Magic Spanner

by Carlton Kirby

  I believe that Froome put everything into that day, drawing on all his resources – emotional, psychological, physical. He went all-in on every level. He drew on the anger and frustration of what had happened in the months leading up to it. That anger is a very big part of what drives him and always has. He got angry with Wiggins when he had to look after him in 2012. He’s vicious when he needs to be. He’s the ultimate predator. And this victory was the ultimate two fingers up to the press who had been hounding him constantly over the Salbutamol case. Likewise he stuck it to his opponents, fellow riders who had publicly spoken out against him racing the Giro and who now fell silent. He had rounded on his critics using his legs, spirit and formidable intelligence. It was a cathartic moment.

  Personally, I feel great sympathy for Chris Froome. Every victory he achieves is received only grudgingly by press and public alike. There are always questions over his wins, and when he doesn’t hit that stellar form, there are questions about that too. What does a guy have to do? It’s ironic that he equips himself so politely and respectfully in public yet gets such negative press. I believe in the future, as his career is fully quantified, Froome will be treated much more kindly.

  So whose was the greatest ride ever? For me, the question has a definitive answer. Froome’s attack that day and subsequent stage win and ultimate Giro victory was an other-worldly performance. We won’t see such a ride again. Chapeau, sir!

  ‘It’s Chris Froome that will be in the Colombian sandwich.’

  22

  The Other Bikers

  There are more motorbikes following Grand Tour races than ever before. Some of them are essential to the broadcast and wider media. Some are not.

  Now, I like motorbikes. I have one myself. In 1993 I completed what was known as a Super Course. I still can’t believe it, but in the space of just 10 days I went from total novice to the owner of a full motorcycle licence. I was, remarkably, suddenly allowed to ride absolutely any motorcycle on sale, no matter what capacity. It was a licence to kill . . . myself.

  Not surprisingly, you can no longer do such a short Super Course: the accident rate in graduates was rather high. Having riders with just 10 days’ experience spanking around, potentially on superbikes, is no longer deemed wise. Surely, you are thinking, no one would be mad enough to buy a high-powered motorcycle with under two weeks of riding experience.

  Er, hello?

  I went from training on a 125cc Honda Plastic to being the proud owner of a Harley-Davidson FXR Evo 1,360cc Police Bike. It was madness.

  I remember going along to Warr’s Harley-Davidson just off the King’s Road to collect my treasure. When I got there, it was standing outside the wash shop, on a back road, looking amazing. All paid up, I swung my leg over it and levelled it before setting off. It weighed a ton. I was in trouble. Suddenly I realised I was in charge of something of which I had absolutely no experience. It was like going from flying kites to a Spitfire. Sure, I had the paperwork. But nothing else, let alone a speaking voice. I was terrified.

  I started her up and gently let the clutch begin to bite. Slowly I moved into the road. As I grabbed a handful of revs, the salesman came out of his office and waved. I waved back. With my clutch hand . . . Booom! Aargh!! The bike lunged forward and I was thrown back, forcing my only gripping hand to wind open the throttle further.

  In super-slow motion, this would have looked amazing. Like something you might find on YouTube under ‘Fat Ballet Biker’, with the soundtrack of ‘The Blue Danube’ accompanying subtitles:

  ‘This is Houston: Apollo, you are clear of the tower.’

  I hurtled along, rattling windows as if I’d been shot out of a cannon. I fired past frightened kids being scooped up by mothers. ‘Wanker’, mouthed one.

  I pulled on the brakes in panic, the machine coming to such a dramatic halt I nearly went over the handlebars. The engine stalled.

  I sat there white as a sheet, panting. ‘What the hell have you done, you mad arse??’ I murmured.

  And I had a bigger problem here: I was living in northern France at the time. So there I was, a complete novice in charge of a leviathan about to set off through London traffic, destination Dover. I was due to take a ferry bound for Calais, from where I had a further two-hour ride on country roads to my old farmhouse in Raye-sur-Authie. Twat!

  I still don’t know how I made it. That night I calmed myself next to the stove with a bottle of red, my left forearm swollen with carpal tunnel strain from the heavy clutch. It could have been so much worse. I spent the next two years learning to ride the thing properly around the near deserted roads of Picardy.

  All of this means that I am fully conversant with the entire gamut of crap motorcycle handling, having passed through all levels of danger and idiocy my very self. I know what good and bad riding looks like. And I duly pass judgement on this regularly while commentating.

  Good Bikes carry TV cameramen and photographers satiating our rapacious hunger for images, both moving and still, on all forms of media.

  Bad Bikes carry fluff. These are a PR or money-making exercise and are a bloody nuisance. Sure, the head of the local yogurt factory might get a buzz out of riding with the pack. Well, get lost, Mr Milko, you’re in the way!

  The recent upsurge in VIP bikes is not just annoying, it’s also dangerous. The riders of these bikes are not at the top of the pecking order in the squadron. So you have a lesser skilled rider coupled with an often rather unwieldy besuited businessman who’s been crammed into waterproof overalls. He’s the jiggling pillion passenger. It makes for an unstable presence around the peloton. And this is bad news. I wouldn’t mind if there were one or two, but there are loads: I counted 12 one day! Add to that the expanded number of press and blogging media now paying for access, and you have a swarm of active vehicles on the course, which is beginning to affect the racing. I get nervous and I know the riders are too; perhaps more so.

  The VIP machines at least have the excuse of inexperience. The photo boys do not. And the drive for drama on dedicated cycling blogs and social media means the hunt for an arty, ‘up the nostril shot’, as I call them, finds motorcycles getting closer and closer to riders who don’t have the benefit of leather and body armour in the event of a collision.

  ‘Get that bike out of there!’ I often exclaim as they get too close.

  I know I sound like a campaigner, and viewers are split on this. Some agree while others tell me to shut up and stick to commentating. The fact is, there have been unnecessary accidents and this has finally led to a 30m (100ft) proximity rule being adopted by some races: not mandatory just yet, but that will come.

  Even the good bikes get it wrong sometimes. Descending ahead of the riders is difficult because some of the best pro cyclists will be travelling faster than the motorcycles, which are far more cumbersome to handle on a twisty descent than lightweight carbon cycles. And a professional rider desperately trying to make up time on his rivals will take more risks. So filming in front of such riders can actually hamper the racing: the riders keep catching up and are sometimes hampered by those taking pictures.

  Filming from behind is even more fraught with danger. We often see riders’ back wheels slip away dramatically in a curve, whether due to an unstable surface, fluid on the road, a puncture, or simply misjudging a curve. A motorcycle who’s following too close could easily run a rider over. This has happened in the past.

  Camera bikes are a necessity. Without live action TV pictures, cycling would die as a sport. So getting these shots is always a compromise. If only all cameramen could be Patrice Diallo.

  Where there are serfs, there has to be a Duke. And that man is Patrice Diallo: the most accomplished camera motorcyclist there is. The guy is a genius.

  Patrice rides like he’s been on a bike since before he could walk. Which is handy because now he can barely walk, having crashed so many times when he was young. His right leg in particular looks like a madman with a cheese grater and a mallet has had some fun with him.
Multiple fractures and burns have scarred him badly.

  Patrice can’t dance. But a motorcycle, in his hands, does. The finesse displayed by Patrice and his machine is simply remarkable. His ability to control his bike, while accounting for the added load and imbalance of a cameraman with all his kit, is remarkable.

  The platform he provides for generating pictures is as stable as they come, even on a highly technical, mixed surface descent. Every cameraman wants to work with Patrice. He is so experienced he knows when and where to go, how to get there and how to get out. It’s almost as if the cameraman just has to press the button because Patrice, with the lines he is taking, has set the shot up for him.

  He gets through gaps clinically and safely while telegraphing his moves effectively so the riders also have absolute faith in him. He knows where he’s going, so do they. That level of assurance between cyclist and motorbike rider comes from vast experience and notoriety.

  I’ve seen Patrice on site all over the world from the Tour de France to the Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia. He’s the favoured rider of Euromedia, who provide the hardware to France Television and thus Le Tour. More often than from any other ground level source, the pictures filling your screen are taken from Patrice Diallo’s bike.

  Don’t go thinking this man is anything like a robot. He is an artist – and sometimes, out of necessity, a clown.

  But it’s not just bike-handling that gets the pictures. Location-finding is also part of the art. Patrice gets himself into amazing positions. He’ll race on and set up a static ride-by of the main favourites, get away safely, stop safely and then get exactly the shot to surprise and entertain. In Qatar, I once saw him open a jam jar containing a live scorpion. He placed it on a rock on a bend. The cameraman was delighted. He bobbed down and did a pull-focus as the peloton cruised by. Wonderful. The menace of the heat was never better described.

  Over the years, Patrice has learned many tricks to generate atmosphere. He carries two things with him at all times. A rubber red nose and a Super Soaker water pistol. Want smiling kids? Any TV director does. Problem is, the expectant fans have been waiting for hours in the baking sun and are a bit tired and fed up. Then Patrice arrives. His big round friendly sunburnt face naturally raises a smile anyway. He winks and twists the ends of his luxurious moustache before adding the touch of the red nose.

  The crowd are now amused, but the shot is still not at peak jollity. Time for the coup de grâce: out comes the Super Soaker. ‘Allez!’ screams Patrice and starts blasting the crowd with water. It’s mayhem! The perfect warm-up act has done his job. The cameraman gets a load of geed-up fans in the sunshine and, right on cue, he pulls back to get the riders approaching. Without our friend Patrice, none of this would have happened. Good TV pictures take work. Sometimes they are fraught with danger. The best in the business make generating such images as this look easy. It is not. Ride long and safe, Patrice. We need you.

  ‘That’s the Danish bringing home the bacon.’

  23

  When the Plug Gets Pulled

  The quality of images from bike races broadcast into homes all over the world has improved dramatically in recent years. When you look back at old footage from 15 and 20 years ago, it was beset with pictures breaking up – and, at times, it was very difficult to make out who the riders were. I remember having to commentate from the back of a van with a towel over my head and a black and white monitor while I tried to decipher who the riders were from their posture because I couldn’t even make out the colours of their team kit. While we’re blessed by great improvements in technology that offer pin sharp images, even cameras attached to the riders’ bikes, there are times that I can’t stop marvelling at how it all comes together. Occasionally it doesn’t.

  The process involved in delivering live cycling on TV is a complex one, and it takes only a small error for the whole show to come crashing down around your ears. The pictures on your TV set at home, whether from a motorbike, a helicopter or static camera by the side of the road, have to go a circuitous route of being pinged up to a circling fixed-wing aircraft and sent back down to the outside broadcast vehicle. This truck sends the signal to a hub-transmission facility in, say, Paris if we are on the Tour. This is then sent via satellite to your provider, who mixes in commentary and retransmits the signal to its own network via either cable, internet or satellite and thus into your home. One tiny error, the smallest slip-up, will put paid to all the hard work of engineers, cameramen, directors, helicopter pilots and producers. When the live pictures fail, there is usually a play-loop of general pictures until the link is fixed. And at a moment such as this it’s up to the commentator to try and plug the gap.

  Remember the dream you had about standing naked in the middle of the Wembley pitch on Cup Final day? Yep, that’s the feeling.

  I was on the Tirreno Adriatico in 2013 where Lloydie and I were voicing the world feed, as opposed to the feed from Eurosport. Before transmission, we were inadvertently filmed for filler by a cameraman who didn’t know us. We were having a spot of lunch – calamari and a glass of prosecco, I think it was. Dan and I had been joined by two colleagues: Valentina Lualdi from the organisers, RCS, and Sophie Ormond of IMG, the managing agents. We would have looked to the cameraman like a perfect pairing of two couples out for lunch in the sunshine (had I not spoiled the effect by looking like their Dad).

  Anyway, it was a bit of atmos footage, shot purely as filler to set the scene at the finish line. Unbeknown to us, our guzzling faces were shortly to appear on the Eurosport broadcast, and not just a fleeting glimpse either. We were on a three-minute loop that was shown again, and again, and again. The line had failed and the only fill-in footage they had was our little luncheon.

  The problem began a few hours earlier, when the broadcast technicians had set up the satellite dish that was to beam the pictures of the race to the world. The truck had been lined up and secured, the dish had been angled correctly, and Sergio and Giuseppe had dusted their hands and disappeared to the local bar to congratulate themselves on a job well done. Only, they hadn’t done the job at all well. While they’d remembered to do all the big complicated stuff, there was one small thing they’d forgotten. Giuseppe had the simple task of snapping down a clip bolt that locked the dish on the roof of the truck to its satellite tracking base. He simply forgot the simple.

  It was a windless, sunny day, so the dish behaved impeccably initially. Our lunch was a distant memory when the helicopter made its first pass over the truck. We were in the last hour of the stage as the loop section of the course was to begin, four times over the finish line being the plan – and most of the world didn’t get to see it.

  The chopper was doing a reverse heads-up shot of the peloton as they came down what would be the home straight in a few laps. He was low and the pictures were amazing. The sea was as sparkly as a cocktail dress, the palms waving and the crowd bellowing.

  As the helicopter flew overhead, the downdraft blew the unsecured satellite dish a degree or two off line. The uplink was broken. All the outbound pictures went pop. Two seconds later, the backup shots went to air: Dan Lloyd, Valentina, Sophie – and Dad. You could almost hear a backing track: Summer Madness.

  The producers in the broadcast truck were in a panic.

  ‘Quick, what other pictures do we have while we get this shit sorted out?’

  ‘Nothing else boss, sorry.’

  ‘Testicoli!’

  Back in London, Declan Quigley was commentating for Eurosport and, in his finest warm Irish lilt, began to describe the pictures he was seeing: ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the lack of footage of the race. Please bear with us while we sort this out. Ho, ho, ho. Goodness me, take a look at what’s going on down at the finish line . . . Ah, it’s alright for some! That’d be Carlton Kirby and Daniel Lloyd on your screens right there, that’s Carlton on the left. The, ahem, larger of the two.’

  Declan naturally fully described the scene, thinking this was just a brief shot.
But three minutes later, the technical problems hadn’t been sorted out, so this same footage of Dan and I popping pieces of calamari in the company of our minders cropped up again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

  Declan was now struggling to repaint the image for viewers: ‘I wonder what they’re eating? Have you any idea, Brian? Pasta, perhaps?’

  Brian Smith, in his Hey mate, this is your problem, don’t get me involved in such flimflam kind of way, simply said: ‘Yeah, could be,’ and it was back to Declan. You can’t usually hear a man sweating. You could on this day.

  Simple as the fault was, it could not be found. All client broadcasters, including Eurosport, finally took mercy on their viewers and commentators and duly pulled the plug.

  The dislodged dish was used to relay pictures away from on-site. For Dan and me, there was no picture loss, so we continued our commentary, all of which was used in the highlights show later. Naturally, out came the internet trolls slagging off Eurosport for pulling a live stage. It was too complicated to explain. We moved on.

  ‘Say what you like about the Swiss, but the flag’s a big plus.’

  Matera in southern Italy is an amazing place. It was settled in ancient times by troglodytes; that’s ‘cave dwellers’ to you and me. It’s been around for thousands of years and some of the caves higher up the hill above the town are just as they were in the time of Christ. Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in this very place. No set required.

  These days, many of the caves are fronted by chi-chi restaurant facades and, once shown to your table, you stare about in wonder at the solid rock from which the place was originally carved. The night before the stage, we were installed in one such establishment. A mix of the modern and ancient. ‘Imagine how tough life must’ve been,’ I exclaimed, tucking into a plate of lobster claw pasta and an impeccable Pinot Grigio. Irked, Dan flicked a bit of my flying food off his phone, ordered another large beer, and carried on Tweeting.