Mark Cavendish Embraces Bernhard Eisel

20 July 2010. Stage Fifteen: Bagnères-de-Luchon to Pau

199.5km. High mountains

Climbing the Col du Tourmalet, Mark Cavendish slips out the back of the group. His loyal team-mate, Bernhard Eisel, remains at his side and tries to encourage him.

‘Big effort, Cav, come on, stay with the group.’

Cavendish screws up his face. ‘Bernie, I can’t do it.’ He is suffering a thousand agonies. He wants Eisel, his best friend, to shut up. But Eisel knows how critical it is that they stay with the gruppetto, the group that rides a shadow Tour de France in the mountains, out of view of the television and photographers’ lenses. For Cavendish, a prolific winner of flat sprinters’ stages, stages like this are the B-sides to his hit singles, songs that no one hears.

Today, the top of the Tourmalet is not the end of the stage: there is a fourth Pyrenean climb, the Col d’Aubisque, and then 60km of flat, valley roads to the finish in Pau. Manageable in a group, impossible as a duo. He and Eisel will almost certainly miss the time cut and be out of the race.

Cavendish is ill, feverish, and in a desperate bid for marginal gains he removes all extraneous items: sunglasses, food from pockets, even bidons. Still Eisel cajoles him and Cavendish snaps: ‘Don’t nag! Just let me fucking ride,’ he says. Fuck you, then, Eisel thinks. He could ride back up to the group and leave Cavendish to his self-pity, to stew in his petulance. But he doesn’t. He sticks to the task, which means sticking with Cavendish, but pointedly veers to the other side of the road.

On they ride up the Tourmalet, ‘together’ but not together, Cavendish hugging one side, Eisel the other, shutting each other out, not speaking a word, sulking like a married couple.

* * *

For the majority, the Tour de France is not about winning. By the third week, it has nothing to do with winning. An example: with two days to go, the 2008 Tour was on a knife-edge. It was so close that either Cadel Evans or Carlos Sastre could still win. The time trial on the penultimate day would decide.

It was thrilling; the watching world was transfixed. On the eve of the decisive time trial, David Millar, not a bad time triallist himself, was asked how he thought the race would go and who he thought would win.

‘I don’t give a fuck,’ said Millar.

The great myth of the Tour is that the riders are all engaged in the main narrative, the battle for yellow. Yet those transfixed by the duel in 2008 did not include most of the riders.

Two years later, on stage nine of the 2010 Tour, a week before Cavendish and Eisel’s turmoil on the Tourmalet, Millar was engaged in his own, very different and very personal narrative. He had crashed on the Tour’s second day, breaking a rib – though he did not know that at the time. He persevered, with the help of painkillers that ‘dulled everything, all sensations’. He decided not to take any when the race entered the Alps. It was the ninth stage to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, taking in one of the longest climbs in the Alps, the Col de la Madeleine. Millar began to struggle just fifteen minutes into the stage, on an uncategorised climb. He was then dropped for good on the Col de la Colombière and rode for over four hours on his own, eventually coming in 42 minutes behind the winner, Sandy Casar. The penultimate finisher was a full seven minutes ahead of him; Millar just scraped inside the time limit.

It is unusual for a rider to spend all day on his own like that. It is even more unusual for him to survive and avoid elimination. The gruppetto, containing the non-climbers, forms in the mountains, usually with a leader, somebody well respected and good at maths who can calculate how hard they need to ride to make the time cut. It acts as a safety net. But if you are dropped from the gruppetto, you might as well wave goodbye to the Tour de France. Millar explains: ‘What happens is a hard stage will start and there are a number of guys, the super domestiques of each team, who will make a calculation: “We’ve got thirty-five minutes today,” or whatever. “We can hang on to the penultimate climb and then let go.”

‘Then, when you get to that penultimate climb, they drop back, shout “Gruppetto!” and everyone says, “OK”, and the gruppetto forms, with the super domestiques, or very experienced, very charismatic guys, in charge. The gruppetto goes hard through the valley, in through-and-off formation, the riders rotating at the front as in a team trial, then they find a comfortable pace on the climbs and ride like banshees down the other side: they know that’s where they can make up time. The idea is to make it inside the time limit. But they know there’s power in numbers; that if 40 per cent of the peloton is there they’re less likely to be eliminated.’

On a typical day in the mountains, the gruppetto can number between around thirty and eighty. On this particular day, with Millar dropped on the Colombière with the Madeleine still to come, it hadn’t even formed yet. When it did, it comprised fifty riders. Behind them was Millar.

That evening, scanning the results sheet, and seeing Millar’s name marooned at the bottom, so far behind the gruppetto, it was clear that something exceptional had happened. There was a story here, perhaps more interesting than what had gone on at the front, given that it had turned into a fairly routine day for the overall contenders. And so the next morning I positioned myself by Millar’s Garmin team bus and waited for him to emerge. First, a gendarme appeared and spoke to the team’s press officer; he was looking for David Millar, too. Oh, dear. Millar had, infamously, been in hot water with the French police before, when he was busted for doping in 2004. But this gendarme’s demeanour did not suggest that kind of trouble.

When the door hissed open and Millar’s lanky frame filled the space, he spotted the gendarme and they embraced, then chatted like old friends. Then Millar went back inside, re-emerging with a Garmin shirt, which he signed and presented. The gendarme accepted it as he would a precious gift and left smiling.

What had that been about, I asked. ‘That was the gendarme who was with me yesterday,’ said Millar. ‘I spent the whole day, five hours, on my own. And he was fifty metres in front of me the whole way. A few times he dropped back and handed me his water bottle. “Here, have a drink.” Then he’d buzz off again. He crawled up the mountains ahead of me, making sure the road was clear because the fans thought all the riders had come through. On the descent of the Madeleine, I knew I could make up time so I really went for it, and he started going nuts, honking, clearing everybody out the way, scraping his bike on the road on the corners. He got really involved in my pursuit. So I just wanted to say, “Thanks for saving my Tour de France.”’

The gendarme had not been allowed to help in a practical sense, but he kept Millar going. By his mere presence, he had helped him to finish the stage and stay in the Tour. An unlikely bond had been forged. It was quite a story, yet it had been witnessed by nobody. Nobody except Millar and the policeman.

* * *

Millar’s day of solo survival was unusual principally because it is the gruppetto that holds the key to survival for the non-climbers in the mountains. And with this in mind, I was keen to speak to Cavendish, the greatest sprinter of his generation, about this aspect of his Tour: the shadow Tour. Days in the gruppetto are Cavendish’s most difficult, the suffering of a different order to the days in which he fights for position and follows his lead-out train, then sprints for the win at the end. Those days, in the full glare of the TV cameras, involve courage, skill and the sharp pain of a flat-out effort (or several). Days in the mountains, away from the glare, involve pure suffering.

When asked to nominate his single toughest day in the mountains, Cavendish struggles. ‘All of them?’ he suggests. Perhaps they seem a long way away from where we are sitting, in a deserted hotel on the Costa del Sol in Spain in January, during a pre-season training camp. How about Hautacam in 2008? ‘That was pretty hard coz I crashed,’ Cavendish recalls, almost nostalgically. ‘I hit a football. A football in the middle of fucking nowhere!

‘But nah, there have been harder ones. Oh, I tell you. There was one I was ill, it finished up the Tourmalet. We only did the Col d’Aubisque and Tourmalet but I had fever. I suffered that day. I was way off on the Aubisque with Bernie, but we got back on the descent. Then I suffered up the Tourmalet …

‘But no, that wasn’t the hardest … I don’t know. Days like 2012, the ring of fire: Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin, Peyresourde. That was bloody hard.

‘No!’ Now Cavendish is sitting forward in his chair. ‘When we did that ring of fire the other way, in 2010. That day was fucking …’ he trails off, shakes his head.

It was dubbed the Circle of Death (rather than ring of fire) when this circuit of the Pyrenees, including four major climbs, first featured on the route in 1910 and the riders feared bear attacks, among other things. A century on, the same route, in reverse, was stage sixteen of the 2010 Tour, over 199.5km.

Cavendish, who was enduring a difficult season after complications following dental surgery over the winter, was ill. He was coughing and feverish in the morning when his main rival for the green jersey, the Italian sprinter Alessandro Petacchi, paid a visit to the bus of his team, HTC-Columbia. Petacchi wanted to discuss how to ride the stage. With the climbs at the beginning rather than the end, and that long run-in from the Aubisque to Pau, it was more complicated than, say, a summit finish.

They started in the pretty spa town of Bagnères-de-Luchon. ‘It started right at the bottom of the Peyresourde,’ Cavendish recalls, ‘literally at the foot of the mountain.’ And because it started with a climb, riders could be seen doing something they rarely did: warming up. One, Julian Dean of Millar’s Garmin team, started to ride up the Peyresourde, on the course itself, but was mistaken for a fan by an over-zealous gendarme. He was told to get off his bike and push it: an instruction he ignored, provoking the anger of the gendarme, who wrestled him to the ground. As if the race wasn’t hard enough for a sprinter like Dean, he was starting it with fresh crash wounds.

‘It was supposed to be neutralised going up,’ Cavendish remembers, ‘but I was dropped right at the start. It was just me, Bernie and [Bert] Grabsch [another HTC team-mate]. And who’s that French guy who crashes a lot? Lloyd Mondory, that’s him.’⁷

Cavendish was in the process of rescuing his dismal season at the Tour, winning three stages in the first two weeks, but on the Peyresourde, so early on stage fifteen, it didn’t look as though he’d make it to Paris.

He takes up the story: ‘So there’s us four, we’re dropped on the Peyresourde, and there’s the gruppetto ahead, with Petacchi. They hear we’re behind, so they try to eliminate us. They start riding full gas so we can’t get back.’ So much for Petacchi’s pre-stage chat: all’s fair in love and the Tour. ‘It’s the four of us,’ Cavendish continues, ‘and we go down the descent from the Peyresourde and then start climbing the Aspin alone. Jens [Voigt, the veteran German] had crashed; he comes flying past on the Aspin, we can’t stay with him, but then we descend the Aspin like mad dogs, and drop Grabsch.’

The small group now comprises Cavendish, Eisel and Mondory. They were a mere 42km into the stage by the time they crested the summit of the second of the four mountains, the Col d’Aspin. Still to come was the monster, the Tourmalet. Eisel, whose job was to accompany Cavendish and make sure he finished in the time limit, reckoned they had to make contact with the gruppetto before the Tourmalet – otherwise their task would be far more difficult, perhaps impossible.

After a flat-out chase from the summit of the Aspin, they made contact. Cavendish remembers: ‘We caught the gruppetto at the bottom of the Tourmalet, by which point all the glycogen has gone; I’m finished. Ivan Basso was ill, so he was in the gruppetto.’ Basso, usually an overall contender, was unused to being with the back-markers, which caused a problem. ‘Normally the gruppetto rides steady up the climbs but Basso was panicking because he thinks we’re not going to make the time cut, and he starts riding up the Tourmalet fucking full gas. I was, like, “Bernie, I can’t do it!”’

As Cavendish slid out the back, Eisel urged him on. ‘Cav, I know you’re ill, mate, but we can’t fuck around here. We have to go faster than this. Come on.’

‘Don’t nag me,’ said Cavendish. ‘Just let me fucking ride. Fucking leave me alone.’

So Eisel shut up. Cavendish was angry. Eisel was furious. And so they rode on up the Tourmalet, side-by-side but on opposite sides of the road, not speaking.

* * *

It was unusual for Eisel to sulk. He has been called a ‘one-man morale boost’. Permanently upbeat, always smiling, he comes from a small Austrian village near Graz. Eisel was a few years older than Cavendish, but they had hit it off immediately when they became team-mates at T-Mobile in 2007. As that team morphed into HTC-Columbia they grew closer; they were often room-mates, confidants and companions in the mountains. They compared themselves to a married couple. But on days like this, Eisel was more like a big brother.

He was an important member of Cavendish’s lead-out train, but it was in the mountains that he really earned his corn. His job went well beyond that of an ordinary domestique or gregario. And yet the strange thing about Eisel, and his faithful service, is that he was better than this; unlike some other gregari, he did not depend on Cavendish for a professional contract. He could win races in his own right – the biggest being Ghent–Wevelgem earlier that same season, 2010.

Eisel’s sacrifice owed something to loyalty, something to pragmatism. It helped, too, that his ego is the size of, say, a category-four rather than an hors-categorie mountain. He had been a professional for seven years when he and Cavendish became team-mates, with Eisel having started out at Mapei, then the world’s biggest team. He was smart; he realised early that the peloton was divided into very good riders and stars (there were no bad riders), and he learned that a good rider could do one of two things: keep trying to be a star, or accept that he was just a very good rider. ‘I could see straight away that I was competitive,’ says Eisel, ‘but to win the race takes so much more.’

When Mapei folded, Eisel moved to Française des Jeux in 2003, from the world’s number one team to a resolutely French outfit run by Marc Madiot, whose first instruction to Eisel was to move to France. ‘I said, “No way.” They wanted you to live in some holiday chalets in the middle of nowhere. I managed to put it off, started getting some really good results, and after Milan–San Remo, where I was 12th, I said to Marc: “Look, I’d love to stay in Austria. I’ll bring you results.” Finally he said OK.’

Still, this was Eisel’s chance to become a leader, a star. He had the physical attributes: he was strong and fast. ‘I had one year when I thought I’d be the bunch sprinter,’ he says. ‘One day I would lead Baden Cooke out, the next day he’d lead me out. But it was a mess. Never put two sprinters together. Me and Cookey still talk, but we could have been best mates. We never really had a problem, but we both knew it just couldn’t work.’

Eisel moved to T-Mobile in 2006. He was still ostensibly a sprinter and he won stages at the Tour of Qatar and Three Days of De Panne. He was also more than a sprinter: he was fifth in Paris–Roubaix. ‘Then Cav came,’ says Eisel. Cavendish was twenty-one, but even then, in 2007, had the self-belief of a champion. ‘I saw in the training camp that he was quick – we had a lot of fast guys there. We had André Greipel as well.’

But it was Cavendish who, in his first full year as a pro, beat a field of fast sprinters to win the Scheldeprijs semi-classic in Belgium. Eisel didn’t go for the win that day: he made a late decision to help Cavendish instead. ‘I can remember just being tired in that race, having done Flanders and Roubaix. I knew I wasn’t going to win that day. I thought I’d give him a chance and he brought it home. We’d done some lead-outs in the training camp. In the first one he was quick, but in the second one, I’d never seen anything like that from a young guy.’

Cavendish was brash, confident – arrogant, some thought. ‘I mean, Cav didn’t show all that much respect, but if you’re as good as him it’s a lot easier,’ says Eisel. ‘If he’d behaved like he did and not won anything, he’d have landed on his nose sooner or later.

‘But I liked him,’ Eisel continues. ‘He was a good kid.’

* * *

Eisel was never officially assigned to the role of Cavendish’s personal escort in the mountains. It just seemed to happen. It helped that he was vastly experienced in the gruppetto, as his finishing positions in his ten Tours de France, from 2003 to 2012, suggest: 131st, 143rd, 107th, 121st, 144th, 150th, 148th, 155th, 160th, 146th. Consistent, if nothing else.

‘I understood how to ride in the mountains, and how Cav had to ride and how he had to be brought over the climbs,’ says Eisel, ‘but in the first few years it wasn’t calculation; it was just like survival.’

They perfected the survival technique together, he adds, summing it up as, ‘steady on the climbs, hard on the descents’. And eventually that technique came to be about more than survival. It was with the next flat stage – the next sprint stage, so the next Cavendish victory – in mind. As Eisel explains: ‘The idea was to help him get through these stages, so he would finish fresher than he would have been if he’d just been scrapping on his own. He would sometimes try to hold the wheel in front. But it would mean killing himself’ – the benefits of sitting behind another rider on a climb, where gravity rather than wind resistance is the main limiting factor, can be negligible. Eisel adds, ‘The fresher he could come out of these stages, the better chance of winning the next day.’

Despite his anger at Cavendish’s petulence, Eisel kept this in mind as he rode up the Tourmalet on the opposite side of the road to his team-mate. The next day was a rest day. If he could only coax and cajole Cavendish through this one …

On they rode up the Tourmalet, still not speaking. ‘There were many stages where we’d argue,’ says Eisel. ‘This wasn’t the only time I’d ride up one side, him up the other, not talking to each other. Sometimes, it was because I was on my limit, rather than Cav.’

Could he be hard on him, like an elder brother? ‘That was really rare. Most of the time I’d be telling him, “Dude, we are this much behind, we need to keep riding.”’ Eisel was in charge of the calculations, and he had this down to a T. ‘It’s an easy calculation on a normal climb: you lose a minute every K at a certain speed. So, you keep that speed. And you know how far down you are at the top. Then, on a 20k downhill, if they don’t race full gas at the front you can bring back a minute or two. If it’s hard rain or slippery, we can bring back five minutes.’

It sounds like they take risks on the descents, but Eisel and Cavendish both say no. Eisel explains: ‘Over the years, I remember a lot from previous years; I really know most of the descents very well. Maybe not every corner, like a MotoGP rider, but I remember the important ones, where you have to be careful; the rest we can go full gas. Also, you have to trust the motorbike in front of you. We always have a motorbike in front. If he doesn’t touch the brakes, then you don’t touch yours; if you see his brake lights, you touch your brakes.’

Eisel and Cavendish’s fall-outs followed a typical routine. ‘He’d come up with a can of Coke in his hand to say sorry,’ says Eisel. ‘That’s how it went.’ He laughs. ‘Like feeding apples to an elephant.’

* * *

So it goes: as they continue up the Tourmalet, Cavendish drops back to the team car and gets Eisel a can of Coke. They’re friends again. ‘After 4k of the Tourmalet, with 18k left, we’re losing about 10 seconds a K [on the gruppetto], but I know we can make it back on the descent,’ says Cavendish, ‘especially with Basso there.’ Basso was strong uphill and notoriously slow going down. ‘We ended up losing two and a half, three minutes on the Tourmalet. And we caught them back halfway down.’ Cavendish’s eyes sparkle as he recalls the pursuit. ‘We were on the edge, like, down that descent – on the edge.’

There was still another climb, the Col d’Aubisque. As well as Eisel, Cavendish now had another team-mate there, Tony Martin. ‘I got a little bit of help from Tony. He was carrying my bottles. Then I took my radio out. I was, like, fuck … I took it off to save weight. I was like, I needed to lose every bit of weight; no sunglasses, nothing.’

Cavendish survives up the Aubisque. Basso seems less anxious here, more confident that his continued participation is not at risk. The gruppetto is unusually large, almost ninety riders. It is another factor in their favour: even if they finish outside the time limit, will the officials be brave enough to expel half the field?

‘It was a big long run-in to Pau and I was just swinging, really struggling to hang on,’ Cavendish says. ‘I’m sat on the back and, next thing, with 10k to go, we’re quite close to the time limit, and I puncture. I haven’t got my radio, have I? I’d given it to Tony to save some weight on the climb. I’m on the back on my own; the guys – Bernie, Tony, Bert [Grabsch, who had rejoined them] – are on the front riding hard to make the time limit.

‘I put my hand up. No team car comes up.

‘I drop back through the convoy. No HTC car. Allan Peiper [his directeur sportif] had at that moment stopped for a piss. And no fucking car wanted to help me until the last car, Astana, stops and gives me a wheel. That saved me. I got back on. But, yeah. Fucking, yeah.’

On the Place de Verdun in Pau, the Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo sprints in at the head of a small group that includes Lance Armstrong. Armstrong had been trying to salvage a stage victory from what had otherwise been a disastrous final Tour; in Pau, he can only manage sixth. ‘It’s a very, very beautiful day,’ says Fedrigo, for whom it is the third stage win of his career. Behind him, Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck roll in almost seven minutes later. Another large group comes in 23 minutes down. Finally, eleven minutes later, comes the gruppetto: 34 minutes and 48 seconds behind Fedrigo. Eighty-three riders make up the group, including David Millar as well as Cavendish and Eisel.

Cavendish and Eisel were sharing a room, and Cavendish went to use the bathroom first. ‘Ten minutes later, Bernie wondered why he hadn’t heard the water running. He stuck his head around the door … I was sitting, cross-legged, fast asleep in the bottom of the shower.

‘Bernie has a photo of me asleep in the shower. I didn’t eat that night. Didn’t have a massage. It was the rest day the next day, but I was so ill, I had fever; I couldn’t get out of bed. I was gobbing up this orange shit.’

The next race day, Cavendish survived another climb of the Tourmalet. He finished 164th, in a seven-man group with his three amigos, Eisel, Martin and Grabsch. Millar, still surviving with his broken rib, was just behind. He was ill, too.

The following day, into Bordeaux, was a classic sprinters’ stage. Cavendish was still rough; still coughing. ‘What I remember most is that I had this square stem on my bike,’ he says. ‘At one point in the stage I coughed up this orange ball, spat it out, and it landed on the stem. It just sat there.’

Four and a half hours later, when Cavendish sprinted into Bordeaux at the head of the peloton, the orange ball of phlegm was still there. He won the stage. And he won again two days later, this time on the Champs-Élysées for the second year in a row.

Few knew how close he had come to not making it to Pau, never mind Paris. It was, like Millar’s ordeal in the Alps, one of the Tour’s untold stories. Another B-side that nobody heard.

7 On the eve of the Tour, Mondory had been in another incident with Cavendish, when he came down in a horrific crash at the Tour of Switzerland for which Cavendish was blamed. ‘If you look at that, he was nowhere near me!’ Cavendish says now. ‘He just can’t handle his bike.’ It was a year in which Switzerland seemed cursed for Cavendish: earlier, at the Tour de Romandie, he was sent home by his team after winning a stage and celebrating with an ‘Up Yours’ V-sign, a gesture apparently directed at his ‘critics’.