YOU THINK AS a professional cyclist that you’re used to pain. I’ve always said that it’s a weird, twisted line of work that treats physical suffering as a part of the job description, like clocking on at an office. At least it comes with the benefit of desensitisation: a wasp-sting, a cramp, something that might have ‘normal folk’, non-cyclists, squealing in agony barely registers on our pain radar. We’re harder, braver, more resilient than ordinary people.
At least that was what I thought until one night in a Majorca hotel room in January 2010, 18 months before my greatest day in Copenhagen.
I wasn’t just squealing but crying and howling like a five-year-old girl. It was razor-blades, acid on an open wound, induced labour, five times up the most infamous of all major tour climbs, the Mortirolo in Italy, all of them at the same time.
I couldn’t take it any more, and so I shuffled my body out of the bed sheets and alongside the wall. I cocked my head in the opposite direction then held it there as I paused to ask myself if this was really such a bright idea. Then I felt it again – a hot poker on my gums – and that made up my mind. Like a centre-forward leaping to meet the perfect cross, I lunged and flicked my head at the wall and waited for the thud.
Then it came. Ahhhh, more pain. And relief.
My logic, you’ll have to admit, was pretty ingenuous: disperse or dilute the pain in my mouth by creating another one in my skull. It was the kind of thing that only I could have come up with. Had it worked? Depends what you meant by ‘worked’; I was definitely in pain in two places. What I didn’t realise at the time was that in those moments, on that bed in that hotel room in Majorca, the opening credits of a six-month waking nightmare were just beginning to roll.
It was my own fault, my own vanity that had done it. My bottom front teeth had always been crooked and over the previous few months I had finally decided to do something about it. Even now it strikes me as so superficial that I find myself wincing as I write, but it’s one of those things that happen when you become more successful and, consequently, more intensely scrutinised. Ever since my debut pro season with T-Mobile, I’d been seeing photographs or videos of myself almost on a daily basis, in magazines and on TV, and over time it had made me more and more self-conscious about my looks. In those dark, thankfully long-gone days, whether in vanity or just insecurity, I would scour internet forums for comments about myself and come across the odd unflattering reference to my teeth. One of the worst was a suggestion for a ‘look-alike’ – a gorilla named Bingo from the old US kids TV series The Banana Splits, whose most distinctive trait was, you guessed it, his massive gnashers. There was no one remark or piss-take that did it, but over the last few months of 2009 I’d finally made up my mind: I’d get them straightened, or whatever it was that they needed, and be done with it.
And so I went to Paraguay. That’s right, Paraguay. I was there for reasons other than my teeth – a holiday – but yes, that was also where I’d decided to have the operation. When I told people this over the months that followed, they reacted as though I’d gone and done it up a tree, hanging from a branch, or down some back alley. They clearly weren’t aware that South America leads the world in cosmetic surgery. The clinic, which in fact was more like a hospital, was reputable and clean. Not cheap, either.
It wasn’t there that the problems started, or even the next day when I went out training, but on the plane on the way to my HTC-Columbia team’s second training camp of the winter in Majorca. I’ve had strict rules on aeroplane food ever since my time at British Cycling’s Under 23 academy, before I turned pro. One of the Federation coaches, John Herety, who had trained at catering college in a former life, had some horror stories and two incontrovertible, inviolable rules: avoid seafood, and avoid ice cream that may have melted and been refrozen. Now, though, thanks to my new braces and a hole in my gums where a tooth had been extracted, ice cream was all that I could eat. It was a recipe for disaster: I spent almost the entire second half of the flight in the toilet cubicle, shall we say, switching ends. It was food poisoning, or a stomach bug, something totally unrelated to the surgery on my mouth. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that I was vomiting over the open wound in my mouth. In doing so, I was setting in motion a sequence of events that, five months later, would take me to my lowest ebb, an emotional and professional macrocosm of the agony I experienced in Majorca.
The 2010 season was always going to be a vital one. They’re all important – of course they are – but there were lots of reasons why in this one, in particular, I needed to hit the ground running: I’d be defending my Milan–San Remo title in March; I had a score to settle and a green jersey to win after missing out at the 2009 Tour de France; there was my first realistic crack at the world championship road race on a course that was potentially going to suit me in Australia; and finally there was the Commonwealth Games.
Off the bike, I’d had a difficult winter, with my mate Jonny Bellis nearly dying in a motorbike crash on his way home from a night out with me in Florence. My brother Andy, with whom I had a complicated and quite distant relationship, was going to prison for getting caught in possession of cannabis and cocaine. It had all been stressful and, with the season now about to start, cycling was going to be my sanctuary, my escape.
Another incentive to make it my best season yet – and a nagging worry – was that I still wasn’t sure where I’d be riding in 2011. I had an ‘option clause’ in my contract, the ambiguity of which had already caused some tension. It could either mean that I would have to stay with HTC-Columbia on a wage that I’d already had offers to double elsewhere, or that I could leave, or renegotiate. The interpretation of the clause had already caused some disagreement between me and my team manager Bob Stapleton, as had what I suspected at the time to be Bob’s tactics to make me stay: while complaining that he didn’t have enough money to give me a better deal, Bob had been busy locking my best and most loyal domestiques into new contracts. His reasoning, as I saw it, was that if guys like Mark Renshaw and Bernie Eisel were sticking around, there was no way I’d leave, even if I stood to earn a lot more money elsewhere.
Making the issue even more fraught was what I saw as Bob’s anxiety about the likelihood of me joining the newly formed Team Sky in 2011. Like a lot of people, Bob had added two and two together and made five: yes, Sky were British, yes, my coach Rod Ellingworth would be working as their ‘race coach’ in what would be their debut season, and yes, a lot of my mates were riding for them. But, I hadn’t spoken to them about 2011, didn’t have any immediate plans to, and I most certainly wasn’t already trying to engineer a move.
I’d had a heated phone conversation with Bob over the winter and told him that he needed to chill out, stop issuing Sky with these ‘hands-off’ warnings in interviews and stop smothering me. I told him that it was like a relationship, and the more pressure he put on me to stay, the more likely it was to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy and I would leave. Even though we didn’t broach the subject in Majorca, it was there, hovering in the back of my mind and Bob’s every time we spoke, and every time we saw each other at races over the following weeks until it was resolved.
My back was also up about our co-sponsor, Columbia Sportswear, who was unhappy over promotional work that I’d been doing for my personal sponsor, Nike. I couldn’t believe the gumption of Columbia, a company which had, relatively speaking, paid buttons to sponsor the team and been repaid in gold – hour upon hour of TV coverage, page upon page in newspapers and magazines, basking in the reflected glory of what was already being hailed as one of the most successful cycling teams in history. I partly blamed Bob here too: he had given Columbia exclusivity over the riders’ clothing without consulting us, effectively overriding all of our individual deals. Nike, fortunately, had been good about it and said they would overlook, for example, me wearing Columbia clothing at press conferences and team presentations, just to placate Columbia. I, though, had started to resent every second, every occasion where I had to wear Columbia clothing, and would vent endlessly to our poor team press officer Kristy Scrymgeour. Besides anything else, I thought we looked like bloody idiots, standing there at team presentations at training camps or before races in full Lycra kit and … Columbia hiking boots.
On top of these minor and major preoccupations, I now had my tooth. The vomiting and diarrhoea had soon eased after the flight, suggesting that it had been food poisoning, and I was able to go out for my first training ride the morning after arriving. My bottom jaw and my gums were aching slightly, but I assumed that was just the braces. Then I went to bed and it started: a pulse like piped electricity through my jaw that kept me up all night. The next morning I went straight to see one of the team doctors, Bohdan Wajs – or ‘Doc Holiday’ as I used to call him, since we didn’t particularly get on, and I wasn’t all that enamoured with his work ethic.
‘Open wide,’ he said.
I showed him.
‘Ah, looks fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll be OK.’
I trained again that day, with the pain still there, bad but bearable when I was on the bike, and then I went to bed again.
Three hours later I was head-butting a wall.
Harder, braver, more resilient than ordinary people? Hmmm, not sure. Maybe just more stupid.
IT DOESN’T TAKE long for your thoughts to start racing, extrapolating, retouching the vision of your future you’d painted in your imagination, when you’re a professional bike rider and you have an illness or an injury. We may pride ourselves on our pain threshold but we learn early to be sensitive to our bodies, hypersensitive, and any niggle or ailment is invariably accompanied by an image of its consequences. The first sniffles or hint of a cold and we know instantly that’s three, four days of training gone. Crash and break your collarbone and that’s four, five, maybe six weeks out, and your entire season compromised
With the throbbing now spreading through my gums like fanned flames, I started wondering and worrying about the effect that all of this was going to have on my plans and goals for the next few weeks. For the second morning in a row, I went to find Doc Holiday.
‘Look, Doc, something’s badly wrong with this.’
He peered into my mouth again and reacted exactly as he had the previous day.
‘Looks fine. Just take some Ibuprofen.’
I shook my head and, reluctantly, did what he said. Took Ibuprofen, way more than you ever should. It got me through until that night, when the now familiar ordeal started again: pain, tears, howls, shrieks, moans and not a wink of sleep.
This time I wasn’t taking no for an answer.
‘Doc, there’s something not fucking right here …’
If he still wasn’t convinced, he would be soon. I brought my thumb and forefinger to my mouth, clamped them around one of my bottom front teeth, and pushed. As the tooth moved, I felt the corners of my eyes fill with water again, and everything in my face tense into a rictus.
The doc’s eyes widened, his expression turning from one of shock to horror. Our team chiropractor, who was also there, said he could see pus was oozing out. He said he’d hold me down, and I should keep pushing it. I tried, but I was almost passing out now. I barely managed to stagger to a team car, in which they immediately drove me to a dentist’s. The dentist saw me straight away, and said it was the biggest abscess he’d ever seen in his life – or rather two abscesses, because there was one either side of the gum.
I’ve never been so glad to see a scalpel in all my life. Still crying, I felt the blade go in and, seconds later, a flood of relief.
It was over. Well, it would be after a course of the strongest antibiotics that the dentist said he was allowed to prescribe: antibiotics with their side-effect of more diarrhoea. I spent five days in that soulless hotel room while my teammates trained. By the end of the camp I was already 1,000, maybe 2,000 kilometres behind schedule, and had possibly already jeopardised both my Milan–San Remo defence and the first two or three months of the season. All because I didn’t like the way my teeth looked in photos.
THE TRAINING CAMP where I’d done next to no training ended in mid-January, about a week before what should have been my first race of the year: the Tour of Qatar. Instead my 2010 season was now going to start at the Ruta del Sol in Spain at the end of February, which gave me a month at my flat in Tuscany to get ready.
That month was miserable. Three things tend to affect a cyclist’s motivation to train, and they’re the weather, the company or lack of it, and your form. You’ll find riders who don’t mind the rain, or training on their own, but you won’t find one who says that it’s easy to get motivated when you’re starting your training and going like a sack of cement. In that February I had the full house, the grand slam of motivation-killers: shit weather, no one to ride with and shit form. I did OK in the circumstances – 90, 100 dripping wet kilometres every day – but I was also cramming, panic training, still clinging to the hope that I might, just might, be ready for Milan–San Remo.
At the Ruta del Sol I managed to complete four out of the five stages, finishing only fourth in the lone sprint that I did, purely because I was lacking fitness. I then came second in the one-day race that comes immediately after the Ruta, the Clásica Almería, to the Dutchman Theo Bos. Bos had just switched to the road, having been one of the best sprinters in the world on the track, and predictably it was already being said in the press that Bos was the new sprint phenomenon, the young pretender who was going to take my throne.
I just laughed at stuff like that now. I’d lost the sprint at the Ruta del Sol because I was still out of shape, and the one against Bos because I’d ballsed up tactically. The day when I was fit, firing, in the right position and still got beaten, that would be the day when I’d start to worry. Whenever I read or heard anyone forecasting my decline, I didn’t have to look very far into the past for reassurance: in 2009 I’d failed to win two of the sprints that I’d properly contested, and in only three of the ones that I’d won had I given it the full Monty (at Milan–San Remo, in the first sprint of the Tour de France, and in the last one on the Champs Elysées). When I pointed this out – and pointed out how much I’d won by on the Champs, approximately ten bike lengths – I was told that I was being arrogant. In fact, as usual, I was just stating the facts.
After Almeria came Tirreno–Adriatico, my last race before San Remo. Mark Renshaw and Bernie Eisel had come to stay with me for a couple of days before the race started, and we did some good training on the roads that were going to play host to the first couple of stages of Tirreno. Even so, I was under no illusions; I was going to get my head kicked in. In yet more shocking weather, that’s exactly what happened for most of the week, until something started stirring in my legs on the last couple of days. I was hardly flying, but I was no longer creeping along either. Suddenly guys were riding alongside me in the peloton spotting the veins starting to protrude from my calf muscles, my legs starting to rotate not in a stiff, chopping motion but a fluid, rhythmic dance.
‘Aie, aie,’ they were saying to me. ‘You’re starting to go well, aren’t you? Better watch out for you at San Remo …’
And I would smile coyly, starting to believe a miracle might just happen.
But there would be no fairytale return. Part of the beauty of Milan–San Remo is that, of the 200 riders on the start-line, with the right weather or tactics, 100 of them can win the race. My team clung to that knowledge, mainly because we didn’t have any better option. The previous year I’d sailed over the two crucial climbs of the Cipressa and the Poggio, and more or less won picking my nose; I could have ridden through the finish and done another 100 kilometres. This time round, my problems started with a broken wheel on the ascent of the first climb in the race, the Passo del Turchino, and continued with a crash on the descent off the second one, Le Manie. On better form, I could have recovered from the chase back to the peloton after those two mishaps and still contended. But, for all that I’d packed in the kilometres over the previous month, I was trying to wing it. It didn’t work and, sure enough, I was dropped on the Cipressa. Up the road, half an hour later, Oscar Freire was inheriting my title.
All things considered, though, mine had been a respectable performance. I was philosophical and proud of how I’d somehow contrived to get myself in reasonable shape after the winter that I’d had. Maybe things were looking up. Three days later I finally got my first win of the season at the Volta a Catalunya.
Three days after that, I had to leave Catalunya with the flu.
It was only March, but the press were already calling it an ‘annus horribilis’.
Pretty soon, I’d stop being philosophical and start agreeing with them. It had been just over three years since my T-Mobile team’s physiologist, Sebastian Weber, had looked at my fitness test results and haughtily informed me that my numbers weren’t worthy of a professional cyclist. It had taken me a matter of weeks to prove him wrong, and since then the disappointments had been comprehensively outnumbered by the successes, the doubts by the certainties, the criticism by the praise. Having gorged on glory, I’d conditioned myself to expect nothing less.
Out of that mindset I’d created a winning recipe – but also the formula for a deep, insidious despair.
I KNEW THE feeling. It had happened once before in the winter of 2005 to 2006, not that I could really put a name to it at the time. Then, I was a 20-year-old world champion, having won the Madison that year with Rob Hayles in Los Angeles, but six months later I was in a dreadful state. My time at the British Cycling Academy was up, I still didn’t know exactly when, where or even if I was going to turn pro, and all I had to keep me going through that winter were ritual batterings on the six-day circuit with Rob. I was living in Cheadle, near Manchester, with the track sprinter Craig MacLean, his girlfriend, and my old Academy mate Ed Clancy. Ed also had a girlfriend who, as the weeks went by, was becoming a permanent fixture at the flat, and who I couldn’t stand. A pattern soon developed: she’d be in the kitchen, cooking for Ed, while I’d spend my days mainly trying to avoid her. My routine was to get up, train, then lie on the sofa, curtains drawn, with only a giant bag of Walkers Sensations for company. I’d finish the bag, go to the petrol station for another, and repeat. Needless to say, after a few weeks of this, not only was I fat, I was depressed, I think clinically.
This time, like then, the depression was going to creep up on me. After Catalunya, for the first time I’d ridden the Tour of Flanders, one of the races I’d dreamt of as a kid. I’d actually gone pretty well there – I finished almost half an hour down, but only after blowing completely near the second feed zone, where I’d been in the first group. We’d hit the Eikenberg, one of the narrow, gnarly cobbled climbs for which Flanders is infamous, and I’d been passed by five groups in the space of a few kilometres. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom – out of the arse, as we say. Nonetheless, I felt satisfied: my positioning had been good and I still believed that I could come back in the future and possibly win that race, given the right weather conditions. Unfortunately, the organisers would change the route in 2012, making it significantly harder, and now I suspect I might need more than just a sunny day and a headwind if I’m ever going to contend. A leg transplant might be more like it.
My spirits were OK when I left Flanders but over the next couple of months I started to get lonely and quite down. One incident stands out from the fortnight or so either side of Flanders. It was a minor irritation at the time, the kind of little drama that I can whip up like a chef does an omelette, but it was symptomatic of how rootless I’d started to feel. It was a midweek afternoon and my phone rang; the display showed an English number that I didn’t recognise. I did something that I never did, except when I was as bored as I was that day: I answered. On the end of the line was Richard Moore, the journalist.
‘Hi, Mark. Just wondering whether we could have a quick chat for a story I’m doing for the Guardian …’
Because I had nothing better to do, I said OK. We chatted for ten minutes about my form, the Tour de France, and he asked for my reaction to some comments in the press a couple of days earlier from my teammate André Greipel, saying he should have been the leader at San Remo.
The next day, I can’t remember whether someone told me to look at the Guardian website, or if I logged on myself. I can just remember reading the headline and thinking, ‘Here we fucking go …’
‘MARK CAVENDISH PUTS TEAM SKY ON ALERT AFTER CRITICISM OF ANDRÉ GREIPEL’ read the headline. ‘FUTURE WITH HTC-COLUMBIA IN DOUBT AFTER CRITICISING TEAMMATE …’ To be fair, Richard hadn’t written anything that I hadn’t said. As often happens with these things, it was the way the story had been spun, the way he’d linked the quotes together, perhaps not maliciously, but still with a slant that was inviting trouble:
‘[Riding in the same team as Greipel] is not a problem for me, because I’m a better rider.’
‘Me on bad form is still better than him.’
‘If Greipel thought he could win, he should have said it before the San Remo rather than when he’s looking at the results sheet.’
‘There’s no chance whatsoever that he’s coming to a bike race that I’m in.’
‘There’s no chance of Greipel winning a “monument”.’
It certainly wasn’t news at this stage that André and I had had our ups and downs. Having ridden on the same team for just over three years, there were two problems between us as far as I was concerned: one, André continued to make too many mistakes, lose wheels and thereby waste his teammates’ hard work; two, he was basically a nice bloke and I wasn’t. Not only could I be a dickhead, I could be very blunt (or, if you were being kind, honest). André and I had actually messaged each other a few times over the winter, spoken a bit at the team training camps in Lanzarote and Majorca, and both probably thought that we’d laid the old animosity to rest. What he’d said after San Remo, though, to my mind verged on delusional; I’d watched him at Paris–Nice while I was at Tirreno–Adriatico and I’d seen him making the same, familiar old mistakes. So I believed what I was telling Richard Moore; I just hadn’t done it very tactfully.
With that one telephone call that I should never have taken, I’d pissed off Greipel, added to Bob’s concern about me joining Sky, and served up yet more evidence for the already sizeable contingent of people who thought I was a mouthy, arrogant, disrespectful little upstart. The only small mercy was that the team seemed more angry with Greipel for what he’d said than my reaction to it.
There was always that unpleasant, sinking sensation when you dived into one of these controversies and this one simply raised a tide-line that had been inching higher since the start of the year. We were now getting towards late April and I’d won one race. Only I knew the pain that I’d felt in January, how many setbacks I’d had, how complex the overall picture was, but those intricate, textured portrayals never sell as well as the ones painted in broad brushstrokes, particularly in the mainstream press. ‘Cavendish’s nightmare year’ was a titillating, convenient, catch-all hook.
All I could do to alter that view and stop the doom-mongering was to start winning. The Tour of Romandy looked like the perfect time and place: in spite of all the agitation, the sense of some invisible, dark force nagging and gnawing at me, my bike had been my refuge, and I’d trained well throughout April. Romandy is the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so you’d expect a bike-race there to be mountainous and hardly the ideal terrain for a rider like me. I knew, however, that at least one of the six stages could conceivably end in a sprint: that would be the day when I finally made my critics eat their words.
The race kicked off with a short prologue around Porrentruy. I’ve always liked and been good at short prologues, even won a few in my time, and rode well here to finish 17th. The next stage was a lumpy one through the Swiss Jura; although I could feel the form coming, slowly blooming through my legs, it was still slightly too tough for me, and I finished in a big second group.
Day three, then, was going to be the one. Had to be, because all that remained after that was a time trial and two final stages with profiles like an alligator’s dental X-ray. I was familiar with the finishing circuit, because stages had finished in Fribourg with an almost identical loop when I’d ridden Romandy in 2008 and 2009. I also knew that it was going to be tough: on both of those occasions I’d been spat out the back on the final climb.
This time around, I floated over. The pedals were purring. I could almost have celebrated at the top of the climb, because by then I knew there was only going to be one winner. Instead I started thinking about what would be an appropriate way, besides the exhibition of sprinting I was going to give them, to respond to the journalists, the British in particular, who had been giving plenty of coverage to my lack of success so far in 2010.
The sprint itself proved trickier than I expected, if not for me then for my team. The wind was gusting into our faces and we’d committed early, which meant that everyone was doing mammoth turns on the front. I just had to sit tight, for Bernie to pull off, then Renshaw, and finally I went.
My kick was there, the spring, the zip, and I was never really in trouble. Fifty metres from the line I knew I was safe and that I was about to stick two fingers up at everyone who’d doubted me.
The problem was, I did it literally: clasping the inside of my right elbow with my left hand, I jerked my right arm upwards and raised my middle and index fingers in an emphatic V-sign. ‘V’ for victory. ‘V’ for, well … you know. In the moment or two after I crossed the line, it didn’t really occur to me that I might have just ridden myself into yet more grief. Blood rushed to my cheeks, but in elation, not alarm or embarrassment.
‘Better now?’ Bernie asked through a huge grin as I turned around to thank him.
Of course I was. Winning was always the cure.
The first hint that I might be in trouble came in the press conference immediately after the stage. I didn’t sugar-coat it: I said the gesture was intended ‘to send a message to commentators and journalists who don’t know jack shit about cycling’. Far from taking it personally, the journalists in the room chortled as they typed or scribbled.
That night, though, you could almost hear the storm rolling in, like thunder in the distance. It started with texts arriving on my phone, which were no doubt in response to stories appearing on the internet. The irony was that I’d provided all of those people who had been writing me off, the very commentators and journalists who were the targets of the gesture, with yet more ammunition for the storyline that they’d been peddling: Cavendish has lost the plot, it’s all gone to his head, he’s finished. Until this moment, I’d failed to realise two things: one, how people love seeing a meteoric rise but are even happier when it’s followed by a precipitous fall, and, two, how cycling and I had outgrown the niche where the only attention we ever received in the UK was positive.
One journalist with whom I’d had a couple of run-ins in the past, Susan Westermeyer from the Cyclingnews website, had immediately called the International Cycling Union (UCI). What action did they intend to take? They said nothing publicly, but contacted Bob Stapleton, who then called me. One of the best things about Bob was that he never tried to curb my, shall we say, volatile tendencies. Perhaps he just knew that he’d be fighting a losing battle, but I think he also knew that I needed licence to express myself, within reason, on and off the bike. He also probably realised that my lack of filter made me highly marketable. Armstrong aside, Bob seemed to think I was the most charismatic and valuable name in the sport. It was just a shame that he tended not to bear that in mind when we were negotiating a new contract.
Bob said that the UCI were talking about banning me for the gesture. If they judged that I’d ‘behaved in such a way as to blemish the image, the reputation or the interests of cycling or the UCI’ I could potentially get a one- to six-month suspension and miss the Tour de France. Bob said they’d talk more some more to the UCI and see what happened, but one solution might be for me to issue a public apology and for the team to pull me from the race.
One of the texts I received that night was from a girl called Katy Nicholson-Lord, who at the time was working for my management company, Face Partnership. I’d explained to Katy why I’d chosen that particular victory celebration, the Churchillian salute, and she tried to be supportive while also, clearly, having some reservations about whether it had been wise. She did also say something else, though, that pricked my ears up: according to one version, the origins of the V-sign could be traced to the Battle of Agincourt in the 15th century, where British and Welsh bowmen took to holding up their arrow-shooting fingers – the same ones that the French would supposedly cut off if they took them captive – as a sign of defiance. Hmm, I thought, that’s not bad, and asked Katy whether she’d mind me using that if the subject came up again. She didn’t and so I tucked it away in my mental filing cabinet, ready to dust off when the need arose.
If I thought it might all have blown over by the morning, I was mistaken. The stage that day was a time-trial, and having finished early I was killing time in our team bus, waiting for the other guys to arrive, when Bob called again. Bob said that the UCI President Pat McQuaid had been hassling Brian Holm at the start that morning and that if we were going to avoid a ban the team needed to be seen to do something. He said that, as far as McQuaid and the UCI were concerned, if I was pulled from the race and issued an apology, they would only give us a fine of a few hundred Swiss Francs, which the team would pay. Bob was nice about it but I, naturally, was mortified. I was also adamant, in my 24-year-old mind, that it had been a riposte perfectly in proportion to criticism of what, essentially, had been just an unlucky start to the season. However, I was also sensible enough to realise that resistance was probably futile and that, for my own sake, and for my chances of riding the Tour de France, I should probably just take the punishment and be on my way.
A couple of hours later the team sent out a press release quoting my apology: ‘I want to publicly apologise for the gesture I made on the finish line of the Tour de Romandy yesterday,’ the statement read. ‘I did want to make a statement to my critics but I realise that making rude gestures on the finish line is not the best way to do that. I apologise to everybody watching the race and especially the kids. I am not proud of releasing the feelings in that way. I hope I can redeem myself and show my feelings and passion for cycling with some exciting results in the next couple of months, rather than with a gesture such as the one [I made] yesterday.’
The following morning, in his weekly column in the Guardian, Richard Williams wrote the single most scathing piece about me that I’d had the misfortune to read since turning professional in 2007. Under a headline stating that my ‘cavalier behaviour will sabotage a glittering career’, he’d started with a reference to my ex-girlfriend. From there it got worse: my victory celebration had been ‘puerile’ and ‘such behaviour should have been outgrown by a man of twenty-four’. He felt that Bob’s decision to pull me from the race had been ‘a judicious form of salutary humiliation’.
One thing that I wouldn’t have disputed was what he’d written about how I usually acknowledged and was genuinely contrite about doing the wrong thing … but not straight away. As Richard Williams put it, ‘He acts first and says sorry – really, really sorry – later. And the funny thing is that you know he means it.’ That was actually true. I lacked a form of self-awareness that would allow me to put my feelings and actions into perspective in real time. I was – am – good at being honest and self-critical after the event, but by then the damage has often been done.
This was also very relevant to Romandy, the consequences of what I’d done there, and my mood generally at that time, because here, too, I was blind to what was happening. Only months later, or perhaps now, could I or can I coldly analyse the build-up of pressure within me, the way that it was released, and judge whether it was acceptable or not. My objective last word on the matter now would be that I was entitled to vent my frustration, and did it in a manner that was consistent with my temperament, consistent with my level of maturity, and consistent with the state of my life at the time.
Would I do it again today? As a 24-year-old: yes. As a 28-year-old: no.
By way of a footnote, if you’re wondering whether the ‘Agincourt excuse’ ever made it into the public domain, naturally I took the first good opportunity – at a press event in Soho the week before the Tour de France. Richard Williams was sitting in the front row. I made sure that I caught his eye.
Once the embarrassment and anger had passed, leaving Romandy early gave me yet another problem: I’d lost two more race days. Fortunately, the next week I was due to set off for the States, where I’d do a mini-training camp before competing in the Tour of California. Another issue that had set tongues wagging at the start of the year had been Bob ‘insisting’ that I raced in California rather than the parallel-running Giro d’Italia, which on numerous occasions I’d called my favourite race alongside the Tour de France. I was apparently ‘furious’ about this, so much so that it was another reason for me agitating to move to Team Sky. The reality was quite different: yes, I would have liked to do the Giro, but I could also see why the team, which had its headquarters in San Luis Obispo in California, wanted me in America. I’d enjoyed California when I’d ridden there in 2008, had a good relationship with the organisers, and was in fact quite happy with the decision.
In those few days before the race, though, as I trained and got ready, the loneliness really started to wear me down again. Probably the single worst antidote I could have chosen was looking at the internet, but of course that was what I did. Having signed off from my last race with a V-sign, a lot of what was being written on cycling sites and forums didn’t make for comfortable reading. Most nights I was so wound up that I couldn’t sleep. I’d lie there, staring at the stars, wating for the world to wake up again and get back on my case. I kept thinking about something Rolf Aldag had said to me in Romandy: ‘Mark, remember that the pen is mightier than the sword – you can’t win.’ That may have been, but I also just wished that they’d stop writing about me and leave me alone. It was a weird paradox: as my results and fortunes had dipped, some of the ‘new friends’ that had appeared from nowhere over the previous couple of years had started to drift away, all of which contributed to my sense of isolation, and yet here I was also yearning to be left in peace. At the same time, though, I’d never been so grateful for the support of the people who had stayed close to me throughout, especially Max Sciandri and the ‘Italian family’ that had formed around Max and me in Tuscany.
At least the race itself gave me some respite for a few days. On stage one to Sacramento I resumed normal service to win the sprint and take the race-leader’s yellow jersey. My victory salute had been more, shall we say, ‘traditional’, and consequently my press conference was rather more light-hearted than had been the case in Romandy: as I walked into the room I was handed a first edition of the American version of my book, Boy Racer, which I proceeded to hold up to the journalists and cameramen, grinning cheesily for the entire duration of the conference.
Losing the jersey on a tougher stage was no real surprise or disappointment. Two days later, though, the curse was back. It was the ‘queen stage’, the one that the pundits had picked out as the hardest of the race, and, after battling in sweltering heat through the mountains of Southern California, I, Mark Renshaw and nine others chugged in 48 minutes behind the winner, Peter Sagan. We were out of the time limit and out of the tour. That was another two days of racing gone.
It was back to Italy and back to the drawing board. My next race was the Tour of Switzerland: this week-long tour might be the single least sprinter-friendly race on the calendar, yet in a certain sense it was also perfect preparation for the Tour de France and its mountains. There might be one, two opportunities at most for me to pick up a stage win in Switzerland, but there would be 2,000-metre peaks galore to crawl over, in readiness for the Alps and Pyrenees.
One time trial and two lumpy road stages in, we were still awaiting the first real bunch sprint. Stage three to Wettingen, though, looked destined to be my day, with only a couple of third category climbs in the final 50 kilometres potentially complicating matters – that and the fact that we had Tony Martin leading the race and needing protection. After a few skirmishes among the overall contenders on the last hill, it all came back together and I was safely sat on Mark Renshaw’s wheel as we headed into the home straight.
With 200 metres to go, Mark was still thrashing down the middle of the road, but guys were now launching their sprints on either side of us. The first and fastest to go was my old teammate Gerald Ciolek. I jumped, took his wheel for no more than ten, twenty metres, then swung to the right to come around him on the outside. Another German sprinter, Heinrich Haussler, had gone around the left of Ciolek, who was fading in the middle of the road, leaving Haussler and I to contest a straight drag-race.
From 150 metres in, I didn’t swerve, I didn’t swing, I didn’t veer – I simply maintained a trajectory slanting gently from the right to the middle of the road. I’ll admit that on one of my best days I would have taken a straighter line and beaten Haussler comfortably. But relying solely on my speed, as I usually did, was a luxury; nowhere in the rules did it say that I wasn’t also allowed to use tactics to close off lines. Other sprinters had turned this into an art form and been celebrated for it. Now I was just doing the same.
The line that I took was dangerous for one reason only: Haussler was sprinting up the middle of the road with his head down, not looking where he was going. As I moved across, ahead of Ciolek and towards Haussler, I expected him to see me coming and also start to edge towards the left-hand side of the road. Instead he went straight on, his eyes fixed not on the road ahead of him but on the tarmac under his wheels. With 100 metres to go, when I kicked down with my left leg and my front wheel jagged that way, Haussler seemed to sense that a collision was inevitable, imminent, and leaned as he braced himself. When it came, the smash was a spectacular one, with my front wheel snapping under Haussler’s, my bike collapsing under me and me falling side-on onto the road surface like someone testing the springiness of a mattress. This bed, I’m afraid to say, was not very comfortable. The five riders who ploughed into me, including Ciolek, didn’t work too well as pillows, either.
As is always the case after a crash, shock and total bewilderment set in before the pain. I sat surveying what was left of my bike, totally flummoxed for a second. I then took a quick look at the damage: road rash on my right shoulder, right hip and right knee. Nothing that seemed to be broken except my bike. Haussler was sat in the middle of another pile of rubble a few metres away. I honestly can’t remember what he said, whether he even spoke, but it was pretty obvious at the time and from his comments later that he was furious and thought I was to blame. A story went around that I’d spat at him as I lifted myself up and wiped myself down; if I did do that – and, again, I swear that I don’t remember – it certainly wasn’t deliberate. I’m only mentioning it here to give the truest possible account of what actually happened. What I do definitely recall is Mark Renshaw having to ride me over the finish-line on the back of his bike, like a kid on his mate’s BMX, because mine was a write-off. Maybe because that was an image that made a few people chuckle, maybe because I’d got up and on my way while Haussler was still down. I think that Haussler and others assumed that I didn’t care whether anyone else was hurt.
It was weird with Heinrich: even before the crash and ever since I’d beaten him, by millimetres, to win Milan–San Remo in 2009, I’d had the feeling that he was harbouring some sort of grudge or resentment. Previously we’d been friends, but then it just flipped and I don’t really know why. We’d never discussed it, and in 18 months we’d barely even spoken.
If Romandy had been a shit-storm, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was going to be a shit-cyclone. I had been given a 30-second penalty on general classification, a 25-point deduction in that competition, plus a token 200 Swiss Franc fine. The clear message was that I had been at fault; in the public relations stakes, the fact that Haussler and two other riders, Lloyd Mondory and Arnaud Coyot, had had to pull out with their injuries further cemented me in the role of villain. Haussler would end up missing the Tour de France with a knee injury that he’d aggravated in the crash.
Like at Romandy, I assumed that it would all have blown over by the next morning. I realised how wrong I was when we got to the start line, again in Wettingen. The flag went down, and nobody could move because there were riders blocking the road on the front row. I asked what was going on and was told that it was Haussler’s team, Cervélo, and maybe one or two riders from Caisse d’Epargne and AG2R – Coyot’s and Mondory’s teams – who were staging some kind of protest. I asked what it was about. ‘You,’ I was told.
Some of the guys causing aggro were ones I’d have expected to be there. The riders who had been consistently the most hostile towards me ever since I’d started winning in 2007 were the grizzled, world-weary journeymen, often sprinters who I felt would always look for and find an excuse for their own lack of success. There were a few of them in there. Mainly, though, it was senior pros from Haussler’s Cervélo team, including Thor Hushovd. Thor, of course, had complained about me before; at the Tour de France in 2009, the pressure that he put on the race commissaires to disqualify me on stage 14 effectively won him the green jersey.
Thor, Klier and the others were telling me that they weren’t going to start the race unless I went home. I, in turn, was spelling out to them that I had no intention of pulling out and that their own sprinter, Heinrich, had been at least as culpable for what had happened the previous afternoon. This went on for no more than a minute or so, during which time other riders – Lance Armstrong among them – were getting impatient and wanting to start. Someone, I think Tom Boonen or Fabian Cancellara, finally forced themselves through the ‘picket line’ and that was that, the race was on, leaving the Cervélo riders standing on the line looking sheepish.
As it turned out, if Cervélo really did want me out of the race, they wouldn’t have to wait very long; having finished that fifth stage 11 minutes off the pace, with my wounds still weeping into bandages and the fabric of my jersey all down my back and the left side of my body, I decided with the team doctor that I wouldn’t start the next day. It was partly a physical thing, partly mental: on the way to Switzerland I’d got the news that my gran, my dad’s mum, had died, and that had been on my mind all week. Between that, the crash, and everything else dragging me down, I couldn’t summon the motivation to suffer through the pain. And so continued an unblemished record of failing to finish races that now dated back to Milan–San Remo in March.
The following year, when we were riding for the same Great Britain team at the world championships in Copenhagen, I asked Jez Hunt, one of the Cervélo riders lobbying for me to be kicked out that day in Switzerland, why they’d done it.
Jez smiled coyly.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘It was to fuck with you before the Tour,’ he said. ‘Get in your head. We couldn’t see any other way of beating you.’
Now, suddenly, it all made sense, but September 2011 was too late to find any comfort in Jez’s explanation. This was June 2010. The Tour de France was three weeks away and I was a mess. Lonely, miserable, out of form, unpopular with journalists, fellow riders and even fans, after the highs of the previous two years, I’d somehow fallen into a pit of despair.
I had three weeks to crawl out. Three weeks to go from a version of hell to the Champs Elysées, the Elysian Fields, resting place of the virtuous.