I've chatted once or twice with Lance Armstrong about this over the past few months. Lance texted George after my first win at the 2008 Tour, inviting George to pass on his congratulations, '... unless he's a dickhead'. George apparently replied that, nah, I wasn't all that bad really and that I actually reminded him a fair bit of a young Lance, perhaps alluding as much to my fearless approach to racing as my fiery temperament.
Lance and I finally met at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas in September 2008, then again, on our bikes, in the second race of his comeback, the Tour of California. It was there that he gave me a piece of advice as simple as its source is authoritative: 'Don't waste your money.' I told him he needn't worry; my directeur sportif Valerio Piva may tut and shake his head at my designer jeans, and I may have developed an expensive habit of buying glitzy watches for myself and my teammates, but I know the value of money. There's hardly a top Italian pro these days who doesn't own a Ferrari or at the very least a Porsche; they can keep them – if and when I next buy a car to replace our Lexus 4x4, it'll probably be second hand, and it certainly won't have a prancing horse on the bonnet.
As for the other attractions of joining Team Sky, and the idea that I'd rather be in a team where the majority or at least a significant proportion of the riders will be British, I'd respond that I love my current teammates and my current directeurs sportifs, and struggle to imagine an environment where I could feel more comfortable. I get on well with Brad Wiggins, Geraint Thomas and Dave Millar – all of whom would be expected to ride for Sky at some point, whether it be next year or further down the line – but I won't be offending any of those guys when I say that I'm equally close to Bernhard Eisel, George Hincapie, Adam Hansen or a number of other teammates. Again, I don't want to prejudge Team Sky or indeed any other team in the peloton; I do, though, believe that my team has an X-factor – a unique mix of ability, camaraderie and unity – that would be nigh on impossible to re-create elsewhere. Between the twenty-nine of us, we won seventy-seven races in 2008 – more than any other team – yet the atmosphere remained that of a bunch of mates meeting up for a joke and a laugh. George, Bernie and another one of my most experienced teammates, Michael Rogers, all say the same – they've never had this much fun in any of their previous teams.
Much as I would like to vacuum-pack and deep-freeze what we had in 2008 and more specifically at the Tour, of course I'm not naive enough to think that our team won't evolve and change. To an extent, at the end of 2008, that had already happened, as the German pair, Gerald Ciolek and Linus Gerdemann, both left for the Milram team. As I've already intimated more than once, while I may not have welcomed Gerald's departure, it certainly made sense, and not solely on financial grounds. He's too good to be straitjacketed to the role of lead-out man – and won't have to be at his new team. Incidentally, there'll be plenty more about another rider who didn't renew his Columbia contract, Brad Wiggins, in the next chapter.
The crucial thing, of course, is that the team carries on winning, whoever the personnel, whatever the colour of the jersey – which, to my slight regret, changed from the blue neon that illuminated the Tour to a yellow and white design for 2009. Tweaking our kit design wasn't, but perhaps could have been, one way of disguising me and disguising the fact that, after my four stage wins at the Tour, suddenly, me winning a sprint was treated by fans and the media as a formality, and losing as a major story. Fortunately, in the second half of 2008 and the first few weeks of 2009, the ratio remained clearly in my favour, thanks to my three wins out of three bunch sprints at the Tour of Ireland in August 2008, three out of five at the Tour of Missouri a month later, two out of two in the Tour of Qatar in February 2009 and two out of three at the Tour of California later in the same month. Most reassuringly, on every occasion bar one or two that the final 200 metres of a race were a test of pure sprinting ability, and my lead-out train was on time and unencumbered, which was usually the case, the press was left to write about the formality of victory rather than the calamity of defeat.
One of my main sprint rivals, Tom Boonen, knows all about this predicament – the pressure of having amassed enough trophies and accolades in your early twenties for a lifetime's achievement, and the expectations that come with such precocity. Boonen has freely admitted over the past couple of years that, having won the World Championship road race in Madrid at twenty-four, he began to lack motivation. Depending on what you read, and whose version of his positive test for cocaine in 2008 and multiple driving offenses over the past couple of years you believe, Boonen has either slightly lost his way and the odd sprint – or, for a brief period, he lost the plot entirely.
In theory, I could be vulnerable to the same malaise. I've also won a lot at a young age. In common with Tom, I'll never win the Tour de France or the Giro d'Italia. Sometimes, I'll confess, in those rare moments in the winter of 2008 when I could reflect on the previous, heady summer, I even wondered how on earth I'd done it all – and more importantly, how I could possibly do it all again.
Does this mean I'm doubting myself? No, more a case of acknowledging that a rider winning four stages in a single Tour is a twice-a-decade occurrence – and that no one has accomplished the feat twice in the same decade since Eddy Merckx in the 1970s. If fans in Britain and abroad expect me to reel off another four or more in 2009, I very much hope that I won't disappoint – but I'd also like them to appreciate that any such deed wouldn't be a case of normal service resuming. It would, in fact, be like climbing to the pinnacle as high as anything in the Alps or Pyrenees – pretty much the peak of what a sprinter can achieve – for the second time in twelve months.
I'm glad to say that, for me at least, motivation shouldn't be a problem. Besides stage wins, at the Tour, I hope one day to wear and take home the green jersey that rewards the winner of the points competition – a race within a race running parallel to the Tour's general classification and offering a sliding scale of points for the first three riders over intermediate finish lines, dotted along the route of every stage, and for finishing positions on each stage. The fact that the green jersey is also occasionally referred to as the sprinters' jersey tells you what kind of rider usually contends. Unfortunately, there are also points available on mountain stages, plus of course the obligation to finish the Tour – which means that the sprinter sporting green in Paris is often not the fastest but the most consistent and the most resilient in the mountains.
Prize jerseys in the Tour and indeed other stage races are one goal that should help to keep me occupied and focused for a few years yet, not to mention a good incentive to work on my climbing. When I say work, I should really say continue working, or even let nature take its course, given that, the more I race, the more mountains I climb, the more I improve. By my own admission, I'm currently one of the worst climbers in the pro peloton, although the perception of what that status entails sometimes frustrates me. No, contrary to what a lot of the 'aficionados' on Internet forums think and write, I don't get dropped 'every time a race goes over a railway bridge'; take the time to examine the route details of one stage that I won in the Giro in particular last year, and you'll discover that it wasn't flat, wasn't merely 'hilly', but did in fact require me to climb a mountain higher than Ben Nevis.
What every cycling fan knows as the 'Classics' are another source of intrigue and stimulation. I mentioned in a previous chapter that the first races to inspire and excite me when I was a teenager were also the most brutal events on the calendar – the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix, with their cobbles and crosswinds and iron-willed, iron-jawed Belgian and Dutch stars. The Grote Scheldeprijs may not rival either of these 'monuments' in terms of prestige, but my wins there in 2007 and 2008 certainly deepened my fascination with the hotbed of racing that straddles the BeNeLux countries and northern France. At our training camp in Majorca in January 2008, Brian Holm had introduced me to a brilliant documentary about the 1976 Paris– Roubaix called A Sunday in Hell; I watch that film now and think that's the era wh
en I wish I was riding. The guy who won was a Belgian by the name of Marc Derneyer. You watch that film and can only marvel at how hard someone like Derneyer was – or the Italian Francesco Moser, who finished the race with his undervest flapping over his mud-splattered shorts. That's cycling – 279 kilometres, over cobbles that rattle your bones like 10,000 volts of electricity, in the wind and cold, with mud flying up into your face, into your eyes and mouth, with some big Belgian bastard on the front who wants to rip your legs off. That's cycling. Some of the blokes who race these days spend too much time worrying about their tanlines.
The Tour's green jersey, Paris–Roubaix, a World Championship road race that's due to take place on a sprinter-friendly course in Melbourne in 2010 or in Copenhagen in 2011, the Olympic road race in London in 2012 and the Tour of Flanders when I'm a touch older and stronger – there's plenty still to aim at. My interest is in leaving a lasting imprint on this sport, and I know that you don't do that by enjoying one or two good seasons, winning a few Tour stages then burying your head in a bowl of powder. Thankfully, those two years at Barclays also taught me to value what I have and that I should think very long and very hard before doing anything that might compromise a career and a wonderful life. It would be both disrespectful and wrong to suggest that there were any cautionary tales among the six lads with whom I shared some fantastic adventures at the Academy in 2004 and 2005, but it's worth reminding myself every now and again that, the odd piece of misfortune here, the odd lapse in focus there, the odd injury, and the dream can soon disappear. In their own ways, Christian Varley, Bruce Edgar and Tom White were all more talented than me yet all stopped racing years ago; Matt Brammeier, again at least as gifted as me, now races for a small, Belgian-based team run by the former rider Sean Kelly; Geraint Thomas rode the 2007 Tour de France with Barloworld but has yet to win a pro road race; Ed Clancy, like Geraint, is now an MBE after his gold-medal-winning ride in the team pursuit in the Beijing Olympics, but on the road competes mainly in Britain for the Halfords Bikehut team.
What has set me apart so far is my passion – and the logical conclusion would be that I'll cease to flourish and maybe even cease to survive as a pro as soon as that runs dry. The logical conclusion might also be the correct one; fortunately, at the moment, I can't conceive of how a feeling so raw and so real could possibly evaporate at least for the foreseeable future. When it does, there'll be only one, sad but necessary, course of action: hang up my bike and retire – very probably to a slightly more slow-moving life on the Isle of Man with Melissa and, who knows, maybe a couple of little boy or girl racers.
What I do know for certain is that I'll carry on splitting opinion, carry on wearing my soppy big heart on my sleeve, carry on smiling when I win and scowling, swearing and spitting the dummy when I lose. A bit like the 2008 Tour de France, it's been one hell of a journey to this point and, at twenty-four years of age, I think it's fair to say and hope that it's only just begun.
Stage 14: Nîmes–Digne les Bains, 194.5 km
* * *
1. Oscar Freire Gomez (Spa) Rabobank 4.13.08 (46.102 km/h)
108. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 3.27
General classification
* * *
1. Cadel Evans (Aus) Silence – Lotto 59.01.55
140. Mark Cavendish (GBr) Team Columbia 1.55.31
EPILOGUE
'GO BRAD! They're gonna blow. They're gonna blow ...!'
As Bradley's hand dropped into mine – a bullet into a gun barrel – my arm drew back, then the trigger released, a huge roar of excitement and anticipation filled the track, as if everyone in the velodrome had read my lips. Maybe that had been the problem for the last forty-five minutes – if the crowd didn't know what we were saying, they definitely seemed to know what we were plotting. Thus, every time Brad started cranking up those massive levers, or my shorter, stumpier little pistons started pumping – and one of us moved a few metres off the front – the noise from the stands alerted our opponents to the danger. All through the race, we'd been attacking – powerfully, relentlessly – yet, every time, it seemed as though, as much as their support was inspiring us, it was creating a wave of sound on which every team was also hitching a ride.
This time, I sensed it was different straight away. The Madison is considered an 'endurance' event – and in terms of track cycling, 200 laps of the velodrome and 50 kilometres is a long way, even if you do ride in teams of two and share the distance. In road cycling, of course, 50 kilometres is nothing – a quarter, a fifth or even a sixth the distance of the most prestigious one-day races. That's why I was telling Brad that the others would blow; with thirty laps to go, and over 40 kilometres already ridden, this is where Brad and I, both of us full-time road pros who dabbled in track racing, would come into our own.
We needed a lap. Just one lap would do it. There are two ways to score in the Madison: finishing in the first four positions in sprints worth 5, 3, 2 and 1 points at predetermined times in the race, or lapping the rest of the field. The winning pair is the one that has gained the most laps at the end of the race; in practice, at the end of a Madison, there are often multiple teams tied on the same number of laps, and that's when the number of points gained in sprints becomes the decisive factor. If you like, sprint points are the 'goal difference' of the Madison.
One lap. Easier said than done, especially as several teams had already opened their account. That meant two things – one, that it was no good dragging them with us, for them to gain a second lap while we notched our first and, two, they would spit blood, teeth and guts to stop us getting away. In other words, we'd have to do it on our own – one team against seventeen other pairs, logic, science and the bounds of belief. Watching Brad streak away now, don't ask me why, but I liked our chances ...
An hour later, we were standing on the top step of the podium with gold medals draped around our necks, smiles on our faces, lumps in our throats, a Union Jack above our heads and 'God Save the Queen' in our ears. As the final bell had rung out, Brad and I now miraculously level on laps with six other teams, I'd glanced at the scoreboard for a final check on what we needed in the final sprint to ensure victory. The board had displayed only positions five to eight, meaning I'd just have to sprint and hope for the best. As the same scoreboard now finally indicated, my third place had been more than enough:
1 Great Britain 19 pts
Mark Cavendish
Bradley Wiggins
2 Germany 13 pts
Roger Kluge
Olaf Pollack
3 Denmark one lap and 11
Michael Morkov
Alex Rasmussen
It was Manchester, March, and we were World Champions. Now we just had to do it all again in five months' time in Beijing.
MY TWO World Madison titles both relied on a lot of luck – not because I didn't deserve them but because, in theory, I shouldn't have been riding on either occasion, in Los Angeles in 2005 or in Manchester in 2008.
In the winter before LA, I was only pencilled in to partner Rob Hayles when Geraint Thomas ruptured his spleen in a crash as we were riding to the Sydney velodrome on a training camp in Australia. Privately, I'd felt pretty miffed when Gee had been selected ahead of me in the first place, then quite vindicated when, having been told that I'd replace him, I finished second in the Sydney World Cup Madison with Tom White, another one of the Academy lads. Tom, smug and southern, and me, northern and narky, had never been great mates, not that there was any real malice intended when, a few days after our Madison in Sydney, I took a brand-new pair of shorts out of his suitcase and put them back in the wardrobe as he was packing for Bendigo, the next stop on our trip. Someone grassed, Tom was furious and so was Rod – so furious that he told me I'd just lost my place in the team for LA Worlds. Tom then, ironically, probably saved me by announcing in the briefing at a circuit race in Bendigo a few days later that he refused to ride for me. Four years on, Rod says now that he should have put his foot down and given Tom a choice – follow
orders, lead me out, or not race at all. As it turned out, we all rode, Ed and Matt Brammeier did a fantastic job and I won ahead of ... Tom White. Not only had Tom's irritation backfired on him, it ended up returning me to the moral high ground and, after more discussions between Rod and Dave Brailsford, to my place for the Worlds.
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