they were seeing. That sense of incredulity would scarcely have been lessened by the glitzy team launch, which drew hundreds of people to Millbank on a freezing cold January morning.

  The kits were printed, the bus was buff, and Wiggins was signed; declarations of ambition were dropping into sound bites all over the airwaves.

  So when the 2010 Tour came along the following summer, it was all a bit of an anticlimax.

  I joined the race late. The World Cup in South Africa delayed my arrival until the first rest day. On 11 July, just as Andrés Iniesta was scoring the only goal of the World Cup final, I boarded a plane from Johannesburg to Heathrow, where I changed to Geneva. By two o’clock the following afternoon, I was swinging around in the back of a car being driven in typically unpredictable fashion by Liam. We ate dinner in a village near Avoriaz in the French Alps, and went back to the chalet where we were being put up. Instantly I felt at home, even though I was staying somewhere I’d never been before.

  The following morning, we rose early and chatted to our English hostess over breakfast. Running the pleasant chalet where we had spent the night was just a sideline for her, it seemed. She and her husband actually ran a company which, to put it simply, made giant stickers.

  A few days prior to our arrival in the Alps, their company had, purely by chance, been contacted by Team Sky. The cycling team wanted to know if they could print and apply a new logo to the side of their bus during the rest day. You should not underestimate how important logos are to Sky. I was present back in September of the previous year when they test-filmed six different designs for the team kit to see what the jerseys looked like in ‘race conditions’ on TV. Some of the of the logos were blue, some white, some transparent, like their poster campaigns on billboards which allow the ‘content to shine through’. They had started the 2010 Tour in Rotterdam with a straightforward silver logo on the side of their bus. Then, when Geraint Thomas had briefly, brilliantly, worn the white jersey, they had changed the logo to white. Now that he was no longer in white, they flipped once again, this time settling on a blue metallic number.

  So our hostess had spent the Monday applying the latest version to the bus. The third design in just over a week. It was a high-pressure sticker, no doubt about that. I dread to think what might have happened to her if she’d left any bubbles in it.

  The stickers worked. The bus worked. The Jaguar team cars worked a treat, as did the personalised number plates.

  The huge satellite dish that unfolded from the top of the bus roof worked, too.

  On a couple of occasions I knocked on the curtain (if such a thing were possible) that divided the cool air-conditioned interior of the bus from the baking rest of France, and popped my head inside. Dave Brailsford, Rod Ellingworth and few others would be sitting in the front few seats of the extravagantly equipped coach, watching the Tour on a huge pull-down HD projector TV.

  That all worked fine. The only problem was the rest of it. The actual race. Geraint Thomas’s gutsy ride across the cobbles aside, it was a pretty damp squib for the world’s best-equipped cycling outfit. No stage wins.

  And no challenge from Wiggins.

  Having been so captivated by 2009, this was the biggest disappointment of all. Watching on from South Africa during that first week, I had a hollow feeling as I absorbed how he fared on the climbs. I watched him fall off the pace on the climb up to Avoriaz. Even from that distance of several thousand miles, it was abundantly clear that he was not the same rider as he’d been the previous year. I knew that I was heading to France the next day. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to our first encounter.

  Our paths didn’t cross for a good few days, and when we did meet, it was a relief. Wiggins had finally got it off his chest, deciding that a little frankness would loosen the pent-up pressure that had so far stifled his Tour.

  ‘I have to confess, last year was a bit of a fluke,’ he told us, dramatically understating his considerable achievement of 2009.

  We stood in front of the team bus, Wiggins talking humbly and sensibly. Then the Sky press officer gave me the traditional ‘off camera’ guillotine sign, and I thanked him for his time.

  He sloped away and, aside from a cluster of British cycling fans, no one seemed to take much notice. Dave Millar summed it up when he spoke of the difficulty in matching up the expectations not just of his huge salary but also of the fact that he now had a team solely built around propelling him up the General Classification ladder.

  Perhaps Team Sky’s stated aim to produce a British Tour de France winner within the next four to five years was never really going to be about Wiggins. There are a number of much younger home-grown talents who were supposed to sit on his metaphorical wheel over the next few years, before themselves assuming the mantle of team leader. That ambition seems some way off right now. And who knows how many logos they might have gone through by then.

  Much has changed in the landscape since I was first introduced to this race. The British have arrived, the American has gone and, even though the Devil may still be jumping up and down in his red leotard, the race has shape-shifted year on year into something else.

  The arrival of Team Sky has moved it on again. In September their much-loved team bus parked up in rainy, windswept car parks up and down the country during the Tour of Britain. Wherever it went, from Blackpool to Colchester, the fans besieged it, the clamour for autographs equal to almost anything you are likely to see on the Tour de France. And that probably tells you all you need to know about what might happen should they ever win the big one.

  Team Sky has given the growing ranks of British cycling fans a point of focus, a spiritual ho
me. One day soon, I am sure, it will graduate again to give them a point of genuine pride.

  But, as far as I’m concerned, Sky, as a broadcaster, can keep the cricket, rugby, golf, speedway and boxing. As long as they leave the Tour to us. Please?

  CAVENDISH – THE FINISH LINES

  That hot afternoon in Châteauroux in 2007, Mark Cavendish won his first stage on the Tour de France. I caught a glimpse of him as he shot past me.

  Three images: he is bent double over the handlebars, mouth suddenly gaping hugely at the realisation he’s won. Then a split second later, sitting up and holding his two fists to his helmet, a gesture of incredulity, with something of the devil in it. Then he whacks the air, catching it with a violent right hook, keeping his arm extended. Somewhere in between these flash frames, he blurred past me, unfolding upright. A wild smudge of blue.

  That moment blew to pieces all my assumptions about British racing on the Tour. The noise as it burst and fell around me was the sound of a glass ceiling shattering. This was suddenly a different game.

  The first sign that everything was not quite as it was came when Mathieu Perez sought me out. In recent years, Mathieu has risen to prominence in ASO. He is the unshaven, unslept, pastis-guzzling chain-smoking doyen of the press. If he cared enough about his ambitions, I suspect he would have all it takes to rise through the organisation and one day become the race director. Only he’s far too laid-back. Students of Tour coverage will recognise him. He’s often to be glimpsed hanging on the left or right shoulder of the maillot jaune, holding an umbrella to keep the sun or rain off the shoulders of the anointed one, or simply coordinating things with a nod and a wink, like an understated auctioneer. He’s the guy you see edging closer when the questioner has taken too long, placing a hand on the outstretched arm that holds the microphone, or grimacing displeasure when one too many questions are fired in. He’s the conductor. We’re the orchestra, albeit a multinational and unwashed one. And if the French, American and German media are the first violins, brass and percussion, we the Brits are accustomed to being the bassoons.