How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  It took years for Phil to remember my name. Years. I was first introduced to him back at the Permanence in Paris in 2003. I have to confess that his name meant nothing to me, just as mine meant nothing to him. He was a ball of enthusiastic energy. Snapping up my accreditation he studied it closely and, seeing to his satisfaction that it had the requisite number of stars and special stamps, his first words to me were, ‘Have you got yours yet?’

  I had no idea what he meant. He took me, almost literally by the hand, to the other side of the vast hangar where the Tour’s administration had set up shop, and, pushing through a phalanx of oddly dressed Belgian journalists, led me to the front of a queue, where a nice lady gave me a plastic bag emblazoned with the Crédit Lyonnais logo. Phil patted me on the back and smiled. ‘There you go, Ben.’

  And with that he vanished, lost in a sea of cycling correspondents. It would be days before our paths crossed again. I looked in the bag. It contained a limited-edition wristwatch commemorating the centenary edition of the Tour. I still have it, unopened, in mint condition. My youngest daughter was born that year and I have it in mind to pass it on to her, so that she can put in on eBay when she’s a student. She might get enough for a few pints and a curry.

  I suspect Phil must have boxes in the attic full of such tat. I wonder if he ever takes it all out and gazes at it with nostalgia and pride. I doubt it.

  The most striking thing about Phil though, and this is what marks him out as uniquely adapted to the role of cycling commentator, is the way his brain works. Freudian psychology hypothesises the existence of the Über-Ich, the super-ego, which acts as an inhibitor to the expression of our id, our most primal instinctive drives. Without this facility, we would be wildly prone to acts of self-expression, which would mean that life would be unlivable. We would give vent to every passing impulse, no matter how much we would be better served by keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

  It’s safe to say that Phil’s Über-Ich is not very high functioning. At best, its batteries need changing. At worst, I think the whole thing needs ripping out and replacing. He operates seemingly without any interface between what is thought and what is expressed. In most of us, this would be catastrophic. But Phil is a benign man, and the worst that his unconscious can throw at us is a mild expression of concern that the weather might be about to turn a little cooler than he had anticipated.

  The great benefit to him of this slight malfunction is that he can talk. In the beginning was the Word, but before that there was Phil.

  You’ll see him at breakfast commentating his way through his choices at the buffet table.

  ‘Marmalade perhaps today or some honey maybe no had that yesterday it’ll be the jam today and maybe a croissant but not a chocolate one had too many of them for tea and besides need to watch the old waistline ah hello Ned how you doing son Ullrich for today I reckon pass us the butter . . .’

  Sometimes you’re not sure whether he’s talking to you, talking on the phone, thinking out loud or actually commentating. You have to study closely the nuances to determine whether these are musings or actual communication.

  ‘Going to be hot today yup for sure Armstrong to make his move bloody iron couldn’t get the damn thing working and the sat nav packed up last night reckon that final climb’ll splinter them today had too much cheese last night woke up bloody thirsty in the night too think Hushovd’ll edge it today don’t you Nick, er Ned. Ben. Morning all.’

  Morning, Phil.

  Yet, even on those early Tours, his voice was bedding itself into my unconscious. Accompanied by Paul Sherwen, the pair of them go through the gears as the stage reaches its end. As the bunch chases the break, the algebra narrowing, the equation of the inevitable catch holding steady, it’s Phil’s voice that will rise to prominence, and which signifies, more than any other sound, July and the Tour de France.

  There’s a section of the show in which Phil and Paul answer viewers’ emails. The office in London filters the best ones, and faxes (yes, faxes!) them through to our truck parked in a field somewhere in France. (If they could find a way of installing a telex machine in the truck, we’d be using that instead of laptops.) The two commentators, sitting side by side in a ridiculously cramped studio, gaze up at the camera, read out the questions and answer them. In doing that, one of them has to pull off one of television’s trickiest feats: the art of looking pleasantly interested in what the other person is saying while not actually looking at them.

  Occasionally these sections will be illustrated with some expert opinion. Men like Rolf Aldag, Graham Jones or Laurent Fignon, while he was still alive and working for French TV, will be consulted. Sections of their interviews will then be dropped into the coverage in answer to a particular enquiry. There came a time on the 2009 Tour when a viewer asked for my opinion.

  I had written in a column for the ITV website at the beginning of the Tour that Lance Armstrong had no chance of winning it. But after a week’s racing and a succession of things going his way, that prediction looked far less secure. I was being asked if I still stood by my statement.

  Phil read out the email, and threw it over to me, posing the question like this. ‘Well, let’s find out the answer. Ned, what do you think? Can Lance Armstrong still win the Tour?’ I had recorded an answer in which I concluded that, no, he couldn’t, and wouldn’t win it. Then, in the final edit the answer was grafted on to Phil’s question, and the show then went on its course.

  It was an important moment for me though. My opinion had been sought and had been deemed worthy of voicing. And what’s more, I was right. Armstrong couldn’t win the Tour that year, and he didn’t. It wasn’t perhaps the hardest call to make in the history of sporting predictions, but it was a start. It had taken me the best part of a decade to muster the self-confidence to make a major judgement I could justify.

  Phil had even got my name right. Someone must have written it down for him in his notes.

  These are the voices and the faces of July then. In the company of Gary, Phil, Paul and Chris, I have become absorbed with the sport, and will gladly corner anyone at any party anywhere in the world and talk endlessly about the Tour, whether I have been invited to or not. A bore has been spawned.

  But still, even now, when I am about to see the little red cue light at the front of the camera flick on, I feel much like that fourteen-year-old boy, sitting on the carpet in the middle of his bedroom, clutching the phone and holding his breath.

  THE YELLOW BOOK

  At Arsenal Football Club’s shiny north London home, the Emirates Stadium, there is an area between the two dressing rooms and the tunnel. It is an empty space, really, whitewashed and unremarkable. But here’s the interesting part: this nondescript architectural afterthought is known as the ‘Sterile Zone’. I should explain. There is no actual need to scrub up with disinfectant, or pull on McDonald’s worker-style hairnets before entering. It simply means that there is a particular type of person who may not enter: the journalist. If I weren’t so care-worn and gnarled, I’d be faintly offended.

  At the end of a match, we wait outside the Sterile Zone with our noses pressed to the glass of a fire-door, watching the players trudge off the pitch, and then re-emerge from the changing room a little later, washed, dressed and pomaded. Then, generally speaking, they disappear without talking to us. Arsenal, by the way, are one of the more obliging football clubs, but our contact with the players is every bit as regulated as the word ‘sterile’ suggests.

  Recently, I have been forced to conclude that football players don’t actually exist. At least not in the way that you and I would define existence. You need a strong grasp of quantum theory to understand the ephemeral nature of their being. After they plug in their iPods and board the coach, they reappear almost instantly in a hotel so exclusive it can only be glimpsed for nano-seconds by scientists working in the CERN large hadron collider. Or they disappear from view via a wormhole located at some regional airport normally reserved for the military. Either way, th
ey just vanish.

  But cyclists are real people. And they sleep in real hotel rooms. The proof for this can be found in The Yellow Book.

  Handed out free of charge to all accredited personnel on the Tour, this indispensable volume contains all the vital practical information that is needed to navigate the route in a car, trying to keep pace with the peloton. Written in hilariously bad English there is a token amount of historical guff and the potted histories of start towns. But, critically, it also lists the hotels in which the teams are staying every night. With addresses and telephone numbers.

  An open invitation to stalk them!

  The first time I was handed a Yellow Book, I was astonished. Even at night and over his breakfast the next morning, the likes of Lance Armstrong would be afforded no peace by the Tour. It’s a wonder they didn’t cut 5,000 copies of his room key and hand them out with every book.

  The helpfulness doesn’t stop there. Most teams will pin a photocopied list of names and room numbers to the wall of the entrance lobby. This speeds up the check-in procedure as the riders get back from the race. But it has the, perhaps, unwitting side-effect of enabling journalists to doorstep them as they nip from room to room.

  In fact, it was in just such a circumstance that I once spent an awkward minute or two in the company of Eddy Merckx. I’d actually been looking for his son, Axel. I’d found out his hotel room number, and was just approaching the door when his dad appeared, leaving the room. He nodded curtly at me. I was suddenly overcome with embarrassment. The last thing I wanted to do was give the five-time Tour de France winner the impression that I was stalking his son. So I walked on, thinking I could duck round the corner and head back once the coast was clear. The only problem was that Eddy turned and walked in the same direction as me, at the same time and at roughly the same pace.

  Eventually we arrived at the lift. To complete the charade I felt I ought to get in. Eddy joined me and together we stood in silence. I thought of a dozen things to ask him. I didn’t ask any of them. Then we got out of the lift together and crossed the foyer together. He then left the hotel.

  I sat down, and tried to figure out how long I should leave it before I went back up to Axel Merckx’s room and tried again.

  The Tour de France inhabits a kind of ‘infected zone’, a space without coherent jurisdiction. The laws that govern journalistic etiquette are often vague. Sometimes they are non-existent. That’s not to say that they don’t apply. It’s just that no one is quite sure how they might apply, because no one knows what they are.

  It is in and around hotels where the public and the private lives of the Tour de France mix. Here is the uncomfortable middle ground, where athletes pad in their sponsored leisurewear across the shining floor tiles of hotel lobbies, greeting family members who have flown in for a visit, mingling with riders from opposing teams, ordering caffè lattes, and battling with wi-fi access codes. Along the endlessly repeating corridors above, behind closed doors, there are other riders, dressing wounds and grimacing through their massages.

  This is where, in theory at least, the din of the race withdraws, and the riders are granted a little sanctity. But not much of it. Show me the hotel foyer, and I’ll show you the journalist, waiting in ambush.

  The first time I ever had cause to strap a pot plant to my head and apply foyer-coloured camouflage paint to my face was after that momentous cock-up on the streets of Paris back in 2003. To compound my agony at having downgraded the maillot jaune to a mundane item of knitwear, I had now been sent off on a mission to winkle David Millar out of the security of his hotel room, just so he could relive the moment all over again for the benefit of our viewers.

  I had discovered, by consulting The Yellow Book, that Millar’s Cofidis team were to be housed twenty kilometres south-east of Paris in a 4-star auberge. We had set off through the thinning Paris traffic, while Matt phoned as many of his contacts as he could, including Millar himself, whose mobile remained resolutely switched off. When we’d finally reached the place, there was no sign of him. The receptionists gazed upon us with deep suspicion as we skulked around outside the lobby with a clatter of equipment, all wearing the same pitifully needy expression. It was already late and we were hungry. Lean, wild dogs at the door.

  While I gazed impotently around the place looking for salvation to jump out from behind the concierge’s polished desk, Matt had been busying himself outside the hotel. He’d interviewed French mechanics as they hosed down the time-trial bikes in the drying sun.

  Dinner time came and went, without so much as an amuse-bouche to share between us. Gloom settled in. We stopped talking to one another completely. Matt’s phone remained mute. The expressions on the faces of the hotel staff shifted imperceptibly towards a position of sympathy.

  This was my first experience of an evening shift on the Tour: staking out some poor sod in a hotel whose only wish is that you would give up and leave him alone to his massage and his evening meal. And all the while you too are thinking that all you really want is to give up and leave him alone to his massage and his evening meal. Yet your duty is to wait and observe, through half-shut doors giving a glimpse into restaurant rooms, how everyone else in the world is rounding off their day with conviviality and claret.

  Cofidis riders had been observed meandering to and from the dinner table. But not Millar. At some point Matt stepped up his assault on the Scotsman’s privacy by obtaining his room number and ringing his bedroom phone. Once again I was staggered to see how easy this was.

  Suddenly, at about 9.30 that night, Matt’s rabbit-and-hat trick worked. We spotted the tall, awkward figure of Dave Millar loping slowly towards us across an interior courtyard in a baggy Cofidis tracksuit. Grim-faced, he shook our hands, and then talked at some length about his disappointment.

  It was all down to Matt, of course. Watching his tireless efforts in the lobbies of hotels has taught me a great deal about persistence.

  If the meerkat is at home in the desert, then Matt lives for the hotel foyer. I have spent countless hours in his company on evening duty, making nuisances of ourselves under the tut-tutting gaze of the receptionists. But while I have felt irritated, bored and discomforted by the experience, I strongly suspect Matt has enjoyed every second. When all trace of adrenalin has been and gone, and all conversation dried up to irritable grunting, Matt Rendell is the only member of our quartet who can still retain his focus, eyes on stalks and head flicking from side to side as he nervously tracks the comings and goings in the foyer.

  On another occasion, we were trying to get an interview with Millar’s former directeur sportif Francis van Londersele.

  We had been hanging around in his hotel for what felt like hours, mainly because it had been. We had doorstepped riders having massages, we had knocked on the doors of empty hotel rooms, checked the gym, the pool and all the rest of it. We kept returning to the foyer, where Matt would take up his favoured position. It was an area of carpeted flooring slightly to the left of reception which afforded a view simultaneously of the front door, the restaurant, the bar, the stairwell, and with a half-step forward and a crane of the neck, the entrance to the toilets.

  Nothing escaped his notice. No rider could slouch by with his hands in his pockets and his gaze directed to the floor without Matt clocking his presence, instantly calculating his usefulness to the cause and accosting him with a beaming smile and outstretched hand. Fearless, he is. And he has been known on more than one occasion heartily to greet absolutely the wrong rider with entirely the wrong name.

  ‘Federico!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Manuel?’ He gets it right eventually.

  For the umpteenth time, he dialled van Londersele’s number and this time it cut through. ‘Francis? Allo. C’est Matt . . . Matt du Foyer.’

  Matt du Foyer! The aristocrat of the media stakeout, a titled hack. Brilliant. Just thinking about it still brings me out in a smile.

  There were still other occasions when I suspect I owe His Foyer
ness my broadcasting life. Late one evening, well after the highlights show had been put together and sent back to London for broadcast, Matt and I were called into the truck by Steve Doherty. We shot a glance at each other. This is almost always ominous, doubly so, when everyone else in the truck is told to get out, so that there can be no witnesses. We feared the worst.

  Inside the dark of the truck, Steve looked up at us. ‘What stories have you got for me for tomorrow?’

  Matt cleared his throat.

  Rashly, I spoke up. ‘Well . . .’ but then I realised instantly that I had nothing to say.

  I tried to buy time within the sentence itself, which rarely works. ‘. . . I was thinking that there might be some value in doing a piece which in some way reflects what people are saying about . . .’

  Matt backed me up. ‘Yup. That.’ He nodded his agreement. Steve looked back down at his running order for the next day, which featured a blank item where ours should be.

  ‘Get to a hotel. Get me some Aussies. I want Aussie riders. In a hotel. I want banter.’

  We were stranded at the top of a mountain. It was already quite late. We were miles from any hotel with Aussies in it. This sounded as close to impossible as any task I had been set on the Tour.

  ‘OK, Steve, no problem.’ We left.

  As we sat in traffic inching down the mountain, Matt phoned as many people as he knew in World Cycling, who even had a tangential connection with anyone or anything Australian. We didn’t reach the hotel of the Française des Jeux team much before 9.30 at night.

  To my amazement, though, once again Matt had done his thing. He led the way, as behind him we clattered into the hotel foyer, trailing wires and dropping batteries as we went. Breathlessly, we arrived at the designated hotel room, aware that riders and team staff were beginning to turn in for the night and that our appearance stretched their definition of open access way beyond what might be considered reasonable. Nervous of what reception awaited us, we knocked on the door.