At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (22 page)

Those crucial, life-altering last 50 meters bearing down on the line that represented so much to so many of us—none of that was anything but the culmination of years and years of hard work. I had no more won the worlds than Rod had won it, than Chris, Jez, Ian,
Gee, Brad, Dave, and Steve had won it. Than Adam Blythe, who had scored that vital single point that had given us an eighth rider. Than Dan Lloyd, who hadn’t made the team but had attended every training camp and whose congratulatory text message was the first on my phone. Than every one of the other hundreds of people who had in some way contributed to Project Rainbow Jersey.

That realization would trouble me throughout what should have been the happiest evening of my professional career. At first I couldn’t process anything: neither Brammy, who had ridden for Ireland, being the first person to embrace me in my first few seconds as the world champion, nor the Prince of Denmark, a huge cycling fan and another mate of Brian’s whom we’d once met for a cup of tea, presenting me with my medal on the podium.

My head was still spinning at a dizzying, disorienting cadence throughout the national anthem, during which I surprised myself by not crying, or at the press conference or dope control.

By the time I’d dealt with the formalities, arrived back at the bus, and clambered up the steps, my teammates were midway through their second, maybe their third happy hour. Everyone was drunk and raucously elated. Even Rod, who is the least proud and self-regarding person you could ever meet, took a photograph—just about the only one in his possession with any commemorative value—and later made it the screensaver on his computer.

We drove back to the hotel, the bus throbbing with cheers, music, and jubilation. The party then spilled into the bar and grew in size and inebriation throughout the night. Peta and Finn were there, as was Simon Bayliff. The guys all had their own stories, different things that they remembered, different vantage points from which they’d seen
me win. Dave and Jez had pulled over next to the big screen on the last lap, watched the sprint, and almost forgotten to finish the race!

Everyone tried to savor the moment and the achievement, but I was struggling slightly. I’m loath to use the word
anticlimax,
but there was a certain hollowness to the joy at having realized an ambition that I’d held for so long. Perhaps I hadn’t drunk enough or, more likely, I felt uncomfortable that so much of the attention was being focused on me. As if I was the world champion and they weren’t. Of course that was the reality—I would now wear the rainbow jersey for a year, the rainbow jersey that I had lusted after, dreamt of, worked toward—but it somehow didn’t seem right that there was so little recognition for them. I had executed my job perfectly, but so had they.

I’m not just talking about money, bearing in mind that our federation didn’t offer any bonus to divide, unlike other nations, and I don’t mean other kinds of material rewards. They would all get a nice watch—an IWC Yacht Club—specially commissioned and customized, with rainbow stripes detailing across the black face and each rider’s name engraved on the bezel. There, too, I was indebted, to Steve Cumming’s wife, Nicky, who worked for the jeweler David M. Robinson and had arranged to have the watches made in secret.

When I talked about recognition, I meant something that money couldn’t buy—a unanimous, even if silent, acknowledgment that I was just one part, and not even necessarily the most important, of an extraordinary, unstoppable machine. They all looked happy enough, beer bottles in hand, staggering around the bar, hugging each other and singing. But as the clock ticked toward one, I was tired and realized that ecstatic-yet-guilty feeling was one that I wasn’t going to shake.

I thanked them all, said goodnight, and took myself and my rainbow jersey off to bed.

A few days later, incidentally, Rob Hayles went to collect the bike that I’d ridden in Copenhagen from the Manchester velodrome. When he located it in the British Cycling coach Shane Sutton’s office, Rob looked down at the front wheel, did a double take, then squeezed the rubber with his thumb. Like the Spaniard Abraham Olano in 1995, I had won the world championships on a punctured tire.

t
his is not necessarily a detail that I’d like recorded in the annals of professional bike racing as a footnote to the first British victory in the world road race championships for 48 years, but soon after thinking
I’m the world champion,
another realization flashed across my thoughts:
Fuck … Head & Shoulders
.

Head & Shoulders was the brand of shampoo that I had recently agreed to endorse, and for which I was due to do a major photo shoot two days after the worlds. It wasn’t dandruff that I was worried about but—like in January 2010—a damaged tooth.

After the 2002 Giro d’Italia, the American Tyler Hamilton had famously needed 11 of his teeth capped, having fractured his shoulder early in the race and used teeth-grinding as a way of displacing the pain. I’d done something similar over the previous six hours (admittedly without the broken bone, but also without the drugs that Hamilton has now admitted were fueling him), and it had left me with a smile more suited to Halloween than a major advertising campaign. I had no choice but to clear the diary over the next two days, call off
interviews, fly to Manchester, and go straight to my dentist. If you look at the adverts we shot later that week, I think you’ll agree that he did a pretty good job.

In my first fortnight as the world champion, I’ll admit that not too much of my time was spent on a bike. There were public appearances, meetings with Simon Bayliff, and, finally, days and evenings to be spent with Peta and Finn without fretting about what I was eating, how long I was staying up, and what impact it would have on the next day’s training.

As well as my new manager, I was going to have someone new helping me stay on top of things—a role that roughly matched the traditional job description of personal assistant but was in actual fact more like a human Swiss Army Knife.

In 2010, partly promoted by Rod’s constant insistence that I get more rest, I’d realized that my afternoons and evenings were filled with tedious admin and practical chores, and that it would be beneficial if someone could lighten that load.

One of my mates from the Isle of Man, a guy named Rob Dooley, worked in a bike shop and was looking for a change of direction and scenery. I asked Dools whether he’d consider being paid to act as my odd-job man, and he had leapt at the chance.

Dools was a lovely guy but, bless him, a bit chaotic. It didn’t matter for the most part because he generally did what I asked, plus I trusted him and liked having him around. There were, though, times when the disorderliness not only annoyed but also alarmed me. One day in the spring of 2011 particularly stands out: I’d got a call one afternoon—it was from either the BBC or the Giro d’Italia organizers, I can’t remember which—to ask whether I was free to go to Sicily and ride up Mount Etna for a preview of the forthcoming race. It was
short notice, but I had no prior engagements and so I said, yes, why not. The next day I duly did the ride, the BBC filmed it, and then we all went back to the airport to catch our flights home.

I thought no more of it until, around two weeks later, a letter from the UCI dropped onto my doormat. I opened the envelope, looked down the page, and gulped. The only three words I remember were “missed test notification.”

I should confess straight away that it was naive and irresponsible to trust another person, whether it was Dools or anyone else, to fill out my anti-doping whereabouts form. These log-sheets had to be continually, accurately updated to allow dope-testing bodies to locate riders for out-of-competition controls. If they were unable to find you and take samples, you got one strike. Three strikes, or missed test notifications, within the space of 18 months added up to a full-scale anti-doping violation, a ban, and an irredeemably damaged reputation. I was now on one strike.

Dools’s excuse was that, although he’d known about my change of plans and change of location for the day, he hadn’t been able to access the Internet and log the new details. I thought it sounded a bit like the-dog-ate-my-homework, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and we moved on.

There were further issues over the summer before it all finally came to a head. The catalyst was an unfortunate mistake by my HTC teammate Alex Rasmussen, or rather three pretty half-witted ones, because that was how many missed test notifications he had chalked up. The team had no other option but to terminate his contract and immediately send him home from the Tour of Britain.

When I heard the news, I suddenly felt an odd, ominous chill. I picked up my phone and immediately scrolled through my contacts
to the number of my UK Sport anti-doping liaison officer. When he answered, I asked whether he could look at my whereabouts information and tell me what it said for today’s date.

“Sure,” he said. “Here it is. You’re in Italy.”

I kept my composure long and well enough for the correction to be made, thanked him, then ended the call and straightaway phoned Dools.

There was no “Hey, Dools, how are you?” no platitudes, just a very abrupt one-line question: “Where am I right now?”

“The Tour of Britain,” said the sheepish voice at the end of the line.

“Oh, okay,” I replied. “So how come on my whereabouts form it says that I’m in Italy?”

This was the final straw. As I put it to Dools, “If I get three missed tests, you’re going to lose your job, but I’m going to lose my career. My career. Do you realize what that means?”

There was nothing he could really say.

I adjusted my tone, ended my rant, and got to the crux.

“Look, Dools, thanks for all you’ve done, but I can’t take these risks. You can’t work with me anymore. I’ll pay you for the next month, even if you’re not working, but I can’t keep you on.”

Dools didn’t take my decision particularly well, and this was the end, sadly, not only of a working relationship but also a friendship.

I now needed someone to replace him, but fortunately didn’t have to look too far or hard. Since the start of the year, Rob Hayles and I had been vaguely discussing some arrangement whereby he could help me when he stopped racing at the end of the year; losing Dools had now put me in a position to offer Rob something akin to a full-time position. The fact that Rob had been a top rider, the man who
had partnered and mentored me to a first world title on the track in Los Angeles in 2005, not to mention that he was one of my best mates, clearly made him the ideal man for what he would tell you can be quite an onerous role. Although I have a lot of friends and there are a lot of people who want and try to get close to me, Rob was and still is one of a tiny handful who, I know, accept and love me for the person underneath the personality. He can be hilariously funny, sick with it, and he can be infuriatingly laid-back for someone as high-strung as me. Even so, it would be very difficult to find someone with a bad word to say about him.

As my Mr. Fix-It, Rob was superb from day one, pretty much ensuring that all I needed to do was get up, get dressed, and get myself on my bike. He frequently stayed at our house and became part of our family; I was part of his, with his wife, Vicky, a more than capable and very straight-talking second mother.

o
n August 4, Bob officially ended his efforts to keep HTC-Highroad alive beyond the end of 2011, having been unable to secure a replacement for HTC as the main sponsor. After informing Bob and Rolf during the Tour that I wouldn’t remain patient any longer, wouldn’t entertain any more promises or even statements of intent from them, I had thought that would at least bring some clarity to my ideas about 2012.

With my new status as world champion and all of this upheaval in the period either side of the race, it was no real surprise that my training suffered, and I had raced only once more, in the French end-of-season classic Paris–Tours. When I woke on the morning of the
race, I was so terrified of getting humiliated in my first outing in the rainbow jersey that it took a stern talking-to from Rod to make me go ahead and race. I managed not to disgrace myself but was never really in with a shout, either, ending up finishing 42nd.

With that fairly anonymous performance and a round of handshakes and good-byes, my time with the team known in its final incarnation as HTC-Highroad came to an end. Perhaps neither I nor my teammates appreciated the poignancy of the moment at the time, but we all began to realize later what a remarkable, unique team it had been and what a tragedy its demise was. Over four seasons, the men’s and women’s teams had amassed a staggering 509 wins, 50 of which had come in stages of major tours. This made us not only by far the most prolific team of our era but also one of the greatest of all time.

What made it even more remarkable was that when Bob Stapleton took over what was then the T-Mobile team from the previous free-spending (and, as has subsequently been proven, ethically dubious) regime, he was suddenly working with a heavily reduced budget. This resulted in across-the-board pay cuts and some controversial redundancies among the riders. Despite operating on limited means, he, as Brian Holm put it, “whipped our arses” and instilled a winning mentality and team spirit that became infectious. At the start of every season, Brian told himself there was simply no way we could sustain the same level of success, the same fairy tale, and yet every year we somehow managed to punch way, way above our weight.