At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  In June, various “insiders” had told journalists that my move to Sky had already been agreed, which wasn’t remotely accurate.

  My fear when these rumors first started circulating had been that Bob might even use them as an excuse not to pick me for the Tour, or perhaps the Vuelta a España in September, which would be key to my preparations for the world championships. Privately, I think it had crossed Bob’s mind that Team Sky might be trying to hinder his search for a new sponsor. He had already seen five of our riders move to Sky at the end of 2009, with Michael Rogers joining them at the end of 2010. The demise of HTC would free up our riders for other teams. It wasn’t just me in demand; the team was crammed with talent, between members of my lead-out train and winners in their own right. HTC folding would also clear Sky’s path to something else: more race wins.

  Bob wasn’t in the Vendée for the Grand Départ, illness having kept him away. He therefore missed Philippe Gilbert winning the first stage, finishing atop the Mont des Alouettes, a 1-km climb that most pundits had decided would be too tough for yours truly. In fact, it wasn’t the climb that ruled me out but a puncture 2 km from the line. Avoiding a crash in front of me, I had swerved and stabbed my front wheel on the crash barriers, punctured, and had to stop for a wheel change. There was then no way back into contention.

  The next stage was one that we were all looking forward to and had prepared for on our spring reconnaissance: the team time trial. These were always the most stressful days for the directeurs, the mechanics, and the riders, particularly with me around. In our press conference the previous week, I’d joked about how I went into “Full Metal Jacket mode” before team time trials. Part of it was my perfectionism and my desperation to do well, but it was also sheer bafflement at the naïveté of some professional bike riders about what this discipline required. While it mystified me, their failure to grasp even the fundamentals also made me realize what a fantastic education my coach, Rod Ellingworth, had given me and the other lads at the Academy when we were Under 23s. My pet hate was riders who would try to pull too hard or for too long on the front just to comfort their ego; changes of pace, whether it was a guy slowing down because he’d been in the wind for too long, or suddenly accelerating, were poison for the team’s momentum.

  I would never tire of emphasizing it, even if my teammates were sick of hearing it: “No fucking heroics!”

  Two days before the Tour started, we had headed out, as a team, for a run-through on the race route. An Australian film crew had followed us, and, typically, I had kicked off about something or other, upon which Matt Goss had got the hump and told me to stop ranting, just like Bernie the previous year at the Vuelta. It had really been nothing, but it made a juicy little bit of footage for the Australian TV crew. When the clip was broadcast, it became, for the rest of the media, an invitation to speculate about an internal rivalry between Gossy and me, fueled by his win at Milan–San Remo.

  In truth, all it had really been was me being myself in the buildup to the team time trial. It was the same on the bus within minutes of stage 1 ending, when I collared our sprint coach, Erik Zabel, and began talking tactics and techniques for the following day.

  “The first three men should be in their aero position,” I told him, “the rest on the brake handles so they can get as close as possible to the wheel in front and brake if they need to …”

  Erik had nodded wearily.

  “Look, Erik, I know you fucking know, but we’ve got to make sure they know as well,” I’d said, jabbing a finger toward my teammates.

  The next day we had barely turned a pedal before we’d had to rethink everything. Moments before riding together from the team bus to the start-ramp, our young American, Tejay Van Garderen, had muttered something about not having the right wheels for the windy conditions, and Bernie had got annoyed.

  “You had half an hour to say something and you didn’t say anything,” Bernie snapped.

  Five hundred meters down the course, on the first left-hand bend, Bernie had clipped Tejay’s rear wheel and gone down.

  Waiting for Bernie to get up and get back on simply wasn’t viable; with Tony Martin, our strongest time trialist, drilling at the front as we exited the bend and hit a short rise, those who had been behind Bernie when he crashed now had to sprint to close the gap. It killed them, and the combination of this and our numerical disadvantage, with Bernie marooned back down the road, cost the team at least 10 seconds—certainly more than the 5 that ended up separating us and the eventual stage winner, Garmin.

  When we arrived back at the bus, Bernie, who is one of the most resolutely upbeat people I’ve ever met, looked suicidal.

  There were no points awarded on the green jersey competition in team time trials, which left the standings unchanged after two stages: Philippe Gilbert, the stage winner on the first day, led on 45, while I languished in 24th place, having picked up five points in the intermediate sprint on day one.

  The new rules took some getting used to. What was already clear, and had been since the announcement of the new points scale, was that while you didn’t have to be winning intermediate sprints to challenge for the green jersey, neither could you ignore them. Tour stages tend to follow quite a stereotypical pattern, whereby at some point in the first two hours a breakaway group of four or five riders will shoot off down the road and consequently beat the main peloton to the intermediate sprint. In the old days, this had often meant that the points available were already gone by the time we in the main bunch arrived, but now there were scoring opportunities for 15 riders, not 3, and so unless there was a large breakaway, every intermediate sprint would somehow count. That in turn meant that I’d have to get myself into them somehow.

  It was interesting to see how my fellow sprinters had approached the intermediate sprint on the first day, and on stage 3 to Redon they were committing four or five men to the lead-out.

  A lot of it was due to ego, I’d decided, and the fact that sprinters are basically gladiators. For some, I sensed, it was about flexing their muscles more than picking up points. This was also something, I realized later, that the media would encourage by suggesting that the intermediate sprints were somehow indicative of what would happen two or three hours later on the finishing straight. That may have applied to other riders, but not to me; I knew what muscle damage was caused by even a seven- or eight-second effort, and how it could impact your speed later when it really mattered. Despite that, here, on stage 3, with five riders down the road, I had led the main bunch over the white line to take sixth place and 10 points.

  The good news as we headed into Redon, with the breakaway now caught, was that my legs were starting to sing. I clearly wasn’t the only one in my team, but therein lay a danger to which we duly succumbed: In our overeagerness to get to the first sprint, we’d gone too early. With 4 km, Bernie had pulled off, leaving just Tony Martin, Gossy, Renshaw, and then me, and even one of Tony’s gargantuan efforts could only take us just inside the 2-to-go barrier. At this rate, I’d be in the wind at 700 meters to go, not 200, so I decided to gamble: With 1,500 meters to go, I let Renshaw’s wheel go, allowing him and Gossy to pull clear. This would force the sprint trains behind me to surge, with the idea being that I would latch onto another team’s train as they came past me.

  I’d acted on instinct and the gamble didn’t pay off. There were no gaps or good openings to slot into, no good wheels to follow. Riders had flooded past me on either side, leaving me submerged and too far back. I managed to get myself back into a reasonable position as we swung around the final bend—reasonable except for one thing: The rider on my inside was Romain “The Menace” Feillu, who took us both wide and almost into the barriers. I unclipped my right foot from the pedal, ready to crash, but skidded like a speedway rider to stay upright. By then I was 50, maybe 60 meters behind Tyler Farrar and his lead-out man Julien Dean. In the last 500 meters I went like a cannonball but needed another 50 meters of road to catch them. Tyler Farrar held on to win, and I f
inished fifth.

  If I’m honest, I can’t say that I was thrilled for Tyler. There was something that never failed to wind me up about the way the media had built him up, the way he added to the hype by exaggerating the importance of my team in interviews, and not fully acknowledging that his was just as strong when it came to lead-outs. For all the talk, he’d only ever beaten me once in my career when I hadn’t had mechanical problems or some other issue. I didn’t rate him, and that day I couldn’t quite bring myself to congratulate him in my interviews after the stage. Instead, I made some typically forthright remarks about “kamikaze Romain Feillu” and how he “always causes havoc.”

  What the journalists who had interviewed me on the steps of our bus didn’t know was that when I’d gone back inside, Mark Renshaw had given me a lecture. Apparently when I’d left the gap 1,500 meters out, he and Gossy had heard “NO!” when in fact I’d shouted “GO!” In any case, Renshaw said, it was a stupid move, “the kind of thing that might work at the Giro, but we’re not at the Giro.”

  My bad day at the office was not yet over. An hour after the finish, the commissaires announced that Thor Hushovd and I had been disqualified from the intermediate sprint and lost our points, supposedly because we had both deviated from our lanes as we fought to follow Philippe Gilbert’s wheel. All that had really happened was that Thor had tried to jump in between Philippe and me, had leant on me slightly, and I’d leant back.

  The decision was farcical and everyone thought so. But then, equally, nothing really surprised me when it came from the commissaires anymore.

  Once again, it was turning into a pretty miserable start to the Tour. There was no discernible improvement, either, after a hilly stage the next day through Brittany, won by Cadel Evans. I now trailed the new leader in the green jersey competition, the Spaniard José Joaquín Rojas Gil, by 48 points. He had 82 to my 34.

  The next day we stayed in Brittany, but I could have been back on the Isle of Man. It was green, it was gnarly, and it was windy.

  The last 25 km hugged the coast, and the final 3 km had the feel of a roller-coaster ride, rippling up and over headlands. We had studied it on Google Maps Street View and decided that a stage win was still well within my capabilities, and we had set off with that in mind … until Erik Zabel radioed our directeurs sportifs halfway through the stage to suggest that it was harder than we’d imagined. Erik said that at 3 to go, the road ramped up at 12 percent and that I and the team would need to really dig in there to have any chance. My finish line, I decided, would be when the road plateaued under the 3-kilometer banner.

  When it came, my chin was nearly on my bike’s top tube. My vision began to fog, but I somehow made it over in fourth place. A win from here was improbable at best, and would have rivaled the penultimate one of my six in 2009, at Aubenas, which I considered my best ever at the Tour. The task was made harder still when, with a kilometer to go, André Greipel barged me toward the barriers. The precedent had been set in the intermediate sprint two days earlier, with my disqualification for leaning on Hushovd: I couldn’t retaliate, even if the impact had killed my momentum and left me 20 wheels back, surely out of it. Now I was sprinting for the minor positions, to pick up a few meager points.

  Or so I thought. With the road now rising toward the finish line from the 500-meters-to-go sign, I glimpsed a white jersey whose owner I mistook to be Brad Wiggins but was actually Geraint Thomas. I promptly jumped into Gee’s slipstream, the lactic acid stinging my every sinew, and pushed and pushed until, 40 seconds later, I glimpsed the finish line through the spokes in my front wheel. Somehow, against all the odds, I’d won. Whether out of shock or exhaustion, I could barely even lift my hands off the bars to celebrate.

  My press conference afterward was the usual, sedate affair: I announced to the world’s press that among them were “ignoramuses” whom I’d been glad to shut up, threatened to sue a journalist who had misheard José Joaquín Rojas’s account of a tangle with Alessandro Petacchi for suggesting that it had been with me, and finally semiseriously admitted that we’d be there all night if I started talking about the “problems in my head” to which I’d alluded in an interview the previous day. Poor Kristy, our press officer, stood to the side of the stage, no doubt despairing.

  After five stages, things were at least looking up for me and the team in the green jersey competition. Philippe Gilbert, who’d come in second on the stage, was the new leader with 120 points, but after my victory I was within striking distance at 84. After stage 6, another hilly one that lent yet more credence to my theory that the Tour organizers were on a crusade to eradicate bunch sprints, probably because they were fed up with our domination, the gap had widened to 144 points against 94.

  A case, then, of one step forward, two steps back. But while stage 6 might not have suited me, stage 7 seemed the perfect chance for me to close the gap again.

  at the route presentation in October 2010, I had flipped open the information packet given to us by the race organizers, scrolled down the list of stages, and felt my eyes immediately drawn to stage 7. What grabbed my attention wasn’t the fact that it looked to be only the second, nailed-on bunch sprint of the Tour, but rather where it was taking us.

  I don’t think Châteauroux’s inhabitants will feel too aggrieved to hear me say that, by most measures, their town is not one of France’s most illustrious or memorable. It lies landlocked in the bullseye of France, surrounded on all sides by flat, featureless plains. Fifty thousand people live there; it has an impressive cathedral, some museums, and a pretty old town, but even judging by the paragraph of tourist blurb in the Tour route book, there aren’t too many reasons to plan a trip.

  Despite this hardly glowing reference, Châteauroux happens to be my favorite place in France. Why? Because it was there that I won my first ever Tour de France stage, in 2008, and there that my HTC teammates now offered a master class in 2011. This time around, the Tour’s route planners had thrown a spanner in the works by positioning the intermediate sprint just 25 km from the finish line, as the road doglegged from its southward course to the east. The danger was that, with the change of direction and the wind suddenly gusting across the road at a different angle, a team or teams would try to split the bunch as soon as we turned after the sprint. The way to make sure that we were all on the right side if the elastic did snap was for the whole team to swarm to the front the second I crossed that intermediate sprint line. Sure enough, within seconds of me edging out Rojas for the 11 leftover points, they were wrapped around me in a protective cocoon. It was just as well, as Fabian Cancellara’s Leopard Trek team was soon applying exactly the kind of pressure we’d successfully preempted at the front.

  Our last 10 km that day would have had connoisseurs swooning. It’s often said that a sprinter’s train sets a fast tempo to deter and soak up attacks, but really that’s only its most rudimentary, in some ways least important, function. The success of a sprint train is gauged not by its speed but by the amount of space that it creates, although the two are intimately linked: The faster the train, generally speaking, the harder it is for other teams and riders to crowd around and cramp its last wagon—in our case, me. Here, we flirted with perfection, our line extending out of the peloton like the barrel from a gun. Everyone went beyond the call of duty, Peter Velits even finishing his work with 3 km to go, slotting back into the train, then returning for a second shift between the 2- and 1.7-to-go mark. The sprint itself was a simple drag race, Greipel having kicked from a deep position then gone wide to the right as he appeared in my sightline, while I hugged the barriers on the left. There was no doubt that André had responded to having a team built around him this season, was making fewer mistakes, and had got quicker. While I still had the edge—quite accurately quantified by the one bike-length that was my winning margin here—André had emerged as my most competitive rival.

  My victory celebration was premeditated, but nothing to trouble the censors, nothing like at Romandie the year before: I had s
imply tried to reenact exactly what I’d done on the same finish line three years earlier, lifting my arms above my head and gripping my helmet with both hands, this time in only mock disbelief. Three years. It was hard to believe it wasn’t more. The last time I’d won here, it had felt like I flicked a switch as I crossed the finish line, and with that, my life changed. The disbelief had been real. Before Châteauroux I had won stages at the 2008 Giro d’Italia, my first in a major tour, but the Tour was and still is the only bike race where a stage win could have that sudden, transformative effect.

  Even at the time, I’d been adamant that riches and fame wouldn’t change me, and in a certain sense I’d been right, but on other levels I could see that, three years later, so much was different now. While I still adored my job, it had become that—a job—with high stakes and daunting responsibilities to teammates, sponsors, the public, and myself. For the most part I relished the pressure, and yet there were times when so many people’s state of mind seemed to depend on what I did aboard my bike. That was what had got to me so much in 2010; while I was devoting all of my energy to putting myself back on track, the media in particular seemed aggrieved that I wasn’t working according to their timetable. For all that I was intelligent and experienced enough by then to have worked out the rules of the game, it still wasn’t easy to learn, mature, and grow at my own pace while constantly in the spotlight. This was especially true given my habit of reacting instinctively, heart throbbing from my sleeve. The same qualities that were “raw,” “refreshing,” and “endearing” when I was winning were flipped to become “rash,” “tiresome,” and “obnoxious” when I wasn’t. Depending on the day, I either reaped the benefits or paid the cost.

  Ours was a fickle existence, and I was reminded of that moments after stepping off the podium in Châteauroux. In an interview with ITV’s Ned Boulting, I discovered that Brad had crashed around 40 km from the finish and was out of the race with a broken collarbone. The joy drained from me. I was crushed for him. Before the Tour, the excitement and curiosity among all of the British riders had been palpable. Now he was out of the race, and a deep respect for the hard work that he’d done and the sacrifices that he’d made accentuated our sympathy.