At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  After everything I’d been through over the previous seven months, I was certainly in no mood to complain that night in Paris, not about the race anyway. Our team’s post-Tour party, however, I wasn’t too enamored with. As usual, it had all been arranged at the last minute, with our logistics manager being asked to find and reserve a venue with 48 hours’ notice on the night of the biggest event in the Parisian sporting calendar. She’d done the best she could, but we’d ended up in a pretty mediocre restaurant, not even sitting around tables but all packed in around a buffet table. To me, at the time, this was yet more evidence that the way we were overperforming and overdelivering on a budget that shouldn’t have entitled us to half of that success wasn’t being appreciated, in both senses of the word. It also showed a lack of recognition for something else, something more fundamental: We’d just completed the Tour de France.

  I went to bed early, just after midnight. The founder of the race, Henri Desgrange, once said the Tour was “a crusade, a pilgrimage, a lesson and an example.” For me, this one had certainly been one hell of a journey.

  revised ambitions

  my last fight with Bernie Eisel had happened a month earlier, on the Col du Tourmalet during the Tour, and for us had been pretty standard stuff. As stragglers in the gruppetto flicked around a bend and out of sight, like a cat’s tail through the crack of a pantry door, Bernie and I had known that it was time to start doing some sums.

  “Cav, I know you’re ill, mate, but we can’t fuck around here. We have to go faster than this. Come on.”

  Bernie’s accent—like an Austrian loudly impersonating an Australian, which in some ways he was, or vice versa—could usually be guaranteed to make me smile, even if only internally. Hearing this, though, I had glared at him.

  “Bernie, we can lose ten seconds a kilometer if we get two and a half minutes back on the descent, which we will. Don’t nag. Just let me fucking ride.”

  “Cav, I’m telling you, mate—”

  “Bernie, no. It’s under control. Ten seconds per kilometer.”

  And so it had gone, until I’d ended the argument by stroppily pedaling over to the other side of the road. The fans on the climb must have been scratching their heads: Why were two teammates battling to beat the time cut riding up the mountain parallel to each other but 3 meters apart, both with faces like smacked backsides?

  That had been the Tour. As usual, we’d soon put it behind us—before the summit, as I remember. Now, at the Vuelta, Bernie and I were at it again. Toys were flying out of prams and the Seville roads were peppered with expletives. Our teammates could only look on, silently wincing behind their sunglasses.

  “Look,” I said one last time, “if you listen and we get this right, we will definitely win this today. But if anyone doesn’t want to listen, they can fuck off now.”

  With a “Fuck you, I’m off then,” Bernie swung his bike around and rode off.

  This wasn’t, I’ll grant you, the most auspicious note on which to start my first Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain). After the Tour de France, I’d skipped the beach, skipped the lucrative post-Tour criterium races, where I could now easily command five-figure appearance fees. I had raced just twice, at the Tre Valli Varesine and the Coppa Bernocchi in Italy, before arriving in Spain. My goal over the next two, maybe three weeks, if I decided to do the whole Vuelta, wasn’t stage wins or the points jersey but to fine-tune my form ahead of the world championships road race in Australia. That would take place on October 3, exactly a fortnight after the end of the Vuelta. Here I was, though, on the morning of the team time trial that would open the final Grand Tour of the 2010 season, contemplating Bernie’s one-man mutiny. As he clipped shoes into pedals, swung his front wheel around, and set off in the direction of the team hotel, I turned to face my other seven teammates, still rooted to the spot and speechless.

  “Right, anyone want to join him?”

  on this occasion at the Vuelta, as on others with me, Bernie thought that there was a point where helpful advice and encouragement ended and verbal bombardment began, and that I didn’t know where to draw the line. He had done team time trials with me before, seen me perform the same General Eisenhower impersonation, but this time he reckoned that I was going too far. I disagreed. On the eve of the race, we’d done a ragged first run-through, not on the race route but just to practice the rotation and cornering, after which I’d reminded everyone—admittedly in my usual, forthright manner—of the importance of holding a steady speed. We then repeated the effort, putting what I’d said into practice, and smashed it.

  “Right, if we all do that tomorrow, we’ll win the team time trial,” I’d announced as we all grabbed drinks and cooled down.

  The TTT itself had been scheduled for the evening—sensible, given that the temperature in the day was edging 40 degrees Celsius (close to 105 degrees Fahrenheit). This also gave us time for a proper practice run, this one on the route itself in the morning. And that was when Bernie started to lose patience. Now, admittedly, I’d taken my i-dotting and t-crossing to a new level of fastidiousness by sketching the corners on pieces of paper before we set out, but as I kept telling my teammates, “If we get 80 percent of the technical aspects of this time trial right, we won’t win. If we get 90 percent right, we might win but we might not, and if we get 100 percent right, we’ll definitely win.” Having labored this point, it then annoyed me when we began our morning reconnoiter and I could hear Kanstantsin Sivtsov and Lars Bak yammering at the back of the line as we approached one key bend.

  “Right,” I said, slamming on my brakes. “You’re not paying attention, so we’ll go back and do it again.”

  This was when Bernie kicked off.

  “No, I’m not doing it again. No way. You need to chill out.”

  At this point, insults flew back and forth across the road, with neither of us giving an inch. So Bernie went back to the hotel.

  When I asked, no one else wanted—or dared—to join him, and we finished the practice lap with eight men.

  An hour or so later, I got back to the hotel and the room that I was sharing with Bernie. I pushed open the door, walked in, and there he was.

  “You’re a dickhead,” were his first words.

  “No, you’re a dickhead,” was my reply.

  And that was it; within 30 seconds, we were best mates again. Not only that, but when we got onto the course for one very last practice lap that night, it was poetry in motion. We’d intended to take it easy—and it felt like a breeze because we were technically perfect—but our time on that practice lap would almost have put us on the podium in the race proper. When we finally did roll off the start-ramp, only this time holding nothing back, we replicated the same fluid turns and clockwork rotation and went on to win by a relatively comfortable margin of 10 seconds. The team had decided that I would cross the line first and so take the red leader’s jersey in the event of victory. It was one of the best wins of my career to date. I was ecstatic, but I also felt slightly guilty that the rider in red at the end of it wasn’t Matt Goss. Gossy was so strong that day that he could have ridden away from us.

  The three weeks in Spain started as they were set to continue. I loved the Vuelta. The loneliness, the lack of any real anchor in my life, the restlessness that had gnawed at me all year, they were still there under the surface, but racing a Grand Tour was the best way to keep my mind occupied, purely by virtue of the fact that I was on my bike and among friends. I was single at the time, but in Bernie I had a fairly convincing substitute spouse, minus the romance; we slept in the same room, spent more time with each other than with anyone else, and bickered constantly, but just like our row over the time trial, the arguments would be explosive and quickly resolved.

  When Bernie had to quit the race on the fourth day because of a virus, for a day or two I felt completely bereft. Without Bernie, without Renshaw (who’d had a long season and been left out of the Aussie worlds squad because they were worried that he’d be tempted to work for me!), wi
thout Tony Martin, I was working with a brand-new, you could say makeshift, sprint train, but one that could still deliver me in style. Gossy was flying, and he was doing a fantastic job, but he was different from Mark; his style was jerkier, more erratic, and it took more balls to follow him. In the first week there were four bunch sprints, and I didn’t win a single one, mainly because I’d got it into my head that it would take a long sprint to win on the worlds course in Melbourne and that I needed to simulate that here. I was kicking with 350 meters to go and dying before the line. Eventually, though, we were bound to win one, and in a technical finish on stage 12 into Lleida, Gossy dragged both of us so far clear going into the last corner that for a second I hesitated, hoping that Gossy would carry on to take the win himself, only for him to nod me through. The next day we dominated again, so much so that I didn’t even have to sprint off Gossy’s wheel—I merely carried on at the same speed as he peeled off. I even had time for a bit of showboating, bunny-hopping over the finish line. In hindsight, that wasn’t particularly wise: Going by the letter of the law, I really ought to have been disqualified, as lifting both wheels off the ground was considered “dangerous riding.” The jury overlooked it, I think perhaps because they knew they should really have relegated Tyler Farrar for blocking me in a sprint earlier in the race but had turned a blind eye there, too.

  The two back-to-back wins had given me a solid lead in the points competition. Consequently, I now felt duty-bound to push on through to Madrid, nurturing my form ahead of the worlds as I went. We also had Peter Velits riding high in the general classification, and I was determined to help him wherever I could.

  Above all, I was enjoying it; if the Giro was three weeks of beautiful chaos and the Tour just a huge, slick, and scary machine, the Vuelta was the decaffeinated grand tour—with all of the flavor of the other two but minus some of the stress. There were hardly any journalists; the starts were comfortably late; and the stages generally settled quickly, with a break going down the road and the peloton slowly cranking up the pace to bring it back in the closing kilometers. The one element that wasn’t to my liking was the climbs—the Lagos de Covadonga, the Bola del Mundo, and other horrors that had more in common with rock climbing than professional cycling.

  I managed to get myself one more win, in Salamanca on stage 18, again superbly set up by Gossy. It would have been two more, I’m quite certain, had I not pinged a spoke 4 km from the finish in Madrid on the last day. With my brake pads rubbing on my rear rim and my power meter showing that I was putting out 800 watts instead of the usual 500 just to stay on Gossy’s wheel as we entered the last kilometer, I was in knots by the time Tyler Farrar snuck past me to nick it on the line. I consoled myself with my first victory in the points competition of a major tour and only the second ever by a British rider, after Malcolm Elliot’s in the 1989 Vuelta. I was delighted with my form and increasingly confident about my chances of pulling on another jersey: the rainbow jersey of the world road race champion.

  The following day I flew back to Tuscany, but it was only a short stop; I’d made plans with the other two members of the British team for Melbourne, David Millar and Jeremy Hunt, to fly to Australia early and get acclimatized. The size of each nation’s team at the worlds is determined by the rankings points scored by riders from that country across that season, and it hadn’t been a vintage year for British riders; I’d had my slow start from January until June, and Brad Wiggins had, by his own admission, flopped badly at the Tour after his fourth place the previous year. That had left us low on rankings points and with a team of only three riders, whereas other nations would have as many as nine. Luckily, among the stronger nations were those who had sent guys to check out the course or had seen it on video and also decided that the best bet would be riding for a sprint finish; they would control the race.

  One of only two Austrians to qualify for the race, Bernie had also gone out early, and he, Jez, Dave, and I trained together in the week before the race. In my desperation to hold the form I was taking out of the Vuelta, I was pushing harder than the other guys up the climbs and doing extra kilometers when they headed back to the hotel at the end of rides. All three of them and Rod Ellingworth, my coach and the GB team’s that week, kept telling me that I needed to calm down. They told me I was doing too much, but I was adamant that I was getting even stronger than I had been at the Vuelta. As the days passed, I convinced myself that I was going to be the world champion, even to the point where, in interviews, I was employing a tactic that had worked for me before Milan–San Remo in 2009: I started bluffing. I told the press that, having now seen and ridden the course, I’d realized that it was much harder than it had looked on paper and on tape and, actually, I had no hope of winning.

  “I’ll have to revise my ambitions,” I lied, holding back a smirk. Sadly it was the course and my rivals who had the last laugh, and Jez, Dave, and Bernie who could say, “I told you so.” The race started in Melbourne, and from there we would ride 83 km to Geelong before completing 11 laps of a 15.9-km circuit. I, though, hadn’t even got to Geelong—hadn’t even made it out of Melbourne, in fact—when I already knew that my confidence had been badly misplaced. Within minutes of us rolling over the start line, we’d come to the bridge curving gently over the Yarra River.

  I’d shifted my weight forward and into the slope, lifted myself up off the saddle … and felt my legs turn to timber. There was no spring, no zip, nothing. It dawned there and then that I would not be going home with the rainbow jersey. In fact, I wasn’t even going to finish the race. I abandoned with three laps to go.

  my turbulent 2010 season had almost drawn to a close, but before I could put my feet up, I had one more long flight and one more important race. The Commonwealth Games wouldn’t rank particularly highly on a lot of eligible riders’ lists of priorities, but for me, as a Manxman, they were a rare opportunity to compete in my island’s colors. It was also a chance to give something back, and to ride with guys I’d been training with since I started cycling seriously in my early teens. The 2010 Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi, were being snubbed by a lot of top riders because of concerns over venue safety, terrorist threats, and hygiene standards. I summed up my feelings on the matter, perhaps going into a bit too much detail, in the press at the time: “The guys who stayed away made a mistake. If you look at the chance of catching disease in India; if you look after yourself you won’t catch anything. As a single guy you run a risk if you sleep with a girl. Risks come with everything.”

  These weren’t the only comments I made that caused quite a stir in Delhi. For a few months now, my frustration with Bob Stapleton’s seeming inability to offer me an improved deal, and also his failure so far to find a sponsor that would secure the team’s future beyond 2012, had been slowly simmering to a boiling point. As far as I could see, no progress was being made on either score. As I’ve already touched on, Bob had also started trying to tie my most trusted and valuable domestiques to long-term deals, I suspected in an effort to also somehow shackle me to the team. The latest contract renewal to be announced had been Renshaw’s a few weeks after the Tour, and I’d made no secret of my disappointment to Mark. I’d told him to wait, promised that I’d get him the deal he wanted, but he’d gone ahead and committed to Bob for another two years before I’d been able to offer an alternative. He said that it was good money and that at 27, he had to start thinking long term, about retirement and his family.

  I could understand that but still disapproved; it was in both of our interests, both sporting and financial, to stick together, and his new deal made it conceivable that we would be on different teams from the end of 2011, when Bob’s contract with HTC ran out, if not earlier.

  My status with HTC-Columbia had been uncertain for months. In the spring, before Tirreno–Adriatico, Bob and Rolf Aldag had arranged to meet me in Tuscany, supposedly to discuss my future and the team’s. We’d booked a table at a restaurant near my house in Quarrata, sat down, made small talk for almost the enti
re meal, then finally got on to business over dessert.

  “So,” Bob said. “What do you want to stay with us?”

  I’d answered bluntly, honestly, and without any hesitation.

  “More money, Bob,” I said. “I want more money.”

  Bob asked me how much.

  “How much am I worth to you? That’s how much I want,” I replied.

  Bob said he’d have to go and see what he could come up with. The atmosphere when we left the restaurant, suffice it to say, hadn’t been as jovial as when we’d arrived.

  I should probably make it clear at this point that money both was and was not the real issue. I felt that Bob was reaping the benefit of the naïveté that I’d shown in signing a contract that I’d negotiated myself in 2008 when I was 23 and that severely underestimated my future value. The bonus scheme was also almost nonexistent. Accepting these terms had been my mistake, I would acknowledge, but at the same time I wanted Bob to show some recognition of the fact that I was worth at least double the salary that I was earning, and verbal offers that had come from other teams were proof of it. I was desperate to stay with what I regarded as by far the best team in the world, and I was willing to make a financial sacrifice to do so, but there was a point where loyalty ended and stupidity began. As the first flush of rookie exuberance and the novelty fade, the realization sets in that, ultimately, it’s your job, your livelihood, and you’re a professional. You can’t undersell yourself, which is effectively what I ran the risk of doing if I pledged my future to Bob for half of my real value, then went on winning and gaining tens of millions of pounds’ worth of exposure for a corporate sponsor.

  As things had stood in the spring, I was contracted to Bob and the team until the end of 2010, and there was an “option” for me to stay on similar terms in 2011. This clause had been the source of intense speculation in the media, along with a lot of uncertainty.