At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (15 page)

I knew Chris was coming to the Giro, but I was surprised to spot him in the VIP enclosure after the team time trial in Turin. I asked him later how he’d acquired a guest pass. Oh, that was simple, he said, he’d just got in touch with the organizers and told them that he was Mark Cavendish’s manager.

If I was already distinctly unimpressed then, I was furious when I discovered that Peta hadn’t been allowed into the enclosure where Chris was enjoying Prosecco and canapés. That night I told Chris how much it had bothered me, while also bluntly informing him that I was far from happy with his work so far. I told him I would give him until December to smarten up his act, and that if he didn’t, I’d be looking for a new manager. To be perfectly frank, I didn’t feel hopeful that much would change.

a
t the Giro itself, in truth, my frustration with Chris had very quickly been overtaken by much more serious and pressing concerns. I’d had the team time trial to worry about on the first day, the sprint in Parma on the second, and was wearing the pink jersey on stage three from Reggio nell’Emilia to Rapallo in Liguria. On that third day, something else had occurred that had made not only the stage but also the entire Giro, and even our careers as professional cyclists, feel like an irrelevance: the Belgian rider Wouter Weylandt had turned to look behind him on the descent of the Passo del Bocco, stubbed his left foot against an iron rail running down one side of the road, spun out of control on impact, and smashed into a wall on
the opposite side. Around an hour later, it was announced that he had died of his injuries.

Even before the descent and indeed before the stage, word had got around that the road down the Passo del Bocco was narrow, dangerous, and tapered at the bottom, where the route hit the coast and a mad scramble for position would begin. With this in mind, having crested the summit adrift of the main peloton, Renshaw and I had embarked on one of our swooping skydives, catching and then passing more riders than we could count. One of these riders had been Wouter Weylandt. At the bottom of the descent, minutes later, we had slotted into a peloton where riders were already whispering in grave tones about a bad crash involving Weylandt. We heard nothing more until we arrived back at the team bus, the race having blown again on a climb before the finish to end my chances.

When confirmation arrived, silence descended upon the bus. I shivered. An hour or so earlier, he’d been riding at our side. Those minutes on the descent had been the last of his life.

We pulled up to our hotel and decamped out of the bus, heads bowed, speechless and numb. I found my room, got undressed, and stepped into the shower. There, I burst into tears.

Weylandt wasn’t a close friend, but I’d always liked him. He had big, bright eyes, a ready smile, and a penchant for eccentric hairstyles, all of which were a reflection of his personality. We had crossed swords in the odd sprint, as I of course had with Wouter’s best mate, Tyler Farrar. Tyler’s team, Garmin, was staying in the same hotel as us that night, but Tyler didn’t come down to dinner. What happened that day had put our petty squabbles into perspective; we were all part of the same family, all exposing ourselves to the same risks on a daily basis, and we’d lost one of our own.

The next day it was decided that we would pay tribute to Wouter by putting on a cortège rather than a race. Each team rode for around 20 km on the front, and scarcely a word was uttered all day. Fans lined the roadside with their applause and their banners commemorating Wouter and his race number at the Giro, 108.

It was beautiful, moving, and desperately sad. It also, inevitably, stirred up thoughts, images, and memories that you usually went out of your way not to dwell on as a professional cyclist—the dangers that lurked on descents, in sprints, that you encountered and defied almost on a daily basis. On the evening of Weylandt’s death and the next day as we rode together—each in a world of our own but probably all thinking the same things—I questioned my career, the way I rode, and whether I could carry on. This was the inner voice of sanity, reason, perspective—and yet this was the one that would soon be drowned out when our warped sense of normality returned in a few hours’ time. The only explanation was that love, our love for the sport, was deaf and blind.

i
t’s not very logical,” admitted the Tour director, Christian Prudhomme.

It was October 2010, and in front of a crowd of cycling’s glitterati at Paris’s Palais des Congrès—and one very happy Manx sprinter—Christian Prudhomme was revealing the route for the 2011 Tour de France. The lack of logic that Prudhomme was referring to was the fact that, despite 15 Tour stage wins since 2008, I had yet to win the green jersey competition, nominally designed to reward the best sprinter in the race.

I’d come close in the previous couple of years. In 2009, Thor Hushovd and my contentious disqualification for dangerous sprinting on stage 14 to Besançon had cost me, and then in 2010 I had been too unnerved by the sudden loss of power from my legs on stage 4 to mop up essential points. On both occasions I’d come within a whisker of winning the green jersey, but there was something fundamentally wrong with the structure of the jersey competition if I was dominating to the extent that I had, yet still losing out to riders stockpiling
points in the two or three intermediate sprints dotted along on the stage routes.

Prudhomme had agreed and decided that the rules needed to change. In 2011, he confirmed, there would be just one intermediate sprint on every stage, not two or three, and these would be worth a whopping 20 points to the winner, with a sliding scale of points right down to 15th place. Under the old system, only the first three riders at the intermediate sprints had scored, with six points for first, four for second, and two for the third rider over the line. The revamp meant that opting out of the intermediate sprints, as I had usually done in 2009 and 2010—judging the risk of wasting energy too great and the reward too meager—would no longer be an option.

Parallel to this, there was also now a bigger premium on winning stages than had previously been the case: Every sprint would be worth 45 points, 10 more than under the old rules. Even more crucially, there would now be a 10-point difference between first and second place in sprints at the end of stages, double what it had been in the past.

Based on Prudhomme’s comments and these notable changes, it was widely assumed that I would be their main beneficiary. However, it was no foregone conclusion; a lot would depend on the placement of the intermediate sprints, which were only revealed a matter of weeks before the Grand Départ in the Vendée region. My task could theoretically be even harder if, for instance, a large number of the intermediate sprints were placed soon after the major climbs.

One thing was beyond question, however: our commitment to banishing and avoiding the regrets of the previous two years. Mark Renshaw, more than anyone else, had been beating the same drum
in the weeks and months leading up to the Tour: “We’re not coming home without that jersey.” Nothing was left to chance in our preparation; when the locations of the intermediate sprints had been released, we studied them and formulated our strategy. At the end of May, we had even gathered at a training camp in northwest France to test-ride the first four stages, in the hope that local knowledge would help give us a flying start.

My last major warm-up race, the Tour of Switzerland in June, didn’t feature a single genuine sprint finish because, as far as I could tell, the race organizer—a former pro by the name of Beat Zberg—thought that no one wanted to watch them. Nonetheless, surviving the glut of giant mountain passes that week had boosted my form and confidence. Further adding to my optimism, our Tour team had never been more singularly geared toward winning sprints. The eight express carriages on what I believed would be my fastest and best sprint train to date went by the names of Matt Goss, Bernie Eisel, Tony Martin, Danny Pate, Lars Bak, Mark Renshaw, Peter Velits, and Tejay Van Garderen.

We were ready.

i
wasn’t the only one with high hopes for the 2011 Tour de France. British interest in the race had been steadily growing ever since the Grand Départ in London in 2007, and Brad Wiggins had big ambitions in the general classification in what was his Team Sky’s second Tour. A year earlier I would have endorsed Brad’s own view that his fourth place in the 2009 Tour (later amended to third, after Lance Armstrong’s disqualification) had been a one-off, the lucky coincidence of favorable circumstances. Over the first six months of 2011,
however, I realized how wrong I had been. A cyclist can often gauge another rider’s form at a single glance, based on things that he does at moments of a race that pass completely unnoticed by the watching public. The way he moves up the peloton after a toilet break, his positioning, how the muscles in his calves flex beneath the skin … I had hardly seen Brad at a race all year, but I studied him over the first week of the Tour and realized that he was a different animal from the one who had turned up 12 months earlier. Equally importantly, I’d heard the stories from guys who had been training with Brad at altitude, or others who had suffered on his wheel the week before the Tour at the nationals, which Brad had won by 35 seconds from Pete Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas, and which I hadn’t finished.

“Brad’s flying. FLYING,” they all said.

“Never seen him this good …”

“Could win the Tour going like that.”

All of which was making headlines back in the UK, which brought with it pros and cons, one being that my future was the subject of intense speculation when we arrived in France.

In June, various “insiders” had told journalists that my move to Sky had already been agreed, which wasn’t remotely accurate.

My fear when these rumors first started circulating had been that Bob might even use them as an excuse not to pick me for the Tour, or perhaps the Vuelta a España in September, which would be key to my preparations for the world championships. Privately, I think it had crossed Bob’s mind that Team Sky might be trying to hinder his search for a new sponsor. He had already seen five of our riders move to Sky at the end of 2009, with Michael Rogers joining them at the end of 2010. The demise of HTC would free up our riders for other teams. It wasn’t just me in demand; the team was crammed
with talent, between members of my lead-out train and winners in their own right. HTC folding would also clear Sky’s path to something else: more race wins.

Bob wasn’t in the Vendée for the Grand Départ, illness having kept him away. He therefore missed Philippe Gilbert winning the first stage, finishing atop the Mont des Alouettes, a 1-km climb that most pundits had decided would be too tough for yours truly. In fact, it wasn’t the climb that ruled me out but a puncture 2 km from the line. Avoiding a crash in front of me, I had swerved and stabbed my front wheel on the crash barriers, punctured, and had to stop for a wheel change. There was then no way back into contention.

The next stage was one that we were all looking forward to and had prepared for on our spring reconnaissance: the team time trial. These were always the most stressful days for the directeurs, the mechanics, and the riders, particularly with me around. In our press conference the previous week, I’d joked about how I went into “
Full Metal Jacket
mode” before team time trials. Part of it was my perfectionism and my desperation to do well, but it was also sheer bafflement at the naïveté of some professional bike riders about what this discipline required. While it mystified me, their failure to grasp even the fundamentals also made me realize what a fantastic education my coach, Rod Ellingworth, had given me and the other lads at the Academy when we were Under 23s. My pet hate was riders who would try to pull too hard or for too long on the front just to comfort their ego; changes of pace, whether it was a guy slowing down because he’d been in the wind for too long, or suddenly accelerating, were poison for the team’s momentum.

I would never tire of emphasizing it, even if my teammates were sick of hearing it: “No fucking heroics!”

Two days before the Tour started, we had headed out, as a team, for a run-through on the race route. An Australian film crew had followed us, and, typically, I had kicked off about something or other, upon which Matt Goss had got the hump and told me to stop ranting, just like Bernie the previous year at the Vuelta. It had really been nothing, but it made a juicy little bit of footage for the Australian TV crew. When the clip was broadcast, it became, for the rest of the media, an invitation to speculate about an internal rivalry between Gossy and me, fueled by his win at Milan–San Remo.

In truth, all it had really been was me being myself in the buildup to the team time trial. It was the same on the bus within minutes of stage 1 ending, when I collared our sprint coach, Erik Zabel, and began talking tactics and techniques for the following day.

“The first three men should be in their aero position,” I told him, “the rest on the brake handles so they can get as close as possible to the wheel in front and brake if they need to …”