Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  Looking around the bus now, you could tell we were heading towards the third week of the Tour. I saw the same eight faces that had lined up at the team presentation in Brest but, in every one, there was a subtle difference, a slight change, or maybe just an accentuation of something that was already there. That was it: in the same way that the speed, the noise, the difficulty were just more in this race, then so here, after two weeks, everyone was somehow more themselves. We hadn't become nine different men in the space of a fortnight, but people were right when they compared this race to an emotional rollercoaster; since leaving Brest we'd not so much ridden through France as embarked on a journey through our own and each other's emotions.

  At the end of every stage, we'd all pile on to the bus and tell our stories, and every one would be different. Each of us was the star of his own personal, daily drama. Some plots were etched in facial features – like the blood-vessels in Marcus Burghardt's eyes, which seemed to grow redder and more prominent with every stage that he spent flaying himself on my behalf, while other tales of triumph and despair played out behind an uncomplaining, inscrutable mask like Thomas Lövkvist's. Tommy was our silent warrior, his mood as steady and steadfast as his position on the bike. There was some debate over whether his bike was even fitted with gears; every time the terrain changed, while the rest of us would be frantically flicking at our gear levers, Tommy knew only one technique and that was to push harder.

  Eisel was even cheerier, Kirchen even drier, Siutsou even more the archetypal East European – they were all just more. My roommate Adam, George Hincapie's main rival for the title of nicest man on the team, was even nicer than usual. Adam had started the Tour apprehensive and still largely unheralded at this level, but, thanks to his fabulous contribution to my stage wins, no one had boosted their profile more in the first two weeks of the race. He was loving it – and it showed in everything he did, however quiet and soft-spoken he remained.

  Adam was desperate for me to win that fourteenth stage. I would have been, too, but within a few kilometres of the start in Nîmes, and possibly even earlier that morning, I'd very quickly realised that my legs were losing patience with their daily beatings. I mentioned in the last chapter that one of the perils of the 'double kick' was a high toll of tiredness the next day, and, sure enough, now I was being asked to pay the full tariff. I'd warned the guys in the briefing that morning that I was unlikely to make it over the third-category climb, fifteen kilometres from the finish in Digne with the main group, and that, consequently, they should concentrate on teeing up Gerald Ciolek. 'If I'm still in touch, I'll let you know on the radio and we can change the plan,' I'd said. Adam had insisted that he should stay with me but I'd been equally adamant that it was a gamble not worth taking. The home town of Nostradamus may have been on the route that day but it didn't take a soothsayer to work out that my great Tour de France adventure might just be entering its final act.

  My prediction turned out to be as accurate as the one on Stage 5 with which I opened this book. This time, there was no trip back to the team car that wasn't enforced, no order to the directeurs sportifs to place bets with Unibet.com; if they'd wanted to have a punt on my race ending in Digne, in any case, all the evidence they needed could be found at the back of the peloton, where I spent the entire day straining to stay in touch. As it happened it wasn't so much the climb that did for me as the mad dash to the bottle-neck at the base of the hill. It was one bunch sprint too many. Earlier in the week, I might have clung on, but now my legs had given up. The Spaniard Oscar Freire would win the stage and a tired Gerald Ciolek finish well down in the same lead-group while I struggled home over three minutes behind.

  If you watch the couple of TV interviews I did on my way back to the bus that afternoon you can see the weariness in my eyes and detect it in my voice, but there's also a hint of sadness. I can only think that my subconscious was in on a secret – because it didn't occur to me there and then that my Tour could be over. My teammates would have told you that it didn't occur to them, either; that afternoon, everyone was exhausted and the sombre mood on the bus ride to our hotel was merely a reflection of that.

  It was when we arrived back at the hotel that the team doctor, Helge, called me into the small room at the back of the bus used by the soigneurs to store and prepare food. He moved deliberately and spoke quietly – as people always do when they're about to break bad news. I braced myself, not for the surprise but more for the inevitability.

  Sure enough ...

  'You know what I'm about to say, don't you?' Helge said.

  I might have croaked a 'Yes', I might have just nodded. Whatever my response, it was followed by an eruption of tears.

  I DIDN'T want to leave the Tour de France. There were all sorts of good reasons for leaving, far fewer for staying, but I still didn't want to leave. It wasn't the prospect of more stage wins or even reaching Paris that would make it so hard to quit; while I very much hoped there'd be other years and other opportunities to target those milestones, what I'd never be able to accurately recreate were all the emotions I'd shared with my teammates since we left Brittany, and which the other eight would now share without me in the last week of the Tour. It was hardly surprising that Brian Holm's last words to me before I left would be 'Whatever you do, don't watch the race, and especially not the bunch sprints, because you'll regret it ...' – not that I'd be at all tempted.

  On the night of that fourteenth stage, some could perhaps have guessed but none of my teammates actually knew that I wasn't starting the next day. I don't know whether I was embarrassed to tell them – whether I was hoping for some miracle rejuvenation – or whether I didn't want to give them any more food for anxious thoughts on the eve of the first Alpine stage of the race to Pratonevoso. Whatever the logic, I waited until breakfast the following day. Alas, there had been no sudden, overnight renaissance and there'd be no Mark Cavendish on the start line in Embrun that morning.

  In truth, there were worse times and places to abort this particular mission. Stage 15 would take the race over the third highest mountain pass in Europe, the Colle dell'Agnello (the race was due over the highest, the Col de la Bonnette, in two days' time) and into Italy. Of the seven stages remaining, only one looked certain to end in a bunch sprint, and that would be on the last day in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées; besides that carrot, in racing terms, the only conceivable benefit of staying on would be a bit more attrition on my CV and the badge of honour that was finishing the Tour. The risks were both more numerous and more laden with consequences. In under a month, I'd be in Beijing, riding an Olympic Madison that I'd been working towards for over three years. Without that to consider, I'd have done my best to press on, but, now, in terms of my form, time spent just surviving would be wasted time in terms of the sharpness I'd need in China. Far better to quit while I was ahead, rest for a week, then refocus. It was a painful choice but also the right one.

  That morning, in Embrun, our team press officer had alerted the media to my abandonment and said I'd be available to answer questions at the team bus before the start of the race. It was pouring with rain – another reason to be grateful – so I chose a sheltered spot, on the steps of the team bus, to talk about what had been over the past two weeks and what would hopefully be in the next month taking me through to Beijing. A crowd of perhaps two dozen journalists and cameramen had gathered – all of them keen to find out whether I appreciated what I'd achieved. I told them that my fellow sprinter, Thor Hushovd, had asked me the same thing in the race the previous day; just as I had with Thor, now I shrugged and said it'd probably take a while to sink in. Only months later, while writing this book, would I realise that, not only had preoccupations with the Olympics hastened my withdrawal from the Tour, they would also mean that the 'sinking in' would never take place.

  One of soigneurs drove me over the Agnello and to the feedzone, where he had to stop, and I hopped in with Brian Holm in one of the directeurs' cars. To the casual spectator, that stage to Pra
tonevoso was the most riveting of the Tour so far – with attacks, collapses, and every other key ingredient of a classic Tour stage. To me, it was a peculiar feeling to be witnessing it all from behind a car windscreen. For the previous two weeks, one race had existed in my eyes and mind and above all my legs, and now

  I was seeing a different Tour. It was a Tour I hardly recognised. A Tour in which I felt a spectator or at worst an intruder. A Tour in which I'd been left behind like a memory.

  I flew back to the Isle of Man the following day, the Tour's second rest day. Melissa picked me up from the airport and drove me straight to her parents' pub in Laxey. My 'hero's' welcome amounted to a kiss from my girlfriend and my pet golden retriever bounding towards me across the pub car park, red, white and blue ribbons tied around her neck. Or at least that's what I thought was the extent of it; had I been a little less weary, a bit more lucid, or just a bit less delighted to see Amber, I might have looked around and realised that the dog had been sent as a cunning decoy to divert my attention from the familiar cars that would have given away the surprise. I pushed open the door to be greeted by balloons, posters commemorating my stage wins and of course, most importantly, the family and close friends who'd perhaps celebrated and savoured my achievements more than I had. Melissa told me that she would have organised something bigger, only she knew that I was tired and I wouldn't want to be hounded. My dad had agreed but, not that I minded, it was him who ended up hounding me more than anyone.

  I said that I didn't follow the last few stages of the Tour on TV. That's not strictly true. When I heard that Marcus Burghardt had won Stage 18 in Saint-Étienne, outsprinting the Spaniard Carlos Barredo after a long breakaway, not only did I make sure that I caught the highlights, but I was probably more emotional watching Marcus win than I'd been after any one of my own stage wins. As I've already stressed more than once, Marcus had barely budged from the front of the peloton since the start of the Tour – a fact borne out by an independent analysis which gauged the visibility each team's sponsor had obtained during the Tour, and which found that Burghi's towering, six-foot-two frame had appeared on screen more than that of any other rider except the eventual winner of the Tour, the Spaniard Carlos Sastre. The difference was that Sastre had been pursuing personal glory all along, whereas everything Burghi had done until that eighteenth stage, he'd done for a teammate. It just went to show that, while Sastre was the rider who'd have a yellow jersey around his shoulders in Paris that Sunday, and while the pundits were pretty unanimous in pronouncing me their other 'star' of the Tour, in many ways, unacknowledged by the watching public and press, Marcus Burghardt had eclipsed both of us.

  I may not have been watching my teammates every day, but I was in contact with them throughout that final week, usually via text messages. George Hincapie was determined that I should fly back to Paris to celebrate with them on the final day but, to me, it didn't seem right; the applause on the Champs-Élysées was a privilege reserved for those who'd earned it – the reward at the end of a journey which I hadn't completed. George would have none of it; no doubt exaggerating, he said that if I didn't show up, the rest of the team would opt out of their lap of honour of the Champs in protest at my absence.

  Melissa believes in karma; she'd say that would explain the catalogue of mistakes and misfortune that befell us that Sunday, that, just as I'd tried to tell George, I was never supposed to be in Paris that afternoon. The complications started even before we set off, when Melissa went to London for a hen weekend and we had to coordinate flights for me to meet her at Gatwick on the Sunday morning. That plan was destined to fail as soon as I arrived at the airport on the Isle of Man at five o'clock that morning and found that fog had delayed my flight. No matter – I called Melissa and told her that she'd have to go to Paris on her own and that I'd swap flights, go to Manchester, then fly from there to Paris. I'd ask Bart, the team soigneur, to pick her up at the airport, then I'd join her later. With a bit of luck, I might still just about make it to the Champs-Élysées in time for the race.

  The hours ticked by. The delays got longer. Eventually, at around lunchtime, the fog lifted and I boarded the plane for Manchester, at around the same time that Melissa was starting her descent for Paris. Now she was the one waiting around as Bart showed up an hour late. We were finally reunited at eight o'clock, three hours after the end of the race, but just in time to join the team for the start of a celebratory dinner in a restaurant in central Paris. At least, that's what we would have done had we been able to find the restaurant. We'd sit down to our starters at ten o'clock. Knackered. After a few drinks, a few laughs and a brief visit to the Garmin team's end-of-Tour party, I'd been awake twenty hours and was desperate to fall into bed.

  HAD THE 2008 Tour de France changed my life? It may not have felt like it in the days and weeks that followed but in some tangible respects, there was no mistaking that some things were different. On the Isle of Man, I've always been just one of the lads, and that hadn't changed. There was more interest, more flickers of recognition when I went to the supermarket – even a giant poster welcoming tourists to 'The Home of Mark Cavendish' at the airport – but the Island was probably where life looked most like it had a month or two earlier. It was when I went back to Europe and particularly the Dutch and Belgian post-Tour criterium or circuit races that kicked off in the week after the Tour that I really got a sense of the shift in perception. The sole purpose of these races is to showcase the heroes of the Tour, who are unsurprisingly happy to bask in the adulation of tens of thousands of fans in return for substantial appearance fees. From my point of view, not only was the money a welcome bonus and the fast, nervous racing ideal preparation for the Olympics, but, in the echoing voices of the fans as they cheered my name lay the most vivid confirmation yet of how wide and powerful the Tour's impact could really be.

  With success, clearly, came popularity and, for a cyclist, with popularity comes money. In no other sport is a rider's earning potential so closely tied to his ability to generate publicity for a corporate sponsor, and, after a Tour in which I'd proven my ability not just as a sprinter but as a moving billboard for the Columbia brand, a re-evaluation of my market value both by me and my team was inevitable. I'd signed my first pro contract for €40,000 a year at the end of 2006, renegotiated and re-signed for another two and a half years in June 2007 when the victories started flowing, and now the sponsor, our manager Bob Stapleton and I all wanted to make sure I remained with the team beyond the end of 2009.

  I could have left Columbia at the end of 2008. Two teams had tabled bids equal to exactly double the salary Bob Stapleton was offering – and that was before I'd even needed to haggle. Ask almost anyone in professional cycling and they'll tell you that it's a short career, that the hundreds of thousands or even millions you can earn as a top pro won't last for ever, and that, therefore, the best offer is also, always, the biggest one. More than one person did tell me this when I confided in them that summer, and every time, I listened respectfully and politely declined their advice. I presented Bob with the minimum figure that it would take for me to stay and he said I had a deal. My new contract would keep me with the team until the end of 2010 with an option for 2011 – in other words Bob could decide to either keep me or let me leave.

  Why didn't I go elsewhere and double my money? Simple – for the same reasons that I'll now honour my contract with Bob, rather than join Team Sky, the much-trumpeted, eagerly anticipated British-based pro team that will debut in the pro ranks in 2010. When the man behind that project, the British Cycling Performance directeur Dave Brailsford, unveiled the first, concrete details of his plan in February 2009, the press at home and abroad were quick to assume that I'd be the fulcrum and figurehead of the team. The Sun newspaper even dedicated almost a full page to a picture of me winning Stage 5 of the Tour, alongside an article speculating that I could be bought out of a contract worth 'about £1.2m' a year with Columbia. They were wrong on two counts – once, spectacularly, on the value o
f my current deal, then again on the likelihood of me wriggling out of that deal before its expiry date.

  So what are those reasons? Well, one is that, while Sky look set to be one of the richest if not the richest team in the peloton – and logic certainly dictates that they'd be willing to fork out more for Britain's most high-profile Tour rider than any Spanish, Italian or, for that matter, American-based outfit – the wealth that motivates me is not the kind that appears on my bank statement. If they could guarantee me wins in Tour stages or Classics like Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo, that would be another matter, but that's the other issue: I solemnly swear that I couldn't guarantee the results I've had this year with different teammates. And what if I really couldn't? What then? Well, just flick back a few chapters and reread what I said about the implications of burning bridges with other riders. The very same applies to auctioning off your services to the highest bidder: for one, two or maybe three years, you cash the cheques and watch the zeroes multiply, but what happens the next time you come to negotiate, when your price has plummeted because you haven't won any races, and you haven't won any races because, although your new teammates are good, your old ones were the best? Is it just me or is it not more sensible to invest first in your potential as a bike rider, then skim off the material benefits as and when they arrive as a consequence of success?