At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (33 page)

Without the pressure of one must-win last sprint, Chris would no doubt enjoy the Champs more than I could. The first nine of the 10 laps, as always, were witheringly fast but relatively uneventful, despite me puncturing on circuit number two and stopping for a wheel-change under the Arc de Triomphe. Alas, that wasn’t the omen that I’d hoped; Having deliberately moved off Steegmans’s wheel and onto Greipel’s as we came through the Place de la Concorde with 400 meters to go, I thought about going for a long one, hesitated, then couldn’t pick up enough momentum on the bumpy right side of the road to overhaul Kittel or Greipel. The three of us all finished within centimeters of each other, but the photo finish spoke unequivocally: I had lost, yet again, to Kittel, had even lost out for second place to Greipel, and in the process lost my 100 percent Champs Elysées record and a little faith in myself. Never before had I experienced this sense of anticlimax, the weird juxtaposition of relief and elation at finishing the Tour, coupled with the despair of failing to win the last stage. Never before had I ridden past the gap in the barriers through which the winner was ushered toward the podium. Never before had I come across the line and glimpsed the Arc de Triomphe through the gloomy tint of defeat.

At that moment, I would gladly have been teleported to anywhere else in the world—anywhere but the Champs, anyplace where I didn’t feel compelled to smile and be happy because, you know, I’d just finished
the Tour de France and everyone else was grinning. Despite it having gone until ten at night, and despite only having finished third, I still had the obligatory dope-test to complete before I could go anywhere. I duly put my bike down, trudged though the door of the mobile dope-control booth, and provided the urine sample. I was all done up and ready to leave when the testing official informed me that I’d only given them 75 milliliters; they needed 90. I would now have to wait until I could supply the missing 15 milliliters. It took an hour, drinking enough water to sink a small ship.

I finally stepped back out into darkness at nearly midnight.

Immediately I felt all despondency lift, not because acceptance or comprehension had set in, but because my family was there to greet me. Little Delilah, in her mum’s arms, didn’t know about the Tour de France, didn’t care—she just wanted to see her daddy.

She stretched out an arm, let out a gurgle, and at that moment her daddy didn’t care about the Tour de France, either.

i
f you live on the Isle of Man and have been sentenced to jail, the building you’ll inevitably call home is a gray, star-shaped structure beside an RAF airbase in the north. It was a place that I’d occasionally passed on bike rides but, needless to say, never expected to see from the inside. That, though, changed one day in the spring of 2010.

A few months earlier, I’d got the news as I waited at Frankfurt airport for a connecting flight to the Tour of Missouri: Andy, the younger brother who had once also been my training partner, but in recent years had gradually become a stranger, had been arrested on drug charges and was facing time in prison. In April 2010 he stood in a courtroom and waited for a judge to deliver his verdict: The defendant was guilty on four charges and sentenced to six years in prison.

When I’d heard about the arrest, my predominant emotion had been anger, but that had soon passed and been replaced by concern. In the same period, my friend Jonny Bellis had almost lost his life in a motorcycle accident, and the ordeal that his parents endured in the days, weeks, and months that followed had given me a wake-up call: As my cycling career had progressed, I’d become more and more self-absorbed and less and less attuned to what was happening in my family’s life. Andy going to jail was painful for all of us, but it was also an opportunity for me to help bring us closer together.

As soon as his prison sentence began, Andy had started writing me letters and we’d spoken on the phone. It took a couple of months, but we then arranged my first visit. I was nervous—which was natural, I suppose—when I pulled up that day in the car park, walked over to the gatehouse, and gave my name and whom I was there to see. When I was finally shown into the visiting area, Andy was waiting for me with arms spread wide. It was like the last few years hadn’t happened.

We talked that day like we’d never talked before. About everything. Like brothers should. The hour flew by. A few weeks later, I was back again, and Andy was doing great. Every time I visited, he’d learned a new skill, got a new qualification, in some way moved forward. He finally did his GCSEs, taught himself to play the piano, then the guitar, then he was writing songs. I started to think, and still believe now, that it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He was finally released after three years, not six, on good behavior.

Andy was anxious about getting out, not least because he’d got married young and had a wife waiting for him. He’d been working as a joiner before going in and was lucky when he was released to find a guy who had also done time and could offer him the same kind of work, to help put him back on track. That’s one advantage of living on a small island like the Isle of Man—people tend to look out for each other. Andy seems determined to take his second chance and is applying himself much more now than he ever did before. It’s nice, for me, to see that he no longer takes his life for granted, just like I no longer take my brother and my parents for granted.

Obtuse though it may seem, this all helps to explain why Delilah’s tiny outstretched hand wiped away all of my disappointment
on the Champs Elysées. Cycling and my career were, are more important than ever, but they’re important because of what they mean to my family. Every time I climb onto my bike now, I do it for them and their future. While I had always known that I was emotional, a big softy double-wrapped in alpha male, I would also never have believed how becoming a parent and discovering the real meaning of unconditional love would transform me and the way I view the world. Of course this doesn’t mean that losing a sprint won’t still eat me alive and make my insides crawl. That was exactly how I felt on the Champs until the second I stepped out of that doping control to be greeted by Peta, Finn, and Delilah.

That night after the final stage, we and the whole team went with the sponsor for a plush, end-of-Tour celebration dinner. I had a laugh and a joke and a drink like everyone else, but I still couldn’t pretend that I was satisfied with my two stage wins. On the journey home the next day—and for the next few weeks, in fact—the memory of the sprints that I’d lost would prod, pursue, and preoccupy me. Even after finding out in Gap that my cranks had been uneven and after piecing together everything else that could possibly have hindered me in those sprints, I still couldn’t, wouldn’t rest until I knew for sure this was how it was going to be now: I would be fast, sometimes still the fastest, but no longer emphatically faster than all the rest.

The only way to test the theory was to get back on my bike and back to racing. The Tour of Denmark started 10 days after the Tour de France and gave me the answer I needed, the answer I was hoping for but was too afraid to expect: All week I felt like a distant, far superior relation of the rider I’d been in that Tour, with a different level of zest in my legs, a different speed, and a different fitness. On
the traditional, race-ending stage to Frederiksberg in the suburbs of Copenhagen, I felt quicker, stronger, more agile than I had even when winning on the same finish line 12 months earlier, and before that in 2007.

Maybe there was life in the 28-year-old dog yet.

Over the course of the week in Denmark, in fact, I had finally realized what the main problem at the Tour had been. It was the antibiotics that I’d been taking at the start; they always knackered me, but only after I’d stopped taking them and for a week, in some cases a fortnight, after that. It had happened in the spring of 2012, and it had happened now in the summer of 2013. I simply hadn’t been myself. It had been the first time in my career that I had not found form somewhere on the route of the Tour de France.

This, then, was all very reassuring, but as I write a few weeks later, I’m not kidding myself, either; my best years as a sprinter are more likely to be behind than in front of me. This, at least, is in terms of what my God-given speed will allow me to do, even if over the next few years I discover and develop ways to eke even more out of that innate ability. After the 2013 Tour, even accounting for the antibiotics and their effects, I had already decided that 2014 may be the year when, for the first time, I have to dedicate substantial time and energy to working on my sprint in training. I’m not old yet, and it’ll be a few years before natural decay robs me of my speed, but the more seasons you race as a professional cyclist, the more your body is being conditioned to ride at relatively low intensities over long periods of time, several hours a day. This is helpful in one sense, as sprinting is also a test of freshness, and as the years go by, your body adapts itself to these drawn-out, multiple-hour efforts. Unfortunately, it also means that you’re gradually losing brute velocity.

Another important consideration, of course, is your opponents. You can never legislate for the emergence of a once-in-a-generation talent, and it may be that, in the second half of my career, a nemesis comes along to ruin all of my plans and take my records. Could that rider be Marcel Kittel? Who knows? At the moment he’s a very fast, above all very powerful rider against whom I’m still pretty confident in a head-to-head drag race. It’s not for me to point out, but a few shrewd observers did remark after the Tour that I had won 4 stages out of 14, at age 23, in my second Tour, whereas this year he won 4 out of 21, at age 25. Whatever happens over the next few years, I do know that he’s a lovely guy and a fantastic advert for sprinting and cycling. I just hope that, one day soon, the way he defends his sport and his transparency about anti-doping is rewarded with some positive coverage at home in Germany.

If it’s not other riders, judging by the way professional cycling has evolved in recent years, it may be race organizers who end not only my reign but also the opportunity for any sprinter to take his place among the crowned heads of the sport. Television rules, we know, and these days so do social networks. The message being sent from armchair viewers to race organizers on Twitter, in particular, is that sprints are boring and more climbs are what is required. The Vuelta a España now finishes up a mountain every other day, the Giro d’Italia is similar, and even the Tour de France has cut down on the number of stages likely to yield bunch gallops. Sprints and sprinters are being phased out, or at least marginalized, and it’s because when people say they’re “boring,” what they really mean is that they don’t understand them. There’s also a huge misconception, a blatant failure to acknowledge the evidence lurking behind those calls for more mountains, more summit finishes; they are more boring because the
Riccardo Riccòs, the Leonardo Piepolis, the Lances—riders who would attack at the bottom of an Alpine climb and solo to the finish—those riders are gone, and we all know why.

What we’re left with is a cleaner sport, but one that’s much more conservative, with riders making moves much later in stages because they’re not physically capable of mimicking their doped-up predecessors. Hence, races peppered with climbs and major tours laden with summit finishes will generally end in disappointment, for the fans as well as for exponents of what I still consider to be my noble art, sprinting.

One day, who knows, I might be able to influence these things in a different capacity. I’d love to run my own team, or perhaps poacher will turn gamekeeper and I, the “Bad Boy” sprinter, the supposed scourge of the cycling establishment, will end up behind a desk drawing up plans for cycling’s future. Before you run for cover, that’s still a long way off, and there are still plenty of boxes left to tick on that list of things to do, races to win, and records to break before I retire. My experience at Team Sky in 2012 certainly taught me something that will remain as a guiding principle as long as I’m still riding at the top level: The Tour de France is my raison d’être as a cyclist, the fulcrum of everything that I do, and something that I shouldn’t and won’t sacrifice ever again.

Legacies are for old legs whose days of winning sprint finishes are long gone, but I can at least begin to think about how I’d like to be remembered. A few words on a mucky stone, maybe draped with some old cycling jerseys, should say it all: Mark Cavendish, cyclist, Tour de France lover and fighter, former world champion, and above all, family man.

Mark would like to express his gratitude to the following people, invaluable contributors either to the execution of this book or to the story at its heart:

Delilah, my angel and the center of my universe.

Peta, the woman who changed my life and continues to make it better every day with her love and support.

Finnbar, my stepson, who embraced and accepted me to the point of getting interested in cycling!

The family whose love has been unfaltering, even if its target has sometimes been hard to reach.

Simon Bayliff, who changed my life professionally, and everyone else at Wasserman.

Rod, who at times has been caught in a tug-of-war, but whose loyalty has remained unwavering and inspirational.

Patrick Lefevere, for giving me the opportunity to ride for a fantastic Omega Pharma–Quick-Step team.

Andrew Goodfellow and Liz Marvin at Ebury, and David Luxton at David Luxton Associates.

Daniel Friebe, without whose patience and persistence this book could never have come into being.

Rob Hayles, for his professionalism, his humor, and his inability or unwillingness to break a partnership born on that incredible 2005 day in Los Angeles.

Finally, the national and trade teammates who have earned the victories, the records, and the accolades every bit as much as the cocky Manxman who was first across the line.