How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read online

  Since his racing career ended, he has been working for Eurosport, where, for me, he invites unflattering comparison with the late, great Laurent Fignon and the idolised Laurent Jalabert, the pundit on France Télévisions, whose urbane charm has won him universal admiration. But at least he doesn’t have to put out all those barriers every morning.

  Which brings us to Thomas Voeckler: the anti-Virenque.

  Few riders inspire as much affection and genuine respect as Thomas, the man with the widest beaming smile in world cycling. He has a naturally engaging temperament and an inclination to good manners, which puts us all to shame. There have been times when I have wanted to jump over the barricades and give the man a hug. The most recent of these came on the 2009 Tour when he held off Cavendish and the marauding HTC-Columbia train to ride out a solo win into Perpignan. It was a stage that the Manxman would have underlined three times over in red ink as a banker win. It would have been the last thing Voeckler would have wanted, naturally, an unrestrained hug from an English journalist. But that’s the kind of reaction he provokes in people, not least the French. This is a man who they properly worship. He’s also the only rider I’ve ever asked to sign anything. I have a poster at home advertising the Grand Départ of the 2005 Tour in Voeckler’s home department of the Vendée. He’s been Photoshopped onto it so that it looks like he’s riding over water. How fitting.

  It’s hard not to talk of this guy in the diminutive. Pick your patronising cliché; it probably applies. But as Matt has often turned to me and angrily pointed out, the man deserves and demands our respect.

  His coming of age was in 2004. His was the kind of gutsy almost-achievement that you would more readily associate with English cricket teams. It bears comparison with Mike Atherton’s mind-bending powers of concentration as he ground away at the crease over the best part of two days to save a Test match against South Africa in 1995. To cricket purists, that was deemed to be one of the greatest innings of all time. This is what Atherton wrote about his career-defining moment: ‘I was in an almost trance-like state. It was a state of both inertia and intense concentration and I knew that I was in total control.’

  Never mind Voeckler, the whole of France, through his 2004 endeavours, entered an ‘almost trance-like state’.

  Voeckler claimed the yellow jersey on Stage 5. He didn’t win the stage, Stuart O’Grady did that, but he was part of a breakaway group in which he was the best-placed rider in the General Classification. Armstrong, containing the pace of the peloton and mindful that greater challenges lay ahead (he was always the master of targeted effort), had let the break get twelve and a half minutes up the road, allowing Voeckler to coast home in fourth place on the stage but straight into the yellow jersey.

  Sitting wrapped up in a kagool to stave off the chilly Normandy winds, I pondered this scenario as I frowned at the TV monitor showing Voeckler, the ‘virtual yellow jersey’. Just one year into my life as a cycling correspondent, my internal mental slide-rule was still too undeveloped to cope. I found it hard to calculate how the race could now be led by a man who had so far finished no better than fourth on any stage. I failed to understand the strange honour that was about to be bestowed on the short, awkward-looking rider from a team sponsored by a brioche bakery.

  Don’t these temporary wearers of the yellow jersey feel a little sheepish? Aren’t they just a little embarrassed that their achievement has only come about because they’ve been deemed to be too irrelevant to anyone in the race who really mattered? Glancing across at Chris Boardman, who had been the temporary custodian of the maillot jaune on three occasions in the past, I felt like asking him what on earth all the fuss was about. Of course, Chris had actually won his stages to win yellow, so the comparison might have seemed disrespectful. And anyway, he was dozing off.

  France, unlike Chris, seemed to be beside itself with excitement. The Voeckler story was only just beginning. It reinvigorated the home nation’s love for the Tour, and taught me much about the nuance of the race; the pack of cards, which gets a daily shuffling.

  Voeckler was about to become a great star, a national icon, by the time the Pyrenees reared up in front of the race. On Stage 13, to La Mongie, half his advantage was wiped out. But the next day, up to Plateau de Beille, Armstrong threw down the gauntlet and said, ‘Go.’ His regiment of blue-clad US Postal riders forced a brutal pace, their leader majestically sitting in behind them in shades. Voeckler, number 129, slipped off the pace immediately, rocking from side to side in an awful ungainly effort, up and out of the saddle before collapsing back down again. His yellow top was completely unzipped and flapped at his sides. He licked his lips, and sometimes looked as if the pain was forcing his eyes closed. He knew he had a certain amount of time he could afford to cede to Lance Armstrong if he wanted to remain in yellow, but, with each passing minute, he was shedding it.

  In the final eleven kilometres he knew he could lose five minutes, but no more. Far ahead of him on the road now, Armstrong and the Italian climber Ivan Basso were alone. The mountainside was encrusted with campervans disgorging hundreds of thousands of spectators, many wearing the orange of the Basque country, all of them straining to get a view of Voeckler as news of his determined rearguard action swept through the race. In our truck too, watching at the finish line, our team had only one eye on Armstrong, the story was now all about Voeckler’s suffering and his spirit. We were all transfixed.

  Still the road bore upwards, and the heat baked down. With five kilometres to go, Voeckler found a slight kick. He stood up again in his pedals and powered past a backmarker who couldn’t hold the pace. A great cheer went up. Lance Armstrong won the stage, comfortably riding past Basso in the final 100 metres. He looked barely out of breath. Now Voeckler knew what he had to do. Armstrong had set him his target. He could lose no more than five minutes, four seconds. A team car drew up alongside him and shouted encouragement. As he entered the last 500 metres it was still in the balance. He lowered his frame onto the drops and tried to time-trial home. That burst of pace was enough. As he rounded the final bend, he knew he was safe. Weakly he punched out his triumph, clawing at thin air. His expression was caught halfway between delight and despair. A twin-faced gargoyle.

  In that instant, France fell in love with Thomas Voeckler. I fell in love with the way France had fallen in love with Thomas Voeckler, and came within a whisker of falling in love with Thomas Voeckler myself.

  I don’t care how dry a salami sandwich might be. Try watching that without caring.

  THE GO-TO MEN

  My childhood was not so very unusual. I watched a lot of television, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds, since there wasn’t very much television to watch. BBC1 only came on during the hours its director-general deemed appropriate for people to be watching telly. ITV was considered too risqué, and we could only get BBC2 if my dad stood right in front of the fire holding the aerial fully extended above his head. He could only ever manage a few minutes of that at a time.

  Some of what I remember best, though, is watching sport. And, just as smells can trigger the strongest memories, so too can the voices of commentators. I can reflect on seminal experiences set against drama unfolding in the voice of David Coleman. Of course, there was also Bill McLaren, who sounded like toast and Marmite and drizzle tapping on the windows. There was Murray Walker, three words from whom would leave me arranging the cushions on the couch for a Sunday afternoon doze. And Brian Moore, whose tones always call to mind crackling hopelessness on a distant football pitch, as England tossed it away again.

  But for some reason it is Coleman and the athletes of the early eighties who hold sway in my imagination. Coe. Ovett. Cram. Daley Thompson. And Shirley Strong.

  Shirley Strong. The plucky hurdler who used to sneak off after her races and smoke fags in the stands with her fans. I can even recall to memory the kind of chuckling ‘good-old-Shirley’ indulgence with which Coleman would embellish live pictures of her chuffing away on an Embassy No. 6 in between heats
at the Gateshead athletics stadium.

  ‘There she is, Shirley. Relaxing as only Shirley can.’

  It’s because we believed we knew them as people that we cared. Whether or not we actually did know them is barely relevant.

  ‘Ho, ho. Typical Shirley.’

  We differentiated in our hearts and minds between the super-smooth, urbane Sebastian Coe and the edgy rough diamond Steve Ovett. Television threw into sharp relief their differences as men, their characteristic weaknesses and strengths as athletes. Coe’s considered eloquence in front of the camera mirrored his friction-free movement as he accelerated off the final bend. Ovett’s pointed, tense shoulders when he ran spoke of frailty but also of unreadable brilliance. He never looked fast, he just was. He spoke little, and with barely concealed reluctance. But I will never forget the moment he turned to the trackside camera after winning through to the 800m final and etched out the letters I L Y to his girlfriend Rachel into the dark air. It was, to my young eyes, shockingly intimate and weirdly compelling.

  We really start to care when we glimpse the human story. These tokens of self, these quirks and tricks and foibles are vital to our appreciation. Television knows this. This is why we go on the hunt for personality.

  On the Tour, this often means we go after David Millar and Robbie McEwen. These two careers have wound and slowly unwound during my spell on the race. To my impatient desire to understand the sport, they brought the words. Over the years they are the men who have dropped into my microphone the verbs, nouns and adjectives that lend cycling its meaning. They are my go-to men.

  Something of Robbie McEwen’s personality is left behind each time he stands before a camera. Close your eyes after he has just delivered a withering evaluation of a rival or a damning appraisal of an underperforming teammate, and you will still see the after-image of his face burnt into your vision. You will see his high cheekbones, his thin lips toying with the notion of a smile, and his bright little brown eyes fixing the interviewer. Rat-a-tat-tat.

  I have great admiration for McEwen. And that’s why on the 2010 Tour, my only encounter with him left me feeling irritated with myself. I was busy trying to grab a cross-section of opinion from as many riders as I could the morning after ‘Chaingate’, Alberto Contador’s somewhat Machiavellian attack on his closest competitor, Andy Schleck. The Luxembourg rider had lost his chain just as he was turning the heat on his rival. Contador took advantage of Schleck’s misfortune to ride past him and into the lead of the Tour de France. It was, some said, ethically questionable. Some riders, admittedly not many, saw it as a breach of etiquette.

  I saw Robbie by his team bus, and came bowling over to him. Even though he expressly told me he was on his way to sign in for the day and couldn’t stop, I went ahead with my interview.

  ‘Should Contador have waited, Robbie?’ I asked. I thrust the microphone at him. He paused a second.

  ‘I don’t know about that, mate. I didn’t see what happened. I’m too concerned about my own race to have an opinion about that,’ he told me, as he rode slowly enough for us to walk alongside him.

  Before I knew what I was about to say, I replied, ‘That’s unlike you, Robbie.’

  I just blurted it out. I didn’t mean it to sound sarcastic. But that’s how he took it, understandably. He looked scornfully at me, shook his head and peddled off. I hope he’s forgotten about that the next time our paths cross.

  He has made a few enemies in the peloton, I am told. And I have to confess that it’s sometimes not hard to see why. He must be a nightmare out on the road – verbal, feral, wildly unpredictable, risk-ready Robbie. My early years on the Tour saw McEwen dominate proceedings. In the lull between Erik Zabel and Cavendish, McEwen was the man, hitting the front of the sprints at the very last second, timing his efforts to perfection.

  What I loved most about his style was the way in which he fed off the efforts of other teams. His Silence Lotto sprint train, such as it was, was a fractured affair, which seemed either never to form at all or to dissolve in the face of greater organisation from other teams. So, more often than not, Robbie would jump on the wheels of opponents’ lead-out men or appear from nowhere through a knotted mass of riders already at maximum effort in the closing fifty metres. He was the street urchin of the sprint.

  But in the media melee, he is a gentleman. More times than I care to mention, McEwen has saved me from drawing a complete blank. You get days when the only notable faces to be presented to the media after a stage are difficult-to-interview Spanish riders, or worse: Vladimir Karpets. Then Robbie will appear, heroically, from behind the podium clutching a bouquet and an ugly glass statue from the sponsors. He’ll make his way languidly towards you, look you full in the eye, crack open a Nestlé Ice Tea, and wait. He is like my guardian angel . . . a fact that I recognised early on in the first week of my first Tour, in another moment of broadcasting confusion pertaining to jerseys.

  In 2003, from Stage 1 onwards, McEwen wore the green jersey for five days, before eventually relinquishing it to his fellow Australian, Baden Cooke. Early on during that sequence I went face to face with the bristling sprinter for the very first time. Nothing more substantial than a microphone separated us.

  I was aware, because it had entered into Tour mythology, that he had delivered a wry one-liner to my predecessor. She had asked him during a live interview after McEwen had won a stage: ‘Robbie, where did you get your energy from for that final sprint?’

  To which he had replied, without blinking, ‘Breakfast.’ And with that he’d walked away. The reporter, for various unrelated reasons, never returned to cover the Tour.

  I went one better. I promoted him. ‘Robbie,’ I opened, brilliantly. ‘What plans do you have now you’re wearing the yellow jersey?’ This last bit was decidedly less brilliant given that he wasn’t actually wearing the yellow jersey. Colour-blind I may have been, but at least I hadn’t put him in a jumper.

  Unaware that I had made the slip at all, I listened with foolish nodding intensity, while McEwen reeled off a complex, fluent, analytical answer. It was all about maximising wattage when required, minimising wasted effort, seeing opportunities, being aware of dangers, feeling his way around the race and, for want of a better cliché, taking each stage as it came.

  Happy that I had got the required answer to my question, I thanked him, and headed away, only to be called back.

  ‘You might wanna do that again, mate.’

  I spun around. McEwen wore the same poker face. Only the merest flicker of amusement in his eyes betrayed what he really thought of my daft question. ‘Yellow jersey?’ he said, in that signature Australian way of turning a statement into a question. For emphasis, he glanced down at his bright green PMU jersey, and then surreptitiously from side to side, as if to check we were alone.

  ‘Oh. Yes. Right.’ He took another long draw on his Nestlé Ice Tea. ‘Thanks, Robbie.’ This time it was my turn to check left and right to see if I was being laughed at.

  We rerecorded the interview, inserting the correct colour. I thanked him again, and entered a position of negative equity with respect to Robbie McEwen. I am still not sure I have broken even.

  The following year McEwen allowed the cameras to film him having his wounds dressed. He’d fallen a few days prior to that, and had huge areas of skin missing from his thigh, hip and buttocks. It made for extraordinary, excruciating viewing, which we actually had to debate whether or not to screen; in particular the moment he stepped under the shower, and screamed, yes, screamed, as the water spilled across his open wounds. A showman, perhaps a show-off. But all the better for it.

  He was also capable of moments of Napoleonic anger. I recall a deluge in Arras. It was 2004, Stage 4. This time, McEwen was indeed wearing yellow. Or as far as I could tell, for it was the kind of rain that not only blurs the image for the TV cameras, it soaks your eyesight too, water bouncing off your head, and streaming down your nose. The team time trial that day was won with a sapping degree of inevitability
by US Postal. In effect, it killed the race as a spectacle. The following morning L’Equipe ran a cartoon that featured two French cycling fans under dripping umbrellas watching Armstrong’s blue train whizz past them. One is turning to the other, and asking, rather demoralised, ‘Yes, but do you think he’ll win in 2005?’

  McEwen’s Lotto team had ridden a stinker. They crossed the line in disarray. With sodden, miserable expressions, they rode on into a congested run-out area. The barriers ended fairly soon after the finishing line, and the riders were almost immediately confronted with the prospect of teetering on their precious bikes through throngs of underwhelmed and very wet locals, with thighs and lungs scorched raw from the exertion. I was positioned at the sweet spot, that area defined after much deliberation, but by common consensus among my small crew, to be the most propitious place for eliciting sound bites from riders too weary to care or too naïve to get away. The run-out area is cycling’s equivalent of no-man’s land, neither totally public, nor restricted to the accredited members of the Tour. It’s like the lanes of traffic in and around multi-storey car parks where no one is quite sure who has priority or right of way, and, if push comes to shunt, who has jurisdiction.

  Sure enough, McEwen appeared in the middle distance, free-wheeling at jogging pace through a parting sea of kagools and umbrellas, with his helmet dangling loosely from his left hand. As he skimmed past me, I thrust an ITV microphone his way and muttered something approaching a formal declaration of surrender. I knew as well as he did that there was no point in talking to the proud sprinter who hated time-trialling’s rigours with a passion and who had just seen his anaemic team give up without so much as a whimper. I pointed my microphone in his direction with as much conviction as a Quaker would point a machine gun.