by Ned Boulting
All this we have to predict and relay back to the transmission centre in London who fit in the commercial breaks, without which there is no is ‘free-to-air’ coverage. They are nightmarishly complex calculations. Ofcom regulates commercial breaks tightly. There are maximum and minimum numbers of breaks each hour. There are minimum part durations. There are under-runs and over-runs, with all the attendant chaos in the ensuing schedules. And as the race plays out during the afternoon, it is cycling clever-clogs Matt Rendell’s onerous job to advise Steve Docherty, the director, on when to take breaks. Matt is a respected writer, a fine intellect, a phenomenally versatile linguist and a consummate Jazz Funk bass guitarist. Yet, this is the hardest of all his disciplines. He must advise on when it will be safe to come off the air, leaving Gary, Chris and myself enough time to wrap up the afternoon’s events without spreading our content too thin.
But too thin was precisely what we were reduced to that day in Luz-Ardiden. Sammy Sanchez had stuffed Matt’s best efforts at predicting the outcome, and we’d ended up with an interminable half hour of airtime at the end of the programme, which somehow we had to fill.
Gary and Chris had looked again at the key moves of the day, glanced at both the Stage Result and General Classification graphic, and talked over the daily parade of self-conscious riders on the podium clutching flowers and cuddly toys and looked forward to tomorrow’s stage. Then it was down to me to get some interviews.
The first of them was easy enough. Straight away, the increasingly shaggy-haired and elongated figure of Geraint Thomas, with his new five-year contract stuffed in his back pocket, made his benign, laid-back way over to the ITV microphone. He’d won the Combativity Prize after joining a mad rampaging breakaway move that had ended in him flying into a grassy ditch just after he’d sped past a bemused-looking lady waving a Welsh flag in his face. Snaking a wildly unstable path between a quad bike and a caravan, he’d executed a perfect comedy fall over the handlebars. Minutes later, he was at it again, this time a parked car was just averted. So, reflecting on his great adventure, peppered with misadventures, Thomas did his usual shtick. Big wide eyes, the flicker of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and his usual humdrum phraseology.
‘I lost it a bit in my head,’ was his frank assessment of his unusually inadequate bike-handling skills.
I thanked him, and he headed off to the podium to collect his ashtray/enamel bucket/oil painting from the sponsor. The rest of the press pack took little notice of him; such is the fate on most given days of the winner of the Combativity Prize. He’s a footnote.
But the dead minutes of airtime still stretched in front of us. It was clear that we would need another interview before finally getting off the air, or Gary would be left to talk over endless replays of Geraint’s wonderful tumble.
From the TV truck several hundred metres away, Steve noticed, by watching the output from Liam’s camera, that Sanchez was being paraded through the interview zone.
‘Does he speak English, Ned?’ Steve demanded in my ear.
‘No idea,’ I replied. Although I reckoned it was extremely unlikely. ‘I’ll check.’
As Sanchez conducted a Spanish language interview with the Belgian network Sporza, to my side, I caught the attention of his ASO minder.
‘Does Sammy speak English?’
‘No. Why don’t you British ever speak other languages.’ It was a fair point.
‘We do. I do.’ I felt my linguistic hackles rising. ‘Does he speak French?’
‘Oui.’
‘Bon. Bring it on.’
And then, before I could guess what live television horrors were about to descend on me, the Olympic champion and stage winner was brought before, looking undeniably very Spanish, and not even remotely French. Before I could say Ola!, I could hear Gary throwing to me. I turned to the camera, and effected an introduction.
‘OK, Gary, we’ll try this very quickly. I’m going to speak French, he’s going to reply in French. He speaks Spanish, and I don’t really. So this is going to be interesting.’
Beads of sweat were already building up. I turned to him.
‘Une victoire superbe. Une étape extraordinaire pour vous.’ Not a question, more a poorly pronounced statement of the obvious, really. But it was French-sounding enough for me to feel like I’d got away with it. Sanchez understood perfectly, and launched into his reply. In Spanish.
Twenty seconds later, he’d stopped talking rapidly in a language I did not understand. So, I guessed, he didn’t speak French after all. I turned and looked imploringly at his soigneur. Perhaps he could translate. All soigneurs can speak a bit of French after all.
I pushed the microphone his way. ‘This had better be good,’ I quipped, by now thoroughly alarmed at the prospect of having to listen to the soigneur’s answer, and translate it back into English for those benefit of viewers at home who hadn’t lost the will to live or kicked a hole in their HD-ready plasma screens. The soigneur, a short bespectacled chap clutching a bouquet and an umbrella, started to speak.
At first I thought I understood one or two words.
‘Pour l’equipe c’est incroyable. Il y a…’
But that was the end of anything intelligible.
On he went, by now drifting into some ghastly Pyreneean hybrid of every major, and some virtually extinct, southern European tongue. ‘…desinges arroyal lesciggarres ici paralos arablo importante corbaranarntobalinos baranquintonitntiones marrraqueltanimonositcallemntes…’
Laughter exploded in my ear. Which didn’t help. Facing away from the camera and towards my strange interlocutor talking utter nonsense at me, I narrowed my gaze, and wondered what my next move should be.
‘…jalamentariostoqui ameris cointabios bono bono lamareica…’
Even Sanchez had stopped listening, too, and had by now started to drift his attention away to the next interview in the line.
‘…hamos barandos pinteria Luz-Ardiden.’
He was done. I thanked him, using all the clipped English insincerity I could muster.
I turned to the camera. There was nothing for it but brute honesty. There was no wool to pull over eyes, and probably no eyes left watching anyway. I felt like I could say what I wanted. It was almost liberating. I didn’t choose my words carefully. I just said the first thing that came to mind.
‘That was the most confusing interview of my life.’
Which, in the polyphonic matrix of the Tour de France interview pen, is saying something.
* * *
The next day, and still reeling a little from my encounter with Sanchez, I was buying a coffee, which seemed like the right thing to do. An espresso, with a little sugar to combat an early morning, mid-Tour slump. Suddenly there was a giant clap on my shoulder.
‘Hey. What about the Tour of Britain? Fucking great race.’
I turned round, and was face to face with the marvellous, nearly murdered, Johnny Hoogerland.
‘Mr Hoogerland,’ I said. And I put out my hand. I have no idea what turned me so formal.
‘Call me Johnny.’
And so I did, feeling giddily blessed. After all, here was a hero. No doubting it. He sat next to me at the bar, and over coffee we spoke about Colchester and Swansea, Blackpool and London. He seemed fascinated by the plans for that year’s Tour of Britain.
Hoogerland. Roll it around the tongue. It is a great sound. Marry it up with that classic Northern European rocker’s throwback first name ‘Johnny’, and you’re in business even before you’ve hurled yourself over your handlebars and into Tour Legend.
I have to say, that I’d seen the Hoogerland thing, or at least something like it, coming. Not literally of course. No one could have predicted that the France Télévisions’ car would suddenly surge up the left-hand side of the road, and then swing violently right in an attempt to assassinate Sky’s Juan Antonio Flecha. But I had come to the Tour knowing intuitively that one of that marauding mob who go under the collective umbrella of Team Vacansoleil
would do something to leave us all both awed and aghast.
Some background is perhaps necessary. Vacansoleil, for those who don’t know, are a Dutch campsite/mobile home-type holiday thing. I’m sure their advertising people have a snappier way of summing up their business than that, and indeed if you were to visit their gloriously blue and yellow website (no, I’m not on commission) you will get the gist straight way. Their main image is this: distant mountains, blue skies, birds a-flutter, kites a-flying, kids a-frolicking and young, beautiful couples lounging around in front of their sun-dappled wooden chalets.
But look beneath the surface. All is not what it seems. The beating heart of Hoogerland Holidays is very different. There is, if you listen hard, Lou Reed blaring from a distorting beatbox across the road, where the parents have collapsed on half-deflated lilos in the pool with a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bong and a bargain bucket of fried chicken. This is what I fondly imagine to be the real Vacansoleil experience. Book now to avoid disappointment.
I have reached this balanced conclusion not because I have ever had the great good fortune to experience a Vacansoleil holiday (as I said, I am not yet on commission), but because I have observed at close quarters their raucous rise through cycling’s ranks to the dizzy heights of the Tour de France.
I was certain that they’d try something at the Tour. Part of the reason for my certainty was their liberating lack of a leader. They had no ‘A’ list sprinter (unless you count Romain Feillu, or Borut Božic, which you mustn’t feel obliged to). They had no ‘captain on the road’, and they certainly didn’t dream of being so pompous as to protect a ‘GC rider’. No, they just had a bunch of blokes with a propensity for unfettered aggression. They wound them up, they clad them in campervan-related logos, and they let them go.
Sadly, it didn’t really work. The irrepressibly attack-minded Belgian Thomas De Gendt fell at the first possible opportunity, smashing himself up, and hauling his overdeveloped quads unconvincingly around the rest of France. Borut Božic and Romain Feillu weren’t good enough to mix it with the rest of the sprinters. Wout Poels, who I erroneously tipped for every Gilbert-like uphill finish, had brought the wrong pair of legs to the party. He abandoned after hitting the tarmac once too often, and then getting sick.
So it fell to Hoogerland to fall. Sponsors, naturally, only have the best interest of the riders at heart. But I wonder if there’s not a Hoogerland chart hanging on a wall in Vacansoleil’s dark blue and yellow headquarters somewhere uninspiring in Holland, with an arrow of interest in the brand rising stratospherically from the instant that Hoogerland unclips his right foot, wobbles, and then shoots over his handlebars and into a barbed-wire fence, tearing his arse to shreds.
‘Ouch’ doesn’t do it justice. Have you ever slipped while cutting a tomato, and nicked a little slice into your finger? That’s ‘ouch’. This was beyond description, but I should try, for the benefit of those who are too squeamish to look it up on Google Images, as I just have.
The impression it left, to return to the tomato slicing metaphor, was this: Imagine Johnny Hoogerland lying face down on the kitchen counter. You rip open his shorts to reveal his left thigh and buttock (bear with me, I’m just illustrating a point). You sharpen the knife, and then you draw at least ten deep slices across his flesh. But your devilish work is not yet quite complete, and so you take a rolling pin and smack him on the head, the shoulder, the elbow, and probably just for good measure, the arse. Then he jumps down from your kitchen work surface, and hops onto a bike. After all, there’s a race on.
I’m exaggerating. Actually, no I’m not. It was worse than that.
Hours later, Johnny, swabbed, bandaged, perhaps in a heightened state of pain relief (I hope for his sake he was), and clad in his blood-drop red polka-dot jersey, hobbled over to say his piece to my colleague from a rival network.
Normally I would have had an unseemly fight with them about this act of rank-pulling. Especially with this particular Italian colleague who sported hair oil, reflective shades and an unencumbered ability to kiss ladies on both cheeks without looking flustered, stopping inappropriately at just one kiss, going for an unwanted third, or bumping noses on the exit manoeuvre. Yes, he was that good. The Silvio Berlusconi of the Mixed Zone, turning the simplest post-race interview into a potential Bunga Bunga party. He wore a gold bracelet. He was the continental’s continental TV reporter, and needed a smack, frankly (which Matt Rendell offered to provide a few days later, I forget why).
But on this occasion, I am reluctant to confess, he got it right. He had a bit of kit with him, attached to the front of his camera, which could play back footage to the interviewee. And so it was that Johnny Hoogerland, with the cameras rolling live on his reaction, watched back the moment that had nearly ended his career, and very possibly his life.
Hoogerland was visibly horrified. I have no doubt that it shocked him to see the violence of the incident. He looked genuinely scared for the rider he saw tumbling through the air like a rag doll. It must have been hard to believe that he was looking at himself. But when he spoke, he was calm, dignified, and resisted calls for punishment. He let us play the role of lynch mob on his behalf. We readily obliged.
That evening, at our hotel in Aurillac, a France Télévisions car, identical to the one that had done the damage, pulled up. They were staying in the same place!
We scowled at each of their team over breakfast the next day, working out which one we were going to dob in. Was it the pasty youth in the crumpled polo shirt or the brunette with the shades, who took too long spreading the butter? Was it the overly cheerful chubby bloke in the cheap supermarket jeans and the Greenpeace T-shirt who set everyone’s teeth on edge by whistling Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’? It was none of them. It was, in fact, the wrong car. The actual vehicle, complete with the actual culprit, had been successfully spirited away. They disappeared from the race, and were never heard of again.
I will never look at those France Télévisions Citroëns in the same light. They have always been driven recklessly. This year’s Tour, despite the appalling incident with Flecha and Hoogerland, featured a definite, and marked return to the bad old (good old) days of driving at 100 kph down the wrong side of a road. Recent Tours had seen this desperately dangerous practice phased out by the police. But for some reason, this year, it returned, and the TV Citroëns led the charge, in particular from Bourg d’Oisans to Grenoble on the penultimate transfer. A thirty-mile stretch of occasional dual carriageway turned into a massive game of chicken with oncoming caravans and the sudden appearance of central reservations. My palms grow sweaty at the memory of that awful drive. Sitting in stationary traffic, you would suddenly become aware of blue flashing lights in your wing-mirror. Three or four police cars would come charging down the (almost empty) wrong side of the road. The trick was to pull out and slipstream them. It wasn’t particularly legal. But it got you to your final destination fast, which, after three weeks on the road, was pretty much all that mattered to any of us.
The French TV cars, needless to say were the most fearless. They instinctively took their place at the front of the convoy, just behind the police vehicles, as a matter of national pride. I once had the temerity to position myself at the sharp end of the race in a spot that was rightfully theirs. I was nearly deliberately rammed. It was like being a Saunier Duval rider trying to mix it with Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Big Blue Train. Not a good idea.
We waged war on them last summer, just as they seemed intent on waging war with the rest of the world. On the descent of the Plateau de Beille, stuck in an immobile snake of traffic, I opted to pull on my running shoes and see if I could get to the bottom of the mountain quicker than Woody and Liam in the Espace. Most of the time, I was running past stationary cars. But sometimes the line of traffic would move, and cars would overtake me slowly. On one such an occasion, I was passed by a France Télévisions Citroën, whose driver saw fit to spray me, quite deliberately, with windscreen wiper fluid. Already running on
frayed nerves, I was instantly incensed. But the traffic came shuddering to a halt round the next corner, and at once I was granted the opportunity to make my feelings felt. I caught up with the offending vehicle.
There were four lads in the car, in their early twenties. They looked like production juniors. I tapped on the window. They wound it down. With exaggerated calmness, but with clunky French I asked them whether or not they would agree that France Télévisions had had an excellent Tour behind the wheel, when taken as a whole, and that their minor act of hooliganism just added a slight blemish to the impression of considerate driving which had so typified their corporate approach.
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I asked them. They looked sheepish enough. I asked them if they wouldn’t mind me noting down their registration. They looked worried. I told them that I would take the matter further the next day. They looked genuinely petrified. Or I imagined that they did. But on reflection, perhaps they were just upset at the sight of my puffy red face dripping detergent and runner’s snot from the end of my imperious nose onto their upholstery.
I withdrew my righteous head, and felt as if I had planted a blue and yellow Vacansoleil flag on the moral high ground of the Plateau de Beille.
I’d done it for Johnny. We’d all done it for Johnny.
The day of his slicing, he stood on the podium and wept, as much in pain as in shock. I think the pride would have come later, if it came at all. That night he had thirty-three stitches to his wounds. But still he rode on. He carried the claret-spattered polka-dot jersey on his shoulders through the next two stages, then lost it, only to regain it again for a further three days. Sometimes he would become detached, suffering on his own at the back of the bunch. But mostly he held his own. Slowly he healed, and as Paris neared, he even featured in the occasional attack.
