At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Page 5

  It was weird with Heinrich; even before the crash and ever since I’d beaten him by millimeters to win Milan–San Remo in 2009, I’d had the feeling that he was harboring some sort of grudge. We’d been friends, but then it just flipped, and I don’t really know why. We’d never discussed it, and in 18 months we’d barely even spoken.

  If Romandie had been a shitstorm, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this was going to be a shit-cyclone. I had been given a 30-second penalty on general classification, a 25-point deduction in that competition, plus a token fine of 200 Swiss francs. The clear message was that I had been at fault; in the public relations stakes, the fact that Haussler and two other riders, Lloyd Mondory and Arnaud Coyot, had had to pull out with their injuries further cemented me in the role of the villain. Haussler would also end up missing the Tour de France with a knee injury that he’d aggravated in the crash.

  Like at Romandie, I assumed that it would all have blown over by the next morning. I realized how wrong I was when we got to the start line, again in Wettingen. The flag went down, but nobody could move because there were riders blocking the road on the front row. I asked what was going on and was told that it was Haussler’s team, Cervélo, and maybe one or two riders from Caisse d’Epargne and AG2R—Coyot’s and Mondory’s teams—who were staging some kind of protest. I asked what it was about. “You,” I was told.

  Some of the guys causing aggro were ones I’d have expected to be there. The riders who had been consistently the most hostile toward me ever since I’d started winning in 2007 were the grizzled, world-weary journeymen, often sprinters who I felt would always look for and find an excuse for their own lack of success. There were a few of them in there. Mainly, though, it was senior pros from Haussler’s Cervélo team, including Thor Hushovd. Thor, of course, had complained about me before; at the Tour de France in 2009, the pressure that he put on the race commissaires to disqualify me on stage 14 effectively won him the green jersey.

  Thor, Klier, and the others were telling me that they weren’t going to start the race unless I went home. I, in turn, was spelling out to them that I had no intention of pulling out and that their own sprinter, Heinrich, had been at least as culpable for what had happened the previous afternoon. This went on for no more than a minute or so, during which time other riders—Lance Armstrong among them—were getting impatient and wanting to start. Someone, I think Tom Boonen or Fabian Cancellara, finally forced themselves through the “picket line,” and that was that. The race was on, leaving the Cervélo riders standing on the line looking sheepish.

  As it turned out, if the Cervélo guys really did want me out of the race, they wouldn’t have to wait very long; having finished that fifth stage 11 minutes off the pace, with my wounds still weeping into bandages and the fabric of my jersey all down my back and the left side of my body, I decided with the team doctor that I wouldn’t start the next day. It was partly a physical thing, partly mental; on the way to Switzerland I’d got the news that my gran, my dad’s mum, had died, and that had been on my mind all week.

  Between that, the crash, and everything else dragging me down, I couldn’t summon the motivation to suffer through the pain. And so continued an unblemished record of failing to finish races that now dated back to Milan–San Remo in March.

  The following year, when we were riding for the same Great Britain team at the world championships in Copenhagen, I asked Jez Hunt, one of the Cervélo riders lobbying for me to be kicked out that day in Switzerland, why they’d done it.

  Jez smiled coyly.

  “Go on,” I said. “Why did you do it?”

  “It was to fuck with you before the Tour,” he said. “Get in your head. We couldn’t see any other way of beating you.”

  Now, suddenly, it all made sense, but September 2011 was too late to find any comfort in Jez’s explanation. This was June 2010. The Tour de France was three weeks away and I was a mess.

  Lonely, miserable, out of form, unpopular with journalists, fellow riders, and even fans, after the highs of the previous two years, I’d somehow fallen into a pit of despair.

  I had three weeks to crawl out. Three weeks to go from a version of hell to the Champs Elysées, the Elysian Fields, resting place of the virtuous.

  five stages

  clunk, clunk, clunk.

  Although I had my head in my hands, I heard the noise just like the TV cameras saw the result. It was reported later that I’d thrown my helmet in a fit of fury, and that it had ricocheted around the inside of the bus, then down the stairs and onto the asphalt where journalists, TV crews, and fans had gathered like wolves around a kill. Alessandro Petacchi had won stage 4 of the 2010 Tour de France to Reims, but as far as they were concerned, I was the story. The truth was that I’d just placed my helmet on a chair; it had fallen off and toppled down the staircase. But the image, I’ll admit, was a neat summation of my year and my Tour de France so far.

  I sat with my head hidden under a towel, staring at the carpet through tears. Our team press officer, Kristy, put her arm around me.

  “What’s fucking happened? I don’t know what’s happened,” I blubbered.

  The emptiness and silence of the bus were amplifying the tumult in my mind, creating a loud, almost visceral echo. Kristy had gone down to pick up my helmet, leaving just me and Bob Stapleton, who sat speechless at the other end of the bus. As the seconds passed, Bob’s unwillingness or inability to say anything, to offer any words of consolation, began to annoy me even more than what had just happened on the road. With 200 meters to go, when Renshaw had peeled off, I’d risen off my saddle and kicked—one, two, three, four, five revs—and then felt the muscles in my legs lock up. There was probably nothing that Bob could have said to make it better—he certainly couldn’t explain what I couldn’t explain to myself—but his silence riled me.

  Only now, three years later, can I hazard an educated guess at what was going though Bob’s mind on the bus that day. I recently discovered that, for weeks before the Tour, one of my teammates, the Australian Michael Rogers, had been dropping none-too-subtle hints to the effect that he could possibly mount a strong challenge on general classification if only the team would give him more support. Rogers had been enjoying his best season in years, having won the Ruta del Sol and the Tour of California, and the view that my recent antics made backing me a gamble and Mick the safe option had apparently gained traction with some members of the management. In hindsight, I should have put two and two together at the Tour of Switzerland in June. There, on the day of my crash, Mick had pulled out, purportedly to prepare for the Tour, when another of our teammates, Tony Martin, was leading the race. Tony went on to miss out on overall victory by 27 seconds. In Tony’s shoes, I would have been more than a little miffed that Mick hadn’t stayed in the race to help.

  While Rolf Aldag and Brian Holm had immediately dismissed the notion of Mick being our coleader at the Tour, sitting on that bus in Reims, I can well imagine that Bob could see the merits of the idea, in retrospect, after five stages and not a sniff of winner’s bouquet.

  I had felt under pressure ever since arriving in Rotterdam on the Wednesday before the Grand Départ. The previous few weeks and months had forced me to think hard about how many of my problems had been self-inflicted, especially the ones created or exacerbated by stories in the media. Just the week before the Tour, I’d done a press event at Bar Italia in Soho that reminded me, yet again, of the drawbacks of what I’d previously hoped and thought was just my “refreshingly” blunt and spontaneous approach in interviews. There was no particular question or answer that set me off, no especially damning headline the next day, but I had been my usual, spiky self. At HTC-Columbia I didn’t feel that anyone was really giving me good advice on how to behave with the media, and most of the time I was going on instinct. I did, though, leave for Rotterdam that week having taken a vow with myself to steer clear of all controversy over the next three weeks. It was simply costing me too much energy.

  My p
erformance in the pre-race press conference in Rotterdam, then, was uncharacteristically monosyllabic and, the journalists probably thought, disappointingly bland. Physically, I was feeling pretty good; although the cuts from my crash in Switzerland hadn’t fully healed and were still causing me some discomfort on the bike, I’d spent a few days on the track in Manchester and done some good sessions there with Rod. Since Sky had launched at the start of the year with Rod as race coach, he and I had had to change our arrangement slightly.

  Given the obvious conflict of interests, I could no longer phone Rod and sound off about teammates or other riders, as I’d always done. He was, though, still the guy who could read me best as a rider, and he was also in charge of the British national team for the worlds in Melbourne later in the year. Before the National Road Race Championships the weekend before the Tour, we’d had a short get-together for the guys likely to make the team, and we’d discussed how we could accumulate more rankings points, thereby entitling us to a bigger quota of riders in the worlds. The race itself was an absolute bloodbath, on a course like an Alpine Tour stage, with 4,500 meters of vertical climbing in Lancashire, and only 11 riders finishing on the same lap as the winner, Geraint Thomas. I didn’t even finish.

  With Geraint’s team, Team Sky, making its Tour debut and aiming to win the race with Bradley Wiggins, all British eyes were on them on the day of the prologue. Meanwhile, I cruised to 126th place and was just glad to be up and running. If cycling was my comfort blanket when things were going wrong, my team was another insulating layer and the reason why being at races was a relief more than a hardship. Here at the Tour, the team line-up was pretty much the one I would have picked if I’d selected it myself. As one of the team leaders, I did have some input and had fought hard for the Australian Adam Hansen to be on the team. Adam was a bit of a rare bird in professional cycling—a quiet yet also quietly eccentric Queenslander with a sideline in computer programming. He’d been fantastic for me on my first Tour but hadn’t been picked in 2009, and Rolf and Brian were hesitating again. Adam was one of those riders who didn’t particularly enjoy the rough and tumble of riding in a peloton, and his edginess made him susceptible to crashes.

  “You watch, if we pick Adam, he’ll crash in the first week and we’ll be doing the rest of the Tour with eight riders,” Rolf kept telling me.

  I, though, kept insisting, saying that Adam would prove them wrong, that he’d be on the front for three weeks, that he’d be amazing. Eventually, they’d caved. Adam was in, with Bert Grabsch, Tony Martin, Bernie Eisel, Maxime Monfort, Kanstantsin Sivtsov, Michael Rogers, Mark Renshaw, and me.

  The first stage would be our first chance, my first chance. We’d been going about an hour when Rolf’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “Adam’s down. Adam’s crashed.” My heart sank; Adam had got up, but we could tell from the snippets of information that were coming from the team car, and then when we saw Adam, that Rolf and Brian’s fears had probably been realized. They were annoyed at him for crashing and didn’t make too much effort to hide it. When Adam drew alongside the team car and asked what he should do, Brian looked back at him blankly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Adam was confused, too. “Well, I can’t ride,” he said. “I think my hand’s broken, my ribs, I can’t brake—”

  Brian cut him dead. “Brake? You don’t need to brake. You’re riding on the front of the bunch all day, anyway, so off you go.”

  Adam did his best for the rest of the day but was packing his suitcases the following morning. We were lucky that he was the only casualty; we’d never seen crowds like that, layered three and four deep along every meter of the route and spilling into the already narrow road. One crash was caused by a dog running into the middle of the peloton. It was mayhem. I’ve always said that most half-decent amateurs would be struggling or crashing even in the neutralized zone on first stages of Tours de France, such is the speed and tension, but this was something else.

  One of my strengths, luckily, is my ability to focus on the task at hand, especially in the last 50 km. In the winter we’d lost George Hincapie, probably the best pathfinder in the pro peloton, but on Mark Renshaw’s wheel I could still lock into autopilot.

  With 8 km to go, the obligatory first-day breakaway was caught, the lead-out trains were starting to rev, and I sat in Mark’s slipstream like a stone in a catapult. In four years of riding the Tour de France, nothing much had changed in my routine: the half hour, hour I spent doing my homework—memorizing the next day’s finish every night, visualizing it, studying it in the roadbook or sometimes on Google Earth—was sacrosanct, as it was at every race. Today’s map had looked relatively straightforward, but I’d made a couple of mental bullet points: a tight, right-angle right-hander with 4 km to go; a wide but very acute right-hander at 2.1 km, almost a U-turn, that looked nothing like the drawing in the roadbook.

  The first one, we’d swooped and positively glided around. As we came out of the bend and onto a wide, straight road, though, the Lampre train surged and we were swamped. Garmin then went and I was 10, 15 wheels back as we approached the second right-hander, until Mick Rogers surged and brought Tony Martin onto the front just as the road started to curve. I said that all I needed to do in the last 50 km was stay on Renshaw’s wheel; now, as we came into the corner, I took that a bit too literally and looked down to see his quick-release wheel skewer tangled in my spokes. It was only a second or two, but the timing and place couldn’t have been worse. All I could do to stay upright was lean on the rider to the left of me, Mirco Lorenzetto of the Lampre team, while carrying straight on toward the barriers, where we both came down anyway. A handful of other riders taking a line between us and the apex of the bend, including the three-time world champion Oscar Freire, were collateral damage, also hitting the deck.

  If nothing else, everything that had happened in the first six months of the year had taught me to roll with the punches. I don’t know, maybe with my confidence as shaky as it was it was also somehow, perhaps subconsciously, a relief not to have to sprint. As the TV motorbike rode alongside me and the cameraman zoomed in to film my reaction, I lifted a hand off my bars, shrugged, and smiled. It was harder to stay cool a few minutes later, when I rode over the finish line, around a corner, and into the small crowd of fans and journalists gathered outside our team bus. Above the shouts of “Allez Cavendishe” and “Hard luck, Mark,” two or three English voices were louder and more noticeable than the rest.

  “Cavendish, you suck! Go home!”

  Standing on either side of me, Kristy and our sprint coach, Erik Zabel, probably feared what was coming next. This, though, was the new, improved, ultraphlegmatic, ultradiplomatic Mark Cavendish. This Mark Cavendish turned, smiled at his new “fans,” and told them to have a nice day.

  The next morning, my self-restraint would be tested again by L’Équipe’s coverage of the crash. The paper that two years earlier had anointed me “The Mozart of the Eleven-Tooth Sprocket” (it sounds more poetic in French) had now decided that a more appropriate nickname would be “Catastrophe Cavendish” or “Le Pyromane” (“The Pyromaniac”). My performance in the first stage of the Tour, in their eyes, was worth exactly 0 out of 10. The French Minister of Sports had even weighed in, calling me “the bad boy of cycling.”

  This all grated, just as it always bothered me to be portrayed as a “dangerous” sprinter. Throughout my career, while always admitting that I was fearless, I’d also prided myself on never, ever being reckless. The risks I took were few and far between and were invariably calculated, endangering only myself. In that 2010 season I’d crashed three times, but because of who I was, the stage I was performing on, and the schadenfreude that was clearly such a popular disease, everything had been magnified and exaggerated. Again, for me, it was all part of the learning curve—finding out that the trappings of success included scrutiny and criticism and realizing that I needed to adapt. Accepting that, though, and assimilating it was going to be a long process, especial
ly for someone as headstrong as me.

  Only once previously, at the 2009 Tour, had I won the first bunch sprint of a major tour, so I knew how to bide my time. Here, though, I was going to have to be especially patient: stage 2 through the Belgian Ardennes was never likely to favor a sprint and turned out to be even more selective than we’d envisaged due to heavy rain. If that stage had been billed as a miniature Liège–Bastogne–Liège, on some of the same roads, the next one would be a passable imitation of Paris–Roubaix, the grueling annual one-day classic featuring long stretches on cobbled farm tracks in northern France. I’d always dreamt of racing Paris–Roubaix as a kid, and now I fancied my chances of a good performance even if a win seemed unlikely. I was actually in a good position and starting to get quite excited until my handlebars and saddle came loose as we hit the cobbles; it was suddenly clear that my bike—Scott’s new aerodynamic Foil frame—was too stiff over the stones. The Foil was a fantastic bike, but the less aerodynamic Addict, which I’d used all year up to that point, would no doubt have suited the terrain better. I was not a happy boy.

  With my wonky handlebars and sinking saddle, I was way out the exhaust. Renshaw performed absolute miracles to take me back into the bunch and through it like Lionel Messi on a mazy dribble, but then—BOOM—bodies and bikes clattered together again.