How Cav Won the Green Jersey (5 page)

Sadly, when I saw the pieces back, I realised that I simply looked an utter arse. There I was, all knees and elbows and silly gears, pretending to be out of breath, with Chris chatting away to camera and sailing along effortlessly in my wake. My one chance to measure myself alongside Chris Boardman, to gain in kudos and rub off a little reflected glory. And I’d blown out my cheeks for comic effect.

I thought of the impeccable Gary Imlach’s vow never to be filmed riding a bike, and, not for the first time, bowed inwardly to his greater wisdom.

* * *

With all this shamefully camp messing around on bikes with Chris, I nearly forgot the main reason for my having been sent to France: to track Mark Cavendish in his attempt to win the green jersey. I was sure that he and I were about to enjoy an easier working relationship. He had, after all, read my account of life covering the Tour, and would perhaps appreciate the particular pressures we have, in our own little ways, to contend with. He would doubtless be full of
sympathy
for my midnight sojourn in a Breton field talking to a French mechanic about hydraulics.

Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way. Talking to Mark Cavendish, both on and off camera, remained a curiously subtle enigma. Undefined, uncertain endings are a hallmark of our encounters. Beginnings aren’t much easier either. He has an unusual way, for example, of giving the interviewer no clear signal as to when an interview should begin. Conventionally, with other riders, this will take the form of a nod, or a deliberate look up, a straightening of the shoulders or a quick, ‘OK, then.’ With Cavendish, you kind of drift into the procedure, unsure, even as you plough through your opening question, as to whether or not the interview has in fact begun. This is just the way it is; the way he is.

Mostly, we got on smoothly enough with our defined roles. We even negotiated our way through a most surprisingly delicate encounter. He’d just pulled on the famous green jersey for the first time that summer, and, with the cameras rolling, turned with a coy three-quarters smile, and simpered, ‘Don’t you think it suits me, Ned?’

I said I thought it did. Very much.

He was happy, by and large, to accept the media obligations of his trade. But not always. There was a tense little situation in a car park in Lorient, which ended well enough, but had started with Cavendish claiming we were treating him like an animal by filming him walking to the bus. There was some truth in that assertion, I suppose. The Tour de France can indeed be bit of a zoo.

But the ‘walking shot’, the ‘car park photo opportunity’ is the stock in trade of reporting the Tour. It might be slightly unimaginative, but it is quite
normal,
and quite essential. News channels call it the ‘today shot’. It lends the story immediacy, giving the viewer a visual context for the unfolding narrative of the morning.

Riders expect it; sponsors and PR managers positively orchestrate it; the Tour demands it. Mark Cavendish has done it a thousand times. But that morning, it enraged him. I wondered what it must feel like to be subjected to that kind of scrutiny. He was there to win bike races, and certainly not to placate journalists. But the encounter told me everything I needed to know about our unchanged relationship, our unequal power play, the unique distance at which the athlete holds the outside world.

By now, of course, Cavendish was in race mode, and as such, he was a different man. I guess his dealings with me, their ease, or lack of it, are a finely calibrated barometer for the pressure he is under. When the bike bit of his life isn’t quite right, the telly bit becomes a torture. I can understand that equation. But one-word losers are every bit as interesting as loquacious winners.

The return to winning ways changed everything, anyway. It always does. And after that sour little exchange, we cracked on with the usual routine. Time and time again, we played out the same pattern as previous years. The towel, the iced drink, the handshake of congratulations, the smile. The winning ride, again and again. It had begun in Cap Fréhel, it continued with Châteauroux, where I had to break the news to him that Bradley Wiggins had crashed out on the road behind him. It came as a genuine shock. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, daring Ofcom to get involved, and forcing Gary Imlach into a pre-emptive apology. He doubled up, then trebled up on these wins by taking the stages into Lavaur and Montpellier, and
then
dropped in another ‘shit’ during a post-race chat in Pinerolo, apropos of not much at all.

And on the Galibier, he put me in my place.

It wasn’t a judo throw of an answer, swinging me over his back, and crashing me onto the floor with little birds tweeting around my unconscious head. But it was pretty smart, and it reminded me of how far I still have to travel before I understand the race without recourse to explanation.

He’d ridden up the mountain in the grupetto, the large clump of sprinters and assorted others who’d been detached from the head of the race, and whose sole ambition was to make the cut-off time. They failed. In fact, they failed by some margin. But the group was so large, that the Tour regulations allowed for them to continue in the race.

Shivering in the freezing winds of the Galibier, and without any means of contacting the rest of our production team stranded miles away in the TV compound halfway down the mountain, I was unaware that, although he had escaped elimination, he had been handed another penalty. So it came as news to me when he said, ‘Obviously, I’ve been docked twenty points in the green jersey competition, which makes that a bit closer.’ His nearest rival, José Rojas had comfortably made the cut.

How did he know this? Was he sure? ‘So, just to confirm, you have been informed that you will lose those twenty points. Is that certain?’ I wanted to make sure of what I had just heard.

‘Anyone who knows bike racing knows that those are the rules.’ He looked squarely at me, and allowed a little pause for the effect of the words to sink in. A hit, a very palpable hit.

When I got back to base, yomping miles back down the Galibier having missed the shuttle bus, I was relieved to find that Cavendish’s answer had caught pretty much everyone on the hop, and had resulted in a frantic fluttering of the pages of the Race Regulations Manual. The gap in my understanding felt less yawning when I realised that Chris Boardman had had to double-check it too. But I was still chastened by the ease with which he had put me away. I wondered how many more years I would have to cover the event, before those gaps eventually silted up with knowledge. Decades more, I suspected.

* * *

The last time I sat down to write about Thomas Voeckler, a confession jumped spontaneously onto the page, rather catching me by surprise in the process. In
July
2005 I had asked Thomas for his autograph. I just wanted it, because I was in awe of him. Because he was brilliant.

Asking for autographs, or rather, being asked by people to ask for autographs, is an occupational hazard for the sports hack. I still have bag full of football shirts from a chronically under-funded kids’ team in south-east London, which I promised to get Frank Lampard to sign four years ago. I still haven’t done it. I just can’t bring myself to ask sportsmen to sign things as it instantly places you in the debit column: fan, and therefore not qualified as a journalist. Not a price worth paying.

So it was with another inner gasp of surprise, that I found myself shouting ‘Thomas! Thomas!’ across the cobbles of the Champs-Elysées. The 2011 Tour was done. My work was finished for the month. My family were alongside me. And yet I felt fit to descend spontaneously to the level of a whooping pre-teen
X-Factor
fan at the sight of the legendary French rider parading through Paris with his teammates.

‘Thomas!’ I trilled.

He caught my eye. I showed him the jersey I wanted signed and the pen I had pinched off someone standing to my side. Probably a child.

He smiled politely. But looked away and rode off.

‘Yup’, I muttered to myself. ‘Let’s just pretend that never happened.’

I handed the pen back, and created a diversion. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I want a beer. Coke, kids?’ My daughters trudged off with me in the general direction of fizz and sugar. Voeckler had done it again. For the second time, he’d turned me into a fan.

On Tuesday, 28 June 2011 Julie Voeckler gave birth to her daughter Lila. Her husband was at her side. He might have been forgiven for spending the previous few days gazing anxiously from the Europcar calendar on the Voeckler family wall, and back again to the sight of Julie’s full-term shape as little Lila bided her time. For Voeckler will have been sweating slightly at the prospect of the mother of all fixture clashes. A new child and the Tour de France. Sometimes life does capricious things like that.

A lot was at stake. The previous autumn, Voeckler had rescued his team from extinction after their sponsor Bouygues Telecom had decided that the best way to market their prestigious B-Box (whatever one of those was) was no longer to stick its logo on the diminutive French Champion’s Lycra. In short, they quit, taking their money with them. Voeckler had offers from a clutch of other teams, but remained loyal to the roster of riders who had been left high and dry.

Eventually, and solely because of Voeckler’s very particular charisma, a sponsor came forward. Europcar, who charge people money to drive cars they don’t own in an uncharacteristically reckless fashion, pinned their green flag to Tommy’s bony backside. They did so, not out of any great sentiment, but purely in the hope that Voeckler would make enough of a splash on the Tour for people like me to write sentences like this that contained the word ‘Europcar’ in future publications.

So the new father to a baby girl (he and Julie already had a son, Mahe) had added a considerable weight of responsibility on his slight frame. His teammates’ jobs were saved, for now, but the Tour had to deliver. A bit like Julie had delivered on the Tuesday, only without the drugs.

Four days later, on the Saturday, the Tour rolled out of his home départment, the Vendée. Predictably, he was subjected to a welter of affectionate attention.

Eight days after that, and just twelve days into Lila’s life, he crossed the finishing line in the main square of Saint-Flour, a town built on a rugged volcanic rock in the heart of the Massif Central. In that instant, and quite unexpectedly, he took over the lead of the Tour de France. Again.

The genesis of this story was, of course, the instant that Johnny Hoogerland and Juan Antonio Flecha were so famously wiped out by the French TV car. Overtaking the riders on a narrow, tree-lined country road, it suddenly swerved erratically to the right, and straight into the Tour de France. Flecha, who never stood a chance, slammed onto the tarmac with violent suddenness. Hoogerland catapulted over his handlebars, towards a barbed-wire fence and into cycling immortality. It was the defining image of the 2011 Tour. But there we will leave Johnny for now, unpicking the steely thorns from his backside. We will, of course, return to him, but up the road something else of huge significance was happening, almost incidentally.

Voeckler was the lead rider in the breakaway when the car struck. He looked over his shoulder, saw the crash, then stepped hard on his pedals and accelerated out of the shot.

Some of this might have been the pure adrenalin of the moment. Yet, like a darts player totting up the permutations of an unlikely checkout, Voeckler knew instinctively what to do. In that split second, he had calculated the consequences. Hoogerland was just twenty-one seconds down on him in the General Classification, a gap that the Dutchman, a more naturally aggressive climber, could
surely
have attacked over the remaining inclines on the stage. That is, Hoogerland could have attacked, had he not ended up tangled in a barbed-wire fence. That kind of slowed him down.

In short, if the peloton let the break go, that crash meant the yellow jersey. Seven years after his improbable defence of the race lead, which had entranced the watching world, Voeckler was suddenly at it again. He didn’t expect it. We didn’t expect it. And little Lila will be told about it for many years to come.

The clockwork of memories rewound to 2004. Could it really have been 2004? A whole seven years ago? I was just thirty five! A mere, slightly podgy sapling, bending in the force-9 gale of events in just my second Tour de France. Armstrong was smashing the race apart. It was such a long time ago that people still thought Jan Ullrich might win. After a while, with this race ticking away in your heart, you start to measure out your life to its annual rhythm. Because it changes shape each year, more often than not with one defining feature, it tolls the bell of my irresistible ageing. 2007: London. 2008: Alpe d’Huez. 2009: Ventoux. 2010: Tourmalet. 2011: Galibier. The gaps in between are just so much padding. 2004: Voeckler.

Now he stood in open disbelief on the podium in Saint-Flour, his face scrunched into a smile devouring his every feature. He grabbed a fistful of the Europcar (there, I’ve done it again) logo on his yellow jersey, and kissed it with a passion not usually accorded to nylon-based weaves. The consummate professional.