At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (30 page)

Sometimes I was getting the impression that they would rather finish in 20th place, in the second group, than bury themselves to bring that group back to the front and therefore give me a chance in a sprint finish. Or, in the lead-out train, they would back off and refuse to take the necessary calculated risks because they were afraid of crashing and jeopardizing their classics season. They were two different types of egotism—the former more to do with naked ambition, the latter with self-preservation—and, without naming names, I’d seen a version of the former at Tirreno–Adriatico and Gent–Wevelgem, and examples of the latter at Scheldeprijs. Such a singular
preoccupation with one period of the year and two races, in particular, was completely alien to me, having spent most of my career in a team where we approached every race as if it was our last.

Matters weren’t helped by what I still perceived as Wilfred Peeters’s lack of confidence in me. He would invariably work to make a break succeed rather than try to bring it back in the expectation of me winning a bunch sprint. I made these points to Patrick Lefevere, to Brian and to other members of the management, and was told things would improve as soon as the classics were out of the way. To the Belgians, the end of April might as well have been the end of the season, but these guys had so much they could offer outside of the classics. For example, when we arrived in Naples for the Giro d’Italia start in the first week of May, Julien Vermote was a 23-year-old in his third pro season that the team didn’t seem to know what to do with. He would leave three weeks later having discovered—and shown me—that he could look after a sprinter in a stage race like few other riders in the peloton, and hence suddenly having found his identity as a rider.

The team as a whole in Italy brought back memories of our very best groups at HTC. Brian, who claimed to hate Italy as much as he loved Great Britain but would change his mind after this, his first full Giro, was one of our directeurs; a former Italian pro named Davide Bramati, or just “Brama,” was the other. If Rolf Aldag and Brian had formerly been one of the best comedy double acts in cycling, Brian and Brama, or as Davide called himself, “cycling’s Mourinho,” ran them close. From the first day, when Brian came up to my room to tell me that Team Sky’s head of technical operations, Carsten Jeppesen, had called me “fat”—thinking that it would fire me up—the whole team just clicked. In the best, most sociable teams, riders will
stay at the dinner table shooting the breeze for an hour, maybe even two after their meal. Here, not only would we do that, but we’d also then all cram into one room to continue the conversation instead of trotting off to bed.

Camaraderie off the road translated into cohesion on it. I would win five stages—every sprint that I contested, including one that I had completely ruled out on the morning of the stage.

That particular victory came at the end of the second week, on a beautiful but unforgiving route through the Langhe hills in Piedmont. I’d put it to Brian in the morning that the guys had ridden too hard to set up my stage win the previous day and therefore deserved a rest, and besides, there was no guarantee that I’d get over the climbs in the finale. Brian agreed, and off we went on what was going to be the longest stage of the Giro, at 242 km. Two hours in, the break had gone and gained 13 minutes, and we were happily cruising along in the bunch. Then Brian buzzed in on the radio.

“Right, guys, to the front. We’re riding for a sprint today.”

I could have throttled him, but now that he’d said it, I also couldn’t opt out. The guys duly went to the front and rode like dervishes; the gap came down, and it was left to me to apply the coup de grâce on one of the hardest, hilliest finishes that I’ve ever even attempted to win on. I finished half-dead, on my hands and knees—but victorious. When Brian tried to congratulate me later, I gave him the shoulder. I was still furious at him for what he’d made me do.

That was my fourth stage win of the five, and my last before a final week jammed with mountains and blighted by more bad Italian weather. The sensible decision at this point might have been to pull out and rest up for the Tour, but I never really considered that
option. It wasn’t only the fact that I was leading the points competition and had the chance to add the Giro’s red jersey to the green jerseys I’d won at the 2010 Vuelta a España and the 2011 Tour de France. I also couldn’t bring myself to desert a team of riders who had already sacrificed half of their race for me, in some cases compromising the personal objectives that they’d come to Italy to pursue.

I wouldn’t deny that more of the kind of weather that we’d seen at San Remo made the last week slightly less arduous than may otherwise have been the case. Climbs were airbrushed from the route or neutralized, and one mountain stage was canceled entirely, depriving my main rivals of vital points. It still took something quite special on the last day—first place in two intermediate sprints and the stage win—to overhaul an 11-point deficit from Vincenzo Nibali and become the first Briton to win the points competition at the Giro d’Italia. I now also joined an even more elite group—riders who had completed a grand slam of points jerseys in all three major tours. Only Eddy Merckx, Laurent Jalabert, Alessandro Petacchi, and Djamolidine Abdoujaparov had previously achieved this feat. The list perhaps would have been longer, but the Giro’s excessively mountainous routes and its points scale opened the competition to a much broader range of riders than the Tour’s green jersey, in particular. That was why, in 2012, I’d been pipped by a climber, Joaquim Rodríguez, whereas here I’d edged out the overall Giro winner Nibali.

I had ticked another box in my checklist of lifetime ambitions, my form was fantastic, and my team at the Giro had neared perfection. The outlook had rarely if ever been brighter as I readied myself for another Tour de France … and yet that Tour was about to leave me wondering whether, at 28, my best days might have already come and gone.

j
uan Antonio Flecha’s omission from the Sky team had been the first hint that my 2012 Tour de France might not turn out quite the way I wanted. This time, the lineup for my first Grande Boucle with Omega Pharma–Quick-Step filled me with optimism.

It wasn’t a team of one-dimensional
rouleurs
picked solely for their ability in a lead-out train, but a collection of multitalented riders as adept at helping me in the closing kilometers as they would be at sniffing out chances for stage wins of their own. Tony Martin exemplified that versatility: Tony was the world time trial champion yet also loved getting his hands dirty for me in a bunch sprint. The “Panzerwagen”—the tank—as Brian had christened him, had ridden the Tour with me three times at HTC and was the prototype of what you wanted a Tour de France teammate to be: a Terminator on the bike, a gentleman who never whined off it. Then we had Jérôme Pineau, who I suspect had been a bit of a scally in his youth (or whatever they call a scallywag in Nantes) and who had confessed to thinking that I was a bit of a prat before we became teammates. A lot of French riders held that view, and Jérôme explained what it was: In races, all they ever heard me say, or the only word they could consistently make out, was
fucking
.

Or so Jérôme reckoned. He and I were joined in the team by another Frenchman, Sylvain Chavanel, Jérôme’s great mate and one of the most powerful, classiest riders in the world. If ever Chavanel was in a break, the whole peloton knew that it was in for a tough day. Sylvain, like Pineau, was always smiling, always upbeat, and he fulfilled the same antidepressant role that had always been Bernie Eisel’s in my previous teams.

Like Jérôme, another of my teammates, the Dutchman Niki Terpstra, also had some fairly negative preconceptions about me before
the start of the year—and this time the feeling was mutual. Niki was one of those guys who didn’t care whom he pissed off in a race, just as long as he was doing his job for his leader. This made him an absolute menace if you were riding against him, or a precious ally if he was your teammate. Peter Velits, a Slovakian who had finished third overall in the 2010 Vuelta, was far too amiable to divide opinion in the same way, but he was equally valuable to my sprint train. Our young Pole, Michał Kwiatkowski, was similarly low-maintenance. He was one of the biggest prospects in cycling, and right from our first training camp in Slovakia, Michał and I had gelled; I’d quickly asked Patrick to change Michał’s race program and pencil him in on the shortlist for the Tour.

The last two members of the team were also the last two components of my lead-out train: Matteo Trentin and Gert Steegmans. Matteo would be the penultimate man to peel off in the last kilometer and had also been entrusted with an even more onerous role: my roommate. Matteo was 23 years old, blond, drove a Fiat Punto, and hailed from high in the mountains of northern Italy, where his training options were limited to left and right into the same valley, or two different ways up a huge Dolomites climb. Matteo, like Michał, hadn’t been due to ride the Tour but was finally included on my recommendation.

In the train, Matteo would precede Gert Steegmans, a giant, veteran Belgian with an enigmatic reputation. My first memory of Gert as a rider was from Scheldeprijs in 2007, where he’d been the Quick-Step team’s sprinter and I’d beaten him to take my first professional race win. Nearly six years on, when I signed for the team, Gert was probably the rider I was most looking forward to working with. He
could be loud in the bunch, he could be a clown, but he was also one of the more deep-thinking riders around. As the last man and therefore most prominent member of the train, Gert was a convenient scapegoat when things went wrong and the criticism started coming from the public, the press, and even the management. Gert, though, had a quality that I needed to learn: He could take it all on the chin.

The National Road Race Championships in Glasgow the week before the Grand Départ gave me a rare opportunity and obligation to race without the support of a full-size team. This handicap, together with the tight marking to which I was also subjected at the nationals, meant that it would take something both unusual and special to win. Four laps from the end, I supplied it by moving clear with Pete Kennaugh and Ian Stannard, both of Team Sky, and Dave Millar of Garmin, then agreeing with Dave that we would work together against the Sky riders to ensure that one of us two prevailed. The way that I finally took the win, burning off Stannard after Dave had effectively taken care of Pete Kennaugh, suggested that I was in fantastic shape for the Tour, which I would have been had I not started to notice the first symptoms of a chest infection the day before the nationals. It got worse over the next few days, and one of the team doctors, Helge, told me that I needed to start a course of antibiotics immediately. I replied that antibiotics always ruined form, to which he replied that it was better to ruin my form than ruin my lungs. So I started the antibiotics and prepared to fly to Corsica, where the race would begin three days later.

In the airport and on the plane, my legs and back ached, and my whole body tingled with fever. I went straight to bed on arriving at the hotel that afternoon, but was then kept up most of the night
with cramps. I trained the next day and waited for the antibiotics to kick in. That night, Thursday, was even worse. I told Helge in the morning that I might not be able to start. We talked about stopping the antibiotics but agreed to wait another day and see how I felt on Saturday, on the morning of the first stage. Twenty-four hours later, it wasn’t good: My muscles were still strangled by cramp, and I was overcome with lethargy. We decided that I should start anyway and that three things might save me: the adrenaline, the simplicity of the course on that first day, and the fact that I’d been careful not to talk about being ill in the press or even to anyone outside a small circle of people within the team. The Tour is a three-week game of poker, and to admit any sort of weakness or ailment is to invite your opponents to exploit it.

In the event, the most troublesome obstacle on that first stage would be not illness, not other riders, but … a bus wedged under the finish line. The story was classic fodder for TV quiz shows, but for those who didn’t see it, the Orica-GreenEDGE team bus and its driver were running late, having arrived at the finish line just half an hour or so before the race was due to arrive, and—depending on whom you believed—had either been waved underneath the bridge-like structure overhanging the line or been told to stop and ignored the advice. What no one could dispute was the outcome—a bus blocking the road and panic in the road.

It had all been going so smoothly, so easily. A benign-looking course doesn’t necessarily translate to a benign race, but this had been the least hairy first stage of a Tour that I could remember. With 25 km to go we had taken control, with 10 to go we were building like a wave, with 6 to go we came to a chicane and a wall of noise from crowds banked on either side. It was at exactly that moment that
I heard Brian Holm’s voice in my earpiece: “Finish … 3 km to go.” That was about all I could make out. Brian repeated, “… 3 km to go.”

“Gert! Did you hear that?! Did he just say the finish has been moved to 3 km to go?!” I shouted to Steegmans.

Gert said he didn’t know. I got the same response from other riders from other teams. Total panic reigned for a few seconds, until Brian chimed in on the radio again, the message clearly audible this time: “The finish line has moved. It’s at 3 km to go now.”

Three km? I looked down at my computer and saw 6 to go.
Fu
—

We had dropped back and now needed to quickly move forward as the peloton swarmed. One of the guys—might have been Tony, might have been Niki, might have been Peter—spotted an opening through the middle and tried to drag us through. Everyone made it, except me. I probed for another gap and had finally drifted left toward the barriers and clear air when André Greipel brought down Tony Martin four positions ahead of me, causing a domino rally. In the run-up to the Tour, I had been testing hydraulic brakes recently developed by the team’s component supplier, SRAM, and had liked them so much that I’d decided to use them on the first stage (hence becoming the first rider ever to use hydraulic brakes at the Tour de France). Now, behind the cascade of flesh and metal, I slammed them hard and came almost to a dead stop, while those around me skidded and sprawled. The only way around the bodies was left, off the route and into a slip road. By the time I’d finished the detour, only five or six seconds later, the peloton was disappearing over the brow of a small rise. At this exact moment, there was another crackle in my ear: “GUYS,” Brian shouted, “the finish has been changed back. Normal finish now!”