OVER THE COURSE of my seven years as a professional cyclist I have being accused of many things. Bowing to convention, though, has not been one of them.
Take any journey with a team of professional cyclists, in a plane, a train or an automobile. Look around and you’ll see a group of young men doing what young men generally do: you’ll see headphones, glossy magazines full of gadgets and girls in bikinis, and perhaps if you’re lucky the odd newspaper (turned to the sports pages, of course).
When you understand this, there can be few surprises – or so my new Omega Pharma–Quick-Step teammates thought. On our flight to Slovakia in December for our first gathering of the 2012–13 winter, I could feel their eyes on me. I looked up to see Matteo Trentin in the seat next to me craning his neck to get a better view of what I was doing; the expression on his face was one of utter bafflement.
‘Ma che cazzo fai?’
My Italian may not be brilliant, but I knew what that meant.
‘What the fuck?’
‘It’s a puzzle book,’ I said. ‘Logic puzzles. It’s training for the mind. For decision making. Helps me in sprints.’
Matteo was bewildered at first, then curious, then before long he too was hooked. Soon there wouldn’t be a copy of GQ in sight.
For me, Omega Pharma–Quick-Step had been a natural choice as soon as I knew that I could leave Team Sky. The Belgian team’s manager, Patrick Lefevere, had declared and repeatedly reaffirmed his interest in signing me during my time at HTC, much to Bob Stapleton’s annoyance. So when he knew that I’d be on the market at the end of the 2012 season he quickly made an offer. Other teams proposed bigger salaries, but there were several reasons, besides Patrick’s long-standing admiration, that swung the balance in his favour. One was the chance to link back up with Brian Holm and Rolf Aldag, both of whom had joined Omega Pharma–Quick-Step after the collapse of HTC. Another was my relationship with Specialized, the bikes and the company, who had supplied us at HTC and would again here. Finally, I was attracted to the history of Patrick’s team, which had existed in various forms with various names since the 1990s, and which had traditionally thrived in the races that I’d dreamt about as a kid – Paris–Roubaix, the Tour of Flanders. Races for real men, real bike riders.
For every incentive to choose Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, there were also regrets about leaving Team Sky. The main one, clearly, was that the starry-eyed hopes and expectations that I’d had a year earlier hadn’t been fulfilled, while other regrets concerned what and perhaps more to the point who I was leaving behind. I had been desperate for Bernie Eisel to come with me to Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, but Bernie had also signed a three-year contract with Sky at the end of 2011 and he, unlike me, was happy enough to stay. Having said goodbye to Mark Renshaw the previous year, I’d now lost my two most important and trusted teammates within the space of 12 months.
There were at least some familiar faces, old friends at my new home. As well as Brian and Rolf, there were also former HTC riders Tony Martin, Bert Grabsch, the Velits twins and Frantisek Rabon. My first impression of the other guys in Slovakia was also unreservedly positive. It had been billed by the management as a team-building exercise, taking the form of a military-style survival camp a bit like the ones that Bjarne Riis had introduced, amid much fanfare, at CSC a decade ago. Riis’s were notoriously brutal, sleepless two- and three-day ordeals in the Scandinavian wilderness; they were all about pushing limits of endurance and fostering team spirit, or, as cynics said, being seen to by the press.
Our camp in Slovakia was somewhat tamer but no doubt considerably more enjoyable at the same time. A similar comparison could be made a month later between our first real, bike-riding, training camp of the winter and the one I had attended a year earlier with Sky – though here the contrast resided more in the atmosphere than the difficulty level. The format with Omega Pharma–Quick-Step was much more like it had been at HTC or, before that, T-Mobile: Sebastian Weber had tried to tailor highly specific training programmes and drills in my first training camps there in the 2006 and 2007, and most of us had ignored him.
Here, at the first camp in Majorca before Christmas and the second one on the Costa Blanca in January, we pretty much just rode our bikes. The team physiologist, a young Belgian named Koen Pelgrim, told me one day that I was on the list to do a rig test in the lab, to which I replied that there was absolutely no point: I’d be shit because I always was in these things and the tests said absolutely nothing about my ability to win races. At first he tried to insist and said that he understood but it was his job. Eventually he gave up. This more or less summed up the lowstress, commonsense approach to most things in the team. What we lost in science and po-faced seriousness we made up for by being relaxed and having fun both on our bikes and at the hotel in the evening. Peta said that, on the phone, it was the happiest that I’d ever sounded when I’d called from a camp.
I got the sense that a few people, riders and staff, had been apprehensive about me joining the team, because of my reputation for being hot-headed or demanding. Over the next few weeks and months many would tell me that I’d surprised them; yes, I could be short-tempered if people didn’t live up to the standards that I expected, but if they did I went out of my way to express my gratitude. I was also never awkward for the sake of being awkward, unlike other riders who had been my teammates in the past.
It was about being professional and a perfectionist. So when, at my first race of the year, the Tour de San Luis in Argentina, I complained about my brakes feeling spongy, that wasn’t just me being a diva, something I would prove by working every bit as hard as the mechanics to find the cause of the problem and solve it. In this case, having completely stripped the brake unit down and changed the cables, we were still scratching our heads, until finally we realised that the problem was something most people wouldn’t even have noticed: a tiny piece of plastic threading the brake-cable into my frame. We solved it by gluing the piece of plastic to the frame, before making a short home video to send to Specialized and show them what we’d done. I gave my equipment suppliers this kind of feedback on a regular basis. With time the smart ones had realised that I was providing information that could and often did help them to improve their product, not just kicking up a fuss.
I had added the Tour de San Luis to my programme at the end of January as a spur to keep my training up and my weight down over Christmas and the New Year, and I arrived in Argentina in good form. Leaving Sky meant that, for the first time since my junior days, I wouldn’t be coached by Rod, and was instead going to try a DIY approach using my own knowledge, intuition and some of the training programmes that Rod and Tim Kerrison had given me the previous year. It was very early days but it seemed to be working: I won the first stage in Argentina, the first time in my career that I had won my first race of the season, then I was part of a team that blew the opposition away at the Tour of Qatar. I won four stages and the general classification. Friends and family said that I was unrecognisable from the person and rider that I’d been at Sky a year earlier.
After a period of good, old-school training on the Isle of Man, then another productive week at Tirreno–Adriatico, where I reinvented myself as a mountain domestique for my teammate Michał Kwiatkowski, I arrived at Milan–San Remo confident but cagey. I’d said in the press that, my 2009 win notwithstanding, it was a race that I would always have a chance of winning, but only in particular circumstances that were beyond my control. In the build-up to the 2009 race I’d more or less written myself off, and journalists had taken every bluffed word at face value, but in the four years since then I’d learned the hard way that Milan–San Remo really was a cruel mistress. When I said now that I didn’t consider myself a favourite, I really was telling the truth.
I did at least have the considerable advantage that day of excellent form and my team’s multi-pronged attack. The plan was nothing revolutionary in tactical terms, but it had the potential to lure rival teams into a fatal trap: Sylvain Chavanel, our ace baroudeur or breakaway specialist, would try to pull away in a group on the penultimate climb, La Cipressa, whereupon we in the main group would stop working on the pretext that we had Chava down the road. Chava, meanwhile, would also ‘sit on’ the break, collaborate only half-heartedly if at all, his excuse being that I was back in the peloton and that we wanted a sprint finish. In either eventuality – whether the break stayed away or was absorbed by the bunch – we would all have saved energy and given ourselves a clear edge.
What no one had banked on, not even having seen the forecast, was weather conditions that would have made an Eskimo think twice about venturing outdoors. What began as cold drizzle in Milan turned to sleet as we left town, and then a blizzard as we neared the coast. The first and highest climb on the route, the Passo del Turchino, was completely snowbound and therefore impassable. Unable to find a suitable deviation, the organisers announced – and our directeurs informed us over the radio – that the race would be suspended at the 117km mark and restarted 42 kilometres up the road, the Turchino and Le Manie climbs having been removed from the route.
The last half hour or so before the stoppage was more like something from Napoleon’s Moscow campaign than Milan–San Remo. No one was changing gear, it being impossible to move the chain onto cogs cloaked in a thick layer of ice. You couldn’t see through the sheath of snow that had settled on your glasses, yet you couldn’t take those glasses off, either, because when you did your eyes would freeze over … It was absolutely brutal, some said barbaric. On the bus my teammates and I howled in agony. Michał Kwiatkowski was shaking like a pneumatic drill. We drove towards the restart and the weather improved considerably – it was now around five degrees and the snow had turned to rain again – but some riders either hadn’t recovered or weren’t prepared to risk the same ordeal again. Out of my team, Tom Boonen, Niki Terpstra and Stijn Vandenbergh all announced that they were pulling out. Which was fine – if a little hard to understand for someone who had grown up on the Isle of Man, with Isle of Man weather. I shrugged, slapped some embrocation oil on my calves and thighs and went outside for the second half.
In 2009 I’d known or could have guessed that it was my day almost as soon as I hit the Capi – the sequence of three short but steep promontories which act as the gateway to the San Remo finale. Four years on, in the same place, I had the same sensation not just of power but almost of a euphoria coursing through my leg muscles. After the Capi, Chavanel guided me expertly up the side of the peloton and onto the front at the foot of the Cipressa, where it was time to execute the plan. Chava accelerated, dragging a small group with him, while I hung back and cruised up the climb.
Chava had gone over the top and down the other side when, from my point of view, everything started to unravel. First, my brakes wouldn’t grip on the wet, treacherous descent of the Cipressa, then I heard our directeur sportif, Wilfred Peeters, imploring Chava to go harder in the break. This would have been perfectly normal had we not agreed before the race that Chava wouldn’t work. My conclusion later was that Peeters didn’t have a lot of faith in me, which may also have explained why he didn’t put more pressure on Boonen, Vandenbergh and Terpstra to stay in the race. I didn’t hold it against those guys, and I know that everything’s easy with hindsight, but I believe now that I could have won that day with their help, and that I’ll never have a better opportunity to repeat my 2009 triumph.
Instead, neither Chava nor I could quite pull it off. The peloton came back together, Chava latched onto another small group that attacked over the final climb, the Poggio, while the same issues with my braking made it impossible for me to join them. Chava was always going to struggle in a sprint, especially after his earlier efforts, and could only manage fourth. My friend and former teammate, Gerald Ciolek, won an unexpected victory but that brought cold – very cold – comfort.
It would be over-dramatising things to say that my honeymoon period with the new team was over, but San Remo did mark the start of a very necessary but sometimes uncomfortable period of mutual adaptation. The problems, if you can call them that, in my opinion stemmed from a culture and cycling heritage that was also the team’s strength and one of the reasons that I had plumped for Omega Pharma–Quick-Step over other outfits. Simply put, both the Belgian riders and staff lived for, built their world around and couldn’t see beyond the ten weeks of racing stretching from late February to the end of April: the Spring Classics. Within this period was one week that they elevated to an even higher, positively astronomical plane of importance and prestige – the eight days of what they called the ‘Holy Week’, book-ended by the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix.
I shared the Belgian obsession with these races, even if I was unlikely to win one, but I also quickly found out that this fixation could have a damaging effect on mentalities within the team. The young Belgian riders, I noticed in two Belgian stage races that I rode in March and April, the Three Days of West Flanders and the Three Days of De Panne, seemed to focus on the Classics (and Flanders and Roubaix in particular) almost to the exclusion of anything else. Either that or they suffered indirectly from the hysteria around these races in Belgium, which lasted for weeks and generated kilometres and kilometres of newsprint in dailies like Het Nieuwsblad and Het Laaste Nieuws. Any race that was seen to have any bearing on what would happen in Flanders or Roubaix would be dissected and discussed over pages and pages, meaning that any decent performance by a young Belgian rider would receive inordinate amounts of coverage.
None of this would have bothered me – if it hadn’t affected me. Those same young Belgians who fantasised day and night about Flanders and Roubaix, desperate to see their name in Het Nieuwsblad, weren’t fully committing in their roles as domestiques. Sometimes I was getting the impression that they would rather finish in 20th place, in the second group, than bury themselves to bring that group back to the front and therefore give me a chance in a sprint finish. Or, in the lead-out train, they would back off and refuse to take the necessary, calculated risks because they were afraid of crashing and jeopardising their Classics season. They were two different types of egotism – the former more to do with naked ambition, the latter with self-preservation – and, without naming names, I’d seen a version of the former at Tirreno–Adriatico and Gent–Wevelgem, and examples of the latter at Scheldeprijs. Such a singular preoccupation with one period of the year and two races, in particular, was completely alien to me, having spent most of my career in a team, HTC, where we approached every race as if it was our last.
Matters weren’t helped by what I still perceived as Wilfred Peeters’ lack of confidence in me. He would invariably work to make a break succeed rather than try to bring it back in the expectation of me winning a bunch sprint. I made these points to Patrick Lefevere, to Brian and to other members of the management, and was told things would improve as soon as the Classics were out of the way. To the Belgians the end of April might as well have been the end of the season, but these guys had so much they could offer outside of the Classics. For example, when we arrived in Naples for the Giro d’Italia start in the first week of May, Julien Vermote was a 23-year-old in his third pro season that the team didn’t seem to know what to do with. He would leave three weeks later having discovered – and shown me – that he could look after a sprinter in a stage race like few other riders in the peloton, and hence suddenly having found his identity as a rider.
The team as a whole in Italy brought back memories of our very best groups at HTC. Brian, who claimed to hate Italy as much as he loved Great Britain, but would change his mind after this, his first full Giro, was one of our directeurs; a former Italian pro named Davide Bramati or just ‘Brama’ was the other. If Rolf Aldag and Brian had formerly been one of the best comedy double acts in cycling, Brian and Brama, or as Davide called himself, ‘cycling’s Mourinho’, ran them close. From the first day, when Brian came up to my room to tell me that Team Sky’s Head of Technical Operations, Carsten Jeppesen, had called me ‘fat’, thinking that it would fire me up, the whole team just clicked. In the best, most sociable teams, riders will stay at the dinner table shooting the breeze for an hour, maybe even two after their meal. Here, not only would we do that, but instead of trotting off to bed we’d then all cram in one room to continue the conversation.
Camaraderie off the road translated into cohesion on it. I would win five stages – every sprint that I contested, including one that I had completely ruled out on the morning of the stage. That particular victory came at the end of the second week, on a beautiful but unforgiving route through the Langhe hills in Piedmont. I’d put it to Brian in the morning that the guys had ridden too hard to set up my stage win the previous day and therefore deserved a rest, and besides, there was no guarantee that I’d get over the climbs in the finale. Brian agreed, and off we went on what was going to be longest stage of the Giro at 242 kilometres. Two hours in, the break had gone and gained 13 minutes and we were happily cruising along in the bunch. Then Brian buzzed in on the radio.
‘Right, guys, to the front. We’re riding for a sprint today …’
I could have throttled him but, now that he’d said it, I also couldn’t opt out. The guys duly went to the front, rode like dervishes, the gap came down, and it was left to me to apply the coup de grâce on one of the hardest, hilliest finishes that I’ve ever even attempted to win on. I finished half-dead, on my hands and knees – but victorious. When Brian tried to congratulate me later, I gave him the shoulder. I was still furious at him for what he’d made me do.
That was my fourth stage win of the five and my last before a final week jammed with mountains and blighted by more bad Italian weather. The sensible decision at this point might have been to pull out and rest up for the Tour, but I never really considered that option. It wasn’t only the fact that I was leading the points competition and had the chance to add the Giro’s red jersey to the Tour de France maillot vert that I’d won in 2011 and the Vuelta a España maillot verde that I’d taken in 2010. I also couldn’t bring myself to desert a team of riders who had already sacrificed half of their race for me, in some cases compromising the personal objectives that they’d come to Italy to pursue.
I wouldn’t deny that more of the kind of weather that we’d seen at San Remo made the last week slightly less arduous than may otherwise have been the case. Climbs were airbrushed from the route or neutralised, and one entire mountain stage was cancelled entirely, depriving my main rivals of vital points. It still took something quite special on the last day – first place in two intermediate sprints and the stage win – to overhaul an 11-point deficit from Vincenzo Nibali and become the first Briton to win the points competition at the Giro d’Italia. I now also joined an even more elite group – riders who had completed a grand slam of points jerseys in all three major tours. Only Eddy Merckx, Laurent Jalabert, Alessandro Petacchi and Djamolidine Abdoujaparov had previously achieved this feat. The list perhaps would have been longer, but the Giro’s excessively mountainous routes and its points scale opened the competition to a much broader range of riders than the Tour’s maillot vert, in particular. That was why, in 2012, I’d been pipped by a climber, Joaquim Rodríguez, whereas here I’d edged out the overall Giro winner Nibali.
I had ticked another box in my checklist of lifetime ambitions, my form was fantastic, and my team at the Giro had neared perfection. The outlook had rarely if ever been brighter as I readied myself for another Tour de France … and yet that Tour was about to leave me wondering whether, at 28, my best days might have already come and gone.
JUAN ANTONIO FLECHA’S omission from the Sky team had been the first hint that my 2012 Tour de France might not turn out quite the way I wanted. This time, the line-up for my first Grande Boucle with Omega Pharma–Quick-Step filled me with optimism. It wasn’t a team of one-dimensional rouleurs picked solely for their ability in a lead-out train, but a collection of multi-talented riders as adept at helping me in the closing kilometres as they would be at sniffing out chances for stage wins of their own. Tony Martin exemplified that versatility: Tony was the world time trial champion yet also loved getting his hands dirty for me in a bunch sprint. The ‘Panzerwagen’ – the tank – as Brian had christened him, had ridden the Tour with me three times at HTC and was the prototype of what you wanted a Tour de France teammate to be: a Terminator on the bike, a gentleman who never whinged off it. Then we had Jérôme Pineau, who I suspect had been a bit of a scally in his youth (or whatever they call a scally in Nantes) and who had confessed to thinking that I was a bit of a prat before we became teammates. A lot of French riders held that view – and Jérôme explained what it was: in races, all they ever heard me say, or the only word they could consistently make out, was ‘fucking’. Or so Jérôme reckoned. He and I were joined in the team by another Frenchman, Sylvain Chavanel, Jérôme’s great mate and one of the most powerful, classiest riders in the world; if ever Chavanel was in a break, the whole peloton knew that it was in for a tough day. Sylvain, like Pineau, was always smiling, always upbeat and fulfilled the same anti-depressant role that had always been Bernie Eisel’s in my previous teams.
Like Jérôme, another of my teammates, the Dutchman Niki Terpstra, also had some fairly negative preconceptions about me before the start of the year – and this time the feeling was mutual. Niki was one of those guys who didn’t care who he pissed off in a race, just as long as he was doing his job for his leader. This made him an absolute menace if you were riding against him, or a precious ally if he was your teammate. Peter Velits, a Slovakian who had finished third overall in the 2010 Vuelta, was far too amiable to divide opinion in the same way, but equally valuable to my sprint train. Our young Pole Michał Kwiatkowski was similarly low-maintenance. He was one of the biggest prospects in cycling, and right from our first training camp in Slovakia Michał and I had gelled, and I’d quickly asked Patrick to change Michał’s race programme and pencil him in on the shortlist for the Tour.
The last two members of the team were also the last two components of my lead-out train: Matteo Trentin and Gert Steegmans. Matteo would be the penultimate man to peel off in the last kilometre, and had also been entrusted with an even more onerous role: he was my roommate. Matteo was 23 years old, blond, drove a Fiat Punto and hailed from high in the mountains of northern Italy, where his training options were limited to left and right into the same valley, or two different ways up a huge Dolomite climb. Matteo, like Michał, hadn’t been due to ride the Tour, but was finally included on my recommendation.
In the train, Matteo would precede Gert Steegmans: a giant, veteran Belgian with an enigmatic reputation. My first memory of Gert as a rider was from Scheldeprijs in 2007, where he’d been the Quick-Step team’s sprinter and I’d beaten him to take my first professional race win. Nearly six years on, when I signed for the team, Gert was probably the single rider that I was most looking forward to working with. He could be loud in the bunch, he could be a clown, but he was also one of the more deep-thinking riders around. As the last man and therefore most prominent member of the train, Gert was a convenient scapegoat when things went wrong and the criticism started coming from the public, the press and even the management. Gert, though, had a quality that I needed to learn: he could take it all on the chin.
The National Road Race Championship in Glasgow the week before the Grand Départ gave me a rare opportunity and obligation to race without the support of a full-size team. This handicap, together with the tight marking to which I was also subjected at the Nationals, meant that it would take something both unusual and special to win. Four laps from the end, I supplied it by moving clear with Pete Kennaugh and Ian Stannard, both of Team Sky, and Dave Millar of Garmin, then agreeing with Dave that we would work together against the Sky riders to ensure that one of us two prevailed. The way that I finally took the win, burning off Stannard after Dave had effectively taken care of Pete Kennaugh, suggested that I was in fantastic shape for the Tour, which I would have been, had I not started to notice the first symptoms of a chest infection the day before the Nationals. It got worse over the next few days, and one of the team doctors, Helge, told me that I needed to start a course of antibiotics immediately. I replied that antibiotics always ruined form, to which he replied that it was better to ruin my form than ruin my lungs. So I started the antibiotics and prepared to fly to Corsica, where the race would begin three days later.
In the airport and on the plane, my legs and back ached, and my whole body tingled with fever. I went straight to bed on arriving at the hotel that afternoon, but was then kept up most of the night with cramps. I trained the next day and waited for the antibiotics to kick in. That night, the Thursday, was even worse. I told Helge in the morning that I might not be able to start. We talked about stopping the antibiotics, but agreed to wait another day and see how I felt on Saturday, on the morning of the first stage. Twenty-four hours later, it wasn’t good: my muscles were still strangled by cramp and I was overcome with lethargy. We decided that I should start anyway and that three things might save me: the adrenaline, the simplicity of the course on that first day and the fact that I’d been careful not to talk about being ill in the press or even to anyone outside a small circle of people within the team. The Tour is a three-week game of poker, and to admit any sort of weakness or ailment is to invite your opponents to exploit it.
In the event, the most troublesome obstacle on that first stage would be not illness, not other riders, but … a bus wedged under the finish line. The story was classic fodder for TV quiz shows, but for those who didn’t see it: the Orica-GreenEDGE team bus and its driver were running late, having arrived at the finish-line just half an hour or so before the race was due to arrive, and – depending on who you believed – had either been waved underneath the bridge-like structure overhanging the line or been told to stop and ignored the advice. What no one could dispute was the outcome – a bus blocking the road and panic in the road.
It had all been going so smoothly, so easily. A benign-looking course doesn’t necessarily translate to a benign race, but this had been the least hairy first stage of a Tour that I could remember. With 25 kilometres to go we had taken control, with 10 to go we were building like a wave, with six to go we came to a chicane and a wall of noise from crowds banked on either side. It was at exactly that moment that I heard a voice, Brian Holm’s, in my earpiece: ‘Finish … three kilometres to go.’ That was about all I could make out. Brian repeated, ‘… three kilometres to go.’
‘Gert! Did you hear that?! Did he just say the finish has been moved to three kilometres to go?!’ I shouted to Steegmans.
Gert said he didn’t know. I got the same response from other riders from other teams. Total panic reigned for a few seconds, until Brian chimed in on the radio again, the message clearly audible this time: ‘The finish-line has moved. It’s at three kilometres to go now.’
Three kilometres? I looked down at my computer and saw six to go. Fu—
We had dropped back and now needed to quickly move forward as the peloton swarmed. One of the guys – might have been Tony, might have been Niki, might have been Peter – spotted an opening through the middle and tried to drag us through. Everyone made it, except me. I probed for another gap, and had finally drifted left towards the barriers and clear air when André Greipel brought down Tony Martin four positions ahead of me, causing a domino rally. In the run-up to the Tour I had been testing hydraulic brakes recently developed by the team’s component supplier, SRAM, and had liked them so much that I’d decided to use them on the first stage (hence becoming the first rider ever to use hydraulic brakes at the Tour de France). Now, behind the cascade of flesh and metal, I slammed them hard and came almost to a dead stop, while those around me skidded and sprawled. The only way around the bodies was left, off the route and into a slip-road. By the time I’d finished the detour, only five or six seconds later, the peloton was disappearing over the brow of a small rise. At this exact moment there was another crackle in my ear: ‘GUYS,’ Brian shouted, ‘the finish has been changed back. Normal finish now!’
Fu—
I tried but, as I feared, it was too late to rejoin the bunch and move into a sprinting position. Marcel Kittel, the young German who had beaten me once at the ZLM Toer in June, took the win in what turned out to be a heavily diluted sprint finish, in terms of both numbers and quality.
Even when I’d lost out in circumstances beyond my control, the frustration, the self-flagellation, the regret would usually have kicked in within a minute or two of me climbing onto the bus. In Bastia there was a further reason to rue what the press would describe the next day as a ‘débâcle’, a ‘fiasco’, even ‘a farce’ of a finale: with no prologue on the Tour route this year, it had been a very rare opportunity for a sprinter to take the yellow jersey. Reminding myself of this would usually have been an exercise in pure masochism, and yet here, as I sat down, unbuckled my helmet and silently stared into space, the anguish had subsided as soon as I glanced out of the window. Standing there, with Delilah in her arms, was Peta, and that was enough for everything else to fade into insignificance. Minutes later, what was now the familiar post-race commotion of Velcro shoe-straps being unfastened and the race relived through my teammates’ breathless post-mortems was interrupted by the shocking appearance of Tony Martin at the top of the steps. You would have said that he’d spent the last hours wrestling sharks, not riding a bike. For a few minutes he seemed woozy but OK, then Helge went to start cleaning his wounds and Tony simply passed out. Soon Helge and the Tour doctor would be unloading him into a stretcher and taking him to hospital. That night it was already being reported – because most right-minded people had assumed – that Tony had been taken back home to Germany and was out of the Tour. In fact, when he’d woken up in the hospital, more or less the first thing he’d said to Helge was, ‘I can ride tomorrow, right?’ Sure enough, the next day in Bastia he’d be on the start line, wrapped like a mummy in bandages, swathed in pain. It was nuts when you thought about it: the Tour de France was probably the only sporting event on earth where you could sustain injuries like that and have completely healed by the end.
I’d finished my course of antibiotics and thought that I was improving, but even a small, easy, uncategorised climb as the route turned inland on stage two gave me a very abrupt realitycheck. It was Jérôme Pineau’s job throughout the Tour to keep things ticking over at the front and ensure any breakaway was within a safe, catchable distance – which was what he was doing, only I couldn’t stand the pace.
‘Jérôme! Slow!’
It was an instruction that Jérôme would hear a few times that day. I looked down at the digital display of my power meter and noticed to my dismay that I was barely nudging above 300 watts, the sort of power I’d usually put out without breaking sweat, yet here I was labouring. I didn’t so much fear as expect the worst on the Col de Vizzavona, the first 1,000-metre climb of the Tour, and the worst was pretty bad. As I sunk through and out of the peloton like a lead weight, other riders glanced across and gawped, almost quizzically, as if to say, ‘Are you taking the piss?’ If only! My team stuck with me, but even sitting up and pootling along taking sips from their bottles, they were nearly leaving me behind. We finally caught and finished with a large gruppetto, 17 minutes behind the stage winner, Jan Bakelants.
The next day was another hilly, sinuous one along the cliffs on the west coast of Corsica, and even fully fit it would have been a push for to me contend. The good news was that I had started to feel better and that we were about to leave Corsica for the French mainland. The island had never hosted the Tour, so it had made a highly symbolic venue for the Grand Départ, and its beauty had also taken my breath away. At the same time, between the flights to get onto and off the island and the yacht that we took from the finish on day two to our hotel, it all felt a bit gimmicky. I’ll always be the biggest advocate of both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia … which is why I don’t think the Tour needs any bells and whistles: the history, the reputation, the difficulty and the riders are enough.
Three stages in, despite the missed opportunity of taking yellow on the first day, I wasn’t alarmed. I was inching back towards full health and, I had no reason to doubt, the first of several stage wins. On the morning of stage four, the team time trial, I ribbed Tony Martin, who still looked as though he’d spent our time in Corsica swimming with Jaws, about my brilliant record in team time trials in the Giro d’Italia, pointing out that I’d done two with him at Tour and never won. I don’t know whether this galvanised him, or for that matter how he was still managing to ride through the pain of his injuries, but when we did practice laps that morning Tony did a passable and out-of-character impersonation of Mark Cavendish; while I stayed fairly quiet, silently purring at the smoothness of our riding and our rotations, Tony barked instructions and encouragement. I loved watching him in that mood. I also knew that, in spite of the Panzerwagen’s injuries, we’d blitz it and either win or get very close. We went out and set the fastest time, 25 minutes and 57 seconds, then spent a tense hour and a half in the ‘hot seat’ beside the finish line, watching 17 teams fail to beat our mark. At ten to four, still glued to the TV monitor, we held our breath as Orica-GreenEDGE whipped around the last corner into the finishing straight, came over the line and stopped the clock on … 25 minutes and 56 seconds. They had beaten us by 75 hundredths of a second – or the difference between me being fully recovered or only 90 per cent, Tony having one less nasty wound, or one of us nailing a corner or going wide. And people wonder why ‘marginal gains’ are so important.
MOST RIDERS WOULD agree that you can do as many Tours de France as you like, but it’s not necessarily going to qualify you as an authority on major French tourist attractions or areas of outstanding natural beauty. The stages become numbers, or days of the week, and the 27 regions and 96 départements get lumped either into one of the main mountain ranges or the paradise, at least in my mind, that is any landscape without a major mountain. Years later you realise that your memory retains a full, pin-sharp film reel of certain stages and their setting, but has discarded others to the cutting-room floor.
It’s the same with all races. We remember what’s marked us, marked our career, perhaps even changed its course. Stage five, rolling west out of Cagnes-sur-Mer towards Marseille 228 kilometres away, appeared to represent nothing more complicated or nostalgia-inducing than an opportunity to win my stage. Instead, it turned into a odd sort of journey down memory lane. First, after 140 kilometres we bowled into a town whose name I vaguely recognised, through streets that were also vaguely familiar. Then I finally twigged: we were approaching and about to ride through what had been the finish line of stage two in 2009, the first of the six stages that I’d won that year. As we did, a broad grin spread across my face as I announced to everyone within earshot: ‘2009 Tour de France. Stage two. I won here.’ Good job that it was a hot day and everyone was wearing shades so that I couldn’t see the rolling eyes.
The next attack of déjà vu came a bit later and was more significant. I’d seen the name of the last climb of the day, the Col de la Gineste, on the route-book, and thought nothing of it, even when Jérôme Pineau talked about how it was a travesty that it wasn’t classified, how it was much harder than the preceding fourth-category climb. As we saw the road swirling up the cliffs above us, like smoke out of a chimney, it all came back: I’d done this climb on my very first day as a fully fledged pro, in GP La Marseillaise in 2007. Not only that, but I could remember being absolutely mystified as to how one of the Brits in the race, Jez Hunt, was up the road, on the attack, on such rugged terrain. I’d put this to another British rider, my teammate at the time, Roger Hammond.
‘Cav,’ he’d chuckled, ‘this is nothing. Not for professional racing, anyway.’
I think at that point, in 2007, I started to panic. Six years on, my team swarmed around me, as per our plan, and practically carried me over and down the other side, until the break was absorbed and we bombed down into the boulevards of Marseille. Trentin went early, so early that I thought we’d blown it, but he held on into the last corner where Gert took over. Gert is a huge hulk of a man, very fast and very explosive, the combination of which had provided some spectacular lead-outs but also posed me a fair few problems since the start of the year. Here, with 200 to go, he was moving so fast that it was tricky to even move around and kick past him. Finally, my nose was in front, I’d unglued everyone from my wheel and taken a relatively easy win, despite not having brilliant legs.
So far, so good. One sprint, one win. Two more back-to-back opportunities now awaited us, but, unbeknownst to me at the time, so did one of my hardest weeks to date as a Tour de France rider. By the end of it L’Équipe would be running a sort of obituary of my sprint domination with the headline CAVENDISH NO LONGER REIGNS. The worst of it was that, deep down, without even really admitting it myself, and maybe for the first time in my career, I’d started to wonder whether they might be right.
I DON’T LIKE excuses and have never had much time for people or bike riders who make them. Yet as that hardest week unfolded I could find and point to factors that in some way mitigated the near misses that, it being me, were now invariably described as ‘failures’.
In Montpellier on stage six there were undoubtedly a couple of issues. One was my bike – or ‘that fucking bike!’ as I referred to it on the bus after the stage, my booming voice easily audible to the scores of fans and journalists huddled around the bus. I had four or five bikes at the Tour, and I’d sensed that something might be wrong with this one on the second day in Corsica. Yes, my legs had felt heavy, listless, but that still didn’t seem to fully explain why I was struggling so badly. I’d wondered whether someone had shunted me on the first day and slightly damaged the bike, cracking the frame or a wheel and making them feel spongy. I’d asked the mechanics to strip it down and check it out. Meanwhile I had ridden stages three, five and was 40 kilometres from the end of stage six on a spare when I came down at a roundabout. The team car stopped, the mechanic handed me a new machine … or so I thought until, our radios having let us down and left me chasing without any teammates, I realised to my horror that I’d been given the same, spongy bike from stage two. It either hadn’t been changed or hadn’t been fixed, hence the ‘that fucking bike!’ diatribe.
My mood wasn’t helped by the fact that we had also gone too early again, duped by the stampede of general classification contenders and their teams that was now a daily occurrence. The conventional wisdom was that by staying at the front they would avoid crashes. In reality, it was more dangerous than ever up there, with more and better sprint teams sniffing around than in all of my previous Tours. Our problem was getting sucked into the frantic, stop–start chaos of it, losing patience and confidence in the timings we’d discussed before the stages. If one guy went too early or too hard, that could compromise everything. I wouldn’t ever criticise the guys if I felt that they were committed, and they had certainly been that in Montpellier. At the same time, I could also tell myself that the combination of the damaged bike, the chase after my crash and the imperfect lead-out had contributed as much to my defeat as the bloke who had beaten me – in this instance, André Greipel.
It’s rare for me to be beaten in a sprint and not immediately atone the next day. In Albi, on stage seven, I didn’t even get the opportunity: Peter Sagan and Cannondale unleashed hell on a second-category climb midway through another blisteringly hot and fast stage and that was me kaput. Sagan duly won the stage and left me looking at an already daunting 105-point deficit on the points classification.
Two days in the Pyrenees took my mind off my sprinting and onto the fight for survival. And on stage nine to Bagnères-de-Bigorre it was quite literally a fight. Early in the stage an Euskaltel rider swerved in front of me, I locked on the brakes, stalled, and shunted Geraint Thomas. I apologised and Gee didn’t make any fuss but from over my shoulder I could hear, even with my limited Spanish, what I knew was an expletive-laden tirade. I looked around. It was Ruben Lobato, another Euskaltel rider. Further angry words were exchanged, his again in Spanish, then Lobato decided to communicate in a more universal language: physical violence. He slapped me, sending my glasses flying off my face, and I swung back. All this was going on while we were still on our bikes, still moving: we were a couple more lusty blows away from having a punch-up in the middle of the peloton. Luckily, there were no commissaires watching and no TV cameras. We were probably fortunate, too, that one of the elder statesmen in the peloton, Stuart O’Grady, stepped in to break us up.
That night, after the stage, buses were waiting to take the riders to Tarbes airport, where we’d catch a plane to Nantes for the first rest-day of the race. And which team was sharing our bus? Euskaltel, of course. I took the chance to explain to their directeur sportif, Igor González de Galdeano, who said Lobato was young and naïve but that he’d have a word. He also mumbled something about how it was in everyone’s interests to get on, because we’d be in trouble if the commissaires saw us fighting.
‘Hang on, you’re forgetting something,’ I said. ‘He punched me, totally unprovoked.’ Usually when I’m in the wrong I’m the first to admit it, even if hours and days might have to pass before I do, but I wasn’t going to apologise for retaliating when someone slapped me in the face at 40 kilometres per hour.
The first rest-day, and the chance to spend time with Peta, Finn and Delilah, was the best possible distraction for 24 all-too-short hours. Then we were straight into some of the most challenging days of my Tour de France career. When the route had been unveiled nine months earlier my eyes had lit up on seeing the second week, with three probable sprint finishes in four days.
But while I got the sprint finishes I had hoped for, I couldn’t say the same for the results.
On stage ten into Saint-Malo my defeat to Kittel would have been headline-worthy enough, had the finish not been notable for other reasons. Kittel’s teammate, the Dutch rider Tom Veelers, had let his head droop and stopped looking where he was going as he finished his lead-out, veered right into my line and into my body with 300 metres to go. In the impact I stayed upright but lost momentum, while Veelers had crashed spectacularly in the middle of the road. Immediately fingers were pointed at me, mainly because, having concentrated on the frames immediately before and during the collision, the TV analysts generally neglected to mention that the road veered left after Veelers’ fall at exactly the same angle that I had taken.
I had then, admittedly, compounded the damage by getting shirty with a journalist who shouted above the scrum outside our bus: ‘Mark, are you to blame?’
How shirty? Enough to pull the voice recorder out of his hand – confiscate it, if you like – and only hand it back a couple of seconds later, after the realisation of how this would play in the morning papers had rushed to my head.
It didn’t look great, I’ll admit. There were better ways of diverting attention away from me, the crash and another missed opportunity to win a stage. Any journalists who hadn’t rushed to our team bus at the finish had waited for Veelers, and their questions had the effect of stoking his anger. I got hold of his number that night and called him with the intention of apologising and defusing things, despite not believing that I’d been in the wrong, but Veelers was having none of it.
‘You can come and apologise to my face,’ he said. To me, this was him starting to milk it.
If Veelers’ aim was to get people on his side and turn them against me, the boos that greeted me as I rolled onto the time trial course the next day confirmed that it had worked. Fans were still jeering – and had been since the start of my ride – when, approximately halfway around the course, a shower of warm liquid flew horizontally across my path, dousing my skin suit, helmet and sunglasses, and, worst of all, splashing my tongue and lips. On the Tour you’re sprinkled or soaked with water or beer at some point every day, but having urine thrown at me was a shocking, repulsive first.
Really, I just wanted to cry. Or stop. Back in 2009, in a Tour time trial in Annecy, a British fan had heckled me on a climb – something along the lines of ‘Cavendish, get up off your arse.’ I’d turned and shouted something back at him, and there, too, had been tempted to get off. Here I was too despondent, too upset to be angry. In the hour or two after I’d crossed the line, got back to the bus and told the team and some journalists what had happened, members of the team staff, Peta and my manager had all talked about taking some kind of action, getting the race organisers involved, maybe even the police.
I told them that we should just forget it; I didn’t want sympathy or justice, I just wanted the whole thing to end. It was the feeling that I’d had in 2010, when I sat on the bus in Reims, towel over my head, stomach churning like a washing machine, the world seemingly collapsing around me. What had troubled me most was that it hadn’t been just that one idiot, which I often got somewhere along the course at the Tour, but so many people along the route booing that the noise had accompanied me from the start ramp to the finish line.
That afternoon, back at a nearly empty team hotel on an industrial estate outside Saint-Malo, the whole experience had left me exhausted, sickened and shell-shocked. The news that Tony Martin had won the time trial brought some solace, but in quiet moments that evening the sights, sounds and, worst of all, rancid taste of that afternoon flooded my thoughts. Every rider that I had seen that day, and every rider that I would discuss it with over the next two or three days, would agree that Veelers’ crash the previous day had not been my fault. The commissaires had also exonerated me. Without wanting to sound egotistical, I could see that the press had been all over it because the ‘Bad Boy Cavendish’ storyline was one of their favourites. Veelers might have been under the misapprehension that they were genuinely outraged, genuinely sympathised with him, which perhaps they did a bit … but they were mainly preoccupied with what it said about me and my Tour. Was this not, they had asked, yet more evidence of me slowing down and resorting to unfair tactics to compensate? Then there had been the incident with the journalist’s Dictaphone, a massive media-relations own goal on my part, although admittedly not quite as dramatic as the papers and TV reports had made out. This all explained the public’s reaction but didn’t lessen the blow. Popularity wasn’t something that I’d ever necessarily craved – but unpopularity wasn’t something that I enjoyed, either.
The next day something unprecedented happened: led out perfectly by Gert Steegmans, I was outgunned, out-sprinted and outclassed by Marcel Kittel on the finishing straight in Tours. I had always said that the day when I had good form, a decent lead-out, no physical or mechanical problems and yet was still beaten – that would be the time to start attaching some credence to the hysterical inquests that the press conducted after every one of my defeats. I had said it while never really believing that the day would come, not for a few years anyway, and yet here it apparently was.
I was racking my brains for a reason, an excuse, an alibi, but this time could find none that was sufficient to explain the loss. Yes, I had been ill early in the race, yes, I had felt ‘twisted’ on the bike ever since my crash in the first week, and, no, my condition wasn’t exceptional, but even this aggregation of marginal losses shouldn’t have put me behind Kittel. Unless, that was, the press were right, and the German Dolph Lundgren lookalike and sound-alike really was now the Master of the Universe when it came to sprinting.
The only way to put things right was to restore what I still hoped was the natural order and do it immediately, the next afternoon on the stage to Saint-Amand-Montrond. This was a stage that had had me licking my lips for reasons beyond the relatively flat route profile: we, like other teams, knew that we would be racing on roads that were exposed, windy and therefore ripe for echelons – the game of cycling snakes and ladders that could be used to split the peloton by strong riders or teams who knew how to use those gusts to their advantage. In the crudest, most simplistic possible terms, echelons happened when a team or group of strong riders attacked with the wind gusting hard from one side; by fanning diagonally across the road towards the wind direction and rotating quickly and cohesively, they could condemn the riders at the bottom of the line to a place in the gutter, in the wind, and in imminent danger of losing contact. Once one of those riders lost the wheel – or was deliberately shut out by a ‘ticket collector’ placed at the back of the line to decide who was allowed into the echelon – there was no way back. It was a fine art that demanded strength, timing, nous and balls; at Omega Pharma–Quick-Step we were considered experts.
In the days that followed what became a famous stage, there would be all sorts of fanciful, verging on folkloric stories about code words devised by Wilfred Peeters and plans concocted the night before by our team and the Dutch squad, Belkin. In reality, our attack was a spur-of-the-moment decision, naturally informed by our prior knowledge of the course. Gert Steegmans had wanted to go even before we dropped the bomb, inside the first 50 kilometres of the stage; Gert had even started pulling away when Tony Martin shouted that it was too early and we should wait. Not long later, though, we plunged the detonator and blew the race apart. Kittel was among the many, many riders – over half of the peloton – left grovelling in the gutter. They would either have to ride faster than our group or wait for a change in the wind to repair the damage. Neither was going to happen.
For 70 kilometres we pounded the pedals and the gap kept growing. Then, with around 30 kilometres to go, the message from the team car was that the winds were about to get even stronger. All day, Alberto Contador’s Saxo Bank team had been freeloading on our work, telling us that they didn’t want to help with the pace-making, yet it was they who now suddenly stepped on the gas to whittle the group down even further and distance the race leader, Chris Froome. As 13 riders started to pull away, I watched Michał Kwiatkowski in front of me try, try, try to be the 14th, and ultimately lose the wheel of the rider ahead of him. I now had a choice to make: to stick or twist, stay or go.
I went, performing my fastest, hardest sprint of the Tour to bridge the gap and join the front group.
Of the 14 now sure to contest the stage win, we had three – Sylvain Chavanel, Niki Terpstra and yours truly. The only rider even remotely likely to challenge me in a sprint was Peter Sagan of the Cannondale team, but Niki had an idea: he would attack with just over a kilometre to go, Sagan’s sole teammate in the group would have to close the gap, whereupon Chavanel would come up behind with Sagan on his wheel and me on Sagan’s. Chava would then peel off at 400 metres to go and leave Sagan in the wind, in the jaws of our trap. We executed the plan almost to the letter.
It was my 25th Tour stage win, which lifted me to joint third in the all-time league table, alongside André Leducq and behind only Bernard Hinault and Eddy Merckx. It was perhaps the first one of those 25, however, for which I’d had to race, really race. Maybe a successful rematch with Kittel would have comforted my ego, marked my territory once again, but that could wait for the Champs Elysées. A win was a win – and this one was pretty memorable.
BEFORE PARIS, THE Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower and a thousand other Tour de France clichés slid into view, the final week of the race had consisted of huge Alpine climbs, oodles of suffering, one time trial and two bits of unexpected but welcome news.
The first very pleasant surprise came on stage 14, where we’d set out for a sprint and got one … but for my roommate, Matteo Trentin, and not me. I was so proud that afternoon. Conventional wisdom stated that, at 24, one Grand Tour in 2013 was more than ample for Matteo, yet he’d finished the Giro in May and put his hand up to do the next less than two months later. His victory in Lyon was made even sweeter by the advice that I’d asked Bramati to pass on as he drove past the peloton and up to Matteo. I reminded Brama that it was one of those rare, very long finishing straights where you could see the line from two kilometres, and this created an optical illusion which would dupe the other guys in the break and make them sprint too early; Matteo was to ignore them at all costs, look only at the distance markers and launch his sprint at exactly 250 metres to go. Brama had passed it on and Matteo had listened, as he always did. He had made huge contributions to many of my victories in 2013, so I was now delighted to have had some input in this, the most prestigious result of his career to date. What had I told him in the plane to Slovakia the previous November? Puzzle books. Decision making. Train the mind, not just the legs.
The second revelation as far as I was concerned in the Alps, after Matteo’s win, was something that happened to catch my eye in Gap on the morning of stage 18. Ever since stage six to Montpellier, I’d felt somehow misaligned, wonky on the bike, and had attributed the discomfort to one or possibly both of two things: the after-effects of that fall and/or occasional, recurring biomechanical issues which I believed dated back to my dental surgery in the winter of 2009–10. My soigneur, Aldis, had been working hard throughout the Tour to loosen and massage out the twinge in my gluteal muscles, but I was still shifting and twisting in the saddle as I pedalled. Tony Martin sat behind me in the bunch one day and said I was riding as though I had ants in my shorts.
It wasn’t that, and now, in Gap, I belatedly realised what the issue might have been: I’d been riding for days with one pedal crank longer than the other. On one side the crank was 170mm, like I always used, but on the other it was 172.5mm. I couldn’t believe it. I was lucky that I wasn’t going to finish the Tour with one leg 2½ centimetres longer than the other! There were no doubt other reasons for my legs lacking bite – elasticity, speed in the four true bunch gallops that I’d contested to date – but this certainly could not have been helping.
Matteo’s victory, added to my two stages, and Tony Martin’s time trial win nonetheless already made the team’s Tour a success, but I had an unbeaten record to defend on the Champs, a score to settle and a reputation as the world’s best sprinter to restore. I was nervous that day, but then I always am before the Champs. This year, the wait before the stage start would be particularly long and so even more tense, the race organiser, ASO, having decided to celebrate the conclusion of the 100th Tour by finishing at dusk. We didn’t leave from Versailles until nearly six in the evening, and wouldn’t arrive on the Champs for the first of our ten laps until nearly eight.
Barring accident, the Tour was going to be won overall by Chris Froome. I was delighted for Chris: I felt that he’d been unfairly criticised in 2012 for what were portrayed in some quarters as treacherous tactics, namely ‘attacking’ Brad in the Alps and Pyrenees, but which were in fact nothing more than evidence of Chris’s naivety. Chris had grown up in Kenya and South Africa, been educated at a Johannesburg boarding school, and had a life story that most of us at Team Sky couldn’t vaguely relate to, and yet it was hard to imagine how anyone could dislike him. My first memory of racing with Chris was from the 2006 Commonwealth Games, where he hadn’t particularly stood out, and then we had both also competed in the Under 23 world championship road race that year in Salzburg. With one big difference: whereas I had just rocked up in my Team GB tracksuit and got on the plane, Chris – riding for Kenya – had had to pose as a representative of their federation in emails to the UCI, and then as a directeur sportif in the organisers’ briefing on the eve of the race. That summed up Chris: he seemed incredibly innocent but also had a determination that, ultimately, I think, he used to channel whatever frustration lingered after the 2012 Tour into 2013.
Without the pressure of one must-win last sprint, Chris would no doubt enjoy the Champs more than I could. The first nine of the ten laps, as always, were witheringly fast but relatively uneventful, despite me puncturing on circuit number two and stopping for a wheel-change under the Arc de Triomphe. Alas, that wasn’t the omen that I’d hoped; having deliberately moved off Steegmans’ wheel and onto Greipel’s as we came through the Place de la Concorde with 400 metres to go, I thought about going for a long one, hesitated, then couldn’t pick up enough momentum on the bumpy right side of the road to overhaul Kittel or Greipel. The three of us all finished within centimetres of each other, but the photo-finish spoke unequivocally: I had lost, yet again, to Kittel, had even lost out for second place to Greipel, and in the process lost my 100 per cent Champs Elysées record and a little faith in myself. Never before had I experienced this sense of anticlimax, the weird juxtaposition of relief and elation at finishing the Tour, coupled with the despair of failing to win the last stage. Never before had I ridden past the gap in the barriers through which the winner was ushered towards the podium. Never before had I come across the line and glimpsed the Arc de Triomphe through the gloomy tint of defeat.
At that moment I would gladly have been teleported to anywhere else in the world: anywhere but the Champs, any place where I didn’t feel compelled to smile and be happy because, you know, I’d just finished the Tour de France and everyone else was grinning. Despite it having gone ten at night, and despite only having finished third, I still had the obligatory dope-test to complete before I could go anywhere. I duly put my bike down, trudged though the door of the mobile dope-control booth and provided the urine sample. I was all done up and ready to leave when the testing official informed me that I’d only given them 75 millilitres and they needed 90. I would now have wait until I could supply the missing 15 millilitres. It took an hour, drinking enough water to sink a small ship.
I finally stepped back out into darkness at nearly midnight. Immediately I felt all despondency lift not because acceptance or comprehension had set in, but because my family was there to greet me. Little Delilah, in her mum’s arms, didn’t know about the Tour de France, didn’t care – she just wanted to see her daddy.
She stretched out an arm, let out a gurgle, and at that moment her daddy didn’t care about the Tour de France, either.