At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane

by Cavendish Mark

  “Ma che cazzo fai?”

  My Italian may not be brilliant, but I knew what that meant.

  “What the fuck?”

  “It’s a puzzle book,” I said. “Logic puzzles. It’s training for the mind. For decision making. Helps me in sprints.”

  Matteo was bewildered at first, then curious; before long, he too was hooked. Soon there wouldn’t be a copy of GQ in sight.

  For me, Omega Pharma–Quick-Step had been a natural choice as soon as I knew I could leave Team Sky. The Belgian team’s manager, Patrick Lefevere, had declared and repeatedly reaffirmed his interest in signing me during my time at HTC, much to Bob Stapleton’s annoyance. So when he knew that I’d be on the market at the end of the 2012 season, he quickly made an offer. Other teams proposed bigger salaries, but there were several reasons, besides Patrick’s long-standing admiration, that swung the balance in his favor. One was the chance to link back up with Brian Holm and Rolf Aldag, who had both joined Omega Pharma–Quick-Step after the collapse of HTC. Another was my relationship with Specialized—the bikes and the company—which had supplied us at HTC and would again here. Finally, I was attracted to the history of Patrick’s team, which had existed in various forms with various names since the 1990s and which had traditionally thrived in the races that I’d dreamt about as a kid—Paris–Roubaix, the Tour of Flanders. Races for real men, real bike riders.

  For every incentive to choose Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, there were also regrets about leaving Team Sky. The main one, clearly, was that the starry-eyed hopes and expectations that I’d had a year earlier hadn’t been fulfilled, while other regrets concerned what and, perhaps more to the point, whom I was leaving behind. I had been desperate for Bernie Eisel to come with me to Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, but Bernie had also signed a three-year contract with Sky at the end of 2011, and he, unlike me, was happy enough to stay. Having said good-bye to Mark Renshaw the previous year, I’d now lost my two most important and trusted teammates within the space of 12 months.

  There were at least some familiar faces, old friends at my new home. As well as Brian and Rolf, there were also former HTC riders Tony Martin, Bert Grabsch, the Velits twins, and František Raboň. My first impression of the other guys in Slovakia was also unreservedly positive. It had been billed by the management as a team-building exercise, taking the form of a military-style survival camp a bit like the ones that Bjarne Riis had introduced, amid much fanfare, at CSC a decade ago. Riis’s were notoriously brutal, sleepless two-and three-day ordeals in the Scandinavian wilderness; they were all about pushing the limits of endurance and fostering team spirit, or, as cynics said, being seen to by the press.

  Our camp in Slovakia was somewhat tamer but no doubt considerably more enjoyable at the same time. A similar comparison could be made a month later between our first real bike-riding training camp of the winter and the one I had attended a year earlier with Sky—though here the contrast resided more in the atmosphere than the difficulty level. The format with Omega Pharma–Quick-Step was much more like it had been at HTC or, before that, T-Mobile: Sebastian Weber had tried to tailor highly specific training programs and drills in my first training camps there in 2006 and 2007, and most of us had ignored him.

  Here, at the first camp in Majorca before Christmas and the second one on the Costa Blanca in January, we pretty much just rode our bikes. The team physiologist, a young Belgian named Koen Pelgrim, told me one day that I was on the list to do a rig test in the lab, to which I replied that there was absolutely no point: I’d be shit because I always was in these things and the tests said absolutely nothing about my ability to win races. At first he tried to insist and said that he understood but that it was his job.

  Eventually he gave up. This more or less summed up the low-stress, commonsense approach to most things in the team. What we lost in science and po-faced seriousness, we made up for by being relaxed and having fun both on our bikes and at the hotel in the evening. Peta said that it was the happiest that I’d ever sounded when I’d called her from a camp.

  I got the sense that a few people, riders and staff, had been apprehensive about me joining the team, because of my reputation for being hot-headed or demanding. Over the next few weeks and months, many would tell me that I’d surprised them. Yes, I could be short-tempered if people didn’t live up to the standards that I expected, but if they did, I went out of my way to express my gratitude. I was also never awkward for the sake of being awkward, unlike other riders who had been my teammates in the past.

  It was about being professional and a perfectionist. So when, at my first race of the year—the Tour de San Luis in Argentina—I complained about my brakes feeling spongy, that wasn’t just me being a diva, something I would prove by working every bit as hard as the mechanics to find the cause of the problem and solve it. In this case, having completely stripped the brake unit down and changed the cables, we were still scratching our heads, until finally we realized that the problem was something most people wouldn’t even have noticed: a tiny piece of plastic threading the brake-cable into my frame. We solved it by gluing the piece of plastic to the frame, before making a short home video to send to Specialized to show them what we’d done. I gave my equipment suppliers this kind of feedback on a regular basis. With time, the smart ones had realized that I was providing information that could and often did help them improve their product, not just kicking up a fuss.

  I had added the Tour de San Luis to my program at the end of January as a spur to keep my training up and my weight down over Christmas and the New Year, and I arrived in Argentina in good form. Leaving Sky meant that, for the first time since my junior days, I wouldn’t be coached by Rod, and was instead going to try a DIY approach using my own knowledge, intuition, and some of the training programs that Rod and Tim Kerrison had given me the previous year. It was very early days, but it seemed to be working: I won the first stage in Argentina, the first time in my career that I had won my first race of the season, then I was part of a team that blew the opposition away at the Tour of Qatar. I won four stages and the general classification. Friends and family said that I was unrecognizable from the person and rider that I’d been at Sky a year earlier.

  After a period of good, old-school training on the Isle of Man, then another productive week at Tirreno–Adriatico, where I reinvented myself as a mountain domestique for my teammate Michał Kwiatkowski, I arrived at Milan–San Remo confident but cagey. I’d said in the press that, my 2009 win notwithstanding, it was a race that I would always have a chance of winning, but only in particular circumstances that were beyond my control. In the build-up to the 2009 race, I’d more or less written myself off, and journalists had taken every bluffed word at face value; but in the four years since then, I’d learned the hard way that Milan–San Remo really was a cruel mistress.

  When I said now that I didn’t consider myself a favorite, I really was telling the truth. I did at least have the considerable advantage that day of excellent form and my team’s multipronged attack. The plan was nothing revolutionary in tactical terms, but it had the potential to lure rival teams into a fatal trap. Sylvain Chavanel, our ace baroudeur, or breakaway specialist, would try to pull away in a group on the penultimate climb, La Cipressa, whereupon we in the main group would stop working on the pretext that we had Chava down the road. Chava, meanwhile, would also sit on the break, collaborate only half-heartedly if at all, his excuse being that I was back in the peloton and that we wanted a sprint finish.

  In either eventuality—whether the break stayed away or was absorbed by the bunch—we would all have saved energy and given ourselves a clear edge.

  What no one had banked on, not even having seen the forecast, was weather conditions that would have made an Eskimo think twice about venturing outdoors. What began as cold drizzle in Milan turned to sleet as we left town, and then a blizzard as we neared the coast. The first and highest climb on the route, the Passo del Turchino, was completely snowbound and therefore impassable
. Unable to find a suitable deviation, the organizers announced—and our directeurs informed us over the radio—that the race would be suspended at the 117-km mark and restarted 42 km up the road, the Turchino and Le Manie climbs having been removed from the route.

  The last half hour or so before the stoppage was more like something from Napoleon’s Moscow campaign than Milan–San Remo. No one was changing gear, it being impossible to move the chain onto cogs cloaked in a thick layer of ice. You couldn’t see through the sheath of snow that had settled on your glasses, yet you couldn’t take those glasses off, either, because when you did, your eyes would freeze over. It was absolutely brutal, some said barbaric.

  On the bus, my teammates and I howled in agony. Michał Kwiatkowski was shaking like a pneumatic drill. We drove toward the restart, and the weather improved considerably—it was now around 5 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit), and the snow had turned to rain again—but some riders either hadn’t recovered or weren’t prepared to risk the same ordeal again. Out of my team, Tom Boonen, Niki Terpstra, and Stijn Vandenbergh all announced that they were pulling out. Which was fine, if a little hard to understand for someone who had grown up on the Isle of Man with Isle of Man weather. I shrugged, slapped some embrocating oil on my calves and thighs, and went outside for the second half.

  In 2009, I’d known or could have guessed that it was my day almost as soon as I hit the Capi—the sequence of three short but steep promontories that act as the gateway to the San Remo finale. Four years on, in the same place, I had the same sensation not just of power but almost of a euphoria coursing through my leg muscles. After the Capi, Chavanel guided me expertly up the side of the peloton and onto the front at the foot of the Cipressa, where it was time to execute the plan. Chava accelerated, dragging a small group with him, while I hung back and cruised up the climb.

  Chava had gone over the top and down the other side when, from my point of view, everything started to unravel. First, my brakes wouldn’t grip on the wet, treacherous descent of the Cipressa, then I heard our directeur sportif, Wilfred Peeters, imploring Chava to go harder in the break. This would have been perfectly normal had we not agreed before the race that Chava wouldn’t work. My conclusion later was that Peeters didn’t have a lot of faith in me, which may also have explained why he didn’t put more pressure on Boonen, Vandenbergh, and Terpstra to stay in the race. I didn’t hold it against those guys, and I know that everything’s easy with hindsight, but I believe now that I could have won that day with their help, and that I’ll never have a better opportunity to repeat my 2009 triumph.

  Instead, neither Chava nor I could quite pull it off. The peloton came back together, Chava latched onto another small group that attacked over the final climb, the Poggio, while the same issues with my braking made it impossible for me to join them. Chava was always going to struggle in a sprint, especially after his earlier efforts, and could only manage fourth. My friend and former teammate Gerald Ciolek won an unexpected victory, but that brought cold—very cold—comfort.

  It would be overdramatizing things to say that my honeymoon period with the new team was over, but San Remo did mark the start of a very necessary but sometimes uncomfortable period of mutual adaptation. The problems, if you can call them that, in my opinion stemmed from a culture and cycling heritage that was also the team’s strength and one of the reasons that I had plumped for Omega Pharma–Quick-Step over other outfits. Simply put, both the Belgian riders and staff lived for, built their world around, and couldn’t see beyond the 10 weeks of racing stretching from late February to the end of April: the spring classics. Within this period was one week that they elevated to an even higher, positively astronomical plane of importance and prestige—the eight days of what they called the “Holy Week,” bookended by the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix.

  I shared the Belgian obsession with these races, even if I was unlikely to win one, but I also quickly found out that this fixation could have a damaging effect on mentalities within the team. I noticed in two Belgian stage races that I rode in March and April, the Three Days of West Flanders and the Three Days of De Panne, that the young Belgian riders seemed to focus on the classics (and Flanders and Roubaix in particular) almost to the exclusion of anything else. Either that or they suffered indirectly from the hysteria around these races in Belgium, which lasted for weeks and generated pages and pages of newsprint in dailies like Het Nieuwsblad and Het Laaste Nieuws. Any race that was seen to have any bearing on what would happen in Flanders or Roubaix would be dissected and discussed at length, meaning that any decent performance by a young Belgian rider would receive inordinate amounts of coverage.

  None of this would have bothered me if it hadn’t affected me. Those same young Belgians who fantasized day and night about Flanders and Roubaix, desperate to see their name in Het Nieuwsblad, weren’t fully committing in their roles as domestiques.

  Sometimes I was getting the impression that they would rather finish in 20th place, in the second group, than bury themselves to bring that group back to the front and therefore give me a chance in a sprint finish. Or, in the lead-out train, they would back off and refuse to take the necessary calculated risks because they were afraid of crashing and jeopardizing their classics season. They were two different types of egotism—the former more to do with naked ambition, the latter with self-preservation—and, without naming names, I’d seen a version of the former at Tirreno–Adriatico and Gent–Wevelgem, and examples of the latter at Scheldeprijs. Such a singular preoccupation with one period of the year and two races, in particular, was completely alien to me, having spent most of my career in a team where we approached every race as if it was our last.

  Matters weren’t helped by what I still perceived as Wilfred Peeters’s lack of confidence in me. He would invariably work to make a break succeed rather than try to bring it back in the expectation of me winning a bunch sprint. I made these points to Patrick Lefevere, to Brian and to other members of the management, and was told things would improve as soon as the classics were out of the way. To the Belgians, the end of April might as well have been the end of the season, but these guys had so much they could offer outside of the classics. For example, when we arrived in Naples for the Giro d’Italia start in the first week of May, Julien Vermote was a 23-year-old in his third pro season that the team didn’t seem to know what to do with. He would leave three weeks later having discovered—and shown me—that he could look after a sprinter in a stage race like few other riders in the peloton, and hence suddenly having found his identity as a rider.

  The team as a whole in Italy brought back memories of our very best groups at HTC. Brian, who claimed to hate Italy as much as he loved Great Britain but would change his mind after this, his first full Giro, was one of our directeurs; a former Italian pro named Davide Bramati, or just “Brama,” was the other. If Rolf Aldag and Brian had formerly been one of the best comedy double acts in cycling, Brian and Brama, or as Davide called himself, “cycling’s Mourinho,” ran them close. From the first day, when Brian came up to my room to tell me that Team Sky’s head of technical operations, Carsten Jeppesen, had called me “fat”—thinking that it would fire me up—the whole team just clicked. In the best, most sociable teams, riders will stay at the dinner table shooting the breeze for an hour, maybe even two after their meal. Here, not only would we do that, but we’d also then all cram into one room to continue the conversation instead of trotting off to bed.

  Camaraderie off the road translated into cohesion on it. I would win five stages—every sprint that I contested, including one that I had completely ruled out on the morning of the stage.

  That particular victory came at the end of the second week, on a beautiful but unforgiving route through the Langhe hills in Piedmont. I’d put it to Brian in the morning that the guys had ridden too hard to set up my stage win the previous day and therefore deserved a rest, and besides, there was no guarantee that I’d get over the climbs in the finale. Brian agreed, an
d off we went on what was going to be the longest stage of the Giro, at 242 km. Two hours in, the break had gone and gained 13 minutes, and we were happily cruising along in the bunch. Then Brian buzzed in on the radio.

  “Right, guys, to the front. We’re riding for a sprint today.”

  I could have throttled him, but now that he’d said it, I also couldn’t opt out. The guys duly went to the front and rode like dervishes; the gap came down, and it was left to me to apply the coup de grâce on one of the hardest, hilliest finishes that I’ve ever even attempted to win on. I finished half-dead, on my hands and knees—but victorious. When Brian tried to congratulate me later, I gave him the shoulder. I was still furious at him for what he’d made me do.

  That was my fourth stage win of the five, and my last before a final week jammed with mountains and blighted by more bad Italian weather. The sensible decision at this point might have been to pull out and rest up for the Tour, but I never really considered that option. It wasn’t only the fact that I was leading the points competition and had the chance to add the Giro’s red jersey to the green jerseys I’d won at the 2010 Vuelta a España and the 2011 Tour de France. I also couldn’t bring myself to desert a team of riders who had already sacrificed half of their race for me, in some cases compromising the personal objectives that they’d come to Italy to pursue.

  I wouldn’t deny that more of the kind of weather that we’d seen at San Remo made the last week slightly less arduous than may otherwise have been the case. Climbs were airbrushed from the route or neutralized, and one mountain stage was canceled entirely, depriving my main rivals of vital points. It still took something quite special on the last day—first place in two intermediate sprints and the stage win—to overhaul an 11-point deficit from Vincenzo Nibali and become the first Briton to win the points competition at the Giro d’Italia. I now also joined an even more elite group—riders who had completed a grand slam of points jerseys in all three major tours. Only Eddy Merckx, Laurent Jalabert, Alessandro Petacchi, and Djamolidine Abdoujaparov had previously achieved this feat. The list perhaps would have been longer, but the Giro’s excessively mountainous routes and its points scale opened the competition to a much broader range of riders than the Tour’s green jersey, in particular. That was why, in 2012, I’d been pipped by a climber, Joaquim Rodríguez, whereas here I’d edged out the overall Giro winner Nibali.