Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  As I'd ridden to the start that morning, and on-and-off as I fought to hold those wheels in the gruppetto, there'd also been another thought nagging at my subconscious: I'd won a stage of the Tour de France and the most precious person in my life hadn't been there to see or share it.

  'I REALLY miss Melissa. Really miss her. Really, really miss her.'

  It was January 2006, Majorca. As Simon Jones turned around and walked out of the door, a thought entered my head that wouldn't leave. Soon it wasn't just a thought but a certainty. It was the surest thing that had ever crossed my mind.

  A few weeks earlier, I'd announced to Melissa's parents and my own that, as long as they didn't have any objections, I intended to propose to Melissa – without having any specific timescale in my head for when the action might follow intention. It could be a month, it could be a year. Now, though, more than a certainty, that thought had become an imperative: I really missed Melissa and I wanted to marry her.

  Suddenly, the previous few hours, the agony of the day's seven-hour session, Jonesy's comment 'That'll teach you for eating those chocolate bars at Christmas', were forgotten. I was going to propose to Melissa, and I knew exactly how and when I was going to do it.

  I reached for my mobile phone to contact Ben Swift, a lad from Sheffield who was in the intake at the British Federation Academy after mine. He picked up straight away.

  'Swifty, I'm going to propose to Melissa. I'm going to take her to the place where we met and ask her to marry me. But I need you to do me a favour: I come home to Manchester Friday night, and I've got to stay in Manchester before I fly home to the Isle of Man on Saturday morning. I get back at about eight o'clock, so will you pick me up and take me to the Trafford Centre, because I've got to buy her a ring?'

  Swifty said that was all fine. 'Awesome,' I said. 'See you Friday.'

  Nothing could go wrong. I had everything planned, I knew what I was going to say and where I was going to do it, and how Melissa would react. It was all going to be perfect.

  Friday finally came. I was nervous but excited. The plane was on time, and even the wait at baggage reclaim was shorter and less of a cattle-run than usual. I gathered my stuff and headed for Arrivals, impatient to see Swifty and crack on with the plan.

  The doors slid open. I scanned the faces in the crowd. 'Where's Swi–Oh my life!' Melissa. Right there. And suddenly, I'm standing there trying desperately to stop a look of horror spreading across my face. Trying and not succeeding.

  'Er, hiya, princess, what are you doing here?'

  She could see straight away there was something wrong, but she'd barely had time to open her mouth before I'd dropped the bags. 'Wait here for a second.'

  'Marky, what's wro—'

  I sprinted outside to find Swifty. Luckily I found him. 'Swifty, mate, you've got to go. She's only bloody here!'

  I was panicking. Instead of just forgetting the whole thing, or at least not dwelling on it, I ran back inside and acted as shifty as a shoplifter. Melissa's anything but stupid and her mind was starting to race.

  'Marky, what's wrong? What were you doing?'

  'Never mind. It's nothing. How come you're here?'

  'Well, I wanted to surprise you.'

  'Yeah, but you didn't need to. I was flying back to the Island tomorrow ...'

  'But you're flying to Australia for another training camp next week. I thought we could spend an extra night together. I've booked a hotel and everything. I wanted us to stay somewhere really nice, but there was a big Manchester United game tonight, and all the best hotels were gone, so I've booked a Travel Inn ... Anyway, I thought you'd be pleased.'

  And so it went for the next ten minutes, all the way through the airport, in the taxi rank then finally in the taxi. She was getting more and more confused and suspicious, and I was starting to get angry. When I snapped and told her to just 'fucking leave it', because I wasn't going to discuss it in a taxi, she pulled out her phone and dialled my mum's number. 'Adele, he's not even pleased to see me. He's acting weird ...'

  All hell had broken loose.

  We finally reached the hotel, paid the driver and walked through reception to the check-in desk. Now we weren't talking. As I struggled through the lobby with my bike-bag, Melissa snatched the key. By the time I'd squeezed inside the door, tears were streaming down my face.

  I didn't have a ring, we were in Manchester and not Douglas on the Island ... it was all wrecked. Ruined.

  She gave me one last chance.

  'Go on then. So what is it?'

  It was time to cut my losses. I got down on one knee, tears still streaming down my face.

  'Well, it's not how it was supposed to be, but will you marry me?'

  'What?'

  'That's it. That was it. I was going to propose to you ...'

  The only thing that went according to plan was her answer. She said 'Yes.'

  HOW OFTEN do people on television talk about sports stars as 'special talents', 'champions', 'geniuses' or 'freaks of nature'? Pretty often, right? Okay, now tell me how often have you heard a commentator or journalist admit what everyone probably already knows, that as well as being supernaturally talented and determined or a bit of both, most top athletes are also incredibly selfish?

  I mean what I say: athletes are very selfish. I'm also not lying when I say that the real champion, the real special talent in our relationship is the girl who's supernaturally selfless – the girl who's sacrificed whatever it took, whatever I needed to realise my dream. The real star of this story is Melissa.

  Four years on from my proposal gone-wrong-gone-right, we still joke that, knowing us and our relationship, it really couldn't have happened any other way. We've both lost count of the number of times I've missed flights. Or the number of times we've missed each other's birthdays. When I was winning my first Tour stage, she was stuck in an airport bar with a mate, in France but a hundred kilometres away from the race, which just confirms that if we were Romeo and Juliet, I'd probably have turned up under the wrong balcony.

  Our relationship's maybe not always been traditionally romantic but right from when we met that night in the Villa Marina in Douglas we've been the best of friends, and occasionally argued like the best of friends. Right from the start, her family was brilliant with me. Within weeks I was round at their house more than my own. Melissa's parents own a microbrewery in Laxey and her dad even sponsored me when I was a junior, or at least I'd do some work for him and he'd overpay me. With my mum and dad and Melissa's, it really is like having four parents and not two.

  'Sacrifice' is a word you hear a lot in cycling – sacrifices in terms of diet, time for training, not going out – but, over the years, she's made at least as many sacrifices as me. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why it's worked so well. I'd always warned her that, if I got as far as I intended in the sport, I'd be away a lot, but how do you prepare a girl for being without the guy who claims he's the love of her life for 200 or 250 days a year, year after year?

  Right from my junior days or my time with the Academy, she'd get upset when I had to leave. I'd always tell her, 'Look, I promise you that it'll pay off in the end. I'm going to earn plenty of money. I promise you I'll give you a good life.' Coming from a little scally who was earning three grand a year at the Academy at the time, this probably sounded about as convincing as Del Boy's 'This time next year, Rodders, we'll be millionaires.' But she didn't care either way. She'd tell me she wasn't bothered about money or material things. She just wanted to be with me.

  Those years at the Academy ought to have been relatively easy on the relationship, since we were spending a lot of our time in Manchester, not all that far from home. But the reality was often pretty testing. In theory, the off-season ought to have been completely dedicated to Melissa – the deserved reward for all her patience and support throughout the year. But at the end of the 2004 road season, the first with the Academy, instead us of going on our first holiday since we went to India together with Melissa's parents wh
en I was sixteen, I spent the autumn traipsing round the Under 23 Six-Day circuit. It was Melissa who lost out.

  Melissa's just as competitive as me and, fortunately, she's also just as much of a perfectionist. Her first job was with Isle of Man Newspapers, but she'd always wanted to work in cabin crew, and of course she got taken on her first application. The airline was Euromanx. Within a few months of joining, she was senior cabin crew, and pretty soon after that she was a line manager and being prepped for senior management.

  That airline was great to me. When I was world Madison champion in 2005, the owner of the company wanted to know whether they could sponsor me. I said that the only help I needed was with getting off the Island. After that, when we used to go away, ironically, I would get free flights and Melissa would have to pay for her tickets, albeit at a special rate.

  Has it all been worthwhile? You'd have to ask her that. She's always wanted to be independent, including financially, but at the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008, she was working such long hours that we were barely seeing each other. It was the off-season, so theoretically the only time of the year when we'd share a lot of quality time, yet we were barely at home together any more than in the middle of the racing season. I could also see how tired and stressed she was getting and it was breaking my heart. Eventually, I told her that if she carried on working, we'd be in danger of splitting up. She reluctantly agreed. It was a bittersweet coincidence when, within weeks of her leaving, Euromanx went bust and her old job disappeared.

  Since the spring, before the 2008 Tour, she'd immersed herself in a new occupation: doing up the farmhouse we'd dismissed as an impossible dream when I first saw it on the Internet at the start of 2007. I'd just turned pro at that point and, the ink still wet on my €40,000-a-year contract, I assumed that we could buy a house. Fat chance; I went online, saw a beautiful, old stone farmhouse on a hill high above Laxey, looking out over the Irish channel and towards the Cumbrian Fells ... then saw the price. So much for that idea.

  I never imagined I'd win eleven races in my first pro season, never imagined my contract would be torn up midway through that season and replaced with something considerably more lucrative. I certainly never thought that, in December 2007, the house in Laxey would still be on the market. And I never thought that Melissa and I would be moving in the following April. Soon after we moved in I left Melissa and an empty, undecorated house and set off for the Giro d'Italia; I came back three and a half weeks later, a double stage-winner, to the house and the girl of my dreams.

  She was my tenth teammate, and I was gutted she hadn't been there to celebrate a victory to which she'd made a huge contribution.

  Stage 6: Aigurande–Super Besse, 195.5 km

  * * *

  1. Riccardo Riccò (Ita) Saunier Duval – Scott 4.57.52 (39.38 km/h)

  168. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 17.46

  General classification

  * * *

  1. Kim Kirchen (Lux) Team Columbia 24.30.41

  141. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 23.28

  My fondness for junk-food isn't a new phenomenon, as you can see from this picture, taken outside my Auntie Ruth's house.

  Maybe it's pictures like this that my critics are referring to when they say I've always been a bigheaded little so and so. Clearly, for mum, I was already quite a handful.

  One of my first wins – at the Ballacloan infant school sports day. Aptly, as it would be for my first triumphs as a cyclist, the Isle of Man National Sports Centre in Douglas provides the backdrop.

  My younger brother, Andy, and I, outside our old house in Douglas. Our first real cycling jerseys were the same as the one Lance Armstrong wore at the start of his pro career.

  Starstruck, posing with Dave Millar during Cycling Week in 1999.

  Winning my first British national road race title as an Under 14 in Hillingdon in 1999. Second across the line, in the blue shorts, is Matt Brammeier, my friend and future partner in crime at the Academy.

  Sporting my brand new national champion's jersey on the podium in Hillingdon in 1999. On my left, Matt Brammeier doesn't appear too upset at finishing second.

  The mean machine: by 2005 the motley crew of scallies and chancers who'd assembled when the British cycling academy was launched in 2004 had developed into a formidable unit. From front to back, here we see me, Geraint Thomas, Ed Clancy, Matt Brammeier and, hidden from view, Tom White in training mode.

  The Beach Boys...but not as you know them. This pic was taken on Bondi Beach during a training camp with Rod in the winter of 2004-2005. From left to right, we see Matt Brammeier, Tom White, me, Geraint Thomas, Matt Crampton and Ed Clancy.

  Ever since I joined the British Cycling Academy in January 2004, when Rod Ellingworth has talked, I've listened. Here's Rod, setting the agenda for a training session with the Academy in 2005.

  Here I am attacking in vain, en route to fourteenth place in the points race at the 2004 British National Track Championships. Two days later, despite my oft-stressed dislike for the team pursuit, I'd be one of the gold-medal winning quartet in that event.

  Max Sciandri and I got off on the wrong foot in 2006, when Max was none-too-impressed with my approach to racing and training. These days we're good mates, not to mention neighbours when I stay and train in Quarrata, Italy.

  British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford (left) and head coach Simon Jones pictured at the Athens Olympics in 2004. The track team's exploits in those Athens games would win Jonesy the "British Sports Coach of the Year" accolade. I neither rated nor liked him.

  With my best friend, inspiration, and soon-to-be wife Melissa. We met in 2001, the year of my GCSEs, and have been inseparable ever since.

  From left to right, Frantisek Rabon, Adam Hansen, André Greipel, Linus Gerdemann, Gerald Ciolek, a slightly portly-looking me and Marcus Burghardt at the T-Mobile team presentation in Majorca in January 2007. Under a month ahead of my professional debut, and with the none-too-flattering comments of my team's coach Sebastian Weber ringing in my ears, I don't exactly look brimful of confidence.

  A magic moment: my first pro win at the Grote Scheldeprijs in Belgium in April 2007, nicked on the line from sprint legend Robbie McEwen.

  A rare pic of me in the colours of the Isle Of Man, before the road race at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. A winner of the scratch race in the track a week earlier, I felt that I could and should have won a medal in the road race, but only managed to finish seventh.

  Clearly over the moon, on the podium with Brad Wiggins after winning the world Madison title in Manchester in 2008. Germany and Denmark completed the top three.

  Brad Wiggins and I were inseparable and perfectly in sync at the track world championships in Manchester in March 2008.

  A skilled lip-reader would have worked out that there was something amiss very early in the Madison in Beijing. Watching from the stands, Tony Blair could hear most of what I was saying...and will probably wish that he hadn't.

  Looking lost, confused and quietly horrified on the Laoshan velodrome after the Madison at the Beijing Olympics. I wouldn't so much as speak to my partner Bradley Wiggins for the next two months.

  Incensed after my disqualification for holding onto team cars in Santa Clarita at the 2008 Tour of California. My directeur sportif Brian Holm (far left) and our team doctor Helge Riepenhof (left) watch my histrionics.

  My first win in a major tour, in Catanzaro, on stage 4 of the 2008 Giro d'Italia. Daniele Bennati, in the plum-coloured jersey, is among the best and most magnanimous of my sprint rivals.

  This exhibition of teamwork and solidarity in stage 17 of the 2008 Giro d'Italia was but a photogenic façade in my long-running power struggle with André Greipel. Happily, it was also the beginning of the end of hostilities between us.