Deep breaths all round. She unwraps a new needle. Needle touches the skin, skin flexes then breaks, needle disappears and we all wait. And wait. There's no blood, so she starts wiggling the needle again, and I can see my skin stretching, stretching, stretching, and I'm hot, no I'm cold, sweating, and the skin's stretching ... then 'BOING', out comes the end of the needle in a different place from where it went in, and now I'm screaming – 'Get the fucking thing out!' – and teammate Thomas Lövkvist's screaming at this girl, because he's watching, and he's Swedish, and this girl's Swedish, and now I'm lying on the bed, feeling sick and someone's gone to get the doctor, and I don't know what's going on any more, and everyone's screaming ...
It was all over in a few minutes – the team doctor, Helge, arrived and I was okay – but it's not an exaggeration to say we'd narrowly avoided disaster. From my point of view it was the last straw or rather the last syringe: I wouldn't let anyone from ACE go near me with a needle for the rest of the season. With all the problems we'd experienced, I don't think there was ever any question of the team carrying on with ACE in 2009. In the event, the decision was taken out of our hands as ACE went out of business.
The concept of independent testing is a really good one, so I was very much in favour when Bob informed us that he'd asked Don Catlin to design a testing programme for us in 2009. Catlin is one of the most respected experts in the anti-doping field, not only in the United States but worldwide. That said, at our training camp in California at the start of 2009, I kicked and screamed about having to attend a team seminar with Catlin for the simple reason that, as I argued to Rolf Aldag, a rider who doesn't dope doesn't need to know how he's not going to test positive. In the end, I was glad that I went; not only was I an awful lot more impressed with Catlin that I had been with ACE a year earlier, I also left that meeting with a strong faith in the system of repetitive testing and long-term profiling which is now the present and future of testing in cycling.
The tragedy in our sport now is that suspicion is almost as much of a problem as doping. People became so used to lies and cheats that they're ready to interpret any gesture, any comment, any decision you make as evidence that you're cheating. For that reason alone, in 2008 it would have been almost inconceivable for us to break off the agreement with ACE halfway through the season. It was ironic: Bob had called in ACE to give a message to the team that doping wasn't an option and to tell the press and public that they could have confidence in our results. Ultimately, we found ourselves in a position where it was the ACE testing that the riders didn't trust, yet admitting that would have left us open to even more speculation and cynicism than if we'd never even employed an independent test agency in the first place.
The sad reality is that the public has been let down so many times that they watch professional cycling with almost the same detachment with which they watch a Hollywood blockbuster: it's entertaining, sure, but, in real life, no one can really cartwheel over that burning bus, no one can really outrun those dozen police cars ... and, in the same way, they assume no one can really win four stages of the Tour de France at twenty-three years of age. This attitude is so well embedded, even among fans and journalists who are aware of the progress our sport has made, that I'm pleasantly surprised when self-confessed sceptics in the media, in particular, look at my results at the 2008 Tour and think or say nothing other than 'chapeau'.
If only everyone had such faith in my ethics and my performances. When I pulled out of the Tour a few days on Stage 14, exhausted, the foreign press immediately insinuated that I was really just getting out before the dope testers could get me, or that I'd already been notified about a positive test and I was sneaking out of the tradesman's entrance. I discovered this only much later, when Brian Holm told me that those fifty voicemail messages he'd left on my phone when I switched it off for a week after the Tour were him, fearing the worst. Even Dave Brailsford had been bombarded by journalists. It was the same a few weeks later when, for exactly the same reason – tiredness – I opted out of the British team for the World Championships in Italy. My announcement just happened to coincide with the news that a number of suspicious samples from the Tour were being retested with a new method to detect CERA – the drug that Riccò had taken. Some newspaper in Belgium then reported that some of the samples apparently belonged to riders who had 'pulled out of the World Championships at the last minute', putting me right in the firing line. They were right about three things – the German Stefan Schumacher had been a late withdrawal from the Worlds, they did retest his blood, and he did test positive. The new method had also nailed Schumacher's Gerolsteiner teammate, Bernhard Kohl, who'd finished third in the Tour, and the winner of Stage 10 at Hautacam, Leonardo Piepoli. Three months on from the Tour, the only repercussions all of this had for me was that the sport I love got dragged through the mud yet again.
Doping had never interested me, never really affected me, never really upset me ... until the 2008 Tour. I was on a plane from Manchester to the Isle of Man at the end of the 2008 season, casually chatting to the guy sitting next to me, explaining that I was a professional cyclist, when the conversation turned to doping. I told him about how often we're tested, about how we have to account for our whereabouts, and his eyes nearly popped out. What I hadn't yet calculated was that I was tested fifty-nine times in 2008! Then you get Rio Ferdinand saying that some Manchester United footballers were tested 'three or four times last season' – as if that's a lot; or Sir Alec Ferguson saying that it would be a 'nuisance' if his players had to provide whereabouts information. I don't want to point the finger at any other sportsman or any other sport, but I would say that cycling seems to be the only one whose governing body, the UCI, will maximise the chance of exposing scandals – scandals that will damage their sport – by maximising the number of tests, maximising the effectiveness of those tests and maximising their transparency about anti-doping. I can't help but notice that, in other sports, it's when the Olympic Games come around, and it's the World Anti-Doping Agency and not the governing bodies doing the tests, that you suddenly start seeing doping cases.
The likes of Riccardo Riccò and Bernhard Kohl brought discredit upon the 2008 Tour and, by indirect association, discredit and suspicion upon me. In a way, though, they were still shame-faced contributors to one of the most positive, downright beautiful developments my sport has ever seen. For years we'd heard that the dopers are always one step ahead of the testers, and they obviously believed they were when they dosed up on the new wonder-drug, CERA. That's always what's annoyed me most about riders who take drugs – not only are they getting an unfair advantage, they think they're smarter than the rest, and smarter than the testers.
In 2008, I had another, much more personal reason to feel not merely aggrieved but positively disgusted with these riders, and in particular Piepoli. My suffering to make the time limit at Hautacam, Bernie Eisel's suffering, the anguish that caused the rest of the team ... it had all been accentuated by Piepoli's cheating. Quite simply, the 1 or 2 or 3 per cent that he gained from his magic potion that day could have equated to the minutes and seconds which might have cost Bernie and me the time-cut and our place in the Tour. As it was, I simply never recovered from the beating we took that day; I would quit the Tour on Stage 14 but in a certain sense my journey ended that afternoon at Hautacam.
The other, direct consequence of all of this for me was that I walked into my press conference after Stage 12 in Narbonne and found myself facing questions about Riccardo Riccò, his positive test for CERA and his ejection from the race that morning. An American journalist took the microphone. He clearly wasn't interested in my feelings on becoming the first Briton ever to win three stages in a single Tour de France.
'Mark, after Riccardo Riccò's positive test for CERA this morning, can you tell us why we should believe that your wins in this Tour de France have been achieved clean?'
Right down to the forty-second pause that which baffled a few journalists but allowed me to gather my t
houghts, I'd still respond now exactly as I did then.
'I am in a sport that I love. I believe in hard work, and that to get the best out of yourself takes hard work. I don't want to tarnish the sport I love, and I know that the majority feel the same way as me. Cycling is not just a job, but a passion, and people that resort to doping don't have the passion I have. That's not just the case in cycling, but in every aspect of life. The tests are catching people and for me that's a good thing.'
Stage 12: Lavelanet–Narbonne, 168.5 km
* * *
1. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 3.40.52 (45.77 km/h)
General classification
* * *
1. Cadel Evans (Aus) Silence – Lotto 50.23.05
147. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 1.52.04
STAGE 13
Friday, 18 July 2008
NARBONNE—NÎMES, 182 KM
Questions about Riccardo Riccò's positive drug test hadn't been all that threatened to ruin my mood after my Stage 12 win – my third of the Tour and the one that took me past the Yorkshire-man Barry Hoban's twenty-nine-year record for stage victories by a British rider in a single edition of the Grande Boucle.
Three or four things stand out about the stage start that day. One was the commotion around the Saunier Duval team bus as the French police arrived to hand Riccò notification of his failed test and lead him away. The second was trying to fight my way through the crush of reporters, fans and rubberneckers gathered to see the little twerp on his way as I rode to the start – and nearly being wiped out by a TV cameraman. The third was the reaction back on our bus – or rather lack of any reaction, because we'd all seen this coming four days earlier, after watching the highlights of his Stage 9 win – and above all the insult to physics and our intelligence that was his attack on the Col d'Aspin. My mate David Millar hit the nail on the head when, in reference to Riccò, he told the press, 'When you see things that appear too good to be true, it usually means they are.'
Above all, we were just too immersed in our personal battles to care. Cycling may be a team sport, and the Tour a collective effort, but as the race groaned towards its third week, we were all ready to lock into the 'survival' mode that Brad Wiggins and I had discussed at the Giro. You often hear people refer to 'Planet Tour' – the world where the cycling family decamps en masse for three weeks every July, and which exists in its own solar system and sphere of consciousness. What no one tells you is that, when you're a rider, on that planet, it's not the Tour that dominates your thoughts – the whole Tour – it's your own Tour and to a slightly lesser extent that of your team. In the evening, after stages, different-coloured sheets of paper showing the standings in all of the race classifications are handed around – one for the general classification, one for the King of the Mountains, one for the points competition, one for the best young rider's classification – and you ignore them all except the one that relates to you and your personal aims. For me, that meant the points or green jersey competition – although with four places and forty points to make up on the leader Oscar Freire, even my interest in that race within a race was fading. All that remained were a couple of stages that, on paper at least, lent themselves to sprint finishes, starting with today. Beyond that, way beyond – too far to contemplate for the moment – lay Paris.
As I've already mentioned, as part of my pre-stage routine, I always took one last, careful gander at the single A4 page in the Tour roadbook mapping the final three or four kilometres of the route. On the morning of Stage 12, while the melodrama starring Riccò unfolded a short distance away, I'd absorbed and memorised everything – but stalled on the roundabout that the sketch said we'd have to negotiate 3.5 kilometres from the finish line. As anyone who's seen TV pictures of the Tour taken from a helicopter will know, a peloton will often split into two lines and take to either side of the roundabout before those lines re-converge into single file as the road continues on the other side. When the route entered and exited the roundabout at the same angle, you could go either way and it would make no difference; that was just it, though – although this map showed the road as a straight line dissecting the roundabout on either side, past experience had told me you couldn't always trust the drawings. That was why, every day, I'd ask the soigneur who'd be waiting for us with towels and drinks on the finish line to recce the last five or ten kilometres of the route and call the directeurs sportifs with feedback as he made his way there.
The message that came back during the stage from the soigneur, via our directeurs sportifs, put my mind at rest: he'd checked and the roundabout was exactly as it appeared in the roadbook – straight in, straight out, and utterly straightforward. Good. That was at least one fewer problem. Now we just had to get there.
In truth, for all my homework on the route (which, in any case, I did for every stage, even mountain-top finishes, because you never knew what might happen), I'd warned my teammates that I didn't fancy sprinting on this stage. Not that I was resting on my laurels, but I had already won two stages, and both my legs and head were baulking at the prospect of another, final 50 kilometres on the edge. As always, though, as the kilometres went by, as the adrenalin started kicking in, I'd become absorbed in the hunt. Two hours into the stage, the sun was blazing , the wind was gusting at our backs, the average speed was a supersonic, record-breaking 59 kilometres per hour and I was in the mood to make a bit of history of my own.
Five kilometres from Narbonne, I was still well placed and my teammates were where they'd been all day and practically all Tour – hammering on the front. We hit the roundabout. I chose the left-hand side. Hugged the inside. Kept going, going, past the apex, going, going ... and going and going and going, until, finally, I intersected with the rest of the peloton at practically 90 degrees to the main current of riders and forty positions further back than when I'd entered the roundabout. Sixty positions from the front, out of contention and fucking furious.
The single thing or rather rider that saved me that day was Adam Hansen. Adam, aka the Terminator, had already taken his final turn on the front and was dropping back through the mass when he spotted me floundering in the second third of the bunch. It was Bernie Eisel at Scheldeprijs in 2007 all over again: almost as though the sight of me struggling had sent him into a trance, Adam forgot everything, somehow numbed himself to the pain and, over the next kilometre and a half, acted as my taxi-cab to the final corner with 1100 metres to go, the top fifteen positions and, most importantly, Gerald Ciolek's wheel.
After the finish that afternoon, before the victory celebrations could begin, I wanted to speak to the soigneur who had fobbed me and everyone else off with his dud info about the roundabout. It was obvious to us all that everything he knew about the last five kilometres of that day's route, he'd learned from the roadbook. Conveniently, he was waiting for me beyond the finish line – the first face on the TV pictures, just how he liked it. I wasn't going to begin my rant in full view of the cameras but neither was I going to let this go. Later, I sought him out and said my piece: 'If I'd lost that stage, you'd have lost your job, so you've got me to thank, no, you've got Adam Hansen to thank for your job right now'.
By that time, my directeur sportif Brian Holm had already unleashed his own tirade, which had been met with the response: 'Well, he still won, didn't he?'
This had incensed Brian even more; yes, I'd won, but in order for me to do so, Adam Hansen had compensated for a member of our backroom staff completely deserting his duties by doing the work of two riders. And, no, you could never breathe a sigh of relief when disaster was averted and victory snatched from the jaws of defeat and, in this case, professional self-sabotage. At the Tour there might always be consequences to pay the next day; who, for instance, could know whether that final, one-kilometre sprint that Adam Hansen had conjured from the depths of exhaustion wouldn't have flooded his muscles with toxins that couldn't be flushed out in time for him to make the time limit the next day?
As had been the case in Stage
8, when I'd had to sprint on the wrong Zipp wheels, and at Hautacam, where I'd had the wrong gears, what annoyed me most about the incident was that details like this could be the difference between me winning and losing. Attention to that detail was one of the reasons why I'd been able to win three stages in the Tour and, by now, almost thirty races since turning pro at the start of 2007. In order for my diligence to pay off, I needed all of the other teammates, mechanics, soigneurs, coaches, directeurs sportifs and doctors to do their bit as well. As I mentioned in Stage 8, the cumulative effect of lots of little improvements – or the 'aggregation of marginal gains' as the British Federation Performance Directeur Dave Brailsford puts it – had been the cornerstone of the British team's domination of the international track scene.
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