MY LAST FIGHT with Bernie Eisel had happened a month earlier, on the Col du Tourmalet during the Tour, and for us had been pretty standard stuff. As stragglers in the gruppetto flicked around a bend and out of sight, like a cat’s tail through the crack of a pantry door, Bernie and I had known that it was time to start doing some sums.
‘Cav, I know you’re ill, mate, but we can’t fuck around here. We have to go faster than this. Come on.’
Bernie’s accent – like an Austrian loudly impersonating an Australian, which in some ways he was, or vice versa – could usually be guaranteed to make me smile, even if only internally. Hearing this, though, I had glared at him.
‘Bernie, we can lose ten seconds a kilometre if we get two and a half minutes back on the descent, which we will. Don’t nag. Just let me fucking ride …’
‘Cav, I’m telling you, mate …’
‘Bernie, no. It’s under control. Ten seconds per kilometre …’
And so it had gone, until I’d ended the argument by stroppily pedalling over to the other side of the road. The fans on the climb must have been scratching their heads: why were two teammates battling to beat the time cut riding up the mountain parallel to each other but three metres apart, both with faces like smacked backsides?
That had been the Tour. As usual, we’d soon put it behind us – before the summit, as I remember. Now at the Vuelta, Bernie and I were at it again. Toys were flying out of prams and the Seville roads were peppered with expletives. Our teammates could only look on, silently wincing behind their sunshades.
‘Look,’ I said one last time, ‘if you listen and we get this right, we will definitely win this today. But if anyone doesn’t want to listen, they can fuck off now.’
With a ‘Fuck you, I’m off then,’ Bernie swung his bike around and rode off.
This wasn’t, I’ll grant you, the most auspicious note on which to start my first Tour of Spain or Vuelta a España. After the Tour I’d skipped the beach, skipped the lucrative post-Tour criterium races, where I could now easily command five-figure appearance fees. I had raced just twice, at the Tre Valli Varesine and the Coppa Bernocchi in Italy, before arriving in Spain. My goal over the next two, maybe three weeks if I decided to do the whole Vuelta, wasn’t stage wins or the points jersey but to fine-tune my form ahead of the World Championship road race in Australia. That would take place on 3 October, exactly a fortnight after the end of the Vuelta.
Here I was, though, on the morning of the team time trial that would open the final Grand Tour of the 2010 season, contemplating Bernie’s one-man mutiny. As he clipped shoes into pedals, swung his front wheel around and set off in the direction of the team hotel, I turned to face my other seven teammates, still rooted to the spot and speechless.
‘Right, anyone want to join him?’
ON THIS OCCASION, at the Vuelta, as on others with me, Bernie thought that there was a point where helpful advice and encouragement ended and verbal bombardment began, and that I didn’t know where to draw the line. He had done team time trials with me before, seen me perform the same General Eisenhower impersonation, but this time he reckoned that I was going too far. I disagreed. On the eve of the race we’d done a ragged first run-through, not on the race route but just to practise the rotation and cornering, after which I’d reminded everyone – admittedly in my usual, forthright manner – of the importance of holding a steady speed. We then repeated the effort, putting what I’d said into practice, and smashed it.
‘Right, if we all do that tomorrow, we’ll win the team time trial,’ I’d announced as all grabbed drinks and cooled down.
The TTT itself had been scheduled for the evening, sensibly given that the temperature in the day was edging 40 degrees. This also gave us time for a proper practice run, this one on the route itself in the morning. And that was when Bernie started to lose patience. Now admittedly, I’d taken my I-dotting and T-crossing to a new level of fastidiousness by sketching the corners on pieces of paper before we set out, but as I kept telling my teammates: ‘If we get 80 per cent of the technical aspects of this time trial right, we won’t win. If we get 90 per cent right, we might win but we might not, and if we get 100 per cent right we’ll definitely win.’ Having laboured this point, it then annoyed me when we began our morning recce and I could hear Kanstantsin Siutsou and Lars Bak yammering at the back of the line as we approached one key bend.
‘Right,’ I said, slamming on my brakes. ‘You’re not paying attention, so we’ll go back and do it again.’
This was when Bernie kicked off.
‘No, I’m not doing it again. No way. You need to chill out.’
At this point, insults flew back and forth across the road, with neither of us going to give an inch. So Bernie went back to the hotel.
When I asked, no one else wanted – or dared – to join him, and we finished the practice lap with eight men.
An hour or so later, I got back to the hotel and the room that I was sharing with Bernie. I pushed the door, walked in and there he was.
‘You’re a dickhead,’ were his first words.
‘No, you’re a dickhead,’ was my reply.
And that was it over: within thirty seconds we were best mates again. Not only that, but when we got onto the course for one very last practice lap that night it was poetry in motion. We’d intended to take it easy – and it felt like a breeze because we were technically perfect – but our time on that practice lap would almost have put us on the podium in the race proper. When we finally did roll off the start ramp, only this time holding nothing back, we replicated the same fluid turns and clockwork rotation and went on to win by a relatively comfortable margin of ten seconds. The team had decided that I would cross the line first and so take the red leader’s jersey in the event of victory. It was one of the best wins of my career to date: I was ecstatic, but I also felt slightly guilty that the rider in red at the end of it wasn’t Matt Goss. Gossy was so strong that day that he could have ridden away from us.
The three weeks in Spain started as they were set to continue. I loved the Vuelta. The loneliness, the lack of any real anchor in my life, the restlessness that had gnawed at me all year, were still there under the surface, but racing a Grand Tour was the best way to keep my mind occupied, purely by virtue of the fact that I was on my bike and among friends. I was single at the time, but in Bernie I had a fairly convincing substitute spouse only minus the romance; we slept in the same room, spent more time with each other than with anyone else, bickered constantly, but, just like our row over the time trial, the arguments would be explosive and quickly resolved. When Bernie had to quit the race on the fourth day because of a virus, for a day or two I felt completely bereft.
Without Bernie, without Renshaw (who’d had a long season and been left out of the Aussie Worlds squad because they were worried that he’d be tempted to work for me!), without Tony Martin, I was working with a brand-new, you could say makeshift sprint train, but one that could still deliver me in style. Gossy was flying, and he was doing a fantastic job, but he was different from Mark; his style was jerkier, more erratic, and it took more balls to follow him. In the first week there were four bunch sprints, and I didn’t win a single one, mainly because I’d got it into my head that it would take a long sprint to win on the Worlds course in Melbourne, and that I needed to simulate that here. I was kicking with 350 metres to go and dying before the line. Eventually, though, we were bound to win one, and in a technical finish on stage 12 into Lleida, Gossy dragged both of us so far clear going into the last corner that for a second I hesitated, hoping that Gossy would carry on to take the win himself, only for him to nod me through. The next day we dominated again, so much so that I didn’t even have to sprint off Gossy’s wheel – I merely carried on at the same speed as he peeled off. I even had time for a bit of showboating, bunny-hopping over the finish-line. With hindsight that wasn’t particularly wise: going by the letter of the law, I really ought to have been disqualified, as lifting both wheels off the ground was considered ‘dangerous riding’. The jury overlooked it, I think perhaps because they knew they should really have relegated Tyler Farrar for blocking me in a sprint earlier in the race, but had turned a blind eye there, too.
The two back-to-back wins had given me a solid lead in the points competition. Consequently I now felt duty-bound to push on through to Madrid, nurturing my form ahead of the Worlds as I went. We also had Peter Velits riding high in the general classification, and I was determined to help him wherever I could. Above all, I was enjoying it; if the Giro was three weeks of beautiful chaos, and the Tour just a huge, slick and scary machine, the Vuelta was the decaffeinated grand tour – with all of the flavour of the other two but minus some of the stress. There were hardly any journalists, late starts, and stages that generally settled quickly, with a break going down the road and the peloton slowly cranking up the pace to bring them back in the closing kilometres. The one element that wasn’t to my liking was the climbs – the Lagos de Covadonga, the Bola del Mundo and other horrors that had more in common with rock climbing than professional cycling.
I managed to get myself one more win, in Salamanca on stage 18, again superbly set up by Gossy. It would have been two more, I’m quite certain, had I not pinged a spoke four kilometres from the finish in Madrid on the last day. With my brake pads rubbing on my rear rim and my power meter showing that I was putting out 800 watts instead of the usual 500 just to stay on Gossy’s wheel as we entered the last kilometre, I was in knots by the time Tyler Farrar snuck past me to nick it on the line. I consoled myself with my first victory in the points competition of a major tour and only the second ever by a British rider, after Malcolm Elliot’s in the 1989 Vuelta. I was delighted with my form and increasingly confident about my chances of pulling on another jersey: the rainbow jersey of the World Road Race Champion.
The following day I flew back to Tuscany, but it was only a short stop; I’d made plans, with the other two members of the British team for Melbourne, David Millar and Jeremy Hunt, to fly to Australia early and get acclimatised. The size of each nation’s team at the Worlds is determined by the rankings points scored by riders from that country across that season, and it hadn’t been a vintage year for British riders; I’d had my slow start from January until June, and Brad Wiggins had, by his own admission, flopped badly at the Tour after his fourth place the previous year. That had left us low on rankings points and with a team of only three riders, whereas other nations would have as many as nine. Luckily, among the stronger nations were those who had sent guys to recce the course or seen it on video and also decided that the best bet would be riding for a sprint finish; they would control the race.
One of only two Austrians to qualify for the race, Bernie had also gone out early and he, Jez, Dave and I trained together in the week before the race. In my desperation to hold the form I was taking out of the Vuelta, I was pushing harder than the other guys up the climbs, doing extra kilometres when they headed back to the hotel at the end of rides. All three of them and Rod Ellingworth, my coach and the GB team’s that week, kept telling me that I needed to calm down. They told me that I was doing too much, but I was adamant that I was getting even stronger than I had been at the Vuelta. As the days passed, I convinced myself that I was going to be the world champion, even to the point where, in interviews, I was employing a tactic that had worked for me before Milan–San Remo in 2009: I started bluffing. I told the press that, having now seen and ridden on the course, I’d realised that it was much harder than it had looked on paper and on tape and, actually, I had no hope of winning.
‘I’ll have to revise my ambitions,’ I lied, holding back a smirk.
Sadly it was the course and my rivals who had the last laugh, and Jez, Dave and Bernie who could say, ‘I told you so.’ The race started in Melbourne, and from there we would ride 83 kilometres to Geelong before completing 11 laps of a 15.9 km circuit. I, though, hadn’t even got to Geelong – hadn’t even made it out of Melbourne, in fact – when I already knew that my confidence had been badly misplaced. Within minutes of us rolling over the start-line, we’d come to the bridge curving gently over the Yarra river. I’d shifted my weight forward and into the slope, lifted myself up off the saddle … and felt my legs turn to timber. There was no spring, no zip, nothing. It dawned there and then that I would not be going home with the rainbow jersey. In fact, I wasn’t even going to finish the race. I abandoned with three laps to go.
MY TURBULENT 2010 season had almost drawn to a close, but before I could put my feet up I had one more long flight and one more important race. The Commonwealth Games wouldn’t rank particularly highly on a lot of eligible riders’ lists of priorities, but, for me, as a Manxman, they were a rare opportunity to compete in the island’s colours. It was also a chance to give something back, and to ride with guys I’d been training with since I started cycling seriously in my early teens. The 2010 Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi, were being snubbed by a lot of top riders because of concerns over venue safety, terrorist threats and hygiene standards. I summed up my feelings on the matter, perhaps going into a bit too much detail, in the press at the time: ‘The guys who stayed away made a mistake. If you look at the chance of catching disease in India; if you look after yourself you won’t catch anything. As a single guy you run a risk if you sleep with a girl. Risks come with everything.’
These weren’t the only comments I made that caused quite a stir in Delhi. For a few months now, my frustration with Bob Stapleton’s seeming inability to offer me an improved deal, and also his failure so far to find a sponsor that would secure the team’s future beyond 2012, had been slowly simmering to boiling point. As far as I could see, no progress was being made on either score. As I’ve already touched on, Bob had also started trying to tie my most trusted and valuable domestiques to long-term deals, I suspected in an effort to also somehow shackle me to the team. The latest contract renewal to be announced had been Renshaw’s a few weeks after the Tour, and I’d made no secret of my disappointment to Mark. I’d told him to wait, promised that I’d get him the deal he wanted, but he’d gone ahead and committed to Bob for another two years before I’d been able to offer an alternative. He said that it was good money and at 27 he had to start thinking long term, about retirement and his family. I could understand that but still disapproved; it was in both of our interests, both sporting and financial, to stick together, and his new deal made it conceivable that we would be on different teams from the end of 2011, when Bob’s contract with HTC ran out, if not earlier.
My status with HTC-Columbia had been uncertain for months. In the spring, before Tirreno–Adriatico, Bob and Rolf Aldag had arranged to meet me in Tuscany, supposedly to discuss my future and the team’s. We’d booked a table at a restaurant near my house in Quarrata, sat down, made small talk almost for the entire meal, then finally got on to business over dessert.
‘So,’ Bob said. ‘What do you want to stay with us?’
I’d answered bluntly, honestly and without any hesitation. ‘More money, Bob,’ I said. ‘I want more money.’
Bob asked me how much.
‘How much am I worth to you? That’s how much I want,’ I replied.
Bob said he’d have to go and see what he could come up with. The atmosphere when we left the restaurant, suffice it to say, hadn’t been as jovial as when we’d arrived.
I should probably make it clear at this point that money both was and wasn’t the real issue. I felt that Bob was reaping the benefit of the naivety that I’d shown in signing a contract that I’d negotiated myself in 2008 when I was 23, and which severely underestimated my future value. The bonus scheme was also almost non-existent. Accepting these terms had been my mistake, I would acknowledge, but at the same time I wanted Bob to show some recognition of the fact that I was worth at least double the salary that I was earning, and verbal offers that had come from other teams were proof of it. I was desperate to stay with what I regarded as by far the best team in the world, HTC-Columbia, and I was willing to make a financial sacrifice to do so, but there was a point where loyalty ended and stupidity began. As the first flush of rookie exuberance and the novelty fade, the realisation sets in that, ultimately, it’s your job, your livelihood, and you’re a professional. You can’t undersell yourself, which is effectively what I ran the risk of doing if I pledged my future to Bob for half of my real value, then went on winning and gaining tens of millions of pounds’ worth of exposure for a corporate sponsor.
As things had stood in the spring, I was contracted to Bob and the team until the end of 2010, and there was an ‘option’ for me to stay on similar terms in 2011. This clause had been the source of intense speculation in the media, along with a lot of uncertainty. Initially it wasn’t clear whether it was my option to stay another year or Bob’s to keep me. Finally, though, I’d given the contract to my lawyers and, to my dismay, they’d confirmed that the option merely served as protection for Bob as the team owner, in the eventuality that we had no sponsor and the team had to fold. The fact was that in 2011 HTC would continue to fund us for at least one more year, the team would continue, and therefore I was obliged to stay. Which was fine – as long as Bob showed willing, and there was some more money in the new contract.
It hadn’t taken long after our dinner in Italy for him to call another meeting. He was in the UK, he said, and could I meet him in his hotel at Heathrow airport, where he’d be waiting to get on a plane back to California. I did a quick bit of research and found out that I could get to Gatwick from where I was training in Italy but not Heathrow, not unless I took two trains and jumped through several logistical hoops. Bob couldn’t change his arrangements, so we had a dilemma, which, as I tapped away on my laptop trying to solve, I explained to my Italian mate, mentor and confidant, the former rider Max Sciandri.
Max, who was born in Britain but couldn’t be more Tuscan if you bottled him and called him Chianti, leaned forward in his chair, claiming to have a solution.
‘Cav,’ he said, in his languid Anglo-Italian drawl. ‘You’re probably going to sign the biggest contract of your career when you’re there. Why not just take a private jet?’
Private jet? Fuck. Rod was always telling me to travel first class if it meant training or racing better when I arrived, but a private jet?
‘Priva … I don’t know about that, Max.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’re going to sign a massive contract, plus it’ll make a good story, won’t it?’
Max had convinced me and, in any case, there were no other options: I forked out the two grand an hour that it would cost to hire plane and flew to Heathrow. It’s just possible that I walked down the airstairs and towards the terminal building at Heathrow with a little more swagger in my step than would ordinarily be the case.
Bob was staying in one of the big, corporate hotels inside the airport complex, I think the Hilton or the Sofitel. I’d asked my manager, Chris Evans-Pollard, to come with me since I didn’t want to be sweet-talked as I now felt that I had been at the 2008 Tour, when I’d negotiated a new three-year deal on my own. Chris and I found Bob waiting with Rolf Aldag in his suite. He seemed surprised that I’d brought Chris, and immediately asked whether he and Rolf could have a few minutes with me alone. I said no, that I wanted Chris there, to which he replied that we might as well all leave then. We finally agreed that Chris would wait downstairs.
Bob was a tough customer to deal with. In some ways he was your archetypal Silicon Valley millionaire, having made his fortune through the sale of his telecommunications company to T-Mobile in 2000 (the press commonly referred to him as a ‘billionaire businessman’, which he didn’t like and said vastly overestimated his wealth). T-Mobile and the teams that they sponsored had been his pathway into professional cycling, and since taking over what was then the T-Mobile men’s team in 2006, he had seen us become the most successful ‘franchise’, as he liked to call it, in the sport. About 5 ft 9 in tall, with a grey goatee beard that gave him an affable, avuncular air, he could be the ‘Cuddly Bob’ that the journalists loved or, when it came to business, a hard-bargaining American businessman. He never raised his voice but he had a slow, deliberate tone that could freeze over like a lake. He could be intensely demanding and sometimes ruthless; as riders, we were all slightly intimidated by him.
Here, now, with me sat opposite him in his five-star suite, he clearly had a strategy. He and Rolf had launched straight into their masterplan for the next two years: what riders we were going to sign, what races we were going to target. Money and contracts weren’t mentioned. After five minutes of this, they could see me getting excited. I could feel myself edging forward in my seat and also, I suddenly sensed, getting lured in.
‘Hang on,’ I said, interrupting. ‘I don’t want to go any further without Chris being here.’
Reluctantly, they agreed and Chris was allowed into the room. Finally we got to the nitty-gritty. Bob handed me an envelope, which I opened to find a letter, a letter of intent, essentially a precontract agreement. I looked at the figure he was offering, then the duration of the contract.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘but I only want one year.’
Bob was taken aback. So I explained: I wanted a new contract, overwriting the old one, for just the 2011 season, not because I had any intention of going somewhere else after that, but as a gesture of goodwill. I wanted Bob to show me what I was worth to him as a rider, not as a speculative punt that he might be able to lock in for less than my eventual market value.
This, Bob said, he couldn’t and wouldn’t do.
‘In that case, I have no choice but to give you this,’ he said, handing me a letter.
I quickly skim-read what was written on the piece of paper. It essentially spelled out that the option clause was valid and that I would have to stay with the team, on the same money, in 2011.
Not too much more was said. Like at our meeting in Italy a few weeks earlier, neither party left with what we’d come for.
After this in March, the weeks had passed. Bob was fully supportive after my injudicious celebration and ‘diplomatic’ early withdrawal at Romandy, and then at the Tour of California seemed ready to announce good news – possibly, at last, a new sponsorship deal that would guarantee the team’s survival beyond 2011 and, just maybe, the brand-new contract that I was after. He called us all onto the bus after the last stage, in which Michael Rogers had wrapped up overall victory. We listened expectantly, only for Bob to feed us an even more oblique, non-committal version of the spiel I’d heard at home in Tuscany: ‘We want the team to stay together, but you have to be fair. You have to do it for the right reasons …’ Meaning, as I understood it, that we should all ignore the far more lucrative offers raining down from other teams and stick with Bob, come what may. More than once that spring and over the summer we’d heard that a new sponsor was in the pipeline, that a deal was maybe just days or weeks away, but every time it came to nothing.
There had been no real progress over the summer, as far as I could discern, and I was now resigned to Bob holding me to my contract, with no pay rise, and the team continuing to operate on the same threadbare budget in 2011. I still had no burning desire to ride in another team’s colours, and was immensely proud that, for the third year in succession, we had won nearly twice as many races as the next most prolific team in professional cycling’s top tier. Our achievements were made doubly impressive by the exodus of high-class riders that took place at the end of every season. Our riders were not only successful but clean, thanks largely to the anti-doping ethos that Bob had implemented and quite aggressively publicised since taking over the team in 2006. That stance, combined with our victories, had become a double-edged sword in that our riders were heavily in demand and able to command salaries that Bob simply couldn’t afford. The career of a professional cyclist is rarely much more than a decade long, and most will generally, understandably, follow the money. This was another thing, I thought, that Bob failed to appreciate: there were several guys on our team, not just me, who were willing to make financial sacrifices, within reason, that most in the sport wouldn’t contemplate in order to stay.
In spite of everything, we still had the best staff, the best work ethic, the best camaraderie and the best equipment of any team. In my mind, this and Bob’s expertise and connections in the business world made his failure to find a new sponsor all the more unfathomable. It upset me that Bob could have created something so special, so beautiful, so unique, and that he couldn’t take the necessary steps to stop it from falling apart. That disappointment tinged with sadness had been building in me all season, and I’d decided to give it an outlet now at the Commonwealth Games.
In my pre-race press conference I was asked about the expectations that I now had to deal with at every race. This was a good enough opportunity …
‘I’ve got great family, great friends, great teammates,’ I told the assembled media. ‘It’s nice. People around me appreciate when it’s like that, but I’m not sure if my team does. Not my team as a whole, but the manager. I’ve not been offered a new contract yet – I don’t know why that is. I’m committed to a contract I signed a few years ago, [but] there’s been no goodwill, no bonuses, nothing. I feel kind of abused for what I’ve achieved.’
The journalists in the room thought Christmas had come early. One now asked whether I was committed to HTC for 2011.
‘I’ve been told I’m contracted to stay, so I have to do it,’ I said. ‘At the end of the day, I’m never going to stop racing because I love racing and I’m going to race with my teammates because they love to race as well. Fundamentally, I ride my bike because I love to ride my bike, but obviously [because of] the pressures, it’s a normal person’s life that I’ve lost. You should see the benefits coming with that, and I don’t get them at the minute, and I’m a little bit disappointed at the minute with that …’
‘We’re the most successful team on the planet and something is wrong when we don’t have enough sponsors,’ I went on. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of people on the team, riders and staff, are not just performing, but over-performing. There are a couple of people whose job it is to get new sponsors and it’s frustrating when they can’t and we suffer for it. I’m just frustrated because I’ve been massively underpaid this year and next because for some reason we can’t get more sponsors.’
As I put the microphone down, for once, I could foresee the repercussions with 20/20 clarity. My comments would be huge news in the cycling press and would infuriate Bob, not that he ever responded publicly. He was also too smart and too keenly aware of what was at stake to enter into an ugly, tit-for-tat argument; I remained the team’s most valuable rider and his best bargaining tool in the hunt for new investment, particularly with cycling enjoying such a boom in the UK.
Bob also had me exactly where he wanted me: under contract for one more year.
IT WAS EVER so slightly ironic that I’d talked about being underpaid at the Commonwealth Games, because Delhi showed emphatically that money wasn’t the primary motivation in my career. The Isle of Man’s team in the road race would be six strong, and of those six I was the only elite professional. Among the other five were a pair of promising Under 23 riders in Tom Black and Mark Christian, plus three decent amateurs with full-time jobs: Andrew Roche, Graeme Hatcher and Chris Whorrall. Andy was an electrician, Chris worked for the post office and Graeme for the water board. They were all talented riders but, by rights, really ought to have been out of their depth in a race where Australia, to cite just one example, were fielding a team consisting entirely of elite pros. I didn’t care, and was also keenly aware that, for most of those six guys, riding the Commonwealth Games would be one of the most memorable experiences, if not the most memorable, of their sporting lives. While our team’s inexperience put us at a major disadvantage, I could still realistically aspire to a podium finish, and I felt that I owed it to those five guys to at least give them something to ride for. Regardless of where I was going to finish, I also adored riding with the Manx lads; we’d raced together, trained together, gone out together and, above all, taken the piss out of each other and laughed together for over a decade.
The road race was 167 kilometres long on a pancake flat course theoretically suited to sprinters. The lads had all been given a job for the first 100 kilometres, after which I knew it would unrealistic to expect too much. They were all buzzing. As predicted, a break went up the road early, and at my instigation our yellow and red Isle of Man jerseys promptly poured to the front. The Australians, by far the strongest team in the race on paper, weren’t represented in the break, and had a good sprinter in Allan Davis. I was confused as to why they weren’t chasing, so I rode alongside Allan in the bunch and asked.
‘It’s too early for us to work,’ I was told.
‘Allan,’ I replied, ‘I’ve got a fucking electrician, a postman and a plumber up there. You really think it’s too early for you, with your six full-time pros?’
It cut no ice. We carried on working without any help from the Aussies.
For all the guys’ brilliant work in the first half of the race, I was always likely to be isolated, overpowered and outmanoeuvred in the finale, and so it proved. New Zealand still had three riders in contention with three laps to go, Canada two and Australia two, whereas David Millar for Scotland, Luke Rowe for Wales and I for the Isle of Man were the only men left for our respective teams in a small lead group. Ploughing our own lone furrow, none of us had any chance, so we chatted and decided that we’d work together to at least try to get a win for a British rider. The Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians were now hell-bent on dislodging me, and were attacking repeatedly to that end. A pattern developed: Dave Millar, mainly, would mark the moves, I would then bury myself to get across, whereupon another rider would ping off down the road. Eventually, the bombardment was always going to wear me down, and finally did as we began the last lap. Dave had latched onto the five-man group that rode into the finishing straight to contest the medal positions, but could only take bronze behind New Zealand’s Hayden Rouslton in second and … Allan Davis in first. I ended getting up seventh. I was disappointed not to have rewarded my teammates for their effort but had relished a rare chance to truly race, rather than just sitting in my teammates’ wheels and wait for a sprint. That had become my day-job at HTC, but part of me missed the kind of racing that I’d been forced to do in Delhi – the chess on wheels, the thrust and counter-thrust. I ended the day feeling exhilarated.
I was due to fly home the next day, but partly because there was nothing or no one to go home to, and partly because I was loving Delhi, I decided to change my flight and stay until the end of the Games. If I was going to stay, I wasn’t just going to spend the time swanning around the athletes’ village trying to look cool in my sunglasses, or growing my sideburns; I was going to make myself useful to the Manx riders who were riding the time trial three days after the road race, Andrew Roche and Graeme Hatcher. It was their Tour de France – and I wanted them to get the same attention and support that I would expect at the Tour. People were surprised to see me pumping up Andrew’s tyres, filling his drinks bottles, wiping him down after his warm-up and following him in the team car on his ride, but I had a fantastic time. Andrew ended up finishing 12th and Graeme 21st. Dave Millar, who had played wife, soulmate and partner-in-crime for the week in Bernie Eisel’s absence, took the gold.
WITH THE COMMONWEALTH Games, the most eventful and testing season of my pro career to date had drawn to a close. The final balance sheet said that I’d picked up 11 race wins plus my points jersey in the Vuelta a España. My teammate, André Greipel, had won almost twice as many races, without ever truly challenging me for the role of HTC-Columbia’s senior sprinter. Now 28, André had still never ridden a Tour de France, and had realised that he perhaps never would as long as we were both in the same team and I was fully fit. As a result, he had no choice but to leave at the end of 2010 and he duly signed with the Belgian Lotto team. André and I hadn’t ridden a single race together for two and a half years, since the 2008 Giro d’Italia.
From my point of view, professionally, the first six months of 2010 had contrasted sharply with July, August and September. On a personal level it had been a strange, often unsettling year. In many respects I had felt unfortunate and sometimes a victim, whereas in others I was fully aware of the need to take responsibility for mistakes of my own making. The abscess in January had caused me a huge setback in my training but I shouldn’t have ridden the day after the initial operation and I shouldn’t have eaten that ice-cream on the plane. It was my brother Andy’s fault that he’d ended up in prison, but I should also have worked harder on our relationship before that and perhaps shown him more sympathy and empathy. Though the press had occasionally twisted things that I’d said or rejoiced a little too much in my failures, coming across as moody, arrogant or impolite in interviews would only encourage them to do that in the future.
These were just a few examples of what boiled down to the same thing – the need to mature and make better decisions. I wasn’t the only 25 year old with a few rough edges to smooth, but the past few months – far more than 2009 – had opened my eyes to the responsibilities that came with my growing profile. While rationally I could tell myself that pressures necessarily came with the privileges of being famous, wealthy, admired, it was still sometimes hard to compute and accept those stresses.
I returned home to England and a packed, three-week schedule of media and commercial commitments that acted as a reminder of exactly this Catch-22. My base was the swish Sanderson Hotel in central London, and every day brought a different party or product launch and a different crowd of people hanging on my every word. It wasn’t their fault; I’d been, and still occasionally am, starstruck in the company of childhood heroes or stars that I’d meet at precisely this kind of event. At the same time, I’d started to see through it all, and I’d find myself having perfectly pleasant conversations with people while silently telling myself that they were interested only in what I was, what fame and success represented to them, and not who I was. After a few days and nights of this, I noticed that it was having a perverse effect on me: rather than alleviating my loneliness, it was actually exacerbating it. I’d go back to my sleek, modern, luxurious hotel room and notice not the flat-screen TV or the art on the wall or the designer furniture but how empty it felt, and how empty it all made me feel.
I was young, single, rich, famous and only truly happy when I was on my bike. Something, I knew, had to change.