Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  The same idea had always been second nature to me, although it's true to say that as my responsibilities had grown, so had the extent of my meticulousness. This was another area in which I was very much on the same wavelength as Rod Elling-worth at the Academy. In 2008, Rod was still 'only' the coach of the Under 23s at the Academy, but that hadn't deterred him from mentioning one or two things that the world's number-one team was doing wrong when he paid us a visit on the day of the first time-trial of the Tour in Cholet. Kim Kirchen would wind up the winner of that stage after the German Stefan Schumacher's positive test for CERA, and like most riders on the Tour, Kim had warmed up for his ride on a stationary bike outside the team bus, facing the crowds milling around the start area. Rod had seen this and been quietly shocked – so shocked that he'd called over our team manager, Bob Stapleton, and asked why on earth his best time-triallist and main hope for the overall classification was warming up where he could be – and was being – continually disturbed by TV crews, members of the public or even members of his own team's staff. That was typical Rod: he didn't give a monkey's about whom he was talking to – if he saw something that flew in the face of common sense or what his experience had taught him, he wouldn't hesitate to point it out.

  Rod and I agreed that, much more than most track disciplines, road racing was a lottery, but one in which you could significantly increase your chances by making sure that you were well prepared. More than that – I'd always maintained that I had to look for my advantages in some pretty unlikely places, because I simply wasn't physically gifted enough to get by on innate ability and a few mere fundamentals – a healthy diet, rigorous training and a light bike. For the very same reason, now that I'd taken my place among the world's top riders, there could be absolutely no question of me easing up or becoming sloppy. Some of my rivals could booze, splash their cash, party and still wing it on their natural talent; me, the day I stopped dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's' would also be the day when I'd stop winning.

  Already in my pro career, there'd been numerous occasions when I could pin down a tiny detail or piece of planning without which I'd have been scrapping for a podium place rather than holding the bouquet. One such occasion was the prologue at the 2007 Tour of Britain, where I'd practised the first corner maybe thirty times, clinging to my team car then letting go around the bend to simulate race pace. After that I'd completed ten or twelve circuits of the full, 2.5-kilometre course. When the results were all in, my old foe from the British Federation, Simon Jones, who was commentating on Eurosport, said on air that he couldn't fathom how a rider with power output could have gone so fast.

  The final stage of the Tour of Denmark, immediately after the 2007 Tour de France was another good example of the same, painstaking preparation. It was to be an important day for me and the team, what with the race finishing in our directeur sportif Brian Holm's old home town, Frederiksberg, and me battling to overhaul a two-point deficit in the points jersey competition. The stage finished with eight circuits of central Frederiksberg and would also almost certainly end in a sprint; the one issue that still needed to be worked out was the gear to use on a gently rising, 300-metre final straight. On the first lap, it struck me straight away that this, more than finishing speed or perhaps even positioning, might be the decisive factor. It also occurred to me that the road was wide enough for me to drop behind the bunch each time that we approached the 300-metre straight, rehearse my sprint, settle on a gear then move comfortably back up to the peloton. And that's what I did, lap after lap after lap until, on the final circuit, I started the last corner in a smaller gear than all of my opponents and scuttled easily past as they tried to grind their way to the line. Again, it may be that I was the fastest rider in the field that day; what I know for a fact is that I was the best prepared.

  I THINK it's already pretty obvious that I was neither exaggerating nor indulging in false modesty when I told our soigneur that he was indebted to Adam Hansen for saving his job in Narbonne on Stage 12 that day. What I didn't mention, and perhaps should, is that it had also taken my most agile and tactically accomplished sprint of the Tour.

  In common English parlance 'switching trains' is what you do when there are leaves on the line on a damp November's morning. In sprinting, the expression refers to a manoeuvre which may be lower on frustration but is somewhat higher on risk; in fact, if you were to trace the metaphor back to its more conventional locomotive context, if you really wanted a make a comparison, I'd say that what I attempted and pulled off in those final 500 metres in Narbonne was somewhat similar to the kind of 'train switching' that Matt Damon's character has down to a fine art in the Bourne trilogy.

  At 800 metres from the finish line I was moving up the right-hand side in a first-class carriage behind my engine driver of choice, Gerald Ciolek. Immediately to our left were the Crédit Agricole threesome of Mark Renshaw, William Bonnet, then poised in last position, Thor Hushovd; to the left of them, much further to the left, on the other side of a wide boulevard road, I could just about make out three white and blue Quick-Step jerseys. And that's when instinct took over.

  Melissa will never forget those next three or four seconds, even if I do. Having whistled past the Crédit Agricole lads' right shoulder, abandoning Gerald's back wheel and jagging across the road at a forty-five-degree angle, edging 70 kilometres per hour, she was already composing a text message threatening me with pre-emptive divorce if I ever repeated the same stunt. As ever, though, from where I was stomping on my pedals, now on the far left of the road, on the back of the Quick-Step train, there was no time for thought or any kind of conscious risk evaluation. I'd seen a faster, better route and I'd gone for it. No doubts, no questions, no hesitation. All that remained was for me to press the accelerator with 300 metres to go, tear past everyone and start celebrating ten metres short of the line.

  The next morning the photo of me striking my victory pose would adorn the front page of the Guardian and the New York Times. I was, said Bob Stapleton, the third cyclist in history to make the front page of the NYT. The first two had won ten Tours de France between them; they were the Americans Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong.

  If by this point papers from all over the world were full of articles debating exactly what it was that was making me so irresistible, Stage 12 had pundits raving about the agility and instinct that, they presumed, came from riding Madisons and points races on the track. No doubt this was partly true; but there was certainly a big difference between sprinting up a straight road on a bike with gears and brakes and bombing around a velodrome on a machine with neither of the above at even higher speeds. On the road, though, my nose for the right line or position had also been honed by necessity. Sprinters fell into two categories – those like Tom Boonen or Hushovd or the Italian Alessandro Petacchi, who generated speed by generating indecent amounts of power, and who could hit the front and wind with 400 metres to go and still hold on. Robbie McEwen and I belonged to the other subset – the speed-merchants who'd learnt to dart from wheel to wheel like a bumblebee buzzes from flower to flower, in search of the nectar that sprinters call shelter. For me, this applied not just in the final kilometre or even ten kilometres of a race but from the moment the starter squeezed the trigger or waved his flag. Rod Ellingworth will tell you that he's looked at data which shows that I consistently have to produce far fewer watts, expend much less energy than other riders throughout a race, partly because I have an efficient natural pedalling technique and partly because I have a knack for finding the smoothest-moving nooks and crannies of the peloton. Rod would also argue that this in large part explains why, unlike a lot of other young riders, I rarely, if ever, run out of gas in races of 200 or 250 kilometres.

  It's not a question of having one secret weapon but of doing my best to assemble a full artillery. My team was far and away the most important component of that and would prove it again on Stage 13 to Narbonne. The helicopter shots that day showed not so much a line as a huge, Columbia-coloured stai
n at the front of the pack, like a puddle of blue ink. The previous day had been hard and hot and by now, there were too many aching limbs in the peloton for the usual bun-fight to be in the first big break of the day in the first hour; two riders attacked in the first kilometre and everyone was quite happy to let them frazzle before the inevitable Columbia charge would bring them back with around ten kilometres to go, which is exactly what happened.

  With three kilometres to go, the peloton vortexed. In simpler terms, a rival line first drew parallel to, then ahead of our train on the opposite side of the road and we spiralled backwards. By now, you know what happens next – all that changes is the teammate who gives me the kiss of life. Today it was Marcus Burghardt. Having just put in the mother of monster turns on the front – one among many in the mother of monster Tour performances – Marcus saw me thrashing about in the belly of the bunch, nodded to me to move on to his wheel then flew up the side of the road to leave me in a perfect position with 1500 metres to go. Marcus had no more to give and I had no more teammates in sight but from there I might just about be able to take care of myself.

  I said I had no secret weapon. I lied. For 'secret', though, read 'very sparingly used' and 'for emergencies only'. Emergencies like the one that began to unfold when around 400 metres from the line, the bottom left-hand corner of my left eye was suddenly flooded with the dark green of a Crédit Agricole jersey and, before I'd had time to react, William Boonet had surged past my right shoulder with Thor Hushovd on his wheel. For every 'What's Cavendish's Secret' piece in the French press there was another one pondering 'How Do You Beat Cavendish?', and the answer was to overpower and outlast me from 300 or 350 metres out. Thor Hushovd had either been reading the papers or drawn a similar conclusion on his own. As I explained in the first few passages of this book, when another sprinter decided it was time for him to go then it was time for you to go as well, whether you liked it or not; now, at the 320-metre-to-go mark, Hushovd had thrown off the shackles and I had no choice but to go with him.

  Without my 'secret weapon' I might barely have crept inside the top ten that day. That's because, within a few seconds of starting my sprint, I could feel the strength seeping from my legs and my front wheel slowing. My secret weapon was my second kick; I'd not needed to use it before in this Tour – I'd not needed it many times in my career – but, with 150 metres to go and Robbie McEwen having swung across from the right-hand side and on to my wheel, I simply had no choice. Double kick, sixth gear, turbo-boost, secret weapon – call it what you want; when you watch the replay of that sprint, there's a precise moment, roughly 100 metres from the line when, rather than sucking the rider behind me along, my rear wheel seems to be blowing everyone backwards. It was no coincidence that the 'double kick' would bring me my biggest victory margin of the Tour – an abyss of three or four bike lengths.

  Was there a secret behind the secret weapon? Genes perhaps, plus determination – that and all the racing I'd done on the track, in Madisons, points races and scratch races. Those events weren't a steady build-up lasting several hours followed by one, big, sprint finish – they were punctuated by constant accelerations at uneven intervals, when you never knew when you might need to eke out a bit more speed to win a sprint or follow an attack. This was why I could move almost seamlessly from a block of track racing to road races and compete straight away; whenever I swapped from the road to the track, on the other hand, it would take me days and sometimes weeks to re-familiarise myself and my muscles with the kind of multi-tiered sprinting speed that I needed to be a regular winner.

  The trouble with the double kick was that, as far as your legs were concerned, it was like riding an extra 50 kilometres at the end of the stage. If it had taken 15.8 kilometres of climbing and a cheat in Leonardo Piepoli to leave me reeling on the ropes at Hautacam, it might just be that the effort of those last 320 metres here in Nîmes, and especially the last 150, was the one that had knocked me to the canvas.

  STAGE 12 had nicely exhibited how attention to detail could win or lose races, as could hair-trigger reactions in the final kilometre; the next stage had showcased my double kick. All four of my stage wins to date and indeed every single thing I'd done since the Tour left Brest two weeks earlier had demonstrated beyond any doubt that I was so good because I wasn't one rider but nine – all of them identifiable by the Columbia sportswear logo on their jerseys. Yet again, on that thirteenth stage, as the temperatures inched towards the mid-thirties, I'd felt not just grateful but humbled and embarrassed as my teammates went back and forth from the team car with water bottles. Had I been observing this from afar I'd have been in awe of every one of them – George, Kosta, Bernie, Gerald, Marcus, Tommy, Kim and Adam – and in awe of a sport and an event which demanded such selfless solidarity.

  My teammates weren't only my water, or my shelter or even my encouragement to make it over a climb – they were the fun in an event which could fast turn unpleasant if you dwelt on the negatives. You only had to look around the peloton at the wan, sunken faces of some of the other riders to see that. The overwhelming tiredness, the niggling injuries, the overcooked pasta in the crap hotels, the homesickness, a moody directeur sportif – if one of these didn't get to you then another would. The only remedy was a sense of fun, enjoyment, play, and nowhere was that more evident than in our team bus on the way to stages or at the dinner table at night. My exchange with George Hincapie as soon as we saw each other on the bus after the first, back-breaking stage in the Pyrenees couldn't have summed it up better.

  Me: 'How many major tours have you done now?

  Like thirty-six, or something stupid ...?'

  George: 'Nineteen.'

  Me: 'You must be fucking nuts.'

  There was a serious point lurking in the laughter that came next – namely that you had to smile, otherwise it would drive you nuts. I'd had the philosophy ever since I'd started riding as a kid: this was too difficult, too painful a sport if you didn't squeeze out as much fun as possible. And, to me, fun is what it had always been, partly because back home on the Isle of Man there were always people to go riding with, mates to take the piss out of, and partly because there was something in my makeup which meant I bloody loved it – even when it was hard and it did hurt like billy-o. It was the same with anything, I'd decided – the more you enjoyed yourself, the better you'd perform. Having fun and giving fun was also the closest I came to a purpose in my life.

  Of course 'fun' or 'passion' was never an answer that was going to satisfy the anoraks who wanted facts and figures and muscle biopsies to account for my sprinting prowess. In fairness, there were scientific factors that played a major part, one of them being a capacity to generate power and therefore speed that was disproportionately high in relation to my frontal area. In plain English, that meant that, while I produced slightly less power than the Tom Boonens or Thor Hushovds or Andre Greipels of this world – say 1400 watts in a sprint to their 1800 – I was a lot shorter and managed to get a lot, lot lower on my bike when I was sprinting. I was therefore a lot more aerodynamic. And the best of it was that, while I could work on increasing my power, there was absolutely sod all they could do except get a fraction lower at the risk of, you guessed it, losing some of their wattage because the position was too uncomfortable.

  My team, my directeurs, my eye for detail, the best equipment, the legs, the bike-handling, the instinct, the passion – they all added up to a simple and honest if arrogant-sounding response to another question that I and other riders and pundits were now being asked on a daily basis.

  The question was 'Is Mark Cavendish the fastest sprinter in the world?'

  The answer, thirteen stages into the 2008 Tour de France, could only be 'Yes'.

  Stage 13: Narbonne-Nîmes, 182 km

  * * *

  1. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 4.25.42 (41.10 km/h)

  General classification

  * * *

  1. Cadel Evans (Aus) Silence – Lotto 54.48.47

  144. Mar
k Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 1.52.04

  STAGE 14

  Saturday, 19 July 2008

  NÎMES—DIGNE LES BAINS, 194.5 KM

  IT'S ONE of the great tragedies of the Tour de France that, at any point in his three-week, 3500-kilometre journey through one of the most naturally beautiful countries on earth, the only landscape and landmarks that exist in a rider's consciousness are also the ones that feature in two dimensions on the pages of the Tour roadbook. Châteaus, rivers, towns and monuments all flash past like a Tourist board slideshow – and leave an even less lasting impression. If a Tour rider was to compile a guide-book based on his experiences, the criteria for inclusion would be 'does it have a road', 'are we going over it' and 'if so, how much will it hurt?'

  Stage 14 demonstrated this unfortunate reality perfectly. The stage village that day hugged the walls of one of the most famous Roman amphitheatres in the world in Nîmes, but my teammates and I were too busy going through our pre-race rituals behind the tinted glass of our team bus to pay any attention. I've often argued that you have to be pretty comfortable with your sexuality to choose a sport in which shaved legs and lycra are the norm – and that's particularly true on our bus when everyone's stripping down and applying all sorts of muscle-rubs and anti -chafing creams in the hour before a stage start. Put it this way: the last time I saw so many dangly objects, there was a tree and it was Christmas.