Despite the sour taste of the trouble with the national team in the last race of 2005, I felt that in my first year with Liquigas my professional life had finally all fallen into place. And, with wonderful synchronicity, at the end of my first year with Liquigas my personal life started to come together too.
It is freezing cold in Finland in November. On a bad day when the rain falls and the sky closes in and the ground becomes as dark as a peat bog, it feels like the only light that you see is electric, and that natural light will never again return.
On one such winter day in November 2005, as the rain pissed down, I found myself walking out of the gloom into a showjumping hall that I knew very well. The hall was at my father’s former home, a place called Gustafsbäck, where I had spent most of my summers after my parents’ divorce. He had sold the buildings a few years previously, and they were now a commercial stable. Like many of the slightly older halls, it was cold and damp in the winter months, not something that bothered the horse riders, but it was a real killer for anyone stood about doing nothing, as I often was.
I’d come down with my father, a showjumping trainer, who I was visiting during my off-season break. I loved being in the building because I was so attached to it, but I didn’t usually hang around while my father trained his poor students, as I found his tough (and very vocal) methods excruciating to watch. As per usual I planned to take my father’s black Labrador, Lida, for a walk and to leave him to it. But as we walked into the hall and I glanced over the usual mix of riders forming their patterns of what looked like organised chaos – people coming and going in different directions, some jumping fences, others doing flat work – I was halted in my tracks, and my Wellington boots became rooted to the freezing muddy floor. It might sound like a terrible cliché, but a beautiful girl on horseback stunned me from across the hall. I was taken completely off guard and a tremor of excitement passed through me. That tremor turned into a full-blown heart-thumping moment when the girl trotted her horse over to go and talk to my father, who’d walked off ahead of me. My father was only training one rider of the six who were there, and she was the one. I couldn’t believe my luck.
On such a dank, dull day she seemed like a ray of pure light. She was beautiful, but she also had a determination about her that you could see a mile off. Much to Lida’s disappointment, I gave up on the idea of a walk and stayed instead to watch the whole session. I was lost in her already; there is something so special about seeing someone concentrating on doing the thing they love. I stood there in the freezing cold, under the harsh electric light, oblivious to Lida’s whining. I was transfixed.
By the time it ended I panicked. I didn’t have the guts to say anything to her, and made myself scarce before she was finished. In the car on the way home I asked my old man about her while trying to sound casual and disinterested. He snapped back that she was the only student he had ever taught who had the guts to answer back to him during one of his sessions. I could see that although he didn’t like her insubordination he also kind of admired it. Knowing my father, I was very impressed. But the reality of my life was all too close. I was only visiting Finland, and in two days’ time I was due to return to Italy, and back to my busy life, so I resigned myself to doing nothing more about it. And deep down I knew that a beautiful, confident girl like that would never be interested in me. But that evening, while I was sat around still torturing myself with what might have been, my mobile phone buzzed with a text message. An unknown number: ‘Don’t tell your dad, but do you want to go out for a drink tomorrow? Camilla.’
It was her! I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea who had given her my number but I was thrilled by the chance to see her again.
The following evening was yet another dark, rainy winter night. We went out in Helsinki. We hit it off straight away; we talked about her love of showjumping, her horses, and her life in Helsinki. I tried my best to explain my life travelling the world with my bike and I was amazed at how she took it all in. Her outlook on life was so beautifully uncomplicated that her very presence seemed to relax me. I walked her back to her apartment in the rain and kissed her in the doorway. Moments like these seem a cliché when they happen to other people, but when it is your own love story it makes perfect sense. As I walked away I realised that this was the very street that my brother had been born in, and where my own parents had lived in the sixties. Suddenly I felt that I had come full circle. My head was spinning, and I drove back to my father’s house at 30 km/h. because I was struggling so hard to process just what was going on. I was flying away tomorrow, and yet I had just fallen in love, and it was impossible to take in.
I climbed into bed and lay awake all night wondering what the hell I was going to do. My mind flirted with the idea of making the huge romantic gesture of missing my flight and turning up on her doorstep in Helsinki ready to start a life together. I knew even then that she was the one for me. It felt like I’d met another part of me, but better. But in the end old habits die hard, and after a sleepless night I was still too cheap to waste my money by throwing away a plane ticket. I went home to Italy and called her as soon as I landed asking if she would like to come and visit as soon as she could.
Camilla flew out to visit me in Varese in December 2005, and this time it was confirmation for me that it was true love. It was an exciting love that made my throat dry and my heart race. I could see that she was going to bring so much more into my life. As we got to know each other I saw that Camilla was a lot of things that I wasn’t: she was organised and strong; she seemed to possess in her character all the things that I felt I was lacking. It felt like I hadn’t been functioning correctly without her and she immediately made me stronger.
As soon as Camilla arrived to stay with me in Italy, I knew that I didn’t want to be without her. The problem was, the logistics of our lives felt so complicated that I was petrified that we couldn’t make it work, or that the thought of trying to be with a man who was away half the year racing would put her off. I worried about it to myself, but I didn’t dare talk directly about it, for fear of not liking the answer. As her stay came to an end and I drove Camilla to the airport to go home, nervous with apprehension over what was going to happen once we were separated again, Camilla turned to me and said, ‘So, what do we have to do to make this work?’
The logistics of my career and our lives meant that over the next year we would be snatching time and taking flights to see each other when we could. But, despite this, Camilla never let it feel complicated for a second. We did what we had to do to make it work, and there was never a moment of doubt that our love wasn’t strong enough to see us through. Within a year Camilla packed up and moved with me to Italy full time and we started to build a home together. It was the most profound, positive influence on my cycling career that I ever had. Up until now I had been trying to race my way to happiness, but that year I realised that was unachievable without a family whom I could love and care for, and who in turn would give my racing some meaning. I completely changed as a person.
• • •
By 2007, my third year with Liquigas, my career had reached another level. Liquigas suited me down to the ground as a team. My salary had increased dramatically every year and I knew that I was valued in my job. Camilla had brought everything that was missing to my life and, for a brief moment, before the challenges of my chosen career would take on a new form, I had my moment of glory at the 2007 Giro d’Italia.
After building his season around a Grand Tour for the first time, Danilo failed to hit top form and flopped in the 2006 Giro, so he returned in 2007 determined to win. The race opened with a team time trial in Sardinia: gaining an advantage here was really important. The team time trial was a discipline that suited me like no other. It seemed to push all the buttons, to bring out the best in me. Increasingly, I had grown to understand the skill required for a team time trial: every single person there has different strengths and weaknesses, but the event rewards a united effort. The key skill – more so than raw power or strength – is an ability to work with other people, to be able to react and adapt yourself to the strengths and weaknesses of those around you, to keep the team together as a cohesive unit. A good team time triallist is like a current-regulating diode – constantly adapting to keep the flow of electricity stable. In Liquigas the rider who could do all that was me.
I was confident that I could perform well, but when we rode the course the day before the event I was struck by how technical it was. It was a big worry for me. In a team time trial, where the key to cohesion and getting the whole squad to go quickly is to keep as tight together as possible, corners and sharp turns are a real challenge. Even a small gap in the line on a circuit like this could mean a team in pieces. Ever since my accident on the back of the quad in Ireland I had struggled psychologically with descents. I was terrified of falling again. My instincts simply didn’t trust that the person in front of me had full control. I couldn’t blindly follow the rider in front like many could. In races I could normally manage my way around this by leaving a little bit of a gap between myself and the wheel in front for security, but that wasn’t an option here. After two laps of the circuit in training on the Friday, I went through forty-eight stressful hours as I tried to calm myself and switch off my natural instincts.
On the day of the race I felt enormous pressure not to let my teammates down. We set off and I used all of the agility I had in my pedalling to stay as tight as I could to my teammates. I was petrified of the technical descents, but for twenty minutes I managed to shut down those instinctual fears. I let go of everything as we shot through turn after turn without touching the brakes and I clung in desperation to the wheel in front. The first turns were terrifying, but I worked so hard at quelling my fears that in a way I overcompensated and I didn’t miss a single turn on the front during the stage. I was one of the strongest riders there.
We crossed the line with the best time and with only a few teams left to finish behind us. Every one of us knew straight away from the sheer sensation of the ride that we were going to be almost unbeatable. We rolled back to the bus and embraced each other for a job well done. It felt like no time at all before Stefano Zanatta jumped on to the bus and yelled, ‘We won! We won!’ The bus erupted. We’d done it. I had never won an individual race, but if I did I couldn’t imagine that the feeling would be greater than on that bus. Every single rider there felt himself a part of that win. It was a shared joy. The release of pressure for all of us was enormous. The Giro was the biggest race of the year for the team, and the previous year’s poor performance was still weighing heavily on us. I could have cried with joy and relief. As we all bounded off the bus to walk the short distance to the podium I had an emotional moment when I saw the proud faces of Mike and Pat Taylor. Mike and Pat often travelled out to watch the big European races, and having them there to share in the achievement felt so special. I was literally bouncing around with joy and ran over to give them a hug before I finally stood on the Giro podium, a winner.
It felt appropriate to me that I stood there on the podium linked arm in arm with my teammates. Winning a team time trial is regarded by some people as a ‘half’ victory, but I could never see the logic in that. Every one of us had worked for it and we all deserved it. As we stood there grinning ear to ear while the crowd applauded us, Di Luca turned to me and said with a satisfied smile (despite having lost his cool at the finish when Enrico Gasparotto crossed the line first), ‘Winning a team TT is not like a normal win, because everyone gets to share this.’ It meant a lot to me, because I understood, and he understood. We worked our backsides off for Danilo and he knew what we did for him, but because of the way the sport works those wins were always a little bit more his than ours, no matter how he thanked us in the press. This was different, though; this win really was ours, and I allowed myself a rare moment of true pride. This win was in no small part mine.
The 2007 Giro continued brilliantly for us, and for me personally it was a dream race. The team knew what to ask of me and I knew how to do it. I loved my job there. On eighteen of the twenty-one stages I took up riding on the front of the bunch. It was fucking hard work physically, but it was enjoyable, not simply because I was doing my job but also because I didn’t have to think about anything when I was riding on the front; when you are not up to it it is awful, but doing it when you are going well can be incredibly satisfying. There is a sadist in every cyclist that is fuelled by the suffering of others; no matter how much you are hurting, hearing or seeing that others are in more pain somehow allows you to push harder. There are all kinds of rewards and incentives that you can find while driving a peloton along, and I picked up a few tricks in my time at the Giro. For example, the fact that there were so many race motorbikes at the head of those races meant I could quite easily (and almost embarrassingly) sit in their slipstream and effortlessly tear the legs off the riders at the back of the bunch. Whenever I was on the front it felt incredibly good to look over my shoulder and see a long lined-out peloton, with people crumpled over their bikes fighting to keep up, or to hear on the race radio that riders were being dropped from the group, or that the time gap to the break was coming down.
When you are on the front of a race you are in control. You control how quickly the bunch comes out of a corner, and if you feel like it, by accelerating at just the right time you can make life harder for the poor sods at the back. I might not have been winning the race, but I was letting everyone know I was undoubtedly there at the Giro, and it felt great. I loved it when riders would come up to me in the hotel bar in the evening and say, ‘Fucking hell, you made that hard for us out there today!’ It was an ego trip, of course, but these little things became the recognition that I decided I wanted. I didn’t measure my success through media exposure or what non-cyclists wrote about me in newspapers or magazines, but through the little things like that: acknowledgement from the people who knew.
After nearly three full weeks of the best work I had done in my career, Danilo Di Luca rode into Milan the winner of the Giro d’Italia. As he crossed the line victorious, he was surrounded by all of his teammates bar one: me. Instead, I was sat at home on the couch with Camilla, refusing to switch on the TV for fear of catching a glimpse of the victory parade that I was cruelly absent from. I had been forced to pull out of the race with one stage to go when I had contracted a fever. I had emptied the tank throughout the whole race, and I was so exhausted at the end of the final mountain stage (which finished atop the Zoncolan) that I stood in the shower fully dressed in my cycling kit and began to shake uncontrollably. Without a spleen, my body couldn’t cope with the fever and I reacted badly. There was nothing to do but pull out. I felt it was fucking typical of my luck that I was forced to abandon after all the hard work was done, and that I couldn’t be there on that final day to be one of the riders who rolled into Milan at the head of the peloton with pink bar tape on my bike and a champagne glass in my hand.
However, despite this bad luck, my move to Liquigas proved to be the best thing I ever did in my career. Liquigas put me in races that suited me and I was given a role that was perfect for me. Finally, I felt incredibly rewarded as a cyclist, and as a man.