How I Won the Yellow Jumper (17 page)

Glenn was a cameraman who had worked on my first two Tours, and many, many more before that. He had been a big presence on the production team. And he had just died.

There is no appropriate place to hear such things. News like this forces itself on you, cramming a certain time and place with meaning it cannot hold.

The Tour had taken me here before. Two summers previously, I had visited the Stade Gerland. It had been on my birthday, 11 July 2003. Alessandro Petacchi had stormed to his fourth stage win of the centenary Tour on a long, wide avenue right outside the stadium. After the podium ceremonials, Glenn and I made our way to the interview zone. Slightly dreading another meeting with the big Italian and his tendency to deadpan his way in flat-noted Italian through interviews, and tiring of his workmanlike success, we cursed him under our breath. Besides, the Tour was a week old and we were getting irritable. We waited in the heat for our allotted thirty seconds with the big man, me with the microphone poised, Glenn with his camera slung over his back like a rocket launcher in a Rambo film.

That was the day I discovered that getting bored with Glenn Wilkinson was much better than getting bored without Glenn Wilkinson.

He was a restless presence with an eye for mischief. For no good reason he started experimenting with pronouncing names of Spanish and Italian riders in a thick and implausible Geordie accent. Marry-Owe Chippowe Lee-Nee. Jo-Sabre Bell-Ockie. Alice-Androwe Pertackie. It became a feature of the rest of that Tour, and the next one. Indefensibly childish, wickedly funny, and typical of Glenn. The joke has stuck, and has broadened out these days to include Wan Antowniowe Fletcher.

On my second Tour, Glenn had invested in a set of comedy teeth. Not in itself a comic triumph. But the thing is, they were seriously convincing teeth, crooked, yellowed and gnarled. He always kept them stuffed in his pocket for easy access. He'd pop them in at a second's notice. Instantly, he'd assume the vacant posh smile of Harry Enfield's ‘Tim-Nice-but-Dim' character. In this guise, he would introduce himself to complete strangers on the Tour who were never able to work out if the guy was for real or not. German colleagues were most impressed, his mannerisms conformed neatly to their notions of how the inbred British aristocracy should behave.

A week or so after his funeral I had to get a new photo taken to supply to the Tour for my press accreditation. By way of paying tribute, I too bought some comedy gnashers. Then, feeling a little self-conscious, I sat behind the pull-across blue curtain in a booth in an unloved corner of Boots, staring at my toothy reflection in the glass, trying to recapture the Wilkinson aura. The joke fell flat, really, but for the next three years my ID carried a picture of me sporting a fantastic set of front teeth.

At the end of a long day, if we made it to a hotel in time for a drink and an evening meal, there would be a great sense of urgency. We would dump our bags, and reconvene seconds later at the bar. All of us, that is except for Glenn. It would take thirty, maybe forty-five minutes before he appeared, a freshly laundered Gap short-sleeved shirt turned up at the collar, his luxuriant wavy hair bouffed up in a style, which would in itself have earned him the guillotine during the French Revolution, and enough aftershave to kill a horse. He'd clap his hands together in elegant delight, and then, mincingly, order a strange aperitif in a too-high voice. We would smile at him. All was well in the world: Glenn was down for dinner.

To have been there in Lyon with him would have been fine. Instead I was thinking about his death. The football came and went. I went about my work a little unsure of myself, a little off-balance. When the last interview of the night had been concluded, I struck off on foot, opting to walk the half-hour back to our hotel on a ring road outside Lyon centre. I left that stadium behind me.

Later that summer, Gary Imlach wrote some simple words about him when he put together a short piece reflecting his contribution. The obituary ran during our coverage of the next Tour. Gary said something along the lines of: ‘If you've been watching the Tour over the last twenty years, you'll not know this, but actually you've been watching Glenn.' Those words
led into a montage of some of his finest shots and dramatic scenes which he and his camera had captured down the years. It was a rich mix: LeMond, Fignon, Hinault, Roche, Boardman, Indurain, Armstrong. Fields of sunflowers.

Glenn had been involved as far back as the Channel 4 days. This was clearly a halcyon era, of which I am constantly being reminded. From time to time the rest of the crew break into a nostalgic riff about the old theme tunes and generally the way things were. To this day, I meet people who will wax lyrical. ‘The Tour de France? ITV, you say? I remember when it was on Channel 4. That was a wonderful show.' We get regular viewers who actually think they're still watching it on Channel 4. They've got every reason to feel tricked though. This is mainly because exactly the same people are still making the show. From the executive producers, Brian Venner and latterly Carolyn Viccari, to the commentators, Phil and Paul, to Gary Imlach. And the cameramen: John must be close to getting a medal for his twenty. Glenn had been approaching that too. His most memorable years were the late eighties and early nineties. British TV, for whatever reason, enjoyed a certain amount of preferential status.

One of the ways in which this manifested itself was that Channel 4 was given a place for a motorbike on the race. It fell to Glenn and his admirable pilot Patrice Diallo to fill the spot.

Riding a TV bike in the middle of a race of the size and scale of the Tour de France peloton is a hellishly complex, as well as a dangerous, proposition, requiring a deep understanding for the fluid dynamics of the sport, as well as Kevlar-coated courage.

There is no equivalent in other sports. Aerodynamics dictate that as soon as you put a motorbike in a race, it will have an effect that can influence the outcome of the event itself. Draughting on the back wheel of a
moto
is a not uncommon phenomenon, and can lead to anger and
accusations of cheating among the peloton. For this reason the motorbikes are watched with exaggerated attention by the commissaires.

But daring is the thing and Glenn had it in abundance. Standing up on the back of a motorbike, facing backwards with a lump on your shoulder that weighs as much as a sack of spuds, while travelling down a rain-soaked alpine pass at seventy or eighty miles an hour takes some doing. On a big descent, the motorbikes have to crown the summit some way ahead of the race, for the simple reason that they cannot go as fast as the men on roadbikes. That's why you'll rarely see the close-up head-on shot which Moto 1 would normally offer up with the peloton in full flight down a mountain. Yet just getting ahead of the race takes great skill and courage.

An understanding had built up between Glenn and Patrice. They trusted each other implicitly. A light tap on Pat's shoulder from Glenn was all that was needed for complex messages to be passed from one man to the other. It might mean to pull alongside a particular rider struggling up a climb. It might signal that Glenn wanted to pass by the whole peloton to shoot along the line, or pull ahead at speed, gain a couple of kilometres on the race, and jump off to frame up a static shot and allow the Tour de France to rattle across the frame. All this was well understood between the two men, treading always an intuitive line, which meant that they were valued and respected practitioners, liked and trusted by both the race organisers and the riders.

Patrice is a big long-haired French rider from Orange, with dark skin, deep brown eyes and uniquely convoluted ethnicity, who gets through his day by chuckling and singing to himself good-naturedly. He has little English. Glenn had a similarly sparing lack of French. Despite nearly two decades following the great race through France, Glenn's French was still infantile. As if stuck on an unending school exchange trip that had
started in 1982, he still had the language skills of an O level schoolboy on the lookout for cigarettes and flick-knives to smuggle back on the ferry.

I last saw Patrice on Mont Ventoux in 2009, four years after Glenn's death. He had grown a wonderful beard which, he said, was ‘off-centre, due to the crosswind'.

A curious pair they made, then. Pat, always in ancient leathers, no matter how hot the weather, and Glenn, with his Home Counties looks and an accent to match, a twitching ball of energy, full of mannerisms and tics and quirks.

‘Bonshore, mon ammeee.' He would announce with a flash of his naturally substantial white teeth. ‘Je swee avec le meediar.' This was his favourite gag of all. Announcing to anyone who would listen and plenty who wouldn't, in the loudest, most braying British accent he could muster, that he was ‘Avec le meediaar.' He was brazen, and unencumbered by embarrassment. I have no idea what Patrice made of it. But I suspect the big man was always inwardly amused by his preposterous teammate. He would smile indulgently.

Glenn had stopped filming out on the race a couple of years before I joined the team, partly because I suspect the privileged place which he'd enjoyed for years was withdrawn. British
riders were achieving next to nothing in the early years of the twenty-first century, and therefore British TV had no right to expect a motorbike place. They'd rather give it to the Germans. These days, in fact, only the French and the Americans get to place a motorbike on the race.

But equally, I suspect that Glenn had had enough of the danger. He had two young boys at home, and perhaps he just didn't need it any longer. Instead he opted for the less adrenalin-filled, but equally highly pressured, world of framing Gary Imlach against an alpine backdrop or a Norman church.

He died very suddenly one afternoon from heart failure. He was aged forty-four. At his funeral, his two boys sat in their collars and ties in the front row, their hair neatly parted, their shoes polished. They stared into the middle distance, inscrutable. The church was full to bursting. Somewhere, at the back of the congregation, was Patrice. Ridiculously, Patrice was wearing a tie with his leathers, hastily put on in the car park after he had ridden overnight from Provence to Surrey.

In 2003, the day before the Tour, I sat in a vast press conference listening to Lance Armstrong hold court in measured, serious tones. He was speaking of the race he was about to win for the fifth time, and he was paying it respect. ‘The Tour has been everything to me. I've seen it all. Courage. Fear. Love. Even Death.' He was referring back to an event in 1995. Descending the Col de Portet d'Aspet, Armstrong's teammate Fabio Casartelli had lost control and fallen at great speed headlong into a sharp-edged concrete pillar marking the edge of the road. He hadn't been wearing a helmet, and that killed him.

It is a stark image; a watershed moment in the modern-era Tour de France. Casartelli's folded body lies at an oblique angle across the tarmac. He appears to be holding the backs of his knees, drawing them in. There is too much blood on the
road.

I remember asking Glenn about it once. There weren't many times in Glenn's helter-skelter life when you could goad him into seriousness. But, on that occasion, I was struck by the sudden shift in him. Stuff goes on out there on the road. And to most of us, most if it will remain hidden most of the time.

He knew and understood a great deal more than he ever acknowledged. I spent only two Julys with him. I wish there had been more.