by Ned Boulting
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Twitter Dedications
Title Page
How Cav Won the Green Jersey
Copyright
About the Book
This is not a 100,000-word, minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow account of the 2011 Tour de France.
This is not the story of Cadel Evans.
This is not the story of Alberto Contador, Andy Schleck, or Bradley Wiggins.
And it’s not even the story of Mark Cavendish.
(Although he is in it quite a lot.)
This is the story of the lesser-known heroes; the Johnny Hoogerlands, the Thomas Voecklers, the hitchhikers, the maniac press drivers, Norbert Dentressangle and the greatest ever Tour de France*.
I was there. And this is what I saw. That is all.
In this 20,000-word digital short, ITV’s Ned Boulting, author of How I Won the Yellow Jumper, takes an honest and idiosyncratic look at the unforgettable 2011 Tour de France, when Mark Cavendish won the Green Jersey.
*probably
About the Author
Ned Boulting started his broadcasting career at Sky in 1997, working as a reporter alongside Jeff Stelling on the now legendary show Soccer Saturday. In 2006 he was given the Royal Television Society’s Sports Reporter of the Year Award. He has presented three Tours of Britain for ITV, as well as the inaugural Tour Series, and contributed features and live reports on eight Tours de France. He is the author of the much-loved How I Won the Yellow Jumper.
Twitter Dedications
Thanks to all those who entered the Twitter signing competition to have your dedications included in the ebook. Here they are:
Amy O’Halloran / @amyling
For all the riders. Especially those with gigantic thighs.
Iain Smith / @smit1872
To next yrs book. How Wiggo & Cav won yellow & green in TDF 2012 & made Ned more cash! #fingerscrossed #WATP #GoWiggo #mod #GoCav
Vicky Higham / @higgumsmythe
To Cav&Wiggo saw u on podium in Madrid. In Paris 4 TdF final stage, 2012 here’s to a @TeamSky yellow&green in July #keepthefaith
Kai Muxlow / @kaimux73
For Kai and all the other everyday cyclists for whom Highgate Hill is the Alpe d’Huez.
Andrew Smith / @andyspex
To Hannah. Thanks for putting up with the books and still wanting to marry me.
Greythorne / @greythorne
I would like to thank Ned for introducing me to Paul Sherwen’s oak-panelled Trouser Gallery.
Phil Cramp / @phil_cramp
For the bike riders who always dreamed the dream, and those who brought that dream to life.
Mark Silcox / @msilcox
To everyone who cycles – keep riding and smiling!
Joe McTaggart / @joemctag
To Joey Halloran and Tom Turner who really got me into cycling in the first place :)
Michael Brader / @mike_brader
To everyone who rode clean. Chapeau.
Gareth / @designbyjack
To Gareth’s wife Jo (@mrsdesignbyjack), for constantly putting up with his two wheel obsession.
Chris Ethchingham / @theboyetch
To Charlotte, Georgie & Poppy as they have to put up with cycling on TV & dominating our lives every July.
Andy Dawson / @sonylite
To Mark and Phil for getting me into this cycling malarkey and Rosa who has to deal with/put up with my obsession! Love you all.
Stevie Dexter / @steviedexter
To Steve Wynn, as inspirational as he is fast at replying to Tweets. Keep the rubber side down! http://bit.ly/AqIFgz
Josh Owen Morris / @joshowenmorris
I like riding bikes and reading books when I’m not talking on the radio or releasing records, so thanks everyone.
Jeff Marshall / @jeffmarshall
To Jeff and all the Vita cycles team
Holly Blades / @lifeofholly
To Matt (@realstephens), who makes me want to actually start riding a bike just to spend more time with him. Love you. Holly x
How Cav Won the Green Jersey
Dispatches from the 2011 Tour de France
Ned Boulting
MARK CAVENDISH WAS UNDER pressure, as I had witnessed a couple of weeks before I left for France. There was nothing new in this. After all, he always was. But it was with some irritation that he challenged a roomful of journalists.
‘Who won the last three green jerseys? Don’t think about it. Just tell me.’
There had been an uncomfortable shuffling noise. It reminded me of those awful moments in echoing classrooms at school when it becomes apparent that absolutely no one has the answer. I looked at my notepad and pretended to be deep in thought. In fact, I was drawing a picture of a swordfish piercing a football, for some reason.
Silhouetted against the bright Soho Street beyond the window behind him, Mark Cavendish sat forward in his chair, injecting a little urgency into his enquiry. For years, he’d been besieged by hapless hacks asking him if he was frustrated never to have won the green jersey.
‘See?’ He leant towards the cluster of microphones, when it became obvious that no one could answer him straight away. ‘You can’t remember, can you? That’s the point.’
As points go, it was quite sharp.
* * *
I have a confession to make. Covering the Tour, I run and I eat. The running is fine, nothing more than a protracted mid-life crisis. But the eating is more of an issue. Philippe and Odette, who cater extravagantly for the ITV crew, have an on-going love affair with butter and olive oil. Because of their exquisite cooking, and because I run myself most days into a state of insatiable hunger, I tend to overeat at lunchtime. It’s no longer something I can control.
There are consequences. Being forty-two years old, and consequently a bit crapper than I was at the age of forty-one, I have a propensity to fall asleep. When it’s 30 degrees in the shade, and there’s cycling on the telly, I don’t just tend to fall asleep, I always fall asleep. Dozing off after a full-fat French lunch is as inevitable as a Michael Rasmussen time trial crash. I’m not the only one to succumb, I hasten to add. Chris Boardman, a year my senior, has been known to drift off, his chin heading south with his masterful head supported by the palm of his left hand. But, being a freak of nature, he is capable of maintaining full 360 degrees sensory perception even while he’s dreaming of scuba diving in the Mersey, setting new hour records, selling more bikes, or whatever it is that he dreams of nowadays. That means it’s very difficult to get a clandestine snap of him snoring. Just as you’re framing up your camera phone, one eye will snap open. ‘Oi!’
On most days, on most Tours, I fashion for myself a restorative ten-minute window in which to nod off. The morning’s scripts have been written, the voiceover sent back to London, and all that remains for the working day is to watch the race and mop up the interviews afterwards. Normally the peloton is something like seventy-three kilometres out from the finish line, holding the breakaway at 4’26’. Or they are still rumbling along the valley floor, thirty-two kilometres from the foot of the final climb of the day. This is just the perfect time for a power nap, drifting off while Paul talks about Huguenot castles and Phil chunters along with lines like ‘Leopard Trek then, tapping out a rhythm. There’s Big Jens Voigt…’
I mention this by way of admitting that not everything about the Tour de France is always thrilling. Except 2011. Last summer, I remember falling asleep only once. In Montpellier. For about five minutes.
The race was that good.
How do you calibrate Tours? How, empirically, do you separate the good from the great? The humdrum from the h
eroic? By what measure can we determine the place each annual chapter will occupy in the century-long heritage of the Tour de France?
The statistics alone will only tell you a fraction of the story. Average speeds on the 2011 Tour, in this increasingly clean era, were nothing to write home about. The lead changed hands an unremarkable number of times. The overall winner himself, Cadel Evans, failed either to win a mountain stage or a time trial. He defended his way to the win. Brilliantly, arguably, but demonstrably short of panache.
So why are we all left with the memory of an immense race?
Here are a few reasons: Jérémy Roy, Thomas Voeckler, Thor Hushovd, Geraint Thomas, Pierre Rolland, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Mark Cavendish, Philippe Gilbert, Juan Antonio Flecha, Johnny Hoogerland. Stick a pin in the list of names and draw out a hero.
* * *
Even my convoluted journey to the start line in the Vendée felt epic. It wasn’t, of course, but to me these days, any car journey of over 200 miles feels epic. Again, I suspect this may have something to do with being forty-two. A journey feels especially awe-inspiring if it involves driving onto a boat.
My trip would start by driving from my home in London down to Plymouth, where I would catch the overnight ferry to Roscoff. Then I would pass by my friend Judi’s campsite near Morlaix, in Brittany, where I would disconnect the battery and leave the car to go gradually rusty under a beech tree in the corner of a field (I planned to return a month later to start a camping holiday with my family). Having dropped off the motor, I then needed to catch a series of progressively smaller and sillier district trains, till Woody and Liam would pick me up from a railway station at a location near somewhere I’d never heard of in the west of France. That was the plan, at least.
What a pilgrimage! I packed a book to read.
I didn’t have to wait long, either, for my first sniff of Tour de Franceness. Amid the humming engines and seagulls of Plymouth docks, a flash of red, and the familiar curves of their deliciously eighties’ logo. The cycling bit of my heart skipped a beat. It was a truck, yes, but so much more than that. It was a Norbert Dentressangle lorry. Contracted by the Tour to carry out its daily grind, these beasts are the oily soul of the race. And as such they are dear.
O canvas awning of blood red! O humble truck, workhorse of the French motorway network! What dormant longing your sudden presence quickens on this damp evening dockside! Mon semblable, mon frère!
I was quoting Baudelaire to myself. I was feeling pompous. I was off to cover the Tour de France. I think I should be forgiven.
The 2011 race looked great on paper. At least that’s the impression it made as I gazed at its curves and contours. They lurched and jumped across the folded creases of the official Tour map, spread flat against the plastic table top of the ferry’s bistro. The channel was in full swell.
The features swayed in and out of vision; those teasing uphill finishes, and the prospect of a well-proportioned wind in the north-west to blow holes in the race. Then there was the surprising scale and dangerous potential of the mountains of the Massif Central, before the Tour would throw itself at the mercy of the Plateau de Beille, the Galibier (twice!), Alpe d’Huez, and then a final time trial to seal everybody’s fates.
And after that, Paris, perhaps with Cavendish in green? That seemed a long way off. Water to be crossed.
With a black marker pen, I ringed the stages I believed he could win. There were seven of them. Then I pushed the map to one side and wolfed down a ferry meal, made palatable only because of the wine decanted from a series of plastic mini-bottles. I found my cabin in the windowless bowels of the ferry, took off my shoes, dropped onto the bunk and fell sound asleep.
* * *
It was strange how his story unfolded over the summer. Mark Cavendish, I have always understood, feels closest to those targets that are, well, closest to him. There is a certain remorseless pragmatism to his assembly line of honours. For a long time, I had known only his thirst for stage wins. It was absorbing to watch the growing dominance of the outstanding HTC team that had been assembled around him: their one stated aim being to shepherd the purest, most explosive sprinter in the history of the sport to his launch point. And time and time and time and time again, he had repaid their faith.
The bunch sprint had become his signature. The Tour de France, his parchment. Or if that sounds too precious, his spread sheet, for he understood well the fiscal relationship between winning and reward, between celebrating and sponsorship.
But what of his relationship with the green jersey? That was less clear-cut. He had ridden recent Tours with self-evident irritation in the face of an evolving Thor Hushovd, who had the presence of mind to throw his hands up in defeat when it came to outsprinting Cavendish, and decided to reset his targets by attacking the sorts of intermediate sprints where riders who looked only for stage wins dared not tread their pedals. Hushovd had become a marauding, opportunistic, classy attacker. Behind him, in 2010, Alessandro Petacchi, another grisly veteran, slipstreamed his way into green. And Cavendish, wisely, offered only meagre opposition. The green jersey, we read into his apparent ambivalence, was some sort of weird, and somewhat arbitrary, consolation prize for sprinters, who were one pedal turn away from obsolescence. The fastest man had no need for such fool’s gold.
But he could only convince us, or indeed himself, of his indifference for so long. In 2011 the points competition was reconfigured, reducing the number of intermediate sprints to just one, while loading more points onto them as an incentive. It had been carried out with Cavendish in mind. It was, I was given to understand, a mark of respect from the race itself. Christian Prudhomme confirmed as much when, to my great surprise, he told me, ‘Mark Cavendish had been the starting point in our considerations. To imagine a rider of his exceptional talent going through his career without ever once winning the green jersey – that would have been unthinkable.’ At least, I think that’s what he said. He was speaking to me in French, as was his wont. So he might have been talking about lawn maintenance or home baking.
There was also the question of legacy. Cavendish knew very well his place in the developing history of the sport. After fifteen stage wins, and with another clutch on the way, there was a sense that new targets should be set, the green jersey being the next in line. And so it was that he found himself being asked the question again.
In retrospect, that pre-Tour press conference had been very revealing. We’d all made our way to the downstairs restaurant area of the Bar Italia in Soho, which Cavendish now chooses on an annual basis for his pre-Tour de France press day, in homage to his breakthrough successes on the Giro.
I arrived at exactly the appointed time, imagining that it would be easy to grab a seat at the last minute. I was wrong. The attendance was big. Bigger, by far, than in previous years. I had to push my way back through the seated ranks, nodding in surprise as I noted how many general (and very senior) sports journalists had shown up. It was packed. The PA system, such as it was, seemed woefully inadequate. When Cavendish began to speak we struggled to hear him, his quiet voice dying into the cluster of Dictaphones on the table in front of him.
With the press conference underway, he seemed to be conducting a guided tour of his disparate personality traits. One by one, he dished them out. And we ticked them off. There was the bullishness, the bratishness, the short shrift. There was the self-effacing charm, the humility, the respect, and the humour.
And then there was the surprising thoughtfulness. He took so long thinking about his answer to one particularly innocuous question from a Norwegian journalist that I genuinely thought he’d slipped into some kind of state of deep meditative trance. His gaze wasn’t so much ‘faraway’ as utterly absent. He appeared to be mouthing his response, preparing it for broadcast, seeing how it felt on the tongue, before allowing it to pass into record. Fascinated, I craned forward to catch his extremely well-prepared words.
‘No. Not really,’ he said, finally.
We all scribbl
ed down his answer, unable to remember what the question had been.
At one point, he stopped abruptly, mid-answer. He appeared to be looking over the tops of all our heads at something behind us.
‘Look, it’s me.’
We craned our necks around. On the back wall of the restaurant hung a plasma TV. The screen was filled with a two-dimensional, digital Mark Cavendish lounging across a television studio couch on some pre-recorded daytime show.
‘He’s good, he is.’ Cavendish said of himself. He was goofing around now. And so we laughed along with him.
It had been a very Mark Cavendish affair.
* * *
On arrival at my final destination, Liam and Woody, my colleagues of numerous Tours, swung by to pick me up from the railway station. I greeted my old friends with the awkward palm-slapping shoulder-hug thing that we British blokes tend to use in lieu of any natural ability to express ourselves. I rounded on them for being late (‘Don’t you know who I am?), flung my bag in the boot (the same red and black bag I had used for the last four Tours, so still a relative novelty on board our car) and climbed in to my usual seat in the rear, my hand reaching unconsciously but with infinite precision to the seat belt. It was telling how the hand knew exactly where to find the belt.
The job got underway in earnest with the filming of the Riders’ Presentation. We stopped to drink a coffee en route to the absurd medieval theme park that had paid the Tour a vast sum of money to host the ceremonials. We took our seats at a Routiers café in the middle of a network of slip roads and dual carriageways, and settled down to our first act of menu perusal of the 2011 Tour. Moules-frites, and glaces artisanales. There, we were up and running.
Then, to my great delight, the top button on Liam’s trousers pinged off. It was as funny as anything I have ever seen. For the rest of the day, he had to operate the camera with one hand and keep his trousers up with the other. One set of slacks down into a three-week Tour, he was in trouble. We took a great deal of pleasure in this.