I was thrilled for him. Naturally, so was Bob. With my victory tally for the year stuck on one, Bob may now have been less alarmed by the prospect of me leaving, since he had a ready-made replacement in Gossy. The reality was that we are completely different riders—Gossy is perhaps stronger and more versatile, though I am the faster sprinter. We are also very different people, for all that we had instantly clicked when he joined the team. Gossy is funny and outgoing, but nothing like the same gift to headline writers (probably a good reflection on him!).
Despite feeling much fitter, the spring of 2011 was starting to bear a disturbing resemblance to the previous one. After San Remo, my next big target was Gent–Wevelgem, the one Belgian classic that has traditionally favored sprinters yet had always eluded me. The most iconic feature of the race and the most important strategically was the double ascent of the cobbled Kemmelberg climb. On the first lap of the 2011 race, I had punctured on the Kemmel and been forced to chase, but I had caught and comfortably stuck with the main peloton when we tackled the Kemmel for a second time. The hard part was done, but then, as so often in the classics, the race took an unexpected and, for me, irremediable turn. I was caught momentarily behind an innocuous-looking crash in the middle of the bunch, when I suddenly felt the back end of my bike jar and looked around to see the Movistar rider Ignatas Konovalovas with his front wheel jammed into my rear triangle. I stayed upright but lost too many valuable seconds dodging the bodies that had also slowed or fallen around us and changing my wheel to have any chance of rejoining the main peloton. Gent–Wevelgem was turning into—and would continue to be—my bogey race: Only once in three appearances to date in the “sprinters’ classic” had I actually been able to sprint for the win, and that was way back in 2008, when I’d finished 17th due to poor positioning.
My fascination with Gent–Wevelgem and the other cobbled classics ran as deep as the treacherous, jagged ruts between their famous pavé stones. I’d realized very early that I’d never have the body shape to be a climber, and as a teenager learning about professional cycling I was drawn to the races that celebrated qualities that I did possess, like speed on the flat, and tenacity. Since turning pro in 2007 I had also, very willingly, undergone Brian Holm’s indoctrination into the “cult of the cobbles.” As far as Brian was concerned, the hard men of the north, the Flandrians such as 1970s classics maestro Roger Vlaeminck, were gods. Other riders paled by comparison and were mere “hairdressers” in Brian’s eyes.
With Brian fueling the passion that I already had, I’d been pestering my team managers for years to let me take part in the most dangerous and punishing of the cobbled classics: Paris–Roubaix. In 2008, Allan Peiper had made a deal with me: I could do Roubaix if I won two stages at the Three Days of De Panne and Gent–Wevelgem. I had kept the first part of the bargain but not the second, and Allan wouldn’t cave. Now, though, partly because I’d shown some promise in the 2010 Tour de France stage that borrowed some of the Roubaix route, and partly because they couldn’t take any more of my earache, he and the other directeurs finally relented. My best legs were also, finally, coming out of hibernation; after my second stab at the Tour of Flanders, where I had mainly worked for the team in the first half of the race, I had won the Grote Scheldeprijs for the third time the following Wednesday.
Paris–Roubaix itself was everything that I’d expected and harder. While the Tour of Flanders is also famous for its cobbles, the pavé in Paris–Roubaix is bigger and even rougher. Imagine riding down a riverbed in a shopping cart, at over 50 kph in places, and that will give you some idea of the sensation. For a day or two before the race, my excitement had been driving Bernie nuts, partly because he knew what was coming and partly because he couldn’t comprehend how anyone would be relishing that amount of suffering. He had a point, although I would argue that my race might have been quite different had it not been for a mechanical problem and bike-change in the first hour. Complaining about punctures, however, or broken spokes or wheel changes at Paris–Roubaix is a bit like booking a holiday in Manchester and complaining about the rain; it comes with the territory. I didn’t make it to the finish in the legendary Roubaix Velodrome, but then neither did 86 of the other 194 starters.
April 2011 would also see me make another debut, this time on Twitter. My manager, Chris Evans-Pollard, had been extolling the microblogging site’s virtues as a promotional tool for a while, but so far I’d resisted. Our team press officer, Kristy, certainly had nightmares about me opening an account. Finally, though, with Mark Renshaw also applying some pressure, I signed up at the end of April. Fortunately for all concerned, I did it at a time when I was content in my private life and didn’t have too much free time on my hands. The days when I would spend whole afternoons reading the online cycling press and their message boards—and usually getting riled by something or someone—were now long gone.
One thing I wasn’t particularly satisfied about that spring was, funnily enough, the number of good commercial opportunities coming from Chris. In the five years since I’d turned pro, I had learned—slowly and often the hard way—that while money would never be my primary motivation, ignoring the financial side of the job was irresponsible and didn’t do me any favors. Me being me, and being a perfectionist, I also notice and get annoyed when I can see someone in my team or entourage not achieving the standards that I expect of them, especially when that affects me. I had been with Chris for just over a year at this point, after my previous manager, Fran Millar, stepped away from athlete management and to take a job at Team Sky. I could theoretically have stayed with Fran’s agency, Face Partnership, but she still owned some of the business and that clearly threw up a conflict of interest. Chris, who already managed Victoria Pendleton, seemed like a good alternative. He was in his midthirties, smart, and personable, and he appeared to have significantly raised Vicki’s profile. I had hoped that he would do the same for me.
I had been willing to indulge and give Chris the benefit of my considerable doubt until the Giro in May. The Giro, the race itself, was a good one for me, starting with another sensational win for us in the team time trial in Turin. Back in 2009, I had screamed at my Italian teammate Marco Pinotti when he lost my wheel on the final corner, fearing that it might cost us vital seconds and me the pink jersey. But Marco quickly corrected his mistake and all had ended well, with the team winning the stage and me in pink. It therefore seemed perfectly fair and natural for Marco to lead us over the line in the 2011 team time trial, particularly as he was wearing the Italian national time trial champion’s green, white, and red jersey, and the 2011 Giro was being billed as a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification. He also deserved it, having ridden superbly. Marco and I could scarcely have been more different—he was studious, undemonstrative, totally disinterested in fast cars and designer clothes—but I had always respected him and even specifically asked to room with him once or twice at races.
I took the pink jersey off Marco in Parma the following day, for one day only … but it was no cause for celebration. For the third time in succession, I had failed to win the first sprint in a major tour. Perfectly teed up by Renshaw, I had waited a split second too long. I had seen Alessandro Petacchi appear over my right shoulder and then deliberately swing left and right across the road to block my path to the line as I tried to get around him. My anger boiled over into furious arm-waving in Petacchi’s direction as we came over the line, but ultimately what really got my goat was the inconsistency of the commissaires. I had lost points and, effectively, the green jersey at the 2009 Tour after a far less pronounced “deviation” in Besançon. By the media’s estimation, Petacchi was a “cunning old pro, showing savoir faire,” whereas I was regularly portrayed as an “outlaw” and a “kamikaze.”
A week would pass before I had any chance to make amends, which I did emphatically with successive wins in Teramo and Ravenna. For a few weeks I had been troubled by a nerve problem in my back—a tiny twinge that caused a mental block mo
re than a physical one and that left me permanently bracing myself for those spasms when I kicked hard. Finally I was able to blank it out and let go, with the result being this pair of comfortable wins. After the second one, as the race prepared to enter the high mountains, I pulled out of the Giro as agreed with the team before the race.
I knew Chris was coming to the Giro, but I was surprised to spot him in the VIP enclosure after the team time trial in Turin. I asked him later how he’d acquired a guest pass. Oh, that was simple, he said, he’d just got in touch with the organizers and told them that he was Mark Cavendish’s manager.
If I was already distinctly unimpressed then, I was furious when I discovered that Peta hadn’t been allowed into the enclosure where Chris was enjoying Prosecco and canapés. That night I told Chris how much it had bothered me, while also bluntly informing him that I was far from happy with his work so far. I told him I would give him until December to smarten up his act, and that if he didn’t, I’d be looking for a new manager. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t feel hopeful that much would change.
at the Giro itself, in truth, my frustration with Chris had very quickly been overtaken by much more serious and pressing concerns. I’d had the team time trial to worry about on the first day, the sprint in Parma on the second, and was wearing the pink jersey on stage three from Reggio nell’Emilia to Rapallo in Liguria. On that third day, something else had occurred that had made not only the stage but also the entire Giro, and even our careers as professional cyclists, feel like an irrelevance: the Belgian rider Wouter Weylandt had turned to look behind him on the descent of the Passo del Bocco, stubbed his left foot against an iron rail running down one side of the road, spun out of control on impact, and smashed into a wall on the opposite side. Around an hour later, it was announced that he had died of his injuries.
Even before the descent and indeed before the stage, word had got around that the road down the Passo del Bocco was narrow, dangerous, and tapered at the bottom, where the route hit the coast and a mad scramble for position would begin. With this in mind, having crested the summit adrift of the main peloton, Renshaw and I had embarked on one of our swooping skydives, catching and then passing more riders than we could count. One of these riders had been Wouter Weylandt. At the bottom of the descent, minutes later, we had slotted into a peloton where riders were already whispering in grave tones about a bad crash involving Weylandt. We heard nothing more until we arrived back at the team bus, the race having blown again on a climb before the finish to end my chances.
When confirmation arrived, silence descended upon the bus. I shivered. An hour or so earlier, he’d been riding at our side. Those minutes on the descent had been the last of his life.
We pulled up to our hotel and decamped out of the bus, heads bowed, speechless and numb. I found my room, got undressed, and stepped into the shower. There, I burst into tears.
Weylandt wasn’t a close friend, but I’d always liked him. He had big, bright eyes, a ready smile, and a penchant for eccentric hairstyles, all of which were a reflection of his personality. We had crossed swords in the odd sprint, as I of course had with Wouter’s best mate, Tyler Farrar. Tyler’s team, Garmin, was staying in the same hotel as us that night, but Tyler didn’t come down to dinner. What happened that day had put our petty squabbles into perspective; we were all part of the same family, all exposing ourselves to the same risks on a daily basis, and we’d lost one of our own.
The next day it was decided that we would pay tribute to Wouter by putting on a cortège rather than a race. Each team rode for around 20 km on the front, and scarcely a word was uttered all day. Fans lined the roadside with their applause and their banners commemorating Wouter and his race number at the Giro, 108.
It was beautiful, moving, and desperately sad. It also, inevitably, stirred up thoughts, images, and memories that you usually went out of your way not to dwell on as a professional cyclist—the dangers that lurked on descents, in sprints, that you encountered and defied almost on a daily basis. On the evening of Weylandt’s death and the next day as we rode together—each in a world of our own but probably all thinking the same things—I questioned my career, the way I rode, and whether I could carry on. This was the inner voice of sanity, reason, perspective—and yet this was the one that would soon be drowned out when our warped sense of normality returned in a few hours’ time. The only explanation was that love, our love for the sport, was deaf and blind.
high hopes
it’s not very logical,” admitted the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme.
It was October 2010, and in front of a crowd of cycling’s glitterati at Paris’s Palais des Congrès—and one very happy Manx sprinter—Christian Prudhomme was revealing the route for the 2011 Tour de France. The lack of logic that Prudhomme was referring to was the fact that, despite 15 Tour stage wins since 2008, I had yet to win the green jersey competition, nominally designed to reward the best sprinter in the race.
I’d come close in the previous couple of years. In 2009, Thor Hushovd and my contentious disqualification for dangerous sprinting on stage 14 to Besançon had cost me, and then in 2010 I had been too unnerved by the sudden loss of power from my legs on stage 4 to mop up essential points. On both occasions I’d come within a whisker of winning the green jersey, but there was something fundamentally wrong with the structure of the jersey competition if I was dominating to the extent that I had, yet still losing out to riders stockpiling points in the two or three intermediate sprints dotted along on the stage routes.
Prudhomme had agreed and decided that the rules needed to change. In 2011, he confirmed, there would be just one intermediate sprint on every stage, not two or three, and these would be worth a whopping 20 points to the winner, with a sliding scale of points right down to 15th place. Under the old system, only the first three riders at the intermediate sprints had scored, with six points for first, four for second, and two for the third rider over the line. The revamp meant that opting out of the intermediate sprints, as I had usually done in 2009 and 2010—judging the risk of wasting energy too great and the reward too meager—would no longer be an option.
Parallel to this, there was also now a bigger premium on winning stages than had previously been the case: Every sprint would be worth 45 points, 10 more than under the old rules. Even more crucially, there would now be a 10-point difference between first and second place in sprints at the end of stages, double what it had been in the past.
Based on Prudhomme’s comments and these notable changes, it was widely assumed that I would be their main beneficiary. However, it was no foregone conclusion; a lot would depend on the placement of the intermediate sprints, which were only revealed a matter of weeks before the Grand Départ in the Vendée region. My task could theoretically be even harder if, for instance, a large number of the intermediate sprints were placed soon after the major climbs.
One thing was beyond question, however: our commitment to banishing and avoiding the regrets of the previous two years. Mark Renshaw, more than anyone else, had been beating the same drum in the weeks and months leading up to the Tour: “We’re not coming home without that jersey.” Nothing was left to chance in our preparation; when the locations of the intermediate sprints had been released, we studied them and formulated our strategy. At the end of May, we had even gathered at a training camp in northwest France to test-ride the first four stages, in the hope that local knowledge would help give us a flying start.
My last major warm-up race, the Tour of Switzerland in June, didn’t feature a single genuine sprint finish because, as far as I could tell, the race organizer—a former pro by the name of Beat Zberg—thought that no one wanted to watch them. Nonetheless, surviving the glut of giant mountain passes that week had boosted my form and confidence. Further adding to my optimism, our Tour team had never been more singularly geared toward winning sprints. The eight express carriages on what I believed would be my fastest and best sprint train to date went by the names of Matt Gos
s, Bernie Eisel, Tony Martin, Danny Pate, Lars Bak, Mark Renshaw, Peter Velits, and Tejay Van Garderen.
We were ready.
i wasn’t the only one with high hopes for the 2011 Tour de France. British interest in the race had been steadily growing ever since the Grand Départ in London in 2007, and Brad Wiggins had big ambitions in the general classification in what was his Team Sky’s second Tour. A year earlier I would have endorsed Brad’s own view that his fourth place in the 2009 Tour (later amended to third, after Lance Armstrong’s disqualification) had been a one-off, the lucky coincidence of favorable circumstances. Over the first six months of 2011, however, I realized how wrong I had been. A cyclist can often gauge another rider’s form at a single glance, based on things that he does at moments of a race that pass completely unnoticed by the watching public. The way he moves up the peloton after a toilet break, his positioning, how the muscles in his calves flex beneath the skin … I had hardly seen Brad at a race all year, but I studied him over the first week of the Tour and realized that he was a different animal from the one who had turned up 12 months earlier. Equally importantly, I’d heard the stories from guys who had been training with Brad at altitude, or others who had suffered on his wheel the week before the Tour at the nationals, which Brad had won by 35 seconds from Pete Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas, and which I hadn’t finished.
“Brad’s flying. FLYING,” they all said.
“Never seen him this good …”
“Could win the Tour going like that.”
All of which was making headlines back in the UK, which brought with it pros and cons, one being that my future was the subject of intense speculation when we arrived in France.
At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Page 11
