At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (32 page)

But while I got the sprint finishes I had hoped for, I couldn’t say the same for the results.

On stage 10 into Saint-Malo, my defeat to Kittel would have been headline-worthy enough, had the finish not been notable for other reasons. Kittel’s teammate, the Dutch rider Tom Veelers, let his head droop and stopped looking where he was going as he finished his lead-out, and he veered right into my line and into my body with 300 meters to go. In the impact I stayed upright but lost momentum, while Veelers crashed spectacularly in the middle of the road. Almost instantly, fingers were pointed at me, mainly because, having concentrated on the frames immediately before and during the collision, the TV analysts generally neglected to mention that the road veered left after Veelers’s fall at exactly the same angle I had taken.

I had then, admittedly, compounded the damage by getting shirty with a journalist who shouted above the scrum outside our bus, “Mark, are you to blame?”

How shirty? Enough to pull the voice recorder out of his hand—confiscate it, if you like—and only hand it back a couple of seconds later, after the realization of how this would play in the morning papers had rushed to my head.

It didn’t look great, I’ll admit. There were better ways of diverting attention away from me, the crash, and another missed opportunity to win a stage. Any journalists who hadn’t rushed to our team bus at the finish had waited for Veelers, and their questions had the effect of stoking his anger. I got hold of his number that night and called him
with the intention of apologizing and defusing things, despite not believing that I’d been in the wrong, but Veelers was having none of it.

“You can come and apologize to my face,” he said. To me, this was him starting to milk it.

If Veelers’s aim was to get people on his side and turn them against me, the boos that greeted me as I rolled onto the time trial course the next day confirmed that it had worked. Fans were still jeering—and had been since the start of my ride—when, approximately halfway around the course, a shower of warm liquid flew horizontally across my path, dousing my skinsuit, helmet, and sunglasses and, worst of all, splashing my tongue and lips. On the Tour you’re sprinkled or soaked with water or beer at some point every day, but having urine thrown at me was a shocking, repulsive first.

Really, I just wanted to cry. Or stop. Back in 2009, in a Tour time trial in Annecy, a British fan had heckled me on a climb, something along the lines of “Cavendish, get up off your arse.”

I’d turned and shouted something back at him, and there, too, had been tempted to get off. Here, I was too despondent, too upset to be angry. In the hour or two after I crossed the line, got back to the bus, and told the team and some journalists what had happened, members of the team staff, Peta, and my manager all talked about taking some kind of action, getting the race organizers involved, maybe even the police.

I told them that we should just forget it; I didn’t want sympathy or justice, I just wanted the whole thing to end. It was the feeling that I’d had in 2010 when I sat on the bus in Reims, towel over my head, stomach churning like a washing machine, the world seemingly collapsing around me. What troubled me most was that it hadn’t been
just that one idiot, which I often got somewhere along the course at the Tour, but so many people along the route booing that the noise had accompanied me from the start-ramp to the finish line.

That afternoon, back at a nearly empty team hotel in a business park outside Saint-Malo, the whole experience had left me exhausted, sickened, and shell-shocked. The news that Tony Martin had won the time trial brought some solace, but in quiet moments that evening, the sights, sounds, and, worst of all, rancid taste of that afternoon flooded my thoughts. Every rider I had seen that day—and every rider I would discuss it with over the next two or three days—agreed that Veelers’s crash the previous day had not been my fault. The commissaires had also exonerated me. Without wanting to sound egotistical, I could see that the press had been all over it because the “Bad Boy Cavendish” story line was one of their favorites. Veelers might have been under the misimpression that they were genuinely outraged, that they genuinely sympathized with him, which perhaps they did a bit—but they were mainly preoccupied with what it said about me and my Tour. Was this not, they had asked, yet more evidence of me slowing down and resorting to unfair tactics to compensate? Then there had been the incident with the journalist’s voice recorder—a massive media relations misstep on my part, although admittedly not quite as dramatic as the papers and TV reports had made out.

This all explained the public’s reaction, but it didn’t lessen the blow. Popularity wasn’t something I’d ever necessarily craved, but unpopularity wasn’t something I enjoyed, either.

The next day something unprecedented happened: Led out perfectly by Gert Steegmans, I was outgunned, outsprinted, and outclassed by Marcel Kittel on the finishing straight in Tours. I had
always said that the day when I had good form, a decent lead-out, and no physical or mechanical problems and yet was still beaten would be the time to start attaching some credence to the hysterical inquests that the press conducted after every one of my defeats. I had said it while never really believing that the day would come, not for a few years anyway, and yet here it apparently was.

I was racking my brains for a reason, an excuse, an alibi, but this time could find none sufficient to explain the loss. Yes, I had been ill early in the race; yes, I had felt “twisted” on the bike ever since my crash in the first week; and, no, my condition wasn’t exceptional. But even this aggregation of marginal losses shouldn’t have put me behind Kittel. Unless, that is, the press was right, and the German Dolph Lundgren lookalike and soundalike really was now the Master of the Universe when it came to sprinting.

The only way to put things right was to restore what I still hoped was the natural order and do it immediately, the next afternoon on the stage to Saint-Amand-Montrond. This was a stage that had had me licking my lips for reasons beyond the relatively flat route profile: We, like other teams, knew that we would be racing on roads that were exposed, windy, and therefore ripe for echelons, the game of cycling snakes and ladders that could be used to split the peloton by strong riders or teams who knew how to use those gusts to their advantage. In the crudest, most simplistic possible terms, echelons happened when a team or group of strong riders attacked with the wind gusting hard from one side; by fanning out diagonally across the road toward the wind direction and rotating through the line quickly and cohesively, they could condemn the riders at the bottom of the line to a place in the gutter, in the wind, and in imminent danger of losing contact.

Once one of those riders lost the wheel—or was deliberately shut out by a “ticket collector” placed at the back of the line to decide who was allowed into the echelon—there was no way back. It was a fine art that demanded strength, timing, nous, and balls; at Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, we were considered experts.

In the days that followed what became a famous stage, there would be all sorts of fanciful, verging on folkloric stories about code words devised by Wilfred Peeters and plans concocted the night before by our team and the Dutch squad, Belkin. In reality, our attack was a spur-of-the-moment decision, though naturally informed by our prior knowledge of the course. Gert Steegmans had wanted to go even before we dropped the bomb, inside the first 50 km of the stage; Gert had even started pulling away, when Tony Martin shouted that it was too early and we should wait. Not long later, though, we plunged the detonator and blew the race apart. Kittel was among the many, many riders—over half of the peloton—left groveling in the gutter. They would either have to ride faster than our group or wait for a change in the wind to repair the damage. Neither was going to happen.

For 70 km we pounded the pedals and the gap kept growing. Then, with around 30 km to go, the message from the team car was that the winds were about to get even stronger. All day, Alberto Contador’s Saxo Bank team had been freeloading on our work, telling us that they didn’t want to help with the pacemaking, yet it was they who now suddenly stepped on the gas to whittle the group down even further and distance the race leader, Chris Froome. As 13 riders started to pull away, I watched Michał Kwiatkowski in front of me try, try, try to be the 14th, but ultimately lose the wheel of the rider ahead of him. I now had a choice to make: to stick or twist, stay or go.

I went, performing my fastest, hardest sprint of the Tour to bridge the gap and join the front group. Of the 14 riders now sure to contest the stage win, we had 3—Sylvain Chavanel, Niki Terpstra, and yours truly. The only rider even remotely likely to challenge me in a sprint was Peter Sagan of the Cannondale team, but Niki had an idea: He would attack with just over a kilometer to go, forcing Sagan’s sole teammate in the group to close the gap, whereupon Chavanel would come up behind with Sagan on his wheel and me on Sagan’s. Chava would then peel off at 400 meters to go and leave Sagan in the wind, in the jaws of our trap. We executed the plan almost to the letter.

It was my 25th Tour stage win, which lifted me to joint third in the all-time league table, alongside André Leducq and behind only Bernard Hinault and Eddy Merckx. It was perhaps the first one of those 25, however, for which I’d had to race—really race. Maybe a successful rematch with Kittel would have comforted my ego, marked my territory once again, but that could wait for the Champs Elysées. A win was a win, and this one was pretty memorable.

b
efore Paris, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and a thousand other Tour de France clichés slid into view, the final week of the race had consisted of huge Alpine climbs, oodles of suffering, one time trial, and two bits of unexpected but welcome news.

The first very pleasant surprise came on stage 14, where we’d set out for a sprint and got one … not for me, but for my roommate, Matteo Trentin. I was so proud that afternoon. Conventional wisdom stated that, at 24, one Grand Tour in 2013 was more than ample for Matteo, yet he’d finished the Giro in May and had put his hand up
to do the next less than two months later. His victory in Lyon was made even sweeter by the advice that I’d asked Bramati to pass on as he drove past the peloton and up to Matteo. I reminded Brama that it was one of those rare, very long finishing straights where you could see the line from 2 km, and that this created an optical illusion that would dupe the other guys in the break and make them sprint too early. Matteo was to ignore them at all costs, look only at the distance markers, and launch his sprint at exactly 250 meters to go. Brama had passed it on, and Matteo had listened, as he always did. He had made huge contributions to many of my victories in 2013, so I was now delighted to have had some input in this, the most prestigious result of his career to date. What had I told him in the plane to Slovakia the previous November? Puzzle books. Decision making. Train the mind, not just the legs.

The second revelation as far as I was concerned in the Alps, after Matteo’s win, was something that happened to catch my eye in Gap on the morning of stage 18. Ever since stage 6 to Montpellier, I’d felt somehow misaligned, wonky on the bike, and had attributed the discomfort to one or possibly two things: the aftereffects of that fall, and occasional, recurring biomechanical issues that I believed dated back to my dental surgery in the winter of 2009–10. My soigneur, Aldis, had been working hard throughout the Tour to loosen and massage out the twinge in my gluteus muscles, but I was still shifting and twisting in the saddle as I pedaled. Tony Martin sat behind me in the bunch one day and said I was riding as though I had ants in my shorts.

It wasn’t that, and now, in Gap, I belatedly realized what the issue might have been: I’d been riding for days with one pedal crank longer than the other. On one side the crank was 170 millimeters, like
I always used, but on the other it was 172.5 millimeters. I couldn’t believe it. I was lucky I wasn’t going to finish the Tour with one leg 2.5 millimeters longer than the other! There were no doubt other reasons for my legs lacking bite—elasticity, speed in the four true bunch gallops that I’d contested to date—but this certainly could not have been helping.

With Matteo’s victory added to my two stages and Tony Martin’s time trial win, the team’s Tour was nonetheless already a success, but I had an unbeaten record to defend on the Champs, a score to settle, and a reputation as the world’s best sprinter to restore. I was nervous that day, but then I always am before the Champs. This year, the wait before the stage start would be particularly long and so even more tense; the race organizer, ASO, had decided to celebrate the conclusion of the 100th Tour by finishing at dusk, so we didn’t leave from Versailles until nearly six in the evening, and wouldn’t arrive on the Champs for the first of our 10 laps until nearly eight.

Barring accident, the Tour was going to be won overall by Chris Froome. I was delighted for Chris: I felt that he’d been unfairly criticized in 2012 for what were portrayed in some quarters as treacherous tactics, namely “attacking” Brad in the Alps and Pyrenees, but that were in fact nothing more than evidence of Chris’s naïveté. Chris had grown up in Kenya and South Africa, been educated at a Johannesburg boarding school, and had a life story that most of us at Team Sky couldn’t vaguely relate to, yet it was hard to imagine how anyone could dislike him. My first memory of racing with Chris was from the 2006 Commonwealth Games, where he hadn’t particularly stood out, and then we had both also competed in the Under 23 world championships road race that year in Salzburg. But whereas I had just rocked up in my Team GB tracksuit and got on the plane,
Chris—riding for Kenya—had had to pose as a representative of their federation in e-mails to the UCI, and then as a directeur sportif in the organizers’ briefing on the eve of the race. That summed up Chris: He seemed incredibly innocent but also had a determination that, ultimately, I think, he used to channel whatever frustration lingered after the 2012 Tour into 2013.