Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  He didn't need to go on. I knew.

  There was something funny about the atmosphere in the bus that afternoon. Somehow, it almost seemed as though we hadn't won. We then arrived at our hotel, back over the border in Italy, went up to our rooms, unpacked our laptop computers and started reading the quotes from Andre's press conference. And that's when the trouble started.

  One of the questions, maybe the first, had focused on my role in the sprint. How did he feel about me 'gifting' him the stage?

  'What gift? I won the stage because I was the fastest ...' Andre had replied, stone-faced.

  In fairness, at that point, he may not have seen the action replays. He also didn't have eyes in the back of his head. He perhaps couldn't know what was patently obvious to the journalist asking the question, namely that, in those last 150 metres, I hadn't been so much sprinting as patrolling his back wheel. In any case, he'd apologise as soon as he saw me back at the hotel and watched the highlights on TV, wouldn't he. Wouldn't he?

  Er, actually, no he wouldn't. Neither that night nor the following morning on the bus, when he at least recognised the need to diffuse some of the tension. 'Guys, yesterday was the biggest win of my career, and some things I said after the finish got taken out of context ...' he mumbled, his speech sounding more like self-justification than an apology. Or a thank you. That's exactly what I told Rolf Aldag when he called to check that harmony – or at least some semblance of it – had been restored.

  It had now been fifteen months since the first of our disagreements at the Étoile de Bessèges. Despite those arguments, I felt that Andre was basically a good bloke who, to give him his due, had a winner's mentality similar to my own. That's what made it hard for us to get along; while we both wanted to be acknowledged as the best rider in the team, if not the world, there was only room on that pedestal for one of us, notwithstanding the fact that Andre's outstanding power made him one of the fastest finishers on the planet.

  In the most sensitive possible terms, this was the news I tried to break to him that evening when, again to his great credit, he came to my room in the hope of clearing the air. It was all quite emotional. And, I suppose, dramatic. In short, he admitted that he'd read interviews I'd given, admitted that some of my comments had upset him, and also that it was hard to revel in my success when gnawing at his consciousness was the hunch that it could and maybe should all have been him. As he sat on the bed, emptying his heart, welling up, it seemed obvious that just over a year of childish squabbles was tapering towards a truce or at least something close to it. Before I knew it, we'd shaken hands and a smile had settled on Andre's lips and mine. Just a few months on, we now celebrate each other's success with the same rigour as our own.

  The Giro had marked my coming of age in so many ways. By now, with just three days and two mountain stages to go, I was about to chalk up my first complete major tour. That in itself was almost as much of a badge of honour as my two stage wins, but perhaps most gratifying was the way that, over the three weeks, I'd sensed my profile growing among the Italian fans. In Belgium, I'd noticed, they loved every cyclist; in Italy, they loved, even worshipped, a winner.

  Physically, I'd surprised even myself by making it through the mountains. Brad Wiggins had explained to me that, in the third week of a major tour, the body and its muscles went into survival mode – rationing their resources, solidifying, and generally becoming leaner and meaner. I was too tired to notice the benefits in the time-trial which brought the race to a close in Milan, but I would in just over a month's time ... I would at the Tour.

  ANDRE Greipel wasn't the only beneficiary of my new-found diplomacy. If anything, in my first few months as a pro rider, my contempt for Sebastian Weber dwarfed even my dislike for Greipel. At least I could relate to Andre, inasmuch as we were both bike racers and we both also wanted to be winners. Weber, on the other hand, had demonstrated to me that he knew sodall about cycling at my first-ever training camp with the team in Majorca in January 2007. 'You won't even hold the peloton' had been his prediction for my first pro races in France at the start of that season. He may have been talking nonsense, but something had still possessed me to overtrain and undereat in my effort to prove him wrong.

  Since that spring Weber and I had had very little contact. To be precise, we'd had very little contact since I'd recovered from my overexertions in February and March, won at Scheldeprijs, twice in the Four Days of Dunkirk and twice again at the Tour of Catalunya doing things very much my own way, i.e. ignoring Weber and his graphs and diagrams and scientific claptrap. After my wins at Catalunya, he'd called to congratulate me, and for once I didn't appreciate someone blowing sunshine up my arse. 'I told you,' I'd said tersely. 'These are the lines that mean something to me – the finish lines, not the graph lines.'

  For months after that – in fact, well over a year – my opinion didn't alter about Sebastian. Meanwhile, he carried on working with the riders who could make use of his analytical skills and left me in peace. This was the difference between Sebastian and Simon Jones – and it was also the reason why, a year or so after our initial clash, almost without me realising it, my respect for Sebastian was growing. In short, Sebastian had understood that we had different ideas about training and racing and that, if I was winning races, what wasn't broke clearly didn't need fixing. In contrast, with Jonesy, it had always been his way or the highway.

  Sebastian and I ended up bonding at the 2009 Tour of California over, of all things, herbal tea. After the prologue in Sacramento, as I hung around for the presentation of the best young rider's jersey for my stage, I'd copped a whiff of a sweet, cinnamon smell and followed the scent all the way to the vapours rising from Sebastian's mug. 'Ah, that smells good,' I cooed. 'I don't suppose you could get me a cup, could you? I can't move from here until the presentation's over ...' A year or so earlier, he'd have looked at me as though I'd just asked him to shine my shoes. Now he said 'Sure' and returned a couple of minutes later with a steaming hot, spicy-smelling mug.

  Every morning in California, I was going for physiotherapy on the pelvis which, I think, has been slightly displaced by years of riding anti-clockwise around a velodrome, my whole body twisted towards the inside of the track. We have a physio who travels with the team at major races, and he happened to be rooming with Sebastian. One morning, I was lying on the bed, receiving my treatment, when Sebastian casually asked whether I'd like a box of the cinnamon tea I'd sampled a few days earlier. 'Nah,' I said, 'you keep it for yourself – I could just have a couple of bags.'

  He insisted: 'Nah, Cav, you take the whole box.'

  Again, a year or even a few months earlier, I'm guessing that the only reason he'd have been giving me his hot drinks would have been in the vague hope that I might burn my mouth.

  Did the end of hostilities with Greipel and Weber mean that, at the grand old age of twenty-three, I was already mellowing? Mellowing, perhaps not – not yet – but maturing, almost definitely. As spiky as I still am and will continue to be, I've always been willing to give people a second chance – provided they know that's also their last chance. That quote from Johan Bruyneel about Lance Armstrong – 'he's always drawn his motivation from anger and resentment', the little black book that Armstrong keeps in his head – all that still applies to me, but it's only half of the story. The truth is that I don't like conflict, especially when it's with people from my own team. I don't like it and I don't always need it but, fortunately or not, I seem to thrive on it.

  Part of maturing was also knowing when it was in my interests and the team's for me to maintain and finesse certain relationships. Since the first summer of that first 2007 season, I'd become one of the team's undisputed leaders, and that status brought responsibility. One such duty was acknowledging how valuable a rider like Greipel could be to our squad of twenty-nine riders when we were racing different programmes, or even when we were together at the same race. From a purely selfish perspective, I could see now that there might be days when I didn't want
the mental pressure or the physical strain of sprinting and preferred to pass the buck to Andre – who would very gratefully and capably take it off me.

  On the bike, I never stopped learning, never stopped growing in that twelve-month block between the 2007 and 2008 Tours. The Giro had been the successful culmination of a year's hard study, but, even there, like at other races in the spring of 2008, the most valuable experiences had maybe been the ones that I'd finished beaten and dejected. The Belgian Classic race Ghent–Wevelgem springs to mind. I'd lined up for that race with my form and morale soaring after a couple of stage wins in the Three Days of De Panne, and the bookies had clearly taken note, installing me as the first British favourite for any Classic since the late Tom Simpson forty-odd years earlier. I dare say that I deserved and would have lived up to my billing had I not let complacency creep in and skulked about, twenty positions back, while my teammates continually tried to drag me to the front in the last hour of the race. With a kilometre to go, I was poorly placed but still unflustered ... then the Spanish rider ahead of me jerked inside the one-kilometre-to-go-banner and blocked my path. I ended up not even sprinting. Half an hour after the race, I was to be found in my usual post-defeat position, sitting alone and in silence at the back of the team bus, a towel over my head, wondering how I could have been so selfish when my teammates had worked so hard on my behalf.

  As ever, I made amends at the next available opportunity, defending my title at Scheldeprijs – the race which meant so much to me after I'd won for the first time as a pro there in 2007. It was good to know that other sprinters also made stupid mistakes: after finding myself obstructed again in the last kilometre, this time by a rider from the Dutch Skil Shimano team, I was able to squeeze past and win thanks to Tom Boonen's premature victory celebration. Boonen might think that he had the last laugh after I slipped and face-planted on the podium that evening – but at least I'd succumbed on my way to collect first prize.

  The final five months of 2006 had been my official 'apprenticeship' or 'stage' as a professional cyclist, fast followed by a six-month baptism of fire ending with the 2007 Tour de France, and now a coming-of-age that would hopefully end with stage wins at the 2008 Tour. First, though, there was just time for me to head to the British National Championships and leave a few hours later not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the way I and the other pros riding for major European teams had been 'targeted' by the domestic pros. Even with dozens of the British-based pros ganging up to chase, someone like David Millar was strong enough to break free, as he'd shown when he won in 2007. Me, I may have been the best sprinter in the world, but in every other department I was average at best. It was hard, frustrating, infuriating, but I had seen it before and I'd seen it again even at the Tour – there were people who'd rather see someone else lose than win themselves.

  And to think that I was the one they called childish.

  Stage 11: Lannemezan-Foix, 167.5 km

  * * *

  1. Kurt-Asle Arvesen (Nor) Team CSC –

  Saxo Bank 3.58.13 (42.19 km/h)

  130. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia

  General classification

  * * *

  1. Cadel Evans (Aus) Silence – Lotto 46.42.13

  156. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 1.52.04

  STAGE 12

  Thursday, 17 July 2008

  LAVELANET—NARBONNE, 168.5 KM

  Speak to anyone who followed professional cycling from afar in the years when I was falling in love with the sport and, at least now, in hindsight, they'd tell you that it was an era dominated by drugs. I was twelve years old when some French customs opened the boot of the Festina team car on the eve of the 1998 Tour de France, and with it a Pandora's box stuffed with EPO, human growth hormone and assorted other banned substances; since that day, pretty much, as far as the general public are concerned cycling's come to mean doping and doping to mean cycling. Unfortunately it's not as though the idiots who thought they could beat the system haven't given them ammunition ...

  In July 1998, I was a twelve-year-old little scally interested in only one thing: bikes. Bikes, not cycling. You may not make the distinction but to me 'riding bikes' was what I did, what I loved, what I couldn't live without, whereas 'cycling' was something else. 'Cycling' was what you read about in the magazines, a spectator sport popular in faraway countries (well, if you live in the Isle of Man, even Belgium seems a long way) whose stars were Italians, Spaniards and French blokes with obscure-sounding names. 'Cycling' was the Tour de France, Paris—Roubaix, the Giro d'Italia. I'd seen the pictures in Cycling Weekly, I knew the names, but that wasn't why I handed over my quid-twenty or whatever it was at the newsagents. My mate Christian Varley, he was into 'cycling'. Me, I was all about the bikes – or rather the adverts which told me how many papers I'd have to deliver before that stem/those handlebars/those wheels I wanted could finally be parcelled up and put on a ferry to the Isle of Man.

  Varley was pretty much my only source of information when it came to the pro road scene. This in itself didn't exactly make Christian an authority on what it took to make it as a pro, but neither did it prevent him from telling me that what it took was drugs. And I listened. I listened because Varley had read the magazines – he knew. 'You know, Cav,' he'd say, 'if we're gonna be pros, we'll have to take drugs.' While I didn't question him, when you're twelve years old, no matter how much you want to be a pro bike rider, it somehow doesn't seem that relevant. The words would go in, I'd nod sheepishly, then ten seconds later, it'd be: 'A quid says I'll beat you to the top of this hill.'

  But as the years went by, I started getting more and more into cycling, and cycling got more and more into drugs, or so it seemed. The year after Festina, the legendary Italian climber Marco Pantani was kicked out of the Giro d'Italia on the penultimate day, and scandals seemed to start coming monthly, weekly and, sometimes, daily. Meanwhile I just carried on racing, winning, loving it, none the wiser. A lot of people in the know will tell you that, in those years, there was even a drug culture in the junior and amateur ranks in continental Europe, but no such notion ever crossed our minds. Danes, Dutch or Belgians or whoever they were – if they were cheating, all I can say is that it wasn't working, because I was a fat banker with an addiction to cream cakes and I was still giving them a kicking. To me, it never appeared in the least bit unusual that I never took a dope test until I was well into my late teens.

  Ignorance was bliss, even later at the Academy. Sure, once a month we'd have to go to do a blood test with Dr Rog – Roger Palfreeman, the Federation doctor – but we didn't think anything of it. Of course, we knew that one of the reasons you get blood-tested in cycling is to screen for the signs of doping, but we certainly didn't have anything to hide. Dave Brailsford or Rod never gave us the third degree about doping, and, on reflection, it was probably better that they didn't.

  This was a lesson that Roger Hammond had taught me when I joined T-Mobile: ultimately it was safest not to even think about doping – and I don't mean think about actually doing it, but not even contemplate the issue at all. Roger was twelve years older than me, but he'd also grown up racing in England, totally sheltered from and naive to whatever unsavoury practices were apparently de rigueur in more established cycling countries in Europe. Roger had turned pro, grafted for a few years in minor Belgian teams, and, as the tests improved, the dopers became more isolated, the races slower, so Rog had started to get results. In 2005, he'd then achieved his big break and joined the same team as Lance Armstrong, Discovery Channel – and it being cycling, people had started asking questions. Rog told me that, even before that, when he joined one team – not Discovery – the first thing one of his teammates had asked him was 'What are you taking?' When he replied 'Nothing', far from being amused or impressed, his teammate was almost disgusted. In this gentleman's eyes, Roger was being unprofessional by not taking drugs and maximising his ability to win races for himself or the team.

  In 2005, still a teenager, more bored
than curious, I'd already broached cycling's 64-million-dollar question with a teammate at Sparkasse: 'Are you taking drugs, and, if so, what?' He was an older guy who'd been around the block a bit. I'd already informed him that I didn't take anything at all and that, to be characteristically blunt, I 'didn't know the first fucking thing about doping'. He took that as his prompt to assure me that he didn't take anything either but that, in case I was interested, the drugs of choice were EPO and human growth hormone; he added that, if I was going to turn pro, I needed to know about these things. I listened, a bit like I had with Christian Varley years before, then, partly out of curiosity, partly out of mischief, enquired where I could acquire such 'essentials' if the need or desire arose. Apparently 'he knew some people ...' When I replied with words to the effect of 'thanks but no thanks', his final advice was that, if and when I finally turned pro, I should 'Go one way or the other – either take drugs or don't, but don't lie to yourself ...' My curiosity both satisfied and killed, I responded by changing the subject.