by Ned Boulting
But the next day, as we got to the finish line in Lisieux, our heroes’ welcome never materialised.
‘Have you got all that stuff, then?’ Mike appeared, looking pretty serene.
We were greeted by the sight of the truck with all its wheels intact, the studio set already erected, and everything about to continue on its sweet seamless course. As if nothing at all had happened.
Apparently the problem with the truck had been instantly fixed, and Richard had set off shortly after us. What, we wondered, was the point in being saints if nobody acknowledged it? None – there was no point. So we sulked for the rest of the morning, and banged things around. Pointedly.
And that’s one of the ways in which Mark Cavendish and I will take away different memories of the 2011 Tour de France.
* * *
And on Stage 7, Bradley Wiggins went home. The last I saw of him was in the car park outside Châteauroux’s main hospital, teetering towards a Team Sky Jaguar with Rod Ellingworth, his coach, behind the wheel. He had broken his collarbone, gained a sling, and exited the Tour, all within a few hectic hours. Sky had chartered a plane to get him home, adding to their growing mystique as the best-funded, best-organised super-cycling team in the world.
We had arrived in the nick of time. It was a little applied wisdom, coupled with pure luck. A minute later and we’d have missed the Jag on its way to the local airport. As it was, we followed him on his wobbly journey from the hospital to the car, where he turned around and talked.
At first I was confused. If he was devastated to be missing out, he was hiding it well. He looked almost amused. Then, midway through his answer, I understood what was going on. The French medics had pumped him so full of morphine that he was struggling to see the serious side of anything. He did well not to burst into song. We commiserated, wished him all the best, and sent him on his way. He beamed back at us, narcotically.
The next time he appeared on our TV screens, it was August, and he was on a mad charge with his teammate Chris Froome for the podium of the Vuelta a España. It was a prodigious ride that belied to some extent the downplaying of his own abilities. And it begged the question of what he might have been capable of had he not crashed out in July. But that, disappointingly was another story, that will never be told.
* * *
If Wiggins couldn’t ride in France, Chris Boardman and I would have to do it for him.
BAFTA were duly informed and sent scouts to France in order to validate our attempts to make some of the Best Television Ever Recorded. Staggeringly, the preparations for the shoot had begun months in advance. Back as early as March, there had been a flurry of emails exchanged between the show’s directors, producers and cameramen, Chris Boardman and myself. There was even some worrying talk of aerohelmets.
This was the Big Idea: Chris, or ‘Olympic Bloke’, as he became universally known during this edition of the Tour, was going to teach me how to ride a bike. For the first time since my dad released his grip from my back wheel and allowed my five-year-old legs to teeter off onto the recreation ground outside our house, I felt myself quivering on the threshold of greatness. This wasn’t Dad, though. This was Olympic Bloke, and so the pressure was notched up accordingly. After all, as Chris’s increasingly irritating adverts on TV suggested, ‘He didn’t know what second place on the podium was for.’ (Apart, that is, from the numerous times when he had to stand there looking up at Miguel Indurain, as we delighted in reminding him.)
I had been out running with Chris for years, admiring his relentless, sapping ability to be consistently 15 per cent better than me over all distances and across all terrains. I had become accustomed to the sight of his hairless Olympian legs pumping away in their fell-running shoes and dropping me on some alpine goat track, whilst he still happily chatted away about the problems syncing an iPad with a Windows-based desktop. Or something.
Running is not an uncommon transition phase for retired roadies. The urge to do something different when they finally stop riding is irresistible. And for many, like the recently retired Olympic rider Chris Newton who posted an alarmingly good time in his first ever marathon, this means running. They feel delightfully liberated by the simplicity of it: a pair of trainers, shorts, and off you go. None of this pump-in-the-back-pocket, chain-lube and Allen-key shenanigans. Not only that, but their entire riding career has been predicated on the principle of doing nothing that so much as even remotely resembles running. In fact, walking can present a problem for most of them. Even standing up a bit does them in. They are, it has to be said, wonderfully feeble individuals in lots of ways, with a propensity for catching colds. They boast weedy little upper bodies and hopeless one-dimensional physiologies. Pedal, pedal, pedal. They’re very good indeed at doing that. But stand around for twenty minutes at a bus stop? Forget it.
Chris Boardman had also run the London Marathon. It galled me greatly that his time had beaten mine by fully twenty-six minutes. That crushing disappointment negotiated, I had been secretly relieved that the old ankle injury he had sustained when he crashed out of the 1995 Tour Prologue had flared up again. The doctor had told him to pack in the running and get back on his bike. I agreed with the doctor, by and large, and started to enjoy lonelier, slower runs during the month of July. By myself. Without him being better than me.
So Chris had rediscovered riding his bicycle. At first gingerly, then with increasing frequency and duration. The fact that he owned a mega-successful bike brand with a warehouse full of sleek black-liveried road bikes with his name all over them, must have acted as some mild incentive. Not that Chris Boardman ever lacks motivation.
So here he was, this born-again, lapsed, and then born-again cycling bloke, outside our hilltop hotel in the neatly panoramic Vendée village of Pouzauges. It was early in the morning as I left the breakfast room to find Chris out in the chilly morning air, down on his haunches and engaging in what he called ‘fettling’. It was a word I was about to hear often over the course of the day.
Two bikes bearing his name in simple, minimalistic yellow and white letters had been loaded onto the TV truck back in England. Here in France they were being carefully unpacked in preparation for the day’s filming. Handlebars, cranks, stems and brackets. I barely knew the names of any of the pieces. I certainly couldn’t have assembled them.
Chris was appalled at my choice of footwear. I was wearing ‘SPDs’. This was not good, it seemed. They are clipped shoes that come with their own special pedals, all right. But they are not designed for performance road cyclists riding ‘performance’ bikes in a ‘performance’ sort of way.
Instead of projecting out from the sole like a metallic bunion, making the footwear unwearable unless clipped onto a bike, SPDs are smaller cleats, embedded into a shoe that might even pass muster for normal, non-cycling use. Apparently, according to cycling purists, they are worn and ridden by idiots. So, naturally, I was wearing them.
I am used to being the only rider on organised rides not hobbling around like a penguin staggering back from the pub when off the bike. I had stopped off especially at a branch of Decathalon on my drive down from Brittany and picked up a brand new set of SPD pedals (Les Pédales des Idiots!). It was these that Chris was now taking a great lack of pleasure in ‘fettling’ onto the ‘cboardman’ pushbike I was to be loaned.
Finally, after an hour or so of unbridled use of spanners and ratchets (probably), and having sent me out in a car to find yet another branch of Decathalon to buy an implausible number of water bottles as props for the shoot, Chris declared himself all fettled out, and we were good to go.
John Tinetti, my taciturn cameraman colleague of every Tour I have covered, climbed onto the back of a motorbike ridden by Jacky Koch, the long-standing moto-pilot of the legendary Tour photographer Graham Watson. We rode down the steep hill through the village and headed for the open road. Instantly I encountered problems, which I was almost too shy to mention to Chris. It seemed that every time I touched my rear brake, I nearly died
. It emerged that my bike was equipped with a carbon rim thing, or something like that, which meant that braking, far from being a safe course of action designed to reduce speed and minimise the chance of falling from your bicycle, had become an act of suicidal self-loathing. We stopped, almost as soon as we had set off, while Chris re-fettled some things.
A little while later, the filming got underway. Six little items were to be shot. Six vignettes designed to bring to life the basic underlying principles of certain aspects of road racing, things like drafting, crosswinds, team time trials. The water bottles were put to breathtaking slapstick use, when I had to pretend to be his domestique. Chris had scripted them all carefully. He would be the master. I would be the student.
Somewhere during the filming of the first little piece though, things started heading in a certain and, from my point of view, somewhat regrettable direction. I think it might have been John’s fault. He was filming a sequence in which I was riding in front of Chris, giving him the paltry benefit of drafting on my wheel. Filmed from the side, Chris delivered a line to camera, and then, with a slight acceleration of the motorbike, the shot panned forward to me, ostensibly working very hard at the front. The problem was that we had to fake it a bit. We couldn’t ride at all fast, really, given that Chris was concentrating on delivering his lines, and I was concentrating on not dying. We were also on the open road, with the motorbike firmly on the wrong side of the carriageway. All in all, it would have failed even the most cursory health and safety audit. Which was a good job, because we hadn’t done one.
The problem, as John informed me, stepping down from the bike, was that it didn’t look even remotely hard. And because it looked too easy, it was failing to make the point. And because it was failing to make the point, it was pointless. And because it was pointless, we were all going to get into trouble etc.. etc. etc.
I should ‘Ham it up a bit, mate.’ That was John’s suggestion. And that was where I ran into a bit of trouble.
For four years from 1991 to 1995, I had struggled under the illusion that I could make a living as an actor. I had cobbled together a CV consisting of sporadic low-key acting assignments. The highlight of my ‘career’ was playing one of the Montgolfier brothers to an audience of airline executives at the launch of the Airbus A330 in Hamburg. A glorified aeroplane salesman in a belle époque wig. I had scoured the German papers in vain the following day for a review of my performance. But it seemed that no critics had attended. Michael Heseltine, sitting alongside Helmut Kohl had appeared to enjoy it, as well as a posse of important South Korean airline types, who I had later spotted looking up at the Airbus and kicking its tyres as they pondered making an offer. But that was it, in terms of acting.
So here I was, the best part of twenty years later, being asked to rekindle a thespian talent, which had flickered with such a modest flame in the first place that it blew clean out at the first cold blast of rent arrears.
We re-shot the sequence, and this time I threw the theatrical kitchen sink at it. Cheeks-puffing, snot-wiping, legs-akimbo. I selected a ridiculously easy gear, so that I could best express the expended effort through the visual medium of spinning my legs ludicrously fast. I felt like I had captured the essence of suffering. This was a refined distillation of the very nature of the sport. I had brought the agony into people’s living rooms. I felt artistically fulfilled.
Word had come back from the production headquarters in London, where these pieces had been edited together, that they were very pleased with them. I read in an email that ‘my contributions had made them’. Irony never transfers well to the printed word.
Sadly, when I saw the pieces back, I realised that I simply looked an utter arse. There I was, all knees and elbows and silly gears, pretending to be out of breath, with Chris chatting away to camera and sailing along effortlessly in my wake. My one chance to measure myself alongside Chris Boardman, to gain in kudos and rub off a little reflected glory. And I’d blown out my cheeks for comic effect.
I thought of the impeccable Gary Imlach’s vow never to be filmed riding a bike, and, not for the first time, bowed inwardly to his greater wisdom.
* * *
With all this shamefully camp messing around on bikes with Chris, I nearly forgot the main reason for my having been sent to France: to track Mark Cavendish in his attempt to win the green jersey. I was sure that he and I were about to enjoy an easier working relationship. He had, after all, read my account of life covering the Tour, and would perhaps appreciate the particular pressures we have, in our own little ways, to contend with. He would doubtless be full of sympathy for my midnight sojourn in a Breton field talking to a French mechanic about hydraulics.
Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way. Talking to Mark Cavendish, both on and off camera, remained a curiously subtle enigma. Undefined, uncertain endings are a hallmark of our encounters. Beginnings aren’t much easier either. He has an unusual way, for example, of giving the interviewer no clear signal as to when an interview should begin. Conventionally, with other riders, this will take the form of a nod, or a deliberate look up, a straightening of the shoulders or a quick, ‘OK, then.’ With Cavendish, you kind of drift into the procedure, unsure, even as you plough through your opening question, as to whether or not the interview has in fact begun. This is just the way it is; the way he is.
Mostly, we got on smoothly enough with our defined roles. We even negotiated our way through a most surprisingly delicate encounter. He’d just pulled on the famous green jersey for the first time that summer, and, with the cameras rolling, turned with a coy three-quarters smile, and simpered, ‘Don’t you think it suits me, Ned?’
I said I thought it did. Very much.
He was happy, by and large, to accept the media obligations of his trade. But not always. There was a tense little situation in a car park in Lorient, which ended well enough, but had started with Cavendish claiming we were treating him like an animal by filming him walking to the bus. There was some truth in that assertion, I suppose. The Tour de France can indeed be bit of a zoo.
But the ‘walking shot’, the ‘car park photo opportunity’ is the stock in trade of reporting the Tour. It might be slightly unimaginative, but it is quite normal, and quite essential. News channels call it the ‘today shot’. It lends the story immediacy, giving the viewer a visual context for the unfolding narrative of the morning.
Riders expect it; sponsors and PR managers positively orchestrate it; the Tour demands it. Mark Cavendish has done it a thousand times. But that morning, it enraged him. I wondered what it must feel like to be subjected to that kind of scrutiny. He was there to win bike races, and certainly not to placate journalists. But the encounter told me everything I needed to know about our unchanged relationship, our unequal power play, the unique distance at which the athlete holds the outside world.
By now, of course, Cavendish was in race mode, and as such, he was a different man. I guess his dealings with me, their ease, or lack of it, are a finely calibrated barometer for the pressure he is under. When the bike bit of his life isn’t quite right, the telly bit becomes a torture. I can understand that equation. But one-word losers are every bit as interesting as loquacious winners.
The return to winning ways changed everything, anyway. It always does. And after that sour little exchange, we cracked on with the usual routine. Time and time again, we played out the same pattern as previous years. The towel, the iced drink, the handshake of congratulations, the smile. The winning ride, again and again. It had begun in Cap Fréhel, it continued with Châteauroux, where I had to break the news to him that Bradley Wiggins had crashed out on the road behind him. It came as a genuine shock. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, daring Ofcom to get involved, and forcing Gary Imlach into a pre-emptive apology. He doubled up, then trebled up on these wins by taking the stages into Lavaur and Montpellier, and then dropped in another ‘shit’ during a post-race chat in Pinerolo, apropos of not much at all.
And on the Galibier, h
e put me in my place.
It wasn’t a judo throw of an answer, swinging me over his back, and crashing me onto the floor with little birds tweeting around my unconscious head. But it was pretty smart, and it reminded me of how far I still have to travel before I understand the race without recourse to explanation.
He’d ridden up the mountain in the grupetto, the large clump of sprinters and assorted others who’d been detached from the head of the race, and whose sole ambition was to make the cut-off time. They failed. In fact, they failed by some margin. But the group was so large, that the Tour regulations allowed for them to continue in the race.
Shivering in the freezing winds of the Galibier, and without any means of contacting the rest of our production team stranded miles away in the TV compound halfway down the mountain, I was unaware that, although he had escaped elimination, he had been handed another penalty. So it came as news to me when he said, ‘Obviously, I’ve been docked twenty points in the green jersey competition, which makes that a bit closer.’ His nearest rival, José Rojas had comfortably made the cut.
How did he know this? Was he sure? ‘So, just to confirm, you have been informed that you will lose those twenty points. Is that certain?’ I wanted to make sure of what I had just heard.
‘Anyone who knows bike racing knows that those are the rules.’ He looked squarely at me, and allowed a little pause for the effect of the words to sink in. A hit, a very palpable hit.
When I got back to base, yomping miles back down the Galibier having missed the shuttle bus, I was relieved to find that Cavendish’s answer had caught pretty much everyone on the hop, and had resulted in a frantic fluttering of the pages of the Race Regulations Manual. The gap in my understanding felt less yawning when I realised that Chris Boardman had had to double-check it too. But I was still chastened by the ease with which he had put me away. I wondered how many more years I would have to cover the event, before those gaps eventually silted up with knowledge. Decades more, I suspected.
