On the day of the prologue of my first ever Tour de France, things felt different. For starters the race that I had spent my youth dreaming of, and trying to trace on Michelin maps of France, started not on the mythical roads of Europe, but instead in England, on the streets of London, of all places. The London start of the 2007 Tour was only the third time in history that the race had visited the UK and the first time since 1994. The prologue course was set to be a 7.9 km tourist trail of the city’s most iconic sights: Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Hyde Park and the Mall. I may have been born in Finland, but I grew up in Britain. British was the nationality of my passport and it was in Britain that I had grown up dreaming of one day racing in the Tour de France.
Driving down Whitehall in the Liquigas team bus, I was taken aback by the size of the crowds. Deep down I expected something profound from the Tour. I had grown up with it on television each summer, and I had answered the question, ‘Do you think you’ll be in the Tour de France one day?’ more times than I could possibly remember. Now, after nearly seven years as a professional, I was.
When we arrived in the allotted parking spaces, I climbed down the steps of the bus and walked out into the expectant crowds. Big crowds never really did anything for me; the faces I knew were the ones that really counted, and as I looked past the row of lime green bikes that the mechanics had hastily arranged on our arrival I was greeted by the marvellous sight of practically my entire family patiently waiting to see me. My face broke into a grin as I saw the group – my mother, my brother, Camilla, and Mike and Pat Taylor, all huddled together waiting to enjoy the moment that I had worked towards for so long. It was a special moment, made all the more incredible by the next face I saw: stood waiting in the wings was my father’s ex-partner, a Finnish woman called Gun Järnefelt.
After my parents’ divorce, during the summers spent in Finland with my father, I had talked incessantly about the Tour de France, insisting to anyone who would listen that I would ride in it myself one day. Gun promised me that if I ever rode the Tour she would bake me my favourite blueberry pie. Sure enough, there she was, arms extended, holding out a blueberry pie she had baked and transported as hand luggage all the way from Finland.
It was more than a blast from the past. Gun and my father had parted ways many years previously, but she had remembered all this time, and the gesture bowled me over. I stood there for a moment, surrounded by the people I loved most in the world, about to partake in the event I had worked my entire adult life to get to. I knew by now I was never going to be really recognised for what I did by the British public – I was as good as Italian to them, and, equally, I would always be British to the Italians (as for the Finns, they really had no interest in me or cycling at all), but to my family, and to Camilla, I was important, and that made me feel very special that bright morning in London.
I felt like I shouldn’t really have had a lot to prove to the outside world when I arrived at that Tour. I had worked hard throughout my career to that point. I had already been part of the winning team at the Giro that year. I knew I was at the top of my game. There was no doubting that I was considered to be a consummate professional by my peers, but until now I had managed to go about my career without ever really having to be the focus of attention or worry about playing any games with the media. The Tour de France, however, is different. Compared to other professional races the Tour can have relatively little action in the race over the three weeks, but it is a feeding frenzy for the world media.
Despite a few requests for interviews from the home press, the build-up to the Tour felt remarkably similar to every other race I had ridden. Even selection for the 2007 Tour had been relatively low key. In a lot of teams, the Tour is such a focal point of the year that making the Tour selection is a really big deal. Typically, though, for a rider like me in a team like mine, selection came in an off-hand way. My directeur sportif, Stefano Zanatta, casually informed me over the phone in May – before the start of the Giro – that I was going to the Tour. There was no room for discussion, and certainly no allusion to the fact that I was any kind of outstanding athlete who’d been selected to go to one of the greatest sporting events on the planet. I just simply fitted the mould of the generic type of rider that was needed at the time.
This disappointingly mundane feeling was exacerbated by the blasé attitude of my Liquigas team. In the aftermath of Di Luca’s Giro win there was no buzz of excitement about doing the Tour; after the emotional high we had all felt there it was as if no one could really muster any more energy. We were just there. To make matters worse we had Dario Mariuzzo as our manager, who, in my opinion, was the worst manager I ever had as a rider. He lacked the necessary language skills, and sometimes seemed only to be able to communicate by swearing in a Venetian dialect. This made the entire build-up to the race feel incredibly trying, but it wasn’t only him.
I had learnt by now that, for many Italians, being outside of their comfort zone was a big challenge. Unfortunately in this case, because I was English, everything was my fault, and every Italian rider in the peloton thought it worthwhile to let me know this. If the coffee was no good, then someone had to tell me. If they didn’t like the hotel breakfast, then it was worth asking me, ‘Does the Queen have to eat beans in tomato sauce for breakfast?’ If the cars were suddenly coming at them on the left-hand side of the road then it was worth yelling at me about out the stupidity of driving on ‘the other side of the road, cazzo!’
At the Tour de France the team was looking to do something to merit their inclusion and please their American bike sponsor, Cannondale – and it didn’t really matter what that was. The strategy they decided on for the race was quite simple: they would send a group of riders from the Classics squad who could try for a stage early on, and pad the team out with guys who were consistent enough to keep Liquigas in the running for the team classification by finishing close to the front on the big mountain stages. The team classification is something that no one in their right mind pays attention to; it is of zero interest to the public, because all eyes are fixed on the overall winners. To a company looking to show off its ethic of ‘cohesive teamwork’, however, it is an acceptable consolation prize.
Liquigas’ whole outlook on the race was more like something you’d expect on the B-programme: we even had a rented team bus (hired from Manolo Sainz, the disgraced former manager of the ONCE team). The night before the race I watched completely impassively as the mechanics decided it was a good time to stick our sponsor’s transfers on the side of the bus, so people could actually recognise the team. I laughed aloud at the thought that the next day cycling fans would be gazing in awe as the bus pulled into the car park covered in exotic-looking logos and sponsors, which had just been slapped on by two uninterested mechanics the night before. It was typical of a professional cycling team, and even more so of the Tour: gleaming and shiny on the outside, but chaotic and unnerving on the inside.
• • •
By the time the start of the race came around, the emotional high of seeing my family felt like such a warm and happy contrast that I didn’t want to leave them. But in no time at all I received a tap on the shoulder from a team soigneur who wanted to know what drink I would like on my bike, which was being set up on the Turbo trainer waiting for me to begin my warm-up. I suddenly remembered it was nearly time to go to work and, after I thanked everyone for coming, I went back to shutting the world out of my mind to allow myself to prepare for the TT effort.
A prologue is always such an immense effort. As per my race programme I hadn’t turned a pedal in anger since the Giro, and I knew that this would be a shock to the system. The course was slightly less than 8 km, which would translate to just under ten minutes of searing pain. In that kind of event, if you felt comfortable you were undoubtedly going too slowly.
There are lots of things that I’d love to say about my first kilometres becoming a Tour de France rider on the roads of my nation’s capital. I’d love to say that the crowds were so loud that the deafening noise spurred me on – but my aero helmet had cowlings that covered my ears, and the only noise I could make out was the gasping of my breath and the furious yelling of the directeur sportif down the radio. I would love to say that the majestic sights of the city encouraged me, but I could only concentrate on the few metres in front of my face – that same view of the tarmac stretching out in front of me that I had seen the world over. I would love to say that I couldn’t feel my legs, or the burning in my lungs, but I could – the sudden jolt back into racing felt like someone had put their hand down my throat and was trying to wrench my internal organs out from my body. I would also love to say that the occasion encouraged me to perform way above expectation … but I finished in 91st place, lost somewhere in the middle of the 190 starters.
If that felt like an underwhelming start, things were even less exciting the following day. As the race hit British roads for the first stage, and the action got underway, David Millar was soon off the front. Dave had always exuded that star quality, and this was his big comeback from a suspension. He instantly inspired the hearts and minds of the British public with a spirited display of bravura, trying to ensure that there would be a British rider on the podium that night. But while Dave was floating along out front, surrounded by the television cameras and the approval of the cycling world, my ride, in contrast, felt more like being dragged along the bottom of the riverbed.
The new frame that Cannondale had given me for the race had been fine during the previous few days of easy training, but as soon as the action had started I found I had a problem with my cranks, which were now loose, and I was going to have to change bikes. As the fresh-legged Tour peloton had charged off down the road, I swapped my race bike. The thing about spare bikes: they get used so little that, as the season goes on, they simply become used for parts when things break and a mechanic needs a quick fix. They slowly degrade, and the less they are used, the less they resemble your own race machine. I hopped up on to a bike with no computer, the most basic training wheels that the team must have found lying around and, worst of all, a brand new saddle. My old saddle was nicely worn in and the sagging was equivalent to roughly 4 mm of saddle height. I was so used to my position with the worn saddle that even the tiniest change made the bike feel wildly different. As I rode back into the cars and began to chase the bunch the first time check was given to David’s break. His gap was well over a minute now, and his day in the spotlight was assured. And there I was, on what felt like someone else’s bike, crawling through the team cars just trying desperately and uncomfortably to get back into the race. There is a great deal of glory to be had in cycling, but none of it can be found back there.
As early as that first road stage, I realised why the Tour is so different. In most of the races I took part in, particularly in Italy, there was a certain place in the bunch that I liked to call ‘the office’, behind the riders at the front who were fighting to get into position. I knew I could find a group of riders whose job it was just to stay out of trouble at that moment, or during that stage, and so they would be a bit more relaxed and give each other a bit of space. There was no pushing or shoving, and every now and again there would be a bit of chat and a few jokes to try to lighten the mood. No one in the office was ever really suffering – the guys who were suffering were the guys hanging on at the back. The office was where I liked to spend my time on the days that I wasn’t going to be in a position to do a job for anyone, or just to wait, in case my leader needed me later on. On a four-hour flat stage of a stage race, the office was my salvation. While I still had to physically hold the speed dictated by the front of the race I could switch off enough in my head to save some of the precious mental energy that I would need to do my job later. In the Tour, though, there was no ‘office’ – instead it was all-out war.
The perceived importance of the Tour de France means that everyone there sees the race as his chance to strike gold. Every single second-rate sprinter is fighting for the wheel that they think will deliver them to the big time; every opportunist is looking for the break that might just catapult them into the limelight. No team leader can take the risk of crashing and losing time, so they, and their entire teams, want to be at the front from the beginning of the race until the end. Bike riders will fight tooth and nail in most races for any kind of success, but at the Tour that is all amplified. It is bike racing with the volume turned up.
The absence of an office to go to in the first week of the race meant there wasn’t a moment to relax. It felt like I had a brake lever shoved up my arse the entire time, and if I so much as left a two-inch gap to the wheel in front then someone would whip round me and push me off the wheel. Riders whom I knew well, and whom I could normally spend a bit of time chatting to in the bunch, didn’t even say hello. It wasn’t because they wanted to ignore me, but simply because they didn’t see me – they were so stressed by the race they could only focus on what they were doing.
This increasing tension and the continually rising speeds can add up to only one grim conclusion: crashes. By 2007 it was already customary for the first week to be plagued by crashes in the tightly packed peloton. Crashes are a part of racing, but in the Tour’s first week they are really horrible. They aren’t a result of the natural hazards of the race which typically cause them – slippery descents or dangerous corners – they are senseless, caused by too much tension, and too many riders trying to be in the same place at the same time.
Crashes weren’t only a risk for me because of injury. For a domestique they can make a tough day even harder, and the frequency of them in the Tour is exhausting. Once a crash went down, presuming I had managed to avoid falling off myself, it was my job to make sure that none of our riders needed help after the crash. If they did, it meant waiting for them to get their bike fixed (for what inevitably felt like an eternity) as the bunch continued to speed down the road. Then I had to help whomever it was get back to the race as smoothly and as quickly as possible. In most races it was enough to cover the distance to the back of the team cars before I could relax and start to feel safe. At the Tour, though, the convoy is so long that even when I spied the tail lights of the last car up ahead there was often still a full kilometre between me and the back of the race. Making up ground at the speed of the Tour peloton is fucking hard, and I knew that saving my leaders from disaster in the treacherous first week would mean serious difficulties for me later in the race.
While I was suffering a personal hell in the first week, things went extremely well for the team. My roommate for the race, Pippo Pozzato, got in early and won the fifth stage. The team was delighted; we had won the Giro and now we’d taken out a Tour stage. In only five stages our job was practically done. In any other race that release would have meant the whole thing became relaxing and fun, but that was the Tour, it just couldn’t be that simple. That same evening Maurizzo, the directeur sportif, walked into the room on his rounds, and after finishing congratulating Pippo in one breath, in the next he reinforced the importance of the team classification to me. What he seemed to fail to realise was that instead of bringing three climbers (as the team had planned) he had only brought two, Manuel ‘Trixi’ Beltrán and myself. Beltrán was a nice guy. He had been one of Ábraham Olano’s domestiques at Banesto and one of Armstrong’s mountain men at US Postal, but he was a bit lost at Liquigas – he served no real purpose, and sending a guy to the Tour to ride the team classification who is used to riding for the overall win was completely unbefitting to his talents. He seemed to think the same thing too, and he sat up every day as soon as he felt like he’d had enough, and eased off.
When we hit the mountains things got nasty on the descent of the Cormet du Roselend during the stage from Le Grand-Bornand to Tignes. As we charged down the descent, and my triceps burned with the strain of my weight being unusually distributed all over the bike, as per usual the world disappeared from my consciousness as I focused intently on the back wheel in front of me. Part way down the descent I shot out of a fast bend, pulled hard on the bars and stamped on the pedals, sprinting full bore after the wheel in front. Suddenly the bike bucked like a rodeo bull. I was flung from my machine and over the handlebars at 70 km/h. and came thumping down on the back of my head before I even knew what was happening.
Crashing is always unexpected, but often when you hear or see a rider fall ahead of you, or you slide out on a bend, you have a microsecond for your brain to register. The feeling of knowing that you are going to fall is perhaps the worst feeling that any professional cyclist can imagine. It is nothing to do with the anticipation of the pain, the potential for broken limbs, the stinging intensity of cleaning the wound out in the shower, or the nights stuck sleeping on one side to avoid touching the parts of your body that have had the top layers of skin grated off … It is much more serious than that. With every slip, overshot bend or unavoidable pile of riders in front of you, as a professional rider about to go down you know in that moment your very career is in jeopardy. For a professional cyclist, just being hurt by a crash is the best possible scenario. A crash, no matter how seemingly innocuous, can be all it takes to start off a chain of events that can end a career. I had known, all too well after my haematocrit issue, that if you are left behind for even a moment, cycling will move on and there can often be no way back in. A crash could have just the same effect. A broken bone would mean time off the bike; time off the bike would mean missing racing and the loss of condition, both of which could potentially put you in a bad position with team management, consciously or not. There is nothing worse for a manager than having one of their twenty-five riders unable to compete. The pressure is passed on to other riders and the management themselves while they try to fill the gap left by an injured rider. When it comes to contract-renewal time the things that count aren’t excuses, they are numbers of wins, numbers of race days and performances. There is simply no room in the twelve or twenty-four months on a rider’s contract for time out for crashes. People often marvel that cyclists continue to race with horrific injuries, and think that cyclists are tough. It isn’t that cyclists are particularly robust guys; it’s just that they don’t have a choice. A rider climbs back on to his bike bloodied and hurt and tries to keep going because he has to. If a rider can get to the finish then at least he has a chance to race the next day. If he can do that then he won’t abandon his team in the race, he won’t lose race days, and he won’t be seen as a problem to anyone.
All of those things are usually what flashes through a rider’s mind as the balance goes beneath him, the split second before the whole deck of cards hits the floor. This time, though, I had no time to see my career flash before my eyes, or wonder about the months of hard work that I might be throwing away if I landed slightly wrong. I hit the floor before I knew I had even fallen. I was completely disorientated.
The recently delivered new frames that we had received from Cannondale for the Tour were pre-production models and weren’t anywhere near rigid enough. The lateral force was too much for the sloppy frame and the chain shipped off the outside of the big chain-ring as the bike flexed through the bottom bracket. I hadn’t stood a chance.
I felt around my head and the back of my helmet was completely caved in. I was shaken, but as the helmet had taken the impact I quickly realised nothing was broken. With my adrenaline still pumping from the descent, I was in a rush to remount, and I picked up my bike and started riding off, only to suddenly realise, by the terrified and confused looks of the riders coming towards me, that I was going the wrong way. By the time I had turned around the effects of the shock hit me and I felt I had suddenly folded in on myself like a burning scrap of paper. All my strength and my nerves had been smashed out of me when I hit the floor. I rode crumpled and slow towards the finish. I eventually crossed the line in 172nd place, dead last.
In the mountains the pressure of the Tour mounted on me even more. Liquigas was hell-bent on going for the team classification, and while Beltrán didn’t seem to care I was too diligent to try to not care. On the road, though, this made my life really hard. In the Tour (as with most races) once the front group has gone off to fight for the victory most riders want to stop racing hard. This is especially true in the groups just behind the leaders, where a lot of the riders have been dropped from the front, having done their job, and want to conserve as much energy as possible by riding at a steady tempo to the finish. I was normally one of those riders. I would do my job, and then find a group that I could ride in to the finish with as conservatively as possible. I knew as well as anyone how irritating it was to have one person amongst the group who wanted to continue racing. The trouble was, with Liquigas dead set on the team classification I knew that I was going to make myself very unpopular.
I was the best Liquigas rider on the road on these stages, and while the riders I was with just wanted to get to the finish with as little effort as possible, I had the number one team car behind the group, with Mariuzzo’s balding head stuck out of the window barking swear words at me and hammering the car horn to get me to keep racing. I found his attitude humiliating rather than motivating, and just about the worst approach I could have imagined as I tried to get through the mountain stages. I felt so irritated about it that I started jumping away from the groups I was with before the final climb of the day and riding alone to the finish, not because I was desperate to get myself a better placing on the stage, but because I was just so embarrassed by the situation.
• • •
On stage ten, during the second week, things took on a new dimension. Seventy kilometres into the stage, as we hurtled down another tiny départmental road at Mach 3, I turned to my Brazilian Liquigas teammate Murilo Fischer and said, ‘Jesus suffering fuck! Has that break not gotten away yet?’
‘Nah, sounds like Schumacher is going to get caught too. Could be a while yet till they let it go.’
‘If some fucker doesn’t get clear soon, I am going to be finished. It’s fucking forty degrees …’
The prospect of having to keep racing at this speed while the endless flurries of attacks and counter-attacks nullified each other and forced the speed of the peloton ever higher was almost too much.
The intensity of the fast flat sprint stages that dominated the first week had been replaced by the wild ride of the transitional stages. In any Tour there are far more specialist stages than there are stages that can be won by an ‘average’ rider. Most Tour de France routes have at least ten stages for pure sprinters, four mountain stages for the climbers, and two time trials for the general classification favourites. Every other rider in the race is forced to focus his energies on a short period in the second week when the stages are open for a breakaway to succeed. In a normal race these stages would be the moment where the race relaxes a little and allows the riders who really want it to try for the win: in the Tour, though, everybody really wants it.
Instead of the usual flurry of attacks that quickly sort out who will go in the breakaway on days like this, in the Tour the peloton becomes a raging mass of riders all desperate to get what they think could be the winning ticket to a better life. As the days go by and these opportunities decrease, then the intensity amongst the riders trying to get in the break increases.
The second week was hard going; at the end of stage 13 of the race I was an exhausted man. But if I was at least prepared for the racing to be hard, nothing could have prepared me for my accommodation for the next two nights. Hotels at bike races are far worse than most people would imagine, and the hotels at the Tour de France were notoriously bad even by the standards of a bike race. I had seen some things in my time as a cyclist, but nothing quite like Hotel Belle Vue in Albi. I mean, by 2007 I had raced all over the world, in tiny unknown places in all sorts of ‘developing nations’ – South America and all over Eastern Europe – but the Hotel Belle Vue, where our team lodged for what was supposed to be the greatest race on earth, was what any civilised person could only describe as a hovel.
We arrived there after a soaking wet time trial (another anonymous hundred-and-something position for me). By this stage of the Tour I was so accustomed to hurting myself that all of the stinging shock I had felt making my effort in the prologue had turned into a kind of dull ache, something I could just about feel if I pushed through the layers of fatigue. What mattered now wasn’t the ability to hurt myself; it was every little thing I could do to make myself comfortable when I wasn’t on the road squeezing the life out of myself. Each night I hoped that we would stay somewhere comfortable, and I could at least relax. As soon as I pushed the door open to our room at the Belle Vue I heard the bump as the back of the door banged into the suitcase that had been squeezed into the only available space in the room by the soigneur. I felt my heart sink.
The room was so cramped that Pippo and I had to remove the desk and a chair to make enough space to open our suitcases, and even then the situation was chaotic. The rain on the stage meant that we had to find a way to dry our shoes and damp clothes. My attempt to enter the bathroom to find some extra space was abruptly halted when I opened the door to a waft of cleaning detergent that was so strong it took me right back to the RSPCA kennels in York where we used to go and get stray dogs when I was a kid. I slammed the door back shut but it was too late: the whole room now stank like a crime scene. Still, at least there was a bed. But when I opened the bed sheets, to my utter disbelief a fucking cockroach was already making itself comfortable!
In the evening events began to resemble an episode of Fawlty Towers. While we were waiting for dinner a row erupted between the owner and his wife. The débâcle escalated to such a level that eventually the owner’s wife called the gendarmes in a desperate attempt to get the owner under control. The upshot of this drama was that our team went without dinner, and the riders had no option but to eat the food we had with us. This was the era before teams travelled with chefs, so it was ham and cheese baguettes and boxes of cereal and protein bars all round. As I slumped into bed that night the old mattress sagged so much my back touched the floor. I listened to the thumping music that was coming out of the nightclub next door, and couldn’t help but think of the many tourists I would ride past the next day who were probably at that moment just finishing a nice meal, washed down with some French wine, before heading back to their four-star hotels for a comfortable night’s rest. The very next day those same people would be standing at the side of the road, marvelling at us shiny bike riders. It felt like a cruel joke. I felt so far from the pinnacle of anything that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and I didn’t honestly have the energy to do either.
• • •
If it was possible to descend any lower than the Hotel Belle Vue, in the third week of the race things seemed to do just that, only with a much more sinister twist. Cycling was in the midst of its toughest period in terms of doping positives. For the decade leading up to the 2007 race it felt like not one Tour de France had passed without some sort of incident involving doping. The reality of doping had forever been held back from the world by a seemingly unbreakable dam wall, but now the dam had sprung leaks all over the place. Cracks were appearing and more and more uncomfortable truths were flowing out. The Tour was the centrepiece of European cycling, and it duly supplied the most explosive and scandalous stories each year.
In that Tour of 2007, one depressing débâcle followed another. T-Mobile’s Patrik Sinkewitz was the first to test positive, followed by double stage winner Alexander Vinokourov (who left the race with his entire team on stage 15). It was like a forest fire was ripping through the group. Doping at the Tour was such big news, it felt as if TV stations kept people on standby ready to pounce on us if there was news of a positive. As soon as anything happened with a doping story, the media presence at the race would swell to another level again.
The first real shock that I experienced personally was the positive test result of Cristian Moreni on stage 16. We were staying in the same hotel as the Cofidis team, and one evening, after a tough six and a half hour stage that finished on top of the Col d’Aubisque, we returned to the sight of police swarming all over the hotel. The French police were so heavy-handed it was ridiculous. They had set up a makeshift command centre in a conference room, with banks of computers and phone lines. They even had police dogs being led about the place. Even though I knew beyond any doubt that there were no pharmaceuticals in my body or in my suitcase, under that kind of scrutiny it was impossible not to feel guilty.
When I eventually made it to the sanctity of my room, I shut the door behind me and peered out from behind the curtain at the scene outside the hotel. It looked like a hostage situation was underway, and if I hadn’t been made to feel so guilty then I’m sure it would have been quite exciting – rather like watching an action movie – but this was really disturbing. Having been on our bikes for the best part of the day, none of the riders had any idea what was going on, nor who was being arrested. We had less information than anyone and we were under siege in our own hotel. There was such an atmosphere of paranoia that I didn’t even want to leave my room to go for a massage, just in case Axel Foley from Beverly Hills Cop pounced on me and started reading me my rights. Still, the intimidating glares of the gendarmes were preferable to the scene outside the hotel, where hordes of press were waiting, desperately looking for a comment from anyone.
The situation was horrible, but I had no energy at all to be wondering about what was going on, or what my reaction should be. I didn’t spend the evening looking at the news on the internet. I did what I could to stay focused and recover from the race and prepare for the next day. In the morning I was still so tired it was a major effort to just get a decent breakfast and re-pack my suitcase. Yet, when I stepped off the bus an hour or so later at the start, such was the media scrum in the road it looked like we’d arrived at a protest march. They had all been following every development in the last twelve hours like their jobs depended on it, and now they wanted an opinion from anyone and everyone.
I’d had no media training, and despite being smart enough to normally avoid the kinds of traps that could be laid in a question I was exhausted mentally from the effort of riding the race. But things had started to change. It wasn’t enough to just ride dopefree; you were expected to take a stand, to say something.
My problem, aside from the obvious one – i.e., not wanting to have to wonder what drugs everyone else had been using to make my job of chasing them around France for the past two weeks so fucking hard – was that I was full of empathy for the people around me. I knew enough to understand that a majority of the riders at the time were ‘second-class’ dopers, who would just as happily have raced without drugs as they would with drugs. I didn’t have the luxury of being able to call all my colleagues dickheads. I understood the immense pressures on them, on all of us. I saw no point in standing there giving an ill-informed soundbite stating the bloody obvious, which would only serve to drag my teammates into the mire and throw mud at most of my colleagues, whom I’d then have to work with. My only wish was to keep my head down and get to the finish of the race, so that my job was done.
But things kept getting worse. Information had been slowly seeping out about the race leader, Michael Rasmussen, who was in trouble with his own Danish federation for missing several out-of-competition tests. The race was thrown into disarray, and the pressure continued to intensify on everyone. Tensions were high even as we raced through the mountains. It would begin from the moment we all woke up; riders tried to stay hidden in their team buses, and rushed to and from the sign-on trying to avoid having to give a quote. Then the tension between the group would grow throughout the day, until we crossed the line at the finish of the stage, where it felt like whatever news had come out was about to be unleashed on us while we struggled for breath amidst the pandemonium. The first rider I can remember to crack was the Dutchman Michael Boogerd of Rabobank, who ended up punching someone. At the time the only surprise registered in the group was that things like that didn’t occur more often. There was almost no way to keep it together in that environment. Riders no longer wanted to be associated with old acquaintances, and the peloton became a very unpleasant place to be.
• • •
It wasn’t until we rolled into Paris on a very relaxed final stage that I finally let go of my stress and slipped to the back of the bunch. In London, at the start, like at the beginning of most Grand Tours, I had been blinkered by the process of what I was about to do. Throughout the race I had felt like a bull in the final act of a bullfight, whose head had been forced lower and lower by the taunts of the matador, but finally, on the very last stage, I felt that I could afford to lift up my head and take look at where I was.
Even more than the impressive sight of the Arc de Triomphe was the feeling of release – of almost being free from the Tour. The pressure cooker had been so demanding that in the final days I reduced my mental focus to the basic mechanical process of simply turning the pedals and nothing more. I had no idea of anything superfluous, like town names; often, my mind zoned out from the fact I was in the Tour de France at all. I knew how long the next day’s stage was, and how much downhill there would be (so I could tell myself the stage was that little bit shorter). My blinkers were on: ‘Drink a bit, eat a bit and stay in front.’ Maybe, if I had thought more, I could have fired myself up somehow, but in the end I found that the only way to survive the scale of the Tour and the drama was to try to sterilise things as much as I could to make them manageable.
What perked me up somewhat as we swept through the streets of another European capital was that I knew Camilla would be there waiting for me at the finish. That was a major boost. Camilla, along with several of the other wives and girlfriends of the Liquigas riders, had made the trip to Paris. I felt a sense of pride, as I always did when she was at a race, and I enjoyed my ride on the cobbled incline up and down the Champs-Elysées to the end of first Tour de France.
If the last stage was rewarding, my final experience with the Tour was just comical. I had endured doping scandals, police raids, crashes, and the charms of the Hotel Belle Vue, and yet as it turned out I still had to sample the delights of the after-Tour party – an event so talked up by so many riders during the last week that I was quite looking forward to it. But as soon as I crossed the line and realised I was actually freed from the race, after three weeks of racing each other, sleeping within two feet of my roommate and never being more than an arm’s length from someone involved in the Tour, all I wanted to do was to spend some time with Camilla. The last thing on my mind was looking at the same ugly bunch of faces I had become overly familiar with during the previous three weeks. But the Tour party – like the Tour itself – was hailed as something you had to do. So after some dinner and a bit of time to rest, Camilla and I found ourselves walking around the middle of Paris on a Sunday night looking for the location of the ‘official’ night out. By now Paris was totally deserted, apart from a few bars filled with alcoholics and tourists – a stark contrast to the day, when the packed streets of fans had made the city feel as if it was bursting at the seams.
After a while we eventually stumbled across the nightclub where it was all supposed to be taking place. There were serious-looking doormen outside and they told me in gruff French that a private party was going on. After the great performance of finding my name on the list, they showed us through the entrance, and we walked into a dingy and half-empty nightclub. My suitably low expectations meant that I wasn’t in the least bit taken aback to see that the big Tour de France party had all the atmosphere of an out-of-season holiday camp disco in Blackpool.
Camilla and I exchanged awkward glances, but felt too many expectant sets of eyes on us to disappear instantly. As we worked out what we were going to do, I excused myself to nip to the bathroom to pee. By the time I returned I was unsurprised to find the tall Belgian Gert Steegmans already chatting Camilla up. I walked over to them and, catching my eye, he asked, ‘Do you want a drink, mate?’ I replied, ‘Yeah. Do you want to buy one for my girlfriend too?’ He just said, ‘Oh, this is your bird, is it?’ and wandered off without a care in the world.
That was enough. My first Tour was done, and we left the party after one quick drink. It wouldn’t be my last Tour de France, but my impression of the race never changed: it was big, it was brash, it was tiring, and nowhere near as glamorous as it looked. What was more, it definitely wasn’t for me.