Boy Racer

by Mark Cavendish

  I watched Chris and Vicky receive their medals from the stands, while Melissa tried to console me. I then called Rod, who was back in England. As ever, while I ranted, he listened.

  'I gave 100 per cent but I didn't get it in return,' I told him, over and over again.

  I was talking about Bradley, but also about the Federation. For the last three years, ever since my world championship win in LA, they'd wanted me to keep proving myself, keep eating into my road commitments, yet they hadn't reciprocated with anything like the same resources they'd devoted to the other events. Every other member of the team was going home a hero, with medals around their neck, and the coaches basking in the golden reflection. I wasn't just going to be the forgotten man now; I'd been the forgotten man all along.

  As the age-old parental admonishment goes, I wasn't angry with Bradley, just disappointed. I didn't feel that three events were too much to ride – I felt that in my event, our event, he'd given up too easily and too early. In the past, and especially at the World Cup events the previous winter, Brad had carried me, but, at the same time, I'd had to dig in as hard as at any point during my career to allow myself to be saved. Now, in Beijing, I felt that I hadn't been able to carry him because, realising he wasn't at his best, he hadn't given me 100 per cent. There was also another, key issue, albeit one that I'd been aware of all along – the fact that Bradley had spent weeks training to do four-kilometre efforts, for the team pursuit, and now he found himself totally unprepared for the completely different nature of a 50-kilometre Madison.

  In our separate ways, Brad and I had both found ourselves in an unfamiliar position that day. I hadn't known how to deal with being the strongest rider on the track – which is what I felt I was – and Bradley hadn't known how to cope with not being the strongest rider. It came down to how we'd grown up as cyclists – me the underdog, the physiological mongrel if you like, who'd learned to scrap and scratch because it was the only way for me to survive. Brad, on the other hand, was a thoroughbred who, in my opinion, was so used to relying on his natural talent that he perhaps hadn't learned how he could still win when that innate ability wasn't functioning. It was a classic role reversal: I didn't know how to take control when I was on the front foot, and Brad didn't know how to react with his back to the wall. In short, like a lot of supremely gifted athletes, Brad perhaps hadn't learned to suffer like I had. It's just my view, but perhaps that was also why his achievements on the road didn't match the success he'd had on the track.

  Some of these points I made to Rod on the phone, some I made to Dave Brailsford when I went back to the Village that night. After dropping Mum at her hotel, Melissa and I had gone for a short and none-too-celebratory drink, after which we'd taken taxis home – she to the hotel and I to the Village. On my way into the apartment block, I'd walked past a large contingent of the track team, all dappered up and ready to go out. I'd kept my eyes on the pavement, walked past and said nothing.

  Dave Brailsford came to find me in my room. My tune hadn't changed: I'd given more than I'd got back; I'd had to prove myself over and over again, yet in the end it had been me who'd been let down; Brad hadn't give me 100 per cent.

  'We're disappointed, too,' said Dave.

  'Well it's too late now ...' I replied.

  Next to tackle the beast was Jamie Staff. I'd always liked Jamie, just as I liked Chris Hoy and Jason Kenny, his fellow goldmedallists in the team sprint, and now Jamie proved what a lovely guy he was by sticking around to commiserate with me when, really, he should have been out on the piss with everyone else. As I sobbed on the bed, he told me the story of his disastrous Games in Athens in 2004, and how he'd felt similar then. My nightmare day ended when Jamie left the room, the light went off and I fell fast asleep.

  The next morning, I was back on my road-bike, back on that mind-numbing highway – but really I'd rather have been anywhere in the world other than Beijing. My flight back to the UK was booked in four days' time, but now I wanted out as quickly as possible. The flight could be switched to the next day without any problem – the only glitch was that, whether I left the next day or four days later, as the only track cyclist who was going home without a medal, I'd also be the only one going home in economy class.

  Luckily I was booked on the same flight back as Jason Kenny. I say 'luckily' because not only did Jason have two medals – one his gold from the team sprint, one his silver from the individual sprint – but he also had the bright idea of lending me his silver at the check-in desk. It was an ingenious plan but one which appeared doomed when the lady at the check-in desk told us that the flight was full and the medals-for-upgrades arrangement British Airways had laid on wouldn't apply.

  Economy class it was, then. Or at least so we thought, until, an hour or so later, we were in the departure lounge, waiting to board, when we saw an air hostess walking promisingly in our direction.

  'Are either of you two medal winners? We've got two seats in first class ...'

  'Yeah, both of us ...' I smiled innocently, producing Jason's silver, while Jason waved his gold.

  As she frowned, her eyes settled suspiciously on my medal. 'That's not your medal, is it?'

  'Er, how do you know that?'

  'I know exactly who you are ...' She paused, '... But you're lucky because my dad and my husband are both cyclists, and I know you won four stages of the Tour de France. On you go, here are your first class tickets.'

  Her dad and husband will have been grateful that she bent rules; a few weeks later, for her troubles, they had a signed jersey that I'd worn in the Tour.

  NOT SINCE the winter of 2005–06, when Ed and I returned from out first season with Sparkasse in Germany, had I felt as demotivated as in August and September 2008. It perhaps didn't show at the Tour of Ireland, where I won three stages, and what turned out to be my final race of the season, the Tour of Missouri, where I'd fired off another three, but I'd travelled from Beijing back to the Isle of Man with no desire to train, no desire to do anything. Anything, that is, except eat junk – just as I had in that 2005 winter of discontent. By the time I turned up in Ireland, a week after leaving Beijing, I'd already started to put on weight.

  What got me down most were the well-meaning but infuriating comments I kept hearing on the Isle of Man. Every time I left my front door, it seemed, someone would mince up, ready to tell me 'hard luck on the Olympics' – and almost never mentioning the Tour. I carried on riding and training throughout but, instead of enjoying the afterglow of my record-breaking Tour performances, I was almost starting to ask myself whether it had all been worth the bother.

  Of course I shouldn't have taken it personally, and I didn't – it wasn't my fault that the British public hadn't grown up with road cycling so didn't appreciate it in the same way as the Belgians, Italians or French – but, by the same token, it was pointless my moaning when I'd known all along that this was the status quo. If I'd wanted my picture in Hello! or a guest appearance on Richard & Judy, I would have focused on the track long ago. I didn't and so I hadn't.

  At the end of October, at around about the same time that I began work on this book, the Observer Sport Monthly magazine named me as one of their athletes of the year and published an interview in which I was critical of the British Federation and their role in the Madison fiasco. I phoned up Dave Brailsford shortly afterwards to clarify that I hadn't been misquoted and that I stood by what I said. In his own defence Dave made the same, justifiable point that he'd made back in Beijing, namely that it was his job to win gold medals, and it was much easier to do that in events where more variables could be controlled, like the team and individual pursuit. 'But it'll be different now. We're changing things,' he said, referring to a restructuring which had seen my coach, Rod, handed responsibility for all 'bunch' races on the track, i.e. the Madison, the points race and the scratch race. Dave also argued that he wasn't to blame for Bradley having a bad day in the Madison.

  'Dave,' I told him, 'I know what you're saying, but if you're get
ting credit and awards for the team's success in Beijing, you've also got to take the flak for whatever goes wrong ...'

  One of Dave's awards – the most prestigious – would be the 'Coach of the Year' at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony in December. The shortlist of ten for the title of actual 'Sports Personality' had been unveiled on 1 December, when I was with my Columbia teammates at our first training camp in Majorca. Knowing what fervour had been whipped up around the Olympics, and the comparatively low profile of the Tour in Britain, I wasn't hopeful of a nomination – and, sure enough, when the list appeared on the BBC website, my name wasn't among the ten. I had – it's true – received six votes in the top-tens submitted by twenty-eight newspaper and magazine editors as part of the initial selection process, but five other, Olympic medal-winning cyclists had received more honourable mentions, and four had made the final ten.

  'Blimey, look at that – four cyclists nominated for Sports Personality of the Year,' I told my roommate in Majorca, Bernie Eisel, as I surveyed the list open on my laptop.

  'Oh, yeah?' Bernie said. 'You reckon you've got a chance?'

  When I'd finished pointing out to him that, no, I didn't have a chance because I wasn't on the list, I ran through the lucky quartet of riders who had made it. He knew of all four except Rebecca Romero. I explained that she'd won the women's individual pursuit in Beijing. By this stage, four months on from Beijing, I was quite calm about the whole thing – or at least resigned. The same, evidently, could not be said about Bernie ...

  'Yeah, but, you won four stages, four stages of the Tour de France!' he bellowed. 'I can't, I can't understand it, I don't believe ... it's fucking ridiculous. It must be a British government conspiracy to kill road cycling!'

  Two weeks later, on the night of the programme itself, I was watching with Melissa from our upstairs lounge at home on the Isle of Man. The Olympic cycling team, of which I, strictly speaking, was a member – albeit an insignificant, non-medal-winning one – won the 'Team of the Year Prize'. As I've already mentioned, Dave Brailsford was the 'Coach of the Year' and Chris Hoy a deserved 'Sports Personality of the Year'. I was thrilled for Chris – a lovely bloke and a great ambassador for his sport.

  It would be wrong to say that I received no coverage; I was given precisely four seconds – as long as it took Sue Barker to say the words '... and Mark Cavendish won a record-breaking four stages of the Tour de France'. Or as many seconds as I won stages.

  The nomination or lack of one hadn't fazed me. Those four seconds, however, were like four daggers through my heart.

  BY THE time March arrived, just two months into the 2009 season, I'd already won two stages at the Tour of Qatar and another two at the Tour of California, which, in its third year, was now regarded or at least hyped as possibly the third most prestigious stage race in cycling, behind the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia. I was also now deep into my preparation for arguably cycling's single most illustrious one-day race barring the World Championships – Milan–San Remo or 'La Classicissima' as the Italian fans or tifosi referred to it. I said barring the World Championships; what I ought to point out is that, for Italian riders, Milan–San Remo is the World Championships.

  The 2009 edition of La Classicissima was to mark the race's centenary, and a universal truth of cycling almost as old stated that a twenty-three-year-old would lack the stamina to win a race which, at 298 km, was the longest single-day event in the sport. In addition to that cliché about endurance being a quality you acquired with age and experience in cycling, there were also three more substantial hurdles to overcome, and they were called Le Mànie, Cipressa and Poggio. To experts, these three sacred places of cycle racing will require no introduction; for the benefit of non-aficionados, they are the three principal climbs on the San Remo course, and also the three main obstacles to a sprinter triumphing in San Remo at the end of La Classicissima's 300 kilometres. In the race's 100-year history, these three climbs had been added to the traditional route along the Ligurian Riviera in three phases, every time the sprinters had threatened to develop a stranglehold. The most recent and most troublesome adjunct had been Le Mànie in 2008; at 4.6 kilometres long and with an average gradient of just under 7 per cent, it was no Alpine or Pyrenean mountain pass, but, even 94 kilometres from the finish, it was difficult enough for me to know that this sprinter, at least, would be out of contention by the time the peloton swung on to the San Remo seafront around seven and a half hours after leaving Milan on 21 March.

  I had – it's true – noticed a discernible improvement in my climbing at the Tour of California in February. A knee injury I'd sustained playing – embarrassingly – a snowboard simulator on the Nintendo Wii at the end of October meant a month's delay to the start of my preparation for 2009 – a month in which I wasn't possessed by the ravenous hunger which often took hold when I was back on the Island training, the weather was cold and the racing season still a prospect as distant as the Cumbrian fells I could see across the Irish Sea on a clear day. I'd eaten sensibly and scrupulously, and as a result, without any great effort or purges, I was now three kilograms lighter than at the same stage in 2008, without having lost any of the speed or power which were the dual pillars of my sprinting prowess.

  The first week of March was spent in Manchester with Melissa, attending to various forms of marriage-related bureaucracy to do with our October ceremony in Cheshire. That week, I'd also hooked up with my old friend and Madison partner Rob Hayles, who lived in the nearby Peak District. The rides with Rob that week were literal trips down or rather up not one but several memory lanes – climbs which were once regular fixtures in our training sessions with the Academy, and where I was once subjected to the same pride-shattering ordeal on every ascent. I knew that I'd improved in the space of five years but it was only now, as I coasted up hills that once supplied the contoured backdrop for my nightmares, that I could measure just how much I'd progressed.

  If I'd surprised myself with the way I was climbing then, at the end of that week, I'd gone to Italy for the Eroica one-day race and surpassed even my own, newly revised expectations. The Eroica has been described as the Italian equivalent of Paris-Roubaix, largely by virtue of the fact that, while a succession of long and brutal cobbled stretches have earned the former the nickname 'Hell of the North', almost 60 kilometres of unpaved strade bianche or white roads fulfil the same purpose of decimating the field in the latter. That, at least, is the popular misconception; in reality, it's the Tuscan hills that those strade bianche wind up and down that make the race a war of attrition - and which prompted me to write off my chances of winning even before I arrived on the start line in Gaiole in Chianti. Five hours later, while thrilled with my teammate Thomas Lövkvist's victory, I was left ruing the fact that I'd not shown more faith in myself; had I done so, I'd have been attacking the corners at the front of the peloton and much better placed to stick with the leaders at least until the steep rise to the finish in Siena. As it was, I had to be content with a none the less encouraging twenty-fourth place and yet another, startling vote of confidence for my climbing – which had come from weaving through riders on those climbs like Ryan Giggs on a mazy dribble.

  Luckily, my impressive form in the Eroica passed almost unnoticed in the media. Why luckily? Well, a week earlier, I'd been informed that one bookmaker had me down as a short-odds favourite for San Remo, a revelation which didn't cause me too much concern, but which did create undue pressure – undue because the notion that a twenty-three-year-old sprinter who the previous year had been possibly the worst climber in the Tour de France could get over Le Mànie and the Cipressa, and the Poggio and win the concluding bunch gallop, in his very first appearance in the race, ought to have been nothing short of preposterous.

  Ought to have been preposterous. Ought to. That was just it – those training sessions with Rob Hayles in the Pennines and now L'Eroica had started to give me ideas. I hadn't shouted about it, mainly because, having seemed 'preposterous' that notion w
hich the bookies had down as a ten-to-one shot now appeared merely far-fetched. In the close season, Bob Stapleton had recruited recently retired sprint legend and five-time San Remo winner Erik Zabel as a technical consultant and, now, from L'Eroica in Tuscany, I travelled north with Erik, our Italian directeur sportif Valerio Piva,Tommy Lövkvist, Bernie Eisel and two other team mates, Edvald Boasson Hagen and Michael Albasini, for a two-day scouting mission on that last stretch of Ligurian coastline which, every spring, plays host to the most nervous, most nail-biting racing on the calendar. Over the next forty-eight hours, I'd already decided, I'd find out whether I really could win Milan–San Remo or not.

  NOT THAT it mattered, in light of the eventual response, but the answer to my question had to wait until the second day of our San Remo 'field trip'. It finally arrived when, having only ridden the last 85 kilometres of the race route, and only climbed the Cipressa and the Poggio, on the second day of our 'field trip', we turned right in the village of Noli, a small road sign announced the start of Le Mànie and the road suddenly tapered through a narrow archway and shot upwards. Five minutes later, my heart thumping like techno music, and my body and backside rocking to a much slower beat, I turned to the lads, shook my head grimly and summoned all the breath left in my lungs to utter a single sentence: 'There's no fucking way I'm getting over this ...'