At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  Unfortunately, as we neared the summit of the Col de Manse, a rider in front of me—a climber, in fact—let a wheel go in front of him, creating a gap that I wasn’t able to bridge. Whereas usually in these circumstances I might have lost my rag, I was under strict instructions from Rod not to waste any energy in the last week, whether physical or emotional. I ended up finishing almost 30 places and two minutes outside the scoring positions, but I was still relieved that both Gilbert and Rojas had missed a major opportunity to eat into my lead. As soon as they were available, I loaded the latest standings onto my phone and sat on the bus studying the numbers:

  Cavendish: 319 points

  Rojas: 285 points

  Gilbert: 250 points

  After another moyenne montagne stage in which I was the only one of the three of us to score—a single point at the intermediate sprint—the Alps and the final hurdles in the race for green loomed. For the next 48 hours, that third opponent—not Gilbert or Rojas but the time limit—would present the biggest danger. It was the guillotine poised above all of our heads, but especially mine as the weakest climber of the trio, with the potential to end not only my green jersey bid but also my race. Riders finishing outside the time limit might conceivably stay in the race, at the commissaires’ discretion, but lose 20 points. You only had to open the roadbook, cast your eyes over the route profiles, and consider the names of the climbs and what they represented in Tour folklore to realize that points might be easier to lose than to gain between here and Paris.

  The 2010 Tour had celebrated the 100th anniversary of the race’s first foray into the Pyrenees; this year, the organizers had decided to pay special homage to the Alps and their most emblematic climb, the 2,645-meter Col du Galibier. We would be going up the Galibier twice, first from the south and finishing at the summit on stage 18, and then from the north en route to Alpe d’Huez on stage 19.

  The night before each of the mountain stages, I did my usual homework, studying maps and videos, paying particular attention to the last 2 km. It was fair to assume that a stage finishing at the top of the highest mountain in the Tour wasn’t going to be decided in a bunch sprint, but many times in the past I had been racing the clock in the last 2 or 3 km and found it useful, if not essential, to know the lay of the land. In readiness for those squeaky-bum scenarios, it is also vital to know the formula for calculating time cuts. This is too complicated to detail in full here, but in basic terms, it amounts to the winner’s time plus anywhere between 9 and 20 percent on top of that, depending on the winner’s average speed, the type of terrain, and the length of the stage. Crudely put, the percentages and time cuts are more generous in the mountains and increase in step with average speeds. Paradoxically, then, fast stages often suited us.

  In my early years at the Tour, Bernie had always taken on the role of timekeeper, not only for me but for the whole gruppetto as well. His was that voice you’d hear, an unmistakable, booming, Austro-Australian foghorn filling the valleys as you climbed: “Guys, 32 minutes with 20 to go. Got to move now. Allez!” There was a science, a special intuition to gruppetto riding, and with time I had become almost as adept as Bernie at both the calculations themselves and judging the efforts required to squeeze in. With the directeurs in the team car also keeping track and relaying time gaps, we had at least three different brains on the job. Nothing could ever go wrong. Or could it?

  fucking hell, guys, you’ve fucked us over here.”

  These were my bitter first words, hissed into the mouthpiece of my intercom radio, as I collapsed over my handlebars. They were directed at Allan Peiper and Valerio Piva in our second team car. All the way up the Galibier, Allan and Valerio had assured us that they had done their sums and that we and the rest of the gruppetto were easily going to make the time limit. We could coast in with no fear of missing the cut and thereby incurring a 20-point penalty. Hearing this news and the confidence with which it was delivered, we had relaxed and given up the mental arithmetic. But then a panicked message arrived in our ears around a kilometer from the summit of the Galibier.

  “Guys, we’ve made a mistake! You’re in trouble here. You’re going to be outside …”

  To everyone else in the group except Gilbert, of course, this made no difference; they didn’t care about losing points, and there was no chance that an entire gruppetto would be dumped out of the race for finishing hors délais. This was also why no one on other teams had thought to warn us that we were in danger. Why bother, when they were perfectly content with the present, leisurely pace, except perhaps Gilbert, who languished with us? This was also typical of the unwritten code governing the gruppetto: While it was mutually understood that all of the riders would share the workload (and hence keep the pace higher on the flat than it would be in an average peloton being driven by a limited number of riders and teams), they would only do so in the pursuit of a common interest. As soon as individual agendas encroached, in this instance our need to get me to the finish inside the time limit, it was no good looking to others for assistance. Ninety-nine percent of the time—in other words, when he doesn’t happen to be in contention to win a points jersey—the gruppetto rider has only two overlapping aims: avoid elimination by finishing in a group too large for the organizer to want to cull, for fear of “decapitating” the race, and do it while riding as slowly and economically as possible, to conserve energy for the challenges ahead.

  Needless to say, then, the atmosphere in the team hotel had noticeably deteriorated after my 20-point penalty on the Galibier had been confirmed, as had my prospects of keeping the jersey. Allan and Valerio, usually our two most meticulous directeurs, were no doubt mortified, but they also made the point that it was stressful for them directing the team from the car. Whoever was in the wrong or right, one certain outcome of the whole fiasco was that, in the future, I’d do my own arithmetic.

  There was now a real danger that I would lose the green jersey at Alpe d’Huez. The stage was unusually short, at 109 km, and designed for maximum thrills, with the ascent of the Col du Télégraphe beginning after just 14 km, to be followed by the Galibier and then Alpe d’Huez. With the day consisting entirely of climbs and descents, it was going to be a back-breaking limbo dance to make it under the limit and avoid another 20-point penalty.

  As soon as we hit the foot of the Télégraphe that day, I at least already knew that my doomsday scenario, elimination, wouldn’t come to pass; I was going like a rocket. Bernie wished he could say the same. He, like Dave Millar, was having a shocker, a textbook jour sans, or “day without”—both had fallen out of the back of the gruppetto and were already in a fight for survival on the lower slopes of the Galibier. With every update from the team car, my guilt at having left Bernie behind tugged a little harder on my jersey, until I finally turned to Tejay Van Garderen, my chaperone for the day in the gruppetto, and announced that I was going back for Bernie.

  “I’m not going to Paris and winning the green jersey without him,” I said. “If he gets eliminated, I go too.”

  Fortunately for all concerned, Bernie needed not martyrs but just a long, not particularly technical descent like the one of the Galibier to rejoin me in the gruppetto. Now the message from the directeurs, this time verified by us, was that we were heading toward another 20-point deduction. This time, though, it caused me no great alarm, since Rojas was paying for his efforts on the Galibier the previous day and also laboring in the gruppetto. We would therefore remain as we were—unless I did something totally unexpected and attacked on Alpe d’Huez to distance Rojas, beat the time cut, and save my 20 points. The idea was good and so were my legs, but I couldn’t quite pull it off. Having picked my spot to accelerate, where the gradient eased 2 km from the line, it took a kilometer to move through the gruppetto and off the front. That effort had cost me too much, and Rojas was alive to the danger. We crossed the line together, and together with 82 other riders, 25 minutes and 27 seconds behind the stage winner Pierre Rolland. And 18 seconds outside the time limit.


  There was confusion about that limit and whether Rolland’s time should have been rounded up to the nearest minute, as the rulebook seemed to state, but really it made no difference to what was now the key equation: Gilbert had made the time cut and avoided a points deduction at Alpe d’Huez, but he was now 50 points adrift and out of the hunt. It would be between me and Rojas, who remained 15 points behind. We had two stages left to ride, but one was a time trial in which neither of us was likely to gain or lose points. It would all therefore be decided in one final sprint showdown on the Champs Elysées.

  While I respected Rojas and was in some ways surprised that he had never challenged for the green jersey before, as he seemed to have all of the prerequisites, I didn’t particularly like him. The controversy over the “assistance” from fans and my team car that I had allegedly received in the Pyrenees had rumbled on throughout the race, and the press was suggesting that Rojas and his team were perpetuating it. The best way to silence them, of course, was by winning on the Champs.

  As it transpired, I wouldn’t have needed to. With a break down the road, I took seventh place and nine points at the intermediate sprint—two more than Rojas. My lead was now 17. Avoid catastrophe—a puncture or a crash—and I’d be unassailable. As we hurtled through the Place de la Concorde and around the right-hander that brought us onto the Champs, Gossy led Renshaw, who led me, and Rojas and everyone watching knew the script from there.

  At the exact moment when my 2011 Tour de France ended, hundredths of a second before anyone else’s, I brought my hands to my chest and rubbed the fabric between thumbs and forefingers. The Tour was Cadel Evans’s, but the green jersey was mine. Just as Mark Renshaw had said, we weren’t going home without it.

  A few minutes later, as the team gathered for our ritual lap of honor around the Champs—the last one that we would ever do together—one of Movistar’s directeurs strolled toward Brian in the area behind the finish line.

  “Hey, hombre,” he said, “I’m sorry about the business in the Pyrenees, with Cavendish. You know, saying he’d been pushed.”

  Brian looked up, quizzically.

  “Yeah,” the gentleman said. “No hard feelings. We were just trying to mess with Cavendish’s mind.”

  project rainbow jersey

  a bit like my green one before it, the 2011 world champion’s rainbow jersey would be won months—no, years—before I pinned on my race number.

  One school of thought is that Project Rainbow Jersey, as it came to be known, dated back to a weekend in Manchester in 2003 when I’d bounded across the velodrome parking lot after my first meeting and training sessions with Rod Ellingworth and thanked him for “the best two days I’ve ever spent on my bike.” Another is that it originated a few months after that, when Rod presented his idea for an Under 23 British Cycling Academy to Dave Brailsford and other federation top brass in one of the meeting rooms in the same velodrome. Rod had asked for around £100,000—about $160,000—to get the plan up and running, and after some hesitation, he finally got the green light to start interviewing riders later that year.

  I was in that first intake of six likely lads. In my interview, Rod had asked what I hoped to achieve in professional cycling. I’d said honestly that I dreamt of winning stages in the Tour de France, then told a strategic white lie about also wanting to win Olympic medals on the track. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, both Rod and I regarded the track as a rite of passage on the way to where we really wanted to be: making waves on the elite road scene. Lottery funding was allocated in reward for Olympic and world championships medals, and it was much easier to obtain them (and consequently more funding to feed more success) in the velodrome.

  Despite the initial track focus, Rod always had the same aim for me as I had for myself. I would turn pro with a major professional road team and one day compete in an attempt to win famous races: the classics, stages and jerseys in major tours and the world championships. In my first year as a professional I won 11 races. In my second I followed two stage wins at the Giro with four at the Tour, and in my third I put my name on my first “Monument,” Milan–San Remo. A world championship was the next milestone and, together with the green jersey, was the most prestigious accolade that a rider with my physical characteristics could win. Rod knew this too, and since the middle of 2008, he had been putting together an audacious plan to give Great Britain its first male world road race champion since Tom Simpson in 1965.

  He’d called that plan—you guessed it—Project Rainbow Jersey. By this time, we knew the venues for the next three world championships and a bit about the courses. Mendrisio in Switzerland would host the 2009 race and looked too hilly for me to harbor any realistic hope, but after that were two world championships with somewhat less undulating terrain: Melbourne and Copenhagen. By 2010, I’d be 25 and about to enter what should be the most fertile years of my career.

  On top of this, the overspill from Great Britain’s glories on the track were crystalizing into a British professional road team, for which Dave Brailsford was already trying to secure sponsorship back in 2008. As far as Rod was concerned, the coincidence of these factors represented a perfect storm … and one at the end of which we’d hope to find a rainbow.

  Even the first time Rod and I spoke about his idea, which at the time really was rather vague and fanciful-sounding, I already knew that there was no one better or more passionate, more thorough, more driven than Rod to take on the challenge. Whenever anyone talks to Brian Holm about the contribution he made to my development as a cyclist, Brian always smiles and thanks them for the compliment, but reminds them that it was Rod who had spotted my potential. It was Rod who had nurtured and molded it, at a time when other coaches even at British Cycling had dismissed me as a physiological mongrel who “didn’t hit the numbers” they wanted to see in fitness tests.

  “Doctor Frankenstein,” Brian called Rod. Obviously, because he was the one who had created the monster.

  Rod had ridden competitively in his youth but never at the very top level. Consequently, current or former professionals sometimes viewed him with a skepticism that, I can see now, was grounded in small-mindedness or insecurity. In the five years since I signed my first professional contract with T-Mobile, barely a week has passed without me putting into practice something that I’d learned with Rod, a basic skill or principle to which other riders were completely oblivious or had once learned and had since forgotten or neglected. In two years at the Academy, Rod had ingrained in us a kind of awareness—or mindfulness—that even a lot of top riders don’t possess.

  As I’ve already said, bike riders devote a lot of time to training their legs but not a lot to an equally important muscle, the brain. From the day I’d first screeched into the velodrome lot in my gold Vauxhall Corsa, with its 007 number plate and Goldfinger windshield sticker, Rod had stressed the importance of thinking about everything we did, from using the £3,000 annual allowance we received from the Federation to analyzing strategies and tactics before and after every race.

  Project Rainbow Jersey was the fruit of this approach. Instead of just rocking up at world championships with a ragtag bunch from assorted trade teams and trying to improvise, or starting to plan only once the team had been selected (as most nations did), under Rod we expected to spend months, if not years, obsessing over the worlds and working out which variables we could control in order to improve our chances. The very act of identifying it as an objective and giving the project a name focused everyone’s minds. It instilled the kind of motivation that you could never take for granted in the worlds, the one race a year when riders were asked to compete against the guys who for the rest of the year were their teammates.

  Fostering that sense of a common goal, then, was going to be crucial. Rod had been given his mandate in 2008, and by the end of that year he was already running structured, off-season training sessions in Manchester for the Academy lads and any British road pros who wanted to attend. In January 2009, I was one of 13
British riders in elite pro teams at the time to receive a group e-mail with the subject line “Pro Worlds Project” and a Word document attached. I opened the file and carefully read the three-page, bullet-pointed letter.

  The key line, the one that made the hairs on my arms stand to attention, was at the top of the second page: “Basic outline performance targets for the road race will be, 2009 Mendrisio top 20, 2010 Melbourne top 10, 2011 Copenhagen first, London Olympic Games first.”

  The rest of the document was typical Rod: a pomposity-, mumbo-jumbo-, and bullshit-free outline of the idea and the practicalities of what was going to happen next. Short training camps that trebled as team-building exercises, brainstorming sessions and opportunities to practice specific skills, such as leadouts, would be one central component of the process. Rod wanted the first one to take place the week before the National Road Race Championships in Abergavenny, Wales, at the end of June, a rare occasion in the season when the majority of us would be competing in the same place. A couple of months later, he gave us a date and a time to report to a Best Western hotel in Newport for the start of our first minicamp and meeting.

  That evening in Newport, when we all shuffled off into a meeting room after dinner, I think we probably all expected a brief speech from Rod about the selection process, a quick discussion about the training we were going to do the next day, followed by an early night. But for all that he’s a straight-talking, no-frills northerner, Rod also knows how to inspire people—and that was clearly his intention here. When everyone was quiet, Rod formally welcomed us and then walked over to a chair draped with some kind of shawl or blanket in the middle of the room. After a pause for maximum dramatic effect, like a cheesy magician, he lifted the material to reveal a white silk cycling jersey. All eyes were immediately drawn to the horizontal rainbow stripes across the middle and around the sleeves. For those who hadn’t already guessed, the garment’s former owner was the late Tom Simpson, the only British rider ever to win the world championships road race. Rod then pressed play on a DVD player and gestured toward the grainy film footage rolling on a projector screen of Simpson’s winning ride in the 1965 worlds. Rod later told me that he had borrowed both the jersey and the video from a British journalist who also happened to be Simpson’s nephew, Chris Sidwells. Rod knew that Chris had a DVD and the jersey, so he had contacted Chris and arranged to meet him at a junction off the M6 near Manchester on his way to Wales. This kind of attention to detail was typical of Rod.