How I Won the Yellow Jumper Page 24

  Yet it was the bassoons who got the nod that day. Mathieu indicated with film-noir nonchalance that we should make our way around the back to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, the area directly behind the podium that teems with cycling’s chosen few: podium girls, former champions, directeurs sportifs, stage winners and jersey wearers. We negotiated our way past the security, our passage eased by Mathieu’s calm authority.

  My first task was to conduct what is known as the ‘Eurovision’ interview. This is the first interview the winner gives and is broadcast by all the TV channels worldwide who either don’t have a reporter on-site, or who don’t have the airtime to wait for their own exclusive. I was handed a microphone by a smiling French floor manager. A cameraman arrived. A shining aluminium and leather stool was placed in front of me, and behind that one of those hideous and ubiquitous advertisers boards that bore the logo of a dozen different companies. But no Mark Cavendish.

  And then all of a sudden there was. Hobbling in on his cleats and grinning widely, his progress hampered by waves of well-wishers and peers throwing their arms around his neck in congratulation. He was finally guided onto to the stool in front of me. He shot me a brief look of acknowledgement, and then drew long and hard on a tin of something cold and fizzy as he waited for me to start the questioning.

  So where to start? This is the question: what is the question? A win is a win, surely.

  What we want now, what TV demands to know, is the stuff that has remained hidden to this point, the stuff the blank stare of the lens cannot hope to unearth. The joy goes without saying; the delight is self-evident. TV wants to find out what the rider has within him: the hidden agenda, the feud resolved, maybe, the personal motivation born from some sense of grief or injustice or anger. Can the rider blurt this emotion out? Can he paint words for us all, which bring back the thrill of watching the win unfold? What can he say to make a good feeling better? And, I return to my initial question: where do I start?

  I refuse to ask, ‘How does it feel?’ It’s tempting, but I know that reporters who ask that are a pet hate of my dad, and the last thing I want to be aware of is an image of him sitting at home cursing the inadequacy of the question.

  No, ‘How does it feel?’ is taboo. It’s off the table. But actually it’s the question most closely related to the answer you want to hear. You want to hear precisely that: ‘Oi! Superman! How does it feel to save the world?’ These athletes, these ‘gladiators’, do things that none of us will ever experience. How must that feel? How does it feel to win a stage of the Tour de France? How does it feel?

  ‘Mark. Congratulations. What a victory.’

  With my BAFTA for incisive journalism firmly tucked away in my back pocket, I sat back and listened to Cavendish relive the race with a minutely detailed memory. He was wide-eyed with pleasure.

  Later that night we found ourselves at the Campanile hotel in Châteauroux. The sun was just beginning to dip as Mark Cavendish made his way, post shower and massage, across a lawn towards us. If you could ignore the drone of traffic moving along the bypass the other side of a threadbare hedge, then it was a very special place. We sat down under a pine tree, and he talked again of his win, the relative quiet of our situation intensifying his thoughtful words. The shrill clamour of the finish line must still have been ringing in his ears, but I guessed the noise was fading.

  His phone rang, mid-interview. It was his mum. ‘Just doing the telly, Mum. I’ll call you back.’

  An hour or so later, we watched on and waited to film. We felt like unwanted guests at a private function, while team Columbia sat at their dinner table quietly delighted with themselves and their new star. Cavendish sat in the middle of the lot of them. He was flanked by George Hincapie and Kim Kirchen. A strip of late evening light fell horizontally into the dining room making him squint, as he, along with the rest of the team, raised a glass of red to the win.

  Standing in a corner of the room, just a few feet away from this quiet, satisfied scene, I don’t think I have ever felt more removed from the riders, nor felt as keenly the distance between those who can and those who can’t, those who talk and those who act. I’ve drunk plenty of wine, but never, I would hazard a guess, a glass to rival how good that must have tasted to Mark Cavendish that night.

  And then there came Toulouse. It was a day so wet that I walked two kilometres beyond the finish line to find a shoe shop, bought a new pair, left the old sodden pair there, and by the time I had got back to our truck, I had ruined the new pair too.

  We did the post-race routine once more. Cavendish said much the same things, just as eloquently. This time we decided to leave him in peace at his hotel in the evening. Kristy, his PR rep, looked positively delighted.

  After that, came the Pyrenees. Every day, we expected him to climb off. We asked him every day if it was going to be his last. But still he kept going.

  He won again in Narbonne. Again the next day in Nîmes. Astonishingly, a sense of normality had established itself. I would hang back at the trucks for as long as I could, long enough to see the break caught, and Columbia hit the front, then saunter over to the podium, with one ear on what was going on. ‘Get yourself over to the podium now, Ned, it’s going to be Cav-tastic!’

  Cav-tastic. An awkward phrase, more school playground than Tour de France, but it was rich with the curious pride we were taking in every winning ride. Cavendish was our man. He might not have known that, and he might have cared even less, but that was neither here nor there. We’d claimed him.

  ‘Cavendish,’ a breath from Liggett, ‘wins again!’

  The jolly French floor manager. His three fingers held out horizontally. Then two. Then one. Cavendish would know exactly when to drop the fizzy drink out of shot. When the red light flashed up on the front of the camera, we were off again.

  ‘Mark. Congratulations. Three/four wins now.’ I too was piling up the BAFTAs.

  And then, suddenly, he left the race. And he left us wondering what we were going to talk about for the rest of the Tour. I got news that he was on his way to Lyon airport and heading home.

  I rang up some contacts at Granada in Manchester, suggesting they send a crew straight away to the airport. A returning hero was on his way. But they hadn’t quite grasped the full weight of his achievement.

  ‘Oh, the cyclist fella. OK. So, is the Tour de France over then?’

  My contact couldn’t have sounded more underwhelmed if he’d tried. I think he would have preferred to send a crew to cover a chip-pan fire in Oldham than waste any time with this little Cavendish story.

  ‘Still a week to go? Well, why’s he coming home, then? Doesn’t he want to try and win the Tour?’

  I tried to explain the significance of what Cavendish had achieved. ‘Isn’t he from the Isle of Man, though?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Oh well.’ I sensed he’d figured out his get-out clause. ‘You’re best off talking to Border TV. That’s their patch. We don’t cover the Isle of Man.’

  We live in a bubble on the Tour. For a month it consumes us wholly. I was astonished to discover that the rest of the country didn’t feel the same way as we did.

  At last the 2008 Tour came to an end. It was the year in which we went from plucky patriots to all-conquering cock-a-hoop serial winners. And Mark Cavendish had blazed the trail for us. In the intervening eleven months I thought much about the man. I followed from afar his failure to secure a medal in the Madison at the Beijing Olympics, and was struck by how peculiarly low-key track cycling looked compared to the grandeur of the Tour.

  Before long he was sweeping most before him again in the Tour of Ireland, and in the Tour of Missouri, a race he chose in preference, and for the second year running, to the Tour of Britain. The thing that takes some understanding about Mark Cavendish is that he is, on the one hand, the archetypal pugnacious British scrapper, carrying into battle with him much of the raw aggression of Wayne Rooney, and some of the spirit of adventure of Daley Thompson. Bu
t on the other hand, he’s a guy who buys into the world, every bit as much as the world has bought into him.

  The life of a pro-rider is, to this day, an itinerant one. Cavendish is no different. He has travelled far and wide, and seen plenty. His horizons are as rich in texture as the bespoke BOSE sound system he’s had installed in his Tuscan flat. It’s here, in Quarata, with his boys, toys and hills, that the man seems truly at home. It’s where he learnt his craft. It’s where he served his time in the British Academy. It’s how he wants to remain, among friends from home, but far from home.

  I visited the little town for the first time in October 2009, a few months after Cavendish’s astonishing six stage wins on the Tour. I was filming for my documentary about Team Sky. Dave Brailsford was there to speak to some of his riders, Ian Stannard, Geraint Thomas, Ben Swift, and Steve Cummings. Wherever we turned were British riders, all dressed from head to toe in the garish colours of the teams they were about to leave. They’d all been out on a training ride that morning, and now they were lolling about town, enjoying the rest, and the chat. They all had battered little Vespas, which they drove about the place. Espressos, gelato, mopeds. They were enjoying the whole Italian vibe.

  Cavendish suddenly appeared, dressed from head to toe in Columbia canary yellow, astride a beautifully reconditioned 1950s Lambretta. He took his helmet off, slowly, as we came near, then with minimal eye contact, he simply asked, ‘How long are you here for?’ When we told him we would be gone in a couple of hours, he seemed to be satisfied. Our presence was an uncomfortable reminder to Cavendish, I suspect, of the country back home that claims him but doesn’t really understand him.

  If 2008 altered the shape of things for him, then 2009 cast them in iron.

  In Monaco that year, at the Columbia team presentation, in a big hall near the famous switchback corner of Formula One fame, I sat to the side in the front row of the auditorium. As the lights dimmed and the hall grew quiet, they ran a video montage of Columbia’s most recent triumphs on big screens scattered around the auditorium. I suddenly became aware, that at the stage door to the side, Mark Cavendish had appeared, alongside the legendary Erik Zabel, Columbia’s new coach. There, in the darkness of the wings, they looked on. Cavendish, watching the film through the back of the projected screens, gazed up at his own achievements, his own image in reverse. He looked thoroughly unimpressed, and when it came to that time when the riders have to stand on a brightly lit stage with their hands behind their backs in tight-fitting clothes designed for riding bikes in, he could hardly have looked more ill at ease. All this was so much nonsense. He knew what he was capable of, and what he was about to deliver.

  He won the first of his six stages in 2009 at the very first opportunity, Stage 1 into Brignoles. Job done. We might not have anticipated such instant success. He had.

  The next morning at his hotel as we buzzed around making nuisances of ourselves, Liam noticed the appearance of a Second World War-style sticker on the fuselage of his bike to denote one target hit. That morning, he was particularly short with us. He was irritated that his bespoke green shorts and green shoes had not been delivered in time. He had a moan to his staff about it, and then posed reluctantly alongside Tony Martin and George Hincapie outside the team bus, sniping at the photographers for wasting seconds of his time.

  That afternoon his team went on to produce the defining show of strength and skill of one of the great sprinters’ trains. Columbia’s team split the bunch on the run in to La Grande Motte (quite incidentally leaving Armstrong to pull clear of his team leader Alberto Contador), and setting up Cavendish for his second win.

  ‘Cav-tastic’.

  By the time of his third win, it was becoming so routine that my presence wasn’t even deemed necessary. I was sent ahead of the race to film a piece in the town that would host the finish the following day. This time it was up a steep climb over the final 500m, the kind of finish that the pundits said wouldn’t suit him. I made the mistake of putting this to him, after he had duly won number four.

  ‘They reckoned the run-in wouldn’t suit you today, Mark.’

  ‘Who said that?’ he squinted back.

  ‘Well, plenty of people were saying that the uphill finish might not be ideal for you.’ I hedged my bets, temporarily completely unable to remember who it was who’d actually said it, if indeed anyone had at all.

  ‘What? Internet forum people?’ He looked genuinely offended that anyone might have doubted this one particular weapon in his armoury. Even as he spoke, I thought how strange it was that this keen sense of vindication somehow needed verbalising. After all, he’d just delivered the most stunning rebuke to his doubters, by winning another stage; a fourth in a Tour that was barely halfway through.

  Then a thought occurred to me, which explained a lot. He googles himself. He searches mentions of his name online. In a stroke it made him more human.

  The fact that it mattered enough to him what Internet Forum People (IFPs) thought about his sprinting capacity was an expression to me of the fact that he had not quite left the human race. He was still made of the same DNA as the rest of us.

  Anyone who dips their toes even slightly into the public realm has to make their peace at some point with IFPs. They lurk at the margin of your self-confidence, taking potshots. If you take out a pair of binoculars and scour the horizon, you will see clearly that the hedges and woods are filled with assassins, all out to get you. It’s best to ignore them, before the paranoia overwhelms you and you end up like Diego Maradona, with a double-nostril-barrelled noseful of cocaine, aiming shots at the media camped outside your house.

  But at this stage, and on into the spring of the following year, Cavendish’s demons were still out to get him.

  On Stage 3 of the 2010 Tour of Romandie, he notched up his third win of a stuttering early season that had been beset with internal political problems at HTC-Columbia, as well as some turbulence in his home life, a loss of form and dental problems in the winter. Instead of punching the air with delight to celebrate his return to winning ways, Cavendish chose to stab an emphatic ‘V’ sign skywards: a peculiarly British insult aimed squarely at the media, and, hiding behind them, the IFPs.

  It was, if nothing else, amusing. In the past, Cavendish has spoken with eloquence and understanding of the fiscal contracts involved in professional road racing. He has often explained his obligations to his sponsors, talking in particular about how it is his team’s job to get him to the point where he can launch his attack, and cross the winning line displaying his sponsor’s logo to the widest possible audience. That’s how it works; that’s what’s made him a millionaire. So, as the world’s photo agencies pinged their wares around the ethernet, the images of Cavendish fully eclipsing the HTC logo on his chest with an act of playground profanity provoked mirth and censure in equal measure. It was, after all, pure Cavendish.

  Back in 2009, and with that fourth win, he equalled the record held by Barry Hoban for the most stage wins accrued on the Tour de France by any British rider. I had been in phone contact with Barry for a week or so, anticipating the moment, and setting up the possibility of linking them together for a telephone interview should the moment happen. Hoban, a silver-tongued smoothie with a keen sense of perspective and a penchant for good PR, commissioned me over the phone to get a ‘bloody good’ bottle of champagne on his behalf, and to have it ready to give to Cavendish as and when the inevitable moment arose.

  We couldn’t quite stretch to ‘bloody good’, so settled for ‘half decent’, figuring that Barry probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from the comfort of his living room. And so it was that the champagne was carted around, slowly getting warmer and fizzier as the great convoy passed through a drenching in the Vosges mountains and a heatwave in the Alps. It sat in the back of our Espace, winking its single gold-foiled eye and threatening to explode at any moment as we swung around switchbacks on our circuitous route to the foot of Mont Ventoux.

  We nearly cracked
it open in Besançon. But instead Cavendish lost the green jersey and the moral high ground by opening up a petty feud with Thor Hushovd, who he had appeared to impede in the final metres of a messy, ragged stage. He went on the following morning to accuse Hushovd of wearing a ‘tainted’ green jersey. Then, thankfully, he let the matter drop.

  Five days later, we pulled up in a dusty car park in the middle of a forgettable little town called Bourgoin-Jallieu. Outside the HTC-Columbia team bus, there was a clutch of British cycling fans. Held back by barriers from getting too close, they were keen to get a glimpse of the little sprinter. Maybe to shake his hand, grab an autograph, or pose for a photo to SMS to their friends. They, like us, stared at the closed hydraulic door at the side of the bus, the livid yellow uncomfortably bright in the morning sun.

  ‘Will he stop and talk to us, Ned?’ they asked me. It was a reasonable question.

  ‘I’d have thought so. You’ve come a long way.’ I tried to sound confident. ‘Just stay as close to us as possible. We’re going to grab a quick word.’

  In fact, that morning we didn’t want an interview. I was there simply to warn him of Hoban’s gift, to explain the significance of the gesture, and to allow him some time to prepare an appropriate response. For a week I had been worried at the prospect of springing the bubbly on him unannounced, and getting a nonplussed reaction.

  He emerged, looking stiff and awkward on his cycling shoes, but spent plenty of time signing stuff and smiling. He was patient and generous with his time. He didn’t move on, in fact, until every item had been signed and every photo posed for. He and I briefly talked records and bottles, and then we hit the road.