As we drove off down the route in the team car, whatever poison had flushed the feeling from my legs now started to seep into my thoughts. The worlds might now be in jeopardy. There was, though, an even more immediate, practical issue to resolve: Peta and her son, Finn, had flown out from London that morning and were due to see me at the end of the stage. Not only would they now not see me racing but they also would be hoping I would go back to the UK with them, which would mean disaster for my worlds preparation.
Even as I tried to recover from whatever it was that had made me ill, I didn’t want any home comforts. It was a question of focus and concentration as much as it was the lack of suitable training in the UK, the weather, or the risk of putting on weight. Not that this was easy to explain to Peta. As most riders will tell you, we make a lot of sacrifices in a career as professional cyclists, but our partners make even more. The faint look of disappointment in their eyes as we break the news that the team has planned another training camp, or that another one of our teammates is injured and needs to be replaced in a stage race, is one that might become all too familiar, yet can still cut like a dagger.
The question that Peta, the team, and Rod were now asking was where I could go to train, if not at home in the UK or my place in Italy. Luckily, Dave Millar, who wasn’t riding the Vuelta, had already come up with the perfect solution: His friend and neighbor, Garmin rider Christian Vande Velde, was away, so I could stay at his place in Girona, Spain, and train with Dave.
Another one of the guys who would be riding for me and Great Britain at the worlds, Jez Hunt, was also going to be there, and Rob Hayles would also fly out. We could therefore make it our own mini-, preworlds training camp. It sounded perfect—and the even better news was that Peta and Finn could come with me.
That was one problem at least half resolved. But there were others. I could train as much as I wanted, but since 2001, every single worlds winner had also competed in the Vuelta—and without exception got a lot further than stage 4. That was one worry. Another, which essentially stemmed from the same issue of my premature withdrawal, was that UCI rules forbade a rider to pull out of one sanctioned race and, before that event had finished, enter another one. This meant that I would not have raced for a whole month when I took my place on the start line in Copenhagen and would near enough have ruined my chances of winning the worlds.
In the heat and panic of the moment, Rod and my team had at first just wanted to know what was going on, why I’d pulled out. From the moment that I’d started losing teammates’ wheels in the second or third kilometer of the team time trial in Benidorm, the media had launched into their usual game of Cavendish controversy bingo. What was it to be this time? The girlfriend? His weight? The money? Or that he couldn’t be bothered? Rolf, Brian, and the others knew better than anyone that it was all pretty much always total nonsense, but they might still have wondered for a second whether there wasn’t an ulterior motive, perhaps linked to this being HTC-Highroad’s last ever major tour. Some of the phone calls exchanged between the directeurs that night, and between them and Rod, were by all accounts pretty fraught.
They, too, though, soon had to focus on practical matters. Providing that I could recover and get back on my bike again within a few days, Rod would come down to Girona and oversee my training with Dave and Jez, but that still didn’t address our fears about my lack of racing. The Tour of Britain, eight days long and finishing the weekend before the worlds, would be ideal, but of course the rules wouldn’t allow me to take part.
Or would they? Rod and Brian knew that there were precedents where riders had pulled out of one race and obtained permission from the UCI and the organizer of the abandoned race to start another. They came to an agreement: Brian said that he would try to find a place for me on HTC’s Tour of Britain team, which already had been selected and was full of riders also desperate for competitive action before the worlds, while Rod dealt with the race organizer and the UCI.
In the space of three or four days in Girona, the toxins in my muscles started to gradually drain away, and I discovered on my first two or three training rides that the fitness built up before the Vuelta was still largely intact. Rob Hayles had arrived with his family and joined Dave, Jez, and me on the rides. Rob was training for what would be his last ever road race, the British National Hill Climb Championships, and we butchered him. Christian’s house is perched at the top of a tough, 1-km climb, and every day I’d whiz up and wait to take the piss out of Rob as he zigzagged, barely still moving, over the brow.
I was flying, not that I realized it at the time. On every ride or after it, I’d be pestering the guys to reassure me about my form: “I’m going okay, aren’t I? You think I’m pretty strong on the climbs … ?” Rob said later that the only thing more stressful than having to constantly put my mind at ease was maintaining my standards of cleanliness in Christian’s house. Rob thought that I might suffer from OCD. To be fair, he wasn’t the first to say it. While we rode in the mornings and rested in the afternoons, Brian and Rod set about their respective tasks. Brian needed to persuade one of my teammates to vacate his place in the Tour of Britain, just in case I got the green light to start the race. The first person he tried was my old chum from the Academy, Matt Brammeier—good old, amiable, unselfish Brammy. There was just one problem: Brammy, who wasn’t exactly earning a king’s ransom with HTC, not only needed the racing before the Tour but also could earn some cash in bonuses from the Irish Cycling Federation if he rode well at the Tour of Britain. From Brammy, then, it was a “sorry, but no.”
Brian looked down the list for another name to try: Peter Velits. Peter is a nice guy and was riding in the worlds but not expecting or expected to be in the shake-up on such a flat course. Brian punched in his number and this time tried a different tactic.
“So, Peter,” he said after the initial niceties, “you’re doing the Tour of Britain, are you? Ach, that bloody race. The transfers in that race are a nightmare, aren’t they? And the hotels?”
By this point, Peter may just have sensed that there was a hidden agenda. But Brian went on to explain our dilemma, and because he understood and was a nice guy, Peter said that it was okay; he would just train at home in Slovakia instead. I later called Peter to check that he was sure, and even said that I’d give him some money as compensation. He told me not to be silly, that it was fine.
I now only needed permission from the UCI and the Vuelta organizers. Which Rod duly secured.
All that was left for me to do was concentrate on riding my bike. In Spain, the combination of Dave and Jez, fantastic roads, and great weather meant that motivation was never going to be a problem. We had smashed ourselves, possibly clocking up more high-quality kilometers than I would have at the Vuelta. I then returned to the UK, to Peta’s house in Essex, slate skies, and torrential rain. But it didn’t faze me; Rod stayed with me, and I got myself back up to race speed on mammoth rides behind his moped, with another British pro, Alex Dowsett, keeping me company. We’d do 260 km, the exact length of the race in Copenhagen, the last 100 of which would be following Rod at 50, 60 kph. I had rarely, if ever, trained so hard. And I was now about to start the Tour of Britain in supreme, crank-wrenching, chain-buckling form.
The race rolled out from Peebles in Scotland, and right from the off I could sense that friends, teammates, and rivals could see that I was flying. I won that first stage to Dumfries, with Renshaw in second place. The stages ended early in the Tour of Britain and weren’t particularly long, unlike the distances between one day’s finish and the next day’s start. For most of the riders this meant tiresome transfers in team buses … but Rod and I were using alternative means of transport for at least part of the journeys. I’d wipe myself down, attend to my media duties, then get back on my bike and prepare to follow Rod for 50 or 60 km on his moped. Stage 2, incredibly, was canceled due to hurricane-force winds, which meant that I still led the race. Twenty-four hours later, I’d relinquished the race leader’s yellow jersey b
ut impressed everyone on a difficult, uphill finale in Stoke-on-Trent. At the hotel that night, Bernie Eisel added his voice to the growing chorus picking me for the rainbow jersey in Denmark. In fact, he did more than just pick me—he said that it was in the bag.
If there really could be no such certainty, I did strengthen my claims and shorten my odds by easing to my second stage win of the race on the last day in London, a week almost to the hour before I’d hopefully be doing the same in Copenhagen.
The secret in that week, Rod and I knew, would be avoiding the mistakes of the previous year in Melbourne. Project Rainbow Jersey had been over 2 years in the making—nearly 10 years if you traced it back to the birth of the Academy—yet its success would now depend on tiny details. There was the choice of kit—in my case a British cycling track skinsuit, cut off three-quarters of the way down the sleeves not for aerodynamic reasons but to keep my wrists cool, which in turn helped to keep my core body temperature down. This was something that I had first learned when I was a junior, bombing around sweaty indoor velodromes.
Then there was my bike—the Specialized Venge designed in conjunction with the McLaren Formula 1 team, with a custom paint job and specially stiffened at the bottom bracket for extra zip in a sprint. The wheels we would agonize over for days, hesitating between a deep-section carbon wheel, more aerodynamic but not as reactive, and a narrow-section wheel that gave me more jump out of the corners but had a higher drag factor and therefore wasn’t as effective at high speeds. Having trained on the circuit throughout the week and paid particular attention to that crucial, right-angle right-hander with 900 to go, I eventually opted for the latter. My positioning from that bend to the finish line—and the scope for correcting mistakes—would be more decisive, I thought, than my straight-line speed.
My tires were also the source of some concern and a lot of discussion right up to the eve of the race. I adored the Continentals that we used at HTC, especially in the rain; Mark Renshaw and I still talked fondly about a descent we’d done in damp conditions at the 2009 Giro, on a day when the Spanish rider Pedro Horrillo had suffered a career-ending crash into a ravine, and we reckoned that we’d caught and overtaken five groups. They were the only tires I wanted on my wheels in Copenhagen, especially if there was any chance of wet weather, but Rod insisted the forecast was for fair skies and that the Continentals were the wrong option. He pointed out that at the Tour of Denmark that year, on Danish roads surfaced with the same kind of tarmac we’d see at the worlds, HTC riders had suffered numerous punctures. Still skeptical, I agreed to train on the Veloflex tires that Rod was recommending … and punctured on that very first ride. That settled it: I was going with my trusty Continentals.
Another of my equipment choices in Copenhagen would be the subject of scrutiny and debate, but not until weeks and months after the race. My helmet was a regulation road one that Rob Hayles had helped the manufacturer, Specialized, to adapt and make more aerodynamic. In the effort to save every watt of power, the helmet had been encased in a transparent carbon bubble covering the air vents. No one said anything at the time, and questions were only raised when the Lotto team’s riders were prevented from wearing a similar helmet, this one with a removable cover, at the Tour Down Under the following January. The discrepancy stemmed from a rule change that the UCI hadn’t publicized, and from the fact that their equipment regulations in general tended to be a movable feast. They could have spared themselves and me some embarrassment, it has to be said, by not using a photo of me crossing the line in the now offending helmet quite so prominently in the documentation that they finally released explaining the rule in March 2012.
these, then, had been the finishing touches to Project Rainbow Jersey, the last effort to second-guess the explosion of variables that would occur on the sound of that gun on the Sunday morning. It would be easy and perhaps tempting amid this eruption of imponderables to cling to faith, to trust in luck and natural talent, but Rod had begun this quest precisely because he knew that wasn’t the way to win any bike race, least of all the world championships. The advantages procured by what the press now delightedly bracketed among my “marginal gains” might have amounted to tens, maybe hundreds of meters over a 266-km race. I ended up beating Matt Goss by less than 1 meter: he was also riding a Specialized bike, but a less aerodynamic model, and was also wearing a vented helmet and a normal jersey and shorts.
Those crucial, life-altering last 50 meters bearing down on the line that represented so much to so many of us—none of that was anything but the culmination of years and years of hard work. I had no more won the worlds than Rod had won it, than Chris, Jez, Ian, Gee, Brad, Dave, and Steve had won it. Than Adam Blythe, who had scored that vital single point that had given us an eighth rider. Than Dan Lloyd, who hadn’t made the team but had attended every training camp and whose congratulatory text message was the first on my phone. Than every one of the other hundreds of people who had in some way contributed to Project Rainbow Jersey.
That realization would trouble me throughout what should have been the happiest evening of my professional career. At first I couldn’t process anything: neither Brammy, who had ridden for Ireland, being the first person to embrace me in my first few seconds as the world champion, nor the Prince of Denmark, a huge cycling fan and another mate of Brian’s whom we’d once met for a cup of tea, presenting me with my medal on the podium.
My head was still spinning at a dizzying, disorienting cadence throughout the national anthem, during which I surprised myself by not crying, or at the press conference or dope control.
By the time I’d dealt with the formalities, arrived back at the bus, and clambered up the steps, my teammates were midway through their second, maybe their third happy hour. Everyone was drunk and raucously elated. Even Rod, who is the least proud and self-regarding person you could ever meet, took a photograph—just about the only one in his possession with any commemorative value—and later made it the screensaver on his computer.
We drove back to the hotel, the bus throbbing with cheers, music, and jubilation. The party then spilled into the bar and grew in size and inebriation throughout the night. Peta and Finn were there, as was Simon Bayliff. The guys all had their own stories, different things that they remembered, different vantage points from which they’d seen me win. Dave and Jez had pulled over next to the big screen on the last lap, watched the sprint, and almost forgotten to finish the race!
Everyone tried to savor the moment and the achievement, but I was struggling slightly. I’m loath to use the word anticlimax, but there was a certain hollowness to the joy at having realized an ambition that I’d held for so long. Perhaps I hadn’t drunk enough or, more likely, I felt uncomfortable that so much of the attention was being focused on me. As if I was the world champion and they weren’t. Of course that was the reality—I would now wear the rainbow jersey for a year, the rainbow jersey that I had lusted after, dreamt of, worked toward—but it somehow didn’t seem right that there was so little recognition for them. I had executed my job perfectly, but so had they.
I’m not just talking about money, bearing in mind that our federation didn’t offer any bonus to divide, unlike other nations, and I don’t mean other kinds of material rewards. They would all get a nice watch—an IWC Yacht Club—specially commissioned and customized, with rainbow stripes detailing across the black face and each rider’s name engraved on the bezel. There, too, I was indebted, to Steve Cumming’s wife, Nicky, who worked for the jeweler David M. Robinson and had arranged to have the watches made in secret.
When I talked about recognition, I meant something that money couldn’t buy—a unanimous, even if silent, acknowledgment that I was just one part, and not even necessarily the most important, of an extraordinary, unstoppable machine. They all looked happy enough, beer bottles in hand, staggering around the bar, hugging each other and singing. But as the clock ticked toward one, I was tired and realized that ecstatic-yet-guilty feeling was one that I wasn’t going to shake.<
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I thanked them all, said goodnight, and took myself and my rainbow jersey off to bed.
A few days later, incidentally, Rob Hayles went to collect the bike that I’d ridden in Copenhagen from the Manchester velodrome. When he located it in the British Cycling coach Shane Sutton’s office, Rob looked down at the front wheel, did a double take, then squeezed the rubber with his thumb. Like the Spaniard Abraham Olano in 1995, I had won the world championships on a punctured tire.
sky high
this is not necessarily a detail that I’d like recorded in the annals of professional bike racing as a footnote to the first British victory in the world road race championships for 48 years, but soon after thinking I’m the world champion, another realization flashed across my thoughts: Fuck … Head & Shoulders.
Head & Shoulders was the brand of shampoo that I had recently agreed to endorse, and for which I was due to do a major photo shoot two days after the worlds. It wasn’t dandruff that I was worried about but—like in January 2010—a damaged tooth.
After the 2002 Giro d’Italia, the American Tyler Hamilton had famously needed 11 of his teeth capped, having fractured his shoulder early in the race and used teeth-grinding as a way of displacing the pain. I’d done something similar over the previous six hours (admittedly without the broken bone, but also without the drugs that Hamilton has now admitted were fueling him), and it had left me with a smile more suited to Halloween than a major advertising campaign. I had no choice but to clear the diary over the next two days, call off interviews, fly to Manchester, and go straight to my dentist. If you look at the adverts we shot later that week, I think you’ll agree that he did a pretty good job.
At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Page 16
