Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  Tour stage winner or just journeyman pro scraping by on the International Cycling Union's minimum wage of €30,000 a year? Take your pick ... because plenty of people who knew exactly what it took seemed pretty sure that professional cycling was no place for a pudgy kid from the Isle of Man with fast legs but an even faster mouth.

  I'M NOT naive or pigheaded enough to suggest that if, at times, I have sensed a disproportionate scepticism about my ability as a cyclist, it's been due to any personal malice or prejudice. On the contrary, with a few exceptions, the individuals who have questioned me over the years haven't so much misunderstood my capacities as, to my mind, they've misunderstood cycle racing.

  My problem is maybe that I just don't look like a cyclist. Pro bike riders come in a range of well-chiselled sizes but my short, stubby legs and long body are at least unusual and maybe unique in the pro peloton. More to the point, I don't look like a bike rider in front of what some coaches regard as the one mirror that never lies – the one which is kept in the gym or the physiology lab, with two pedals, a saddle, wheels that move without travelling and a digital display programmed – it seems to me – to communicate to the world exactly how mother nature was on an off day when she made me.

  All cyclists hate stationary bikes or 'rigs', mainly because they're synonymous with leg-butchering, lung-perforating fitness tests, but no one hates them more than I do. At the Academy I'd almost literally kick and scream even before I was put through one of these ordeals, to the point where eventually the coaches decided it was too much melodrama to bear and agreed to let me opt out. All the feedback I've got from these tests could be condensed into a single message – and the same one you often hear directed at opposing fans at football matches: 'You're shit, and you know you are ...' Hearing this once might fire me up; hearing it time and time again was guaranteed to kill any motivation I'd ever had.

  As for the real mirror, well, I didn't need that, and neither did my coaches, to confirm that my muscles didn't ripple quite as close to my skin as some of my colleagues'. While the average pro's body is generally between 4 and 10 per cent fat, mine had occasionally been close to 20, particularly prior to my 'epiphany' at the Ghent Six at the end of 2004. In the past, my weight had also fluctuated dramatically and in a manner probably most familiar to female readers, with purges when I'd aim to eat no more than 1000 calories a day alternating with times when all self-control was lost completely. Like many people, unfortunately, I use food, and especially junk food, as an antidepressant. 'Rig' tests depressed me because they told me I was useless, and feeling depressed made me hungry. The obvious and convenient conclusion to draw was that if I wanted to stay away from food I should also steer clear of anything resembling a rig.

  In a sport growing ever more obsessed with science, a kid whose performances on the road simply didn't seem to translate into watts in the lab was always likely to be confusing and sometimes infuriating. Generally, leading teams were and still are managed by old pros who knew from their own experience that cycling is much too complex to reduce to a mathematical equation, but, in recent years, ironically, cycling has seen sports scientists as the revolutionary soldiers to lead cycling out of its doping crisis. The argument goes that anyone who competed as a pro in the 1970s, '80s or '90s either doped or raced with and against doped athletes, and therefore had by definition been 'contaminated'. The theory falls down not only because such generalisations are unfair and inaccurate, but also because a lot of sports scientists live up to only about half of their job description: they know plenty about science and sod all about sport.

  Given my views on the matter, Simon Jones and I were never likely to hit it off. He'd been taken on by British Cycling in 1998, and had since graduated to the position of Head Coach, with a particular focus on the endurance disciplines on the track and especially the team pursuit. When Great Britain won one gold, a silver and a bronze in endurance events at the Athens Olympics in 2004 – and a lot was made in the press of their studious, scientific approach – Jonesy was voted British sports coach of the year.

  My contact with him was limited until my first senior track World Championship in Los Angeles 2005. Even there it was minimal, simply because, in the team pursuit, Jonesy seemed to have found the perfect focus for all his theoretical know-how and attention to detail. My event – and by extension me – were neglected at best, ignored at worst. My preparation for what turned out to be a world-championship-winning ride with Rob Hayles consisted of circling the track behind the team pursuiters, me on my upright track bike, them on their aerospace-engineered speed machines.

  One thing that Jonesy did seem fascinated by straight away was my diet. That week in LA, I spent a lot of time with the sprinters, who happened to do a lot of eating, albeit in a highly structured, scrupulous way ... most of the time. However, one day, Chris Hoy and Jamie Staff announced that they were heading out in Chris's courtesy BMW X5 on a mission to locate some Krispy Kreme donuts. They seemed to raise no objections when Ed Clancy and I bundled into the back.

  It turned into quite an adventure: a couple of wrong turnings soon took us into the ganglands of Inglewood, where there was not a Krispy Kreme in sight and Chris was too frightened to ask for directions. When, later, we finally stumbled upon the deep-fried gold at a Drive-Thru and decided it was safe to wind down the windows, I chirped from the backseat that Jamie and Chris should tell the waitress they were with Mark Cavendish and they'd probably get a free order. She had another idea: she said we could have free donuts if Jamie danced. So that's what he did.

  We got back and Jonesy went apeshit; little did he know that we'd only guzzled twelve of a possible twenty-four on the way home ... or that Jamie's tango had saved us about five dollars.

  Jonesy's nagging continued all through that week. I was only nineteen, and his lack of interest in my event probably saved me more grief. Still, though, at dinner, I could sense his eyes following me around the buffet table. 'Cav, isn't that sauce a bit creamy for you?' 'Cav, no sauce on your pasta, please ...' It was depressing. And we all knew what I did when I was depressed.

  I WAS DEPRESSED again the following winter ... only this time, for a brief period, maybe clinically so. In that spring of 2005, our second with the Academy, in the post and out of the blue, two German racing licences had arrived bearing the names 'Ed Clancy' and 'Mark Cavendish'. We'd called Rod, who'd matter-of-factly announced that he was sending us to race with the German Sparkasse team. Equally matter-of-factly, a few weeks later, we'd stuffed our worldly possessions into a pair of suitcases, pitched up in Germany, performed impressively all summer then, in autumn, headed straight for the Six-Day circuit.

  The high four-figure appearance fees I was banking on as a world Madison champion did nothing to ease the cumulative fatigue which came with these events, their five-hour racing sessions and three-in-the-morning bedtimes. Unfortunately, those fees had become a means to an end, as British Cycling had just told me and Ed that, since we were now riding in Germany with Sparkasse, they would no longer provide or pay for our accommodation. In theory, as a world Madison champion, I ought to have been on the top grade of lottery funding, i.e. £24,000 a year, but the Federation decided that was too much for a rider under the age of twenty-one and changed their own rules. They ended up giving me £12,000 – three times what I'd been earning at the Academy but now I also had to pay for my own place to live.

  Ed and I moved in with the Scottish sprinter Craig McClean in the Cheadle area of Manchester. Craig was great, the flat was great ... but unfortunately Ed's new girlfriend, an American who also happened to be Matt Brammeier's cousin, drove me insane. She was bossy, really bossy. As the weeks went by that autumn, the exhaustion of continual trips to Europe for the Six Days were grinding down my patience, and every time I came back to the flat Ed's girlfriend had her feet a little bit further under the table.

  In the end, in desperation, I turned to ... Walker's crisps.

  I'm not sure if the Federation knew about my dietary habit
s that winter. Or that my training regime consisted almost entirely of 'intervals' – repeat journeys to the shops in Cheadle to buy large bags of Walker's Sensations. I was addicted. So addicted that I ate nothing else. For a few weeks, my days all looked the same; to be precise, they looked like the view from Craig's sofa with the curtains drawn, my mind a fog, and a bag of Sensations tantalisingly open somewhere between me and the TV screen.

  It sounds funny now, but it wasn't at the time. My fitness or mental health had barely improved that Christmas when I went home to the Isle of Man. One thing that was usually guaranteed to boost my mood, besides junk food, was a ride with the usual gang on the Island – the Kennaugh brothers, Peter and Timmy, Johnny Bellis and anyone else who wanted to tag along. One day between Christmas and New Year, we all headed out for what would probably be the last session of 2005.

  Little did I know that all of the problems of the previous couple of months – or indeed any problem, in any month – were about to fade into the cruellest perspective.

  It was a normal day, normal ride out to the café in St Johns, and my normal reaction to sprint into the slipstream of a caravan that overtook us on the route home. Peter Kennaugh darted after me. The first sign that something was amiss came a kilometre or so up the road, when we saw what looked like a giant lorry wheel rolling down the hill and we both needed all the reflexes we'd learned on the track to miss it.

  Instinctively, we turned around to warn the others. It was too late. All we were able to do was watch the loose wheel ploughing right into the middle and taking out smallest rider, a thirteen-year-old called James Berry.

  We panicked. At twenty years old, I was the oldest one in the group, so it was natural for everyone to look to me to take charge, but I was in shock. James's bike was in pieces on the road, so was his helmet, and his eyes were flickering. 'James, James, wake up ...!' I cried, but there was no response. 'James. James ...' but still nothing. Within a minute or two, someone had produced a mobile phone and we'd called James's dad and an ambulance. After a few more minutes the ambulance had arrived and James's motionless body had been lifted inside on a stretcher. By this time, I'd rung Melissa to pick me up; I couldn't bring myself to get back on my bike.

  We heard nothing until the following day. We knew that James had been knocked unconscious, but no more about the precise nature of the injuries. I woke up early that morning and drove to Douglas to see the Isle of Man Racing Director, Gary Hinds at the bike shop, Bikestyle, hoping that he may have heard something, or at least know which ward James was in at the hospital. I'd parked up and was on my way in as another of the lads who'd been there the previous day was on his way out. Before I'd even had the chance to ask he said, 'Have you heard the news? James has died.'

  I called Johnny and Peter and Timmy. We were all incredulous and distraught. Really, though, at times like these words were and still are redundant. All I will say is that, in spite of grief that dwarfed anything that we might have been feeling, James's dad was fantastic. Not only did he say that we weren't to blame, he also said that James at least died doing what he'd wanted, what he loved – riding his bike. I couldn't know if that was true but I could promise that I'd win a gold medal for the Isle of Man at the 2006 Commonwealth Games the next spring and dedicate it to James.

  The following March, I was as good as my word, winning the Commonwealth Games scratch race on the Melbourne track in homage to James. Sadly, that was all I could do; nothing would bring James back, and nothing could erase his parents' grief, nor the horror of realising that it would all have been avoided if only that wheel had never come loose from that Leyland truck – the same wheel that had been refitted after a repair two days earlier.

  The manslaughter trial of the two mechanics accused of gross negligence in refitting the wheel ended in a verdict of not guilty in February 2008.

  EVERYTHING that had happened before that Christmas of 2005 had suddenly paled into insignificance, but the frustration and fatigue and binge-eating had now been replaced by deeper and more unpleasant emotions. In that frame of mind, and in the pitiful physical condition to which I was now reduced, the second-to-last thing I needed was a British Cycling training camp in Majorca. The last thing was a British Cycling training camp with Simon Jones.

  The prospect was already enough to make me rip open another bag of Walker's. Then, before the camp, I was told to come to Manchester for a meeting with Dave Brailsford and Simon Jones. Jonesy was the one who did most of the talking; in short, he said that the Federation wanted me to turn professional and they wanted me to do it with Landbouwkrediet, a lowly Belgian team with which the Federation now had a loose 'feeder' arrangement. In a sport where there were maybe two dozen good, well-funded teams that had access to the major races, it would be the equivalent of starting a football career with Burnley.

  I was aghast. I told them that, no, I had no interest in joining Landbouwkrediet; the world's number-one team, T-Mobile, had already invited me for a three-month trial to begin in August 2006 and I fully intended to score a permanent deal with them. The meeting ended with me walking out, livid. It took a conciliatory phone call from Dave B and words to the effect of, 'we admire your determination, and we still want you to ride for Great Britain', to calm me down.

  For a number of reasons, that camp in Majorca merely exemplified my problem with Jonesy. He wasn't a bike rider and that was reflected in everything he did – right down to the itineraries he'd choose for our training sessions. Training camps are tedious enough as it is, but one of the things that can alleviate the monotony is a nice, varied route in an attractive location, which Majorca definitely is. Jonesy, though, would have told you we weren't there for a pleasure ride; it therefore didn't matter that every day we'd go out in one direction, usually over Puig Major to Soler, then back on exactly the same road.

  It was obvious to everyone except Jonesy that I needed base fitness and not the kind of high-end, hype-regimented team time-trial drills that the pursuit lads were doing up and down the seafront. 'Cav,' he'd say repeatedly, 'you're not hitting the numbers. You need to hit the numbers' – meaning watts of power output or some other trivial statistic. And every time, I'd counter with, 'Simon, I don't need numbers. I just need to ride my bike and lose some weight.'

  I was like a bug in his computer which ruined all his sums. I had two things that he couldn't plot on a graph: passion and an ability to suffer. To me there was no limit. There was no universal rule of cycling except that the bloke who rode fastest won the race.

  Our clash of ideas was always likely to come to a head on that trip. Sure enough, that's exactly what happened at the end of one of the hardest rides of the camp, seven hours over Puig Major and back, with the others stopping at the top of the climbs to wait for me.

  All day I'd been yo-yoing off the back, then finally I felt the string snapping on the way home. The pursuiters were all in good form, especially Steve Cummings, and I couldn't hold the wheels. I had lost contact, when, above my own puffing and wheezing, I heard the sound of a car engine and I tilted my head to see Jonesy leaning out of the car window.

  I'll never forget what he said to me next.

  'That'll teach you, eating all those chocolate bars at Christmas ...'

  And then he drove off.

  I burst into tears. I'd been trying so hard all day. The lads asked me what was wrong, and I told them, at which point even some of them turned on Jonesy. As for me, well that was the moment when I stopped simply disliking him and started detesting him.

  I just about pulled myself together enough to make it back to the hotel. I then called Rod and told him what had happened. I begged him to work with me again: if I needed to, I'd even go back on the Academy programme – I just had to get as far away as possible from Jonesy. Rod said he'd call Simon.

  An hour or two later, I was in the bathroom, shaving, still enraged, when, in the mirror, I saw the door behind me open. It was Jonesy. I kicked the door in his face and it slammed shut. It swung open again and h
e started talking.

  'Cav, it's not easy for me either. I miss my wife and kids as well.'

  'Well, don't get so perverted with this training then. I miss my girlfriend as well, but at least no one's being a prick to you.'