French Renaissance

by Jeremy Whittle

  Kimmage’s 2008 articles on Garmin were deemed by many to vindicate the team’s and manager Vaughters’ ethical stance, despite the significant number of confessed and apparently repentant dopers among team personnel. Kimmage, deeply sceptical and seen as a very tough nut to crack, had, in effect, vouched for Garmin’s good intentions.

  By 2013, however, Team Sky’s hesitancy over having a sports journalist on board seemed to have dissolved yet it was Walsh, not Kimmage, who began travelling with the team. In the aftermath of USADA’s reasoned decision on Armstrong’s doping, Walsh’s stock as exposer of deceit was at a peak. That may have been the characteristic that made him most appealing to Brailsford. Post-Armstrong scandal, Walsh vouching for Team Sky had huge PR value.

  My own feelings about the effectiveness of any journalist being embedded in any environment are mixed. Is it really a given that a journalist will get to see behind the façade? Added to that, it is almost inevitable that when you spend weeks travelling with a group in such a hothouse environment, you relax, you build relationships, you let down your guard. And if that happens, surely it must compromise your objectivity?

  I sit watching the final 45 minutes of the 2013 Ventoux stage in a pop-up studio for a Dutch TV station, perched on the Col des Tempêtes, just below the summit of the Giant. Two steps too far out of the back door and it would be a very long fall into the Toulourenc valley, far below.

  The Dutch presenters are in make-up, watching on monitors. A cameraman I’ve seen on almost every finish line I’ve ever stood on walks past and nods in recognition. ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ I say in acknowledgement. I have no idea what his name is.

  On the studio monitors, Nairo Quintana is making his big play. His attack, 13 kilometres from the summit, however great his abilities, is either overconfident or naive. In terms of the recent history of racing on the Giant, this is a long-distance punt, with little hope for success. Maybe it’s a sign of desperation in the face of Froome’s apparent ease, or of a lack of knowledge of the nuances of Ventoux.

  Long distance worked for Merckx, Poli, and even for Virenque – something that Armstrong now wishes he hadn’t allowed – and, with the podium positions being fought out behind him, it worked for Gárate in 2009. But with the Alps still to come, it is unlikely ever to work for a rider harbouring dreams of winning the Tour. Or maybe, given Froome’s current form, the Colombian is just thinking of the stage victory. He has to try something after all, because the British rider appears to be in complete control.

  Quintana arrives on Mikel Nieve’s shoulder just after the Virage du Bois. Behind him, Froome is speaking into his radio. Soon afterwards, with ten kilometres still to race, he moves over to the right-hand side of the road and snatches a musette from a Team Sky helper. Moments later, Pete Kennaugh, pace-setting for Froome over the past few kilometres, is gone, engine blown with nine kilometres left. Such is the decrease in his pace that – unlike Hamilton and Livingston in 2000 – he nearly grinds to a halt, coming close to a track stand before he wearily moves off again.

  But this is Team Sky and there’s always another rider to pick up the slack and ensure the pace remains unremitting. Now Richie Porte takes over, while Froome rides tempo in his wake, Alberto Contador already looking stressed, dancing on the pedals, baring his teeth with the effort. And then, as they near Chalet Reynard, there are just four: Porte, Froome, Contador and Roman Kreuziger, chiselling their way into Quintana’s slim lead.

  Back in the team cars, the directors watching on dashboard televisions can sense what is coming. They know Contador’s ‘tell’, the continuous dancing, too much of it sideways, the bared teeth and now the sagging shoulders. Froome knows it too.

  Struggling to be heard above the crowd, Froome barks into Porte’s ear. Then, just before the seven-kilometre to go mark, as the gradient eases to five per cent, his legs explode – there’s no other word for it – and Froome is gone. His astounding increase in cadence – here, on this mountain of all mountains, the dreaded Ventoux – comes after the draining climb from St Estève to just below Chalet Reynard. This moment, analysed and pored over for years to come, changes Froome’s career, for ever.

  Camera phones track him speeding through a left-hand bend, his acceleration even taking TV motorbikes by surprise. Froome’s legs whirl, as he reduces the Ventoux to an overblown spin class. In the wake of this attack, will come scepticism and derision. He will be openly questioned, compared to the proven dopers of the past, and continuously asked to explain his performance. Eventually he, and his wife Michelle, patience exhausted, will become enraged by the experience.

  But on this day, as he speeds through the 1,400-metre altitude point, Froome, and also Brailsford, watching at the summit, aren’t thinking about any of that.

  Froome flies past Mikel Nieve and on through the next bend, Contador now receding further behind him, slumping back into the saddle, yesterday’s man, physically and psychologically diminished. Watching alone on the Dutch TV station’s monitor, I feel an inevitable disbelief. Then comes a wave of déjà vu, of gnawing doubt and rising panic. Maybe I should feel delight in such a performance. I can’t, though, because I know what will happen next.

  Almost immediately the media chooses sides. Eurosport’s British commentary team, not known for being critical of the sport, loves it, while Belgian TV’s team is less than flattering.

  ‘The scooter is launched! It’s an out-of-body Lance! He’s burning the watts! It’s a Martian – on the moon!’

  As Froome pulls away from Contador it gets worse.

  ‘What would you call that? An attack – or a spasm?’ they muse.

  For a moment, as the sport takes in what it is witnessing, there is a lull. Froome races on, with Contador and Nieve now collaborating in pursuit. Froome reverts to ‘normal’ pedalling, but he is soon on Quintana’s back wheel. Then, just 500 metres or so after his first high-altitude attack, he does it again, sprinting past the Colombian’s left shoulder just before Chalet Reynard.

  Quintana chases and bridges the gap. Once back together, the pair ride on, towards the summit. I leave the studio and head across the bleached rock for the finish line. On the road far below, Nieve and Contador ride together to try to limit their losses, but can do nothing.

  Froome and Quintana close on the Simpson memorial, but – as was the case in 2000, when Armstrong and Pantani passed – there is no time for gestures, no cap- or helmet-doffing. With 1,300 metres to go, Froome lifts himself out of the saddle one more time. Quintana puffs out his cheeks and, after almost 12 kilometres on the Ventoux, riding at the front of the race, he cannot respond.

  Now the outcome is clear: Chris Froome, on the mountain where fellow Briton Tom Simpson collapsed and died, is about to take the biggest, most controversial, stage win of his career.

  For all the high-fives, back-slapping and fist bumps, Chris Froome was not the first Briton to win, wearing the yellow jersey, on the Ventoux. That ground-breaking moment had gone, almost unnoticed, nine summers earlier, when a different rider became the first Briton to win the Tour de France.

  In 2006, in a virtuoso display of attacking riding that ranked with the Ventoux’s greatest exploits and that went virtually unreported in the British press, Nicole Cooke rode solo over the summit, climbing up from Malaucène, to clinch victory in that edition of the women’s Tour de France.

  It took some persuasion and a succession of emails before Nicole agreed to meet me. At first, I was a little bruised to be lumped in with the hordes of exclusively male sportswriters who she so vehemently attacked in her eye-popping book, The Breakaway. But Nicole’s emails made her convictions plain.

  We – the male-dominated sports media – had collectively failed her, and women’s cycling generally, by choosing to ignore her and her peers and instead to focus on the ongoing soap opera of doping scandals in men’s cycling. In the process, she believed we’d driven women’s cycling from the periphery of a financial model to the outer limits of sustainability. The dopers
– and any of those in the media who’d been complicit, sympathetic or indulgent – were to blame.

  Her emails both scolded and scalded me.

  . . . Those reporters and journalists, including yourself, failed to see what was so obvious to myself and others, and rather, spent time furthering a corrupt fiction whilst ignoring my exploits.

  My moment in the sun was taken for ever, by people who thought so little of my efforts because they were so wrapped up in writing eulogies for the corrupt.

  Any apologies or talk of blaming it on ‘the culture’, what was known and unknown at the time, or on the lack of editorial space and the constraints of British libel law, fell on stony ground. ‘The cheats win on the way up and on the way down,’ she had said bitterly in The Breakaway. But then, given her experience, her treatment by the media, why should I not expect her to think that? And, if needed, there was further conclusive damning evidence that I remembered only too well.

  When Cooke, in the yellow jersey of Tour de France leadership, was racing solo to a memorable win over the Ventoux, we – the British cycling media – were chasing Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and the others around a hotel car park in Strasbourg as Operación Puerto overshadowed the Grand Départ of the 2006 Tour. Nicole’s triumph over the Ventoux, and the first-ever British win in the Tour de France, went unrecognised because of the obsession with doping and because of gender bias. She may have become the first cyclist since Tom Simpson to be nominated for BBC Sports Personality of the Year after her victory, but there’s no doubt that she deserved better.

  Just a cursory glance at her long list of career achievements – Olympic gold medallist, World Road champion, multiple national champion, World Cup winner, Tour de France winner, Giro d’Italia winner, Classic winner – and it was clear this was a résumé that outshone those of Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Mark Cavendish.

  Ironic, then, that as she achieved that solo victory over the Ventoux, wearing the yellow jersey, those same media hordes were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the start of the 2006 men’s Tour dissolved into farce. Ironic, too, that when the 2006 Tour route had been unveiled the previous autumn with the usual pomp, in the Palais des Congrès, Paris, incoming Tour director Christian Prudhomme had said: ‘The worst thing in sport today is suspicion. We can never eliminate doping, but to eliminate suspicion is possible.’

  Cooke’s win on Ventoux was one of the most spectacular ever seen on the mountain. Perhaps fittingly, given her outsider status, her victory focused on the recently ignored north face, rather than the TV-friendly south side, now so familiar from recent men’s racing. What’s more, Cooke didn’t need to attack on the Ventoux. Barring a major turnaround, the race was already effectively won. ‘I think up to that point I had a lead of around a minute,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a huge lead but with bonuses here and there . . .’

  But she adopted a warrior’s approach to the 115-kilometre stage over the Giant, from Valréas to Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, attacking, à la Merckx, from the foot of the climb. Even more surprisingly, she had never ridden the Ventoux before. ‘My approach was pretty simple,’ she told me. ‘These are the moments you train for, these are the magic days, days that define your career and that you dream of when you’re training in the winter and it’s cold and wet.’

  After retiring from racing in 2013, Nicole Cooke studied for an MBA. She now works in the City of London, close to St Paul’s, and has also spent time working in Paris. When she’s in London she cycles into work every day, but it’s a far cry from the 180-kilometre training rides to and from Lake Garda that were once her stock in trade. We finally meet in an anonymous branch of an anonymous brasserie, close to her workplace and a short walk from St Paul’s.

  Even in retirement, she continues to be a thorn in the side of the cycling establishment and is a regular critic of the lack of support for women’s cycling and the ongoing inadequacies of anti-doping regulations. She shakes her head wearily as we discuss her battles – before Jess Varnish, sexism and Sutton, and before the Bradley Wiggins TUEs and the tale of the errant Jiffy bag – with British Cycling.

  Given her dominant form, victory in the 2006 women’s Tour seemed probable, even before the Ventoux stage. Her attack on the long climb from Malaucène made victory inevitable.

  ‘I was probably already going to win overall. There were two stages to go after the Ventoux stage and in that Tour I’d picked up the yellow jersey in the prologue and had led all the way through. So I did consciously want to make the most of the day as well as sealing the overall. We set up the team for that, to make a fast pace to the bottom of the climb and then it would be up to me to attack.’

  But Nicole hadn’t ridden the Ventoux before. ‘I know the high Alps – the Col de Bonette, Col de Vars – really well. So it was a little bit of an . . . an exploration, a bit of a journey into the unknown!

  ‘The risk was that I would blow up – and really blow – but at that point it felt like the worst that could happen would be that I’d get caught and have to manage the situation and not lose time before the finish. But there’s always a risk. And it was hot, boiling hot, somewhere in the high thirties. I had pretty obvious tan lines afterwards.

  ‘I attacked early, in the trees up from Malaucène, after about two kilometres. Once I’d made the move, everyone got into their pace, but the time gap steadily drifted out. After that, it was down to me, and my personal time trial, up the mountain.’

  Attacking in the heat, so soon after the start of the climb – on the Ventoux of all places? That’s very early, I say. That’s definitely Merckx territory. You have to go back to the 1970s, maybe even 1950s, to find the last time someone achieved a similar exploit on the Ventoux . . .

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she laughs. ‘But there was the prestige of the day, wanting to really stamp my authority on the race, but also that personal drive to put myself to the test. I felt I could ride it really well, and I wanted to see if I could do it.

  ‘And in the context of that race and that field, the competition wasn’t as strong as the field in that year’s Giro, for example. I don’t think I would have done it at the Giro – it was a combination of circumstances. There were other stages when it would have been a flawed tactic and when I would decide to wait.’

  Did attacking that soon, on so fearsome a climb, spread panic among her rivals?

  ‘I guess, probably – I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, really, but I don’t suppose anybody wanted to chase me all the way up the Ventoux. And the heat was a big factor. People don’t want to chase on a hot day because it’s so debilitating.

  ‘At the start I looked back and could still see them, chasing behind me. Gradually it stretched out. Once I couldn’t see them any more, I was getting time checks every two kilometres as the lead drew out.’

  Nicole rode on, focused on the 21.4-kilometre climb, steeling herself through the gruelling sections at 12 per cent on the approach to Mont Serein ski station. ‘There’s a point – about halfway up – where the road is long, straight, steep, and that was where the team car pulled in behind me.

  ‘I was riding against the distance markers so I knew how many kilometres there were to go. I’d trained in the mountains before the Tour, during the build-up, so I knew the importance of pacing myself.’

  She rode through the junction to the ski station, past a crowd of spectators at the Chalet Liotard, and began the final section of the climb, through the pines, and on towards the ladder of hairpins snaking across the white rocks, the observatory towering over her.

  ‘I can remember it was amazing at the top, but it all went so quickly. It was just, “Get over the top, then charge on.” I took in a bit of the atmosphere and it would have been glorious if it had been a mountain-top finish. That was a bit sad in a way.’

  There was little time to take in either her surroundings or the Simpson memorial, just below the summit.

  ‘I really went for it on the descent. You might think that attacking so early was a risk, but I we
nt pretty hard downhill as well. I was looking for the memorial – I did want to see it – but, bombing past at 80 kilometres an hour, the chances were slim.’

  Again, such a tactic, particularly through the forest section from Chalet Reynard to St Estève, with its infrequent but tight bends and occasional switches in camber, is, at best, nerve-wracking.

  The descent from Chalet Reynard to St Estève is high speed and there are some corners and a chicane with rocky outcrops, where it’s easy to get it wrong. There are a few crosses and plaques on the way down, I point out. Nicole just shrugs.

  ‘I’d never seen it before, but I still went full tilt down it. And the director in the car behind, he stuck with it. I could hear the car screeching through the corners behind me. We left everyone else, all the other vehicles, behind us . . . I was a fearless descender at the time, but I’m older now!’

  Her rapid descent further extended her advantage. ‘I think I had about three minutes at the top and then around four by the bottom. But after “beasting” it over the mountain, I still had about 40 kilometres to go to the finish.’

  Between Bédoin, at the foot of the Ventoux, and the finish among sleepy Isle-sur-la-Sorgue’s network of waterways and antique shops, Cooke punched her way through the hot afternoon air and drew yet more time out of the chasing bunch. ‘I didn’t let up at all. I pushed hard all the way to the finish. There were some sections, straight road, in the baking heat, when I was just out there. It was only in the last 500 metres that I relaxed a bit and allowed myself to celebrate . . .

  ‘Everybody in the team was thrilled because the plan to take hold of the race had come off. My team-mates came in exhausted and saw me jumping around grinning. After the finish, we went off to a café close to the finish and had ice creams. It was one of the special days.’