In an earlier chapter, I said I'd never had a true crisis of confidence. On reflection, now, I can see that, as I prepared to embark on my first full season as a professional cyclist, I was perhaps less sure of myself than I'd previously thought. It wasn't just Weber; Aldag had also said I was 'fat', and somewhere, deep in my memory, there was also the echo of conversations with Max Sciandri, Dave Millar and Simon Jones. Maybe they were right and I was the one who'd got it wrong. Maybe it would all be different now that I was a pro – a full-time pro, not just T-Mobile's equivalent of the office tea-boy. Maybe those races that I'd ridden as a stagiaire in late 2006 had been unusually slow. Maybe Andreas Klier and another well-travelled teammate Servais Knaven were the ones who were deluded when, one evening in Majorca, they told me their cash would be on me to bring T-Mobile its first race win of 2007.
One thing I did know as I flew out of Majorca at the end of that camp was that I wasn't going to give Sebastian Weber the satisfaction of seeing me fail. I'd go back to the Isle of Man, train harder than ever before, eat less, and show up to the GP
L'Ouverture La Marseillaise lean, serene and ready to win – immediately.
It would take me three or four months to realise it, but before my professional career had even begun, that January, I'd already made my first, very costly mistake.
Stage 7: Brioude –Aurillac, 159 km
* * *
1. Luis Leon Sanchez Gil (Spa)
Caisse d'Epargne 3.52.53 (40.964 km/h)
145. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 21.53
General classification
* * *
1. Kim Kirchen (Lux) Team Columbia 28.23.40
48. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 45.15
STAGE 8
Saturday, 12 July 2008
FIGEAC—TOULOUSE, 172.5 KM
Allan Peiper says that one incident from Stage 8 of the 2008 Tour de France summed up me and summed up my race. Allan, ironically, had been one of my biggest fans when I started my pro career with T-Mobile at the start of 2007. Why ironically? Well, Allan had left his previous employer, Lotto, the Belgian outfit, after controversial comments about the team's fondness for unwinding with a glass of wine or beer. A month or two later, at the end of 2006, one of Allan's first assignments in his new job at T-Mobile involved quizzing me about my taste for the same performance-impairing drug.
Allan, Rolf Aldag, Brian Holm – they all seemed cut from the same mould. All three had enjoyed successful if not prolific riding careers over the past two and a half decades, and all three still had the kind of athletic, sinewy physique which many current pros, me included, would need a lengthy stint on the salads to achieve.
Like Rolf and Brian, Allan was a good communicator and good directeur – friendly and fair, firm but not authoritarian. In many ways, he was a typical Aussie – fast-talking, with a brilliant turn of phrase and an up-and-at-'em approach to racing, but with his neat, silvery hair, tanned complexion and immaculately pressed shirts, he might easily have been mistaken for a French bank manager who spent summers on the Côte d'Azur.
Allan would be in charge at what was to be the first race of my first full season as a professional, the GP L'Ouverture La Marseillaise in February. Between leaving the team training camp in Majorca in January and flying to Marseille, Sebastian Weber's comments had followed me on every training ride, every visit to the dinner table. I was overweight and I wasn't pushing enough power, he'd said. I wouldn't even be able to stay with the peloton, he'd insisted. Over the next four weeks, on every six-hour ride, on every day when my calorie intake barely crept towards four figures, those words had stalked me like a dark and menacing shadow.
It's difficult now to express exactly what I was thinking and feeling at that first race, La Marseillaise. What's certain is that I missed the key break and finished anonymously in the main group. This was nothing unusual or alarming – much more important, from my point of view, was that all the training and self-denial of the previous month had clearly paid off; I had good fitness, good legs and I fully intended to demonstrate this at the Étoile de Bessèges, the four-day stage race set to begin the following day.
It was a short journey from Marseille to Pézenas, host-town to the first stage. In the morning, as at every race, amateur or professional, the team directeur held a pre-race briefing to define our tactics. Today's stage, said Allan, would probably finish in a bunch sprint and logic therefore dictated that we'd work for the team's faster finisher. The only thing that remained to establish was who that was. I looked around the team bus: Roger Hammond and Marco Pinotti – both quick but not that quick; Axel Merckx – couldn't sprint for toffee; Lorenzo Bernucci, Scott Davis, Frantisek Rabon – neither of them; the German André Greipel – a chiselled hulk of a man, was immensely powerful but not fast, not as quick as me, so no; so that left Cavendish, well yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you ...
Then Allan spoke: 'So, you got that, chaps? We're working for Greipel, all right?'
The best I could do now was deliver Greipel with such speed and precision that he couldn't lose. Of course there was a risk to this strategy; the better I set him up, the more likely Greipel was to win, therefore reinforcing his credentials as the team's senior sprinter. But I had no other option: there's only one thing a cycling team with a budget of €15 million-per year likes less than a 'fat', mouthy twenty-one-year-old and that's a fat, mouthy twenty-one-year-old who disobeys orders. As the peloton swung into the final two kilometres, and the sprinters' teams began to congregate at the front of the bunch, I was exactly where Allan and Greipel wanted me.
I slotted neatly into the conga-line now being led by the Unibet team, a handful of positions from the front. Directly behind me was the Unibet sprinter Baden Cooke. Directly behind him was Greipel. We flashed under the red flag indicating one kilometre to go, then into the final 800 metres. The Unibet rider now in first position, Jeremy Hunt, glanced back, saw me on his wheel and pulled to one side; as he did so, the wind hit me like the air from an oversized hairdryer. I kicked and kicked again, past 500, past 300, to the sign showing 200, then veered across the road, leaving Greipel a clear corridor to the line.
I turned around. No, it couldn't be, surely not: I'd dropped the bloody peloton. Trouble was, it was now too late to recover my momentum. I tried desperately to clamber on top of the pedals, but, having slowed, the gear was far too big. The Italian Angelo Furlan whistled past me within a few metres of the line to leave me in second place, cursing my own bad luck and wondering what the hell had happened to the team's so-called number-one sprinter.
Where was Greipel? My question was answered a minute or two later. I arrived at the bus, still breathless, took off my helmet and climbed off my bike. I looked around and saw Greipel arriving. He didn't look pleased. In fact, he looked enraged.
'Cavendish!' he screamed, seemingly oblivious to the small crowd of spectators, riders and managers within earshot. 'You only sprint for yourself! You're selfish!'
'What are you talking about?' I said. 'I was leading you out!'
'No, no, you only sprint for yourself. You selfish bastard!'
'I fucking led you out. Where the fuck were you?'
I dare say we'd still be swapping expletives now if Allan hadn't been there to restore some order. As it was, I was summoned to the podium to collect my and the team's consolation prize – the jersey awarded to the best young rider on general classification.
Allan waited in the car while I collected the jersey. As we drove off towards the team hotel, I made my case to Allan and broached the question of why we'd been working for Greipel in the first place. Allan mumbled something about Greipel being German, the sponsor being German – 'You know how it is Cav ...' – plus the fact that Greipel could point to several years of experience and even sporadic victories in the pro ranks. He spoke in a paternal tone: 'Look Cav, I know how fast you are but you've got to ride for Greipel here ...'
'I did fucking ride for him,' I said. 'I didn't sprint from five hundr
ed metres for myself! Anyone in that race will tell you that.'
Back at the hotel that evening, the inquest continued. My teammate Axel Merckx was one of the first people I saw. He immediately tried to put my mind at rest; Axel had spoken to Scott Davis, who in turn had spoken to his fellow Aussie Baden Cooke, the Unibet rider who'd been tracking my wheel when I accelerated with 500 metres to go. Cooke was adamant: no sprinter in his right mind would hit the gas so far out unless he was working for someone else. I then got a call from Andreas Klier – the teammate who'd made a private wager that I'd be the team's first winner of the season. I told Andreas about Greipel. He sounded sympathetic. The only thing that concerned me slightly was that there was no congratulatory text message on my phone from Rolf Aldag; Rolf always sent a congratulatory text message after a good result. Concern turned to mild alarm when fifteen minutes after I'd finished talking to Klier, he sent me a text message: 'I think it's better that you do what the directeur says.' I could only assume that Klier had spoken to Aldag.
I didn't bother relating what Baden Cooke had said to Greipel. There was no point. I could also have gloated that Allan now seemed to believe my version of events and not Andre's, but again, what would that have achieved? The best option now was for me to avoid Greipel and for Greipel to avoid me. There was just one, minor problem with that: our malfunctioning partnership would be called upon again in what looked like another sprinter-friendly stage on day two.
So, here we are – roughly the same time, the same place, same routine for the pre-stage briefing on day two. Allan speaks: 'So chaps, we're working for ... Greipel again today. You got that?'
The briefing had been more or less the same and the result was near enough identical; precisely where Greipel finished no one except him really cared – what mattered was that, despite more good work from the rest of the team, he hadn't won, hadn't even come close. This was all the more frustrating for me since, as both stages had worn on, I'd felt my legs looser, the bike become lighter and the tarmac smoother under my wheels. I was experiencing the first flickers of a magical and elusive feeling that every trained cyclist knows simply as 'form'.
Any decent doctor or old-wife will tell you: the 'in form' athlete is also an athlete who, for reasons never fully explained, is also one who's particularly vulnerable to illness and infection. Any cyclist, in turn, will tell you that there's nothing crueller than a bout of sickness to sabotage 'form', which has taken weeks and sometimes months of sacrifices to build.
On that second stage, I ended up lasting 20 kilometres before I flagged down Allan and told him that I was ill. He told me not to worry. Later on, back at the hotel that night, he even said that I could stay with the team, rest and maybe head out for the odd spin if I felt up to it. He said I had good form and it'd be a shame to waste it. As if he needed to tell me that.
The next day I managed 120 kilometres on my own. I felt sick, lethargic, empty. I flew home to the Isle of Man later that week, under orders to recover. But every time I could feel my strength, my energy, my motivation coming back, I'd take my bike from the garage, head out, then have to shamble back two or three hours later with my legs and my morale destroyed. I'd go to bed, recuperate a little, then restart the whole vicious cycle with my next training – or rather, draining – session. Days rolled into weeks and still the pattern continued. At the beginning of March, I'd hoped to be fulfilling a childhood dream by riding my first real 'Classic' – a Flandrian feast of cobbles and crosswinds ridden on an out-and-back route between the town of Kuurne and Brussels. As it turned out, the only dreams that day were the ones troubling my sleep as I lay in bed in the Isle of Man.
At first, when I'd left France, I'd assumed that I'd simply caught one of the endless bugs and flus that get passed around the peloton like a smutty joke. It had taken several recoveries and relapses and many more calls to my directeurs sportifs to convince me that something more serious might be up. Finally, I went to see my local GP on the Isle of Man. I described my symptoms, when they'd started, how I'd felt brilliant those first two days at the Étoile de Bessèges, how I'd trained so hard for that race, my diet that winter, all the weight I'd lost ... and, as I spoke, it became obvious: I'd undereaten, overtrained, overstressed and overstretched myself. The reward had been an abrupt and spectacular spike in my form and fitness then an equally steep descent into this pitiful state.
I now played the last three or four months back in my head. If only I could have relived them; given that opportunity, I would have respectfully nodded at everything Sebastian Weber had told me in Majorca, then walked away and done my own thing entirely.
SO: STAGE 8 of the 2008 Tour de France. That story – the one Allan said 'summed me up'.
The race was now at the end of its first week and rapidly making its way south. The previous evening, the Tour had its first doping scandal when the Spaniard Manuel Beltràn was kicked out for a positive test for EPO. Now, at the start village in the little town of Figeac, the general mood was like the forecast for the rest of the day: gloomy.
For three consecutive days now, there'd been lumpy terrain in the first quarter of the race – terrain that had me scrambling to stay with the peloton. The previous two stages had taken us through the Massif Central. Today it was the gentler hills of the south-east around Toulouse. To me it all meant the same thing: pain.
When the attacks started as we approached the first climb of the day after nine kilometres, I decided to adopt a novel tactic. Rather than position myself in the middle of the bunch and try desperately to hang on, I shot after one of the groups now launching themselves down the road and hoped that I'd reach the top before, or at least not behind, the main peloton. As so often with these things, it was a great idea in theory which lost some of its effectiveness in practice: after a grand total of around three kilometres off the front of the peloton, I was swallowed up around a kilometre before the summit and spat out no more than a few hundred metres later. My sole consolation was that I wasn't alone; for the next 25 kilometres, I and around fifteen others found ourselves more than making up for the lack of team time-trial on the 2008 Tour route in a frantic relay which finally, thankfully, took us back to the main pack.
Before every Tour, even as early as the presentation of the route in a fancy Parisian auditorium the previous October, there are a certain number of stages you can tick off straight away as 'sprint stages' or 'mountain stages'. Or if you're me, 'good' and 'bad' days. Then there is a third category of stages which fall into a grey area – a grey area, as it happens, gently sprinkled with hills that I may or may not get over in a position or physical state that will allow me to sprint and, hopefully, win. Predictably, the problem with these stages is their unpredictability: until the actual day, the last climb, the last kilometre or even the last kick to launch my sprint it's simply impossible to know whether the 'grey' stages would be better left to other members of my team.
I can deal with not knowing. I, of all people, will always argue that cycling isn't an exact science. The problem is that these things take planning. On that eighth stage to Toulouse, for instance, we had a yellow jersey to defend, and a decision to make about how many men and resources to devote to Kim and how many to me. There was also the question of equipment. At the start of the 2008 season, our management had realised that there were simply too many variations in technology and terrain for one type of wheel, or even one manufacturer, to cover all bases. Hence, Bob Stapleton had taken an unusual step: never mind the money we could get from endorsing a particular company's products, we'd simply buy whatever wheels were most suitable for particular conditions on a particular day of a particular race.
So, there I was, finally back in the peloton, back in the hunt. Still 120 km and two and a half hours from the finish, rapidly getting wetter but feeling good. Good enough to take one hand off the bars and reach towards the microphone tucked under my jersey. 'Allan, I'm coming back to the car for an 808 rear wheel.'
An '808' was the model name of the deep-s
ection carbon wheel, manufactured by the American company, Zipp, which I used for sprint finishes. Unsure of my own strength and the severity of the hills, I'd started the day with my lighter, shallow-rimmed 'climbing' wheels – a pair of Zipp '404s'.
There was silence for a second or two – the time it took Allan to relay my message to the mechanic in the back seat.
Boy Racer Page 15