by Ned Boulting
Although Liam’s primary concern was to replace his useless trousers, our first proper target before the start of the race was to sit down with Bradley Wiggins and get his thoughts on digital video tape. Big things were expected of him. He’d ridden all season as if freed from the arduous, if self-inflicted, pressures of the previous campaign. A few weeks previously Wiggins had won the 2011 Dauphiné, a prestigious race in its own right, and a significant form guide for the tour, as the Queens Club is to Wimbledon. He had beaten Cadel Evans into second place. His preparation had been exceptional, his ambitions were privately high, but his public utterances, muted. After the hyperbole of Team Sky’s launch and his 2010 capitulation, he wisely chose the course of expectation management.
‘You should never forget that I’m a track rider, really, who can time trial a bit. Or a time triallist who can climb a little. You won’t seem me attacking in the mountains. That’s not going to happen.’ A shy grin, but earnest eyes. I twiddled my biro and listened. How well riders talk about their sport. Is it simply a result of the solitary hours in the saddle? Is philosophy at one remove from chamois cream?
We sat opposite one another, in a corridor next to the huge, busy Salle de Presse. Wiggins talking so fluently, that I could hardly get the question out before he jumped in with his answer, typically a fraction before the question was finished.
I was very aware that ITV’s long-serving Producer/Director, Steve Docherty, was sitting behind me, rather disconcertingly, as I conducted the interview. It was a rare public appearance for a man who spends every July with his hands welded to the control panel inside a TV truck. This was probably because the vehicle, which was to be his home for the rest of the month, hadn’t yet been fully booted up and plugged in, so he was effectively officeless and had nowhere else to sit. But equally, I suspect he just wanted to see for himself what shape Wiggins was in. Literally. Wiggins was thin, even more so than usual, if that was possible.
As soon as the interview was finished, Steve jumped up very suddenly from behind me and ambushed Wiggins.
‘How much do you weigh then?’ He growled, almost accusingly, without introducing himself. I thought about butting in to make the introductions (just the basics, really: ‘Brad, this is Steve. Steve this is Brad’) but already the conversation had moved on.
‘Well, I’m six kilos lighter than I was at the start in 2009.’ Wiggins looked understandably disarmed by Steve’s tall frame standing inches from him, and demanding answers. It can be an intimidating sight, and one that I have had cause to be very familiar with over the years.
‘Bloody hell. Six kilos?’ I could see him calculating virtual odds in his bookmaker’s brain. ‘Right ho. Well, good luck.’ And with that Steve turned away. So too did Bradley Wiggins. They went their separate ways, leaving me on my own scratching my metaphorical head at the strangeness of the encounter. It was the first time in nearly a decade covering the Tour that I’d ever seen Steve actually talking to an actual rider.
I ran after Wiggins, and gave him a copy of my book, How I Won the Yellow Jumper, which had just been published. He looked suitably nonplussed. He had approached France with his targets intact, but he would leave with an unread paperback and his collarbone in bits.
* * *
I had also given Mark Cavendish a copy, too, back at that faltering press conference in Soho. The book contained a reasonably (and perhaps riskily) frank unpicking of the occasional difficulty of working with Cavendish’s unpredictable moods. I figured that, cycling being a fairly narrow gene pool, it was inevitable he would get wind of what I had written. So, in an attempt to head off his reaction at the pass, I decided to pre-empt any issues by confronting them directly.
‘Mark, you know I’ve written a book? Can I give you a copy?’ I slid the offending article across the table in his direction.
‘Oh yeah! I’ve heard about this. I want to read this.’ He picked it up and started to read the quotes on the back. I think I saw him smile at the point where he got to ‘evidently he was clueless’, the quote that David Millar had provided.
‘Thanks a lot,’ he said.
‘Well, you might not be saying that once you’ve read it. Anyway, some of it might strike a chord.’ I felt like I should be honest. He glanced up at me.
‘Will you sign it for me, please?’
I fished out a pen, and scribbled something.
To Mark. You might want to skip the two chapters about some bloke called Cavendish. Cheers, Ned.
Then he kindly posed for a picture, holding the book. He looked like he’d just been subjected to a mild electric shock; just enough for his eyes to pop out, and to enliven his hair. And he hadn’t even started reading it yet. I fretted a little. But then I reassured myself by considering how unlikely it was that he’d ever get around to reading it. He’d leave it in his hotel room probably and forget all about it.
Three days later, our paths crossed again. It was the eve of the National Road Race Championships. We were both watching a criterium race in Newcastle. He was standing at the finish line, patiently signing autographs and posing for pictures with an endless stream of fans.
When he saw that I was there, he nodded a coy hello at me. I went over and shook his hand.
‘Hi, Ned.’ He wore a curious smirk. Or at least I imagined that he did.
‘Hello, Mark, you all right?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Looking forward to tomorrow?’
He shrugged. But the smirk hadn’t quite gone away. I could smell an elephant in the room.
‘I read your book.’
‘Ah. Right. OK. Did you read the stuff about you and me, then?’
‘I’ve read it all.’
‘Really?’ I was amazed. ‘And?’
‘I thought it was good.’
There was a pause. He clearly wasn’t going to elaborate. I thought I’d quit while I was ahead.
‘Excellent. Thanks.’ A change of tack. ‘So what do you think about the course tomorrow?’
‘I pissed myself when I read about Wagner.’ He broke into a broad grin.
Wagner had been the imaginary name I had given to his erstwhile PR manager at T-Mobile, a man with whom I had experienced a few problems, and who had been on the receiving end of some fairly blunt treatment in the book.
‘Yes, but what was his real name, Mark? I just guessed that it was Wagner. I couldn’t remember what he was really called.’
‘No, that was it. He was called Wagner. Stefan Wagner.’
‘Really? And he did look like that, didn’t he? He did have a face that was “loosely based on Michael Stich”?’ I was being uniquely vain; quoting back a phrase from my own book. But it had been a description that I was particularly pleased with.
Cavendish shrugged. The smile suddenly went.
‘I don’t know who Stick is.’
‘Oh, right.’ I remembered that he was only twenty-six. Of course he wouldn’t know Michael Stich.
‘He’s that German Wimbledon Champion, from the eighties. Or maybe the nineties. Anyway, he won it once…’
At that point someone approached him for an autograph, and it became apparent that he’d stopped listening. I was left feeling like Spike Milligan’s overenthusiastic religious zealot in The Life of Brian, who only realises that he has been utterly deserted when he’s halfway through proclaiming, ‘Yea, he cometh! Like the seed to the grave…’ But no one is listening any more. He shuffled off stage right. And so did I.
* * *
The Tour was underway. Instantly there was carnage. Contador crashed at the earliest possible opportunity, hurting his knee and obviating the need for us to worry about him winning it, with all the ramifications his dubious status brought with it.
Phillipe Gilbert, wearing the Marmite colours of the Belgian National Champion, threw himself all over the race, winning, attacking, misfiring and failing and all the while looking like an extra from Mad Max, with his craggy features and bottle-blond barnet.
Ge
raint Thomas snaffled himself the white jersey for a while by finishing in the top placings day after day after day. That gave us an interview banker in the mixed zone, and provided the viewers back home with a stream of boy-next-door quotes: no-nonsense Welsh wisdom in this fancy foreign whirligig of a race.
‘How did you go out there today, Geraint?’
‘It was pretty hard, really.’
Can’t argue with that.
After a week or so of being brilliant, he was rewarded with a new five-year deal by Team Sky. A number of other teams had been sniffing around. Dave Brailsford had been forced to dig a bit deeper than he might have expected to retain Thomas’s prodigious services. The morning they made the new contract public, I was there to get his reaction.
‘You must be very pleased, Geraint.’
‘Yeah, it’s pretty good, really.’
Couldn’t argue with that either.
Rider after rider crashed out. From Vinokourov to Van de Velde, through Horner and Van den Broeck, they were dropping like wind-tunnel tested, highly paid flies. We embarked on the usual round of vox-pops from riders about safety on the race. It’s one of those complaints that surfaces annually. I cannot remember a Tour on which we have ever asked the question and got a different answer.
‘What do you think about safety this year?’
A perennial favourite, and a good question to thrust at a rider whose thighs have been effectively rubbed up and down with a giant tarmac leg-grater.
‘Perfect. Outstanding. Virtually risk-free. Next!’
But the weather was appalling. The sunny start melted away as we headed for the top left-hand corner. Brittany did as Brittany does, pouring misery on the race. Stage after stage finished in torrential rain, with riders spattered in mud. It lent the proceedings a retro feel. Old-fashioned valour.
Norway was having the time of its woolly-jumpered Scandinavian life. From the moment that David Millar’s Garmin team had powered Thor Hushovd into the race lead after winning the Team Time Trial (‘We just went out there to try and win the Yellow Jumper, Ned,’ as David Millar had explained with a wink in his live post-race interview), the Norsemen were in raptures.
They only had two riders on the race. But what a pair. One tall and blond; the other blond and tall. Thor Hushovd and Edvald Boasson Hagen. Hushovd had the clothing dilemma from which cycling dreams are woven. For seven days he had to cast aside his iconic rainbow jersey (worn by the reigning Champion of the World) in favour of the yellow jersey. That’s a bit like putting your half-eaten Crunchie to one side because someone’s just offered you a Toblerone. Except even better.
Not content with hogging the knitwear, he won two brilliant stages. The first of those came about amidst the Catholic gaudiness of Lourdes, and very nearly conferred a spirituality that the town’s nakedly commercial heart scarcely deserves. The second, into Gap, he rode out simply because he could. Not to be outdone, the considerably younger Edvald Boasson Hagen won a bunch sprint (of sorts) into Lisieux, and a Hushovdian breakaway across the border to Pinerolo on Stage 17. Two riders. Four wins. An amazing strike rate.
It didn’t make Boasson Hagen any easier to interview. There is a disengaged serenity about the young Norwegian that makes you wonder if he has any inkling of just how good he is and what he can go on to achieve. He smiles politely and gives answers which pull up at least ten seconds short of the standard minimum reply duration, as set out in the rule book. If you want to get a minute out of EBH, you need to have six or seven questions ready, which can take you quickly into unusual territory.
‘Edvald, congratulations. Tell me why you decided to attack when you did?’
‘What are your ambitions now for the rest of the Tour?’
‘Um. Ever been in a hot air balloon?’
Liam affectionately calls him Ice Cream Boy, in oblique homage to Hagen Dazs. It’s a name that works.
Norwegian television’s Dag Otto, whom you may recall drives a liveried car around France with his handsome leathery face plastered all over it, had upped the ante in response to his countrymen’s achievements. His TV studio now featured a table-top map of France, on which sat a toy car replica of the actual car he drove. It too, had a tiny little replica photo of Dag Otto’s handsome, leathery (but very small) face on it.
We suggested to Gary Imlach that he should get one, too. He didn’t seem to be listening.
Of course, Norway’s elation was short-lived. News filtered through overnight of the shootings in Oslo. A gunman, dressed as a police officer, had killed sixty-nine people at a Norwegian summer camp.
By the morning of Saturday, 23 July, the extent of the tragedy had become apparent. I made my way over to see the guys from TV2. They were standing around in the damp Grenoble air waiting for instructions from head office. I don’t think that they broadcast anything from the Tour de France that day. Suddenly their golden summer had been taken away from them.
There are rare occasions when the Tour’s self-important bubble is burst. This was one of them.
The finish line at Lisieux was another.
I had noticed an unusual proliferation of American cyclo-tourists. In general, clusters of loudly enthusiastic amateurs were the cue for considerable, and largely unwarranted, muttering from our crew. And this bunch was being particularly annoying. Partly this was because there were so many of them, partly because they were all wearing matching yellow jerseys (a BIG breach of etiquette), but mostly because they kept parading noisily through the back of the shot every time I tried recording a rather overwritten (and therefore complex) piece to camera at the finish line.
Looking more closely, though, I began to notice that they scarcely fitted the usual demographic. Many of them were black, which is shamefully uncommon on the Tour. They were all very young and, almost to a man, tattooed. And every other one had a limb missing.
I spoke to one of their number, a very polite, very handsome Italian-American. He explained that they were all veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Cycling together had become part of their rehabilitation. He told me how often these guys had been sent home to isolated communities with little or no support, and that only by meeting up on these cycle rides could they find kinship, and some chance to talk about their shared experiences. They were dropping in on the Tour de France, and riding the routes of the first few stages, often on specially adapted bikes for amputees. They avoided the Caravane Publicitaire, though, since its explosive noise had been far too close for comfort. The wars still rang in their ears.
When he left, one of his colleagues turned to me.
‘You know who that was, right?’
‘I have no idea. Sorry.’
‘That’s Sal Giunta. He’s the first living man since the Vietnam War to receive the Purple Heart.’
I watched Sal go on his way. Then I turned, and went back to the truck to carry on writing a script about Andy Schleck. It was one of those chance encounters that are the speciality of the Tour de France.
* * *
Cavendish got round to winning, albeit a little late. Having missed out on one or two earlier opportunities, it was in Cap Fréhel, on an uphill drag to the line, where he notched his first win. A remarkable victory. But not what either Liam, Woody or I will remember Stage 5 for. It was about nine o’clock when we got the call. We had just arrived at a ghostly hotel with oak panels, a lame dog, lace curtains and a lingering smell of deep fat fryers. We were in Saint Malo, a torturous two-hour drive from the finish line in Cap Fréhel. We’d just performed the ritual unloading of the car, and had assembled in the grisly foyer, ready to hasten away towards the sea front in search of a restaurant that didn’t serve human body parts.
‘Ned, it’s Mike.’ Our technical supervisor sounded a bit frayed on the phone. ‘Um, so now you have to get back to Cap Fréhel.’
‘OK.’ I looked at the others. A certain wide-eyed horror spread across my face and must have hinted at bad news. But just to reduce the room for ambiguity, I added, ‘That’s
shit. Why?’
‘The truck’s broken down. It hasn’t left the finish line yet. But we reckon we can still get an audio feed on air for tomorrow if you go back to the truck and get some kit off the trailer.’
Two hours later, we pulled up in the gathering darkness back at Cap Fréhel. It was a bizarre sight. Where there had been an entire broadcast village just hours before, now there was only a ploughed field. And our broken truck.
Woody spent the next hour scrabbling around in the pitch black (we had no torch) trying to retrieve the leads, cables, and nameless, numberless other bits of technical nuts and bolts that Mike had detailed.
Meanwhile I had to help Richard, our endlessly patient driver, talk French to a local firm of Breton emergency mechanics. The issue had something to do with tyres. I had a horror of this. After all, how do English speakers pronounce the word ‘pneu’ without not only sounding stupid, but also being stupid?
‘Bollocks!’ shouted Woody from the back of the truck as he banged his head on yet another overhanging crate.
‘All right, Woody. Don’t get in a silly little tizzy,’ Liam chipped in, encouragingly.
‘Et il se trouve où, le camion?’ The heavily accented Breton mechanic asked me on the phone. Where was the truck? A reasonable question, given that he had to find it.
‘Ici.’ I pointed rather inadequately at the field he was nowhere near, and I shrugged apologetically at Richard.
‘Bugger’. There was a thud of kneecap on metal. Woody was no longer enjoying being in the back of the truck.
Eventually we had all the gear. There was not a cubic inch of space left in the Espace that didn’t contain DIN leads and CODECS (whatever they were). I assured Richard that my telephone conversation with the Breton mechanic had been not only geographically precise, but also technically perfect, pinpointing the exact nature of the breakdown. Nothing could go wrong. We drove off, feeling furious, but nothing short of heroic. The show, mesdames et messieurs, would go on.
We didn’t get back to the Saint Malo hotel till one in the morning. When we did, the lame dog snarled, and the foyer smelt even more strongly of fat. We set our alarms for ‘stupidly early’, and went to our various cells without a word.