Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  Was I being my usual melodramatic self? Without a doubt – but I was also being my usual, realistic self. The previous day, I'd tried to simulate race-pace on the Cipressa and I'd felt lactic acid gushing through my legs as I clambered towards the top. Now, twenty-four hours later, Tommy, Bernie and the other guys set the same infernal rhythm to test me on the same climb, and not only did I hold on, I attacked them as the road twisted around the olive groves that hugged the hillside and towards the summit. On the Poggio, too, the last and easiest but also potentially the most crucial of the three ascents, I'd felt comfortable enough to coast alongside Valerio in the team car and assure him 'this isn't going to be a problem'.

  No, the problem was that the problem came around 85 kilometres back up the coast, back towards Milan, where the road narrowed and pointed towards Le Mànie.

  The last and most important stepping stone in my preparation for San Remo started forty-eight hours after that final recce, back around the Rivieira in Tuscany. A sought-after stage race in itself, the Tirreno–Adriatico is also widely regarded as the best litmus test of pre-San Remo form, particularly among the top sprinters, who always turn out in force. This year, if a sprinter really was going to survive the Manie-Cipressa-Poggio triple whammy and triumph in San Remo, it would almost certainly be the one who emerged with bragging rights from what was to be a battle royal between the world's fastest finishers over the next seven stages. Everyone was here: proven Classics winners like Tom Boonen and Thor Hushovd, sprinters who'd come close at San Remo several times before like Robbie McEwen, sprinters who could climb like Alessandro Petacchi and Daniele Bennati, dark horses like my old teammate Gearld Ciolek, then a favourite who felt like an outsider, i.e. me.

  Little did I know it when I took to the start line that Wednesday morning, but the first stage of Tirreno was to turn my and the media's impressions of my chances in San Remo on their head. That evening, on examining the results sheet, and seeing Daniele Bennati, Alessandro Petacchi and Tom Boonen's names occupying positions three to five, just twelve seconds behind the rogue breakaway winner, Frenchman Julien El Farès – then scrolling all the way down to my name, the 182nd on the list, over seven minutes adrift of El Farès, the pundits were all thinking the same thing. That night, in the press room at Capannori, judging by their reports the next day, more than one conversation between journalists no doubt went like this:

  'Ah, so Cavendish came a cropper on that last climb, then ...'

  'What, that one seventeen kilometres from the finish? The one a bit like the Poggio?'

  'Yep, you got it.'

  'Ah, I knew it. I guess we can forget about him for San Remo, then ...'

  Had they known the reality, or rather if they'd seen me skimming serenely up that very same final hill after a mechanical problem had dumped me out of the main peloton on the approach to the climb, they'd at least have reserved judgement. That's what I had done after our recces of the San Remo, but now, forget 'reserve', I'd seen and felt enough on that last incline to reverse whatever premature conclusions I'd been tempted to draw. That night, I turned to my teammates much as I had four days earlier: 'Guys,' I said simply, 'I think I can get over Le Mànie.'

  That little announcement had raised a few eyebrows. My next one, to my directeurs sportifs, was going to be even more unexpected. While one reason for me to be perturbed by my favourite's billing was the burden of expectation, another, more relevant consideration was that, the more the other sprinters feared me, the more likely they were to focus on eliminating me before the Poggio and certainly before the finishing straight in San Remo. They'd know, as I knew, that there'd be one sure-fire way of achieving this goal – and that was marshalling their teammates to set a punishing pace on Le Mànie.

  They had their tactic, but I also had mine. Now, clearly to the consternation of my directeurs sportifs, I unveiled my masterplan: 'Over the next few stages, I'm not going to bust a gut on the climbs. I want to keep a low profile, keep the rest of them thinking that I'll never get over the climbs at San Remo ... Guys, I'm going to bluff them.'

  'IT'S FUCKING worked. It's only fucking worked ...'

  I hope you'll grant me two, final lapses into profanity, for the sake of describing reaction to what I saw on the pink pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport on the morning of 21 March, the morning of Milan–San Remo. Before every major race, La Gazzetta assessed the likely favourites with a sliding star rating, with maybe the dozen top contenders awarded between one and five stars, according to the strength of their credentials according to the newspaper. Now, I looked at what La Gazzetta had come up with for 'La Classicissima', a race which the newspaper's parent company owned: Alessandro Petacchi, five stars, Daniele Bennati, five stars ... and so on and so on, until finally, I saw my name.

  'Mark Cavendish ... one star'.

  I was absolutely buzzing.

  Tirreno had ended the previous Tuesday – and it had ended with my first stage win of the race; I'm afraid my bluffing didn't extend to losing sprints, especially as that's exactly what I'd done four days earlier, finishing second to the American Tyler Farrar. Where I could maintain the charade was in my press conference in San Benedetto del Tronto on that last evening. Asked how I rated my own chances in Milan–San Remo at the weekend, I smiled meekly. 'San Remo is one of the most difficult races on the calendar. I am only twenty-three years old and don't expect too much ...' I said.

  Over the next three days, after we'd journeyed north to our hotel on the outskirts of Milan, I was extremely nervous. Which was a good sign, because it meant that, contrary to what I'd been saying all year and even in the last week about 'just going for the experience', now I was really starting to believe that I might have the slimmest of chances of emulating Tom Simpson, the only previous British winner of La Classicissima. Had I not believed it myself, my roommate, Bernie, had enough faith for both of us: 'You know, Cav, you can do it. You really can ...' he kept saying.

  On the Friday night, as was the case before every race, we were handed our race numbers. Mine was 213. I looked hard at those three figures. 'Hey Bernie,' I said. 'Look at that: 213. What does that say to you?' He looked puzzled. 'Two, one, three, Bernie,' I insisted. 'The twenty-first of the third, Bernie – the twenty-first of March. Tomorrow's date.'

  I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but something felt special – and that special something was making me even more nervous.

  The race began under luminous blue skies. I was still apprehensive, but at least I was riding protected by the most formidable human-shield in professional cycling: my seven Columbia-Highroad teammates, George Hincapie, Bernie Eisel, Tommy Lövkvist, the Canadian Michael Barry, whose presence I'd specifically requested after he'd baby-sat me through the entire Tour of California, the Norwegian Edvald Boasson Hagen and two of our new signings, the Belgian Maxime Monfort and the Aussie Mark Renshaw.

  Almost immediately, the attacks started and the peloton unravelled into one, raking, 300-metre line – as it always does when the pace nudges 50 or even 60 kilometres an hour. I waited for the first signs of tightness in my legs or my lungs – except they never came. I was floating, on that magic carpet again, in spite of the wind that was gusting across the featureless landscape that persisted all the way to the bottom of the first major climb of the race, and also the highest – the Passo del Turchino. At one point, after the road had been dragging slowly towards the treeline for what seemed like just a couple of kilometres, I asked George Hincapie, 'George, when does the hard part start?' He didn't have time to answer before Tommy chipped in, 'What do you mean? We're almost at the summit.'

  The descent off the Turchino fed on to the coast road, the Via Aurelia, which would take us all the way to San Remo via three brief detours inland, to Le Mànie, the Cipressa and the Poggio. Michael Barry and I made one last toilet stop as we hit the Aurelia. 'Right, now I'm racing,' I told Michael as we sped off.

  Edvald and Michael had been given the task of bringing me to the foot of Le Mànie in the first ten or
twelve positions in what, 200 kilometres into the race, was still a 170-strong main bunch. Three kilometres from that ominous right-hand turn in the village of Noli, Edvald had been bludgeoning his way to the front of the pack with me on his wheel; for the next two kilometres, it had been Michael; then, just as Michael looked to be flagging, like the proverbial phoenix, Edvald reappeared, revived, to sprint into that keyhole of a slip-road which led into the climb and drop me off in fifth position.

  I waited again, this time for the other sprinters' teams to converge on the front of the bunch, ready to crank up the pace and send me spiralling back down this 4.7-kilometre staircase to hell. I kept waiting. Nothing. Not even the teams whose only chance was eliminating all of the sprinters, and not only me, seemed to be riding that fast. Or maybe it was just me and my magic legs; as we neared the summit, close to the point where, two weeks earlier, I'd officially declared my San Remo challenge over, Maxime Monfort, a climber, looked across at me, dumbfounded. 'Wow, you're climbing well!'

  I later discovered that, once we'd reached the summit, swooped down the other side and rejoined the Aurelia, Maxime had dropped back to speak to Valerio in the team car. 'Get over in the main bunch? He was climbing better than me ...!' Maxime had said.

  I'd cracked it. Made it over Le Mànie unscathed. Or was I? The leg muscles which had felt light and elastic in those first 200 kilometres of racing were now tighter, less springy. I could only hope that everyone else's were the same ...

  Eighty-five kilometres. An hour and three-quarters, maybe two. Cipressa and Poggio – that was all. Well, apart from the Capi – three ripples of headland that served the same purpose as speed-bumps as the race rattled towards the Cipressa but which today, to me, on this form, with Bernie Eisel's wheels in front and the wind gusting behind, seemed like precisely that – speed-bumps.

  Forty-five, 40, 30 kilometres to go. Cipressa and Poggio.

  On the radio: 'Cav, how are you feeling?'

  'Really, really good.' It was the like the first day of the sales – the peloton vortexing, people jumping lines, shouldering each other out of the way, all at 55 kilometres an hour – but I meant what I said: I felt really, really good.

  As it had at Noli, towards Le Mànie, in San Lorenzo al Mare, the road kicked right and diagonally towards the hilltop in the distance known locally as La Cipressa. In 2008, on these same, first half-dozen hairpin bends of the climb, Tommy Lövkvist had attacked but now he was sacrificing his own chances to bubblewrap me safely in the first twenty positions of the peloton. I was surprised again by how comfortable it all felt; yes, I was slowly drifting backwards but, on that two-day reconnaissance mission with Erik Zabel, on both evenings, we'd studied videos of the 2007 and 2008 races and seen how you could survive both the Cipressa and the Poggio by maintaining a good, steady rhythm, while others who'd invariably get lured into the stampede up the first two-thirds of the 5.6-kilometre climb would be vulnerable on the steeper ramps towards the top. Now, sure enough, to my delight and amazement, riders who'd charged past a few minutes earlier were boomeranging back towards me as I gained momentum. Riders like Tom Boonen – the same Tom Boonen who said in the build-up that I'd be long gone by the time the race reached the Cipressa.

  Another foreign rider from what was in theory a rival team, Juan Antonio Flecha of Rabobank, drew alongside as I neared the summit, tucked in behind Petacchi and two of his teammates. After passing Boonen, I'd been tempted to surge again and make up the ten seconds that were separating me from the leading group of twenty or thirty riders – but decided to sit tight and save energy in Petacchi's slipstream. Flecha now glanced at me in much the same way as Monfort had on Le Mànie. 'You can win this,' he said.

  Eighteen kilometres.

  In my earpiece, I heard Valerio: 'Cav, you've got George. He's going to be there for you all the way. Stay with him on the Poggio ...'

  'Okay, I can see him.'

  Fifteen kilometres, 14, 13, 12 ... 6 to the bottom of the Poggio, 9 to the top.

  Come on, Cav, keep it there. Keep it there.

  That was easier said than done: on those final, 5 kilometres of coast road there may have been only fifty riders left in the hunt, but the group was now less a peloton than a rolling riot. 'Shit-fight' is actually the technical term.

  Nine-point-nine kilometres. The Poggio. Another right turn, like the ones to Le Mànie and La Cipressa, only this one just a gentle flick inland, hardly gaining altitude. Unfortunately the pace wasn't gentle – but at least I had George. He'd ushered me into the first ten or twelve positions in the group and now I just had to hold the wheels. That, too, was easier said than done.

  Come on, Cav, keep it there. Keep it there.

  'The Poggio's not going to be a problem,' I'd told Valerio a fortnight earlier. And it wouldn't be, or rather it wasn't, except for a short stretch of false-flat a few hundred metres from the top where, everyone knew, the riders who'd have no hope in a bunch sprint always made their move. Now who should accelerate off the front but Filippo Pozzato – Flash Filippo, the show pony. As he attacked, so I also pushed harder on the pedals, taking myself from around thirtieth to twentieth position in a fast-fractioning bunch. Pozzato and his handful of breakaway companions would turn left as they entered the village of Poggio di San Remo and begin their descent seven seconds before I swung past the same spot. Seven seconds that were never going to be enough.

  Come on Cav. Three-point-three kilometres downhill. The easy bit. Bernie, Flecha, they were right – you can win this, you can fucking win this. Come on Cav.

  At the bottom of the descent, the road widened. I saw then picked my way in between the twenty or thirty riders in front of me, including Pozzato – and that's when I also saw George. There was no one in the world whom I'd rather have seen at that moment than George Hincapie – second-nicest man in the world, after his brother, and as far as I was concerned, second-best pilot in New York, behind the fella who landed the plane on the Hudson River. George slowed and nodded to his backwheel; with less than two kilometres to go, I was in his jetstream.

  Into San Remo. On to the seafront.

  Twelve hundred metres. One thousand. Eight hundred.

  Cav, you can fucking win this.

  Well, yeah, I could, but I could also lose it. George was now committed. It was too early to commit, but then 298 kilometres in, timing and tactics became irrelevant; it was about ekeing out whatever energy was left.

  At 500 metres to go, George's bottomless tank finally runs dry.

  Four hundred and fifty. Four hundred and twenty-five; here it comes, Cav. Brace yourself.

  And suddenly I'm swamped, stifled, suffocated by the Garmin rider Julian Dean, who's tried to sprint through the metre-wide channel between me and the barriers on the left-hand side of the road, but who's run out of puff and is now boxing me in. I can't move, can't sprint, can't do anything except watch in horror as, to the left of Dean, a black jersey suddenly flashes past and into clear daylight. It's the German Heinrich Haussler.

  Haussler's getting away, Cav. He's getting away and no one's moving. He's going and going and there's no gap but you've got to go, Cav. You've got to go now – it's not a gap but you've gotta go, Cav. You've gotta gamble.

  So I veer left, push all of my chips into the middle of the table.

  He's too far, Cav, too far. But I'm getting closer and it's 125 and it's 100 and all my weight's going through the pedals and my nose is almost grazing my front wheel, just like when I was a junior, and it's 75, and Haussler's starting to tire, he's zigzagging all over the road ...

  Seventy, 60, 55, 35, Cav, you can fucking win this. You can fucking win this.

  At 20 metres to go, my front wheel's level with Haussler's back one; at 15 it's level with his thigh; at 10 it's his shin; at 5 it's his front wheel; at 1 metre it's still his front wheel.