At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  In my first fortnight as the world champion, I’ll admit that not too much of my time was spent on a bike. There were public appearances, meetings with Simon Bayliff, and, finally, days and evenings to be spent with Peta and Finn without fretting about what I was eating, how long I was staying up, and what impact it would have on the next day’s training.

  As well as my new manager, I was going to have someone new helping me stay on top of things—a role that roughly matched the traditional job description of personal assistant but was in actual fact more like a human Swiss Army Knife.

  In 2010, partly promoted by Rod’s constant insistence that I get more rest, I’d realized that my afternoons and evenings were filled with tedious admin and practical chores, and that it would be beneficial if someone could lighten that load.

  One of my mates from the Isle of Man, a guy named Rob Dooley, worked in a bike shop and was looking for a change of direction and scenery. I asked Dools whether he’d consider being paid to act as my odd-job man, and he had leapt at the chance.

  Dools was a lovely guy but, bless him, a bit chaotic. It didn’t matter for the most part because he generally did what I asked, plus I trusted him and liked having him around. There were, though, times when the disorderliness not only annoyed but also alarmed me. One day in the spring of 2011 particularly stands out: I’d got a call one afternoon—it was from either the BBC or the Giro d’Italia organizers, I can’t remember which—to ask whether I was free to go to Sicily and ride up Mount Etna for a preview of the forthcoming race. It was short notice, but I had no prior engagements and so I said, yes, why not. The next day I duly did the ride, the BBC filmed it, and then we all went back to the airport to catch our flights home.

  I thought no more of it until, around two weeks later, a letter from the UCI dropped onto my doormat. I opened the envelope, looked down the page, and gulped. The only three words I remember were “missed test notification.”

  I should confess straight away that it was naive and irresponsible to trust another person, whether it was Dools or anyone else, to fill out my anti-doping whereabouts form. These log-sheets had to be continually, accurately updated to allow dope-testing bodies to locate riders for out-of-competition controls. If they were unable to find you and take samples, you got one strike. Three strikes, or missed test notifications, within the space of 18 months added up to a full-scale anti-doping violation, a ban, and an irredeemably damaged reputation. I was now on one strike.

  Dools’s excuse was that, although he’d known about my change of plans and change of location for the day, he hadn’t been able to access the Internet and log the new details. I thought it sounded a bit like the-dog-ate-my-homework, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and we moved on.

  There were further issues over the summer before it all finally came to a head. The catalyst was an unfortunate mistake by my HTC teammate Alex Rasmussen, or rather three pretty half-witted ones, because that was how many missed test notifications he had chalked up. The team had no other option but to terminate his contract and immediately send him home from the Tour of Britain.

  When I heard the news, I suddenly felt an odd, ominous chill. I picked up my phone and immediately scrolled through my contacts to the number of my UK Sport anti-doping liaison officer. When he answered, I asked whether he could look at my whereabouts information and tell me what it said for today’s date.

  “Sure,” he said. “Here it is. You’re in Italy.”

  I kept my composure long and well enough for the correction to be made, thanked him, then ended the call and straightaway phoned Dools.

  There was no “Hey, Dools, how are you?” no platitudes, just a very abrupt one-line question: “Where am I right now?”

  “The Tour of Britain,” said the sheepish voice at the end of the line.

  “Oh, okay,” I replied. “So how come on my whereabouts form it says that I’m in Italy?”

  This was the final straw. As I put it to Dools, “If I get three missed tests, you’re going to lose your job, but I’m going to lose my career. My career. Do you realize what that means?”

  There was nothing he could really say.

  I adjusted my tone, ended my rant, and got to the crux.

  “Look, Dools, thanks for all you’ve done, but I can’t take these risks. You can’t work with me anymore. I’ll pay you for the next month, even if you’re not working, but I can’t keep you on.”

  Dools didn’t take my decision particularly well, and this was the end, sadly, not only of a working relationship but also a friendship.

  I now needed someone to replace him, but fortunately didn’t have to look too far or hard. Since the start of the year, Rob Hayles and I had been vaguely discussing some arrangement whereby he could help me when he stopped racing at the end of the year; losing Dools had now put me in a position to offer Rob something akin to a full-time position. The fact that Rob had been a top rider, the man who had partnered and mentored me to a first world title on the track in Los Angeles in 2005, not to mention that he was one of my best mates, clearly made him the ideal man for what he would tell you can be quite an onerous role. Although I have a lot of friends and there are a lot of people who want and try to get close to me, Rob was and still is one of a tiny handful who, I know, accept and love me for the person underneath the personality. He can be hilariously funny, sick with it, and he can be infuriatingly laid-back for someone as high-strung as me. Even so, it would be very difficult to find someone with a bad word to say about him.

  As my Mr. Fix-It, Rob was superb from day one, pretty much ensuring that all I needed to do was get up, get dressed, and get myself on my bike. He frequently stayed at our house and became part of our family; I was part of his, with his wife, Vicky, a more than capable and very straight-talking second mother.

  on August 4, Bob officially ended his efforts to keep HTC-Highroad alive beyond the end of 2011, having been unable to secure a replacement for HTC as the main sponsor. After informing Bob and Rolf during the Tour that I wouldn’t remain patient any longer, wouldn’t entertain any more promises or even statements of intent from them, I had thought that would at least bring some clarity to my ideas about 2012.

  With my new status as world champion and all of this upheaval in the period either side of the race, it was no real surprise that my training suffered, and I had raced only once more, in the French end-of-season classic Paris–Tours. When I woke on the morning of the race, I was so terrified of getting humiliated in my first outing in the rainbow jersey that it took a stern talking-to from Rod to make me go ahead and race. I managed not to disgrace myself but was never really in with a shout, either, ending up finishing 42nd.

  With that fairly anonymous performance and a round of handshakes and good-byes, my time with the team known in its final incarnation as HTC-Highroad came to an end. Perhaps neither I nor my teammates appreciated the poignancy of the moment at the time, but we all began to realize later what a remarkable, unique team it had been and what a tragedy its demise was. Over four seasons, the men’s and women’s teams had amassed a staggering 509 wins, 50 of which had come in stages of major tours. This made us not only by far the most prolific team of our era but also one of the greatest of all time.

  What made it even more remarkable was that when Bob Stapleton took over what was then the T-Mobile team from the previous free-spending (and, as has subsequently been proven, ethically dubious) regime, he was suddenly working with a heavily reduced budget. This resulted in across-the-board pay cuts and some controversial redundancies among the riders. Despite operating on limited means, he, as Brian Holm put it, “whipped our arses” and instilled a winning mentality and team spirit that became infectious. At the start of every season, Brian told himself there was simply no way we could sustain the same level of success, the same fairy tale, and yet every year we somehow managed to punch way, way above our weight.

  I wondered, though, whether this same pattern of overachievement wasn’t eventually our undoing: B
ob seemed to assume that we would maintain the same standards on our frugal salaries and that sponsors would come running to buy into such an uncommon, inspirational underdog story. As I told a journalist in an interview in 2010, “Bob thinks it’s Hollywood and he’s Steven Spielberg.”

  What I saw as his misjudgment and ingratitude—or certainly his failure to understand how uniquely efficient the team had been—had of course soured our relationship in 2010 and 2011.

  The lack of a satisfactory pay raise or new contract for me were symptomatic of the same thing: him thinking that we’d happily all carry on getting our arses whipped, with no credible promise of a change or reward at the end of it all.

  I realize now that I was unfair in my assessment of Bob. He wasn’t intentionally depriving me or anyone else of the money we deserved; he simply didn’t have it. The signs of our poverty were everywhere you looked, from the fact that our bus was just about the only one without a shower to the team failing to pick up the Swiss franc fine that I had incurred for my V-sign at the 2010 Tour of Romandie, as they had promised.

  Scandalized by the doping controversies that had rocked the team in 2006 and 2007, T-Mobile had effectively paid to have its contract with the team rescinded and its name disassociated from us; that money ended up accounting for a large wedge of our budget for the next four seasons. Columbia and then HTC had both chipped in, but they had paid a little for a lot of exposure and success and therefore been spoiled. When Bob later went to them to talk about a contract renewal and upping their investment, I can imagine that they balked. Why would they pay full price for what we’d previously given them at a huge discount?

  The other recurring problem with cycling sponsorship was that it was too effective for brand awareness. The exposure was so fantastic that companies often felt that they had already derived more-than-adequate benefits after only one or two seasons and therefore didn’t need to stick around for the long haul. For this reason and others, the business of cycling sponsorship didn’t follow the same basic logic or patterns as most others, and I wondered if that was something Bob may not have fully grasped. It occurred to me that with the HTC deal running down and the company’s interest in renewing dead, Bob was perhaps approaching big corporations without considering the single most important factor that seemed to predispose companies to sponsor cycling teams: a love of the sport, usually the CEO’s or a marketing director’s, which meant that sponsorship wasn’t only a strategic initiative but also something that they did for fun, a flight of fancy that they could also justify on business grounds. Perhaps I’m presuming too much when I say that maybe Bob wanted to sign the deal, take the money, and go off and run a brilliant team, when a lot of sponsors wanted more engagement and influence than that. Or maybe Bob was just unlucky.

  In my final analysis, I’d stand by what I thought at the time: Everyone at HTC was overdelivering in their jobs, except the people or person whose responsibility it was to find backing for the most successful, cosmopolitan, and attractive team in the sport. That person—although it pains me to admit it—was Bob.

  On the other hand, I would also admit that I regret the lack of empathy I showed for Bob, and my lack of appreciation. What Bob accomplished by taking an underperforming team riddled with systematic cheating and turning it into the best organization in the sport—and also one of the first to truly combat doping from the inside—makes him worthy of a place among the best managers that professional cycling can ever have seen.

  on October 11, two days after Paris–Tours, the worst-kept secret in professional cycling ceased to be. After months of speculation and weeks of serious negotiations, it was announced that I had signed a three-year deal with Team Sky.

  The deal might have seemed inevitable, but what I hadn’t been prepared for, as the lawyers on both sides hammered out the small print, was the collateral effect on friends and current teammates. I had told Mark Renshaw to wait for me to sign with Team Sky before considering any of the other lucrative offers that he’d had, and I had even said that I would cover lost earnings out of my own pocket if the Team Sky deal didn’t come off. As the days had passed, though, Mark had started to get edgy and couldn’t perceive any real desire on Team Sky’s part to sign him. Meanwhile, on the back of the success that he’d tasted at the Tour of Qatar in February, the Dutch Rabobank team was trying to tempt him with a big salary and the chance to try his hand at being its front-line sprinter rather than a lead-out man. Mark had finally called me to say that he was going with Rabobank, and I’d said that I understood why he made that choice, while deep down thinking that he could have been more loyal and held off for a bit longer.

  Brian Holm had been in a similar position. He had my solemn word that I’d find a way in for him at Team Sky, but, like Renshaw, he wasn’t detecting any real will from Team Sky to take him on. Brian also had other options, the best of which seemed to be the Belgian team Omega Pharma–Quick-Step. They were a notoriously old-school outfit, unglamorous and proud, which appealed to the wannabe old rocker in Brian, a man who held Thin Lizzy and Roger De Vlaeminck in equally high esteem. I still didn’t think he’d accept the offer, and so I was shocked to receive a text from Brian one day in early August announcing that he’d said yes. I texted back, “You’re fucking kidding me.” But, alas, he wasn’t.

  There was more to my decision to join Team Sky than just the fact that it was a British team that met my asking price and employed riders and staff whom I had known for years. In signing for Team Sky, I was also buying into a vision for cycling in the UK that I shared. BSkyB, the team owner, wanted to grow the sport on all levels, and its investment reflected that, spanning the track, the road, and recreational riding. While money does matter, it has also always been imperative to me to believe in and like any company with which I associate myself. That’s been the case with Nike, which has sponsored me since the start of my career, and with Oakley; it also applied to Team Sky, now that I was aligning myself with its brand. When I turned pro, I made a vow to myself never to bow to PR bullshit, to never be untrue to myself, and I’m proud to say that I’ve never really deviated from that principle—often with some fairly incendiary results.

  Having spent essentially my entire career in the same team up to that point, I couldn’t have been more excited about the change of scenery. Team Sky represented the best of both worlds—the familiarity of many of the riders and staff, and the novelty of a new environment. After the austerity of HTC, I was looking forward to new and well-funded ways of working. Our first get-together was a two-day meeting in Milan at the end of October to discuss the season just passed and plan for the next one. My expectations were high, but this surpassed them. Dave Brailsford made a speech that captivated everyone, about what the team had already achieved and what our targets for 2012 would be. The attention to detail—from the meals we ate to our clothing fittings for the coming year—was a notch above even what I’d seen at HTC, where we’d always been ahead of the curve.

  Team Sky had gained a reputation for professionalism at the expense of enjoyment, but that weekend in Milan suggested that there could be hard play as well as hard work. On the first night, after a formal dinner with team sponsors, we all headed out en masse for a few drinks and ended up in the Just Cavalli nightclub, most of us a little worse for wear. Team-building exercises have become fashionable in cycling in recent years, from survival camps in the forests of Scandinavia to go-karting, but to my mind there aren’t many things better for creating camaraderie than a few drinks, a boogie, and a taxi home in the small hours.

  Before the year was out there was time for two more bits of good news. The first one, in truth, I’d known about for a few weeks, but could only now reveal: Peta and I were expecting our first child together. She—because I was already sure that it was a girl—had been conceived during the Tour de France and was due in mid-April, in the week of Milan–San Remo.

  If the green jersey, the world championship, and Peta’s pregnancy hadn’t already made 2011 special
enough, more was to follow. A fortnight before Christmas, I was voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. As much as recognition of my achievement, it was an eloquent statement about how far the sport had come in the UK, bearing in mind that, four years earlier, four Tour stage victories hadn’t even earned me a nomination. It felt like a culmination but also the start of something even bigger; the plans Team Sky had outlined in Milan went beyond the goal of winning the Tour de France with a clean British rider by 2014, and beyond almost anything ever achieved by a professional cycling team. I was looking forward to going for the yellow jersey, the green jersey, and world domination. “Believe in better” was the BSkyB corporate slogan. I believed that we could be better than anyone imagined.

  the almost robotic professionalism that I’d seen only in fleeting glimpses in Milan was more evident at Team Sky’s training camps that winter—not that I was complaining. At HTC, the first of our two training camps per winter, in particular, had served mainly just to get us back on our bikes and clocking up some kilometers. At Team Sky there were drills and specific exercises every day. I’d trained well all winter, partly because I only needed to glance down at the rainbow stripes across my chest to feel an extra kick of motivation, but also because I thrived on the more regimented style of the Team Sky camps.

  This single-minded focus on performance was hard to argue with, since the results were there for rival teams to see and envy, even if they were unable to muster the discipline to emulate them. At the same time, such a Spartan existence took some getting used to, having come from a much more relaxed, convivial ambience at HTC. When training was over every day, there was very little socializing and hardly anyone venturing outside the confines of their room; just about the only extracurricular activity to look forward to was the odd game of pool. Light relief at Team Sky came in brief snatches—Brad’s impersonations, or Jez Hunt walking out of one massage, straight across the corridor and into another one, lying to the second masseur that he still hadn’t been seen.