At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Read online

  Frank Schleck, one of the pre-race favorites, was down with a broken collarbone. I managed to stay upright and bunny-hop over another rider spread-eagled on the cobbles, but by then everyone who had been in front of the crash was barreling away in a cloud of dust. After the race, a few people said to me that they thought 25th was a good result. I, though, was sure that I could and should have made the top 10 and possibly won.

  I took heart from the fact that the sprints were finally on their way—three nailed-on bunch gallops as the race wound its way down the east of France and toward the Alps. That night, after my roommate, Mark Renshaw, had dropped off, I lay with my eyes wide open for a few minutes, imagining those final 200 meters in Reims—like a bomb detonating down my thighs and through my calves, every cell ablaze with lactic acid and adrenalin, and then the explosion of joy on the line. I’d experienced it four times in the Tour in 2008 and six times in 2009. Nothing else in cycling quite compared.

  I definitely woke the next morning, I definitely got on my bike and rode from Reims, and I definitely saw Alessandro Petacchi win the fourth stage of the Tour de France. The rest—the race itself, those final kilometers that I’d memorized, the lead-out and then those four, five pedal strokes before I sat up—are all still there, but somehow the picture is foggy and drained of color and noise. It was as though, when I’d finally nodded off the previous night, the lights had stayed off until the next afternoon. It was as though the noise that had woken me wasn’t my alarm but Clunk, clunk, clunk.

  there is one thing worse than losing a Tour de France sprint that you expected to win: losing one and then having to spend the night in a Hotel Campanile. Over the course of a Tour, the race organizer, ASO, tries to give each team an even spread of five-star luxury and two-star slumming, and Campaniles have become infamous among Tour riders for occupying a position very much at the more modest end of the scale. Right then, though, not even room service in the penthouse at the Mandarin Oriental could have raised my spirits. I was distraught and still at a loss as to how it had happened; never before had my legs abandoned me like they had on that finishing straight in Reims.

  Luckily, I had Brian and Aldis.

  I’d met Aldis Cirulis years earlier during a winter spent doing Six-Days with Rob Hayles. Bald, Latvian, and unfailingly good-humored, over the previous couple of seasons Aldis had become my personal masseur, the guy the team sent to all of the big races where I was competing. Aldis could listen to me and my muscles like no one else. Both he and Brian are also among the funniest people I’ve ever met. And what I needed that night, more than anything else, was a bit of light relief.

  The one saving grace about that Campanile was its location—ironically, for us, in the heart of Champagne country. Sensing my anger and dismay, Brian, like pretty much all of the other staff and riders, had tried to keep well out of the way in the hour or two since the stage finish, taking himself off for a jog in the vineyards.

  He had then showered and come to the masseur’s room where I lay on the massage table, waiting for Aldis to get to work. When I turned to face Brian, my attention was immediately drawn back to Aldis and the clink of three glass tumblers.

  “Here,” Aldis said. “I’m going to give you something that’ll make you feel better.”

  Grinning, he took a bottle of vodka in one hand and one of the glasses in the other. As he poured, his smile widened. He then opened a can of Sprite and filled the glass almost to the top. He then did the same in the other glasses. It was barely a single shot of vodka—certainly not enough to get me drunk—but in the circumstances, it was the perfect medicine.

  Within a minute or two, Brian was telling stories, Aldis and I were giggling away, and what had just happened on that finish line in Reims seemed to belong to a different age, a different world.

  Then, when we’d stopped laughing, just as he was about to leave, Brian turned serious.

  “Cav,” he said, “is there anything we can do to help you? Would you rather we didn’t go for it tomorrow, didn’t go for a sprint? You know, because if—”

  “Brian,” I said, interrupting him. “Don’t worry about anything. I’m going to win tomorrow.”

  The fact was that suddenly, for some reason, I felt ready. The team’s confidence in me had also not wavered; the previous day, Kanstantsin Sivtsov, a climber by trade, had spent the entire day tapping out a steady pace on the front of the bunch, just to keep the breakaway within a safe distance. Now he’d do the same on stage 5.

  Again, it was hot, and getting hotter as we rode into La France Profonde—the dry, desolate breadbasket of central France. A three-man breakaway had gone away early in the stage, but that wouldn’t give us too many headaches, providing we got the timing right. With 6 km to go, we duly reeled them in.

  The sprints in the 2010 Tour were different from 2008 and 2009. We were getting next to no help on the front of the bunch, and so we were having to commit two or maybe three of our riders even before the lead-out really started to wind up. The result was that we looked less dominant than we had been in 2009 in the final 10 km. This stage conformed to the new pattern; when we gobbled up the last survivor from the break, José Iván Gutiérrez, this was Lampre’s and Garmin’s cue to try to swamp us. Garmin, in particular, was exceptionally strong, so trying to wrestle back control was pointless. There was no real need, either, as I could trust Mark Renshaw to pick a pocket somewhere in the first 10 positions, and all I had to do was follow him. It sounds easy, and he made it look easy, but Renshaw was a magician; there were other lead-out men with his speed, his instinct, his anticipation, his aggression, and his bike-handling, but no one else had assembled the full armory. Along with George Hincapie, he was the only rider I’d ever ridden with whose judgment I would take over my own. With Mark, it was like riding a tandem.

  Even with Renshaw at his best, I still needed a bit of luck. Or a favor. Geraint Thomas momentarily snuck in between Mark and me with 1,500 meters to go, boxing me in. “Oh, Gee!” was all I needed to shout; Gee eased to the side and let me through.

  At 1,000 meters to go, Mark was coming up on the outside of the Garmin train, shoulder to shoulder with Thor Hushovd.

  Oscar Freire was also fighting for the last Garmin wheel, while I stayed glued to Mark.

  At 750 we swung right around a right-angle bend and then into the home straight.

  Mark looks around, 600, another look, 550, he’s still waiting, waiting, just holding me there. It’s 450 and he doesn’t move, then 400 and he’s starting to slide out, alongside the Garmins, then past them. It’s 350 now and I’m praying my legs don’t fucking let me down, Not again, not today, Cav. It’s coming now, 300, and it’s open, wide open, and If you can’t win from here, Cav, it’s fucking wide open. It’s 250 and it’s 240 …

  Mark’s fading to the left and I’m going to the right. I kick and know, I know straightaway: one kick, one pedal stroke, and I know. I’ve won. I know.

  And I win. Finally I win and the nightmare’s over, all six months of it.

  I scream and I turn to see the guys and it’s chaos, bedlam, people grabbing me, pushing me, hitting me with cameras, but I don’t care because I’ve won. And then the tears come. The tears come.

  I don’t know what it was that set me off. It may have been seeing Geraint as we got changed behind the podium, him going to collect his white jersey as the leader of the young rider’s classification, me as the stage winner. I’d like to say it was linked to the experiences I’d shared with Gee growing up together as cyclists, all those times we’d talked and fantasized about doing this, the poignancy of us standing there behind a Tour de France podium together. Really, though, I think I was just ready to let it all out.

  When it was my turn to go up on the podium, I’d composed myself, but then I heard the Tour anthem, the few bars of classical music that they play just as you’re about to walk up the steps to the stage, and I went again. This time the tears came in uncontrollable floods. As someone pointed out to me later, I’d crie
d at some point in every Tour de France I’d done. This time, we were barely a week in and within the space of 24 hours there had been tears of sorrow and tears of joy.

  The interviews I’d given until that point in the Tour had been almost comical—except for the journalists having to contrive stories out of my quotes. In my desperation not to court any kind of controversy, I’d turned myself into a parody of the PR-pandering monosyllabic sportsman. One day I’d been asked whether I was already too far behind in the green jersey competition to have any chance—the kind of question that infuriated me—but I’d responded with a forced smile and parroted, “I’m looking forward to the rest of the Tour.” Now, when waterworks had stopped pumping, I could finally relax in the press conference and in front of the cameras. Standing and “supervising” me, Kristy didn’t know whether to feel relieved or petrified.

  If my demeanor had changed overnight, then so had the tone of the coverage in the press. Here’s a little sample of the next day’s cuttings:

  Het Laatste Nieuws (Belgium):

  CAVENDISH SENDS HIS TORMENTOR TO HELL IN MONTARGIS

  Cavendish found a wonderful way to exact sporting revenge.

  He came off Renshaw’s wheel like a man possessed, staring into infinity. Immediately after the finish, tears streamed from his bulging cheeks.

  Gazet Van Antwerpen (Belgium):

  CAVENDISH WINS AND BREAKS THE TOUR SPELL

  Le Figaro (France):

  THE “CAV” BRIDLED

  The “bad boy” who burst into tears. The fifth stage of the Tour de France has marked the awakening of Mark Cavendish and unveiled his human face.

  Guardian (UK):

  MARK CAVENDISH’S PYROTECHNICS BLOW FIELD AWAY

  I didn’t mind the fickleness, because I was often guilty of the same thing. I certainly preferred that to Bob’s reaction as we’d driven from the press conference to the hotel. “Well, just make sure you keep that up now,” he’d said, or words to that effect.

  The insinuation that only if I kept winning would he be satisfied, that no more mistakes would be allowed, momentarily popped my balloon.

  Bob should never have doubted me. My teammates—most of my teammates, at least—never had, and my faith in them was bulletproof. The next day’s stage, another flat one to Gueugnon on the edge of Burgundy, was going to reflect that and, I think now, would encapsulate in a single sprint everything that was special about my understanding with Mark Renshaw.

  The team had headhunted Mark at the end of 2008, after Gerald Ciolek had signed for Milram and left me without a lead-out man. When our directeurs first mentioned Renshaw as a potential replacement, I’ll admit that I wasn’t particularly enthused. My only real contact with him prior to that had been physical, literally—I’d shoved him out of the way in a sprint in the 2008 Tour.

  Beyond that, I’d not really noticed him, which I didn’t think was a particularly good sign. But I’d given his hire my blessing anyway, and he’d joined. We’d got on well enough at training camps that winter, though to say that we’d hit it off instantly wouldn’t be strictly accurate. Mark is still fairly quiet, and at first you might think a bit standoffish. More to the point, our first race together had been the Tour of California in 2009, and our first sprint there had been a disaster. I’d lost Mark’s wheel on the way in to the finish, he’d carried on and done his own sprint to come in third, and I was livid. That night, after the stage, I went to see him in his room.

  “Listen, mate, what you did today … that’s not on.” I didn’t raise my voice, but he clearly got the message. From that evening on, our understanding was practically telepathic.

  Before stage 6 to Gueugnon, the planning and homework was key. This was another area where Mark and I were perfectly in sync and in which Mark was the model pro. The previous night, after my win in Montargis, we’d done our routine, painstaking virtual reconnaissance of the final kilometers on Google Maps Street View.

  Whatever conclusions we drew from that, Erik Zabel would then go ahead of the race to test, and he would relay his observations back to Rolf in the team car. Rolf would then give us the vital information over race radio. Victory or defeat on this stage, we realized, was going to hinge on the final corner—a right-angle left-hander at 800 meters to go. The message from Erik was that it was blind, but if we took the right line, we didn’t need to brake.

  Intel like this took on even more significance now that we couldn’t necessarily dictate terms in the final 2 km. Mark’s role also became more important for the same reason. It’s a common misconception that a lead-out man is just a second-rate sprinter, someone who can sprint at 55 kph and whose finish line is the 250-to-go sign, but who can’t sprint at 60 kph from there to the finish. In reality, the two jobs are totally different. When he’s not part of a team riding like aerobatic display planes—with riders peeling off at predetermined points until only the sprinter is left—a lead-out man’s work will often consist of multiple explosive efforts, or one long one very close to his maximum power. After that, the sprint, those last 250 or 200 meters, aren’t about how many watts I can put out, they’re about how many I can put out when I’m on the limit, because I should already be on the limit when I’m on my lead-out man’s wheel.

  Mark’s other fantastic asset was his ability to stay cool. This was another thing we shared. Both of us treated sprints like a math exam: something you’d prepared for, watching videos, studying maps, imagining what questions you’d be asked, visualizing your answers, and then on the day thinking as quickly as possible but never forgetting to do just that—think. In everything you ever read or see about sprinting, great emphasis is placed on the speed, the danger, the thrills, and the adrenaline, and I think perhaps some sprinters get caught up in or perhaps fall in love with that tearaway image of themselves. Neither Mark nor I ever thought of ourselves or our jobs in those terms; our approach was calm, studious, clinical. What I’ve said before about staying physically fresher by saving emotional energy also applied to Mark.

  This was a classic example: We were swamped by Garmin in the penultimate kilometer, and their train rattled headlong toward that last left-hander with 800 to go, while Mark laid off them, hanging back 10 or 20 meters. By doing that, we knew—thanks to our prep and Erik’s—that we could freewheel around the corner while the Garmin riders, Julian Dean and Robbie Hunter, had to slow and then accelerate again into the finishing straight. We weren’t trying to dive-bomb them out of the bend—just to save a few pedal revs, a few watts, which would then make the difference for Mark when he started to wind it up, and for me when it was time to go at the 250-meter mark.

  The previous day’s sprint, like all of the others so far in this race, had been a “power sprint,” an exercise in strength more than speed. I’d had to labor the gear, churn rather than spin it. This one was much more up my street. I kicked and knew instantly not only that I’d won but also that my jump was back to its springiest, fastest, and most deadly. I won by two bike lengths from Tyler Farrar, easing up in the last 20 meters. While I hugged my teammates—and this time held back the tears—the Spaniard Carlos Barredo and the Portuguese rider Rui Costa were grappling with each other on the tarmac, this after Barredo had detached his front wheel from his bike and used it to wallop Costa over the head.

  The Tour could get to you like that; I knew it better than anyone. It could be cruel, but it could also be kind. Three days after wondering whether I would ever win again, I was suddenly two stages to the good.

  as the years and Tours passed, my confidence and ability in the mountains had followed a steady upward curve. Even so, every now and again you’d still get a stage that, a bit like Carlos Barredo’s carbon rim, hit you and left you dazed. Stage 7 of the 2010 Tour was one such day. On paper it was only a moyenne montagne (“medium mountain”) stage through the gently sloped, wooded Jura range, with a crescendo of fairly minor climbs culminating in the category 2 ascent to the Les Rousses ski resort; in reality, it turned out to be a brute. It was the
perfect example of how it isn’t the route that determines the difficulty of a race but the way that the riders choose to tackle it. Perhaps more than any other race, because every kilometer of the route carries value for some rider, some team, some sponsor, the Tour was permanently beholden to a butterfly effect that would jolt it out of a fragile equilibrium and into balls-to-the-wall chaos. On this stage, all it took was one of the French teams, Bbox Bouygues Telecom, to miss the key break of the day and the next three or four hours were turned into a groaning, aching procession of agony.

  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.