How I Won the Yellow Jumper (18 page)

He looked my way. He stepped my way. He spoke no English. I had no other option but to address him in his native tongue.

‘Alessandro,' I repeated needlessly, playing for time. ‘
Una bella vittoria!?
' Half question, half statement. It would have to do.

I beamed at him and thrust my microphone in the direction of Alessandro Petacchi, the winner of Stage 3 of the 2003 Tour de France. He started to speak.

‘
Si
. . .' But, I confess, the rest was lost on me. I nodded along as if I understood, bravely facing down the salvos of quick-fire Italian being sprayed in my direction. I felt not the slightest discomfort. On the contrary, I was beginning to see that stuff like this happens on the Tour, the natural habitat of us charlatans and linguistic chancers.

The Tour de France is a cacophony of polyglot noise. For obvious enough reasons, the mother tongue of the race used to be French, but that's not quite as true now as it once was. Although continental pro-riders have always been enviably multilingual, there was once an understanding that French was their common currency. Now that doesn't necessarily stand up to scrutiny. The race doesn't really know what language it should speak. Norwegian? German? Spanish? Italian? Russian?

There used to be a distinctive feature of our production, which, sadly is no more. Some viewers remember it fondly and call for its reinstatement. But, for others, its disappearance has been a cause for celebration.

We used to film almost every rider staring directly, if
sheepishly, into the camera and delivering the killer line: ‘Hello, I'm (insert rider's name here). You're watching the Tour de France on ITV.' These little introductions would play before and after every commercial break. Since English was seldom their mother tongue, the variety of ways riders would find to mangle this simple message was a source of constant wonder.

‘You see Tour de France in TVI. Thank you.'

‘Hello. This is the Tour de France. I am watching TV.'

‘This is ITV's Tour de France on the BBC. Hello.'

I am deeply respectful of each and every rider who ever obliged us in this way. I admire their courage, mostly because I share their shortcomings.

These days everyone just has to muddle through, and muddling through is especially invigorating when you neither speak nor understand the language in question.

Nowhere is this muddling through more widespread than in the interview pen. This is essentially an area about the size of two table tennis tables, demarcated by the same kind of agricultural fencing that usually encloses sheep before they're dipped. That sometimes seems to be a fair reflection of our status in the eyes of the men in charge. Recent Tours have featured the French team Agritubel. This fencing is precisely team Agritubel. This fencing is precisely the sort of product
Agritubel they manufacture. I often wonder whether the Tour cuts a deal with them to provide free housing for the ladies and gentlemen of the media in return for a place in their race.

On arrival in this undignified cage every day, there are handshakes and nods of acknowledgement. There are brief exchanges of gossip and little flurries of laughter between fellow journalists sharing a joke. It is a cocktail-party atmosphere, with a nervous edge. Over many years, I have become familiar with this international melting pot. I have started putting names to their faces.

Frankie Andreu, the perfectly groomed, white-toothed, deeply tanned American reporter. He was a teammate of Lance Armstrong in his pre-cancer Motorola team, and he would be thrust into the spotlight when the testimony given by Frankie and his wife Betsy threatened to implicate Armstrong in a doping scandal. Armstrong was later cleared, but how Andreu maintained a functioning relationship with the Texan with all that flying around I will never know. But he enters the pen, and, in the nicest possible way, always takes up the prime spot, at the corner nearest the area behind the podium from which the riders will eventually emerge. No one challenges his pre-eminence. He is clearly the alpha male.

Then there is Mike Tomalaris, Tommo. He is the lanky legend of SBS and hosts the coverage in Australia; a man with a broadcaster's haircut and a perpetual air of confused amusement playing over his lips. He is a kind, funny man. There were times, even through my first Tour, when he would bow to my superior knowledge. I sometimes bumped into Tommo half an hour after the end of a stage when he would give the impression of being only dimly aware who had won. Time pressure never weighed too heavily on his shoulders.

There's Dag Otto, from Norwegian TV, who drives a car with his own face all over it. We teased him once on the way to the car park: ‘Which one's yours, Dag Otto?'

‘That one over there.'

‘Really?'

Then there's Jorgen Leth, the famous Danish film director who now slums it as a cycling reporter and who'd rather have been directing Brecht at the Copenhagen National Theatre than bumping shoulders with me. There's Bernd, the twitchy German, and his perspiring ineffectual colleague Thomas. And Alessandra De Stefano, the first lady of Italian cycling. A cosmopolitan flock standing about in their pen, ready for dipping.

I have become fascinated by the nuances of living in a kind of fully functioning scale model of Europe. I pride myself on separating from some distance the Austrians from the Swiss, simply by their footwear (Austrians practical, Swiss needlessly flamboyant). I understand instinctively that you can approach the Danes at any time, but the Italians can be tetchy, and the Norwegians often like to have a snooze in the afternoon, so it is best to leave them alone.

It is a daily delight to be surrounded by a dozen different languages competing for pre-eminence. I have became sharp at realising that the Dutch can speak all of them, but while the Swedes can converse in very passable French, only Germans from southern states like Swabia, Bavaria or Hessen will trust themselves at all to speak the local tongue.

The Americans would if they could. But they can't, so they don't. The French grudgingly break out in a little English if they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. The Italians are the same, although they understand more English than they let on, which I find a bit sly. The Belgians watch Formula One on their tellies and don't mix much.

The Brits, well we're up for anything really, even if it stretches way beyond our capacity. Not much of a stretch, come to think of it.

One of the biggest linguistic challenges I had was to interview Jean-Marie Leblanc, the former General Director of the Tour de France. A blustering, bald, portly, trad-jazz clarinet-playing former Tour rider who ruled the roost for years, it was an honour to have made his slightly overbearing acquaintance. He was a towering figure really, who presided over the Indurain and the Armstrong years, over drugs busts and riders' strikes, demonstrations and machinations.

But his lasting legacy as far as many of us were concerned in the media, was the introduction of the ‘detachable lanyard'. The word lanyard may conjure up images of ship's chandlers and nautical knots, but in the narrow little world of sports events it means one thing only. It is the brightly coloured, often sponsored necklace of polyester from which your laminated accreditation is hung by means of a clip. A sub-standard lanyard can spell all sorts of bother, for if the accreditation drops off and gets lost without the wearer noticing its departure, days of bureaucracy can ensue before a replacement can be issued. Thus, the lanyard is, for the month of July, your professional life. I have been known to shower still wearing it.

The relief when you can take it off and pack it away for good in Paris is the same feeling you get when someone turns off a poorly tuned radio: until it's gone you'd never realised how irritating it had become. After a decade in this line of work, I have a collection of these things from all sorts of
events, which, up until the time I wrote this, I have never admitted to. I suspect all my colleagues are the same, and that somewhere back at home, perhaps in the attic, they have a dedicated Lanyard Wall, and dream of walking their grandchildren up and down it, regaling them with tales of sports journalistic heroism.

Jean-Marie Leblanc's contribution to the development of accreditation accessories was to design a lanyard with a cunningly designed clip which would detach if tugged hard enough. The official line was that this was a safety measure designed to prevent hapless journalists from getting snared up in a rider's handlebars and dragged down the tarmac by the neck. But we didn't believe that for a second. We suspected the Machiavellian Leblanc had designed it in order to remove his enemies, and to rule by fear.

He had been seen on a number of occasions, it was darkly rumoured, to instantaneously remove someone's accreditation at the flick of his meaty wrist. One deft movement, and the offending journo's summer was over, quite possibly losing him his job. The stakes were high: you didn't mess with Him.

Mentally, I tried hard to prepare intensely for those rare occasions when the multilingual Matt Rendell was not around and I would have to interview Leblanc. As a rule, we only ever bothered seeking out his opinion if there was a matter of some controversy to discuss. I was conscious of being in the presence of a man who had complete control over his thoughts and their expression. He joined them up. He was a joined-up man.

His answers soared, exquisitely constructed and spoken with a precision and clarity of accent that left you in no doubt of his absolute Frenchness. He was elegant and exact, but just below the silky surface of his speech, you would occasionally become aware that his words carried the furious threat of a butcher with a meat cleaver in his hand. Talking to him was
like going back to school.

In conversation with Leblanc, I would occasionally attempt to rise to the occasion, daring to use words that I was only half-sure of, like ‘
néanmoins
', or ‘
d'ailleurs
'. I would try to get as close as I possibly could to the distinctive aspirated whistling noise that real French people so effortlessly tack onto commonplace words like ‘
perdu
' and ‘
tendu
'. I might even, on a good day, have contemplated letting fly a casual subjunctive.