by Ned Boulting
Through sliding glass doors we gazed on as, one by one, the T-Mobile team came down the spiral staircase to take their seats at dinner. All in their standard-issue Adidas clobber, they had the languid, slow, satisfied gait of the well exercised and well massaged. And of the about to be well fed.
Cavendish appeared, the last of the nine to take his place. We nudged closer to the glass, trying to catch his eye; Dickensian orphans at the window of a sweet shop. If he would only spot us now, he would no doubt come and talk to us for the requisite three or four minutes so we could push off and finish our shift, and he could resume the intimate, pampered life of the professional cyclist without the attention of the national broadcaster on his doorstep.
But no. He sat for what seemed like an eternity chatting to Linus Gerdemann, before standing up from the table and heading towards the buffet where he spent the longest time imaginable weighing up the comparative merits of coleslaw versus pasta salad. All the time, we could see ‘Wagner’ sitting at some distance from Cavendish, doing nothing by way of cajoling or persuading. Still, he seemed to be enjoying his glass of red and plate of cold meats, so that was some consolation.
By the time the sliding doors finally parted, and Mark Cavendish emerged onto the balcony, we were so dispirited we’d forgotten why we were there. He was disarmingly good to talk to, though, listening intently to my questions, and responding with bullishness and wit. I asked him about his two or three falls on Tour so far. ‘I’ve got that much puppy fat on me, I reckon I just bounce off the tarmac.’ His lips curled into a smile. It was humility and toughness rolled into one very sweet sound bite. It made him tremendously likeable.
When we were done, we thanked him for his time, and he turned to head in again. To our surprise, he stopped abruptly in his tracks, and looking at all three of us, wretchedly still standing there, had the good grace to utter an apology, of sorts. ‘Sorry about keeping you lot waiting. You should have said.’ And with that, he shot ‘Wagner’ a bit of a glance, and was gone, back off to the buffet for more Parma ham and olives.
Then it was ‘Wagner’s’ turn to shoot a glance at us. We left, hurriedly.
Two years later, at the home of SV Hamburg football club, I met ‘Wagner’ again. I was there shooting some preview material for a UEFA Cup match. All afternoon, as we waited around for our various interviewees to show up, ‘Wagner’ and I sneaked furtive glances at one another; aware that we’d met somewhere, but unable to remember where or when. Eventually, I cracked first.
‘Wir kennen uns doch,’ I offered. Haven’t we met?
‘Ja. Tour de France, oder?’ ‘Wagner’ smiled. ‘Cavendish!’
The Pfennig had dropped. I spent a little while chatting to him. He’d quit the sport altogether. That summer he’d seen the writing on the wall and had jumped from T-Mobile, indeed jumped from cycling altogether. The shockwaves that followed Jan Ullrich’s tarnished retirement had led their national team sponsor to withdraw, the main TV stations to boycott the Tour, and the Deutschland Tour to be abandoned. ‘Wagner’ cut a far happier figure in Hamburg, and we were able to laugh about the stress of managing a man who didn’t necessarily want to be managed.
During the rest of that 2007 Tour, our pursuit of Cavendish was all about trying to second-guess when he might climb off and retire from the race. We tried to orchestrate a meeting before he disappeared altogether, but failed utterly. Often it’s simply a question of logistics, which undoes the best-intentioned plans on the Tour. We might well have been able to get to him, and sit him down to reflect on his Tour debut, had he not decided to abandon on some distant incline on the road to Tignes. As he was being swept up by his magenta team car, and then chauffered off, probably to Geneva airport, we were hurtling in the other direction preparing to call home the winner of Stage 8, and the new race leader: Michael Rasmussen. In short, we were about to disappear into a far bigger crevice, and the Tour was about to morph into another shape, trampling the story of Cavendish’s debut underfoot. He managed a couple of top-ten finishes, but nothing more than that. Quickly, we all moved on.
A year later, though, everything was different.
I made my way at some hideously early hour to Birmingham airport on the Wednesday before the 2008 Prologue. A few days after returning from football duties in Austria, it was deemed necessary that I board a flight to Brest in Brittany. I sat rubbing my sleepless eyes and chatting to Liam who’d flown down that morning from Glasgow, wondering where another year had gone. As I spoke, I became peripherally aware that Liam had spotted someone way more interesting than me. He seemed a little distracted, a little less enthralled than he should have been in my seamless blow-by-blow account of Euro 2008. Eventually, he leant forward and whispered, ‘Don’t look now, but isn’t that Cav?’
Laptop under his left arm, his right hand trailing a tiny rolling travel case, and this time dressed in a very non-corporate pair of jeans. He plonked his stuff down, and went up to get himself a coffee.
‘Yes. It’s Cav.’
A little cynically, I saw this as an opportunity. We were virtually alone in the departure hall that morning. The demand for places on a morning flight to Brest from Birmingham was obviously not quite what the airline would have wished. There was Liam, there was Cavendish, and there was me. To a journalist in my position, this represents a dilemma, a challenge, an opportunity and a problem, all rolled into one. The way in which sport is marketed and managed these days has restrained the once free and easy association between the media and the athletes to such a rigorous extent that encounters such as this seldom happen, even in the much less regulated sport of cycling.
The simplest thing would have been to leave him completely alone. The most invasive would have been to load up the camera and try and grab an interview, guerilla-style. The most productive, and also the most polite and engaging alternative was the one I chose. Go over and have a natter. What harm could possible come of it?
I shook his hand. ‘Hi, Mark. You well?’
‘Hi. Not bad thanks.’ A shy half smile. He glanced down at his laptop once again. I started off with some small talk. We spoke about his hugely successful Giro d’Italia. I asked him for his thoughts on the Tour. We spoke briefly about Brittany and airports and coffee. And that was that. I reckon it couldn’t have lasted much more than a minute or two, and for no significant portion of that time did his eyes leave his computer screen. Sensing that I was on borrowed time, I went in for the journalistic kill. The question which we all dread, and which we all have to ask. The question that is the benchmark by which we judge each other.
‘Mark, could I scribble down your mobile number?’ I thought that the rather cutesy use of the word ‘scribble’ might somehow diminish the absolute significance of what I had just asked him. I tried to make it sound like I was asking him to pass the sugar, or what he was going to have for tea, when in fact I was asking him to trust me. That was the nub of it. Had I gained his trust?
‘Sorry, mate. I don’t like handing out my mobile number.’
And that was that. The next issue to present itself was one of social etiquette. For how much longer, after what had amounted to a form of snub, should you hang around? To leave immediately would suggest that it was only ever the mobile number that you were interested in, and that the entire encounter had instantly been rendered meaningless. But staying on too long afterwards would be awkward, too. Hadn’t it just been made fairly clear where the parameters had been set? What could possibly be gained from dragging both of us into further discussions about the white chocolate chips in the muffin that sat glowering on a saucer in the middle of the table. Somehow, I fudged my exit and took my leave.
There was nothing about the encounter that had been rude or inappropriate. But it had been surprising, and a little disappointing. It bore the hallmarks of football. Until this point, cycling had seemed to me a happy playground for journalists, where the approachability and availability of the riders had seemed to be inbuilt in the character of the spor
t. Even Armstrong, although I know of almost no one who’s ever claimed to have his mobile number, has been up for a chat now and then in a lift at a hotel or clutching a warm cup of coffee on a chilly morning as the mechanics prepared the bikes.
Yes, the mobile number is the obsession of the modern jobbing hack. By your SIM card’s contacts are you measured. Sportsmen have developed many different ways over recent years of not giving it out. Changing their number on a weekly basis is still the favourite means of fending off the outside world. I have even fallen foul of the ‘made-up number scam’, when a Premier league footballer, whose number I had asked for, amusingly answered, ‘Sure. It’s 0777 777773.’ I got halfway through writing it down before I realised what was going on.
But again, you must return to the issue of trust. I was two weeks into filming a documentary with Steven Gerrard a few years ago at the height of his fame as the swashbuckling captain of Liverpool. The building of trust had been slow and painstaking. It took a long time for me to persuade him that our intentions were benign, our discretion absolute. Then, one hideously wet December afternoon as I left his mansion in Formby after a long day’s filming, I forgot I had my outdoor shoes on and trod at least a dozen filthy black footprints in single file across the full extent of the white carpet in his living room. This was not a good moment.
If anything was designed to put our relationship under stress, this was. Despite my offers to get contract cleaners round straight away, he sent me, on my way back down to London, with a scowl and an unconvincing sounding, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ But worry was all I did. I fretted into late that evening, when out of the blue, I received a text message. ‘Enjoyed filming today. Hope you got home OK. Don’t worry about the carpet. Skipper.’ The message was a very welcome relief, but the real prize was that it included his mobile number, of course. An act of trust. Of course, he’s changed it a dozen times since.
‘I’ll ask you again tomorrow about your mobile number, Mark,’ I quipped as we disembarked the tiny propeller plane at Brest airport. The faintest grin, and he was on his way.
The first few days of that Tour didn’t go well for Cavendish. If his reputation for prickliness is built on anything at all, it’s built on the interview that he gave to Matt after Stage 3, when the bunch had failed to chase down a break, and Cavendish had seen another realistic chance of a maiden stage win disappear. Matt collared him just as he crossed the line, and pushed him hard on why the chase had failed. It was something I’m sure that I, too, would have done. It’s just that that year, I was somewhere else at the time.
The interview incensed Cavendish to the extent that a forensic analysis of it appears in his autobiography, which came out the following year. Four pages at the start of Chapter 3, to be precise.
There are many things you’d like to do when you’ve just blown your chance in a stage of the Tour de France, but trust me when I say that giving a television interview is a fair way down your list of priorities.
Mark’s just warming up.
‘Mark, Mark, can we have a word?’
He must have seen from the look on my face that the prospect didn’t exactly fill me with glee, but the guy had a job to do. Anyway, as soon as the camera starts rolling, you’re trapped; tell him to stick his microphone where there’s never any sun on the forecast, or even put it more politely, and you’ve just starred in your own version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
I’ve seen that look on his face. It’s a kind of soft-edged threat. It has an intensity that unsettles you. Matt did well to hold on to his train of thought. He concludes:
‘Interviewer: ‘Mark, so what have you learnt from today?’
Me: ‘That journalists sometimes ask some fucking stupid questions.’
Although not actually what he said (Cavendish writes that he only thought of saying this after the interview had been recorded), it has a certain ring of truth to it. It’s probably what he thought. And it’s probably what he still thinks.
I like Mark Cavendish, almost precisely because of his occasional thinly disguised fury. He may exercise his right to answer monosyllabically, petulantly, with irritation, anger or grievance. He sometimes, again rightly, decides not to talk to the cameras. To walk, or to talk. It’s up to him. He can do, or be, whatever he likes. But unless the dumb lens of the television camera is present, he will exist in a vacuum. And, alongside the ‘fucking stupid questions’, there will be no glory, no adulation, no crowds. There will be no riches. No race. Mark Cavendish is thoughtful enough and clever enough to know all this. At least most of the time.
One afternoon the following spring, after he had stormed to three individual stage wins of the 2009 Giro d’Italia, we spoke at length about this. I had made my way to Bar Italia in Soho where Mark was ‘doing’ the British media in one fell swoop. His book had just come out, so there was that to plug too. Dressed in his regulation white Columbia shirt, complete with wrinkly unironed collars, Cavendish had set up shop in an upstairs room. One by one, members of the press filed in and out of there, using up every last second of their allocated timeslot. I requested an audience later on in the day with him, figuring that the fewer journalists I had queuing up after me, the less pressure would be exerted by the Columbia press officer to get the thing done.
‘Hi, Mark,’ I offered as a loosener. Then, brandishing my copy of his book in one hand, ‘Won’t keep you long. Just got a few fucking stupid questions for you.’
The ploy worked. Cavendish cracked a huge grin, and protested straight away, ‘That wasn’t you, you know. It wasn’t you that did that interview.’
‘I know it wasn’t. And I want you to go on the record and tell everyone that it wasn’t me.’ We were enjoying this. The release of a little tension.
With the camera rolling, we then went on to discuss the subject in depth. I wondered whether he thought we had the right to ask such questions on the finish line. His reply astonished me.
‘Of course. It’s cycling. It’s what makes our sport special.’ He went on to defend his tormentors in the press.
He noted the differences between cycling and other sports, he paid homage to the culture of the bike race which flings its heroes into the sweaty clutches of the people, where they can see their heroes, ‘gladiators’, as he referred to them, for what they are: just men who do a hard job. He paid articulate tribute to the traditions of covering the Tour; those moments on the television which had lodged in his memory and framed his understanding of the sport that had been his childhood passion.
The moments he recalled were precisely those post-race shots of triumph or defeat, when the camera is witness, prosecution, and defence, and the rider is in the dock. He understood to perfection the nuances that made up the fabric of my job on the Tour. It was a little humbling to hear him speak like that. I had always assumed that Cavendish belonged to a generation that didn’t think too deeply about the wider heritage of their sport. I was quite wrong.
For my part, I willed him not to change. I tried to impress on him that his occasional awkward moments serve only to paint a rounder picture of the man, and speak of his fullness as a character, as a man pushing himself to the limits of his endeavour. No right-minded person would ever begrudge him the right to remain honest and authentic.
And so we came to a happy truce. He defended my right to stick a microphone under his nose; I defended his right to ignore it. Then the real interview resumed.
‘Mark, does it irritate you that your achievements have gone unappreciated by large sections of the British public?’
‘No, but I tell you what does irritate me. It irritates me that I get asked that question all the time.’ Etc., etc. And straight away, we were back to what we both do best. Fucking stupid questions and tetchy answers.
To return to the sunshine. To go back to Châteauroux.
My radio blasted into life. ‘One rider out the front, but he’ll be caught. One kilometre to go. Columbia on the front. It’s Cav-tastic!’ Steve Doherty bello
wed his excitement over talkback.
Then the helicopters, the clattering of hands on the advertising boards, the increase in pitch and volume from the loudspeakers . . .
‘Cavendish!’
The first of his Tour stage wins came in Châteauroux. It was Wednesday 9 July 2008. I remember little else of the day. But I remember the heat. I remember the result.
MANGE TOUT
Food. However oddly it may be presented, it fills in the gaps in the Tour. With normal life on hold as we hurtle headlong through another July away from home, food compensates for a nagging feeling of dislocation. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that it becomes a substitute for happiness and something of an obsession. Luckily we are in France. And they’re quite good at cooking.
The 2003 Tour had begun to roll south. By the time my birthday came around, it had reached Lyon and was bracing itself for the famous assault on the Alps, which would leave Beloki in hospital and Armstrong in the yellow jersey. That evening the production company had managed to find us accommodation just outside the city in a tiny hamlet, constructed, to all intents and purposes, along a bypass.
For a country rich in beautiful villages and towns, there are many which are considerably more prosaic. I can remember little of the two-star auberge in which we found our beds that night, other than that it conformed to a checklist of depressing features: yellow wallpaper, brown bedspread, dusty nylon flowers in a dusty vase in reception, next to a small bowl of ageing sweets. Shuttered windows were flung open on entering the room in an attempt to blow away the smell of last night’s guest. The shuddering of traffic sloughing along the Route Nationale and a toilet, that doesn’t flush so much as vibrate and sputter.
