by Ned Boulting
‘Hmmm.’
‘What do you mean, “hmmmmm”?’, I asked, adding a couple of extra ‘m’s of my own.
He scratched his chin, in the style of Jean Paul Sartre.
‘If he wins, we have a big problem, I think.’ I stared at him, uncomprehendingly. ‘It would be a little nicer for everyone if he loses the maillot today.’
It’s the reality of the Tour de France, which we had been able happily to ignore in our euphoric appreciation of Voeckler. But every performance that rips up the form book raises eyebrows as it does so. For a great portion of the non-Anglophone world in 2009, it had been the same with Wiggins’ unlikely fourth place overall. That is not to say that there was a shred of evidence to suggest wrongdoing with Wiggins or now, two years on, with Voeckler. Quite the contrary: a glance at their closest influences, their public utterances, and a sense of their privately expressed beliefs, stacked up overwhelming in their favour. British cycling and, more recently, the prevailing culture of the sport in France have been at the forefront of the fight against doping, with both Wiggins and Voeckler the public faces of those campaigns. But the ragged recent history of the Tour and the repeated unmasking of outstanding performances, have created an atmosphere of febrile suspicion. In a way, it was surprising that I had not noticed these darker mutterings earlier. It was a depressingly familiar moment.
My coffee companion clapped me on the back, got up and left me alone to mull over his words. Tommy? Really? Not a chance.
Besides, later on that day, he was exposed in all his familiar frailty, turning in the kind of collapse that spoke not so much of Superman, but of Mighty Mouse. On Stage 19, they tackled the Galibier again, from the other side, and from there they rode up Alpe d’Huez. The sight of him labouring up the first big climb all alone, after losing contact with the lead group and getting caught in no-man’s land, was reassuring in its vulnerability. We knew this Voeckler more intimately than the sudden super-climber. We could relax now, and watch him lose the lead. His point had been made. Splendidly made.
He’ll be back of course next year. Voeckler will lead his team across the month of July one more time, maybe once again in the colours of the French National champion, which he has worn with great élan (obviously, a French word works best in this sentence). And I am certain that he will be fêted (and there’s another one) as he slips by stealth into a neatly composed breakaway on Stage 13 and is outsprinted by somebody from the Czech Republic with an unmemorable name. Perhaps we’ll shout his name when he launches an absurdly overambitious attack on the peloton from twelve kilometres out. He can spend the remaining years of his career fostering the prodigious talent of Pierre Rolland, who may well win the Tour for the French before too long. And in doing so, we will witness his talent slowly fading until it disappears from the canvas of the Tour entirely, at which point he will take his rightful place as a stalwart of France Télévisions. I’ve got it all planned out for him, you see. He won’t wear the yellow jersey again, though.
* * *
‘This far. But no further’ was a concept young Simon Carnochan singularly failed to understand.
‘What is it you’re planning to do?’ I’d foolishly asked him back in June.
‘Hitchhike round the route of the Tour de France.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I want to hitchhike, um, round the route of the Tour de France.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s what you said.’
I paused to let this mad idea take shape in my imagination. It wouldn’t. I needed more detail.
‘How are you going to get to the start? It’s a long way away, the Vendée.’
‘I’m going to hitchhike.’
‘Why?’
‘Just to see if I can, really.’
This had been my first meeting with the unusual eighteen-year-old Simon Carnochan. I say meeting, but actually we were just speaking over Skype. I had been reluctant to make my number known by ringing him from my mobile or landline for fear he would prove to be a maniac. I was only semi-wrong. He did indeed prove to be a maniac. But not an axe-wielder. More an arch-blagger.
Simon had told me that he was taking time out after A levels before starting at college. Hitchhiking round France had come to him in a flash of inspiration watching telly one day. Such things, it seems, are indeed possible. I suspect that Simon watches an unhealthy amount of televised sport. He seems to know all about it. He wasn’t setting out with the aim of raising money for charity, but to test his powers of endurance. He simply wanted to see if it might not be fun.
At his age, I had completed a few epic hikes around Europe, and found that I was always being helped out by drivers who told me that, ‘At your age, I completed a few epic hikes around Europe.’ It’s a generational thing, a self-feeding mutually assured system. It’s how hitching works. One day, Simon Carnochan, sliding into whatever dysfunctionality middle age blesses him with and in an effort to reconnect with his reckless youth, will doubtless pull over without hesitation at the sight of some weedy chancer with a cardboard sign, or its Bluetooth equivalent, by a motorway slip road. And so it will continue.
I liked his story. I didn’t believe it would be possible, but I liked it.
‘OK. Keep in touch. Come and say hello at the finish line, if you get there. Good luck.’ I hung up, with Skype’s trademark swoosh, shook my head, and wondered briefly if I’d ever speak to him again.
By the time we had driven up to the top of the Mûr-de-Bretagne several weeks later, parked up in a ploughed field and trudged through the raincloud that shrouded the finish line towards our truck, I had long forgotten our conversation. It had been quite washed away by the more immediate demands of covering the race. I had consigned young Mr Carnochan to the notional and overflowing in-tray of vague medium-term obligations and projects that may or may not ever need to be accessed.
Entering our little compound, where the studio had been unpacked, I nodded ill-tempered hellos at the sad collection of colleagues sat around in waterproof tops and trousers, their chins buried in the warmth of their chests. When would this Tour warm up again? Nobody looked up at me. It was Stage 4, after all, so what did I expect. My God, unless things perked up, this was going to be a long month.
‘There was some bloke here looking for you,’ I was told. ‘Some kid who said you’d invited him.’
I paused momentarily. No, I had no idea who that might have been, and could not recall any arrangement to meet anyone. I slipped into the darkened interior of the truck and went on with my task of writing a piece about Mark Cavendish’s latest outburst.
When I next emerged, the mood had lifted. This normally only happens when someone from outside our immediate group makes an appearance to break up the monotony of our own company. A pale, very young-looking, blond-mopped boy (there’s no other word for him) stood by our table. He was eating a madeleine cake, which I instantly recognised as emanating from the kitchen of Phillipe and Odette, our caterers, and regaling people with stories. He was wearing a pair of beige shorts, a Saur-Sojasun replica top, and was draped in a Union Jack. From head to toe, he was drenched. This was Simon Carnochan. He’d made it this far.
It was the beginning of our occasional fostering of his extraordinary campaign. After cake and coffee, Rob Lewellyn, our phlegmatic production manager, had seen fit to lend him a VIP day pass, which got him access to pretty much every area. He nearly wept with delight, and duly set off for the finish line.
Some time later, he was really weeping. It seems that his bizarre, and not entirely sanitary, presence alongside the great and good of the Tour in the hospitality areas close to the finish line had been cut short by an official. They had taken one look at the unwashed (and seemingly underage) hitchhiker wearing a wet flag and taking pictures of everything that moved, and had instantly removed his precious, borrowed accreditation, before kicking him out. Presumably with a cartoonish boot, and the words, ‘And don’t come back!’
By the time I saw him in tears, he�
�d blagged his way back into the compound. Simon was something of a master at Blagging his Way Into Things, and occasionally Out of Them. But he felt miserable here. Rob did his best to cheer him up, putting his mind at rest and insisting that ITV could easily get the pass returned. But for a while I could see the tiredness and the strain that getting as far as Brittany had induced in his slight frame. He would pitch his tent that night, somewhere. And prepare for another evening with as much food as his €1.50 daily budget allowed him to eat, and little or no idea how he would get to the next stage finish. We posed for pictures with him on the TV studio set, shook him by the hand, stuffed some more bits and pieces into his rucksack, and sent him on his way.
It kickstarted a sequence of sightings. He became known to us simply as ‘Carno’. The next day we spotted him jogging along towards the finish line at Cap Fréhel, looking a bit dryer, a bit blonder and a bit more British than before, perhaps in anticipation of Mark Cavendish’s maiden 2011 victory.
‘Carno!’ Woody had spotted him again. His hair was whitening in the increasing hours of sunshine, which had began to fall on the roads into Massif Central. Hanging over the rails at fifty metres to go. Sat on the grassy verges of a Category Two climb. There, here, everywhere was Carno, the Where’s Wally of the 2011 Tour de France.
Every now and then, he’d drop in to see us. Chris Boardman took a particular avuncular interest in his journey, perhaps because his own eldest son was abroad as well during July, picking strawberries in Denmark, a wonderful activity designed to hedge against the inevitable onset of adulthood. His son had sent Chris the most amazing email detailing with finicky precision the best techniques for efficient berry harvesting.
I think Chris valued Carno’s initiative. I think we all did, particularly because, as the weeks ground on, he would never arrive empty-handed. Opening his increasingly grimy and over-stuffed rucksack, he would hand out the goodies he had scavenged from the Caravane Publicitaire. Salty little biscuits. Tubs of cream cheese. Mini sausages. Cakes and washing powder. Hats. Hats and hats. And of course, Haribo. For us, these things were an amusing frippery – something of a quaint diversion. For him, they were subsistence. He had consumed his body weight in Haribo, and he had lived to tell the tale. The margins of his physiology had started to wobble gently. We respected him. He had become our gelatine friend.
One day we were filming in a start village.
‘Carno!’
We looked over to where Liam had spotted him. He had plonked his giant rucksack down on the ground to the side, and was standing at a sponsor’s stand chatting up an implausibly glamorous, well-manicured and tall French lady whose job it was to hawk her employer’s wares (wine, in this case, I seem to remember) to visiting dignitaries. I don’t imagine for a second that it was in her job description to fawn over a grubby English gap-year kid who had a precocious talent for stuffing fruit, bread, and yes, wine, into the pockets of his beige trousers. But the look on both their faces suggested that they were enjoying each other’s company more than was decent, let alone explicable.
Blimey, he was a player. We watched on, highly amused. Our respect for Simon grew by the day.
Weeks later: ‘Carno!’
‘Where?’
‘There! Holy shit!’
He wasn’t hard to spot, actually, despite the fact that he was surrounded by a seething, beery, orange-clad, pissed mass of loosely cycling-related revellers pumping out the phattest sub-woofer mayhem into the Alpe d’Huez night air. Obviously, Simon Carnochan had made it to Dutch Corner, the epicentre of the Tour’s wildest excess, and he was right in the thick of the action. What else did we honestly expect?
As we forced our car through the crowd of intoxicated international zombies, Carno came leering out towards us. We were concerned on his behalf. It was obvious what had happened to our lad. He’d clearly been kidnapped by a highly boisterous posse of drunken oafs from the Low Countries, dragged backwards along a ditch, force-fed a giant frankfurter, and then made to gyrate wildly in the middle of the road in order to slow traffic down to walking pace. We vowed that we would make representations the very next day on his behalf to the British Consulate in Grenoble.
Actually, we just roared with laughter. He’d almost made it. Alpe d’Huez was the penultimate stage before Paris, and he had an epic journey behind him. He’d slept rough, spent a string of nights in the back of the van belonging to some Norwegian tourists who he had found particularly useful to his cause, and most memorably, he’d befriended a priest in the town of Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux who, in a spirit of biblical literalism, had invited the traveller in, and washed and fed him. Carno had blagged redemption, which, metaphysically, takes some doing.
At another point, he’d fallen in with the accredited organisation known as ‘Les Jeunes Reporters du Tour’, which trains journalistically minded French teenagers in the art of being Gary Imlach. Simon, presumably lying about his age by knocking off a good four years, was given free transport and lunches galore, and then sent out with a microphone to interview some of the English-speaking riders. He found it quite an eye-opener.
‘Cav’s a bit difficult,’ he confessed to me one day, as he lolloped around in our production area.
‘Hmm,’ was my reply. ‘Pass us a Haribo, Carno.’
But it was the Doublet and Movico guys to whom he owed his Tour. They are the army of boys and girls who set out the miles of barriers each day, and install the endlessly long PA systems at each finish line, and other such unsung activities. They invited him in daily to share their largely cheese-and-pasta-based affairs, which fuelled them for their tasks. Carno was all over them like a rash. They even ensured that, every now and then, he washed.
On the final transfer from Grenoble to Paris (some 600 kilometres), he played his trump card. Or rather, we presented him with his trump card, since it was not in his nature ever to ask favours of our team. We had discussed it among ourselves, and had reached the conclusion that it might be mildly diverting to allow him into our Espace for that final drive. We had long since run out of new ways of insulting each other, and the presence of an eighteen-year-old force of nature might make the kilometres pass more quickly.
So he threw his by now absurdly distorted rucksack, along with the obligatory half-inched ‘Départ’ sign, into the back of our car, and hopped in. The journey proved pleasant enough. Carno chattered away about the people he’d met en route, emitted a curiously goat-like smell, insulted our music choices by knowing the songs ‘because it’s all the same stuff that my dad plays’, and then fell asleep.
When we reached the lovely little Hotel Alison in the Rue de Surène, it was the middle of the night. Carno had been awake as we’d hit the outskirts of Paris.
‘Where you going to sleep, Carno?’ Woody had asked him.
‘I dunno. Probably won’t. Think I’ll just head for the Champs-Elysées, and wait till it gets light.’
‘No, you won’t.’ It was nice to be able to trump his trump card. ‘There’s a spare room in our hotel. You have it. But don’t come down for breakfast without washing,’ I added. ‘In fact, don’t come down to breakfast at all.’
So it was that we checked him in under a pseudonym. ‘You’re Chris Boardman, if anyone asks, OK? You won the Prologue in 1994, and then again in ’97 and ’98. You run a multi-million-pound bike franchise.’
‘Cheers, guys.’
‘But don’t come down for breakfast.’
He’d made it to Paris. The following morning, the Monday after it was all over, just as we were heading off in our separate directions, Carno came down to breakfast. Or rather, he swayed down to breakfast. In fact, he stepped in off the Paris street from a hugely extended night out, straight into breakfast.
‘What the hell happened to you, Carno?’
He grinned, glassily. ‘Went to the Team Sky party thing. Had to buy some trousers specially. Then went on after that. Somewhere. I think.’ It transpired under interrogation that he’d ended up in some place of i
ll repute with a clutch of British cycling’s finest talents.
We told Chris Boardman about Carno’s final blag in Paris. He was deeply impressed, but also amused that he hadn’t received an invite to the Team Sky party. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘But I won the 1994 Prologue, and then again in ’97 and ’98. What’s Carno ever done?’
But, Simon, if you’re reading this, I take my hat off to you, my young friend! Just don’t do it again.
* * *
The same could very well be said for Sammy Sanchez, who won the stage to Luz-Ardiden. And well done to him. Genuinely, we were all chuffed to bits for the bony little Asturian with the Olympic rings pinned to his earlobe. Having said all that, it would have been more convenient for us if he chose never to do it again. His victory led to a regrettable moment of broadcast confusion, in three different languages.
Cycling is the very hardest sport to televise. It does not take place within the cosy confines of a stadium. The logistics of covering an event which is played out along a very thin line stretched out over 200 kilometres of public road is one thing. But trying to guess when the game is going to end is quite another challenge. There is no final whistle after ninety minutes. And there can be plenty of extra time.
The Tour does its best to try and help, naturally. In the Race Manual, it prints a hugely detailed table of potential timings; the vertical columns are divided into three ‘schedules’: the fast, medium and slow timings. The horizontal lines relate to points on the map. In other words, the Race Manual helps you to predict that the head of the race will pass the level crossing between Saint-Pierre de Somewhere and St Jean de Somewhere Else at 14.58, provided they are going slow. The problem with this system is that it is well-intentioned nonsense. The race speeds up and slows down organically and often without rhyme or reason. A thirteen-kilometre climb with an average gradient of 9 per cent might take no time at all to get over. But it also might take an age if the heat is out of the race. And besides, there might be a lone leader going hell for leather, stretching out a lead over a wholly uninterested peloton. So who do the timings relate to? And when is the race ‘over’ for the day? When the leader crosses the line? When the yellow jersey group comes in? When the pre-race favourite struggles in five minutes down on him? Or when Tom Boonen finally hauls his sprinter’s frame into view?
