At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane (9 page)

The heat was unbearable. On the penultimate climb, Bernie Eisel, Renshaw, and I had slipped behind the gruppetto, the last group on the road. We chased and had regained contact at the foot of the final climb, but by then panic was starting to spread through the gruppetto about missing the time limit. The humidity that had made a stifling sweatshop out of the peloton early in the day had now also built into a huge bank of storm clouds over our heads. It all contributed to the growing sense of urgency—and the quickening pace. Every 100 meters or so, someone, somewhere in the gruppetto, would scream at the riders at the front to slow down.

We finally crossed the line 59 seconds inside the time cut. When I was later asked to describe the suffering I’d endured that day, I could only liken it to having your fingernails pulled off very slowly, one by one.

After a day like that, you wake the next morning wondering how you’ll ever survive the same again—or worse. All that gets you through is knowing that there are other guys in the same boat, or who are even worse off due to crashes or illness. Over the course of a career as a cyclist, through experiences like mine at Les Rousses, you also become accustomed, almost brutalized, to making demands of your body that it simply wasn’t designed to fulfill. You either let that reality overcome you, or you overcome it with pure bloody-mindedness.

In the Alps, just like every year, I did precisely that: I suffered, but I survived. Up the road, in a parallel universe, there was apparently a bike race happening, the Tour de France. We’d get back to the bus after mountain stages, hear maybe from the directeurs or on the TV that Andy Schleck had attacked Alberto Contador, that Armstrong was struggling, or that Cadel Evans had blown on the Col
de la Madeleine, and we’d react as you do when your mum tells you that a second cousin has just graduated from university, or Maureen from down the road is moving house. It was news, but only of very vague interest to us.

Most of the time, your sphere of consciousness and concern narrowed as the race progressed and as your fatigue levels crept ever higher. Eventually, you’d get to the point where you only really cared about your teammates, but for them, your empathy was intense. Perhaps that’s what made stage 11 such a bitter blow, even though I crossed the line first and took my third win of the Tour.

It had been another exemplary HTC-Columbia performance, on another hot day and another only gently undulating stage, until 500 meters from the finish line in Bourg-lès-Valence. Garmin had, as usual, left the work to other teams before a late surge, this time under the kilometer-to-go kite. Bernie Eisel pulled off, leaving Renshaw and the Garmin rider, Julian Dean, going shoulder to shoulder, toe to toe on the front, with me and Tyler Farrar, respectively, tucked in behind them, both ready to jump.

It was a routine finale until Dean started inching left, brushing Renshaw with his elbow, and Renshaw responded by leaning across and nudging Dean three times with his head (others said it was more like the movement of a rutting stag). It was too early for me to go, 400 meters from the line, but too risky to stay, so I steered wide of Renshaw on the left and flew up the inside of the barriers. I’ve always had the ability to “go long”—hold my speed over 15, sometimes even 20 seconds—and it’s also one of the few aspects of sprinting that I actually train, insomuch as I finish every training ride with one very long sprint. Here, I held off Farrar and Petacchi comfortably, but there was a sheepishness, a distant hint of doom in the faces that
ought to have been elated when I crossed the line. Within minutes, the Tour’s competition director, Jean-François Pescheux, announced that Renshaw had been not just
déclassé,
or disqualified, in the stage, but
exclu du Tour de France:
sent home in disgrace.

Pescheux and I have—and had—always got on okay. With his permanently furrowed brow, narrowed eyes, and upside down smile, he didn’t always exude charm, but I generally felt that his own career as a rider in the 1960s and ’70s had attuned him to the riders’ needs and their difficulties. Now, though, in my opinion, he’d been swayed by a series of factors that ought to have had no bearing on his decision: my “bad boy” reputation and the sheer volume of interest in me and my team; the fact that Renshaw and I were suddenly dominating the sprint finishes in this Tour; the exposure of the Tour and the pack mentality of the public; failing to realize that although the last of Renshaw’s three “head-butts” was definitely intimidating, out of order, and worthy of a disqualification from the stage, what Julian Dean had done was actually more dangerous. That was the bottom line, as I still see it: Renshaw was using the only available means to keep himself and Dean upright, given that the rules forbid you from taking your hands off the bars. Had he allowed Dean to keep veering across him, they could easily have locked bars and brought down me, Renshaw, and 20 guys around us.

What really annoyed me was the lack of consistency. Barredo had got a slap on the wrist for throwing three punches at Rui Costa and clobbering him over the head with a wheel after stage 6. There were shoves and scuffles in nearly every bunch sprint that were at least as likely to cause someone serious injury, but they went unpunished. It stuck in the throat to see Garmin’s manager, Jonathan Vaughters, immediately scuttling off to lodge a complaint with Pescheux and
the race jury. A year earlier, Garmin had been chasing down George Hincapie, our rider at the time, apparently because they couldn’t bear the thought of an American rider not on their team taking the yellow jersey. To me, this was just the latest evidence that they spent far too much time and energy trying to stop us winning, and not enough on themselves.

We could complain all we liked, but it would change nothing. Mark was devastated as much by the fact that he was going home as the damage that had been done to his reputation. As a rider, you sometimes felt that you couldn’t live with the Tour, yet you also couldn’t live without it. While the riders in the race envied the guys with their feet up at home, the guys with their feet up at home would have given anything to be killing themselves on their way around the French countryside for 21 days.

t
here were certainly days in that Tour when my team and I both wondered whether I was going to miss Mark Renshaw at all, because it seemed quite likely that I’d also soon be on my way home. The problems began on stage 13 to Revel, which was sure to represent my last chance at a fourth win before the Pyrenees, and it was an outside chance at that. In the morning, I’d told my teammates that I was confident of surviving the category 3 Saint-Ferréol climb, which crested 7.5 km from the finish; I felt I could get over in the main peloton or within striking distance, and that if they worked, I wouldn’t let them down. As the Cervélo and Milram teams accelerated in an effort to drop me on the climb, I duly buried myself, bent almost at a right angle over my bike, swaying wildly from left to right. Alexandre Vinokourov, who had attacked in the final kilometer of the
climb, led by around 15 seconds as I reached the summit and began my descent. I could barely make out Michael Rogers’s back wheel, the display on my SRM power meter showing 550 watts, or, for that matter, the zigzags of the steep, descending road; for a few seconds I was actually blacking out, fainting on the bike. I only knew that the gap was rising and that it would take the descent of my life to catch Vinokourov. The irate cries of “Cavendish!” from other riders as I cut one bend after another shook me back to full consciousness, but it was all in vain. Vinokourov held on to take the stage by 13 seconds, and my “winning” sprint was to be first of the losers.

The result, though, was less alarming than the goose bumps that ran all up my arms when I peeled off my jersey on the team bus. I didn’t need to ask a doctor; I knew I was getting ill. The next morning began with shivers, a splutter, and, if you’ll excuse the overly vivid description, a missile of greenish-brown phlegm into the toilet bowl. If I’d been apprehensive before about the three consecutive Pyrenean stages coming next, now I was consumed with dread.

The first one to Ax 3 Domaines was an ordeal, but I scraped through in the gruppetto. That was also the day when Brad Wiggins told the press that he was “fucked” and wasn’t in good enough form to contend for the Tour. I’ll make a confession: I thought Brad’s fourth place in 2009 was as good as it would ever get for him.

The coughing was getting worse, the fever in me was rising, but, with the gruppetto as my life raft, I somehow struggled ashore again the next day at Bagnères-de-Luchon. Now I only had to survive one more stage before the second rest day. But what a stage. In the 1910 race, the first one ever to take on the Pyrenees, one of the Tour riders, Octave Lapize, had branded the organizers “murderers” for inflicting the consecutive torture of the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet,
and Aubisque passes upon the peloton. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of that first foray into the Pyrenees, we were facing the same quartet of climbs—the “Circle of Death,” as Lapize called it.

Alessandro Petacchi, the Lampre sprinter, had come to see me at the start that morning to discuss ways to make the day as painless as possible. From Bagnères-de-Luchon, the stage route reared straight up and over the Peyresourde, and Petacchi and I agreed that it would probably make sense to form a gruppetto almost immediately, on the lower slopes of the climb, and then settle in for a long day of nervously watching the clock and calibrating our effort to sneak inside the time cut.

The plan was quite sound, but it was based on the assumption that I would be strong and healthy enough to follow the gruppetto. As it was, when the gun went off, that idea went up in smoke; dropped immediately on the Peyresourde, with Bernie Eisel and Bert Grabsch at my side, I could only watch forlornly as the gruppetto disappeared over the summit. We then got news through our earpieces that Petacchi and Lampre were hammering down the descent in a bid to put me out of the time limit, out of the green jersey competition that Petacchi was leading, and out of the race.

One of the by-products of spending a lot of time trying to beat time cuts is that it forces you to become a fearless descender. Ask most cycling fans or commentators and they’ll tell you that Vincenzo Nibali or Samuel Sanchez is the best descender in the world, but they’d soon change their mind if they saw the majority of guys who regularly ride in the gruppetto. Once, at one of my teams, I told the team manager that I couldn’t ride on the tires that we were being given by our sponsor because they simply wouldn’t have withstood the rigors of gruppetto riding. I was told that the team’s general classification
leader used the tires and got on just fine. That just underlined the widespread misconception: GC riders simply don’t take the same risks as we do—they don’t have to.

The Lampre riders certainly weren’t going to gain any time on me on the way down, but the gap was still substantial as we started the next climb, the Col d’Aspin. Jens Voigt had crashed on the descent of the Peyresourde, and he now helped us make good ground for the first half of the climb before pounding up the mountain on his own. After another breakneck descent, we caught the gruppetto at the foot of the Col du Tourmalet—one of the highest passes in the Pyrenees and the climb that had prompted Lapize’s “Murderers!” diatribe in 1910.

I was now shivering with fever. To make matters worse, Ivan Basso, the reigning Giro d’Italia champion, was also ill and reduced to riding in the gruppetto, the etiquette and strategies of which were clearly all new to him. Basso had started to fret about the time limit and ride full gas, not realizing that we would gain minutes on the front group over the last 60 km from the summit of the final climb, the Col d’Aubisque, to the finish line in Pau. A gruppetto by definition contains stronger riders on the flat—big
rouleurs
—than the front group of ace climbers, but everyone is expected to chip in with the pacemaking. Admittedly, just because it’s expected doesn’t mean that everyone does; every gruppetto has its share of passengers, usually Frenchmen who were attacking in the first 5 km of the stage and who then later tell you that they’re
trop fatigué
to do any work.

I was dropped again on the Tourmalet, with only Bernie now for company. At this point, the calculators were out: How many seconds per kilometer could we lose on the Tourmalet and the Aubisque, how many minutes would we have to recoup on the flat, and was it all
going to be in vain anyway, because I’d be too sick to carry on? The game of yo-yo continued on the Aubisque.

Now I was on my knees, certain that even if we made it inside the time limit, I’d be going home. As we lost sight of the gruppetto again, I started unloading all excess weight: my bottles, food, radio. Bernie, Grabschy, and Tony Martin, who had now also waited with us, took all of it. Yet again, miraculously, we rejoined the gruppetto at the bottom of the descent of the Aubisque.

Then, with 20 km to go, disaster. I punctured. I reached down to squeeze the radio mouthpiece under my jersey.

“What the … Oh fuck!”

I’d forgotten that Tony Martin still had my radio. My teammates were already pulling away and out of sight, so I had to go old-school—raise my arm and wait for the team car to arrive. Five, six, seven team cars passed me. Eight, nine, ten. Where was our second directeur sportif, Allan Peiper, in ours? I looked dolefully into the windows of the passing team cars, hoping that one would stop to give me a wheel, but they all swished past. I was still shivering, my punctured tire was juddering, and there was still no sign of Allan. Finally I found a good Samaritan in the last car from the Astana team, which had no real interest in dumping me out of the time limit. The Astana car stopped, gave me a wheel, and paced me back up to the convoy. They had saved me.

Allan, I found out later, had stopped for a toilet break. Half an hour later, I crossed the finish line in one of the biggest gruppettos I’d ever seen, almost 100 strong. If before that stage I’d thought I knew my limits, over the six hours that I’d spent on my bike that day, I’d entered a new dimension of suffering. I’d crossed a Rubicon where it becomes more than bloody-minded, more than masochistic,
both of which descriptions imply a certain degree of will and consciousness. This hadn’t been that. This had been a boxer lifting himself off the canvas after a knockout and staggering around a ring, concussed, inviting yet more punishment only because that obligation is implicit in what he sees as his job. A boxer will go on boxing, a Tour de France cyclist will go on cycling, come what may, until it becomes an impossibility.