How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  Yet Armstrong vanished. He was gone. We’d looked everywhere for his team car. We’d considered all the avenues he could have turned into. We’d asked the right people and kept our eyes open, but we had drawn a blank.

  Just as we turned and filed back towards the TV truck. Just as we were hatching a version of events that might explain, or even justify, the fact that the ‘Finish Line Crew’ was returning to base without the big interview of the day, we ran into him.

  He was at the centre of a small knot of cycling journalists. The guys from the press had trapped and encircled him with their Dictaphones. We joined the circle, our microphone suddenly swelling the numbers. I held back with the questions to gauge the tenor of the conversation.

  There was a difficult balance to be struck. Lance had clearly been spotted and persuaded to talk by a pack of writers. I had to respect that fact. Understandably, perhaps, the written press have a high regard for what they do and a fairly obdurate disregard for the work of TV and radio. They resent our privileges. They resent our facile lines of questioning. They resent our demands for space (have you seen how big our cameras are?) and, frankly, they sometimes just resent us. Now they had cornered the main man on their own, it was made clear to me, from the scowls of disapproval, that he was theirs, and theirs alone.

  I listened.

  ‘Lance, another day in yellow. How does it feel?’

  ‘Lance, talk us through the closing stages.’

  Where was the question? Had I missed it? I could tell from the knitted brows of the writers that all the while they were holding their recorders close to Armstrong’s lips, they weren’t listening to a thing. They were formulating a plan of attack. They were scheming, manoeuvring the conversation to a point from which they could launch their attack and fire in the silver-bullet Simeoni question. Armstrong looked to me as if he was fully aware of what was going on, too. The unasked question was the elephant in the huddle.

  This was a rough-and-ready encounter, which was taking place in a public place on neutral ground. There were no chaperones or media officers. He was alone and so were we. There was no barrier to keep us apart. We were face to face and inches apart. This type of confrontation, when it comes to it, is not without its tensions. The Simeoni question would stir things up for Armstrong. It would invoke the spectre of his association with the wrong people.

  ‘What went on between you and Simeoni, today?’ I could wait no longer. And in an instant, I knew for certain that no one had asked him that question yet. Their microphones all inched forward a notch. We were bunched together so tightly now, that we might have been rehearsing a world record attempt to see how many people you could fit in a telephone box, only without the telephone box.

  He looked right at me. Very close. ‘I just follow on the wheels.’

  And with that, he broke into the broadest of smiles. He seemed pleased with the joke, and enjoyed a little ripple of sympathetic laughter from some of the onlookers. Then he turned half away from me, a dismissive gesture designed to close the chapter. His smile appealed to the other guys to chip in with a different line of enquiry. I knew he didn’t want to hear my voice again, but that if I hesitated for a fraction, he would take that as a sign of weakness and ride off.

  ‘There is a rumour that you asked Mario Cipollini that he shouldn’t be selected . . .’

  He’d turned back to me now, and he didn’t wait for me to finish my question. ‘That’s absolutely not true.’

  ‘Not true?’

  Filming to my left, I found out when I reviewed the footage later, John had started a slow zoom, ever tightening into Armstrong’s taut features. ‘One hundred per cent not true. Absolutely not true. How can I ask a team who to take? I can barely control that on my own team.’

  Our encounter was finished. For once, I felt, it had been a score draw. In his long and winning Tour career, Armstrong had enjoyed many great days. This wasn’t one of them. I rushed back to the truck, with the tape. My throat was dry.

  Elsewhere, amidst the debris of the splintered peloton, Matt had cornered Simeoni.

  ‘Yes, it’s true. Cipollini did everything to keep me out of the Tour team.’ He looked bruised, but coherent. ‘Armstrong showed what sort of person he is today.’

  We ran both interviews in full. Gary Imlach’s carefully chosen words that closed the programme that night were among the best I have ever heard in a sports programme. He touched on Armstrong’s greatness before going on to say, ‘Armstrong needs grudges the way that the Flying Scotsman needs a steady supply of coal.’ He continued, ‘What we saw on the road today was the most powerful cyclist in the world using his status to take revenge on a man who won’t make in his career what Lance is going to make this month.’

  It was the tail end of only my second Tour, and I was now recognisable to Armstrong. Up to this point, I had really only had cause to celebrate the man. Now I had been brought face to face, literally, with something different: Armstrong continuing his battles off the bike. From that moment on it’s possible that he became more aware of me in the press pack. I certainly felt that the ground had shifted a little, and that our subsequent encounters were defined by the lines we had drawn that day. As a journalist, the taped encounter left me a little exhilarated, but, in equal measure, uncertain.

  EN ROUTE

  There is a misconception among my friends and family back at home that I spend every July stopping off to sketch a Roman viaduct, or perhaps to take in an open-air opera in some town square. Pure fallacy. There is nothing very charming about following the Tour de France. For the most part, getting around the route of the Tour de France involves sitting wordlessly in a hired car that belches diesel fumes into the atmosphere, while wondering which type of sandwich you might choose from the service station, if the traffic ever starts moving again.

  At the beginning of each Tour the three of us, sometimes four, when Matt is in our car, have to confront the reality of thousands of miles in front of us. There are routines to observe, conversations to beget and forget, old jokes to be revisited, new ones to develop (although this is becoming a rarer occurrence).

  July is made up of moments like this.

  Matt is at the wheel, accelerating hard and missing gears with insouciant abandon. I am in the passenger seat beside him. A heap of photocopied A4 sheets detailing our itinerary spills uselessly across my knees. A week ago, they were all bound in a sensible folder, but chaos has consumed them. Woody is fully engaged in our hunt to find a bed for the night. He leans forward from the back seats, trying to help us navigate. Liam, iPod in ears, slumped against the door, eyes half closed, is praying to the French god of food, Michelin. He won’t say much until we’ve arrived.

  But, even though we’ve only just started, it’s worth stopping here. A freeze-frame of our grey Renault Espace trundling up a charmless provincial industrial estate in search of human comfort. Following the Tour.

  Let me begin with luggage.

  Suitcases are such hateful things. They represent misery in bulging plastic form. Heaved with loathing from pillar to post, and left in the back of the car to melt in unreasonable temperatures, their glowering presence makes manifest your distance from home. The long expanse of their zips reminds you of the distance to be traversed before home is reached again.

  Experienced Tourists can probably date suitcases to the exact stage. Like trees add a ring for each year, so our cases accrue the scurf of daily decay. One year, the strap on my big blue one finally broke. I laughed at it. I literally stood there on the damp pavement outside the gloomy Hotel de la Croix Blanche in Tarbes, laughing scornfully at a bag.

  They are dictators: they impose their will; they determine your happiness.

  Like a stiffening bovine corpse left out in the summer’s heat and allowed to rot, a suitcase will start to swell. By about day five, this becomes a problem. Inside it there is a burgeoning pressure, a building up of noxious gases: by-products of a rot that has infected clothes left for dead. Generally speaking,
it starts with the socks.

  At first, it’s manageable. Prologue socks can be easily contained. But a day of pounding up and down the streets of some prestigious regional capital in pursuit of riders on carbon-fibre bikes will grind a pair of Gap ankle socks into a state of compacted and frayed filth. Some simple rules should be observed that will help contain the carnage if diligently followed. A little suitcase husbandry is critical.

  So, listen up. Should you be lucky enough to sit down for dinner in the comforting surroundings of a brasserie, your socks will need changing before you head for the bar. Do this as soon as you get to the hotel room. Pair them up in their saline filth, roll them together and slip them inside the complimentary plastic sack that is meant for your laundry order. This can be found by sliding back the door to the left of the desk with the leatherette wallet containing information on how to dial internationally using the phone on your bedside table.

  Should you find yourself in a hotel too modest for a laundry service, don’t despair. Underneath the desk with the telephone on it, or just to the right of the door, you will find the waste bin. Take out the small white bin liner. This will do for a few days but won’t last longer than that, as it will tear. Or simply melt away.

  Then unzip the inner lining at the top of the suitcase and slide the bagged-up socks in there. If the Tour starts in the temperate gloom of Belgium or Brittany or, indeed, Britain, you might get a few days’ grace before the plastic starts to degrade, allowing them to infect the healthier tissue in the main body of the case, spreading their malignancy. But be warned: by week two, there will be nothing left that doesn’t look, and smell, like it’s been stuffed down the back of a couch.

  It is a kind of slow misery, watching the disorder begin, gain a foothold and then ride roughshod over all the best intentions.

  Back at home there is a rhythm and a structure to the process of packing. Over the years, it has become a source of some pride to me. Packing has become a work of great finesse, very different from the wild overcomplication of my first year on the Tour. Shorts are in their rightful place. Shirts, too. Pants, adapters, and chargers; the multiplying mutant strands of twenty-first-century life. Everything neatly displayed and in pristine order.

  Then there are the nonsense items; all the other nuts and bolts. They are signifiers of a perplexing naivety taken on the trip in a spirit of wild optimism, and then neglected the whole way round. This can be a sketchbook or a pair of swimming trunks, but most years it takes the form of a thick and impenetrable novel. Two years ago, it was Crime and Punishment. I read as far as the crime, but by the time we’d reached Limoges, I’d given up on the punishment.

  It is a trip of three and a half weeks, if you include the days spent filming before the start of the race. It can feel like months. A rider once told me that he too sits in his hotel room of an evening after yet another gruelling stage, opens the route book at the relevant page, and measures with the pad of his thumb the thickness of pages passed, against that of those remaining. Reaching the halfway mark is like the first glimmer of dawn after a long and sleepless night. You suddenly become aware that it is possible that this whole thing might, at some distant point in the future, end. You know, actually end.

  There are daily irritants. For me, the most challenging of these is the need to appear passably turned out in front of the camera. Some people are born presentable, others have presentability thrust upon them. That’s me. The effort to appear even remotely tidy – smooth of chin, slick of hair and sporting a pressed shirt – leaves me weak. And, routinely, I fail.

  Let’s leave aside the problem area of my face for a moment, which tends to sport an angrily burnt nose, and eyes that permanently bear the wrinkles of another dreadful night’s sleep. No, the thing I struggle most of all with is my inability to iron.

  The battle starts even before I leave for France. I stalk the big clothes shops of Oxford Street, picking up polo shirts and wrinkling them to see how quickly and smoothly they unfurl. I know what I am looking for, even as the security guard eyes me with suspicion. Never mind the cut and the colour, are they easy-iron? But I’ve never cracked it. I might buy half a dozen new shirts each summer, only to find that at least four of them won’t be fit for purpose and will end up at home, adding another layer to my polo-shirt mountain.

  I crave polyester. My dreams are woven in simple nylon.

  How I envy Gary Imlach. He has amassed, during his twenty-odd years of Tour experience, a collection of shirts that are as unchanging and timelessly uncrumpled as Phil Liggett’s smiling face. The trick he has refined is to wear his ‘non-broadcast’ shirt in the air-conditioned gloom of the TV truck while he is scripting, thinking and generally preparing. His ‘broadcast-quality’ shirt, that is to say the favoured shirt singled out for the purposes of the day in question, hangs patiently on a hook behind him. Late on in the day comes the moment when the scripts are printing off and he’s ready to leave the truck, find a scenic backdrop and record the closing to the show. Then, and only then, does he slip on the unwrinkled shirt, and stroll out into the sun. Perfect.

  The only time this really couldn’t work was on the Tourmalet in 2010, when a deluge meant that the only sensible clothing was a bin bag. Still, he’d managed to iron his hair.

  I quizzed him about his regime once. He told me that his first decade covering the Tour had been spent in much the same despair as mine with regard to ironing. Until that is, he discovered ‘steaming’. It seems he used to hang the shirt on the shower rail in his hotel room, carefully adjust the angle of the head and the trajectory of the hot water stream, and then, after setting it to ‘Unbelievably Hot’, allow it to run until his accommodation resembled an Istanbul hammam. Seemingly unconcerned by the 92 per cent humidity that built up in his bedroom, Gary was able to leave for work in the morning buoyed by the knowledge that he would not be plagued by crumpledness, confident that his journalistic acumen would not be undermined by a crap collar. These days, he’s refined this down to one of those portable hand-held steamers, which he wields with extraordinary dexterity.

  I, on the other hand, iron. I iron on desks, bedside tables, sink tops, chairs. Sometimes I iron on ironing boards, although these occasions are rare. Any half-decent forensic scientist could track my progress round France by recording the distinctive scorch marks left by my travel iron on the work surfaces of cheap hotels. They are cloven hoof marks of a ruminant hack.

  Ironing involves forward planning. However late I might finally get to bed, the need arises to think about tomorrow’s shirt. It must be ironed right there and then. It cannot wait till the morning. The reason for this is simple enough: the iron travels with us. There is no time in the morning to allow it to cool down naturally. A hot iron, even if wrapped in a stolen hotel towel, should never be placed in your luggage alongside a nougat-related confectionery gift supplied to you by the Office of Tourism of Montelimar. Really, never.

  I would like to say that I have become adept at this down the years, but it would not be true. Any casual observer of our Tour coverage will recognise the wilting collars and ragged seams that characterise my sub-standard attempts at grooming. But assuming that I have managed to get down to the breakfast room wearing a shirt that doesn’t draw open ridicule or even hostility from my colleagues, the next hurdle I have to overcome is the ritual of the morning bad moods.

  Over an endlessly repeating cycle of croissants and stubby baguette ends garnished with pats of butter unfolded from foil wrappings and miniature pots of confiture de fraises, I have to confront the daily disparate psychopathologies of the crew with whom I share my professional life.

  If Matt is with us, then he has normally jumped the starting gun by a good hour, found a local newsagent, and committed to memory every word of at least three newspapers in three different languages. His mind is fizzing with cycling minutiae, as he juggles breakfast and deep thought. He pushes his laptop’s luck by sloshing coffee and orange juice around the table. He has cycling on his mind, a
nd cannot conceive of a world not similarly obsessed. At this hour, he struggles to find like-minded conversation partners.

  ‘You know what?’ No one answers. ‘The thing about Juan Antonio Flecha is this . . .’

  ‘Not listening, Matt.’

  A moment later, he understands his error of judgement. ‘Yeah. Suppose so. Yup.’

  Liam is always last down. Breakfast for him is the slow unfurling of a frown. It is his chance to emit silence.

  Generally speaking, at the agreed hour of our departure, negotiated at midnight the night before in the lobby of the hotel, Liam will be loading up salami and soft cheese onto another baguette. As he heads for the car, he is still sloshing a steaming cup of black stuff and mumbling profanities about the quality of the coffee in French hotels.

  Woody, having drained the orange juice dispenser dry, will have passed through almost unnoticed, save for a sneezing fit. He has a habit of sneezing three times, one after the other, and turning each individual sneeze into a foul-mouthed (nosed?) profanity. Atch-anker! Atch-ollocks! Atch-osspot! Just the three, and then he’ll let it rest, before silently mixing a pot of honey into a plain yoghurt.

  Still, he has his uses. He’s the one who remembers to bring the squeezable Marmite with him from home.

  On certain rare occasions, my colleagues might actually ask what we’re doing that morning, who we would be chasing. They might feign interest. But if I start to explain the nuances of the cycling story with too much journalistic enthusiasm, I will be met with the ‘Partridge-shrug’. This takes its name from Alan Partridge’s famous restaurant scene and is a gesture of such complete indifference that it withers the soul and diminishes both the shrugger and the shruggee. And so it is, lost in our private little worlds, that we load into our vehicles the stuff which we had unloaded only hours before.