How I Won the Yellow Jumper

by Ned Boulting

  I last saw Patrice on Mont Ventoux in 2009, four years after Glenn’s death. He had grown a wonderful beard which, he said, was ‘off-centre, due to the crosswind’.

  A curious pair they made, then. Pat, always in ancient leathers, no matter how hot the weather, and Glenn, with his Home Counties looks and an accent to match, a twitching ball of energy, full of mannerisms and tics and quirks.

  ‘Bonshore, mon ammeee.’ He would announce with a flash of his naturally substantial white teeth. ‘Je swee avec le meediar.’ This was his favourite gag of all. Announcing to anyone who would listen and plenty who wouldn’t, in the loudest, most braying British accent he could muster, that he was ‘Avec le meediaar.’ He was brazen, and unencumbered by embarrassment. I have no idea what Patrice made of it. But I suspect the big man was always inwardly amused by his preposterous teammate. He would smile indulgently.

  Glenn had stopped filming out on the race a couple of years before I joined the team, partly because I suspect the privileged place which he’d enjoyed for years was withdrawn. British riders were achieving next to nothing in the early years of the twenty-first century, and therefore British TV had no right to expect a motorbike place. They’d rather give it to the Germans. These days, in fact, only the French and the Americans get to place a motorbike on the race.

  But equally, I suspect that Glenn had had enough of the danger. He had two young boys at home, and perhaps he just didn’t need it any longer. Instead he opted for the less adrenalin-filled, but equally highly pressured, world of framing Gary Imlach against an alpine backdrop or a Norman church.

  He died very suddenly one afternoon from heart failure. He was aged forty-four. At his funeral, his two boys sat in their collars and ties in the front row, their hair neatly parted, their shoes polished. They stared into the middle distance, inscrutable. The church was full to bursting. Somewhere, at the back of the congregation, was Patrice. Ridiculously, Patrice was wearing a tie with his leathers, hastily put on in the car park after he had ridden overnight from Provence to Surrey.

  In 2003, the day before the Tour, I sat in a vast press conference listening to Lance Armstrong hold court in measured, serious tones. He was speaking of the race he was about to win for the fifth time, and he was paying it respect. ‘The Tour has been everything to me. I’ve seen it all. Courage. Fear. Love. Even Death.’ He was referring back to an event in 1995. Descending the Col de Portet d’Aspet, Armstrong’s teammate Fabio Casartelli had lost control and fallen at great speed headlong into a sharp-edged concrete pillar marking the edge of the road. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and that killed him.

  It is a stark image; a watershed moment in the modern-era Tour de France. Casartelli’s folded body lies at an oblique angle across the tarmac. He appears to be holding the backs of his knees, drawing them in. There is too much blood on the road.

  I remember asking Glenn about it once. There weren’t many times in Glenn’s helter-skelter life when you could goad him into seriousness. But, on that occasion, I was struck by the sudden shift in him. Stuff goes on out there on the road. And to most of us, most if it will remain hidden most of the time.

  He knew and understood a great deal more than he ever acknowledged. I spent only two Julys with him. I wish there had been more.

  THE LINGO

  He looked my way. He stepped my way. He spoke no English. I had no other option but to address him in his native tongue.

  ‘Alessandro,’ I repeated needlessly, playing for time. ‘Una bella vittoria!?’ Half question, half statement. It would have to do.

  I beamed at him and thrust my microphone in the direction of Alessandro Petacchi, the winner of Stage 3 of the 2003 Tour de France. He started to speak.

  ‘Si . . .’ But, I confess, the rest was lost on me. I nodded along as if I understood, bravely facing down the salvos of quick-fire Italian being sprayed in my direction. I felt not the slightest discomfort. On the contrary, I was beginning to see that stuff like this happens on the Tour, the natural habitat of us charlatans and linguistic chancers.

  The Tour de France is a cacophony of polyglot noise. For obvious enough reasons, the mother tongue of the race used to be French, but that’s not quite as true now as it once was. Although continental pro-riders have always been enviably multilingual, there was once an understanding that French was their common currency. Now that doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny. The race doesn’t really know what language it should speak. Norwegian? German? Spanish? Italian? Russian?

  There used to be a distinctive feature of our production, which, sadly is no more. Some viewers remember it fondly and call for its reinstatement. But, for others, its disappearance has been a cause for celebration.

  We used to film almost every rider staring directly, if sheepishly, into the camera and delivering the killer line: ‘Hello, I’m (insert rider’s name here). You’re watching the Tour de France on ITV.’ These little introductions would play before and after every commercial break. Since English was seldom their mother tongue, the variety of ways riders would find to mangle this simple message was a source of constant wonder.

  ‘You see Tour de France in TVI. Thank you.’

  ‘Hello. This is the Tour de France. I am watching TV.’

  ‘This is ITV’s Tour de France on the BBC. Hello.’

  I am deeply respectful of each and every rider who ever obliged us in this way. I admire their courage, mostly because I share their shortcomings.

  These days everyone just has to muddle through, and muddling through is especially invigorating when you neither speak nor understand the language in question.

  Nowhere is this muddling through more widespread than in the interview pen. This is essentially an area about the size of two table tennis tables, demarcated by the same kind of agricultural fencing that usually encloses sheep before they’re dipped. That sometimes seems to be a fair reflection of our status in the eyes of the men in charge. Recent Tours have featured the French team Agritubel. This fencing is precisely team Agritubel. This fencing is precisely the sort of product Agritubel they manufacture. I often wonder whether the Tour cuts a deal with them to provide free housing for the ladies and gentlemen of the media in return for a place in their race.

  On arrival in this undignified cage every day, there are handshakes and nods of acknowledgement. There are brief exchanges of gossip and little flurries of laughter between fellow journalists sharing a joke. It is a cocktail-party atmosphere, with a nervous edge. Over many years, I have become familiar with this international melting pot. I have started putting names to their faces.

  Frankie Andreu, the perfectly groomed, white-toothed, deeply tanned American reporter. He was a teammate of Lance Armstrong in his pre-cancer Motorola team, and he would be thrust into the spotlight when the testimony given by Frankie and his wife Betsy threatened to implicate Armstrong in a doping scandal. Armstrong was later cleared, but how Andreu maintained a functioning relationship with the Texan with all that flying around I will never know. But he enters the pen, and, in the nicest possible way, always takes up the prime spot, at the corner nearest the area behind the podium from which the riders will eventually emerge. No one challenges his pre-eminence. He is clearly the alpha male.

  Then there is Mike Tomalaris, Tommo. He is the lanky legend of SBS and hosts the coverage in Australia; a man with a broadcaster’s haircut and a perpetual air of confused amusement playing over his lips. He is a kind, funny man. There were times, even through my first Tour, when he would bow to my superior knowledge. I sometimes bumped into Tommo half an hour after the end of a stage when he would give the impression of being only dimly aware who had won. Time pressure never weighed too heavily on his shoulders.

  There’s Dag Otto, from Norwegian TV, who drives a car with his own face all over it. We teased him once on the way to the car park: ‘Which one’s yours, Dag Otto?’

  ‘That one over there.’

  ‘Really?’

  Then there’s Jorgen Leth, the fam
ous Danish film director who now slums it as a cycling reporter and who’d rather have been directing Brecht at the Copenhagen National Theatre than bumping shoulders with me. There’s Bernd, the twitchy German, and his perspiring ineffectual colleague Thomas. And Alessandra De Stefano, the first lady of Italian cycling. A cosmopolitan flock standing about in their pen, ready for dipping.

  I have become fascinated by the nuances of living in a kind of fully functioning scale model of Europe. I pride myself on separating from some distance the Austrians from the Swiss, simply by their footwear (Austrians practical, Swiss needlessly flamboyant). I understand instinctively that you can approach the Danes at any time, but the Italians can be tetchy, and the Norwegians often like to have a snooze in the afternoon, so it is best to leave them alone.

  It is a daily delight to be surrounded by a dozen different languages competing for pre-eminence. I have became sharp at realising that the Dutch can speak all of them, but while the Swedes can converse in very passable French, only Germans from southern states like Swabia, Bavaria or Hessen will trust themselves at all to speak the local tongue.

  The Americans would if they could. But they can’t, so they don’t. The French grudgingly break out in a little English if they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. The Italians are the same, although they understand more English than they let on, which I find a bit sly. The Belgians watch Formula One on their tellies and don’t mix much.

  The Brits, well we’re up for anything really, even if it stretches way beyond our capacity. Not much of a stretch, come to think of it.

  One of the biggest linguistic challenges I had was to interview Jean-Marie Leblanc, the former General Director of the Tour de France. A blustering, bald, portly, trad-jazz clarinet-playing former Tour rider who ruled the roost for years, it was an honour to have made his slightly overbearing acquaintance. He was a towering figure really, who presided over the Indurain and the Armstrong years, over drugs busts and riders’ strikes, demonstrations and machinations.

  But his lasting legacy as far as many of us were concerned in the media, was the introduction of the ‘detachable lanyard’. The word lanyard may conjure up images of ship’s chandlers and nautical knots, but in the narrow little world of sports events it means one thing only. It is the brightly coloured, often sponsored necklace of polyester from which your laminated accreditation is hung by means of a clip. A sub-standard lanyard can spell all sorts of bother, for if the accreditation drops off and gets lost without the wearer noticing its departure, days of bureaucracy can ensue before a replacement can be issued. Thus, the lanyard is, for the month of July, your professional life. I have been known to shower still wearing it.

  The relief when you can take it off and pack it away for good in Paris is the same feeling you get when someone turns off a poorly tuned radio: until it’s gone you’d never realised how irritating it had become. After a decade in this line of work, I have a collection of these things from all sorts of events, which, up until the time I wrote this, I have never admitted to. I suspect all my colleagues are the same, and that somewhere back at home, perhaps in the attic, they have a dedicated Lanyard Wall, and dream of walking their grandchildren up and down it, regaling them with tales of sports journalistic heroism.

  Jean-Marie Leblanc’s contribution to the development of accreditation accessories was to design a lanyard with a cunningly designed clip which would detach if tugged hard enough. The official line was that this was a safety measure designed to prevent hapless journalists from getting snared up in a rider’s handlebars and dragged down the tarmac by the neck. But we didn’t believe that for a second. We suspected the Machiavellian Leblanc had designed it in order to remove his enemies, and to rule by fear.

  He had been seen on a number of occasions, it was darkly rumoured, to instantaneously remove someone’s accreditation at the flick of his meaty wrist. One deft movement, and the offending journo’s summer was over, quite possibly losing him his job. The stakes were high: you didn’t mess with Him.

  Mentally, I tried hard to prepare intensely for those rare occasions when the multilingual Matt Rendell was not around and I would have to interview Leblanc. As a rule, we only ever bothered seeking out his opinion if there was a matter of some controversy to discuss. I was conscious of being in the presence of a man who had complete control over his thoughts and their expression. He joined them up. He was a joined-up man.

  His answers soared, exquisitely constructed and spoken with a precision and clarity of accent that left you in no doubt of his absolute Frenchness. He was elegant and exact, but just below the silky surface of his speech, you would occasionally become aware that his words carried the furious threat of a butcher with a meat cleaver in his hand. Talking to him was like going back to school.

  In conversation with Leblanc, I would occasionally attempt to rise to the occasion, daring to use words that I was only half-sure of, like ‘néanmoins’, or ‘d’ailleurs’. I would try to get as close as I possibly could to the distinctive aspirated whistling noise that real French people so effortlessly tack onto commonplace words like ‘perdu’ and ‘tendu’. I might even, on a good day, have contemplated letting fly a casual subjunctive.

  With other resolutely French French-speakers on the scene, I am more typically inhibited.

  At the start of the 2008 Tour I tracked down Bernard Hinault, who, in 1985, was the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France. He was known as The Badger, a nickname that implied feral aggression. I wondered if he’d taken the same approach into his post-racing career.

  A busy man at the best of times, Hinault is in constant demand on the Tour de France, where he has a contractual arrangement with the organisers to turn up and be Bernard Hinault. Really, he is the only man for the job, and the French public can’t get enough of him. I was aware of a queue of journalists, well-wishers, sponsors and other accredited Tour types building up behind me.

  That year the Tour started in Brest, at the most westerly extremity of the country. This was Brittany, Hinault’s country. I wanted to talk to him about the characteristics of cycling in that part of the world, which is battered by Atlantic winds most of the year. I wondered whether the rigours of the landscape had forged a distinctive type of man: no nonsense, bluff and a little gruff.

  No sooner had I embarked on the interview than my French just fell apart, and was left in a heap of broken little words on the floor in front of him. What did for me was the whole Brittany thing. I struggled with the pronunciation of ‘Bretagne’. I forgot that the adjective was ‘Breton’, and not ‘Brittanique’, an error that became all too apparent when I ended up asking him if all Breton riders consider themselves to be fundamentally British.

  The Badger looked at me with thinly disguised pity.

  And in 2010 I came face to face with Laurent Fignon for the final time. A few years previously I had conducted a similarly shambolic interview in French with him at his hotel complex in the Pyrenees. He’d been a gentleman, and had refrained from showing open scorn. Perhaps because he knew that I was basically plugging his business. But also, I imagine, because he was curious to see how much longer I could continue groping around in the linguistic darkness before I finally broke down in front of him. I wondered during our last interview if he remembered our ridiculous encounter.

  He seemed to be well enough in the summer of 2010. But he wasn’t. A month or two later, cancer claimed his life. With him went a large portion of France’s cycling heritage.

  But where Fignon’s memory is revered, others are less fondly remembered. Take, for example, Jan Ullrich: the earring-wearing, freckled, seemingly humourless German whose repeated capitulations in the face of Armstrong’s dominance in the mountains characterised my early Tours.

  Ullrich showed a disinclination to speak any English, which led me, not unreasonably, to believe that he couldn’t. Why should he after all? He’d grown up in East Berlin in the eighties, where learning English was an act of relative decadence. He’d spent most of his racing years in
German-centric teams built in his image, and lived and trained in the mountains of southern Germany. The man was as retro-Deutsch as a faded denim jacket.

  This shouldn’t have mattered. After all, I had a good knowledge of German, having spent a few formative years in the early nineties in Hamburg, gazing into the dregs of Bier glasses wondering what to do with my life. So, I felt a little drawn to Ullrich, my ersatz-countryman. I claimed him, in fact.

  There was much I liked about him. I liked the way he flattered to deceive. I found him to be frail, human, charmingly charmless. In some ways, he was the anti-Armstrong, prone to fits of pique, breathtaking weight gains over winter, and with a propensity for slapstick: most memorably flying through the rear window of his team’s support vehicle when out for a training ride two days before the start of the Tour.

  And yet, he and I never hit it off. In three years of covering those Tours that Jan Ullrich contested, I didn’t actually interview him once. Not once. That’s a pretty remarkable record really, given the fact that he finished second, fourth and third in consecutive races before disappearing feet first into a quagmire of doping scandals from which he never emerged.

  I don’t know what it was, but he always managed to swerve me. In big media bundles, I would hold my microphone into the middle of a clump of others, and would fail to get a question in. He would never look my way. Then, at the very last second, I would throw in my effort, just at the moment where he would be turning on his Adidas heels and getting back on the bus. I was always too late.