AS COUPLES DO, Bernie and I had booked to go on our holidays together. For the 2011 season, the team’s bike supplier was to change from Scott to Specialized, and to smooth that transition and get us all fitted up and familiarised with the new equipment Bob had arranged for our first training camp of the winter to take place in California, near the Specialized headquarters. Bernie and I decided to go out early and spend the whole of November 2010 having ourselves some fun, sunshine and training in Santa Monica. Our bachelor pad for the month overlooked the beach and the Pacific, with Bernie’s grooming products taking up approximately half of the square footage.
The week before flying out, I’d attended one of what seemed like endless parties and product launches that month, this one for the gym equipment manufacturer Technogym. During a casual chat with one of their PR people, I’d mentioned the Santa Monica trip, and he’d said that was a coincidence, because they would also be there for the end of a Help for Heroes charity walk from New York to LA. He explained what Help for Heroes did and that among the participants would be former soldiers with serious injuries, some of them amputees. I was impressed and said I’d definitely go along.
On our second day in Santa Monica, sure enough, I’d gone down to the pier, where the walkers were due to arrive that morning. There were a few people milling around, clearly waiting for someone or something, but my contact wasn’t answering his phone and I was left standing on my own. After a few minutes there was a bit of commotion and more people started to arrive. I got chatting to the chef preparing food for the walkers, and as we talked a burst of bright red over his shoulder stole my attention; I turned, looked and saw a brown-haired girl in a scarlet T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Sun newspaper, denim shorts and Converse shoes. She was smiling, pouting at a photographer army-rolling along the floor as he took her picture.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked the chef, my eyes having widened.
The chef shrugged and said he didn’t know.
Even before his answer, I’d made up my mind that I was going to talk to her, or at least try. But I was also running out of time: the walkers had appeared on the horizon, jogging towards us, before slowing to a walk just as they reached the pier. I figured that gave me a couple of minutes, so I took my chance.
‘Look, you can tell me to fuck off if you want,’ I said, ‘but I saw you were on your own and I wondered whether you wanted some company …’
As chat-up lines go, it was, well … I’d given her the option of telling me where to go, and she’d not taken it. We spoke for a few minutes – long enough for me to mention that I was a professional cyclist, and for her to make it clear she didn’t have a clue what that entailed or who I was – before she was hauled away for some sort of presentation on the stage. As that got underway, I noticed her stealing occasional glances and smiling at me, and I naturally smiled back. Then, when it was all over and the crowd started dispersing, I turned to leave and saw that same red T-shirt flash in front of me.
‘Hey!’
Initially, I think that my only audible reply may have been a gulp.
‘I’m going now,’ I said.
‘Oh well, if you want to meet up later …’ she replied.
My phone was out of my pocket and the number saved before you could say ‘fastest man on two wheels’.
That afternoon dragged horribly. Bernie and I went out to buy some groceries, but all I could think about was why this girl – ‘Petra’ or ‘Peta’ she’d said her name was – was taking one, two, sometimes three hours to reply to the text messages that I’d been sending. I said to Bernie that she clearly wasn’t interested, but that, just in case, I’d try an old tactic and add her as a friend on Facebook. I just had to get hold of her surname, so I opened up Google and typed in ‘Peta’ and ‘the Sun’.
The search results flashed onto the screen, and my jaw dropped. She was a glamour model, a Page 3 girl.
‘Bernie,’ I said, ‘Come and have a gander at this. Here’s why she’s not interested…’
After that initial shock, I told myself that I had nothing to lose and still headed out to the bar where she’d said she’d be. We stayed for a couple of hours, in a large group, then she asked whether I’d like to go on with them to another bar. I told her that I didn’t drink, she said that was fine, so on we went. At two or maybe three in the morning the gathering spilled out onto the pavement, with me still completely sober but the others less so. Peta and I arranged to meet the next day for lunch, before she flew home. I ended up taking her to Ago in West Hollywood, which as well as being reputedly the best Italian restaurant in LA is owned by Max Sciandri’s parents, Scarlett and Agostino (or ‘Ago’). Scarlett and Ago ate with us and, when Peta had left, gave her an emphatic thumbs-up.
Rob Hayles, my old world championship madison-winning partner, was flying out to join us, and it was a good job, because Bernie had practically been dumped. Over the following few days and weeks I’d come back from training to spend two, three, four hours on Skype to Peta. The last thing I’d been looking for from our trip to LA had been a girlfriend, but I’d fallen quickly and hopelessly. She was intelligent, funny and beautiful. She had a four-year-old son, Finnbar, and even from the few hours we’d spent together and the conversations we’d had I could tell that she was a fantastic mother. As soon as I arrived at our training camp in December, I was telling my teammates and anyone else who would listen that I’d found the girl that I was going to marry.
MEETING PETA HAD transformed me and my mood within the space of a few weeks. That happiness in my private life had, in turn, spilled into my cycling; Bernie and I had trained well on our own and the other guys in the team could see it when we headed out for our first rides. Yet again, there had been an end-of-season exodus. Many had gone from the team for the key reason of our inability to match other teams’ salary offers. André Greipel, Michael Rogers, Maxime Monfort, Adam Hansen, Vicente Reynes, Marcel Sieberg and Aleksejs Saramotins had all left, and were replaced by Matt Brammeier, Alex Rasmussen, Danny Pate, John Degenkolb, Gatis Smukulis and Caleb Fairly. Our directeurs sportifs had a deserved reputation as the best talent-spotters in the sport, but I still wasn’t particularly enthused by some of our new signings. As it turned out, in most cases they would prove me wrong. It was certainly good to have Matt Brammeier, my old mate and fellow tearaway from the British Cycling Academy, on board. We’d both come a long way since our days of drawing giant equine reproductive organs on the window of our house in Fallowfield, Manchester. Brammy’s journey had been a more meandering, stop-start one than my own, partly because of a horrific collision with a lorry on a training ride in 2007. He’d since spent four years regaining his fitness and grafting in small teams and finally, now, was getting his first opportunity at the top level.
The atmosphere at the camp, as usual, was excellent. We were spending the first week around the corner from Specialized’s headquarters in Morgan Hill and the second further south in the Malibu Hills. The training was good, as was the weather, the roads and our new bikes … the only thing that wasn’t ideal was my relationship with Bob. In fact, there now was no relationship. The camp was symbolic in my mind as the start of the extra year, the ‘option’ year, when I’d be paid a similar salary as I had for the 2009 and 2010 seasons. I hadn’t spoken to Bob since my outburst at the Commonwealth Games, and every moment was awkward in each other’s company – or rather, in each other’s presence, since I went out of my way to avoid eye contact and conversation. One day, after our official photo shoot, he stood in the doorway and put a hand on my shoulder as I left the set. I brushed it away and carried on walking. With a bit of hindsight, and perspective, I can see now that I was being petulant and that Bob didn’t deserve that treatment. Months of frustration had festered inside me to produce that reaction. The fact that all communication between us had broken down put Bob in a difficult position when it came to courting prospective sponsors; if they were going to invest millions of dollars in the team, they would invariably want to knew whether they could count on the current team’s most marketable rider, namely me, and that was a guarantee that Bob would have found hard to provide. This dilemma wasn’t lost on a few of the more astute members of the team, and I know that, among themselves, they wondered and spoke about what could be done to somehow reconcile us.
Our directeurs sportifs, on the whole, didn’t involve themselves in any of the politics. They, like us, appeared to be completely in the dark about the sponsorship negotiations and the probability of the team surviving into 2012. Nonetheless, along with the mechanics and masseurs, they too were starting to ask themselves where they’d be in a year’s time.
If this was indeed going to be our last season, that threw up a frightening prospect: the camp in California would be the last time that we all got together, riders and staff, both the men’s and our women’s team. I was due to start my 2011 season at the Tour Down Under in January, so like a few others I wouldn’t attend the second camp in the New Year. On our last evening in Morgan Hill, Specialized had laid on a party, after which the directeurs decided that we could all have a very rare night out. From the Specialized event in the hills overlooking the Pacific, someone had phoned around bars and restaurants in the area and finally persuaded one to stay open, or rather re-open for us. An hour or so later we had turned a quiet, suburban steakhouse a few miles away into a thumping school disco.
Later that night my smiling, semi-inebriated teammates were duly uncoordinatedly tail-spinning around the dance floor while, at the back of the room, the directeurs sat quietly sipping their drinks, half-amused, half-appalled by what they were watching. Brian, the deadpan, self-styled Danish style guru with a bizarre passion for all things English, from fried breakfasts with milky tea to the Sex Pistols – and Rolf, or rather ‘Adolf ’ as Brian called him, the fastidious, affable German straight-man and serial butt of Brian’s jokes. Next to them sat Allan Peiper and Valerio Piva. Allan had given me my first big break by allowing me to sprint for myself rather than lead out André Greipel in the 2007 Grote Scheldeprijs, where I’d gone on to take my first pro race win. Valerio had overseen my best performances in Italian races, but we’d clashed quite regularly, generally because he thought it was impossible to own a fast car and also be a fast bike rider, or eat lunch with your girlfriend in a Grand Tour and then go out that afternoon and do a respectable time trial. It boiled down to Valerio thinking that I was a ‘Big Time Charlie’, or least falling back on that clichéd image of me when things weren’t going well.
I’d shared triumphs and disagreements not just with Valerio but all of the directeurs, and, in one way or another, those experiences had moulded me as a man and a rider. As I watched my teammates shimmying and swaying unsteadily, drunkenly, to the music – or in a few cases quietly nursing soft drinks – I thought how strange we all looked and probably felt in this, a context that was completely banal to most people of our age.
It wasn’t just tonight: we were forever in the same state of limbo, between what had been and still were our dreams and the real world which kept on turning while we turned our pedals. The night out was supposed to be an escape – but really it was the rest of our lives, the very existence of the professional cyclist, that was out of the ordinary. One day it would end and – depending on who we were, what we’d accomplished and what we’d learned – we would either parachute to a soft landing or drop down to earth with a thud. All along, though, our secret was the sheer joy that we took in riding our bikes together and winning. I think we were all still living half in hope, half in denial. In the event that Bob found the sponsor and the money, I knew it would be very hard to turn my back on everyone in our makeshift disco that night. But the future of the team was something that most of us chose not to contemplate. Better to live in the moment, dancing like we didn’t care.
AFTER CALIFORNIA, I’D gone back to the UK for, among other things, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards. Not nominated in 2009, fourth in 2009, this time I finished seventh of the ten nominees. The winner, deserved in my opinion, was the jockey Tony McCoy.
I then flew to Tuscany, where I spent Christmas with Max Sciandri and his family. Although my training had gone smoothly in California and I’d rarely if ever been in better shape in December, one thing I’d learned in 2010 was just how much energy was required to sustain your motivation and form all the way through the year to the Worlds in late September. With the Worlds one of my goals for 2011, I had taken it easy either side of the New Year. A little too easily as it happened – by the time I left for Australia in the middle of January I was three kilos heavier than my usual weight at that time of the year.
Even when I was lean, I had never had the kind of muscles that would rise in impressive, contoured ridges just below the skin’s surface. In races and on television, I always somehow managed to look fat. My weight was something that I worried about but also that I’d learned, with time, to control. Every year I’d take a month off at the end of the season and, having weighed 69 kilos at the Tour, I’d go up to 76 kilos by the time I started training again in November. It was the simple and predictable consequence of burning fewer calories than I consumed, and attending events and parties where I’d drink and eat things that during the season wouldn’t pass my lips. It was also a question of structure: at that time I had none. I would be getting last-minute calls to attend such and such an event, in this or that location, and bought whatever food was available in airports or shops on my route. Other riders could perhaps do the same and put on no more than a couple of kilos. Unfortunately, however, my metabolism wasn’t as fast as my sprinting or my backchat.
In spite of a few kilos of extra insulation, I wasn’t worried when I arrived in Australia for the start of the Tour Down Under. It was enough just to be racing, bearing in mind that exactly a year earlier I’d been lying under a duvet, sick. I had none of the health issues that had beset me in the 2010 season, and I was much happier in my private life. In Australia, I felt strong … but fat, and any hopes I had of nicking a stage win or two ended with a bad crash four kilometres from the end of the second stage. If I finished battered and bloodied there, the next day insult was added to injury when I found myself in a group of stragglers on a hilly finishing circuit – and moments later we were slaloming in and out of traffic, the police and race marshals having prematurely reopened the road. Only thanks to some pretty nifty bike-handling did we make it to the finish unscathed.
After Australia, my next race was the Tour of Qatar in February. Completely flat, and essentially six different combinations of the same cobweb of roads crossing the Qatari desert, this race was notoriously fast, windy and good preparation for the spring season. For me, once again, it started terribly. At 2.5 kilometres long, the prologue was the kind of short, sharp effort in which I’d often excelled in the past, and, sure enough, at the first time-check I was still very much in the hunt for a win and the first leader’s jersey of the race. The course was straightforward except for a couple of speed bumps. Supposing that the best way to hold my speed would be a low bunny hop, maybe just grazing or narrowly clearing the apex of the bump, I’d jarred my rear wheel on the first one but stayed in control. Approaching the second bump, I repeated the same steps; I jerked with my arms and felt the bike take off, but this time the impact was too heavy and catapulted me over my handlebars and onto the road. I’d hit my head in exactly the same place as in Australia and, though not as hard this time, it was enough to completely compromise my race. Because I was beaten up and not contesting any of the sprints, Mark Renshaw was able to ride for himself that week and also enjoyed the role reversal of having me as his domestique. He picked up one second place, one stage win and the general classification. Looking back, I think that Qatar was what convinced Mark that, if the team did fold, it was perhaps time for him to stop working for others and sprint for himself.
From Qatar, I hopped across the Persian Gulf, and finally took my first win of the season in the Tour of Oman. That week, Renshaw wasn’t racing. In a certain sense, our paths were already beginning to diverge.
It was also in that period, as the spring Classics approached, that I made at least one firm decision about my future: I didn’t want to carry on working with Bob, even in the increasingly remote eventuality of him finding a new sponsor. I’d assumed for a while now that HTC wouldn’t renew their contract with the team, but they had shown an interest in working with me on an individual basis. The press had reported that there had also been conversations between Bob and the audiovisual retailer RadioShack, whose team needed to somehow reinvent itself after Lance Armstrong’s second and definitive retirement, but those talks, too, would come to nothing. Bob was now so busy trying to win sponsorship that he was barely ever attending races, yet still implying in emails or via our directeurs sportifs that a deal of some sort was likely. I had lost all faith and patience with it; and couldn’t now envisage a situation whereby we would continue to work together.
For a few weeks, at least, I think Bob had decided that whether I stayed or not wouldn’t matter hugely. At Milan–San Remo I was put firmly in the shade by another HTC rider, Matt Goss. The pre-race plan had been for everyone to stick with me except Peter Velits, who would work for Gossy. In the morning, perhaps because of nerves and not for the first time before an important race, I had felt suddenly nauseous and started vomiting. The symptoms continued once I had got on my bike, ultimately leading to my capitulation on the crucial climb of La Cipressa. I had been dropped earlier in the race, on Le Manie, and the entire team, even Velits, had stayed with me and exhausted themselves by towing me back to the peloton. This had left Gossy completely isolated in the front group, but he ‘hid’ brilliantly in the wheels and duly blitzed the sprint. To anyone who had known Gossy as an Under-23, it frankly wasn’t much of a surprise. On turning pro, I think he had perhaps set himself back first by signing for Saxo Bank, who didn’t support him as much they should have. In the last year and a bit, though, having switched to our team, Gossy’s talent had finally bloomed.
I was thrilled for him. So, naturally, was Bob. With my victory tally for the year stuck on one, Bob may now have been less alarmed by the prospect of me leaving, since he had a ready-made replacement in Gossy. The reality was that we are completely different riders – Gossy is perhaps stronger and more versatile, though I am the faster sprinter. We are also very different people, for all that we had instantly clicked when he joined the team: Gossy is funny, outgoing but nothing like the same gift to headline writers (which is probably a good reflection on him!).
Despite feeling much fitter, the spring of 2011 was starting to bear a disturbing resemblance to the previous one. After San Remo, my next big target was Gent–Wevelgem, the one Belgian Classic that has traditionally favoured sprinters, yet which had always eluded me. The most iconic feature of the race and the most important strategically was the double-ascent of the cobbled Kemmelberg climb. On the first lap of the 2011 race I had punctured on the Kemmel and been forced to chase, but had caught and comfortably stuck with the main peloton when we tackled the Kemmel for a second time. The hard part was done, but then, as so often in the Classics, the race took an unexpected and, for me, irremediable turn. I was caught momentarily behind an innocuous-looking crash in the middle of the bunch, when I suddenly felt the back end of my bike jar and looked around to see the Movistar rider Ignatas Konovalovas with his front wheel jammed into my rear triangle. I stayed upright, but lost too many valuable seconds dodging the bodies that had also slowed or fallen around us and changing my wheel to have any chance of rejoining the main peloton. Gent-Wevelgem was turning into – and would continue to be – my bogey race: only once in three appearances to date in the ‘sprinters’ Classic’ had I actually been able to sprint for the win (in 2008, when I’d finished 17th due to poor positioning).
My fascination with Gent-Wevelgem and the other ‘cobbled’ Classics ran as deep as the treacherous, jagged ruts between their infamous pavé stones. I’d realised very early that I’d never have the body shape to be a climber, and as a teenager learning about professional cycling I was drawn to the races which celebrated qualities that I did possess, like speed on the flat and tenacity. Since turning pro in 2007 I had also, very willingly, undergone Brian Holm’s indoctrination in the ‘cult of the cobbles’: as far as Brian was concerned, the hard men of the north, the Flandriens such as 1970s Classics maestro Roger Vlaeminck, were gods. Other riders paled by comparison and were mere ‘hairdressers’ in Brian’s eyes.
With Brian fuelling the passion that I already had, I had been pestering my team managers for years to let me take part in the most dangerous and punishing of the cobbled Classics: Paris–Roubaix. In 2008 Allan Peiper had made a bet with me: I could do Roubaix if I won two stages at the Three Days of De Panne and Gent-Wevelgem. I had kept the first part of the bargain but not the second, and Allan wouldn’t cave. Now, though, partly because I’d shown some promise in the Tour de France stage that borrowed some of the Roubaix route in 2010, and partly because they couldn’t take any more of my earache, he and the other directeurs finally relented. My best legs were also, finally, coming out of hibernation: after my second stab at the Tour of Flanders, where I had mainly worked for the team in the first half of the race, I had won the Grote Scheldeprijs for the third time the following Wednesday.
Paris–Roubaix itself was everything that I’d expected and harder. While the Tour de Flanders is also famous for its cobbles, the pavé in Paris–Roubaix are bigger and even rougher: imagine riding down a river bed in a shopping trolley, in places at over 50 kilometres per hour, and that will give you some idea of the sensation. For a day or two before the race, my excitement had been driving Bernie nuts, partly because he knew what was coming, and he couldn’t comprehend how anyone would be relishing that amount of suffering. He had a point, although I would argue that my race might have been quite different had it not been for a mechanical problem and bike-change in the first hour. Complaining about punctures, however, or broken spokes or wheel changes at Paris–Roubaix, is a bit like booking a holiday in Manchester and complaining about the rain; it comes with the territory. I didn’t make it to the finish in the legendary Roubaix Velodrome, but then neither did 86 of the other 194 starters.
April 2011 would also see me make another debut – on Twitter. My manager, Chris Evans-Pollard, had been extolling the micro-blogging site’s virtues as a promotional tool for a while, but so far I’d resisted. Our team press officer, Kristy, certainly had nightmares about me opening an account. Finally, though, with Mark Renshaw also applying some pressure, I signed up at the end of April. Fortunately for all concerned, I did it at a time when I was content in my private life and didn’t have too much free time on my hands. The days when I would spend whole afternoons reading the online cycling press and their message boards – and usually getting riled by something or someone – were now long gone.
One thing that I wasn’t particularly satisfied about that spring was, funnily enough, the number of good commercial opportunities coming from Chris. In the five years since I turned pro, I had learned – slowly and often the hard way – that, while money would never be my primary motivation, ignoring the financial side of the job was irresponsible, and didn’t do me any favours. Me being me, and being a perfectionist, I also notice and get annoyed when I can see someone in my team or entourage not achieving the standards that I expect of them, especially when that affects me. I had been with Chris for just over a year at this point, after my previous manager, Fran Millar, stepped away from athlete management and to take a job at Team Sky. I could theoretically have stayed with Fran’s agency, Face Partnership, but she still owned some of the business and that clearly threw up a conflict of interests. Chris, who already managed Victoria Pendleton, seemed like a good alternative. He was in his mid-thirties, smart, personable and appeared to have significantly raised Vicki’s profile. I had hoped that he would do the same for me.
I had been willing to indulge and give Chris the benefit of my considerable doubt until the Giro in May. The Giro, the race itself, was a good one for me, starting with another sensational win for us in the team time trial in Turin. Back in 2009 I had screamed at my Italian teammate, Marco Pinotti, when he lost my wheel on the final corner, fearing that it might cost us vital seconds and me the pink jersey. But Marco quickly corrected his mistake and all had ended well, with the team winning the stage and me in pink. It therefore seemed perfectly fair and natural for Marco to lead us over the line in the 2011 team time trial, particularly as he was wearing the Italian national time trial champion’s green, white and red jersey, and the 2011 Giro was being billed as a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification. He also deserved it, having ridden superbly. Marco and I could scarcely have been more different – he was studious, undemonstrative, totally disinterested in fast cars and designer clothes – but I had always respected him and even specifically asked to room with him once or twice at races.
I took the pink jersey off Marco in Parma the following day, for one day only … but it was no cause for celebration. For the third time in succession I had failed to win the first sprint in a major tour. Perfectly teed up by Renshaw, I had waited a split second too long. I had seen Alessandro Petacchi appear over my right shoulder and then deliberately swing left and right across the road to block my path to the line as I tried to get around him. My anger boiled over into furious arm-waving in Petacchi’s direction as we came over the line, but ultimately what really got my goat was the inconsistency of the commissaires. I had lost points and, effectively, the green jersey at the 2009 Tour after a far less pronounced ‘deviation’ in Besançon. By the media’s estimation, Petacchi’s was a ‘cunning old pro, showing savoir faire’, whereas I was regularly portrayed as an ‘outlaw’ and a ‘kamikaze’.
A week would pass before I had any chance to make amends, which I did emphatically with successive wins in Teramo and Ravenna. For a few weeks I had been troubled by a nerve problem in my back – a tiny twinge that caused a mental block more than a physical one, and which left me permanently bracing myself for those spasms when I kicked hard. Finally I was able to blank it out and let go, with the result being this pair of comfortable wins. After the second one, as the race prepared to enter the high mountains, I pulled out of the Giro, as agreed with the team before the race.
I knew Chris was coming to the Giro, but was surprised to spot him in the VIP enclosure after the team time trial in Turin. I asked him later how he’d acquired a guest pass. Oh, that was simple, he said, he’d just got in touch with the organisers and told them that he was Mark Cavendish’s manager.
If I was already distinctly unimpressed then, I was furious when I discovered that Peta hadn’t been allowed into the enclosure where Chris was enjoying Prosecco and canapés. That night I told Chris how much it had bothered me, while also bluntly informing him that I was far from happy with his work so far. I told him I would give him until December to smarten up his act, and that, if he didn’t, I’d be looking for a new manager. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t feel hopeful that much would change.
AT THE GIRO itself, in truth, my frustration with Chris had very quickly been overtaken by much more serious and pressing concerns. I’d had the team time trial to worry about on the first day, the sprint in Parma on the second, and was wearing the pink jersey on stage three from Reggio nell’Emilia to Rapallo in Liguria. On that third day something else had occurred that had made not only the stage but also the entire Giro, and even our careers as professional cyclists, feel like an irrelevance: the Belgian rider, Wouter Weylandt, had turned to look behind him on the descent of the Passo del Bocco, stubbed his left foot against an iron rail running down one side of the road, spun out of control on impact and smashed into a wall on the opposite side. Around an hour later it was announced that he had died of his injuries.
Even before the descent and indeed before the stage, word had got around that the road down the Passo del Bocco was narrow, dangerous and tapered at the bottom, where the route hit the coast and a mad scramble for position would begin. With this in mind, having crested the summit adrift of the main peloton, Renshaw and I had embarked on one of our swooping skydives, catching and then passing more riders than we could count. One of these riders had been Wouter Weylandt. At the bottom of the descent, minutes later, we had slotted into a peloton where riders were already whispering in grave tones about a bad crash involving Weylandt. We heard nothing more until we arrived back at the team bus, the race having blown again on a climb before the finish to end my chances.
When confirmation arrived, silence descended upon the bus. I shivered. An hour or so earlier, he’d been riding at our side. They were his last moments of life.
We pulled up to our hotel and decanted out of the bus, heads bowed, speechless and numb. I found my room, got undressed and stepped into the shower. There, I burst into tears.
Weylandt wasn’t a close friend but I’d always liked him. He had a big, bright eyes, a ready smile and a penchant for eccentric hairstyles, all of which were a reflection of his personality. We had crossed swords in the odd sprint, as I of course had with Wouter’s best mate, Tyler Farrar. Tyler’s team, Garmin, were staying in the same hotel as us that night, but Tyler didn’t come down to dinner. What happened that day had put our petty squabbles into perspective; we were all part of the same family, all exposing ourselves to the same risks on a daily basis, and we’d lost one of our own.
The next day it was decided that we would pay tribute to Wouter by putting on a cortège, rather than a race. Each team rode for around 20 kilometres on the front, and scarcely a word was uttered all day. Fans lined the roadside with their applause and their banners commemorating Wouter and his race number at the Giro, 108.
It was both beautiful, moving and desperately sad. It also, inevitably, stirred up thoughts, images and memories that you usually went out of your way not to dwell on as a professional cyclist; the dangers the lurked on descents, in sprints, that I encountered and defied almost on a daily basis. On the evening of Weylandt’s death and the next day as we rode together – each in a world of our own but probably all thinking the same things – I questioned my career, the way I rode, and whether I could carry on. This was the inner voice of sanity, reason, perspective – and yet this was the one that would soon be drowned out when our warped sense of normality returned in a few hours’ time.
The only explanation was that love, our love for the sport, was deaf and blind.