At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Read online

  an extra year

  as couples do, Bernie and I had booked to go on our holidays together. For the 2011 season, the team’s bike supplier was to change from Scott to Specialized, and to smooth that transition and get us all fitted up and familiarized with the new equipment, Bob had arranged for our first training camp of the winter to take place in California, near the Specialized headquarters. Bernie and I decided to go out early and spend the whole of November 2010 having ourselves some fun, sunshine, and training in Santa Monica. Our bachelor pad for the month overlooked the beach and the Pacific, with Bernie’s grooming products taking up approximately half of the square footage.

  The week before flying out, I’d attended one of what seemed like endless parties and product launches that month, this one for the gym equipment manufacturer Technogym. During a casual chat with one of their PR people, I’d mentioned the Santa Monica trip, and he’d said that was a coincidence, because they would also be there for the end of a Help for Heroes charity walk from New York to LA. He explained what Help for Heroes did and that among the participants would be former soldiers with serious injuries, some of them amputees. I was impressed and said I’d definitely go along.

  On our second day in Santa Monica, sure enough, I’d gone down to the pier, where the walkers were due to arrive that morning. There were a few people milling around, clearly waiting for someone or something, but my contact wasn’t answering his phone and I was left standing on my own. After a few minutes, there was a bit of commotion and more people started to arrive. I got chatting with the chef preparing food for the walkers, and as we talked, a burst of bright red over his shoulder stole my attention; I turned, looked, and saw a brown-haired girl in a scarlet T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Sun newspaper, denim shorts, and Converse shoes. She was smiling, pouting at a photographer army-rolling along the floor as he took her picture. “Who’s that?” I asked the chef, my eyes having widened.

  The chef shrugged and said he didn’t know.

  Even before his answer, I’d made up my mind that I was going to talk to her, or at least try. But I was also running out of time: The walkers had appeared on the horizon, jogging toward us before slowing to a walk just as they reached the pier. I figured that gave me a couple of minutes, so I took my chance.

  “Look, you can tell me to fuck off if you want,” I said, “but I saw you were on your own and I wondered whether you wanted some company.”

  At chat-up lines go, it was, well … I’d given her the option of telling me where to go, and she’d not taken it. We spoke for a few minutes—long enough for me to mention that I was a professional cyclist and for her to make it clear she didn’t have a clue what that entailed or who I was—before she was hauled away for some sort of presentation on the stage. As that got underway, I noticed her stealing occasional glances and smiling at me, and I naturally smiled back. Then, when it was all over and the crowd started dispersing, I turned to leave and saw that same red T-shirt flash in front of me.

  “Hey!”

  Initially, I think that my only audible reply may have been a gulp.

  “I’m going now,” I said.

  “Oh, well, if you want to meet up later …” she replied.

  My phone was out of my pocket and the number saved before you could say “fastest man on two wheels.”

  That afternoon dragged horribly. Bernie and I went out to buy some groceries, but all I could think about was why this girl—“Petra” or “Peta” she’d said her name was—was taking one, two, sometimes three hours to reply to the text messages I’d been sending. I said to Bernie that she clearly wasn’t interested, but that, just in case, I’d try an old tactic and add her as a friend on Facebook. I just had to get hold of her surname, so I opened up Google and typed in “Peta” and “the Sun.”

  The search results flashed onto the screen, and my jaw dropped.

  She was a glamour model, a Page 3 girl.

  “Bernie,” I said, “come and have a gander at this. Here’s why she’s not interested …”

  After that initial shock, I told myself that I had nothing to lose and still headed out to the bar where she’d said she’d be.

  We stayed for a couple of hours, in a large group, then she asked whether I’d like to go on with them to another bar. I told her that I didn’t drink, she said that was fine, so on we went. At two or maybe three in the morning, the gathering spilled out onto the pavement, with me still completely sober but the others less so.

  Peta and I arranged to meet the next day for lunch before she flew home. I ended up taking her to Ago in West Hollywood, which as well as being reputedly the best Italian restaurant in LA is owned by Max Sciandri’s parents, Scarlett and Agostino (Ago). Scarlett and Ago ate with us, and when Peta had left, they gave her an emphatic thumbs-up.

  Rob Hayles, my old world championship Madison-winning partner, was flying out to join us, and it was a good job, because Bernie had practically been dumped. Over the following few days and weeks, I’d come back from training to spend two, three, four hours on Skype with Peta. The last thing I’d been looking for from our trip to LA had been a girlfriend, but I’d fallen quickly and hopelessly. She was intelligent, funny, and beautiful. She had a four-year-old son, Finnbar, and even from the few hours we’d spent together and the conversations we’d had, I could tell that she was a fantastic mother. As soon as I arrived at our training camp in December, I was telling my teammates and anyone else who would listen that I’d found the girl I was going to marry.

  meeting Peta had transformed me and my mood within the space of a few weeks. That happiness in my private life had, in turn, spilled into my cycling; Bernie and I had trained well on our own, and the other guys in the team could see it when we headed out for our first rides. Yet again, there had been an end-of-season exodus. Many had gone from the team for the key reason of our inability to match other teams’ salary offers. André Greipel, Michael Rogers, Maxime Monfort, Adam Hansen, Vicente Reynes, Marcel Sieberg, and Aleksejs Saramotins had all left and were replaced by Matt Brammeier, Alex Rasmussen, Danny Pate, John Degenkolb, Gatis Smukulis, and Caleb Fairly. Our directeurs sportifs had a deserved reputation as the best talent-spotters in the sport, but I still wasn’t particularly enthused by some of our new signings. As it turned out, in most cases they would prove me wrong. It was certainly good to have Matt Brammeier, my old mate and fellow tearaway from the British Cycling Academy, on board. We’d both come a long way since our days of drawing giant equine reproductive organs on the window of our house in Fallowfield, Manchester. Brammy’s journey had been a more meandering, stop-start one than my own, partly because of a horrific collision with a lorry on a training ride in 2007. He’d since spent four years regaining his fitness and riding for small teams and finally was getting his first opportunity at the top level.

  The atmosphere at the camp, as usual, was excellent. We were spending the first week around the corner from Specialized’s headquarters in Morgan Hill and the second week farther south in the Malibu Hills. The training was good, as were the weather, the roads, and our new bikes … the only thing that wasn’t ideal was my relationship with Bob. In fact, there now was no relationship.

  The camp was symbolic in my mind as the start of the extra year, the “option” year, when I’d be paid a similar salary as I had for the 2009 and 2010 seasons. I hadn’t spoken to Bob since my outburst at the Commonwealth Games, and every moment was awkward in each other’s company—or rather, in each other’s presence, since I went out of my way to avoid eye contact and conversation.

  One day, after our official photo shoot, he stood in the doorway and put a hand on my shoulder as I left the set. I brushed it away and carried on walking. With a bit of hindsight, and perspective, I can see now that I was being petulant and that Bob didn’t deserve that treatment. Months of frustration had festered inside me to produce that reaction. The fact that all communication between us had broken down put Bob in a difficult position when it came to courting prospective
sponsors; if they were going to invest millions of dollars in the team, they would invariably want to know whether they could count on the current team’s most marketable rider, namely me, and that was a guarantee that Bob would have found hard to provide. This dilemma wasn’t lost on a few of the more astute members of the team, and I know that, among themselves, they wondered and spoke about what could be done to somehow reconcile us.

  Our directeurs sportifs, on the whole, didn’t involve themselves in any of the politics. They, like us, appeared to be completely in the dark about the sponsorship negotiations and the probability of the team surviving into 2012. Nonetheless, along with the mechanics and masseurs, they too were starting to ask themselves where they’d be in a year’s time.

  If this was indeed going to be our last season, that threw up a frightening prospect: The camp in California would be the last time we all—riders and staff, both the men’s and women’s team—got together. I was due to start my 2011 season at the Tour Down Under in January, so like a few others, I wouldn’t attend the second camp in the New Year. On our last evening in Morgan Hill, Specialized had laid on a party, after which the directeurs decided that we could all have a very rare night out. From the Specialized event in the hills overlooking the Pacific, someone had phoned around bars and restaurants in the area and finally persuaded one to stay open, or rather reopen for us. An hour or so later, we had turned a quiet, suburban steakhouse a few miles away into a thumping school disco.

  Later that night, my smiling, semi-inebriated teammates were duly uncoordinatedly tail-spinning around the dance floor while, at the back of the room, the directeurs sat quietly sipping their drinks, half-amused, half-appalled by what they were watching. Chief among them were Brian, the deadpan, self-styled Danish guru with a bizarre passion for all things English, from fried breakfasts with milky tea to the Sex Pistols; and Rolf, or rather “Adolf,” as Brian called him, the fastidious, affable German straight-man and serial butt of Brian’s jokes. Next to them sat Allan Peiper and Valerio Piva.

  Allan had given me my first big break by allowing me to sprint for myself rather than lead out André Greipel in the 2007 Grote Scheldeprijs, where I’d gone on to take my first pro race win.

  Valerio had overseen my best performances in Italian races, but we’d clashed quite regularly, generally because he thought it was impossible to own a fast car and also be a fast bike rider, or to eat lunch with your girlfriend in a Grand Tour and then go out that afternoon and do a respectable time trial. It boiled down to Valerio thinking I was a Big-Time Charlie, or at least falling back on that clichéd image of me when things weren’t going well.

  I’d shared triumphs and disagreements not just with Valerio but with all of the directeurs, and, in one way or another, those experiences had molded me as a man and a rider. As I watched my teammates shimmying and swaying unsteadily, drunkenly, to the music—or in a few cases quietly nursing soft drinks—I thought how strange we all looked and probably felt in this, a context that was completely banal to most people our age.

  It wasn’t just tonight: We were forever in the same state of limbo, between what had been and still were our dreams and the real world that kept on turning while we turned our pedals. The night out was supposed to be an escape, but really it was the rest of our lives, the very existence of the professional cyclist, that was out of the ordinary. One day it would end and—depending on who we were, what we’d accomplished, and what we’d learned—we would either parachute to a soft landing or drop down to earth with a thud. All along, though, our secret was the sheer joy that we took in riding our bikes together and winning. I think we were all still living half in hope, half in denial. In the event that Bob found the sponsor and the money, I knew it would be very hard to turn my back on everyone in our makeshift disco that night. But the future of the team was something that most of us chose not to contemplate.

  Better to live in the moment, dancing like we didn’t care.

  after California, I’d gone back to the UK for, among other things, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards. Not nominated in 2008 and fourth in 2009, this time I finished seventh of the ten nominees. The winner, deserved in my opinion, was the jockey Tony McCoy.

  I then flew to Tuscany, where I spent Christmas with Max Sciandri and his family. Although my training had gone smoothly in California and I’d rarely if ever been in better shape in December, one thing I’d learned in 2010 was just how much energy was required to sustain your motivation and form all the way through the year to the worlds in late September. With the worlds one of my goals for 2011, I had taken it easy either side of the New Year. A little too easy, as it happened—by the time I left for Australia in the middle of January, I was three kilos heavier than my usual weight at that time of the year.

  Even when I was lean, I had never had the kind of muscles that would rise in impressive, contoured ridges just below the skin’s surface. In races and on television, I always somehow managed to look fat. My weight was something that I worried about but also that I’d learned, with time, to control. Every year I’d take a month off at the end of the season, and having weighed 69 kilos at the Tour (about 152 pounds), I’d go up to 76 kilos (167 pounds) by the time I started training again in November. It was the simple and predictable consequence of burning fewer calories than I consumed and attending events and parties where I’d drink and eat things that during the season wouldn’t pass my lips. It was also a question of structure; at that time, I had none. I would be getting last-minute calls to attend such and such an event, in this or that location, and bought whatever food was available in airports or shops on my route. Other riders could perhaps do the same and put on no more than a couple of kilos. Unfortunately, however, my metabolism wasn’t as fast as my sprinting or my backchat.

  In spite of a few kilos of extra insulation, I wasn’t worried when I arrived in Australia for the start of the Tour Down Under. It was enough just to be racing, bearing in mind that exactly a year earlier I’d been lying sick under a duvet. I had none of the health issues that had beset me in the 2010 season, and I was much happier in my private life. In Australia, I felt strong … but fat, and any hopes I had of nicking a stage win or two ended with a bad crash 4 km from the end of the second stage. If I finished battered and bloodied there, the next day insult was added to injury when I found myself in a group of stragglers on a hilly finishing circuit—and moments later we were slaloming in and out of traffic, the police and race marshals having prematurely reopened the road. Only thanks to some pretty nifty bike-handling did we make it to the finish unscathed.

  After Australia, my next race was the Tour of Qatar in February. Completely flat and essentially six different combinations of the same cobweb of roads crossing the Qatari desert, this race was notoriously fast, windy, and good preparation for the spring season. For me, once again, it started terribly. At 2.5 km long, the prologue was the kind of short, sharp effort in which I’d often excelled in the past, and, sure enough, at the first time-check I was still very much in the hunt for a win and the first leader’s jersey of the race. The course was straightforward except for a couple of speed bumps. Supposing that the best way to hold my speed would be a low bunny-hop, maybe just grazing or narrowly clearing the apex of the bump, I’d jarred my rear wheel on the first one but stayed in control. Approaching the second bump, I repeated the same steps; I jerked with my arms and felt the bike take off, but this time the impact was too heavy and catapulted me over my handlebars and onto the road. I’d hit my head in exactly the same place as in Australia, and though not as hard this time, it was enough to completely compromise my race. Because I was beaten up and not contesting any of the sprints, Mark Renshaw was able to ride for himself that week and also enjoyed the role reversal of having me as his domestique. He picked up one second place, one stage win, and the general classification. Looking back, I think that Qatar was what convinced Mark that, if the team did fold, it was perhaps time for him to stop working for others and sprint for himse
lf.

  From Qatar, I hopped across the Persian Gulf and finally took my first win of the season in the Tour of Oman. That week, Renshaw wasn’t racing. In a certain sense, our paths were already beginning to diverge.

  It was also in that period, as the spring classics approached, that I made at least one firm decision about my future: I didn’t want to carry on working with Bob, even in the increasingly remote eventuality of him finding a new sponsor. I’d assumed for a while now that HTC wouldn’t renew its contract with the team, but the company had shown an interest in working with me on an individual basis. The press had reported that there had also been conversations between Bob and the audiovisual retailer RadioShack, whose team needed to somehow reinvent itself after Lance Armstrong’s second and definitive retirement, but those talks, too, would come to nothing. Bob was now so busy trying to win sponsorship that he was barely ever attending races, yet still implying in e-mails or via our directeurs sportifs that a deal of some sort was likely. I had lost all faith and patience with it, and couldn’t now envisage a situation whereby we would continue to work together.

  For a few weeks, at least, I think Bob had decided that whether I stayed or not wouldn’t matter hugely. At Milan–San Remo, I was put firmly in the shade by another HTC rider, Matt Goss. The pre-race plan had been for everyone to stick with me except Peter Velits, who would work for Gossy. In the morning, perhaps because of nerves and not for the first time before an important race, I had felt suddenly nauseous and started vomiting. The symptoms continued once I had got on my bike, ultimately leading to my capitulation on the crucial climb of La Cipressa. I had been dropped earlier in the race, on Le Manie, and the entire team, even Velits, had stayed with me and exhausted themselves by towing me back to the peloton. This had left Gossy completely isolated in the front group, but he hid brilliantly in the wheels and duly blitzed the sprint. To anyone who had known Gossy as an Under 23, it frankly wasn’t much of a surprise. On turning pro, I think he had perhaps set himself back first by signing for Saxo Bank, a team that didn’t support him as much as it should have. In the last year and a bit, though, having switched to our team, Gossy’s talent had finally bloomed.