How I Won the Yellow Jumper (22 page)

When the interview got under way, though, I was struck by his thoughtfulness and his self-belief. Those twin tracks define the margins of every subsequent interview I have conducted with him, and there have been many. He spoke quietly of his own achievements that spring, of winning the Scheldeprijs by a whisker from the great Robbie McEwen to claim his maiden Pro-tour win. This, he recalled, was vindication of his form and ability. It delighted him, but it surprised him not a bit.

Now the Tour loomed. He was frank about the limits of his ambitions, freely admitting that he would ride no further than the foot of the Alps before stepping off. But at the same time he declared firmly his intention of winning a stage or two. He could see no reason why he shouldn't be mixing it with the world's greatest sprinters. After all, he told me, he was one of them.

What you think about Cavendish is ultimately a matter of personal taste. For some, his candour, coupled with unusually high-functioning self-esteem, is a source of genuine irritation. His readiness to acknowledge the efforts of his teammates when celebrating a win is one thing, but the scratchiness of
his complaints when fate deals him a slighter hand has caused a few to write the man off as cycling's superbrat. Others may just accept this as part of the necessary psychological landscape of the winner, and celebrate it. After all, there is much to celebrate.

I shook his hand, and gave him my pre-prepared speech with which I assail every British Tour rider on meeting them for the first time. I spoke to him about the need to bring him close to the audience back home, and apologised in advance for the inevitable badgering that would characterise the end of most stages. Would he please be patient enough to cooperate with my daily attempts to illicit a sound bite from him, however much he may find this to be a dreadful imposition? I thanked him very much in advance and impressed on him that his compliance would make my life a whole lot easier.

Cavendish looked understandably unimpressed, and from his lofty height of several inches shorter than me, cast up a somewhat wary look, then with the faintest of perfunctory smiles, he was off. Loping along at a distance of exactly two paces behind him went ‘Wagner'. I watched them round a corner, my broadcaster's grin welded to my face. Then I let it drop, and turned to Woody and Liam to see what they made of it. But they were already busily packing down their kit, and hadn't listened to single word of what was actually being said.

‘Weird voice,' offered Woody. ‘Needed to boost the levels a bit. But then it all got a bit Billy Joel on the hotel PA system, so I couldn't push it any further. Hope you can hear him OK when you play it back.'

I was left with the vague feeling that talking to Cavendish wasn't going to be the easiest job I'd ever have.

Three days later he skidded on his backside over a stretch of Kent tarmac, and by the time he'd dusted himself down and got back on his bike, Robbie McEwen had claimed the stage.
I chased after him along the drab stretch of Canterbury road that Le Tour had decided would be part of this year's route, until there was no longer any point. He wasn't going to stop for me that day.

A day later, on a foul and blustery afternoon on the road to Ghent, he fell off again. Using all the intuitive journalistic brilliance of a Pulitzer Prize winner, we deemed it necessary to interview Cavendish once more. This time, we had to involve ‘Wagner'. There followed painstaking negotiations over the phone, which bordered on the baffling:

‘He fell off.'

‘We know. That's why we want to talk to him.'

‘I don't think he'll want to talk to you.'

‘Well, could you please ask him?'

‘I could ask him.'

‘Thank you.'

‘But I think he won't want to talk to you because he fell off.'

And so it was finally that the matter-of-fact German curtly instructed us (by T-Mobile text message, naturally) to get to the team hotel and then to wait outside on the balcony. When we arrived at the venue after some circuitous navigation, the Belgian hotel staff barely disguised their suspicion. To make matters worse, it was just beginning to spit with rain. It was nearly nine o'clock at night, and frankly we were fed up. Fed up with the chasing the unfortunate and so far spectacularly unsuccessful Mark Cavendish. Fed up with the raining Belgian days of a Tour that had begun in glorious sunshine and wonderful London crowds. And the prospect of continually hassling the elusive Cavendish wasn't improving our mood much.

Through sliding glass doors we gazed on as, one by one, the T-Mobile team came down the spiral staircase to take their seats at dinner. All in their standard-issue Adidas clobber, they
had the languid, slow, satisfied gait of the well exercised and well massaged. And of the about to be well fed.

Cavendish appeared, the last of the nine to take his place. We nudged closer to the glass, trying to catch his eye; Dickensian orphans at the window of a sweet shop. If he would only spot us now, he would no doubt come and talk to us for the requisite three or four minutes so we could push off and finish our shift, and he could resume the intimate, pampered life of the professional cyclist without the attention of the national broadcaster on his doorstep.

But no. He sat for what seemed like an eternity chatting to Linus Gerdemann, before standing up from the table and heading towards the buffet where he spent the longest time imaginable weighing up the comparative merits of coleslaw versus pasta salad. All the time, we could see ‘Wagner' sitting at some distance from Cavendish, doing nothing by way of cajoling or persuading. Still, he seemed to be enjoying his glass of red and plate of cold meats, so that was some consolation.

By the time the sliding doors finally parted, and Mark Cavendish emerged onto the balcony, we were so dispirited we'd forgotten why we were there. He was disarmingly good to talk to, though, listening intently to my questions, and responding with bullishness and wit. I asked him about his two or three falls on Tour so far. ‘I've got that much puppy fat on me, I reckon I just bounce off the tarmac.' His lips curled into a smile. It was humility and toughness rolled into one very sweet sound bite. It made him tremendously likeable.

When we were done, we thanked him for his time, and he turned to head in again. To our surprise, he stopped abruptly in his tracks, and looking at all three of us, wretchedly still standing there, had the good grace to utter an apology, of sorts. ‘Sorry about keeping you lot waiting. You should have said.' And with that, he shot ‘Wagner' a bit of a glance, and was
gone, back off to the buffet for more Parma ham and olives.

Then it was ‘Wagner's' turn to shoot a glance at us. We left, hurriedly.

Two years later, at the home of SV Hamburg football club, I met ‘Wagner' again. I was there shooting some preview material for a UEFA Cup match. All afternoon, as we waited around for our various interviewees to show up, ‘Wagner' and I sneaked furtive glances at one another; aware that we'd met somewhere, but unable to remember where or when. Eventually, I cracked first.

‘
Wir kennen uns doch
,' I offered. Haven't we met?

‘
Ja. Tour de France, oder
?' ‘Wagner' smiled. ‘Cavendish!'

The Pfennig had dropped. I spent a little while chatting to him. He'd quit the sport altogether. That summer he'd seen the writing on the wall and had jumped from T-Mobile, indeed jumped from cycling altogether. The shockwaves that followed Jan Ullrich's tarnished retirement had led their national team sponsor to withdraw, the main TV stations to boycott the Tour, and the Deutschland Tour to be abandoned. ‘Wagner' cut a far happier figure in Hamburg, and we were able to laugh about the stress of managing a man who didn't necessarily want to be managed.

During the rest of that 2007 Tour, our pursuit of Cavendish was all about trying to second-guess when he might climb off and retire from the race. We tried to orchestrate a meeting before he disappeared altogether, but failed utterly. Often it's simply a question of logistics, which undoes the best-intentioned plans on the Tour. We might well have been able to get to him, and sit him down to reflect on his Tour debut, had he not decided to abandon on some distant incline on the road to Tignes. As he was being swept up by his magenta team car, and then chauffered off, probably to Geneva airport, we were hurtling in the other direction preparing to call home the
winner of Stage 8, and the new race leader: Michael Rasmussen. In short, we were about to disappear into a far bigger crevice, and the Tour was about to morph into another shape, trampling the story of Cavendish's debut underfoot. He managed a couple of top-ten finishes, but nothing more than that. Quickly, we all moved on.

A year later, though, everything was different.

I made my way at some hideously early hour to Birmingham airport on the Wednesday before the 2008 Prologue. A few days after returning from football duties in Austria, it was deemed necessary that I board a flight to Brest in Brittany. I sat rubbing my sleepless eyes and chatting to Liam who'd flown down that morning from Glasgow, wondering where another year had gone. As I spoke, I became peripherally aware that Liam had spotted someone way more interesting than me. He seemed a little distracted, a little less enthralled than he should have been in my seamless blow-by-blow account of Euro 2008. Eventually, he leant forward and whispered, ‘Don't look now, but isn't that Cav?'

Laptop under his left arm, his right hand trailing a tiny rolling travel case, and this time dressed in a very non-corporate pair of jeans. He plonked his stuff down, and went up to get himself a coffee.

‘Yes. It's Cav.'

A little cynically, I saw this as an opportunity. We were virtually alone in the departure hall that morning. The demand for places on a morning flight to Brest from Birmingham was obviously not quite what the airline would have wished. There was Liam, there was Cavendish, and there was me. To a journalist in my position, this represents a dilemma, a challenge, an opportunity and a problem, all rolled into one. The way in which sport is marketed and managed these days has restrained the once free and easy association between the media and the athletes to such a rigorous extent that encounters such as this
seldom happen, even in the much less regulated sport of cycling.

The simplest thing would have been to leave him completely alone. The most invasive would have been to load up the camera and try and grab an interview, guerilla-style. The most productive, and also the most polite and engaging alternative was the one I chose. Go over and have a natter. What harm could possible come of it?

I shook his hand. ‘Hi, Mark. You well?'

‘Hi. Not bad thanks.' A shy half smile. He glanced down at his laptop once again. I started off with some small talk. We spoke about his hugely successful Giro d'Italia. I asked him for his thoughts on the Tour. We spoke briefly about Brittany and airports and coffee. And that was that. I reckon it couldn't have lasted much more than a minute or two, and for no significant portion of that time did his eyes leave his computer screen. Sensing that I was on borrowed time, I went in for the journalistic kill. The question which we all dread, and which we all have to ask. The question that is the benchmark by which we judge each other.

‘Mark, could I scribble down your mobile number?' I thought that the rather cutesy use of the word ‘scribble' might somehow diminish the absolute significance of what I had just asked him. I tried to make it sound like I was asking him to pass the sugar, or what he was going to have for tea, when in fact I was asking him to trust me. That was the nub of it. Had I gained his trust?

‘Sorry, mate. I don't like handing out my mobile number.'

And that was that. The next issue to present itself was one of social etiquette. For how much longer, after what had amounted to a form of snub, should you hang around? To leave immediately would suggest that it was only ever the mobile number that you were interested in, and that the entire encounter had instantly been rendered meaningless. But
staying on too long afterwards would be awkward, too. Hadn't it just been made fairly clear where the parameters had been set? What could possibly be gained from dragging both of us into further discussions about the white chocolate chips in the muffin that sat glowering on a saucer in the middle of the table. Somehow, I fudged my exit and took my leave.

There was nothing about the encounter that had been rude or inappropriate. But it had been surprising, and a little disappointing. It bore the hallmarks of football. Until this point, cycling had seemed to me a happy playground for journalists, where the approachability and availability of the riders had seemed to be inbuilt in the character of the sport. Even Armstrong, although I know of almost no one who's ever claimed to have his mobile number, has been up for a chat now and then in a lift at a hotel or clutching a warm cup of coffee on a chilly morning as the mechanics prepared the bikes.

Yes, the mobile number is the obsession of the modern jobbing hack. By your SIM card's contacts are you measured. Sportsmen have developed many different ways over recent years of not giving it out. Changing their number on a weekly basis is still the favourite means of fending off the outside world. I have even fallen foul of the ‘made-up number scam', when a Premier league footballer, whose number I had asked for, amusingly answered, ‘Sure. It's 0777 777773.' I got halfway through writing it down before I realised what was going on.

But again, you must return to the issue of trust. I was two weeks into filming a documentary with Steven Gerrard a few years ago at the height of his fame as the swashbuckling captain of Liverpool. The building of trust had been slow and painstaking. It took a long time for me to persuade him that our intentions were benign, our discretion absolute. Then, one hideously wet December afternoon as I left his mansion in Formby after a long day's filming, I forgot I had my outdoor
shoes on and trod at least a dozen filthy black footprints in single file across the full extent of the white carpet in his living room. This was not a good moment.