‘IT’S NOT VERY logical,’ admitted the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme.
It was October 2010, and in front of a crowd of cycling’s glitterati at Paris’ Palais Congrès – and one very happy Manx sprinter – Christian Prudhomme was revealing the route for the 2011 Tour de France. The lack of ‘logic’ that Prudhomme was referring to was the fact that, despite 15 Tour stage wins since 2008, I had yet to win the green jersey competition, nominally designed to reward the best sprinter in the race.
I’d come close in the previous couple of years. In 2009 Thor Hushovd and my contentious disqualification for dangerous sprinting on stage 14 to Besançon had cost me, then in 2010 I had been too unnerved by the sudden loss of power from my legs on stage four to mop up essential points. On both occasions I’d come within a whisker of winning the green jersey – but there was something fundamentally wrong with the structure of the jersey competition if I was dominating to the extent that I had, yet still losing out to riders stockpiling points in the two or three ‘intermediate’ sprints dotted along on the stage routes.
Prudhomme had agreed and decided that the rules needed to change. In 2011, he confirmed, there would be just one ‘intermediate’ sprint on every stage, not two or three, and these would be worth a whopping 20 points to the winner, with a sliding scale of points right down to 15th place. Under the old system only the first three riders at the intermediate sprints had scored, with six points for first, four for second and two for the third rider over the line. The revamp meant that opting out of the intermediate sprints, as I had usually done in 2009 and 2010, judging the risk of wasting energy too great and the reward too meagre, would no longer be an option.
Parallel to this, there was also now a bigger premium on winning stages than had previously been the case: every sprint would be worth 45 points, ten more than under the old rules. Even more crucially, there would now be a ten-point difference between first and second place in sprints at the end of stages, double what it had been in the past.
Based on Prudhomme’s comments and these notable changes, it was widely assumed that I would be their main beneficiary. However, it was no foregone conclusion: a lot would depend on the placement of the intermediate sprints, which were only revealed a matter of weeks before the Grand Départ in the Vendée region; my task could theoretically been made even harder if, for instance, a large number of the intermediate sprints were placed soon after the major climbs.
One thing was beyond question, however: our commitment to banishing and avoiding the regrets of the previous two years. Mark Renshaw, more than anyone else, had been beating the same drum in the weeks and months leading up to the Tour: ‘We’re not coming home without that jersey.’ Nothing was left to chance in our preparation: when the locations of the intermediate sprints had been released, we studied them, and formulated our strategy. At the end of May, we had even gathered at a training camp in north-west France to test-ride the first four stages, in the hope that local knowledge would help to give us a flying start.
My last major warm-up race, the Tour of Switzerland in June, didn’t feature a single genuine sprint finish, as far as I could tell because the race organiser, a former pro by the name of Beat Zberg, thought that no one wanted to watch them. Nonetheless, surviving the glut of giant mountain passes that week had boosted my form and confidence. Further adding to my optimism, our Tour team had never been more singularly geared towards winning sprints. The eight express carriages on what I believed would be my fastest and best sprint train to date went by the names of Matt Goss, Bernie Eisel, Tony Martin, Danny Pate, Lars Bak, Mark Renshaw, Peter Velits and Tejay Van Garderen.
We were ready.
I WASN’T THE only one with high hopes for the 2011 Tour. British interest in the race had been steadily growing ever since the Grand Départ in London in 2007, and on Team Sky’s second Tour, Brad Wiggins had big ambitions in the general classification. A year earlier I would have endorsed Brad’s own view that his fourth place in the 2009 Tour (later amended to third, after Lance Armstrong’s disqualification) had been a one-off, the lucky coincidence of favourable circumstances. Over the first six months of 2011, however, I realised how wrong I had been. A cyclist can often gauge another rider’s form at a single glance, based on things that he does at moments of a race that to the watching public pass completely unnoticed. The way he moves up the peloton after a toilet break, his positioning, how the muscles in his calves flex beneath the skin … I had hardly seen Brad at a race all year but I studied him over the first week of the Tour and realised that he was a different animal from the one who had turned up 12 months earlier. Equally importantly, I’d heard the stories from guys who had been training with Brad at altitude, or others who had suffered on his wheel at the Nationals the week before the Tour, which Brad had won by 35 seconds from Pete Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas, and which I hadn’t finished.
‘Brad’s flying. FLYING,’ they all said.
‘Never seen him this good …’
‘Could win the Tour going like that.’
All of which was making headlines back in the UK, which brought with it pros and cons, one being that my future was the subject of intense speculation when we arrived in France.
In June, various ‘insiders’ had told journalists that my move to Sky had already been agreed, which wasn’t remotely accurate. My fear when these rumours first started circulating had been that Bob might even use them as an excuse not to pick me for the Tour, or perhaps the Vuelta a España in September, which would be key to my preparations for the World Championships. Privately, I think it had crossed Bob’s mind that Team Sky might be trying to hinder his search for a new sponsor. He had already seen five of our riders move to Sky at the end of 2009, with Michael Rogers joining them at the end of 2010. The demise of HTC would free up our riders for other teams. It wasn’t just me in demand; the team was crammed with talent, between members of my lead-out train and winners in their own right. HTC folding would also clear Sky’s path to something else: more race wins.
Bob wasn’t in the Vendée for the Grand Départ, illness having kept him away. He therefore missed Philippe Gilbert winning the first stage finishing atop the Mont des Alouettes, a one-kilometre climb that most pundits had decided would be too tough for yours truly. In fact, it wasn’t the climb that ruled me out but a puncture two kilometres from the line. Avoiding a crash in front of me, I had swerved and stabbed my front wheel on the crash barriers, punctured, and had to stop for a wheel change. There was then no way back into contention.
The next stage was one that we were all looking forward to and had prepared for on our spring recce: the team time trial. These were always the most stressful days for the directeurs, the mechanics and the riders, particularly with me around. In our press conference the previous week, I’d joked about how I went into ‘Full Metal Jacket mode’ before team time trials. Part of it was my desperation to do well and my perfectionism, but it was also sheer bafflement at the naivety of some professional bike riders about what this discipline required. While it mystified me, their failure to grasp even the fundamentals also made me realise what a fantastic education my coach, Rod Ellingworth, had given me and the other lads at the Academy when we were Under-23s. My pet hate was riders who would try to pull too hard or for too long on the front, just to comfort their ego; changes of pace, whether it was a guy slowing down because he’d been in the wind for too long, or suddenly accelerating, were poison for the team’s momentum. I would never tire of emphasising it, even if my teammates were sick of hearing it: ‘No fucking heroics!’
Two days before the Tour started, we had headed out, as a team, for a run-through on the race route. An Australian film crew had followed us, and, typically, I had kicked off about something or other, upon which Matt Goss had got the hump and told me to stop ranting, just like Bernie the previous year at the Vuelta. It had really been nothing but made a juicy little bit of footage for the Australian TV crew. When the clip was broadcast, for the rest of the media it was also an invitation to speculate about an internal rivalry between Gossy and me, fuelled by his win at Milan–San Remo.
In truth, all it had really been was me being myself in the build-up to the team time trial. It was the same on the bus within minutes of stage one ending, when I collared our sprint coach, Erik Zabel, and began talking tactics and techniques for the following day.
‘The first three men should be in their aero position,’ I told him, ‘the rest on the brake handles, so they can get as close as possible to the wheel in front and brake if they need to …’
Erik had nodded wearily.
‘Look, Erik, I know you fucking know, but we’ve got to make sure they know as well,’ I’d said, jabbing a finger towards my teammates.
The next day we had barely turned a pedal before we’d had to rethink everything. Moments before riding together from the team bus to the start-ramp, our young American, Tejay Van Garderen, had muttered something about not having the right wheels for the windy conditions, and Bernie had got annoyed.
‘You had half an hour to say something and you didn’t say anything,’ Bernie snapped.
Five hundred metres down the course, on the first left-hand bend, Bernie had clipped Tejay’s rear wheel and gone down. Waiting for Bernie to get up and get back on simply wasn’t viable: with Tony Martin, our strongest time triallist, drilling at the front as we exited the bend and hit a short rise, those who had been behind Bernie when he crashed now had to sprint to close the gap. It killed them, and the combination of this and our numerical disadvantage, with Bernie marooned back down the road, cost the team at least ten seconds – certainly more than the five that ended up separating us and the eventual stage winners, Garmin. When we arrived back at the bus, Bernie, who is one of the most resolutely upbeat people I’ve ever met, looked suicidal.
There were no points awarded on the green jersey competition in team time trials, which left the standings unchanged after two stages: Philippe Gilbert, the stage winner on the first day, led on 45, while I languished in 24th place, having picked up five points in the intermediate sprint on day one.
The new rules took some getting used to. What was already clear, and had been since the announcement of the new points scale, was that while you didn’t have to be winning intermediate sprints to challenge for the green jersey, neither could you ignore them. Tour stages tend to follow quite a stereotyped pattern, whereby at some point in the first two hours a breakaway group of four or five riders will shoot off down the road and consequently beat the main peloton to the intermediate sprint. In the old days this had often meant that the points on offer had already gone by the time we in the main bunch arrived, but now there were scoring opportunities for 15 riders, not three, and so unless there was a large breakaway, every intermediate sprint would somehow count.
It was interesting to see how my fellow sprinters had approached the intermediate sprint on the first day, and on stage three to Redon they were committing four or five men to the lead-out. A lot of it was down to ego, I’d decided, and the fact that sprinters are basically gladiators. For some, I sensed, it was about flexing their muscles more than picking up points. This was also something, I realised later, that the media would encourage by suggesting that the intermediate sprints were somehow indicative of what would happen two or three hours later on the finishing straight. That may have applied to other riders, but not to me; I knew what muscle damage was caused by even a seven- or eight-second effort, and how it could impact on your speed later when it really mattered. Despite that, here, on stage three, with five riders down the road, I had led the main bunch over the white line to take sixth place and ten points.
The good news as we headed into Redon, with the breakaway now caught, was that my legs were starting to sing. I clearly wasn’t the only one in my team, but therein lay a danger to which we duly succumbed: in our over-eagerness to get to the first sprint, we’d gone too early. With four kilometres, Bernie had pulled off, leaving just Tony Martin, Gossy, Renshaw and then me, and even one of Tony’s gargantuan efforts could only take us just inside the two-to-go barrier. At this rate, I’d be in the wind at 700 metres to go, not 200, so I decided to gamble: with 1,500 metres to go I let Renshaw’s wheel go, allowing him and Gossy to pull clear. This would force the sprint trains behind me to surge, with the idea being that I would latch onto another team’s train as they came past me.
I’d acted on instinct and the gamble didn’t pay off. There were no gaps or good openings to slot into, no good wheels to follow. Riders had flooded past me on either side, leaving me submerged and too far back. I managed to get myself back into a reasonable position as we swung around the final bend – reasonable except for one thing: the rider on my inside was Romain ‘The Menace’ Feillu, who took us both wide and almost into the barriers. I unclipped my right foot from the pedal, ready to crash, but skidded like a speedway rider to stay upright. By then I was 50, maybe 60 metres behind Tyler Farrar and his lead-out man Julien Dean. In the last 500 metres I went like a cannonball but needed another 50 metres of road to catch them. Tyler Farrar held on to win, and I finished fifth.
If I’m honest, I can’t say that I was thrilled for Tyler. There was something that never failed to wind me up about the way the media had built him up, the way he added to the hype by exaggerating the importance of my team in interviews, and not fully acknowledging that his was just as strong when it came to lead-outs. For all the talk, he’d only ever beaten me once in my career when I hadn’t had mechanical problems or some other issue. I didn’t rate him, and that day couldn’t quite bring myself to congratulate him in my interviews after the stage. Instead, I made some typically forthright remarks about ‘kamikaze Romain Feillu’ and how he ‘always causes havoc’.
What the journalists who had interviewed me on the steps of our bus didn’t know was that when I’d gone back inside Mark Renshaw had given me a lecture. Apparently when I’d left the gap 1,500 metres out, he and Gossy had heard ‘NO!’, when in fact I’d shouted, ‘GO!’. In any case, Renshaw said, it was a stupid move: ‘the kind of thing might work at the Giro, but we’re not at the Giro …’
My bad day at the office was not yet over. An hour after the finish, the commissaires announced that Thor Hushovd and I had been disqualified from the intermediate sprint and lost our points, supposedly because we had both deviated from our lanes as we fought to follow Philippe Gilbert’s wheel. All that had really happened was that Thor had tried to jump in between Philippe and me, had leant on me slightly, and I’d leant back. The decision was farcical and everyone thought so. But then, equally, nothing really surprised me when it came from the commissaires any more …
Once again, it was turning into a pretty miserable start to the Tour. There was no discernible improvement, either, after a hilly stage the next day through Brittany, won by Cadel Evans: I now trailed the new leader in the green jersey competition, the Spaniard José Joaquín Rojas Gil, by 48 points. He had 82, I was on 34.
The next day we stayed in Brittany, but I could have been back on the Isle of Man. It was green, it was gnarly and it was windy. The last 25 kilometres hugged the coast, and the last three had the feel of a roller-coaster ride, rippling up and over headlands. We had studied it on Google Street View and decided that a stage win was still well within my capabilities and had set off with that in mind … until Erik Zabel radioed our directeurs sportifs halfway through the stage to suggest that it was harder than we’d imagined. Erik said that at three to go the road ramped up at 12 per cent and that I and the team would need to really dig in there to have any chance. That, when the road plateaued under the three kilometre banner, I decided, would be my finish line.
When it came, my chin was nearly on my top-tube, my vision began to fog – but I somehow made it over in fourth wheel.
A win from here was improbable at best, and would have rivalled the penultimate one of my six in 2009, at Aubenas, which I considered my best ever at the Tour. The task was made harder still when, with a kilometre to go, André Greipel barged me towards the barriers. The precedent had been set in the intermediate sprint two days earlier, with my disqualification for leaning on Hushovd: I couldn’t retaliate, even if the impact had killed my momentum and left me 20 wheels back, surely out of it. Now I was sprinting for the minor positions, to pick up a few meagre points …
Or so I thought. With the road now rising towards the finish line from the 500-metres-to-go sign, I glimpsed a white jersey whose owner I mistook to be Brad Wiggins but was actually Geraint Thomas. I promptly jumped into Gee’s slipstream, the lactic stinging my every sinew, and pushed and pushed until, 40 seconds later, I glimpsed the finish line through the spokes in my front wheel. Somehow, against all the odds, I’d won. Whether out of shock or exhaustion, I could barely even lift my hands off the bars to celebrate.
My press conference afterwards was the usual, sedate affair: I announced to the world’s press that among them were ‘ignoramuses’ whom I’d been glad to shut up, threatened to sue a journalist who had misheard José Joaquín Rojas’s account of a tangle with Alessandro Petacchi for suggesting that it had been with me, and finally semi-seriously admitted that we’d be there all night if I started talking about the ‘problems in my head’ to which I’d alluded in an interview the previous day. Poor Kristy, our press officer, stood to the side of the stage no doubt despairing.
After five stages, things were at least looking up for me and the team in the green jersey competition. Philippe Gilbert, who’d come second on the stage, was the new leader with 120 points, but after my victory I was within striking distance on 84. After stage six, another hilly one which lent yet more credence to my theory that the Tour organisers were on a crusade to eradicate bunch sprints, probably because they were fed up with our domination, the gap had widened to 144 points against 94.
A case, then, of one step forward, two steps back. But while stage six might not have suited me, stage seven seemed the perfect chance for me to close the gap again.
AT THE ROUTE presentation in October 2010 I had flipped open the information pack given to us by the race organisers, scrolled down the list of stages and felt my eyes immediately drawn to number seven. What grabbed my attention wasn’t the fact that it looked to be only the second, nailed-on bunch sprint of the Tour, but rather where it was taking us.
I don’t think Châteauroux’s inhabitants will feel too aggrieved to hear me say that, by most measures, their town is not one of France’s most illustrious or memorable. It lies landlocked in the bullseye of France, surrounded on all sides by flat, featureless plains. Fifty thousand people live there, it has an impressive cathedral, some museums and a pretty old town, but even judging by the paragraph of tourist blurb in the Tour route book there aren’t too many reasons to plan a trip.
Despite this hardly glowing reference, Châteauroux happens to be my favourite place in France. Why? Because it was there that I won my first ever Tour de France stage, in 2008, and there that my HTC teammates now offered a masterclass in 2011. This time around, the Tour’s route planners had thrown a spanner in the works by positioning the intermediate sprint just 25 kilometres from the finish line, as the road doglegged from its southward course to the east. The danger was that, with the change of direction and the wind suddenly gusting across the road at a different angle, a team or teams would try to split the bunch as soon as we turned after the sprint. The way to make sure that we were all on the right side if the elastic did snap was for the whole team to swarm to the front the second I crossed that intermediate sprint line. Sure enough, within seconds of me edging out Rojas for the 11 leftover points, they were wrapped around me in a protective cocoon. It was just as well as Fabian Cancellara’s Leopard Trek was soon applying exactly the kind of pressure we’d successfully pre-empted at the front.
Our last ten kilometres that day would have had connoisseurs swooning. It’s often said that a sprinter’s train sets a fast tempo to deter and soak up attacks, but really that’s only its most rudimentary, in some way least important, function. The success of a sprint train is gauged by the amount of space that it creates and not its speed, although the two are intimately linked: the faster the train, generally speaking, the harder it is for other teams and riders to crowd around and cramp its last wagon, in our case me. Here, we flirted with perfection, our line extending out of the peloton like the barrel from a gun. Everyone went beyond the call of duty, Peter Velits even finishing his work with three kilometres to go, slotting back into the train, then returning for a second shift between the two and 1.7 to go mark. The sprint itself was a simple drag race, Greipel having kicked from a deep position then gone wide to the right as he appeared in my sightline, while I hugged the barriers on the left. There was no doubt that André had responded to having a team built around him this season, was making fewer mistakes, and had got quicker. While I still had the edge – quite accurately quantified by the one bike-length that was my winning margin here – André had emerged as my most competitive rival.
My victory celebration was premeditated, but nothing to trouble the censors, nothing like at Romandy the year before: I had simply tried to re-enact exactly what I’d done on the same finish-line three years earlier, lifting my arms above my head and gripping my helmet with both hands, this time in only mock disbelief.
Three years. It was hard to believe it wasn’t more. The last time I’d won here, it had felt like I flicked a switch as I crossed the finish line, and with that my life changed. The disbelief had been real. Before Châteauoux I had won stages at the 2008 Giro d’Italia, my first in a major tour, but the Tour was and still is the only bike race where a stage-win could have that sudden, transformative effect.
Even at the time I’d been adamant that riches and fame wouldn’t change me, and in a certain sense I’d been right, but on other levels I could see that, three years later, so much was different now. While I still adored my job, it had become that – a job – with high stakes and daunting responsibilities towards teammates, sponsors, the public and myself. For the most part I relished the pressure, and yet there were times when so many people’s state of mind seemed to depend on what I did aboard my bike. That was what had got to me so much in 2010: while I was devoting all of my energy to putting myself back on track, the media in particular seemed aggrieved that I wasn’t working to their timetable. For all that I was intelligent and experienced enough by then to have worked out the rules of the game, it still wasn’t easy to learn, mature and grow at my own pace whilst constantly in the spotlight. This was especially true given my habit of reacting instinctively, heart throbbing from my sleeve. That same qualities that were ‘raw’, ‘refreshing’, ‘endearing’ when I was winning were flipped to become ‘rash’, ‘tiresome’ and ‘obnoxious’; when I wasn’t; depending on the day, I either reaped the benefits or paid the cost.
Ours was a fickle existence, and I was reminded of that moments after stepping off the podium in Châteauroux. In an interview with ITV’s Ned Boulting, I discovered that Brad had crashed around 40 kilometres from the finish and was out of the race with a broken collarbone. The joy drained from me. I was crushed for him. Before the Tour, the excitement and curiosity among all of the British riders had been palpable. Now he was out of the race, a deep respect for the hard work that he’d done and the sacrifices that he’d made accentuated our sympathy.
If a British rider wasn’t going to be wearing yellow in Paris, I could at least now make sure that one was wearing green. My second win in Châteauroux perhaps hadn’t changed my life, but it had caused a major shift in momentum in the points competition. Rojas still led on 167, but I now trailed by only 17.