At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  I had ticked another box in my checklist of lifetime ambitions, my form was fantastic, and my team at the Giro had neared perfection. The outlook had rarely if ever been brighter as I readied myself for another Tour de France … and yet that Tour was about to leave me wondering whether, at 28, my best days might have already come and gone.

  juan Antonio Flecha’s omission from the Sky team had been the first hint that my 2012 Tour de France might not turn out quite the way I wanted. This time, the lineup for my first Grande Boucle with Omega Pharma–Quick-Step filled me with optimism.

  It wasn’t a team of one-dimensional rouleurs picked solely for their ability in a lead-out train, but a collection of multitalented riders as adept at helping me in the closing kilometers as they would be at sniffing out chances for stage wins of their own. Tony Martin exemplified that versatility: Tony was the world time trial champion yet also loved getting his hands dirty for me in a bunch sprint. The “Panzerwagen”—the tank—as Brian had christened him, had ridden the Tour with me three times at HTC and was the prototype of what you wanted a Tour de France teammate to be: a Terminator on the bike, a gentleman who never whined off it. Then we had Jérôme Pineau, who I suspect had been a bit of a scally in his youth (or whatever they call a scallywag in Nantes) and who had confessed to thinking that I was a bit of a prat before we became teammates. A lot of French riders held that view, and Jérôme explained what it was: In races, all they ever heard me say, or the only word they could consistently make out, was fucking.

  Or so Jérôme reckoned. He and I were joined in the team by another Frenchman, Sylvain Chavanel, Jérôme’s great mate and one of the most powerful, classiest riders in the world. If ever Chavanel was in a break, the whole peloton knew that it was in for a tough day. Sylvain, like Pineau, was always smiling, always upbeat, and he fulfilled the same antidepressant role that had always been Bernie Eisel’s in my previous teams.

  Like Jérôme, another of my teammates, the Dutchman Niki Terpstra, also had some fairly negative preconceptions about me before the start of the year—and this time the feeling was mutual. Niki was one of those guys who didn’t care whom he pissed off in a race, just as long as he was doing his job for his leader. This made him an absolute menace if you were riding against him, or a precious ally if he was your teammate. Peter Velits, a Slovakian who had finished third overall in the 2010 Vuelta, was far too amiable to divide opinion in the same way, but he was equally valuable to my sprint train. Our young Pole, Michał Kwiatkowski, was similarly low-maintenance. He was one of the biggest prospects in cycling, and right from our first training camp in Slovakia, Michał and I had gelled; I’d quickly asked Patrick to change Michał’s race program and pencil him in on the shortlist for the Tour.

  The last two members of the team were also the last two components of my lead-out train: Matteo Trentin and Gert Steegmans. Matteo would be the penultimate man to peel off in the last kilometer and had also been entrusted with an even more onerous role: my roommate. Matteo was 23 years old, blond, drove a Fiat Punto, and hailed from high in the mountains of northern Italy, where his training options were limited to left and right into the same valley, or two different ways up a huge Dolomites climb. Matteo, like Michał, hadn’t been due to ride the Tour but was finally included on my recommendation.

  In the train, Matteo would precede Gert Steegmans, a giant, veteran Belgian with an enigmatic reputation. My first memory of Gert as a rider was from Scheldeprijs in 2007, where he’d been the Quick-Step team’s sprinter and I’d beaten him to take my first professional race win. Nearly six years on, when I signed for the team, Gert was probably the rider I was most looking forward to working with. He could be loud in the bunch, he could be a clown, but he was also one of the more deep-thinking riders around. As the last man and therefore most prominent member of the train, Gert was a convenient scapegoat when things went wrong and the criticism started coming from the public, the press, and even the management. Gert, though, had a quality that I needed to learn: He could take it all on the chin.

  The National Road Race Championships in Glasgow the week before the Grand Départ gave me a rare opportunity and obligation to race without the support of a full-size team. This handicap, together with the tight marking to which I was also subjected at the nationals, meant that it would take something both unusual and special to win. Four laps from the end, I supplied it by moving clear with Pete Kennaugh and Ian Stannard, both of Team Sky, and Dave Millar of Garmin, then agreeing with Dave that we would work together against the Sky riders to ensure that one of us two prevailed. The way that I finally took the win, burning off Stannard after Dave had effectively taken care of Pete Kennaugh, suggested that I was in fantastic shape for the Tour, which I would have been had I not started to notice the first symptoms of a chest infection the day before the nationals. It got worse over the next few days, and one of the team doctors, Helge, told me that I needed to start a course of antibiotics immediately. I replied that antibiotics always ruined form, to which he replied that it was better to ruin my form than ruin my lungs. So I started the antibiotics and prepared to fly to Corsica, where the race would begin three days later.

  In the airport and on the plane, my legs and back ached, and my whole body tingled with fever. I went straight to bed on arriving at the hotel that afternoon, but was then kept up most of the night with cramps. I trained the next day and waited for the antibiotics to kick in. That night, Thursday, was even worse. I told Helge in the morning that I might not be able to start. We talked about stopping the antibiotics but agreed to wait another day and see how I felt on Saturday, on the morning of the first stage. Twenty-four hours later, it wasn’t good: My muscles were still strangled by cramp, and I was overcome with lethargy. We decided that I should start anyway and that three things might save me: the adrenaline, the simplicity of the course on that first day, and the fact that I’d been careful not to talk about being ill in the press or even to anyone outside a small circle of people within the team. The Tour is a three-week game of poker, and to admit any sort of weakness or ailment is to invite your opponents to exploit it.

  In the event, the most troublesome obstacle on that first stage would be not illness, not other riders, but … a bus wedged under the finish line. The story was classic fodder for TV quiz shows, but for those who didn’t see it, the Orica-GreenEDGE team bus and its driver were running late, having arrived at the finish line just half an hour or so before the race was due to arrive, and—depending on whom you believed—had either been waved underneath the bridge-like structure overhanging the line or been told to stop and ignored the advice. What no one could dispute was the outcome—a bus blocking the road and panic in the road.

  It had all been going so smoothly, so easily. A benign-looking course doesn’t necessarily translate to a benign race, but this had been the least hairy first stage of a Tour that I could remember. With 25 km to go we had taken control, with 10 to go we were building like a wave, with 6 to go we came to a chicane and a wall of noise from crowds banked on either side. It was at exactly that moment that I heard Brian Holm’s voice in my earpiece: “Finish … 3 km to go.” That was about all I could make out. Brian repeated, “… 3 km to go.”

  “Gert! Did you hear that?! Did he just say the finish has been moved to 3 km to go?!” I shouted to Steegmans.

  Gert said he didn’t know. I got the same response from other riders from other teams. Total panic reigned for a few seconds, until Brian chimed in on the radio again, the message clearly audible this time: “The finish line has moved. It’s at 3 km to go now.”

  Three km? I looked down at my computer and saw 6 to go. Fu—

  We had dropped back and now needed to quickly move forward as the peloton swarmed. One of the guys—might have been Tony, might have been Niki, might have been Peter—spotted an opening through the middle and tried to drag us through. Everyone made it, except me. I probed for another gap and had finally drifted left toward the barriers and clear air when André Gr
eipel brought down Tony Martin four positions ahead of me, causing a domino rally. In the run-up to the Tour, I had been testing hydraulic brakes recently developed by the team’s component supplier, SRAM, and had liked them so much that I’d decided to use them on the first stage (hence becoming the first rider ever to use hydraulic brakes at the Tour de France). Now, behind the cascade of flesh and metal, I slammed them hard and came almost to a dead stop, while those around me skidded and sprawled. The only way around the bodies was left, off the route and into a slip road. By the time I’d finished the detour, only five or six seconds later, the peloton was disappearing over the brow of a small rise. At this exact moment, there was another crackle in my ear: “GUYS,” Brian shouted, “the finish has been changed back. Normal finish now!”

  Fu—

  I tried, but as I’d feared, it was too late to rejoin the bunch and move into a sprinting position. Marcel Kittel, the young German who had beaten me once at the ZLM Toer in June, took the win in what turned out to be a heavily diluted sprint finish, in terms of both numbers and quality.

  Even when I’d lost out in circumstances beyond my control, the frustration, the self-flagellation, the regret would usually have kicked in within a minute or two of me climbing onto the bus.

  In Bastia there was further reason to rue what the press would describe the next day as a “débâcle,” a “fiasco,” even “a farce” of a finale: With no prologue on the Tour route this year, it had been a very rare opportunity for a sprinter to take the yellow jersey.

  Reminding myself of this would usually have been an exercise in pure masochism, but back on the bus, where I sat down, unbuckled my helmet, and silently stared into space, the anguish subsided as soon as I glanced out of the window. Standing there, with Delilah in her arms, was Peta, and that was enough for everything else to fade into insignificance. Minutes later, what was now the familiar post-race commotion of Velcro shoe straps being unfastened and the race relived through my teammates’ breathless post-mortems was interrupted by the shocking appearance of Tony Martin at the top of the steps. You could have said that he’d spent the last hours wrestling sharks, not riding a bike. For a few minutes he seemed woozy but okay, then Helge went to start cleaning his wounds, and Tony simply passed out. Soon Helge and the Tour doctor would be unloading him into a stretcher and taking him to the hospital. That night it was already being reported—because most right-minded people had assumed—that Tony had been taken back home to Germany and was out of the Tour. In fact, when he’d woken up in the hospital, more or less the first thing he’d said to Helge was, “I can ride tomorrow, right?” Sure enough, the next day in Bastia he’d be on the start line, wrapped like a mummy in bandages, swathed in pain. It was nuts when you thought about it: The Tour de France was probably the only sporting event on earth where you could sustain injuries like that and have completely healed by the end.

  I’d finished my course of antibiotics and thought I was improving, but even a small, easy, uncategorized climb as the route turned inland on stage 2 gave me a very abrupt reality check. It was Jérôme Pineau’s job throughout the Tour to keep things ticking over at the front and ensure any breakaway was kept within a safe, catchable distance—which was what he was doing, only I couldn’t stand the pace.

  “Jérôme! Slow!”

  It was an instruction that Jérôme would hear a few times that day. I looked down at the digital display of my power meter and noticed to my dismay that I was barely nudging above 300 watts, the sort of power I’d usually put out without breaking a sweat, yet here I was laboring. I didn’t so much fear as expect the worst on the Col de Vizzavona, the first 1,000-meter climb of the Tour, and the worst was pretty bad. As I sunk through and out of the peloton like a lead weight, other riders glanced across and gawped, almost quizzically, as if to say, “Are you taking the piss?” If only!

  My team stuck with me, but even with me sitting up and pootling along taking sips from their bottles, they were nearly leaving me behind. We finally caught and finished with a large gruppetto, 17 minutes behind the stage winner, Jan Bakelants.

  The next day was another hilly, sinuous one along the cliffs on the west coast of Corsica, and even fully fit it would have been a push for me to contend. The good news was that I had started to feel better and that we were about to leave Corsica for the French mainland. The island had never hosted the Tour, so it had made a highly symbolic venue for the Grand Départ, and its beauty had also taken my breath away. At the same time, between the flights to get onto and off the island and the yacht we took from the finish on day two to our hotel, it all felt a bit gimmicky.

  I’ll always be the biggest advocate of both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, which is why I don’t think the Tour needs any bells and whistles—the history, the reputation, the difficulty, and the riders are enough.

  Three stages in, despite the missed opportunity of taking yellow on the first day, I wasn’t alarmed. I was inching back toward full health and, I had no reason to doubt, the first of several stage wins. On the morning of stage 4, the team time trial, I ribbed Tony Martin, who still looked as though he’d spent our time in Corsica swimming with Jaws, about my brilliant record in team time trials in the Giro d’Italia, pointing out that I’d done two with him at the Tour and never won. I don’t know whether this galvanized him, or for that matter how he was still managing to ride through the pain of his injuries, but when we did practice laps that morning, Tony did a passable and out-of-character impersonation of Mark Cavendish; while I stayed fairly quiet, silently purring at the smoothness of our riding and our rotations, Tony barked instructions and encouragement. I loved watching him in that mood. I also knew that, in spite of the Panzerwagen’s injuries, we’d blitz it and either win or get very close. We went out and set the fastest time—25 minutes and 57 seconds—then spent a tense hour and a half in the hot seat beside the finish line, watching 17 teams fail to beat our mark.

  At ten to four, still glued to the TV monitor, we held our breath as Orica-GreenEDGE whipped around the last corner into the finishing straight, came over the line, and stopped the clock on … 25 minutes and 56 seconds. They had beaten us by 75 hundredths of a second—or the difference between me being fully recovered or only 90 percent, Tony having one less nasty wound, or one of us nailing a corner or going wide. And people wonder why marginal gains are so important.

  most riders would agree that you can do as many Tours de France as you like, but it’s not necessarily going to qualify you as an authority on major French tourist attractions or areas of outstanding natural beauty. The stages become numbers, or days of the week, and the 27 regions and 96 départements get lumped either into one of the main mountain ranges or the paradise, at least in my mind, that is any landscape without a major mountain. Years later, you realize that your memory retains a full, pin-sharp film reel of certain stages and their setting, but discards others to the cutting room floor.

  It’s the same with all races. We remember what’s marked us, marked our career or perhaps even changed its course. Stage 5, rolling west out of Cagnes-sur-Mer toward Marseille 228 km away, appeared to represent nothing more complicated or nostalgia-inducing than an opportunity to win my stage. Instead, it turned into an odd sort of journey down memory lane. First, after 140 km we bowled into a town whose name I vaguely recognized and through streets that were also vaguely familiar. Then I finally twigged: We were approaching and about to ride through what had been the finish line of stage 2 in 2009, the first of the six stages I’d won that year. As we did, a broad grin spread across my face as I announced to everyone within earshot, “2009 Tour de France. Stage 2. I won here.” Good job that it was a hot day and everyone was wearing shades so that I couldn’t see the rolling eyes.

  The next attack of déjà vu came a bit later and was more significant. I’d seen the name of the last climb of the day, the Col de la Gineste, in the roadbook and thought nothing of it, even when Jérôme Pineau talked about how it was a travesty that it wasn’t
classified, how it was much harder than the preceding category-4 climb. As we saw the road swirling up the cliffs above us, like smoke out of a chimney, it all came back: I’d done this climb on my very first day as a fully fledged pro, in GP La Marseillaise in 2007. Not only that, but I could remember being absolutely mystified as to how one of the Brits in the race, Jez Hunt, was up the road, on the attack, on such rugged terrain. I’d put this to another British rider, my teammate at the time, Roger Hammond.

  “Cav,” he’d chuckled, “this is nothing. Not for professional racing, anyway.”

  I think at that point, in 2007, I started to panic. Six years on, my team swarmed around me, as per our plan, and practically carried me over and down the other side, until the break was absorbed, and we bombed down into the boulevards of Marseille.

  Trentin went early, so early that I thought we’d blown it, but he held on into the last corner, where Gert took over. Gert is a huge hulk of a man, very fast and very explosive, the combination of which had provided some spectacular lead-outs but had also posed me a fair few problems since the start of the year. Here, with 200 to go, he was moving so fast that it was tricky to even move around and kick past him. Finally, my nose was in front, I unglued everyone from my wheel and took a relatively easy win, despite not having brilliant legs.