When 2006 dawned it was thus a new beginning in every sense: the first Tour for years without Armstrong and also, as optimists thought, a time when a fresh start might be made. Pessimists reckoned that after recent events things could not become any more wretched, but even they had forgotten the chilling lines from King Lear: ‘The worst is not, / So long as we can say, “This is the worst.”’ After Basso won the Giro in May he was a favourite for the Tour, while some thought that Ullrich could have a last chance, and other riders had put down markers. The Paris–Nice ‘Race to the Sun’ in March had become something of an American benefit, won the year before by Bobby Julich of CSC and in 2006 by Floyd Landis of Phonak.
In the event, this running of the Tour saw some good bike racing, not to say a thrilling last week, but it will no more be remembered merely for what happened on the road than was the 1998 Tour – or in hindsight Armstrong’s victories. After a Prologue in Strasbourg, the parcours ran anticlockwise north and then west, through Normandy towards Rennes on the coast of Brittany before skipping down to Bordeaux and into the Pyrenees, crossing the Midi through Carcassonne and Montelimar and then the Alps, with an uphill finish in l’Alpe d’Huez, another climb to Morzine and a second individual time trial (the team time trial once again having been dropped).
All was set, in Strasbourg, when the story exploded. A police investigation in Madrid called Operación Puerto (Operation Gate or Mountain Pass) had raided the offices of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, another ‘sports doctor’, and found it a Dracula’s trove of bottled blood as well as drugs. His files suggested that he had been serving a large number of sportsmen, including many Spanish footballers, but also cyclists. The Tour authorities decided that in the name of rough justice – better than no justice – they had no choice but to eject anyone whose names had been mentioned in connection with this raid, and those included none other than Basso and Ullrich, the two favourites. Vinokourov wasn’t implicated, but his team was, and he was left stranded with no one to ride for.
And so the race began on this melodramatic note and with a gravely depleted field. The Prologue, back to 7.1 kilometres, was won by the sometime world champion Thor Hushovd, a Norwegian with Credit Agricole, although George Hincapie, the American with Discovery, shared his time. The first week then saw a sprinters’ ding-dong, with the yellow jersey passing from Hushovd to Hincapie, back again, then to Boonen, riding for Quick-Step, who held the lead through St Quentin, Caen and Vitré. A first time trial in Rennes was won by the Ukrainian Serge Honchar of T-Mobile by 61 seconds from Landis, who was now stepping right into the picture. When they reached the Pyrenees, Menchov won over the passes to Pla-de-Beret, but Landis took the GC lead, only to lose it to the Spaniard Oscar Pereiro of Caisse d’Epargne after two days.
Then came an astounding last week. On the Tuesday, Fränk Schleck and Damiano Cunego duelled up to l’Alpe d’Huez, while Landis finished fourth and reclaimed the yellow jersey from Pereiro. After triumph came disaster. On the Wednesday, they rode from Le Bourg d’Oisans to La Toussuire over four gruelling climbs, including the Galibier. Until the last fifteen kilometres, up a category-one climb, Landis appeared still to be in command. But when Schleck’s CSC team-mate Carlos Sastre attacked, Landis cracked, finishing the stage in twenty-fourth, a disastrous 10'4" behind the winner, ceding the yellow jersey again to Pereiro, and seeming to have lost all hope in the race.
On Thursday morning, nobody covering the race gave Landis any chance of regaining the lead, which would require an unprecedented feat over five more big climbs. Landis attacked on the first climb, helped by his Phonak team, dropping one after another of the contenders. He did it again on the Col de la Colombière, putting so much time into his rivals that suddenly and almost incredulously we realized that he had for the moment reclaimed the GC lead. He had soon left everyone in his wake, and won the stage by 5'4" from Sastre. Pereiro finished well enough to cling on to the yellow jersey, but the Tour was now Landis’s for the taking. And he took it: in the time trial on the penultimate day, he was third behind Honchar and Klöden but decisively put enough time into his rivals, regaining the yellow jersey and triumphantly raising his arms in the Champs-Élysées, where the Stars and Stripes was raised for the eighth successive year.
In some ways he was an unlikely champion. There have been plenty of obvious rascals riding in the Tour over the years, and few winners have been men of entirely saintly character. Landis seemed to be the straightest of straight arrows, brought up in Pennsylvania in a Mennonite community, strict puritanical Protestants. Since his family eschewed television, movies and most other aspects of modern life, it was a curious childhood, not least when his father tried to keep him from the useless pastime of riding a bike. He began competing on mountain bikes, switching to road racing in 1999. Armstrong spotted him and hired him for the Posties. He rode with them for three of Armstrong’s victories, from 2002 to 2004, before accepting an offer from Phonak. In 2005, he finished ninth in the Tour GC and was now a plausible contender.
Only four days after the Tour ended came the grim news: on that sublime Thursday, Landis had tested positive for abnormal levels of testosterone. He immediately, and then repeatedly, protested his innocence, but the first analysis was confirmed by his B sample. Landis wasn’t formally stripped of his title as yet, but fell into a legal limbo, with the Tour authorities saying that they did not recognize him as the winner. His devout Mennonite parents said they refused to believe a word of the charges, but a pall of shame fell. His father-in-law committed suicide, although family friends said that the doping charges were unlikely to have been the main cause. Into the new year Landis continued to claim that mistakes had been made by technicians who handled his two urine samples. And the rest of us were left stunned and bewildered.
One way and another 2006 finished as what Samuel Abt in the International Herald Tribune called ‘a bad year, an extremely bad year’ for cycling, but at the beginning of that year there had been good news for at least one man. In late January, after the usual endless process of lobbying and bidding and negotiating, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, gleefully announced that the following year’s Tour would start in the capital, a third English visit after the 1974 and 1994 Tours. For most of his life, Livingstone has been a controversial figure. As a young extreme leftist, he took control of the old Greater London Council. Years later, after the GLC had been abolished by the Thatcher government and then an elective post of Mayor of London had been created by the Blair government, he was the first mayor to be elected, as a Labour renegade. In a wonderful display of backtracking, Tony Blair was desperate to stop Red Ken at all costs, but then bowed to the inevitable and welcomed, or at least accepted, him back into the Labour fold when a second term became inevitable. Livingstone made his mark with various innovations, such as a charge for cars entering central London, and he shared Blair’s exultation when London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics.
More than ever, the Tour began in 2007 amid a mood of anxiety – and clutching at straws: the only honest view of the great race by now was Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, and a good deal more of the former. Armstrong had retired, or so it seemed, and there was a fresh start from a new Grand Départ. After a 7.9-kilometre Prologue in London, the parcours took the old Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury for the first stage. Then the race crossed the Channel to Dunkirk, turned east to Ghent in Belgium and then went more or less due south through Burgundy, then took in three Alpine stages, reached Marseilles, crossed to the Pyrenees, rode from Cahors to Angoulême and reached Paris after a last time trial in Cognac.
By any standards, the English stages were a success. London was startled by the sight of French motorbike gendarmes leading the field up the Mall; as Richard Williams of the Guardian drily observed: ‘Maybe that explained why no member of the royal family emerged on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to watch the world’s greatest free sporting event passing by their front door.’ Whatever the House of Windsor may have been doing, the capital was en fête for what Williams called London’s happiest mass event since VE Day. The riders pounded their highest gears from Whitehall to the Serpentine Bridge, at such a pace that the Australian sprinter Stuart O’Grady, who was about to post a fast time, came off his bike swerving to and fro round Hyde Park Corner. Exhilarating as the day was for all present, there was no surprise at the end when Fabian Cancellara, in the rainbow jersey, won by a clear margin.
That happy day was followed by another as they rode through Kent in Provençal-like sunshine, with villages festooned with bunting and cheering crowds outside pubs. But the Tour inevitably began under a shadow, which only lengthened over the next three weeks. Vinokourov hadn’t competed in the 2006 Tour but had won the Vuelta and, in the absence of Armstrong, Basso and Landis, he started as the favourite. After his convincing performance in London, Cancellara held on to the yellow jersey for the first week, winning another stage from Waregem to Compiègne. Then the lead was briefly taken by Linus Gerdemann, and then by Michael Rasmussen, the Danish rider with the Dutch Rabobank team. However, the festive spirit was blighted when it was announced that Patrik Sinkewitz of T-Mobile, who had already abandoned after a crash, had tested positive weeks before the Tour, whereupon the German television channels ZDF and ARD pulled out of covering the race in disgust.
Then Iban Mayo tested positive for EPO and Vinokourov showed traces of blood doping. He and his Astana team withdrew; on top of that, Cofidis withdrew their team when the Italian Cristian Moreni showed high testosterone levels. Rasmussen was still in yellow when they reached the Pyrenees and he won over the Aubisque, but scarcely had that victory been digested than Rabobank announced that Rasmussen had been suspended, not for failing a test but for misleading the team as to his whereabouts when in training. In his absence, Spaniard Alberto Contador took the GC lead and held it to Paris. The day before, the time trial had been won quite easily by Levi Leipheimer, riding for Contador’s Discovery Channel, from Cadel Evans.
On the Champs-Élysées, Evans stood in second place with Leipheimer in third – but not for good, as it turned out. Only 31 seconds separated the three of them, the smallest ever margin there had been between the men on the podium. Leipheimer had ridden with US Postal for two years in 2000–2001, and five years after the 2007 Tour he was one of the penitent former Posties who owned up to doping. He was given a six-month ban from September 2012, but more to the point was stripped of his Tour third place, as well as all race results between June 1999 and July 2006.
Although the 2008 Tour began a long way from Whitehall, and further still from the Isle of Man, that was whence a new hero came. Born in 1985, Mark Cavendish emerged young as a brilliant track cyclist, winning two gold medals in the Worlds for that esoteric two-man discipline the madison, with Rob Hayles in 2005 and Bradley Wiggins in 2008. Turning to road racing and joining T-Mobile in 2006, Cav racked up eleven wins in his first professional season, to equal Pettachi’s record. It was in 2008 that he erupted into the grand tours, winning two stages of the Giro and then four in the Tour. He might well have won more had he not retired the day after his fourth victory in order to prepare for the Olympics in Beijing.
The race began in Brest, without a Prologue, and turned round Brittany for three stages before heading deep into the interior at Châteauroux, where Cavendish took his first victory, and across through the Massif Central to Toulouse. Three Pyrenean stages were followed by an amble across Provence, a dip into Italy at Prato Nevoso, hard slogging through the Alps (which poor Cavendish never enjoys) including the finish up to l’Alpe d’Huez, a gentle stage to Saint-Etienne and Montluçon, a final time trial and Paris. Despite the ridiculous protests of the UCI that any Pro-Tour team was eligible for the Tour, ASO excluded the Astana team this year, partly in response to the previous year’s lurid events, and also to the Puerto scandal, which meant that Contador was absent. From afar, he picked Evans as the likely winner, which wasn’t wrong, just premature. Evans did in fact take over the yellow jersey by the tenth stage, after it had been worn by Alejandro Valverde for two stages, then Romain Feillu for one, Stefan Schumacher for two and Kim Kirchen for four.
On that Italian divagation to Prato Nevoso, Fränk Schleck took the GC lead, but at the foot of the climb to l’Alpe d’Huez, Sastre, with the help of his CSC Saxo Bank colleagues, attacked the Schleck brothers, those two very talented Luxembourgers Andy and Fränk. Sastre won the stage, and the Tour, when he held his own in the time trial and finished in Paris 58 seconds ahead of Evans. The third man on the podium was the Austrian Bernhard Kohl, but his name was struck out the following year when he tested positive and admitted to doping during the Tour. No one was elevated in his place, just as later no one was elevated in Leipheimer’s place. From now on Tour records and palmarès become occluded, with asterisks and blank lines. Promoting second place to first when the original first is disqualified, or fourth to third, is conventional enough with track athletes and horse racing, and with bike racing also. But it can scarcely be done when a pall of suspicion hangs over the whole field, and no one really knows who is clean and who isn’t.
Sad to say, Cavendish’s withdrawal to train didn’t bring him good fortune at the Olympics alongside an Englishman who has already entered the story. Bradley Wiggins was born in 1980 in Ghent. His father was a promising but dissolute and self-destructive cyclist who abandoned his family and went to Australia. Brad was taken to London by his mother and grew up in a council flat in Kilburn. He soon emerged as a precociously gifted track cyclist, racking up a tally of six gold medals in the Worlds between 2003 and 2008, and the 2004 Olympics in Athens, an event which may have helped bankrupt Greece, brought Wiggins new glory with a gold medal for the individual pursuit.
He made a modest start in road racing, winning a time trial in the 2005 Circuit de Lorraine, but finishing that year’s Giro in 123rd. His first Tour de France in 2006 was no better: riding with Cofidis he ended at 124th. In 2007, he won the Prologue of the Dauphiné, and in the Tour came fourth in the London Prologue and rode a brave 190.5-kilometre escape on the sixth stage as a birthday present for his wife Cath – he then suffered the indignity of being withdrawn with the rest of the Cofidis team when Moreni was busted. An enraged Wiggins denounced dopers and threw away his Cofidis kit in a rubbish bin at Pau airport.
At the 2008 Olympics, he successfully defended his gold in the individual pursuit – the first rider ever to do so – and helped win another gold in the team pursuit. The madison was less happy. Wiggins and Cavendish had paired up after Hayles was removed, but they could finish only ninth in the final. Cavendish felt that Wiggins had put his all into the two pursuit events and hadn’t left enough in the tank for the madison. Perhaps as a result, relations between these two great British cyclists, Manxman and Londoner, would over the years be complicated – tense at times and affectionate at others.
It was the next year that saw Brad’s breakthrough and the true coming of Cav. The 2009 Tour began in Monaco with a time trial almost inevitably won by Cancellara, who kept the yellow jersey for the first week as the race set off clockwise through Provence to Marseilles, then a team time trial in Montpellier won by the ill-reputed Astana, thence to Perpignan and a long loop down into Spain with a stage from Girona to Barcelona. The first Pyrenean stage to Andorra was won by Feillu, while the GC lead was taken there by Rinaldo Nocentini, who held it for another week.
But no English patriotism was needed to see that the real star was Cavendish. He won the second, third, tenth and eleventh stages, and he did it not only in a way that would become almost wearily familiar to his rivals but in a way that showed he was simply the fastest man on wheels. As long as the peloton was controlled by the leading teams and any breakaways were caught and brought back, as long as his team were in at the kill under the flamme rouge, as long as his lead-out man Mark Renshaw was in the right place at the right time with Cav behind him, then Cavendish could provide a final blistering burst of speed which no one else could live with. Little as he enjoyed the mountains, he was still strong enough after the Pyrenees, and then the Alps after the parcours had made an unusual turn north-eastward from Limoges to Colmar and Besançon, to win the antepenultimate stage to Aubenas. And then after a still more unusual penultimate stage up Mont Ventoux, he won on the very last sprint on the Champs-Élysées, claiming five stage victories in total but finishing a frustrating ten points behind Thor Hushovd who won the green jersey. The Mountains prize was won – for the moment – by the Italian rider Franco Pellizotti.
In the spring of 2009, Wiggins had made his own preparations with his Garmin-Slipstream team. They won the opening team time trial of the Tour of Qatar. Not long before, the idea of racing outside Europe – apart from the United States for American riders – seemed exotic if not absurd, but there was plenty of money in the oil-rich if democracy-poor Gulf states, and European riders increasingly took part in the furthest flung of all events, the Tour Down Under in Australia. Wiggins then won an individual time trial in the Three Days of De Panne, and another in the Giro.
All of this is to forget the ghost at the feast. Suspicion, insinuation and open accusation had followed Armstrong everywhere since he stood for the last time in the yellow jersey on the Champs-Élysées on 24 July 2005, with retirement bringing him no respite. Then in September 2008 came the astonishing news that he would return to cycling the following year, after three years’ absence, taking no salary or bonuses and posting his internally tested blood results online. His objectives would be to participate in the Tour once more and in the process, by riding clean, to demonstrate that he had always been clean. As with his insistence that he must be innocent because he had never failed a test, there was a logical crux. It was rather as though at that same time Ratko Mladic had announced that he was entering electoral parliamentary politics in Bosnia to show that he had never been anything but a peace-loving democrat.
More startling still, Armstrong was allowed to race with Astana. This only strengthened suspicions that the UCI had to some degree been sheltering Armstrong, in return, it was alleged (and denied), for payments he had made to the Union for ostensibly charitable purposes. But compete in this Tour he deplorably did, finishing third overall, though only for the time being, and with a worthier rider in fourth place behind him.
Wiggins arrived at the Tour having lost six kilograms (almost a stone in old-fashioned English parlance), and looking skinnier than ever. Thinner or thicker, at somewhere under 80 kilos he is heavier than many riders, but then at 1.90 metres (6 foot 3 inches) he is very tall for a cyclist.
He came third in the Monaco Prologue, and then played an essential part in taking his Garmin-Slipstream team to second place in the team time trial, even though they finished without four riders. Although he was never at his best in the mountains, he managed twelfth in the first high finish, holding fifth place in the GC as the second week began, rising to third until an attack by the Schleck brothers pushed him back to sixth. He moved up the ladder again on the last time trial, his favourite discipline, and held his own on Mont Ventoux, so that by Paris he was fourth overall, equalling Robert Millar as the highest place held in the final GC by any British rider. It would take another three years before Armstrong’s disqualification saw Wiggins elevated from fourth to third, by which time he had hugely eclipsed that record.
Although Wiggins was contracted to Garmin-Slipstream for another season, it was announced in late 2009 that he would be joining Sky, a new British team backed by BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster, and James Murdoch, son of Rupert, and which was launched with the stated intention ‘to win the Tour de France within five years’. Some excellent continental riders were recruited, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Thomas Löfkvist and Juan Antonio Flecha among them, but even before Wiggins the core of the team was British – Geraint Thomas, Steve Cummings, Chris Froome and Ian Stannard – and it was a mark of the huge recent success of British cycling that such a team could easily be reckoned world beaters.
A Prologue in Rotterdam began the 2010 tour, and was won by Cancellara. Cavendish very likely would have won the first stage into Brussels but for being caught in a crash three kilometres from the line. The sprinter’s art includes the knack of being in the right place at the right time and an ability to use his elbows when needed. But it also requires an ability to avoid crashes, which may be as much a matter of luck as judgement, and Cavendish sometimes seemed short of luck. Until into the second week, Cancellara alternated in the yellow jersey with Sylvain Chavanel. Then Evans briefly took the lead, as the parcours looped through Belgium and then turned south to reach the Alps on the second Sunday, with two tough climbing stages. After Gap, another flat stage from Sisteron to Bourg-lès-Valence beckoned for Cavendish, who duly won, having already won the seventh and eighth stages. But he was at a disadvantage for the rest of the race: on that sprint into Bourg-lès-Valence, his lead-out man, the talented Australian Mark Renshaw, leaned into the New Zealander Julian Dean, his opposite number with Garmin-Transitions, and head-butted him. Renshaw was ejected from the race and Cavendish felt his loss.
He nevertheless won two more stages, to Bordeaux on the last Friday and on the Champs-Élysées, to finish the points competition in second again, just eleven points behind Petacchi. Wiggins had frustrations of his own. His first season with Sky began promisingly enough, with a win in the Tour of Qatar team time trial and third place in the Tour of Murcia, and then a more serious victory in the Prologue of the Giro on wet streets in Amsterdam. But he crashed two days later and faded to finish the race in a distant fortieth. The Tour didn’t bring much better news, with Wiggins managing no better than seventy-seventh in the Prologue and nineteenth on the first climb to Morzine. He ended the race in twenty-fourth.
At the head of the field, Andy Schleck held the yellow jersey for six days before ceding it to Contador, who stood on the winner’s podium in Paris. By now it could be assumed that there would be a second narrative, and so it proved. Contador had already incurred much odium on stage fifteen by attacking when Schleck, in yellow, threw his chain, thereby breaking the ancient unwritten code which forbids attacks when the maillot jaune is in trouble. Schleck took second place in Paris, no more than 39 seconds behind Contador. Revenge would come for Schleck, though not as he might have expected.
In September, it was announced that Contador had tested positive for clenbuterol during the Tour. This is a useful decongestant prescribed to asthmatics and others, but it had been categorically forbidden as a performance-enhancing drug for athletes: the American swimmer Jessica Hardy, the Mexican boxer Erik Morales and the Major-League pitcher Guillermo Mota were among a long line busted for using it. Contador’s explanation entered another long line, of implausible excuses. He had disliked the team food, he said, and had eaten a steak at a restaurant that must have contained clenbuterol unbeknown to him. Maybe that was so; no doubt there have been schoolchildren whose homework really was eaten by the dog. But by now even the cycling authorities weren’t buying easy excuses, and in February 2012, despite still protesting his innocence, Contador was stripped of his second Tour-winner’s title and Schleck was awarded the race.
By then the 2011 Tour had brought triumph to les anglo-saxons hailing from as far apart as Katherine in the Northern Territories of Australia and Douglas on the Isle of Man, although misfortune to the boy from Kilburn. Wiggins chose to miss the Giro, taking his chances in other races while commuting to the Canary Islands for altitude training. He seemed a little short of form in the Paris–Nice, managing only second at 20" in the time trial to Tony Martin, who then won the race with Wiggins in third, before he came second in the Critérium International. But his careful preparation had not been wasted. In the Dauphiné, his second place in the time trial put him in the leader’s jersey (yellow like the Tour) and he held his lead over Evans through tough climbing stages to win the race.
There was no Prologue and the Tour began on 2 July with a brisk 191.5-kilometre stage through the Vendée, won by Philippe Gilbert. Garmin-Cervélo won the following day’s team time trial, before four more stages twisted and turned through Brittany. The fifth stage to Cap Fréhel was won by Cavendish. Hushovd took the yellow jersey on the second day and held it for a week. Cavendish won again at the end of the seventh stage from Le Mans to Châteauroux. The parcours then went due south through Gascony, turned east through the Pyrenees and then to Montpellier, on to the Alps, a finish to l’Alpe d’Huez and a time trial on the last Saturday.
The first ten days of the Tour were plagued by crashes, taking Andreas Klöden and Vinokourov out of the race among others. An appalling incident saw a photographer’s motorbike knock down Nicki Sørensen, the Danish rider, who might easily have been killed, while two other riders collided with a television car. On that seventh stage won by Cavendish, Wiggins was forty kilometres from the finish when he crashed and broke his collarbone. His challenge over, the race proceeded to Saint-Flour and then Lavaur, where Cavendish won another stage to take the green jersey, which he kept all the way to Paris. In the meantime the yellow jersey had passed to Voeckler, dear old ‘Tit-blan’.
He was still wearing it after the first stage in the Alps and French hopes were high. Might there be a home win after so many years? But when the last Thursday began with Voeckler in yellow, there was a sense of grim impending fate as they rode over the Galibier and up again to Serre Chevalier, at 2645 metres the highest finish in the history of the Tour. Sure enough, the gruelling finish was fought out between the brothers Schleck. Andy won, followed by Fränk at 2'07" when they reached the summit. Voeckler was only 14 seconds behind, but ominously Evans was 6 seconds ahead of him. On the penultimate stage to l’Alpe d’Huez, Andy took the GC lead, but the race now hung on the last time trial, 42.5 kilometres around Grenoble. Tony Martin, the German with HTC-Highroad, won but by no more than 7 seconds from Evans, who was a long way ahead of the Schlecks. The dour Australian had now won the Tour. Fourth place in the time trial was taken by his compatriot Richie Porte of Saxo Bank-SunGard, laying down a marker for the future.
And so an Aussie wore the maillot jaune in Paris for the first time ever, and there was another first on this final day of the Tour, which in its way was just as impressive. By winning in the Champs-Élysées, Cavendish not only increased his tally of Tour wins to twenty, he became the first rider ever to win the final sprint three years in succession, and the first British rider ever to win the green jersey. He had arrived at the Tour fortified with an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and he left with more glory to come, not only the points jersey in the Vuelta but a truly glorious victory in the Road World Championships in Copenhagen at the end of September. The eight-man British team, with Wiggins playing a prominent role, controlled the race throughout, leaving Cavendish perfectly placed for his explosive final burst of energy to the line.
Once upon a time, after another team had won a famous victory, one of their number recalled the evening that ensued: ‘Prolonged rejoicings, intense inward satisfaction, and nocturnal festivities from which the use of wine was not excluded.’ That was Winston Churchill’s description of the celebrations after the 4th Hussars – for whom he played despite a dislocated arm strapped to his side – had beaten the 4th Dragoon Guards in the Indian Inter-Regimental Polo Tournament of 1899 at Meerut. By all accounts, his words might have applied to the night in Copenhagen after Cav won the rainbow jersey. At some point, Wiggins managed to lose his passport; it must have been quite a party.
So as 2012 began, hopes were high for British cycling, and for Britain. For only the second time in history, a monarch was about to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee, following Queen Victoria’s in 1897. Queen Elizabeth II’s sixtieth anniversary on the throne was to be marked at the beginning of June. The Tour de France began on the last day of that month and ended on 22 July. And only five days later, the Olympics Games opened in London, where they were being held for the third time, and for the first time since 1948. It was rightly supposed, except by the meanest spirits, that the British people would enjoy the Jubilee, as a tribute to a woman who had served her country, from her wartime days as a mechanic in the Auxiliary Transport Service, to those six decades as constitutional monarch, with an unflagging sense of duty. It was reasonable to guess that Team GB would enjoy success at the Olympics, certainly in cycling, where British riders had triumphed in recent Olympics as well as the Worlds. Was it too much to hope that one of them might also win the Tour at last?
Omens were good. Cavendish had joined Sky, to make the team even stronger, although there was bound to be a conflict for him as a sprinter in a team with a genuine GC contender. Wiggins began the season with the Volta ao Algarve, narrowly beating the time-trial World Champion Martin in the final time trial. He then raced in the Paris–Nice, taking the lead on the second day as part of a thirty-man breakaway and holding it until the last day when he stamped his victory by easily winning the final stage, a time trial on the Col d’Èze, to make him the first British winner of the race since Simpson in 1967. That was followed by victories in the Tour de Romandie and, once again, in the Dauphiné, altogether a highly promising hat-trick ahead of the Grand Départ. The Tour began in Belgium with a 6.4-kilometre Prologue in Liège, needless to say won by Cancellara, who kept the yellow jersey for a week.
The second stage from Visé to Tournai was won by Cavendish, but this was to be a disappointing Tour for him in a disappointing year. He suffered from recurrent ailments, still afflicting him when he rode in the Tour of Qatar, although he managed to bag a couple of stages, was injured in the Tour of Oman and failed to win a second Milan–San Remo after he was dropped on Le Manie. That could be blamed on no one else, but what happened in the Giro was worse than wretched luck. Cavendish won the second stage, appearing on the podium with Peta, his charming lady, and their newborn baby. He was well placed near the finish the next day when Roberto Ferrari swerved into him and brought him down, with plenty of others. It was an outrageously dangerous piece of riding for which Ferrari was merely relegated to last place when many felt he should have been ejected from the race. Had a CCTV camera caught him doing what he did on an ordinary British road he might have been given a prison sentence. What with the appalling ‘sports doctor’ Michele, Ferrari was in danger of becoming a name of ill repute in bike racing, however highly it might be viewed at Monza or Silverstone. At the end of the race, poor Cav lost the red jersey, the Giro’s equivalent of the Tour’s green, by a single point.
In the Tour, two days after that victory at Tournai, he was brought down in one more crash. It had never looked likely that he would win the green jersey again with Sky. Bike racing had become more specialized since the days when Merckx could win the 1969 Tour and the Mountains prize and the points jersey – maillots jaune, pois rouges et vert – all at once, and Cavendish shouldn’t have complained after the race (though he did). However, during the race, he was nothing but the best and most loyal team player, faithfully serving as domestique. It’s a very rare sight to see the man in the World Champion’s rainbow jersey carrying out the humblest tasks, like fetching water bottles, as Cav did.
But then it is also an unusual sight (though not unique) to see a team leader challenged by one of his own men. That was what happened on the seventh stage – and the most dramatic day – of this Tour, a moderate mountain stage finishing up a first-category climb to La Planche des Belles Filles in the Vosges. There were early breakaways, but Sky had the peloton well under control and was never far behind the quixotic leaders, who were caught a few kilometres from the finish. By the flamme rouge there were five riders clear at the front, Wiggins and Chris Froome of Sky, Evans of BMC and Vincenzo Nibali and the Estonian Rein Taaramäe. Evans was in the lead at first, but then Froome attacked, passing him – and Wiggins. Quite what the plan was never became clear, although Wiggins was obviously taken aback, and so were those in the Sky team car, as their terse messages made apparent.
There was a happy outcome – for the moment. Froome won the stage, with Evans and Wiggins at 2"; Froome also took over the Mountains jersey; Taaramäe took over the young rider’s white jersey; and Wiggins took over the yellow jersey, the first British rider to wear it since David Millar in 2000. What’s more, unlike Millar and all his other compatriots, Wiggins never lost it, retaining the GC lead for two weeks all the way to Paris. The frisson didn’t immediately dissipate, however. If the two Sky riders more or less kept quiet, their womenfolk did not, and a new horror had been added to sporting rivalry. During the Ryder Cup a couple of months later, a commentator unfashionably but understandably said that Twitter was like giving a sub-machine-gun to a mental defective, and the sight or rather sound of the sundry spouses or girlfriends of sportsmen scratching each other’s eyes out tweet-wise was momentarily diverting but then exasperating, and couldn’t really do much for team morale.
Two days afterwards, Wiggins won the first of the two time trials, 41.5 kilometres from Arc-et-Senans to Besançon, easily beating Froome at 35" and Cancellara at 57", to give the Londoner a healthy lead of 1'53" over Evans in the GC. From then on it was a matter of controlling the peloton and getting Sky and its leader over the mountain stages, with three more in the Pyrenees. If that sounds a little unexciting, drama of the wrong kind was provided on stage fourteen from Limoux to Foix, with two ‘first-cat’ climbs at Port de Lers and Mur de Péguère. On the latter, after a long ascent almost in darkness through trees, the riders found a further grotesque hazard: some malevolent buffoon had sprinkled carpet tacks on the road. As many as thirty riders punctured, with Evans the first victim.
The race leader himself signalled to his maillot jaune group to slow down: ‘I just thought it was the honourable thing to do,’ Wiggins said. ‘No one wants to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.’ He was resigned to the fact that these things, however disgraceful, were always possible in an event as open to all as the Tour – ‘If it happened at a football ground, there would be arrests’ – but he implicitly rebuked Pierre Rolland, the young French rider, who had ignored ancient etiquette and attacked when others were in trouble.
There were critics who fretted that, such incidents apart, this was a dull Tour. Team Sky was not merely very well organized and efficient, it won clinically, without dash and colour. Certainly it was a pity that no one had a go, that there were no lonely escapes over the mountains, no acts of magnificent bravura in the style of Coppi or Merckx. In many ways bike racing had indeed become much more carefully organized and controlled, but the romance of the Tour wasn’t really dead. By the final Friday, the last road flat stage, Wiggins’s lead was secure and Cavendish had no hopes left of the green jersey. But mightn’t he win this stage? Prudence dictated that Sky rode cannily, to keep the lead and take no chances, but it was Wiggins who told the team that they owed it to Mark to try to let him have one more victory. And so Sky rode for Cavendish. Near the finish, Nicolas Roche and Luis León Sánchez attacked, but the Norwegian Boasson Hagen gave his team-mate Cavendish a faultless lead-out and Cav went around the leaders to snatch his twenty-second Tour win, and a very popular victory it was.
The next day, the penultimate stage, was less dramatic, a 53.5-kilometre time trial from Bonneval to Chartres. It seemed only a question of how much Wiggins would win by. The answer was a brilliant time of 1h04'13" which put him all of 1'16" ahead of Froome, with the rest of the field sprawled behind. All that remained was a triumphal entry into Paris; a final sprint dominated by Sky, with even Wiggins playing a part in the lead-out, which is not to be expected of a yellow jersey on the last day; and yet another brilliant sprint from Cavendish to give him his fourth successive victory on the Champs-Élysées and move him into fourth place on the list of Tour stage winners, with a tally of twenty-three. As usual, Wiggins looked puzzled and out of place on the podium. There were no ringing words about his victory and the greatness of the Tour, just some blokey advice to the British fans to go home carefully and ‘don’t get too drunk’.
Only five days later he looked baffled again, as he rang a great bell in the new Olympic Stadium at the start of the opening ceremony. For some of us, that was the high point of the evening, which then went downhill with a weird pageant inexplicably admired by many but correctly described by the great octogenarian Israeli dissenter Uri Avnery as pure kitsch. For the next few days there was growing apprehension: where were the British victories? Then came the gold rush, an extraordinary tally of medals in sports as different (and sometimes esoteric) as canoe slalom and double-trap shooting.
After so many victories for British cyclists at the Athens and Beijing Olympics, and now the first British winner of the Tour, more was expected in London. One gold medal on the road came but another didn’t. Cavendish was favourite to win the road race, less than a year after he had won the rainbow jersey in Copenhagen. The Team GB squad included Wiggins, Froome and Stannard, and could scarcely have been stronger, but there was to be bitter disappointment. With no one else setting the pace, the British riders had to do it themselves. Then a group escaped on Box Hill on the North Downs thirty kilometres south-west of London and could not be brought back. On the Mall, Cavendish finished in twenty-ninth, at 40" from Vinokourov, a most regrettable winner in a year in which it had been hoped that the shadows would lift from cycling.