Disbelief and delight mingle in my reaction to my first 2008 Tour de France stage win in Châteauroux. Oscar Freire (in orange) and Baden Cooke (in red) certainly wouldn't be glad to keep seeing the back of me over the next nine stages.
Ready for our excellent adventure at the 2008 Tour, from left to right, standing first: Allan Peiper, me, George Hincapie, Kim Kirchen, Marcus Burghardt, Bob Stapleton, Bernie Eisel, Gerald Ciolek, Brian Holm; (front row) Tommy Lövkvist, Rolf Aldag, Kosta Sivtsov and Adam Hansen.
The media circus before the 2008 Tour in Brest. Here, we see the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the BBC, among others, all represented. With most UK reporters I have a decent relationship; others take advantage of my no-holds-barred approach to interviews.
A spectacular shot of my second Tour stage win, in the rain in Toulouse. Notice Gerald Ciolek, looking mightily impressive as he finishes second. After this victory, it dawned on me that Gerald was too good to ride the Tour as my deputy.
The team's coach, Sebastian Weber, and I clashed immediately when I turned pro with T-Mobile at the start of 2007. A year and a half later, here you can see that our rapport has already improved somewhat as we plot a training route the day before the 2008 Tour.
My Columbia-Highroad directeur sportif Valerio Piva watches me make a few last-minute adjustments before a training session ahead of the 2009 Tour of Qatar. This was to be my first race of 2009 and I'd end it with two stage wins.
Bob Stapleton congratulates me after one of my two stage wins at the 2009 Tour of California. A few years ago, Bob was a businessman selling his wireless communications company for billions of dollars; now he's my team manager, my mate and one of my biggest fans.
The ultimate cliffhanger: the German Heinrich Haussler and I prepare to lunge for the line in the 2009 Milan-San Remo. Notice how low and therefore aerodynamic I can get compared to the much taller Haussler.
A world-famous icon...and, on his right, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just kidding – here I am, collecting the best young rider's jersey after the 2009 Tour of California prologue in Arnie's home town, Sacramento.
Emotional? Me? I've cried a few times in my career, but never as hard or happily as in San Remo in March 2009. One of the greatest sprinters of all time, the now-retired Mario Cipollini (far right, in the black jacket) muscles in to greet the new winner.
STAGE 7
Friday, 11 July 2008
BRIOUDE—AURILLAC, 159 KM
HOLY fuck.
If I'd been asked for two words to describe today's stage, not for the first time in this book or in my life, I'm afraid you'd have been owed an apology for my bad language.
But, really – holy fuck.
Stage 7 of the Tour de France was perhaps the hardest day I'd ever experienced on a bike. The roadbook said Brioude– Aurillac, 159 km, with five climbs in the Massif Central, none especially difficult. In Tour-speak, or rather according to the arbitrary classification of Tour climbs used for the King of the Mountains competition, category-four climbs were usually small and relatively gentle inclines, generally between one and four kilometres. At the other end of the scale you had Pyrenean and Alpine 'special category' climbs. Today's five never got beyond second category, which, in most people's eyes, qualified this as nothing more than a 'transition' stage.
For me the stage was marked by several transitions: from apprehension to panic, to pain, to agony, to more agony and, finally, when it was all over, to an overwhelming sense of relief.
Ask most sprinters and they'll tell you that they have an intense dislike for climbs at the start of stages. Handicapped by our weight and dense, fast-twitch muscle fibres, for some reason, those natural disadvantages are accentuated before the blood and adrenalin are fully pumping. Today's profile showed a category-three hill, the Côte de Fraisse, after eleven kilometres; the prospect seemed about as inviting as cold porridge.
On most mornings at the 2008 Tour, I'd spent as long as possible safely tucked away in the team bus. Twelve months earlier everything had been a novelty – the crowds, the colour, the media attention. The five British riders in the race had developed a ritual of congregating in a small corner of the start village to drink coffee, read the morning newspapers, compare sob stories and shoot the breeze. The start village was a packed fairground of food, hospitality tents, journalists, riders and other distractions. This year distractions were not what I needed; the best place to avoid them was behind the tinted, one-way glass of our team bus.
Today I stepped out early, not to sign autographs or give interviews but to go for a warm-up on the roads fanning out of the start village. With Kim's yellow jersey the team's priority, and most of our men and resources focused on that, it would be essential for me to get over that first, third-category climb, with the main peloton. Fail and I'd find myself racing against my most feared, most persistent, most detested opponent – the time limit.
There is a time limit in every Tour stage – no, in every cycle race. Calculated according to the stage winner's total time, the 'comfort zone' can vary between 5 and 12 per cent of that total time, depending on the winner's average speed, and on whether the stage is classified as 'flat', 'rolling' or 'mountainous'. If it sounds complicated, it is; for safety and convenience, it's usually smart to assume that, finish more than twenty-five minutes from the winner and you're dicing with possible elimination.
The start line that morning was like the photo-finish at the end of a sprint. I looked one way and saw McEwen and Zabel, looked the other way and saw Freire and Hushovd. We all knew that we had to be as close as possible to the front when the race hit the bottom of the climb, and, sure enough, the neutralised zone that day was like the Alamo.
The road was narrow, the climb steeper than I expected. After a brilliant first week in which we'd held the white, green and now yellow jerseys, and, more importantly, bossed the entire race, morale in the team was high. But today Kim looked stressed. I'd gently teased him about his refusal to sport the matching shorts that the team had custom-ordered for the eventuality of one of our riders wearing the yellow jersey. Kim simply didn't do 'flash'. He'd headed to the start in the team's normal, regulation black shorts.
I arrived at the climb in the first twenty positions. So far so good. A kilometre or two later, I was rapidly dropping backwards but not, apparently, as rapidly as some of the other sprinters. Our directeurs sportifs had already spotted Francesco Chicchi losing ground, swaying through the cars. 'Good job lads,' Allan Peiper chirped over the radio. 'Chicchi's dropped ...'
It's a cruel sport, cycling. Chicchi was a fellow sprinter – by rights we were bound to the same unspoken pact, the same union. 'Never attack a fellow sprinter ...'
Bollocks to that. I stepped harder on the pedals.
I was still clinging on to the main peloton when we passed under the giant inflatable banner signalling the end of the first climb. Just. The armchair spectator may not see it, but it's never a surprise to a bike rider when the rear wheel of the man in front starts drawing away, slowly yet definitively, like a train from the station platform. When the fateful moment comes, when millimetres become centimetres become one bike length then two, the rider has known for several seconds or even minutes that he's rattling like that train towards an inevitable conclusion.
Now, on the second climb of the day, like Chicchi before me, I reached that conclusion.
Perhaps it was a funny kind of karma; perhaps it was the crosswinds; perhaps I just had shit legs; perhaps whichever team it was that was battering at the front was determined to make these 159 kilometres a misery. Whatever the reason – after 60 kilometres, I was in a group of twenty riders hunched over my handlebars and thinking of only one thing: the time limit.
Who was that battering on the front? I made a few enquiries and discovered that it was David Millar's team, Garmin. I fucking knew it. We were both American teams, we'd both made a big deal of our strict anti-doping politics, there was a healthy rivalry between us, but there was also one crucial difference: a
s far as I could see, our team rode just to win races while they rode for that and to fuck other people up.
Garmin's tactics bemused me. They'd bemuse me even more later that day, after the stage, when Dave Millar said in an interview that they'd been trying to make the race hard for Columbia. A Garmin rider, Christian Vande Velde, was in fourth place on general classification, forty-four seconds from Kim, but surely they didn't think they'd be able to isolate him and take the yellow jersey on a so-called 'transition' stage, however hard that was turning out to be. In any case there were two other riders and their teams between Christian and the Kim yellow jersey – Cadel Evans and Stefan Schumacher. To me, Garmin's strategy smacked of them just wanting to get their faces and corporate logo on TV.
The rest of the stage was one long, leg-ripping roller coaster through wind and fog, over climbs that were much harder than they'd looked on paper. I'd never seen such a big gruppetto in the Tour. An Italian term that translates literally as 'little group', the gruppetto is also variously referred to as the 'autobus' or 'laughing group'. 'Autobus' is the French name, and it may be no coincidence that French riders seemed to regard the 'autobus' as somewhere to go when you wanted a free ride to the finish. The phrase 'laughing group', meanwhile, comes from the idea that the last big group on the road is where non-climbers assemble to banter and lark their way through the mountains. The second image is romantic but, as usual where romance is involved, slightly unrealistic: the task of avoiding the time limit is a risky and unpleasant business. This may explain why the senior pro who takes it upon himself to calculate the likely cut-off point and pace the group is often referred to as the 'bus driver'.
As usual on these stages, two races had developed: one, the real competition which would end with bouquets and excited applause and kisses from the podium girls; the other, invisible to the cameras, less competition than coalition, with the right to fight another day the common goal.
In race one, the Spaniard Luis Leon Sanchez was first across the line and Kim fourth. This meant Kim would keep his yellow jersey. Sanchez's average speed had been almost 41 kph, in crosswinds, on heavy, undulating roads.
In race two, the whole gruppetto – all sixty-one of us – made the time limit by six minutes. Only one rider didn't make the cut. It was Magnus Backstedt. He rode for Garmin.
That night, as usual, the first thing some of the team did when they arrived back at our hotel was sink into one of the portable plunge pools the soigneurs had set up in the car park. The team had used these baths in 2007 and was repeating the experiment in 2008. The theory was that immersing your legs in cold water improved circulation to the muscles and helped to get rid of toxins. As usual, I walked straight past the baths and up to my room. The only thing I wanted to sink into was my bed.
That evening, at dinner, all the talk revolved around the day's stage and its sheer, brutal relentlessness. The general perception was that, with the French Anti-Doping Agency taking over drug-testing duties and promising all manner of rigorous blood, urine and even hair testing, the 2008 Tour would be the cleanest in recent memory. It followed that it should also be slower than the drug-addled races of the mid-1990s.
Brian Holm and Rolf Aldag had both been around in that era – the so-called EPO years. In the past year, both men had spoken openly in the media about having used EPO but I had never discussed it with them. Now, though, after that massacre, I was curious.
I told Rolf I had a question. 'What was the Tour like on EPO?'
The resulting conversation was long, fascinating and, above all, reassuring. Rolf said that, in the mid-1990s, Tour stages had been exactly like today's, but the difference then was that every stage had been like today's. EPO perhaps hadn't made the Tour faster but it had made recovery easier and, as a result, the race had been more consistently savage. 'Just you wait,' he said. 'Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow will be okay ...'
That just about summed up the Tour; when you didn't win, or when it hurt, which was every day, you always had that hope to cling to – probably the same hope that gets people through every kind of suffering, every day, all over the world. 'Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow will be okay ...' They were the only mottos or mantras you needed to ride the Tour.
As for doping, well, the conversation with Rolf had confirmed to me that I should reserve judgement and concentrate on my own race. Beyond that, it had also cemented a bond with Rolf which I'd never anticipated when I'd joined his team just under two years earlier.
ALL MY life, I'd been trying to make people laugh – often succeeding, sometimes not – but this was definitely one occasion when I'd rather have seen six, poker-straight faces. The six faces belonged to my six new bosses, T-Mobile's six new directeurs sportifs, the six former pros Rolf Aldag, Allan Peiper, Tristan Hoffman, Valerio Piva, Jan Schaffrath and Brian Holm. I hadn't cracked any jokes and neither had they. So why, then, were they all smirking?
We'd been called in to discuss our objectives for the coming 2007 season and how the team was going to work under the new regime. Aldag and Bob Stapleton had recently been installed as the new management duo and this get-together in Lugano, Switzerland, was going to be a key part of their bedding-in process and mine as a rider.
I was desperate to make a good impression. Apparently I'd already failed.
'What do you want?' Rolf asked, still smiling.
'Er, what do you mean?'
'Which races?
'Obviously, I'd like to do the big races, but I don't know ...'
'You don't know much, do you?' said Rolf, giggling with the other directeurs.
This wasn't going well. It was about to get worse.
Tristan Hoffman spoke next. A big, bracing former Dutch pro now entering his late thirties, he had a reputation for rarely taking anything seriously. Trouble was, his question sounded very serious indeed: 'We hear you have a problem with the drink. That you're a bit of a party animal. Is this true?'
I was stunned. I told them that, no, I most certainly did not have a problem with drink – in fact I barely ever drank at all. I pointed out that I'd won twenty-six races, riding for Sparkasse. 'I'm really professional ...' I protested.
The conversation moved on before I'd had a chance to argue my case. Those mysterious grins had disappeared but left all sorts of questions pinging back and forth in my mind. We went on to talk about race programmes and training. The discussion lasted ten, maybe twenty minutes. I left the room confused.
It was Roger Hammond's turn to go in next. He came out an hour later looking pale and exhausted. Seeing me, he shook his head in exasperation. 'I've just been in there an hour and fifty minutes were about you ... Max Sciandri's spoken to Piva and told him to watch out for you, because you're a party animal. He's told them that you really like your alcohol.'
My thoughts suddenly raced. To be precise, they raced back to my ride with Max after the Baby Giro earlier that year. I thought of the pep-talk he'd given me about training and behaving like a professional. The only other time I'd seen him was at a birthday party for Dave Millar's sister, Fran, which happened to be in a bar. Now it clicked: Max had seen me drinking in a bar and somehow assumed that I must clearly be some kind of raving boozehound.
It had all started so well, with my first races as a stagiaire just a couple of months earlier, in August 2006. That summer, a management overhaul at T-Mobile had left me fearing that the whole deal would be off, especially when the manager of the German Sparkasse team where I'd spent most of the summer riding assured me that was effectively the case. I'd gone to Sparkasse the previous year with Ed Clancy, when, one day while we were officially on the Academy programme, to our total bafflement, a German racing licence arrived in the post. We immediately called Rod. He made a shocking announcement: 'Oh, yeah, lads, we're sending you to race in Germany, to get some experience'.
Just over a year and twenty-odd race wins later, I was still with Sparkasse, still winning, still loving it as much as they were loving me, but now here was the team's manager
telling me that I should forget my ambitions of a pro contract with T-Mobile. 'Aldag says none of the deals signed before he arrived are valid. You may as well stay with us,' he told me. I was incredulous – literally, in the sense that I refused to believe what he was saying. 'Well, I don't care, I'm still going to ride for a top team next year, whether it's T-Mobile or not,' I replied.
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