At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Read online

  It wasn’t there that the problems started, or even the next day when I went out training, but on the plane on the way to my HTC-Columbia team’s second training camp of the winter in Majorca. I’ve had strict rules on airplane food ever since my time at the British Cycling Academy, before I turned pro. One of the British Federation coaches, John Herety, who had trained at catering college in a former life, had some horror stories and two incontrovertible, inviolable rules: avoid seafood, and avoid ice cream that may have melted and been refrozen.

  Now, though, thanks to my new braces and a hole in my gums where a tooth had been extracted, ice cream was all I could eat. It was a recipe for disaster: I spent almost the entire second half of the flight in the toilet cubicle switching ends, shall we say. It was food poisoning, or a stomach bug, something totally unrelated to the surgery on my mouth. What didn’t occur to me at the time was that I was vomiting over the open wound in my mouth. In doing so, I was setting in motion a sequence of events that, five months later, would take me to my lowest ebb, an emotional and professional macrocosm of the agony I experienced in Majorca.

  The 2010 season was always going to be a vital one. They’re all important—of course they are—but there were lots of reasons why in this one, in particular, I needed to hit the ground running: I’d be defending my Milan–San Remo title in March; I had a score to settle and a green jersey to win after missing out at the 2009 Tour de France; I’d have my first realistic crack at the world championships road race on a course that was potentially going to suit me in Australia; and finally there was the Commonwealth Games.

  Off the bike, I’d had a difficult winter, with my mate Jonny Bellis nearly dying in a motorbike crash on his way home from a night out with me in Florence. My brother, Andy, with whom I had a complicated and quite distant relationship, was going to prison for getting caught in possession of cannabis and cocaine. It had all been stressful, and with the season now about to start, cycling was going to be my sanctuary, my escape.

  Another incentive to make it my best season yet—and a nagging worry—was that I still wasn’t sure where I’d be riding in 2011. I had an option clause in my contract, the ambiguity of which had already caused some tension. It could either mean that I would have to stay with HTC-Columbia on a wage that I’d already had offers to double elsewhere, or that I could leave, or renegotiate. The interpretation of the clause had already caused some disagreement between my team manager Bob Stapleton and me, as had what I suspected at the time to be Bob’s tactics to make me stay: While complaining that he didn’t have enough money to give me a better deal, Bob had been busy locking my best and most loyal domestiques into new contracts. His reasoning, as I saw it, was that if guys like Mark Renshaw and Bernie Eisel were sticking around, there was no way I’d leave, even if I stood to earn a lot more money elsewhere.

  Making the issue even more fraught was what I saw as Bob’s anxiety about the likelihood of me joining the newly formed Team Sky in 2011. Like a lot of people, Bob had added two and two together and made five: Yes, Sky was a British team, yes, my coach Rod Ellingworth would be working as the team’s race coach in what would be its debut season, and yes, a lot of my mates were riding for Sky. But, I hadn’t spoken to them about 2011, didn’t have any immediate plans to, and I most certainly wasn’t already trying to engineer a move.

  I’d had a heated phone conversation with Bob over the winter and told him that he needed to chill out, stop issuing Sky these “hands-off” warnings in interviews, and stop smothering me. I told him that it was like a relationship, and that the more pressure he put on me to stay and the more he worried about me leaving, the more likely it was to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even though we didn’t broach the subject in Majorca, it was there, hovering in the back of my mind and Bob’s every time we spoke and every time we saw each other at races over the following weeks until it was resolved.

  My back was also up about our cosponsor, Columbia Sportswear, which was unhappy over promotional work that I’d been doing for my personal sponsor, Nike. I couldn’t believe the gumption of Columbia, a company that had, relatively speaking, paid buttons to sponsor the team and been repaid in gold—hour upon hour of TV coverage, page upon page in newspapers and magazines, basking in the reflected glory of what was already being hailed as one of the most successful cycling teams in history. I partly blamed Bob here, too: He had given Columbia exclusivity over the riders’ clothing without consulting us, effectively overriding all of our individual deals. Nike, fortunately, had been good about it and said they would overlook, for example, me wearing Columbia clothing at press conferences and team presentations, just to placate Columbia. I, though, had started to resent every second, every occasion when I had to wear Columbia clothing, and would vent endlessly to our poor team press officer Kristy Scrymgeour.

  Besides anything else, I thought we looked like bloody idiots standing there at team presentations at training camps or before races in full Lycra kit and … Columbia hiking boots.

  On top of these minor and major preoccupations, I now had my tooth. The vomiting and diarrhea had eased soon after the flight, suggesting that it had been food poisoning, and I was able to go out for my first training ride the morning after arriving. My bottom jaw and my gums were aching slightly, but I assumed that was just the braces. Then I went to bed and it started: a pulse like piped electricity through my jaw that kept me up all night.

  The next morning I went straight to see one of the team doctors, Bohdan Wajs—or “Doc Holiday,” as I used to call him, since we didn’t particularly get on and because I wasn’t all that enamored with his work ethic.

  “Open wide,” he said.

  I showed him.

  “Ah, looks fine,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  I trained again that day, with the pain still there, bad but bearable when I was on the bike, and then I went to bed again.

  Three hours later I was head-butting a wall.

  Harder, braver, more resilient than ordinary people? Hmmm, not sure. Maybe just more stupid.

  when you’re a professional bike rider and you have an illness or an injury, it doesn’t take long for your thoughts to start racing, extrapolating, retouching the vision of your future you’d painted in your imagination. We may pride ourselves on our pain threshold, but we learn early to be sensitive to our bodies—hypersensitive—and any niggle or ailment is invariably accompanied by an image of its consequences. The first sniffles or hint of a cold and we instantly know that’s three, four days of training gone. Crash and break your collarbone and that’s four, five, maybe six weeks out and your entire season compromised.

  With the throbbing now spreading through my gums like fanned flames, I started wondering and worrying about the effect that all of this was going to have on my plans and goals for the next few weeks. For the second morning in a row, I went to find Doc Holiday.

  “Look, Doc, something’s badly wrong with this.”

  He peered into my mouth again and reacted exactly as he had the previous day.

  “Looks fine. Just take some ibuprofen.”

  I shook my head and, reluctantly, did what he said. I took ibuprofen, way more than you ever should, and it got me through until that night, when the now familiar ordeal started again: pain, tears, howls, shrieks, moans, and not a wink of sleep.

  This time I wasn’t taking no for an answer.

  “Doc, there’s something not fucking right here.”

  If he still wasn’t convinced, he would be soon. I brought my thumb and forefinger to my mouth, clamped them around one of my bottom front teeth, and pushed. As the tooth moved, I felt the corners of my eyes fill with water again, and everything in my face tense into a rictus.

  The doc’s eyes widened, his expression turning from one of shock to horror. Our team chiropractor, who was also there, said he could see pus was oozing out. He said he’d hold me down, and I should keep pushing it. I tried, but I was almost passing out. I barely managed to stagger to a team car
, in which they immediately drove me to a dentist. The dentist saw me straightaway and said it was the biggest abscess he’d ever seen in his life—or rather two abscesses, because there was one on either side of the gum.

  I’ve never been so glad to see a scalpel in all my life. Still crying, I felt the blade go in and, seconds later, a flood of relief.

  It was over. Well, it would be after a course of the strongest antibiotics that the dentist said he was allowed to prescribe—antibiotics with their side effect of more diarrhea, of course. I spent five days in that soulless hotel room while my teammates trained. By the end of the camp I was already 1,000, maybe 2,000 km behind schedule and had possibly already jeopardized both my Milan–San Remo defense and the first two or three months of the season. All because I didn’t like the way my teeth looked in photos.

  the training camp where I’d done next to no training ended in mid-January, about a week before what should have been my first race of the year, the Tour of Qatar. Instead, my 2010 season was now going to start at the Ruta del Sol in Spain at the end of February, which gave me a month at my flat in Tuscany to get ready.

  That month was miserable. Three things tend to affect a cyclist’s motivation to train: the weather, the company or lack of it, and your form. You’ll find riders who don’t mind the rain or training on their own, but you won’t find one who says that it’s easy to get motivated when you’re starting your training and going like a sack of cement. In that February I had the full house, the grand slam of motivation-killers: shit weather, no one to ride with, and shit form. I did okay in the circumstances—90, 100 dripping wet km every day—but I was also cramming, panic training, still clinging to the hope that I might, just might, be ready for Milan–San Remo.

  At the Ruta del Sol I managed to complete four of the five stages, finishing only fourth in the lone sprint that I did, purely because I was lacking fitness. I then came in second in the one-day race that comes immediately after the Ruta, the Clásica Almería, to the Dutchman Theo Bos. Bos had just switched to the road, having been one of the best sprinters in the world on the track, and predictably it was already being said in the press that Bos was the new sprint phenomenon, the young pretender who was going to take my throne.

  I laughed it off. I knew I had lost the sprint at the Ruta del Sol because I was still out of shape, and the one against Bos because I’d ballsed-up tactically. The day when I was fit, firing, and in the right position and still got beaten, that would be the day when I’d start to worry. Whenever I read or heard anyone forecasting my decline, I didn’t have to look very far into the past for reassurance: In 2009 I’d failed to win two of the sprints that I’d properly contested, and in only three of the ones that I’d won had I given it the full Monty (at Milan–San Remo, in the first sprint of the Tour de France, and in the last one on the Champs Elysées). When I pointed this out—and pointed out how much I’d won by on the Champs, approximately 10 bike lengths—I was told that I was being arrogant. I was, as usual, just stating the facts.

  After Almería came Tirreno–Adriatico, my last race before San Remo. Mark Renshaw and Bernie Eisel had come to stay with me for a couple of days before the race started, and we did some good training on the roads that were going to play host to the first couple of stages of Tirreno. Even so, I was under no illusions; I was going to get my head kicked in. In yet more shocking weather, that’s exactly what happened for most of the week, until something started stirring in my legs on the last couple of days. I was hardly flying, but I was no longer creeping along, either. Suddenly guys were riding alongside me in the peloton spotting the veins starting to protrude from my calf muscles, my legs starting to rotate not in a stiff, chopping motion but in a fluid, rhythmic dance.

  “Aïe, aïe,” they were saying to me. “You’re starting to go well, aren’t you? Better watch out for you at San Remo.”

  And I would smile coyly, starting to believe a miracle might just happen.

  But there would be no fairy-tale return. Part of the beauty of Milan–San Remo is that of the 200 riders on the start line, with the right weather or tactics, 100 of them can win the race. My team clung to that knowledge, mainly because we didn’t have any better option. The previous year I’d sailed over the two crucial climbs of the Cipressa and the Poggio and more or less won picking my nose; I could have ridden through the finish and done another 100 km. This time round, my problems started with a broken wheel on the ascent of the first climb in the race, the Passo del Turchino, and continued with a crash on the descent off the second one, Le Manie. On better form, I could have recovered from the chase back to the peloton after those two mishaps and still contended. But, for all that I’d packed in the kilometers over the previous month, I was trying to wing it. It didn’t work, and sure enough, I was dropped on the Cipressa. Up the road, half an hour later, Oscar Freire was inheriting my title.

  All things considered, though, mine had been a respectable performance. I was philosophical and proud of how I’d somehow contrived to get myself in reasonable shape after the winter that I’d had. Maybe things were looking up. Three days later I finally got my first win of the season at the Volta a Catalunya.

  Three days after that, I had to leave Catalunya with the flu.

  It was only March, but the press was already calling it an “annus horribilis.”

  Pretty soon, I’d stop being philosophical and start agreeing with them. It had been just over three years since my T-Mobile team’s physiologist, Sebastian Weber, had looked at my fitness test results and haughtily informed me that my numbers weren’t worthy of a professional cyclist. It had taken me a matter of weeks to prove him wrong, and since then the disappointments had been comprehensively outnumbered by the successes, the doubts by the certainties, the criticism by the praise. Having gorged on glory, I’d conditioned myself to expect nothing less. Out of that mindset, I’d created a winning recipe—but also the formula for a deep, insidious despair.

  i knew the feeling. It had happened once before in the winter of 2005–6, not that I could really put a name to it at the time. I was a 20-year-old world champion, having won the Madison that year with Rob Hayles in Los Angeles, but six months after that win, I was in a dreadful state. My time at the British Cycling Academy was up; I still didn’t know exactly when, where, or even if I was going to turn pro, and all I had to keep me going through that winter were ritual batterings on the Six-Day circuit with Rob. I was living in Cheadle, near Manchester, with the track sprinter Craig MacLean, his girlfriend, and my old Academy mate Ed Clancy. Ed also had a girlfriend who, as the weeks went by, was becoming a permanent fixture at the flat, and whom I couldn’t stand. A pattern soon developed: She’d be in the kitchen, cooking for Ed, while I’d spend my days mainly trying to avoid her. My routine was to get up, train, then lie on the sofa, curtains drawn, with only a giant bag of Walkers Sensations for company. I’d finish the bag, go to the gas station for another, and repeat. Needless to say, after a few weeks of this, I was not only fat but also depressed, I think clinically.

  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.”