Magic Spanner

by Carlton Kirby

  All this prompted an obvious question: Why bother to have the ultimate spectator sport come to your country and not allow spectators? I asked one of the security people. A little nonplussed, he explained it was to keep the race secure. It wasn’t about entertaining the masses; it was about showing the best of the country to a worldwide audience ‘without interference’ – from the general public, obviously. Well, thanks for the view of the magnet factory! Save for that, I can honestly say I can’t remember a single majestic vista, or anything else for that matter, that would tempt a TV viewer into making the trip.

  The Beijing Tour no longer exists.

  ‘My Gran said nothing cools you like a cup of tea. She was nuts.’

  9

  Comfort Breaks

  11.00 a.m. Time to go racing. But first. . .

  As the Queen Mother, God bless her soul, reportedly once said, ‘Never walk past a loo and never refuse a cup of tea.’

  I would say that’s a pretty good rule for both rider and commentator alike. But what goes in must also come out and there have been numerous occasions when both professional bike riders and commentators have been caught short, either finding themselves low on vital sustenance or indeed rather urgently needing the famous comfort break. Now, if you’re going to spend say five hours of your time riding or commentating on a full stage, you’ll definitely need to relieve yourself at some point. With this always in mind, the first thing I do when I arrive at the TV compound is to look for the pissoir. A rather public but very handy plastic urinal. A very big one. This monstrosity can accommodate five proud male journalists standing in a circle, who, on cool days, regularly chat while doing what they have to do. The women’s cubicle facility is less congenial but apparently better smelling. Anyway, it is rather essential that this upright plastic receptacle is located close at hand if you want to take advantage of an ad break; I would say within 20m (65ft) of the commentary box door would be ideal. If it’s any further away, it can be a devil to find in the maze of trucks and cables that make up any media park. I have known Kelly to go on a walkabout in desperate search of relief and I’ll be left jabbering away on my own for 20 minutes or so. On hot tours – let’s say La Vuelta, where temperatures regularly exceed 35°C (95°F) – these pissoirs can become rank. Conversation around them dries up as the wafts of ammonia gas from the exit fluid produced by numerous beery journalists and engineers billows invisibly around those seeking relief. It makes the eyes water.

  ‘What’s wrong!?’

  ‘It’s OK, I’m not crying. I’ve been for a piss.’

  ‘Ahh.’

  Meanwhile, out on course things are a little more freestyle for the riders.

  It’s amazing how many times I’ve been asked the question, ‘How do the riders go to the toilet?’ Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go! The comfort break has produced various public displays that the cameras and picture editors alike are, on the whole, pretty good at keeping away from broadcast.

  The Start Line

  The start line of a stage on a Grand Tour can be a nerve-jangling time for the riders. Even on the last day of the Tour de France, which is a rather processional affair until the peloton reach Paris, the sprinters will be on edge because this is the most prestigious stage for them to win. The unofficial Sprint World Championships, even. But each day has something worth fighting for: a breakers’ day, a climbers’ day and so on. Any start line is time to go to work. Don’t forget that professional racing is, at its core, a form of combat. Sure, everyone will have emptied their bladders before the off, but the actual racing won’t start until the so-called départ fictif has been completed – and that can take some time. Everyone is fully hydrated before the start of this processional roll-out. This gives the riders a chance to warm up on the move and the fans at the departure venue a look at the riders. It also gives all competitors and teams a chance to check that the bikes are set correctly before racing begins proper at the départ réel, aka Kilometre Zero. This parade can be rather long if there’s a big city to be negotiated before they get out on more open roads. Sometimes there are promotional reasons for a delay before the true start: the riders may be guided through an industrial park passing a major sponsor’s factory or such like. If this happens to be a full commentary day from start to finish, this false start can be purgatory: ‘And there is the Wash-Easy complex . . . the largest producer of industrial launderette machines in Turkey . . . it says here.’

  Once they’re up to speed and the director is happy with the way everything is going, he’ll stick his head out of the sunroof of the leading car, wave his flag and finally they’ll be off. But often not for long.

  If it’s a sprinter’s stage, a breakaway will quickly be allowed to form – and this is the perfect time for the peloton to take a pee. It allows the breakaway to build up a decent buffer and the rest of the pack to do their business at the side of the road. It’s not shown on TV very often, except by accident. It’s not a pretty sight. Sometimes the race leader or the patron of the peloton (a senior and well respected rider) will flamboyantly come to the front and drift to the side of the road. It’s a cue to everyone who needs to go to stop at the side of the road, pull aside their bibs and try to avoid the spray from anyone else. Difficult on a breezy day. All this is supposed to be away from the gaze of the public. Indeed, there are rules about this. And fines. Basically, don’t do it in town or at a place where the crowd is dense. If you do, carefully worded edicts will be issued along with a fine. These contraventions vary in terms of their official description (often euphemistic), depending on the race. They are detailed in the course road book and can be quite hilarious.

  ‘Not respecting the sobriety and conduct expected of a rider.’

  ‘Bringing the race into disrepute.’

  Or even once: ‘Public display of intimate body parts.’

  Take your pick, but basically they all mean a fine for getting your knob out in public. Or, indeed, your lady bits. Fines will follow and are documented in a list of shame the following day as part of the results dossier. We always flip to the back page for a giggle at the Naughty List.

  Sean Kelly’s An Post team was once racing the Tour of Britain while we were commentating on the Vuelta out in Spain, and Sean was sent an email from his Directeur Sportif back home saying that they’d been ‘unfairly fined’ by the organisers. Apparently an angry resident had complained about a couple of the guys peeing over his hedge. Later, it turned out not to have been any of the team’s riders at all but those in the team car itself. This was, of course, hilarious to us as Kelly shouted down the phone, ‘What’s wrong with a sales rep’s toilet?’ Otherwise known as using a regular drink bottle, this is the sort of thing you encounter in lay-bys all over the world. I used to wonder why the bright orange soft drink Irn-Bru was often dumped half-finished by the road. Well, it’s not Irn-Bru.

  Of course, the subject of toilet breaks came sharply into focus at the 2017 Giro, when Tom Dumoulin got his feeding all wrong and found that he needed to evacuate his system. The fact that this happened to be while he was wearing the leader’s jersey in a Grand Tour in front of millions of viewers, just as the peloton was about to tackle an iconic climb, was rather unfortunate. The cameras could not ignore the race leader at such a crucial and potentially decisive moment, no matter what the reason. It was the story, however scatological. Tom Poomoulin was a briefly popular nickname.

  To avoid this sort of thing happening, cyclists have, over the last century, tried to refine a feeding system that avoids such embarrassing and potentially race-losing situations. There are many things to eat that are carb specific and, not to put too fine a point on it, don’t produce stools.

  A favoured snack is a ball of rice, often dipped in honey. Rice is amazing: it is almost entirely metabolised by the human body, being so finely broken down that it generates the maximum amount of energy while leaving very little waste. If you get your feed wrong, however – by taking on too much fibre, say – you can get a problem l
ater, which is exactly what happened to poor old Tom.

  At the famous moment I was sitting next to my co-commentator Dan Lloyd, and at first I couldn’t work out what was going on. I could see him pulling to the side of the road and getting off the bike and I said, ‘He’s got a problem.’ He took off his helmet and then the top came off, the leader’s jersey, and I still had no idea what he was doing. Dan Lloyd, who has some experience of this kind of thing himself, being a former racer, blurted out, ‘Oh no! Oh no! Not that!’ Dan understood as soon as the helmet came off. You have to take the helmet off to get the jersey off. And the jersey has to come off to get the shorts down, which are normally held in place by looped braces under the jersey.

  ‘Not what?’ I asked as the whole process began to unfold. Dan silently mouthed the word shit at me before imploring the cameras to leave Tom alone. The camera operator hadn’t realised either. Thank heavens the director did; so most blushes were saved. As the shorts came down we cut to another shot – though for a split second or two we got to see more of Tom Dumoulin than even his mother has seen in recent years.

  Tom took all the resulting jibes with a smile and a sense of humour. Pictures appeared on the internet of bikes with loos attached to the saddle. Spectators spent the next few days waving bog rolls as he rode past. I’m still surprised that the eventual Giro winner never got offered a sponsorship deal with a toilet roll company.

  Tom wasn’t the first rider – and certainly won’t be the last – to find himself with this kind of problem. It’s a wonder that the French team FDJ used to insist on making their riders wear white shorts, which hide nothing. You’d think they would learn after a junior ended up on a lone breakaway that was completely unexpected. He had a dicky tummy but there were no team helpers to clean him up at the finish, so he ended up on the podium with badly stained shorts. The presentation team on the podium gave him a very wide berth.

  Then Arnaud Démare (also riding for FDJ – is it something to do with the French diet?) pulled over by a camper van on a mountain stage of the Tour de France. He practically tore the door off its hinges and pushed his way past the owner, demanding to use the toilet.

  Sean Kelly remarked to me, off air, ‘Ah yes, he’s got a dose of the scutters.’

  ‘The scutters?’

  ‘Yes. The scutters.’

  Back live on air I said casually, ‘Well, it seems that Arnaud Démare has had a dose of the, um… er… scutters.’

  Sean’s reaction seemed to me extreme: he mouthed a silent but dramatic NOOOO! and began shaking his head and waving his hands around. I carried on until the next ad break, when I turned back to Sean and asked, ‘What is the scutters?’

  It turns out that, as Sean put it, ‘It’s one of the worst fecking things you can say in Ireland!’

  He explained that scutters means the shits, but it’s more that that. It is simply the coarsest description of the worst possible trouser movement you can imagine. It’s only the Irish who fully understand the dark meaning of it.

  Back in Ireland, all the viewers were howling with laughter at the fact that ‘that eejit Kirby just said the word scutters on live TV. Bet it was Sean put him up to it.’

  Sometimes, of course, it is the facilities themselves that fail. On the women’s Tour of Qatar back in 2013, the organisers had provided precisely one, yes one, solitary portable toilet cabin. For the entire field. Naturally, down the road, riders began to stop to relieve themselves. Somebody important went ballistic.

  There are police everywhere, but in the Middle East there are also the Religious Police. Nobody, even the regular police, messes with the Religious Police. They carry big sticks and a big attitude. Someone high up was very upset at word of women relieving themselves outdoors, albeit due to poor planning. Next day there was an edict on the noticeboard. ‘All competitors in need of taking a natural break must do so with modesty and out of sight. Riders will seek a place of privacy or face expulsion.’

  Expulsion? That’s out of the country, not just out of the race! This was patently ridiculous. Qatar is flat. Pancakes look mountainous in comparison. To find a ‘place of privacy’, riders would have to ride off-road towards the horizon, which would take 20 minutes to be ‘out of sight’. There are no bushes to crouch behind.

  It’s not just riders that have come a cropper due to official toilet placement, either. At one remote, mountaintop village finish during the 2014 Giro, it was a hell of a business squeezing all the production vehicles into the tiny square. Anyway, we were all finally sorted – with not a spare centimetre left after the trucks and other facilities were installed either side of the finish line. Then we were informed that ‘somebody local’ wanted to park his car.

  Apparently, this somebody was someone who was not the sort of person to take no for an answer. Not, at any rate, in southern Italy.

  After much consternation, it was deemed that the only place Mr Somebody could park his car was where two Portaloos had been stationed: right next to the transmission truck. Clearly Mr Somebody wasn’t going to walk anywhere, maybe due to fear of assassination or perhaps just because he couldn’t be arsed. Fearing recriminations, the logistics guys set about making it possible.

  The only thing they could move were the Portaloos. A cherry picker pitched up and set about lifting them up. Once the hooks were in place, the loos were raised. It was then that we began to hear the manic screaming. The crane operator, however, couldn’t hear anything thanks to the noisy diesel engine. As the twinset of bogs was raised about 3–4m (12ft) off the ground, the door of one stall was flung open and a man stood, trousers down, clinging on to the door frame as a bowl of blue poo-soup slopped out all over his ankles. Happy days.

  ‘It’s all very well taking a big chunk, but you’ve got to swallow it.’

  10

  Attention Seekers!

  What is it in the human psyche that makes us seek notoriety? And how is this to be achieved in the absence of luck or talent? Often this doesn’t make for a dignified spectacle, especially when it comes to cycling. And so it is that we find Kevin the greengrocer from Bideford dressed in a lime green mankini running alongside elite athletes and emphasising the silky smooth legs of our heroes by displaying a pair of jiggling hirsute buttocks. He might be having fun. And at first he did raise a smile. But Kevin is not alone. The acid green mankini has been seen many times. Now even the addition of a ginger wig does not make it special. After many such visions, up many a mountain, this is a sight that has become bloody irritating.

  There aren’t any other major sports in the world where the spectator can get so close to their heroes. Cycling’s arenas are the open roads that snake their way up alpine mountains and through everyday public streets. We have no need of Wembleys, Camp Nous and Maracanãs: we have the world to play with. Access to this world is free. There are no tickets. You only have to turn up with your trestle table and fold-up chair and ‘Robert est ton oncle’, you’re in the thick of it. Up close and personal. There is nothing like this sort of access in any other sport. This is a cycling fan’s privilege. Everyone is within touching distance of the superstars of the sport. And the unwritten contract that allows this to remain the case is that nobody is supposed to touch the competitors or affect the racing. Sadly, some of the fans are starting to get a bit too involved in the action itself. This is a problem.

  The show-offs turn up in their myriad forms. And while I’m not a fan of CRS-style policing, I have a smidgen of sympathy for them when it comes to dealing with these idiots. I have to confess there have been some off-mike moments when we shout out in sheer joy as an outrunner in a dinosaur suit is run over by a police motorcycle. ‘Oooh, I hope that hurts. . .’

  When spectators start to have a negative influence on what happens in the race, then things have gone seriously wrong. Sure, there are the careless and accidental incidents such as untethered dogs bringing riders down. Handlebars getting caught in spectators’ bags or camera straps. I can almost accept this as a product of the mass
participation that makes cycling so great. But deliberate interference? No.

  There are various forms of interference that I call out on air. You may have heard, ‘Get out of the way you idiot,’ or such like. Occasionally I’ll go into detail about how the morons are harming the race. This is a genuine concern for the health and well-being of the riders. The perfect example of this is the havoc played out by those I call the Flare Boys.

  What on earth is the idea – other than to create a spectacle with the instigator centre stage on his bit of turf along the course? What is it that motivates a ‘fan’ to take a powder flare along to a cycling event? They have been banned in many sports. You can be arrested at a football game for setting off such a smoke bomb. But not in cycling, where the governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), has failed to act.

  The impact of phosphoric smoke pulled deep into the billowing lungs of a climbing cyclist is simply dangerous. I know I sound like an angry headmaster: ‘What are they thinking? Morons!’ But, I mean, how does their morning start off?

  ‘I’m off to the cycling, love!’

  ‘OK, honey, don’t forget your powder flares!’

  This on-air exchange with myself on the matter raised a few laughs on social media, but I was serious. Properly livid.

  I was asked once if I thought I could have been held responsible for incitement. There was a fan running alongside the riders when another spectator lamped him, taking him clean out. It was a move once referred to in wrestling parlance as ‘a forearm smash’, and aimed squarely to the jaw. His legs went up in the air and he went bang to the ground, disappearing in his own smoke bomb. My thoughts remain my own on this, but I was seen to smirk.

  Dutch Corner on Alpe d’Huez is perhaps a distillation of the extraordinary. Even driving through in a car you can hardly breathe from all the orange flares being deployed there. Maybe their name, Distress Flares, is apt . . . but it is the rider in distress. They’re breathing so deeply on these peaks, desperately trying to oxygenate their blood, and they really don’t need coloured smoke microparticles sucked into the depths of their lungs. It’s an extreme irritant, and riders like Chris Froome who have a history of respiratory problems must actually hold their breath when they’re going through particularly thick clouds of the stuff. Once a rider does that, especially when they’re at their absolute max going up a mountain, the knock-on effect is huge.