How I Won the Yellow Jumper (23 page)

If anything was designed to put our relationship under stress, this was. Despite my offers to get contract cleaners round straight away, he sent me, on my way back down to London, with a scowl and an unconvincing sounding, ‘Don't worry about it.' But worry was all I did. I fretted into late that evening, when out of the blue, I received a text message. ‘Enjoyed filming today. Hope you got home OK. Don't worry about the carpet. Skipper.' The message was a very welcome relief, but the real prize was that it included his mobile number, of course. An act of trust. Of course, he's changed it a dozen times since.

‘I'll ask you again tomorrow about your mobile number, Mark,' I quipped as we disembarked the tiny propeller plane at Brest airport. The faintest grin, and he was on his way.

The first few days of that Tour didn't go well for Cavendish. If his reputation for prickliness is built on anything at all, it's built on the interview that he gave to Matt after Stage 3, when the bunch had failed to chase down a break, and Cavendish had seen another realistic chance of a maiden stage win disappear. Matt collared him just as he crossed the line, and pushed him hard on why the chase had failed. It was something I'm sure that I, too, would have done. It's just that that year, I was somewhere else at the time.

The interview incensed Cavendish to the extent that a forensic analysis of it appears in his autobiography, which came out the following year. Four pages at the start of Chapter 3, to be precise.

There are many things you'd like to do when you've just blown your chance in a stage of the Tour de France, but trust me when I say that giving a television interview is a fair way down your list of priorities.

Mark's just warming up.

‘Mark, Mark, can we have a word?'

He must have seen from the look on my face that the prospect didn't exactly fill me with glee, but the guy had a job to do. Anyway, as soon as the camera starts rolling, you're trapped; tell him to stick his microphone where there's never any sun on the forecast, or even put it more politely, and you've just starred in your own version of
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
.

I've seen that look on his face. It's a kind of soft-edged threat. It has an intensity that unsettles you. Matt did well to hold on to his train of thought. He concludes:

‘Interviewer: ‘Mark, so what have you learnt from today?'

Me: ‘That journalists sometimes ask some fucking stupid questions.'

Although not actually what he said (Cavendish writes that he only thought of saying this after the interview had been recorded), it has a certain ring of truth to it. It's probably what he thought. And it's probably what he still thinks.

I like Mark Cavendish, almost precisely because of his occasional thinly disguised fury. He may exercise his right to answer monosyllabically, petulantly, with irritation, anger or grievance. He sometimes, again rightly, decides not to talk to the cameras. To walk, or to talk. It's up to him. He can do, or be, whatever he likes. But unless the dumb lens of the television camera is present, he will exist in a vacuum. And, alongside the ‘fucking stupid questions', there will be no glory, no
adulation, no crowds. There will be no riches. No race. Mark Cavendish is thoughtful enough and clever enough to know all this. At least most of the time.

One afternoon the following spring, after he had stormed to three individual stage wins of the 2009 Giro d'Italia, we spoke at length about this. I had made my way to Bar Italia in Soho where Mark was ‘doing' the British media in one fell swoop. His book had just come out, so there was that to plug too. Dressed in his regulation white Columbia shirt, complete with wrinkly unironed collars, Cavendish had set up shop in an upstairs room. One by one, members of the press filed in and out of there, using up every last second of their allocated timeslot. I requested an audience later on in the day with him, figuring that the fewer journalists I had queuing up after me, the less pressure would be exerted by the Columbia press officer to get the thing done.

‘Hi, Mark,' I offered as a loosener. Then, brandishing my copy of his book in one hand, ‘Won't keep you long. Just got a few fucking stupid questions for you.'

The ploy worked. Cavendish cracked a huge grin, and protested straight away, ‘That wasn't you, you know. It wasn't you that did that interview.'

‘I know it wasn't. And I want you to go on the record and tell everyone that it wasn't me.' We were enjoying this. The release of a little tension.

With the camera rolling, we then went on to discuss the subject in depth. I wondered whether he thought we had the right to ask such questions on the finish line. His reply astonished me.

‘Of course. It's cycling. It's what makes our sport special.' He went on to defend his tormentors in the press.

He noted the differences between cycling and other sports, he paid homage to the culture of the bike race which flings its heroes into the sweaty clutches of the people, where they can
see their heroes, ‘gladiators', as he referred to them, for what they are: just men who do a hard job. He paid articulate tribute to the traditions of covering the Tour; those moments on the television which had lodged in his memory and framed his understanding of the sport that had been his childhood passion.

The moments he recalled were precisely those post-race shots of triumph or defeat, when the camera is witness, prosecution, and defence, and the rider is in the dock. He understood to perfection the nuances that made up the fabric of my job on the Tour. It was a little humbling to hear him speak like that. I had always assumed that Cavendish belonged to a generation that didn't think too deeply about the wider heritage of their sport. I was quite wrong.

For my part, I willed him not to change. I tried to impress on him that his occasional awkward moments serve only to paint a rounder picture of the man, and speak of his fullness as a character, as a man pushing himself to the limits of his endeavour. No right-minded person would ever begrudge him the right to remain honest and authentic.

And so we came to a happy truce. He defended my right to stick a microphone under his nose; I defended his right to ignore it. Then the real interview resumed.

‘Mark, does it irritate you that your achievements have gone unappreciated by large sections of the British public?'

‘No, but I tell you what does irritate me. It irritates me that I get asked that question all the time.' Etc., etc. And straight away, we were back to what we both do best. Fucking stupid questions and tetchy answers.

To return to the sunshine. To go back to Châteauroux.

My radio blasted into life. ‘One rider out the front, but he'll be caught. One kilometre to go. Columbia on the front. It's Cav-tastic!' Steve Doherty bellowed his excitement over talkback.

Then the helicopters, the clattering of hands on the
advertising boards, the increase in pitch and volume from the loudspeakers . . .

‘Cavendish!'

The first of his Tour stage wins came in Châteauroux. It was Wednesday 9 July 2008. I remember little else of the day. But I remember the heat. I remember the result.

Food. However oddly it may be presented, it fills in the gaps in the Tour. With normal life on hold as we hurtle headlong through another July away from home, food compensates for a nagging feeling of dislocation. It's not unreasonable to suggest that it becomes a substitute for happiness and something of an obsession. Luckily we are in France. And they're quite good at cooking.

The 2003 Tour had begun to roll south. By the time my birthday came around, it had reached Lyon and was bracing itself for the famous assault on the Alps, which would leave Beloki in hospital and Armstrong in the yellow jersey. That evening the production company had managed to find us accommodation just outside the city in a tiny hamlet, constructed, to all intents and purposes, along a bypass.

For a country rich in beautiful villages and towns, there are many which are considerably more prosaic. I can remember little
of the two-star auberge in which we found our beds that night, other than that it conformed to a checklist of depressing features: yellow wallpaper, brown bedspread, dusty nylon flowers in a dusty vase in reception, next to a small bowl of ageing sweets. Shuttered windows were flung open on entering the room in an attempt to blow away the smell of last night's guest. The shuddering of traffic sloughing along the Route Nationale and a toilet, that doesn't flush so much as vibrate and sputter.

There was no question of dinner on-site that night. Our keys had been laid out on the counter. The landlady was already in her pyjamas, with the French version of
Temptation Island
blasting out of a television in her back room.

Once we'd thrown our bags in our rooms, we convened seconds later, hungry and a little angered by the turn of events that had left us once again standing in a grisly hotel reception without a dinner plan. Matt dragged Madame away from the television for a second time and consulted her. She seemed to suggest that there would be a chance of getting a bite to eat about half a mile down the road. This struck us as a little unlikely, since it was just a busy bypass, and we would be heading out of town.

To our astonishment though, after a ten-minute walk we found ourselves in a little square framing a fountain in the middle, and two restaurants, with tables outside. Where this had materialised from I have no recollection, and at the time no understanding. It seemed to make no sense at all. Then, in a second stroke of good fortune, we made the right choice between the two restaurants.

What followed was both funny and fabulous. Menus were handed out. We staggered through them, and made our choices. When the lady who owned the restaurant came out to take our orders she simply refused to accept them, telling us instead that we had made incorrect selections and that she would bring us something quite different. She did the same with the wine. She
laughed and cajoled and generally bossed us around. But she provided us with a remarkable feast. I ate a rich beef stew. We sat with idiot grins strapped to our faces, soaking it all in. The wine was fine and salty. The night was warm. The Tour felt very good at that particular moment.

Later on that evening the lady's daughter was ordered out to come and talk to us. According to her mother, we would have so much in common. It transpired that she was a rugby correspondent. She knew nothing of cycling and cared even less. We knew little of rugby and cared even less. After a few moments of polite nodding and amused silence, she thanked us and took her leave, shaking her head in irritation at her mother's assumptions.

It was one of those rare nights on the Tour when the race and the clamour and the stress just backed off, and we could breathe and drink and relax. It was also the first of hundreds of places I've visited and loved and of which I have completely failed to make a note. And now it's too late.

It often is on the Tour.

It was very late too when, a year or two later, we descended some creaking staircases into the fusty dining room of the Hostellerie de la Poste somewhere near Tours. By a miracle of compassion, the patron had agreed to keep the chef on if we hurried to the table. So we did.

The place was empty, expect for us. It was stuffed full of reproduction eighteenth-century furniture, all falling gently asleep under the antique electric flickering of a vast reproduction chandelier. One of the floorboards was loose in the middle of the room, and as each of us crossed the open space to reach our table, our footsteps made a tabletop crammed with crystal decanters rattle violently. One by one we took our places.

The food, as I remember was full of butter, and a bit full of itself. The wine, a bottle of Château du Val de Mercy (one of the rare occasions on which I actually committed to memory a memorable bottle of wine) was as beautiful to drink as French wine often is. The outstanding feature of the evening, however, was the menu itself.