At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  Instead of saying to me, “Cav, you’re at 430 watts, that’s much better than last week,” or “Cav, 410 isn’t enough,” Tim laid out in detail exactly what would be required to win the Olympic road race, and therefore what was required in training.

  “This is how much you’ll weigh on the day of the Olympic road race,” Tim explained, “and this is the number of watts that you’ll have to produce over this many minutes on Box Hill to win.”

  The words that resonated with me were the last two: to win.

  Rather than just dismiss me as a physiological ugly duckling, Tim was intelligent enough to frame the science within something that, he knew, was impossible to quantify: my ability to suffer. Even in his work in rowing and swimming before he joined Team Sky, Tim said, he’d rarely seen an athlete who could squeeze as much out of his or her innate capabilities. He said it astounded him that I could even finish the Tour de France.

  I’m not the greatest trainer, not when it’s training for training’s sake. Whereas other riders can pick out a circuit and do lap after lap, or work through prescribed, specific exercises focusing only on their heart rate or power output, I need different and much more varied stimuli. If I have to train alone, I’ll never take the same road twice on the same ride, even if it means exploring new terrain and potentially getting lost. The idea, then, of simulating the Olympic road race course and the laps of Box Hill by finding an equivalent climb and repeating it seven, eight, nine times would normally have horrified me. Tim, though, made it bearable by planting a vision, a conviction in my mind: I wasn’t training to improve, I wasn’t training to hit a number, I was training to win the Olympic road race. Thus, a Tuscan climb known locally as La Riola became a slice of Surrey transplanted to Italy for an intensive block of training after the Giro in June. With Rod pacing me, baiting me, torturing me on the moped, the sessions were brutal. They exhausted but also, somehow, invigorated me. I could feel myself improving by the day, by the hour, or even with every repetition of the climb. Weight, of course, was a vital part of the equation, and I was helped hugely in this regard by the British Cycling and Team Sky nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell, who was sent to live with and cook for me in key training phases in both Italy and the UK.

  the Olympics, then, had been at the forefront of my mind throughout the year and throughout the Tour. They became my sole preoccupation from the moment I crossed the line in Paris as a stage winner and a member of the first team to guide a British rider to victory in the Tour de France.

  That evening we attended a short reception hosted by our sponsors before being whisked off to the airport and a plane that would take us directly back to London. Our holding camp was at Foxhills hotel and golf course in Surrey, where we spent five days resting and recovering, with a couple of fairly intensive training sessions on Box Hill on Wednesday and Thursday. Brad had gone home for a couple of days, which left the other four members of the team—me, Dave Millar, Chris Froome, and Ian Stannard—to enjoy some downtime with our families. When Brad joined us on Wednesday, he was relaxed, funny, and an altogether different beast from the tense, introverted, hyperfocused rider we’d seen at the Tour. He and Chris seemed to be getting on fine, and the atmosphere was, on the whole, a lot more jovial than it had been in France. I was much happier, too, having been able to spend some time with my family, and also having opened up to Dave Brailsford about my intention to leave Team Sky. In fairness to Dave, he understood and the conversation was amicable.

  The night before the road race, Brad left us for a couple of hours to go into the Olympic Village and officially open the Games, no less. When he arrived back at the hotel, we all sat down for our final meeting to go over what were, in truth, fairly simple tactics. As we had in Copenhagen, we would ride together throughout and look to bring the race back together, ready for a bunch sprint, in the final 20 km.

  All week I had had that special feeling—a magic in my legs and an unswerving belief that gold was my destiny. On the morning of the race, right up until the starter’s flag going down, the five of us joked and laughed in a way that suggested we all shared the same confidence. We were all kitted out with aero helmets and high-tech skinsuits and were quite an intimidating unit—at least when we started riding. The guys were absolutely flying. At one point, after around 50 km, the Italian rider Luca Paolini rode off the front of the bunch and up to a TV motorbike to berate the pilot for riding too close and sucking us along. The motorbike had actually been nowhere near us. We were just going that fast.

  One of my teammates would lead into Box Hill on every lap, and I’d be safely tucked in behind, just floating up the slope. The road was so narrow that we could almost block it to prevent attacks, although one large group had already broken away early in the stage, and there would be sporadic counterattacks throughout.

  As we came to the bottom of Box Hill for the last time, though, we were still very satisfied with how the race was panning out. One more ascent, another 2.5 km of climbing, then we’d be over the top and, if not quite home and dry, then certainly very difficult to escape on the fast, mainly downhill roads into London.

  We expected a flurry of last-ditch efforts from riders who would have no chance in a sprint, and they duly came. Fabian Cancellara’s acceleration, in particular, set my alarm bells ringing, but I resisted the urge coming from my legs that seemed to want nothing more than to jump across to Cancellara’s wheel. The night before, we’d accurately predicted and discussed precisely this scenario—a blizzard of attacks on the last lap of Box Hill—and finally agreed with Dave Millar that we were strongest as a unit and should stick to our own pace. As we crested Box Hill, I shouted to Brad to go faster, to suffocate a large group now opening clear airspace between themselves and us at the front of the peloton, but Brad couldn’t hear me over the din of the crowd.

  It was in these moments that our race unraveled. The guys had already butchered themselves to get me here, and the tiredness now started to tell, especially as teams that had been expected to help us were showing no interest in collaborating. The Aussies had Stuart O’Grady down the road in what was in danger of being the winning break, but where were the Germans? With 15 km to go and our chances still alive but hanging by a thread, one German rider, John Degenkolb, moved onto my shoulder to find out what I knew about the time gap, since race radios weren’t allowed at the Olympics and information was scarce.

  “So is it still a minute, eh? Fuck, it’s gonna be tough …”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it is, so you guys had better start riding.”

  Degenkolb replied that he couldn’t: He was André Greipel’s lead-out man, and if he worked now, he’d have nothing left for the last kilometer.

  “Lead-out man?” I said. “There’s not even going to be a sprint if you don’t hurry up and start helping, so I don’t know why you’re worried about that.”

  Degenkolb either didn’t listen, didn’t care, or his hands were tied. Germany didn’t work, we were on our last legs, and, sure enough, the break stayed away. Alexandre Vinokourov took gold, my Sky teammate Rigoberto Urán silver, and the Norwegian Alexander Kristoff bronze. Having punctured 2 km from the finish, I was the third rider in a large second group to cross the line, in 29th position, 40 seconds adrift of Vinokourov.

  I’d be lying if I said the reaction to my second “failure” at an Olympics didn’t irk me, and it started to get under my skin as soon as I made my way through the mixed zone to do my first post-race interviews. The BBC’s sports editor, David Bond, asked whether I’d paid for and was still weary after my exertions at the Tour de France.

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” I snapped, without hanging around to give him an answer.

  The press coverage the next morning reflected the same lack of understanding. The Sun’s headline was FROM BRAD TO WORST. It was clearly too much to expect the press to understand the irony of hailing Brad and denigrating me: It could be argued, could it not, that Brad hadn’t fulfilled his brief if the bunch hadn’t come back tog
ether for a sprint, whereas I hadn’t even been given the opportunity to do my job. I would never have made this argument, because the guys had been fantastic, but it was no more ridiculous than any attempt to pin the blame on me.

  While cycling in Britain has grown rapidly and my public profile has followed the same curve, the casual viewer still had a fairly loose grasp on the intricacies of the sport and didn’t understand how a rider could be the favorite for a race, perform admirably, yet still “only” finish 29th. In 2008 I’d started to earn some recognition in the UK for my four Tour de France stage wins but was equally well known as the single British cyclist who had come home from the Beijing Olympics without a medal. I’d even had to borrow track sprinter Jason Kenny’s silver medal and pretend that it was mine to get an upgrade to first class on my flight back! In the autumn of that year, when I’d told Bernie Eisel that I wasn’t among the 10 nominees for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, Bernie had thought it was some kind of joke—either mine or on the part of whoever had drawn up the shortlist.

  Four years on, I was doomed, once again, to be the “forgotten man.” Well, perhaps not completely forgotten, given that I was due to make my debut as an in-studio pundit for the BBC in the velodrome, and most TV viewers would probably be sick of the sight and sound of me within a few days. Even so, I was still somehow the runt of the British cycling litter. In the BBC studio, I would happily play along with and even encourage any reference to my Olympic jinx, but certain comments and questions, like the one from the BBC guy after the road race, still made me shudder. My own disappointment didn’t stop me reveling in the so-called British gold rush on the track, or in my new gig as the BBC’s track cycling oracle. I’d done similar things before, but in previous TV appearances found that the presenter’s ego sometimes got in the way of whatever insight you were trying to deliver. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case with Jake Humphrey, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The hardest part was purging my speech of all swearwords.

  After Brad’s Tour win and then yet more success, it was wonderful to see Britain suddenly gripped by cycling fever, as much as I thought there were some riders who had sacrificed too much to be competing in London. I was fairly blunt about Geraint Thomas and what I perceived as his misplaced priorities in Boy Racer. Typically, though, Gee didn’t hold it against me: one, because he’s not the kind to bear grudges, and two, because he already knew exactly where I was coming from. I felt the same as I had after Beijing, and Gee reacted similarly when we spoke at the Tour of Denmark a month after the London Olympics. I was aware that it sounded disrespectful and like sour grapes, but I firmly believed what I was saying: The gold medal that Geraint had won in London in the team pursuit, to go with the one he already had from Beijing, would change nothing for him.

  “What, so I should have just concentrated on helping you win the road race? Is that it?” he replied.

  I explained that, no, what I meant was that he had sacrificed too much for the track, and got what out of it? Your average Joe in the street didn’t even know who was in the team pursuit team.

  Which was fine—it wasn’t that kind of recognition that interested me, either—but Gee had put his road career on hold for years for those medals. In the peloton, he is rightly considered to be one of the most powerful and talented riders around, yet at the time of this writing, he himself would acknowledge that he has won very little, and certainly not an amount commensurate with his ability.

  With my business head on, and based on my experience over the previous few years, I could also hazard a guess at how much money it had cost him to prioritize the track over the road. Even having gone down the track route and won that second medal, I thought Gee and some of the other guys, like Pete Kennaugh, or whoever represented them, weren’t doing enough to boost their profile. I told Pete that he should be doing Attitude magazine cover shoots … and was only half taking the piss.

  Perhaps I had another, more fundamental conviction—you could even call it a prejudice—about the comfort zone that they had found at British Cycling and Team Sky. From their point of view, with their objectives, I could see how Sky was the perfect team. No other team would have allowed them to put their road careers on the back burner in the same way as Sky, certainly not on their salaries. This brought both advantages and disadvantages for them personally and for cycling in the UK.

  While Team Sky might have been the perfect team for someone like Gee, the same wasn’t true for me. I was different and so were my feelings about where would be the best place to pursue my career. Having informed Brailsford a few days before the Olympics that I wanted out, I gathered that he was also open to an amicable separation. The negotiations had dragged on but finally reached a satisfactory resolution at the beginning of the autumn.

  A year and a week after I was unveiled as Team Sky’s new star signing, another announcement was made to confirm that I would ride for Omega Pharma–Quick-Step in 2013.

  winning clean

  on January 17, 2013, in a hotel in Argentina, I found a position on the floor as close as possible to the TV, turned the volume low so as not to disturb my sleeping roommate, and watched a man I used to know tell the world that he was the biggest cheat in sport.

  My instinctive reaction to Lance Armstrong on Oprah’s Next Chapter? Too many adverts.

  Lance and I had met at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas in September 2008. Introduced by George Hincapie, once Lance’s domestique deluxe and then mine, we had instantly struck up a rapport. There was something mesmeric about Lance. That’s something people often say about so-called celebrities, but not until I spent an hour or two with Lance did I really fully appreciate what it meant. I think it’s best summed up by saying that if Lance was in a crowded restaurant or bar, you could somehow sense or feel his presence. There was a buzz, an electricity that seemed to take hold of the room. The energy he radiated seemed to hang everywhere, yet when Lance spoke, the space suddenly emptied to leave just you and him. His eyes were like strobe lights, burning through you. He inserted your name into every sentence, paid attention to everything you did, remembered everything you said. It was hard, as a 23-year-old who had watched him win seven Tours de France, goggle-eyed, not to be impressed or at least intrigued. My teammates that year, George Hincapie and Michael Barry, would continually tell stories about him—sometimes more appalled than amused, but Lance clearly fascinated them.

  That first encounter in Vegas had coincided, within the space of a few days, with the announcement that Lance was making a comeback to the sport. A couple of nights out in Las Vegas hadn’t suddenly made us close friends, and we had no contact until a congratulatory text message after my victory in Milan–San Remo in March 2009. For the next couple of months after this, George would tell Lance that I’d bought an expensive watch, or a sports car, and I’d get a text from Lance: “Cav! Don’t waste your money on watches! What did I tell you? Save it. Be smart with it.” And so he had told me; in fact, in Vegas he never tired of repeating it. Perhaps I was under his spell, but when it came to giving me advice, he appeared both genuine and generous.

  For all that he was the same man—brash, charismatic, uncompromising—I think that Lance could see as soon as he came back in 2009 that a lot had changed in the four years since his infamous farewell speech on the Champs Elysées in 2005, in which he told the “cynics and skeptics” that he was “sorry they can’t believe.” The signs were there at the Tour of California in February 2009, where the Irish journalist, Paul Kimmage, tackled him in the pre-race press conference. Kimmage thought, and had written, that Lance had cheated his way to those seven Tour titles, and likened his comeback to the recurrence of a cancer; this led to a fairly feisty exchange that, of course, Kimmage’s colleagues in the press lapped up.

  Like everyone else, I was well aware of the doping rumors that had swirled around Lance and his career, but I never dwelled on them too much: first, because I hadn’t been competing against him between 1999 and 2005; and second, I had gathe
red from riders who had competed in that era that doping had been widespread if not endemic. Rolf Aldag, my directeur sportif at T-Mobile and later HTC, had made this very clear in a presentation to the team at the beginning of my 2007 debut season. In his era, Rolf said, the sport had been so poorly policed that it had degenerated into anarchy, which in turn had made drug-use a near necessity for most. That, at least, was how they saw it. Rolf was telling us this, he said, because he wanted us to understand that cycling had changed beyond recognition and that excuse—“everyone did it”—no longer washed. You could compete and win races completely clean. Having heard murmurs about the grim reality of professional cycling and for years having been told by fellow junior and amateur riders that doping was de rigueur, Rolf’s words came as a massive relief. They were also confirmation of what I’d already seen in the handful of races I’d done as a T-Mobile stagiaire at the end of 2006: I could hold my own with nothing more in my medicine cabinet than a normal multivitamin.

  So, no, I wasn’t completely naive about Lance, but neither was all the speculation going to prejudice my relationship with him. The same went for Kimmage after that press conference in California in February 2009: When he requested an interview a few months later for his newspaper, the Sunday Times, I happily obliged and went in with a completely open mind. Just because a friend or acquaintance doesn’t get on with someone, I’m not going to allow that to color my judgment before meeting the person. That’s just not my style.