At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (5 page)

This time, like then, the depression was going to creep up on me. After Catalunya, I’d ridden the Tour of Flanders for the first time, one of the races I’d dreamt of as a kid. I’d actually gone pretty well there—I finished almost half an hour down, but only after blowing completely near the second feed zone, where I’d been in the first group. We’d hit the Eikenberg, one of the narrow, gnarly cobbled climbs for which Flanders is famous, and I’d been passed by five groups in the space of a few kilometers. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—out of the arse, as we say.

Nonetheless, I felt satisfied. My positioning had been good, and I still believed I could come back in the future and possibly win that race, given the right weather conditions. Unfortunately, the organizers would change the route in 2012, making it significantly harder, and now I suspect I might need more than just a sunny day and a headwind if I’m ever going to contend. A leg transplant might be more like it.

My spirits were okay when I left Flanders, but over the next couple of months I started to get lonely and quite down. One incident stands out from the fortnight or so either side of Flanders.

It was a minor irritation at the time, the kind of little drama that I can whip up like a chef does an omelet, but it was symptomatic
of how rootless I’d started to feel. My phone rang on a midweek afternoon, and the display showed an English number I didn’t recognize. I did something that I never did, except when I was as bored as I was that day: I answered. On the end of the line was Richard Moore, the journalist.

“Hi, Mark. Just wondering whether we could have a quick chat for a story I’m doing for the
Guardian
.”

Because I had nothing better to do, I said okay. We chatted for 10 minutes about my form, about the Tour de France, and then he asked for my reaction to some comments in the press a couple of days earlier from my teammate André Greipel, saying he should have been the leader at San Remo.

The next day, I can’t remember whether someone told me to look at the
Guardian
web site, or if I logged on myself. I just remember reading the headline and thinking,
Here we fucking go
.

MARK CAVENDISH PUTS TEAM SKY ON ALERT AFTER CRITICISM OF ANDRÉ GREIPEL, the headline read. FUTURE WITH HTC-COLUMBIA IN DOUBT AFTER CRITICIZING TEAMMATE. To be fair, Richard hadn’t written anything that I hadn’t said. As often happens with these things, it was the way the story had been spun, the way he’d linked the quotes together, perhaps not maliciously, but still with a slant that was inviting trouble:

“[Riding in the same team as Greipel] is not a problem for me, because I’m a better rider.”

“Me on bad form is still better than him.”

“If [Greipel] thought he could win, he’d say it before the race rather than when he’s looking at the results sheet.”

“There’s no chance whatsoever that he’s coming to a bike race that I’m in.”

“There’s no chance of Greipel winning a ’monument.’”

It certainly wasn’t news at this stage that André and I had had our ups and downs. Having ridden on the same team for just over three years, there were two problems between us as far as I was concerned: One, André continued to make too many mistakes, losing wheels and thereby wasting his teammates’ hard work; and two, he was basically a nice bloke and I wasn’t. Not only could I be a dickhead, I could also be very blunt (or, if you were being kind, honest). André and I had actually messaged each other a few times over the winter, spoken a bit at the team training camps in Lanzarote and Majorca, and both probably thought that we’d laid the old animosity to rest. What he’d said after San Remo, though, to my mind verged on delusional; I’d watched him at Paris–Nice while I was at Tirreno–Adriatico, and I’d seen him making the same old mistakes. So I believed what I was telling Richard Moore; I just hadn’t done it very tactfully.

With that one telephone call that I should never have taken, I’d pissed off Greipel, added to Bob’s concern about me joining Sky, and served up yet more evidence for the already sizable contingent of people who thought I was a mouthy, arrogant, disrespectful little upstart. The only small mercy was that the team seemed more angry with Greipel for what he’d said than my reaction to it.

There was always that unpleasant, sinking sensation when you dived into one of these controversies, and this one simply raised a tidemark that had been inching higher since the start of the year. We were now getting toward late April and I’d won one race. Only I knew the pain that I’d felt in January, how many setbacks I’d had, how complex the overall picture was, but those intricate, textured portrayals never sell as well as the ones painted in broad brushstrokes,
particularly in the mainstream press. “Cavendish’s nightmare year” was a titillating, convenient, catch-all hook.

All I could do to alter that view and stop the doom-mongering was to start winning. The Tour of Romandie looked like the perfect time and place; in spite of all the agitation, the sense of some invisible, dark force nagging and gnawing at me, my bike had been my refuge, and I’d trained well throughout April. Romandie is the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so you’d expect a bike race there to be mountainous and hardly the ideal terrain for a rider like me. I knew, however, that at least one of the six stages could conceivably end in a sprint; that would be the day when I finally made my critics eat their words.

The race kicked off with a short prologue around Porrentruy. I’ve always liked and been good at short prologues, have even won a few in my time, and I rode well here to finish 17th. The next stage was a lumpy one through the Swiss Jura. Although I could feel the form coming, slowly blooming through my legs, it was still slightly too tough for me, and I finished in a big second group.

Day three, then, was going to be the one. Had to be, because all that remained after that was a time trial and two final stages with profiles like an alligator’s dental X-ray. I was familiar with the finishing circuit, because stages had finished in Fribourg with an almost identical loop when I’d ridden Romandie in 2008 and 2009; on both of those occasions I’d been spat out the back on the final climb, so I knew it was going to be tough.

This time around, I floated over. The pedals were purring. I almost could have celebrated at the top of the climb, because by then I knew there was only going to be one winner. Instead, I started thinking
about what would be an appropriate way, besides the exhibition of sprinting I was going to give them, to respond to the journalists—the British ones in particular—who had been giving plenty of coverage to my lack of success so far in 2010.

The sprint itself proved trickier than I expected, if not for me then for my team. The wind was gusting into our faces and we’d committed early, which meant that everyone was doing mammoth turns on the front. I just had to sit tight and wait for Bernie to pull off, then Renshaw, and finally I went.

My kick was there, the spring, the zip, and I was never really in trouble. Fifty meters from the line I knew I was safe and that I was about to stick two fingers up at everyone who’d doubted me.

The problem was, I did it literally: Clasping the inside of my right elbow with my left hand, I jerked my right arm upwards and raised my middle and index fingers in an emphatic V-sign. V for victory.
V
for, well … you know. In the moment or two after I crossed the line, it didn’t really occur to me that I might have just ridden myself into yet more grief. Blood rushed to my cheeks, but in elation, not alarm or embarrassment.

“Better now?” Bernie asked through a huge grin as I turned around to thank him.

Of course I was. Winning was always the cure.

The first hint that I might be in trouble came in the press conference immediately after the stage. I didn’t sugarcoat it: I said the gesture was intended “to send a message to commentators and journalists who don’t know jack shit about cycling.” Far from taking it personally, the journalists in the room chortled as they typed or scribbled.

That night, though, you could almost hear the storm rolling in. It started with texts arriving on my phone, like thunder in the distance, which were no doubt in response to stories appearing on the Internet. The irony was that I’d provided all of those people who had been writing me off, the very commentators and journalists who were the targets of the gesture, with yet more ammunition for the story line they’d been peddling: Cavendish has lost the plot, it’s all gone to his head, he’s finished.

Until this moment, I’d failed to realize two things: one, how people love seeing a meteoric rise but are even happier when it’s followed by a precipitous fall, and two, how cycling and I had outgrown the niche where the only attention we ever received in the UK was positive.

One journalist with whom I’d had a couple of run-ins in the past, Susan Westermeyer from the Cyclingnews web site, had immediately called the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). What action did they intend to take? They said nothing publicly but contacted Bob Stapleton, who then called me. One of the best things about Bob was that he never tried to curb my, shall we say, volatile tendencies. Perhaps he just knew that he’d be fighting a losing battle, but I think he also knew that I needed license to express myself, within reason, on and off the bike. He also probably realized that my lack of filter made me highly marketable.

Lance Armstrong aside, Bob seemed to think I was the most charismatic and valuable name in the sport. It was just a shame that he tended not to bear that in mind when we were negotiating a new contract.

Bob said that the UCI was talking about banning me for the gesture. If they judged that I’d “behaved in such a way as to blemish the
image, the reputation or the interests of cycling or the UCI” I could potentially get a one- to six-month suspension and miss the Tour de France. Bob said they’d talk some more to the UCI and see what happened, but one solution might be for me to issue a public apology and for the team to pull me from the race.

One of the texts I received that night was from Katy Nicholson-Lord, who was working for my management company at the time, Face Partnership. I’d explained to Katy why I’d chosen that particular victory celebration, the Churchillian salute, and she tried to be supportive while also, clearly, having some reservations about whether it had been wise. She did also say something else, though, that pricked up my ears: According to one version, the origins of the V-sign could be traced to the Battle of Agincourt in the 15th century, where British and Welsh bowmen took to holding up their arrow-shooting fingers—the same ones that the French would supposedly cut off if they took them captive—as a sign of defiance.
Hmm,
I thought,
that’s not bad,
and I asked Katy whether she’d mind me using it if the subject came up again. She didn’t, so I tucked it away in my mental filing cabinet, ready to dust off when the need arose.

If I thought it might all have blown over by the morning, I was mistaken. The stage that day was a time trial, and having finished early, I was killing time on our team bus, waiting for the other guys to arrive, when Bob called again. Bob said that the UCI president, Pat McQuaid, had been hassling Brian Holm at the start that morning and that if we were going to avoid a ban, the team needed to be seen to do something. He said that, as far as McQuaid and the UCI were concerned, if I was pulled from the race and if I issued an apology, they would only give us a fine of a few hundred Swiss francs, which the team would pay. Bob was nice about it, but I, naturally, was mortified.
I was also adamant, in my 24-year-old mind, that it had been a riposte perfectly in proportion to criticism of what, essentially, had been just an unlucky start to the season. However, I was also sensible enough to realize that resistance was probably futile and that for my own sake and for my chances of riding the Tour de France, I should probably just take the punishment and be on my way.

A couple of hours later, the team sent out a press release quoting my apology: “I want to publicly apologize for the gesture I made on the finish line of the Tour de Romandie yesterday,” the statement read. “I did want to make a statement to my critics but I realize that making rude gestures on the finish line is not the best way to do that. I apologize to everybody watching the race and especially the kids. I am not proud of releasing the feelings in that way. I hope I can redeem myself and show my feelings and passion for cycling with some exciting results in the next couple of months, rather than with a gesture such as the one [I made] yesterday.”

The following morning, in his weekly column in the
Guardian,
Richard Williams wrote the single most scathing piece about me that I’d had the misfortune to read since turning professional in 2007. Under a headline stating that my “cavalier behavior will sabotage a glittering career,” he’d started with a reference to my ex-girlfriend. From there it got worse; my victory celebration had been “puerile,” and “such behavior should have been outgrown by a man of twenty-four.” He felt that Bob’s decision to pull me from the race had been “a judicious form of salutary humiliation.”

One thing that I wouldn’t have disputed was what he’d written about how I usually acknowledged and was genuinely contrite about doing the wrong thing … but not straight away. As Williams put it, “He acts first and says sorry—really, really sorry—later. And the
funny thing is that you know he means it.” That was actually true. I lacked a form of self-awareness that would allow me to put my feelings and actions into perspective in real time. I was—am—good at being honest and self-critical after the event, but by then the damage has often been done.

This was also very relevant to Romandie, the consequences of what I’d done there, and my mood generally at that time, because here, too, I was blind to what was happening. Only months later, or perhaps now, could I or can I coldly analyze the build-up of pressure within me, the way it was released, and judge whether it was acceptable or not. My objective last word on the matter now would be that I was entitled to vent my frustration and did it in a manner consistent with my temperament, consistent with my level of maturity, and consistent with the state of my life at the time.