How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  A few hours later, it was complete. The win in Aubenas was the clincher. His ninth win in two years. And, to misuse a phrase, he still had Paris. When I handed over the champagne, he smiled humbly, and turning to the camera, he addressed Hoban directly, according him respect and talking of honour. It was the gesture of a practised diplomat, made all the more remarkable by the fact that just a few seconds earlier he had been threatening to decapitate a French rigger whose TV cable had nearly upended him. Such adaptability is Cavendish, too.

  We never saw him to speak to in Paris. Replaying the footage of that 2009 final stage win still takes the breath away. At the crucial moment, the director cuts to the moto camera riding alongside him, on the other side of the central reservation. Suddenly the speed becomes unreal, and the margin of victory almost unnatural. Five, ten bike lengths and still pulling away from his rivals. He sits up early, the race won, and coasts across the line open-mouthed, with teammate Mark Renshaw sailing along in his wake, mirroring the arms-wide victory salute of the winner.

  As he passed me, positioned just yards behind the finishing line, I knew already that the moment had passed. The curse of the history-maker fell like a shadow across the cobbles. With all that already done, what on earth could he possibly do next?

  The answer, of course, was clear. On the 2010 Tour Mark Cavendish faltered briefly, when he lost out to a superannuated Alessandro Petacchi, but then imposed his will on the race once more. And he did this despite losing the services of his blue-chip leadout man Mark Renshaw, after Renshaw’s extraordinary head-butting antics on Stage 11.

  That day I had to interview Cavendish three times. Once for the ‘world feed’, then again after he had come down from the podium just for ITV. Shortly after that, I caught sight of the race director Jean-François Pescheux holding court to the francophone media. I went to eavesdrop.

  I was astonished to hear that he was explaining the Tour’s decision to expel Renshaw forthwith. I glanced back at Cavendish, still conducting interviews a few yards away, and beaming from ear to ear. Pescheux was telling the media, before anyone had bothered to tell Cavendish. Eventually, a Columbia soigneur whispered in his ear. He took a visible step back, and looked up in shock. Such things are public property on the Tour. Dealings and rulings, which in other sports take place behind closed doors, are routinely carried out under the unfeeling gaze of the TV cameras.

  I had to interview Cav again, with the updated news. He was monosyllabic. Not rude. He was just quiet, holding it in and picking his words with care.

  He went on that summer to win two more stages. Five in total, making it fifteen stage wins already on the Tour de France. More will follow. And as the records pile up, the fascination grows.

  So there I’ll leave Cavendish for now. His career stretches ahead of us all. His domination as unfathomable as his mobile number appears unknowable (at least to me). He is a thoughtful braggart, a cultured man of the world, an islander with a continental understanding.

  He’s the most un-British Brit you could summon into existence. Yet, at the same time, British to his bones.

  OH, THE TOILETTE

  The Tour turns molehills into mountains and makes neurotics of us all. We absorb the shocks, ride out the bumpy road, as the race throws the unpredictable in our way. Braced then as we are for events to drag us away from what we thought would happen, we cling to those fragments of routine which keep us sane, and without which we would lose all grip. They are the snags of rock just big enough to gain a fingerhold and prevent us from slipping off the sheer rock face of the Tour de France: regularity, security, dependability, toilets.

  Next to the cordoned-off area known as the Zone Technique, which houses the fleets of broadcasters’ trucks, is the cutely named Zone de Vie. This is a tented village to which the actual inhabitants of the town have no access and which is there to sustain life among those of us lucky enough to wear the lanyard around our necks. Although it bears the title Zone de Vie, that would imply a fairly narrow philosophical understanding of what is needed to sustain life. This is a no-frills environment, its sole function to allow the Tour’s mobile army to attend to their bodily functions.

  Although washing is a priority, so too are toilets. If this is a word that makes you flinch inwardly, it might be worth skipping to the next chapter.

  The Tour does its best with the circumstances that prevail, but there are a lot of people to provide for and the heat of July in the south of France is intense. There is only so much time you can endure inside a chemical toilet, with the midday sun bearing down on you. I would go further than that: I suspect there are only a certain number of visits you can reasonably be expected to perform over a lifetime, before the bleached air impairs your vision and leaves you with a blistered bronchial tract. But they serve a purpose, and there have been times when I have been deeply grateful for their presence.

  They are, of course, the result of carefully planned logistics, and, as with so many of the other feats of human endeavour on the Tour, they come at the cost of great personal effort.

  On my first few Tours, the man in charge of the toilet operation was a prodigious, instantly recognisable operator. He was among the hardest working of anyone following the race, and I include the riders in that. Yet he guarded his fiefdom zealously, a Tsar of Ablutions who would do his darndest to make sure that your visit was as untraumatic as it could be under the circumstances.

  He drove a distinctive open-backed truck round France marked ‘Pelicab’. It was festooned with a logo of a diligent pelican, its gullet worryingly full-looking, wearing blue overalls and carrying a broom. Each day he would unload half a dozen telephone-box-sized toilets, which he then dispersed around the place. At the end of the day he’d round them all up, empty them of their contents and drive off, presumably via a sewer.

  He closely resembled Abel Xavier, the former Everton and Portugal defender whose dark skin was offset by a bottle-blond head of hair with matching beard. But while Xavier affected this look voluntarily, I have a suspicion Monsieur Pelicab acquired it in the course of his duties, being exposed to dangerous levels of industrial-strength Harpic. His beard must have acted like a CO2 indicator on the side of a boiler. When the hair went totally white, he knew it was time to move on, career-wise. I can only hope he’s got his feet up somewhere nice, and that someone else is cleaning his toilet for him. I wonder if his hair has returned to its natural colour.

  There is a different man who does his job now. One searingly hot afternoon in 2010, when he was enjoying a well-deserved fag break, I introduced myself to the new Abel Xavier, and was amazed to find out that he wasn’t French. I’d have thought that a job as prestigious as Toilet Keeper to the Tour would have been a reserved occupation only to be made accessible to French citizens. But no, Rudiger is from Dortmund, in the Ruhr valley, the industrial heart of Germany. He is a tanned, wiry, quick-witted man in his early fifties, who has an astonishing grasp of almost every mainstream European language, so long as you are talking about flushing, showering or generally sluicing.

  I caught him on a bad day. There is a truck that houses six shower units. It is used principally by the army of lorry drivers, who drive through the night to park up in the small hours. They sleep in their cabs, by and large, and then expect to shower at Rudi’s place in the late morning.

  But the showers had stopped working and the patient German plumber was having to deal with a constant stream of complaints in a number of different languages from poorly slept truck drivers. Later on that day, I passed by his workplace once again. The problem with the showers was fixed, but something catastrophic had happened to one of the toilets. I glimpsed Rudi, down on his knees, pumping some blue effluent out of a tank into buckets as if he were single-handedly trying to save the Titanic from going under. I remembered him telling me that he had only accepted the job in order to help his son through college in Cologne. Quite a price to pay. I hope the boy appreciates it.

  The experience of a few weeks on the To
ur will teach you that the chemical toilet is really only there in extremis. Explore every other avenue first.

  The matter is best dealt with in the relative comfort of the hotel that morning before embarking on the day’s work. If necessary, any further opportunities to take advantage of more permanent facilities should be exploited, however unexpectedly they arise. Even if this means keeping Raymond Poulidor waiting in the foyer of his 4-star hotel while you attend to your needs. What you don’t want to do is find yourself with no choice other than Plan B, even though it’s inevitable that over the course of a three-week stage race that this will be, at some point, the only course of action open to you.

  Another curiosity of the Tour’s voracious appetite for toilet facilities is the ‘mushroom’. Although they bear a passing resemblance to an upturned mushroom, I like to think that they really get their name because they sprout up overnight. Tour debutants, on seeing them for the first time, consider them to be so wildly decadent that they could only come from France, frankly (if that isn’t tautologous).

  France is, of course, famous for pushing the envelope in terms of micturition technology, having been the last major European power to simply not bother with anything much except a hole in the ground, which scarred a few generations of visitors from the British Isles more than they would like to admit.

  Then two factors collided to create a big bang in the field, although not literally: the advent of mouldable plastics and the growing internationalisation of the Tour de France.

  When these two fuses were lit, and fanned by the winds of climate change that over the latter half of the twentieth century have raised summer temperatures in southern France to levels that require Tour workers to drink constantly from readily available sponsored water bottles, the invention of this particular type of pissoir was only a matter of time.

  Women would rightly argue that they have been overlooked in this headlong charge towards an easier future. This is undeniably true, and while I can offer nothing compelling in defence of the Tour’s toilet allocation policy, I should point out this one, irreducible fact. Everyone can watch you having a pee.

  To return to the image of the upturned mushroom, three people can balance on the ‘head’, facing centrally, and peeing against the ‘stem’. The great joy is that they can be plonked anywhere, and, simply drained off every now and again when their capacity has been reached. The physics, though, are a little precarious. At the beginning of the day, particularly if the mushroom has been placed on a patch of bumpy or uneven ground, there is not quite enough ballast to prevent the whole thing from developing an unsettling wobble. However, this improves with each subsequent visit.

  I discovered early on that it is really only the English-speaking crews who find the ‘mushroom’ a source of mirth and mortification. To the French it’s probably a source of pride. To the Germans it’s just a neat solution to a potentially thorny problem. But to the British, Australians and Americans, it’s a ribald source of fun, unrelentingly humorous and not a little titillating. It’s the first question asked on arrival at the Zone Technique every day (‘Anyone seen a mushroom?’ ‘Over there, just behind the Danes’), and it’s the last thing visited at the end of the day too, before jumping in the car and resuming the endless travel.

  The curious thing is the word ‘mushroom’. The more enlightened among us, like US cycling commentator Bob Roll, tend to pay our host country the respect of calling them ‘Champignons verts’. But don’t for a minute think that this translates into Actual French. I have tried it, on more than one occasion, only to be met with a bemused frown from an Actual French Person and, on repeating my question, been fobbed off with a dismissive wave directed roughly towards the local supermarket.

  Other than that, there is the demanding matter of etiquette. The mushrooms often appear in very popular thoroughfares between trucks, used by hundreds of co-workers every hour of the day. This poses a particular set of dilemmas. Is it, for example, acceptable to shout an unabashed ‘Hello!’ at friends and colleagues, while continuing to go about your business as if this was nothing remotely unusual? Is there any form of legitimate conversation which can continue without hesitation under such circumstances? Sometimes, other veterans of many Tours, quite senior in their own right and respective areas of responsibility, will engage you in high-level editorial discussions about the day’s agenda, disregarding the fact that all the while you are urinating down a length of green plastic. It’s not easy talking to a Swabian TV executive about Gerolsteiner’s form in such a context.

  On the 2010 Tour, in the shade of a plane tree which had miraculously sprouted out from within the TV compound (or could it have been vice versa?), I was engaged by Phil Liggett in a longish debate about the morality of Alberto Contador’s opportunistic attack on the slopes of the Porte de Bales.

  ‘What do you think, Neil? Should he have waited?’

  The silver-haired commentator unzipped himself and started peeing, peering round the side of the mushroom to listen to my reaction.

  ‘I don’t know, Phil. On the one hand . . .’ I grew distracted. ‘Phil?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can we continue this conversation another time when you are not holding your penis?’

  And yet mostly, and with people I feel less inclined to joke with, it would feel churlish to suggest reconvening at another point and starting the conversation from scratch when, perhaps, I wasn’t emptying my bladder. I am, I suppose, too British to object really. After all, if you come on the Tour, then by default you are buying into a ‘citizen of the world’ set of values, in which nothing as trivial as a toilet should upset your equilibrium.

  The weekend in 2007 when the Tour de France came to London provoked a seismic culture clash. The minute the Tour plonked its mushrooms down on the Mall, it introduced another layer of socio-political complexity to the issue, which touched on our competing notions of republicanism versus the monarchy.

  Public peeing was one thing. But in sight of Buckingham Palace?

  Actually it was quite liberating. It was an almost cathartic procedure for anyone of an anti-monarchist hue. Perhaps if the French aristocracy had simply installed pissoirs in front of Versailles, nothing would have kicked off; all revolutionary zeal would have been poured out in angry torrents, which would have dissipated before reaching the gates. All that republican fury neutralised in one simple gesture.

  No French Revolution. No Bastille Day! No Richard Virenque! All because of a simple mushroom.

  CONTADOR – AN EPILOGUE

  I was perched uncomfortably on the front of a rather over-engineered modernist chair in an Utrecht hotel room. It was, as hotels often tend to be, right next to a railway station. Through the double-glazed and unopenable window I was aware of the rumblings of Holland’s garishly coloured rolling stock as it set about its task for the day, moving the Dutch back and forth across their watery land. The trains crunched over the points, grinding and slipping on steel still damp from the morning mist. It was a northern European sort of noise to set your teeth on edge. One that hinted ominously of greater forces being set in motion.

  That was where I was when, one late September morning in 2010, and just when I was least expecting it, everything changed again.

  These days I rarely bother switching on TV sets in hotel rooms. The landscape of channels grows bleaker by the year; a parody of itself morphing and evolving across cultural and linguistic borders till eventually nothing is left which is distinguishable from anything else.

  But on this occasion, there was a race on somewhere in the world and I wanted to watch it. So I made an exception.

  I had waded through endless German language business news channels before finding Sporza, the brash and cycling-obsessed Belgian sports network. It’s knowledgeable Flemish-speaking commentators had a flair for dipping into every major European language (‘Ooh la la. Fabian Cancellara. Wat een man. History in the making!’). It was the men’s time trial at the 2010 World Championships. The pi
ctures were coming live from Australia.

  I watched the familiar hunched figure of David Millar, his head snapping up, and then sinking, rising and falling with extreme effort.

  The mute cursor blinked at me on the computer screen. But I was glad of a distraction from the job of writing and was at once gripped by the action. At one point the graphics on the TV, based on live GPS readings from motorbikes on the course, suggested that Cancellara and Millar were locked together, tussling for pre-eminence. There was a chance that Millar might prevail, repositioning again the moral compass from 2003, when, with blood artificially enriched by EPO, he had won the thing once before.

  Wearing a cobbled-together-looking GB skinsuit with his cobbled-together-looking Garmin aerohelmet atop his cobbled-together-looking body, he was simply tearing into the race. This was a late, unexpected flowering. Even though I knew in my heart he would ultimately not have the beating of the almost superhuman Cancellara, he was giving him a run for his money. I said a heathen little four-lettered prayer for him, and left him to it.

  It was with about 15km to go that I returned my gaze to the job in hand and spotted a message on my laptop screen: Contador positive.

  ‘Alberto Contador today confirmed that a sample taken on 21 July 2010 had produced a positive test result for the presence of clenbuterol.’

  It was one of those moments again. Millar. Landis. Hamilton. Vinokourov. Schumacher. Ricco. Riis. Basso. Beltran. Rasmussen. I was well enough versed in these stories to understand straight away the sequence of events that would now doubtless unfold.