At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Read online

  Initially it wasn’t clear whether it was my option to stay another year or Bob’s to keep me. Finally, though, I’d given the contract to my lawyers, and to my dismay, they’d confirmed that the option merely served as protection for Bob as the team owner, in the eventuality that we had no sponsor and the team had to fold. The fact was that in 2011, HTC would continue to fund us for at least one more year, the team would continue, and therefore I was obliged to stay.

  Which was fine—as long as Bob showed willing, and there was some more money in the new contract.

  It hadn’t taken long after our dinner in Italy for him to call another meeting. He was in the UK, he said, and could I meet him in his hotel at Heathrow airport, where he’d be waiting to get on a plane back to California. I did a quick bit of research and found out that I could get to Gatwick from where I was training in Italy but not Heathrow, not unless I took two trains and jumped through several logistical hoops. Bob couldn’t change his arrangements, so we had a dilemma, which, as I tapped away on my laptop trying to solve, I explained to my Italian mate, mentor, and confidant, the former rider Max Sciandri.

  Max, who was born in Britain but couldn’t be more Tuscan if you bottled him and called him Chianti, leaned forward in his chair, claiming to have a solution.

  “Cav,” he said in his languid Anglo-Italian drawl. “You’re probably going to sign the biggest contract of your career when you’re there. Why not just take a private jet?”

  Private jet? Fuck. Rod was always telling me to travel first class if it meant training or racing better when I arrived, but a private jet?

  “Priva—… I don’t know about that, Max.”

  “Look,” he said, “you’re going to sign a massive contract, plus it’ll make a good story, won’t it?”

  Max had convinced me, and in any case, there were no other options. I forked out the two grand an hour that it would cost to hire a plane and flew to Heathrow. It’s just possible that I walked down the airstairs and toward the terminal building at Heathrow with a little more swagger in my step than would ordinarily be the case.

  Bob was staying in one of the big, corporate hotels inside the airport complex, I think the Hilton or the Sofitel. I’d asked my manager, Chris Evans-Pollard, to come with me since I didn’t want to be sweet-talked, as I now felt that I had been when I’d negotiated a new three-year deal on my own at the 2008 Tour. Chris and I found Bob waiting with Rolf Aldag in his suite. He seemed surprised that I’d brought Chris and immediately asked whether he and Rolf could have a few minutes with me alone. I said no, that I wanted Chris there, to which he replied that we might as well all leave then. We finally agreed that Chris would wait downstairs.

  Bob was a tough customer to deal with. In some ways he was your archetypal Silicon Valley millionaire, having made his fortune through the sale of his telecommunications company to T-Mobile in 2000 (the press commonly referred to him as a “billionaire businessman,” which he didn’t like and said vastly overestimated his wealth). T-Mobile and the teams that it sponsored had been his pathway into professional cycling, and since taking over what was then the T-Mobile men’s team in 2006, he had seen us become the most successful “franchise,” as he liked to call it, in the sport. About 5 feet 9 inches tall, with a grey goatee that gave him an affable, avuncular air, he could be the “Cuddly Bob” that the journalists loved or, when it came to business, a hard-bargaining American businessman. He never raised his voice, but he had a slow, deliberate tone that could freeze over like a lake. He could be intensely demanding and sometimes ruthless; as riders, we were all slightly intimidated by him.

  Here, now, with me sitting opposite him in his five-star suite, he clearly had a strategy. He and Rolf had launched straight into their master plan for the next two years: which riders we were going to sign, which races we were going to target. Money and contracts weren’t mentioned. After five minutes of this, they could see me getting excited. I could feel myself edging forward in my seat and also, I suddenly sensed, getting lured in.

  “Hang on,” I said, interrupting. “I don’t want to go any farther without Chris being here.”

  Reluctantly, they agreed, and Chris was allowed into the room.

  Finally, we got to the nitty-gritty. Bob handed me an envelope, which I opened to find a letter of intent, essentially a precontract agreement. I looked at the figure he was offering, then the duration of the contract.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I only want one year.”

  Bob was taken aback. So I explained: I wanted a new contract, overwriting the old one, for just the 2011 season, not because I had any intention of going somewhere else after that, but as a gesture of goodwill. I wanted Bob to show me what I was worth to him as a rider, not as a speculative punt that he might be able to lock in for less than my eventual market value.

  This, Bob said, he couldn’t and wouldn’t do. “In that case, I have no choice but to give you this,” he said, handing me a letter.

  I quickly skim-read what was written on the piece of paper. It essentially spelled out that the option clause was valid and that I would have to stay with the team, on the same money, in 2011.

  Not too much more was said. Like at our meeting in Italy a few weeks earlier, neither party left with what we’d come for.

  After this meeting in March, the weeks had passed. Bob was fully supportive after my injudicious celebration and “diplomatic” early withdrawal at Romandie, and then at the Tour of California he seemed ready to announce good news—possibly, at last, a new sponsorship deal that would guarantee the team’s survival beyond 2011 and, just maybe, the brand-new contract that I was after.

  He called us all onto the bus after the last stage, in which Michael Rogers had wrapped up overall victory. We listened expectantly, only for Bob to feed us an even more oblique version of the spiel I’d heard at home in Tuscany: “We want the team to stay together, but you have to be fair. You have to do it for the right reasons….” Meaning, as I understood it, that we should all ignore the far more lucrative offers raining down from other teams and stick with Bob, come what may. More than once that spring and over the summer, we’d heard that a new sponsor was in the pipeline, that a deal was maybe just days or weeks away, but every time it came to nothing.

  There had been no real progress over the summer as far as I could discern, and I was now resigned to Bob holding me to my contract, with no pay raise, and the team continuing to operate on the same threadbare budget in 2011. I still had no burning desire to ride in another team’s colors and was immensely proud that, for the third year in succession, we had won nearly twice as many races as the next most prolific team in professional cycling’s top tier. Our achievements were made doubly impressive by the exodus of high-class riders that took place at the end of every season. Our riders were not only successful but also clean, thanks largely to the anti-doping ethos that Bob had implemented and quite aggressively publicized since taking over the team in 2006.

  That stance, combined with our victories, had become a double-edged sword in that our riders were heavily in demand and able to command salaries that Bob simply couldn’t afford. The career of a professional cyclist is rarely much more than a decade long, and most will generally, understandably, follow the money. This was another thing, I thought, that Bob failed to appreciate: There were several guys on our team, not just me, who were willing to make financial sacrifices, within reason, that most in the sport wouldn’t contemplate in order to stay.

  In spite of everything, we still had the best staff, the best work ethic, the best camaraderie, and the best equipment of any team. In my mind, this and Bob’s expertise and connections in the business world made his failure to find a new sponsor all the more unfathomable. It upset me that he could have created something so special, so beautiful, so unique, and that he couldn’t take the necessary steps to stop it from falling apart. That disappointment tinged with sadness had been building in me all season, and I’d decided to give it an outlet now at the Commonwe
alth Games.

  In my pre-race press conference, I was asked about the expectations that I now had to deal with at every race. This was a good enough opportunity.

  “I’ve got great family, great friends, great teammates,” I told the assembled media. “It’s nice. People around me appreciate when it’s like that, but I’m not sure if my team does. Not my team as a whole, but the manager. I’ve not been offered a new contract yet—I don’t know why that is. I’m committed to a contract I signed a few years ago, [but] there’s been no goodwill, no bonuses, nothing. I feel kind of abused for what I’ve achieved.”

  The journalists in the room thought Christmas had come early. One now asked whether I was committed to HTC for 2011.

  “I’ve been told I’m contracted to stay, so I have to do it,” I said. “At the end of the day, I’m never going to stop racing because I love racing and I’m going to race with my teammates because they love to race as well. Fundamentally, I ride my bike because I love to ride my bike, but obviously [because of] the pressures, it’s a normal person’s life that I’ve lost. You should see the benefits coming with that, and I don’t get them at the minute, and I’m a little bit disappointed at the minute with that….

  “We’re the most successful team on the planet and something is wrong when we don’t have enough sponsors,” I went on. “Ninety-nine percent of people on the team, riders and staff, are not just performing, but over-performing. There are a couple of people whose job it is to get new sponsors and it’s frustrating when they can’t and we suffer for it. I’m just frustrated because I’ve been massively underpaid this year and next because for some reason we can’t get more sponsors.”

  As I put the microphone down, for once, I could foresee the repercussions with 20/20 clarity. My comments would be huge news in the cycling press and would infuriate Bob, not that he ever responded publicly. He was also too smart and too keenly aware of what was at stake to enter into an ugly, tit-for-tat argument; I remained the team’s most valuable rider and his best bargaining tool in the hunt for new investment, particularly with cycling enjoying such a boom in the UK.

  Bob also had me exactly where he wanted me: under contract for one more year.

  it was ever so slightly ironic that I’d talked about being underpaid at the Commonwealth Games, because Delhi showed emphatically that money wasn’t the primary motivation in my career. The Isle of Man’s team in the road race would be six strong, and of those six, I was the only elite professional. Among the other five were a pair of promising Under 23 riders in Tom Black and Mark Christian, plus three decent amateurs with full-time jobs: Andrew Roche, Graeme Hatcher, and Chris Whorrall.

  Andy was an electrician, Chris worked for the post office, and Graeme for the water board. They were all talented riders but, by rights, really ought to have been out of their depth in a race where Australia, to cite just one example, was fielding a team consisting entirely of elite pros. I didn’t care, and I was also keenly aware that, for most of those six guys, riding the Commonwealth Games would be one of the most memorable experiences, if not the most memorable, of their sporting lives. While our team’s inexperience put us at a major disadvantage, I could still realistically aspire to a podium finish, and I felt that I owed it to those five guys to at least give them something to ride for. Regardless of where I was going to finish, I also adored riding with the Manx lads; we’d raced together, trained together, gone out together, and, above all, taken the piss out of each other and laughed together for over a decade.

  The road race was 167 km long on a pancake-flat course theoretically suited to sprinters. The lads had all been given a job for the first 100 km, after which I knew it would be unrealistic to expect too much. They were all buzzing. As predicted, a break went up the road early, and at my instigation our yellow and red Isle of Man jerseys promptly poured to the front. The Australians, by far the strongest team in the race on paper, weren’t represented in the break and had a good sprinter in Allan Davis. I was confused as to why they weren’t chasing, so I rode alongside Allan in the bunch and asked.

  “It’s too early for us to work,” I was told.

  “Allan,” I replied, “I’ve got a fucking electrician, a postman, and a plumber up there. You really think it’s too early for you, with your six full-time pros?”

  It cut no ice. We carried on working without any help from the Aussies.

  For all the guys’ brilliant work in the first half of the race, I was always likely to be isolated, overpowered, and outmaneuvered in the finale, and so it proved. New Zealand still had three riders in contention with three laps to go, Canada two, and Australia two, whereas David Millar for Scotland, Luke Rowe for Wales, and I for the Isle of Man were the only men left for our respective teams in a small lead group. Plowing our own lone furrow, none of us had any chance, so we chatted and decided that we’d work together to at least try to get a win for a British rider. The Aussies, Kiwis, and Canadians were now hell-bent on dislodging me, and were attacking repeatedly to that end. A pattern developed: Dave Millar, mainly, would mark the moves, I would then bury myself to get across, whereupon another rider would ping off down the road. The bombardment was always going to wear me down, and it finally did as we began the last lap. Dave had latched onto the five-man group that rode into the finishing straight to contest the medal positions, but could only take bronze behind New Zealand’s Hayden Rouslton in second and … Allan Davis in first. I ended up getting seventh. I was disappointed not to have rewarded my teammates for their effort but had relished a rare chance to truly race, rather than just sitting on my teammates’ wheels and waiting for a sprint. That had become my day job at HTC, but part of me missed the kind of racing that I’d been forced to do in Delhi—the chess on wheels, the thrust and counterthrust. I ended the day feeling exhilarated.

  I was due to fly home the next day, but partly because there was nothing or no one to go home to and partly because I was loving Delhi, I decided to change my flight and stay until the end of the Games. If I was going to stay, I wasn’t just going to spend the time swanning around the athletes’ village trying to look cool in my sunglasses or growing my sideburns; I was going to make myself useful to the Manx riders who were riding the time trial three days after the road race, Andrew Roche and Graeme Hatcher.

  It was their Tour de France—and I wanted them to get the same attention and support that I would expect at the Tour. People were surprised to see me pumping up Andrew’s tires, filling his drink bottles, wiping him down after his warm-up, and following him in the team car on his ride, but I had a fantastic time. Andrew ended up finishing 12th and Graeme 21st. Dave Millar, who had played wife, soul mate, and partner in crime for the week in Bernie Eisel’s absence, took the gold.

  with the conclusion of the Commonwealth Games, the most eventful and testing season of my pro career to date had drawn to a close. The final balance sheet said that I’d picked up 11 race wins plus my points jersey in the Vuelta a España. My teammate André Greipel had won almost twice as many races, without ever truly challenging me for the role of HTC-Columbia’s senior sprinter.

  Now 28, André had still never ridden a Tour de France and had realized that he perhaps never would as long as we were both in the same team and I was fully fit. As a result, he had no choice but to leave at the end of 2010, and he duly signed with the Belgian Lotto team. André and I hadn’t ridden a single race together for two and a half years, since the 2008 Giro d’Italia.

  From my point of view, professionally, the first six months of 2010 had contrasted sharply with July, August, and September. On a personal level, it had been a strange, often unsettling year. In many respects I had felt unfortunate and sometimes a victim, whereas in others I was fully aware of the need to take responsibility for mistakes of my own making. The abscess in January had caused me a huge setback in my training, but I shouldn’t have ridden the day after the initial operation and I shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream on the plane. It was my brother, Andy’s, fault that
he’d ended up in prison, but I should also have worked harder on our relationship before that and perhaps shown him more sympathy and empathy. Though the press had occasionally twisted things that I’d said or rejoiced a little too much in my failures, coming across as moody, arrogant, or impolite in interviews would only encourage them to do that in the future.

  These were just a few examples of what boiled down to the same thing—the need to mature and make better decisions. I wasn’t the only 25-year-old with a few rough edges to smooth, but the past few months—far more than 2009—had opened my eyes to the responsibilities that came with my growing profile.

  While rationally I could tell myself that pressures necessarily came with the privileges of being famous, wealthy, and admired, it was still sometimes hard to compute and accept those stresses.

  I returned home to England and a packed three-week schedule of media and commercial commitments that acted as a reminder of exactly this catch-22. My base was the swish Sanderson Hotel in central London, and every day brought a different party or product launch and a different crowd of people hanging on my every word. It wasn’t their fault; I’d been, and still occasionally am, starstruck in the company of childhood heroes or stars that I’d meet at precisely those kinds of event. At the same time, I’d started to see through it all, and I’d find myself having perfectly pleasant conversations with people while silently telling myself that they were interested only in what I was, what fame and success represented to them, and not who I was. After a few days and nights of this, I noticed that it was having a perverse effect on me: Rather than alleviating my loneliness, it was actually exacerbating it. I’d go back to my sleek, modern, luxurious hotel room and notice not the flat-screen TV or the art on the wall or the designer furniture but how empty it felt, and how empty it all made me feel.

  I was young, single, rich, famous, and only truly happy when I was on my bike. Something, I knew, had to change.