The first races on my 2012 program would be the Tours of Qatar and Oman in February. At our camps in Majorca, former HTC teammates had all agreed that I looked stronger and leaner than in any winter since 2008–9, and my form was matched by my excitement. On the plane to Qatar, though, I began to feel ill.
I ended up spending 40 of the 48 hours immediately before stage 1 in bed. Antibiotics seemed to have cured me—I went on to win stages 3 and 5 after some incredible work by Bernie Eisel and Juan Antonio Flecha—but lethargy kicked in between Qatar and Oman, and it continued to affect me for the next few weeks. It was always the same with me and antibiotics; the short-term benefits came with long- or at least mid-term costs.
Oman was a much hillier race than Qatar, but under normal circumstances at least four of the six stages lent themselves to sprint finishes. I vaguely contended in only two of them, with our sprint-train as rickety and erratic in Oman as it had been smooth and rapid in Qatar. My assigned lead-out man was the Australian Chris Sutton, who was a decent sprinter in his own right. With him as my last man, though, we just didn’t gel. This early in the year, the lack of any outstanding candidate for this role wasn’t yet a major worry, although I was still disappointed that Mark Renshaw had signed elsewhere. Of the riders on the Team Sky roster, the only one I could envisage doing a comparable job to Renshaw was Geraint Thomas, but his year and road program revolved around the London Olympics and winning a gold in the team pursuit on the track.
I came home from Oman feeling completely drained. It wasn’t only the lingering effects of the antibiotics but something that had nothing to do with racing: My first child was due in a month’s time, and I was scared. The anxiety was making me irritable, the pregnancy was making Peta ratty—especially when I was away at races—and we were starting to get at each other. In Qatar and Oman we’d argued on the phone on a couple of occasions, and although everything quickly returned to normal, this only added to my apprehension. I wanted the baby to have a perfect life, a perfect family, and perfect parents right from the first day, but we were both trying too hard. Together with aftereffects of the antibiotics, the mental strain had started to wear me down and manifest itself in physical pain, specifically in my stomach.
As was the case the year before at San Remo, stress had left me vomiting a brown, bilious liquid that my HTC team doctor had explained was stomach acid and that he had treated with antacid medication. Twelve months on, I recognized the same symptoms and so made my way to Manchester to see one of the British Cycling doctors, get it checked out, and get some of the same tablets.
When I arrived at the velodrome that day and asked which of the doctors was around, I was told there was no one except the psychiatrist, Steve Peters. Steve and I had known each other for years and got on okay, but our different takes on sports psychology meant that, unlike Vicky Pendleton or Chris Hoy, I was never going to be banging down his door for advice. My views were slightly more nuanced now than in the early part of my career—I no longer just needed “sunshine blown up my arse,” as I wrote in Boy Racer, because I got too much of that now and sometimes needed the opposite. Fundamentally, though, I still held the opinion that a lot of what I imagined Steve did was not for me.
These opinions, of course, had no bearing on me seeing Steve quickly to get a prescription for some basic antacid pills. Or so I assumed. Two hours of what felt to me like intensive psychoanalysis later, I was no longer sure of anything.
It had started with what was, for me, an utterly baffling discussion about the exact color of the vomit that I was trying to describe. The conversation progressed from there, eventually, into a full inventory of everything in my life and how it made me feel. At one point, he asked me about Milan–San Remo. We got on to talking about failure there, and suddenly he was questioning whether I should even be taking part. At first my reaction was that he was talking rubbish, but before long he had me doubting San Remo, doubting my ability, doubting everything in my life. At one point I was almost reduced to tears and felt like a basket case.
I’ve seen Steve work wonders with others, but the work he does is just not for me.
My sensations on the bike, like my mood, continued to fluctuate quite wildly in that period. I won the Belgian semi-classic Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne at the end of February after a textbook display by the team, and took stage 2 of Tirreno–Adriatico in the second week of March before abandoning the race early, confident of my form ahead of Milan–San Remo later that week. Rod and the Team Sky nutritionist Nigel Mitchell had me experimenting with what was known as a “low-residue diet,” the purpose of which was to completely clear my intestines of food residue and its surplus weight. The diet lasted about a week and in my case consisted mainly of egg and rice. Some of the other Team Sky riders, like Brad Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen, had tried the diet and swore by it. We now hoped and thought that it would give me a decisive advantage on the short climbs that pepper the last 100 km of Milan–San Remo. However, the main effect that it seemed to have was to deprive me of energy; I was dropped on the Le Manie climb with 90 km to go and never really recovered. Nigel would do some fantastic work with me in my year at Team Sky, but this wasn’t an experiment that we’d be repeating.
I left Italy distraught, but two better performances without sparkling results at Dwars door Vlaanderen and Gent–Wevelgem brought much-needed reassurance. In my private life, too, things also felt a little calmer; as Peta’s due date had drawn closer, the excitement of becoming a father had overcome my trepidation about the baby’s arrival. Peta finally went into labor on April 3, and at five in the morning we headed to the Portland Hospital in central London. The greatest day of my life was about to begin.
Over the next 17 hours, Peta put my pain threshold to shame and made me glow with pride. At 10:30 that night, we finally had our beautiful baby girl, Delilah Grace Cavendish.
Everyone had told me that having a kid changes you and changes your life, but I hadn’t expected the transformation to happen so quickly. Now for every decision I made, from what I ate for breakfast to when I trained and when I went to bed, how it would affect Delilah would be the first thought that entered my head.
It was a lot to take on board. For a few days I oscillated between boundless joy and terrible anxiety that I wasn’t up to the challenges of parenthood. I remember one day a week or so after Delilah’s birth, in particular, when the weight of it all completely overwhelmed me. I was up at Rob Hayles’s place in the Peak District, training on the roads familiar from my grueling first weeks at the Academy in 2003. The weather was gorgeous, and to Rob, who was pacing me on the moped, there was nothing obviously wrong as we came to a hill and started climbing. I made it a few hundred meters before the tarmac under the wheels started to feel like treacle, I could no longer feel the warmth from Rob’s exhaust, and I pulled over onto the grass verge. My bike fell to the ground as tears started falling from my eyes.
When Rob looked over his shoulder to check that I was still there, he saw me not bobbing up the slope but weeping back down the slope on the grass. He turned around, parked the moped, and came to put his arm around me. He didn’t need to ask what was wrong. Over several weeks he’d seen me growing more and more anxious, less and less confident of my ability to deal with fatherhood. They were natural, normal feelings, but at the time, it took a lot of advice and support from true friends like Rob to make me realize that.
This period of readjustment, which really was all it was, lasted for a few weeks. As an athlete, you’re used to being—almost encouraged to be—self-absorbed, and Delilah and fatherhood released me from that inward-looking, self-obsessed spiral. In almost every interview I did that spring, I was asked whether being a parent wouldn’t make me ride a little more conservatively, maybe to the detriment of my sprinting. I knew that wouldn’t be the case; a certain fearlessness was in my nature, and having Delilah was an incentive to work even harder and, if anything, take even more calculated risks to continue winning.
I retur
ned to racing at the end of April in the Tour of Romandie, where I spent four days riding as a domestique for Brad Wiggins before pulling out on the penultimate stage. Brad’s determination and his physical condition had been impressive even at the training camps in the winter, and suddenly in races he could do no wrong.
I’d always considered Brad the single most talented rider in the world, but for a long time I doubted whether he had the perseverance to win a Tour de France. But as he added victory in Romandie to the overall win that he’d recorded at Paris–Nice in March, I already sensed that he was in the process of proving me wrong.
As I prepared for the start of the Giro d’Italia—beginning in, of all places, Denmark—I still had no real complaints about the team. Yes, I was light on support at the Giro, with the Colombian climbers Sergio Henao and Rigoberto Urán also pursuing their own ambitious goals, but I’d known this would be the case since January and had fully approved. There was no point in devoting too many resources to helping me at the Giro when we’d be pursuing such lofty goals later in the year.
The lack of a bona fide lead-out train at the Giro initially concerned me less than Urán’s and Henao’s very individual—and I thought individualistic—style of racing. After my friend Taylor Phinney won the first stage for BMC, Geraint Thomas showed me exactly what I’d been missing with some brilliant work in the finale to set me up for victory on stage 2. Gee had been as tireless and selfless as the Colombians had been (and would continue to be) frustrating. In the first two or three hours of stages, the rest of the team would surround me in the peloton like bubble wrap, and I’d be moving serenely along, only to notice that there were two riders missing: Henao and Urán. If we were lucky, they’d be skulking and nattering at the back of the peloton; if we weren’t, they’d lost a wheel through not paying attention and needed someone, usually Ian Stannard, to go and pace them back into the bunch.
Eventually I snapped at them, “You’re being asked to concentrate for four, maybe five, maybe six hours a day, you’re being paid very well, and yet you still can’t do it! If you were working in an office, you’d be there for eight, nine hours, and you’d be sacked if you got distracted this easily!” If they didn’t understand the words, because, with all due respect, neither spoke or understood English particularly well, they would certainly have known from my tone and gestures that I wasn’t showering them with compliments.
My tirade led to the management deploying Juan Antonio Flecha as the Colombians’ “guide dog.” That, at least, was the term they used.
Flecha was outraged … or pretended to be.
“Oh, I’m a dog now, am I?!” he trilled, trying not to join in the laughter.
In fairness to Urán and Henao, by the end of the three weeks they had taken some of my “advice” on board and we were getting on okay. They also rode pretty well; Henao would end up ninth on general classification and Urán seventh overall and first in the young rider competition.
For me, stage 3 should have been win number two, but a kamikaze maneuver from the Italian Roberto Ferrari put me on the deck 100 meters from the finish line and turned one side of my body into a smorgasbord of road rash. I was fortunate that a rest day—actually a travel day, but good enough—awaited us before the race resumed in northern Italy. Two days later, with the cuts and wounds still weeping and screaming at me like teenage girls at a One Direction concert, I won again at the end of a grueling stage to Fano on the Adriatic coast. It was the 11th Giro stage victory of my career and by far the most important. The reason? Peta was waiting with Delilah at the finish to see me win for the first time.
When I won another stage, in Cervere in the second week, I promptly abandoned my plan to leave the race that day. With only a week of the race to go, I was leading the points competition, snug in the red jersey that was equivalent to the Tour’s green jersey. There was no question of me pulling out as long as I still had a chance of winning that competition. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, as I lost out by a single point to the Spanish climber Joaquim Rodríguez.
Who knows, had I worn one of Team Sky’s own high-tech skinsuits instead of the red all-in-one provided by the organizers, I might have been able to sneak inside the top 15 to gain the single point I needed to draw even with Rodríguez. With him leading the race on general classification and hence wearing the more prestigious maglia rosa, the red was passed to the rider in second place in the points competition—in other words, me. I tempered my bitterness, I should add, by conceding that Rodríguez was perhaps the more deserving winner, having cruelly lost out to Ryder Hesjedal for overall glory in those last 28 km against the clock.
With the Giro over, all roads now led to the Tour de France. While Brad was underlining his credentials as a possible first British winner of the event by successfully defending his Dauphiné title, my last competitive outing before the Grand Départ would be at the ZLM Toer. This was a four-day stage race based in Holland that also took in some of the famous climbs of the Belgian Ardennes. It was a race usually dominated by sprinters, and this one lived up to that reputation, only perhaps not in the way that I or anyone else expected. I was beaten three times in bunch sprints—twice by the young German Marcel Kittel and once by André Greipel—but despite this, I pulled off a huge upset by winning the general classification. It was my first overall title in a professional stage race and one of the most remarkable results of my career.
The decisive stage took place on the third day, with the race going over one of the steepest and most notorious climbs in professional cycling, La Redoute in the Ardennes. At one point, surprised at how comfortably I was spinning my gear, I had looked around to see an array of grimacing climbers all appalled that I was making it look so easy. I had then even attacked at the top of the climb to bridge a 50-meter gap to the lead group. Bernie wasn’t particularly impressed, saying later that I shouldn’t have been wasting so much energy so close to the Tour, but I was delighted.
At one point on the stage, I had urged Juan Antonio Flecha to attack and thereby, in all likelihood, take the overall victory that his efforts deserved. He had declined the invitation in favor of protecting me, and in doing so I felt he had more than earned his place in Team Sky’s starting line-up for the Tour de France. This, with hindsight, was where the fault line with Team Sky began—the crack that soon became an unbridgeable crevice in my relationship with the team.
The week after the ZLM Toer, I discovered that only Bernie, and not Flecha, had made the cut. This took me by surprise, as I had presumed that at least two riders would be dedicated to me and my green jersey charge. The message that it clearly sent was that the team had now decided to play it safe. I understood and would never have disputed that yellow should be our priority, but I’d been under the impression that “believing in better,” as per the BSkyB motto, was going to be about big ambitions, pursuing nearly impossible dreams, defying history and conventional wisdom. I felt sad and disappointed that we were already accepting compromises even before arriving in Liège for the Grand Départ.
I got the feeling that it was going to be a very long three weeks. How long, though, and how different my professional future was going to look in Paris, I could never have envisaged.
the difference between riding a Tour de France in a team whose primary motivation is the yellow jersey and one with more diverse aims, like HTC’s had been, was summed up neatly on the first morning in Liège. At least that was how I came to look back on an apparently trivial incident at breakfast in the team hotel.
I’m the first to admit—and have done so already in this book—that I have fastidious, you might even say anal, tendencies. I also take my coffee very seriously, like a lot of cyclists do. So I was pleased when I came down to breakfast on that morning in Liège to see a Nespresso automatic coffeemaker. I was less amused, however, when I opened up the flap under which you insert your coffee capsule to find one that had already been used by whichever of my teammates had served himself before me.
An, ahem, short spe
ech followed, after which I was sure the same thing wouldn’t happen again. Except it did, both the next day and again the day after that, until my morning diatribe was a feature of daily life—at least for the time that we were in Liège. Instead of the desired effect, though, all my speeches were producing was hilarity—so much so that the team produced a warning poster on my behalf and stuck it above the machine.
That was probably the most the team laughed in the entire three weeks—which in itself was telling—but the story of the coffee capsules became a kind of parable for me. For all that I loved Brad, Chris Froome, Richie Porte, and the other guys, they were totally wrapped up in their own world—or their own coffee capsules, as it were. They had approached the business of making coffee the same way they dealt with riding their bikes—with tunnel vision. The staff at Team Sky, I had noticed and would see even more clearly at the Tour, was there to execute their designated tasks and think of nothing else. It was efficient, it was professional, it put other teams to shame—but it wasn’t a lot of fun.
With every passing hour in the days leading up to the Grand Départ, it became more and more obvious to me that, in management’s eyes, going for green as well as yellow was simply too risky. When we talked about how I should approach the intermediate sprints, which my victory in the competition in 2011 had shown to be vital, I gathered that the team didn’t feel it would always be able to justify the efforts needed to get me into a point-scoring position. Out of sympathy or solidarity, Bernie said privately that he would try to give me a hand.
Our head directeur at the Tour was Sean Yates. One of only four British riders up to that point to have worn the yellow jersey at the Tour, Sean was revered as a legend of the sport in the UK. A superb time trialist and domestique to Lance Armstrong, among other stars, in the 1980s and 1990s, Sean had known and been respected by Brad for years. Before the Tour, I had done only one race with Sean—the Tour of Romandie—and quickly got the sense that he didn’t think much of my skills or admire me. I assumed it wasn’t personal and that he was one of those former bike riders with preconceptions about sprinters, namely that they were lazy and prima donnas. Sean’s man management also just didn’t suit me: I found him cold, uninspiring, and miserly in praise. At Romandie I had buried myself for Brad yet couldn’t remember getting even a “well done” from Sean.
At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Page 18
