How I Won the Yellow Jumper (3 page)

111
The logo on the side of a Team Sky Jaguar.

112
Team Sky's fleet: the bus and one of the Jaguars.

113
Personalised number plates on one of Sky's Jaguars.

114
Geraint Thomas, wearing his British national champion's jersey, being interviewed on the 2010 Tour.

115
Mark Cavendish on the 2010 Tour.

116
Mark Cavendish, caught on a TV monitor.

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Mark Cavendish, the centre of attention behind the podium.

118
The ITV truck parked up next to a toilet in Paris.

119
A beautifully worded, instructive notice in the Tour toilets.

120
A chemical toilet placed next to some sculpture in Paris.

121
A non French-speaking driver appeals for help.

122
A 'mushroom'.

123
Alberto Contador takes a long drink before answering questions on the 2010 Tour.

124
The note given to me by a police officer who had witnessed my accident.

125
A cheap photo opportunity.

I'd love to say that cycling has always been my passion. It would be advantageous to claim that I had run away from home in the mid-seventies, stowed away on the Zeebrugge ferry, armed with only a Curly Wurly to sustain me and a Kodak Instamatic to record my adventure, in the hope of catching a glimpse of Joop Zoetemelk riding the Flèche Wallonne. But, to my great regret, that would be a lie.

Instead I have had to accrue history, to acquire heritage at double-quick pace.

I was a few days short of my thirty-fourth birthday when I first saw a bike race of any description. It wasn't any old bike race, mind you. It was the Tour de France. And I was there to report on it for television, which meant that I had to at least look and sound like I knew what I was talking about. That confidence trick wasn't always successful.

My first year covering the Tour passed in a haze of angst-ridden confusion and I vowed never to return. Yet, unconsciously, something of the Tour had wormed its way into my DNA. Before I knew what I had done, I agreed to work on the 2004 Tour. Then I ended up covering every Tour between 2005 and 2010, eight Tours in all. I have now spent a total of twenty-four weeks following the peloton round France, gradually growing ever more obsessed with the race.

After the best part of a decade, I might almost claim to understand it, or at least bits of it, from time to time.

I am not the only one to have made this progression. The chapters to come are for anyone who has made a similar journey in following this extraordinary sport. They reflect, to some extent, my transition from novice to devotee, taking in both scepticism and wonder. They also invite a minute inspection
of the nooks and crannies of life covering the Tour de France. They tell of champions and car parks, yellow jerseys and filthy socks. They celebrate the race, but they celebrate all the other stuff, too.

That ‘stuff' is what makes this a unique event: the millions of fans lining the road, the thousands of Tour vehicles, the villains, the virtuous, the hungry and the hopeless. It's not just about the riders. For the rest of us, it's the mere act of crashing through France, chasing after an event that won't stand still: a series of lurches from incident to accident.

You will notice that, like the Tour itself, this book doesn't follow a straight line. It has a mind of its own, and tends to jump from superstar to supermarket, from the riders to the roadies, from an appraisal of the career of Lance Armstrong to a meditation on the workings of launderettes. My experiences over the eight Tours that make up the substance of this account are necessarily a little disorderly. The random nature of everyday life grinds away at your journalistic endeavour, and leaves it smoking like the red-hot clutch plate of an overheated Renault Espace, immobile and stranded up a mountain. In fact, there's a chapter about just that.

Like those mind-bendingly difficult pixellated designs that were all the rage in the eighties, my hope is that, if you stare at these chapters for long enough, suddenly a fully rounded 3-D picture of the Tour de France will emerge. Fleetingly.

But what of the race itself?

The sport of cycling, not for the first time, faces extreme scrutiny. In fact, it exists in a permanent state of tension. A series of doping scandals involving some of its biggest names has taken cycling's credibility close to the brink. It feels as if the watershed moment, the point of no return, is now both increasingly imminent, and indefinitely delayed.

Ever since I have started to cover cycling, bad news has broken across its bows. But incessant attacks on its integrity,
the most damning from within cycling itself, have done little to dull the growing popularity of the sport, particularly in the UK. The unravelling of reputations at the very highest levels has coincided with the emergence of a generation of British cyclists able to compete with the very best in the world and, in the case of Mark Cavendish, thrash them. So even if the Tour has never had it so bad, we, in our British bubble, have never had it so good.

That's not the only ambiguity that has defined my evolving attitudes to covering the race. In fact, there's not much about the Tour that isn't ambiguous. Therein lies the fascination.

A colleague once told me that the only way to follow the Tour is to use the same technique that Inuit people use when faced with the blinding whiteness of the snow. They look at it ‘with an off-centre gaze'.

Here are my off-centre thoughts.

Ned Boulting

June 2011

‘Who won the Tour de France?' This is what they were asking me.

A difficult question: a slippery customer, alive with Gallic guile. It would take some thinking about. But thinking wasn't that easy any more.

I was drawn to the sight of my knees. They, at least, were recognisable. The scars still there from my countless childhood scrapes, but hidden now by straggles of hair. In fact, the whole length of my shins and calves down to my ankles were hairy – something that, while it didn't directly puzzle me, seemed strangely ill-fitted to the moment.

Above the curvature of the kneecap there was a flourish of scarlet, not blood, but something odd and out of place. Elastic. Red elastic, tight too. The red trim of a pair of shorts whose shiny black expanse seemed both utterly alien and entirely familiar.

Cycling shorts. Lycra. Where had they come from? Who had put me in a pair of Lycra shorts?

I jerked my head upright, urgently scouring the antiseptic environment for clues. A tray of metallic bowls. A curtain. Posters of diseased lungs. Nothing informed me. No help at all as my heart and mind raced, chasing after an explanation. Understanding trickled away like sand through my fingers. I returned my
gaze to the sight of my shorts, torn slightly on the left thigh. This time I contemplated them with sullen resentment.

I was, I could only conclude, ever so confused.

‘Ask him again.'

‘Who won the Tour de France?'

July 2003. What was I doing in Paris?

I had slept fitfully in the Best Western alongside the old cavalry stables in the Avenue Duquesne. All night long a storm had crashed around, banging the spindly branches of a plane tree against my window. If my sleepless night had been a scene in a film, they would have angled the camera on its side. I would have opened an eye. The clock on the bedside table would slowly have come into focus: 5.40 a.m.

I got up to see if breakfast was being served.

A bitter coffee, a beautiful croissant and several hours later, I sat in the plump comfort of the driver's seat in a brand-new Renault Espace. It was an early summer's day. Paris was enjoying a morning of blazing contrasts. Lumpy clouds rumbled across the city throwing down shafts of deep shade. Otherwise, the sky was painted the brilliant blue of a kid's bedroom. It was two days before the Grand Départ of the Centenary Tour. I was struggling with two new life experiences. The first of these was satellite navigation.

The second was the Tour de France.

A month or so before this moment of solitary fear in a Paris side street, I had been fiddling nervously with a teaspoon in a Soho café, sitting opposite Gary Imlach. He was the seasoned presenter of the Tour de France; I had just been told that ITV would be sending me out to work on it as a reporter. Gary, in between tiny bites of his minimalist Italian biscuit, was doing
an extraordinary job of hiding his concern, not to mention alarm, at my lack of preparation. To fill the silence, I opted to speak.

‘Lance Armstrong. He's the American cancer bloke, isn't he? Keeps winning it,' I said, feeling that I'd got off to a flyer.

It wasn't long though before I'd exhausted my scant knowledge and was out of my comfort zone. Gary had suddenly started to talk about the team time trial.

‘They have teams?' I offered, genuinely surprised. ‘I didn't know that.'

Gary mentally dropped his espresso cup. It had been an uncomfortable sort of meeting.

Deciding that the depth of my ignorance wasn't going to subside overnight, I had embarked on a course of doing not a lot. I could have buried myself in research. But I had so much to learn that I decided anything I did this late in the day would have been quixotic, so I learnt nothing. It was a technique that had got me through school and university and I wasn't going to abandon it now.

So I had hastily thrown as much clothing as I could into the biggest suitcase I could find, along with a passport, an iron and some leftover euros I found in a jar in the kitchen. Then I left for France.

Now the day had dawned, I stared slack-jawed through the windscreen as Paris came to life. A street cleaner power-hosed the grime from a petal-shaped grille at the base of a tree. Two American girls deep in gossip waltzed arm in arm. A thin man spat.

I fought through the sat nav menu options and tried in vain to change the language settings from French to English. I felt a sense of rising panic. This was not only my first experience of the Tour, it also would be the first bike race I had ever seen. And only now, with my accreditation swinging from my neck
like a noose, did it dawn on me that I might just be the wrong man for the job. I started the engine and drove off, unsure of my destination.

‘À deux cent mètres, au rond-point, tournez à gauche.'

At least the sense of direction and purpose that navigating Paris gave me papered handily over the cracks of my fear. I had been instructed to head for what is known as the ‘Permanence'. An odd name this, since the ‘Permanence' is anything but permanent. It is the Tour's headquarters. Logistic and administrative officers, commissaries, media, medical staff, tailors and drivers all need somewhere to work. The Permanence is where this happens, normally situated at imponderable expense in the biggest place they can find. But since the Tour generally moves 200 kilometres every day, the Permanence shape-shifts and re-emerges in another exhibition hall on the outskirts of another town each time. Its permanence is relative.

Parked up and once again outside the comfort of the Espace, I made my way towards the cavernous hall in which I had arranged to meet my colleagues from ITV. Including me, the production team totalled twelve. Most had an average of ten Tours under their belts. Some were closing in on their twentieth.

I entered the brightly lit room, and at a stroke understood that the phoney war was over. Everywhere I could see actual riders with actual bikes spouting actual foreign languages besieged by people who actually knew what they were talking about.

Fighting shy of any encounter that might bring me into close contact with this alien world, I skirted the walls till I found some familiar faces. Gary Imlach was tap-tap-tapping into a Mac, looking useful, absorbed and in command. Sitting opposite him at a desk was my producer, Steve Doherty. He had a long list of stuff he needed to discuss with me. We left Gary
to it and went off in search of somewhere quiet.

On the other side of the hall we found a space, which seemed to accommodate a thousand desks. We helped ourselves to a paper cup of nasty Grand'Mère café. It glowered up at me from its awful blackened depths (the Tour eventually inculcates a strong instinct for which freebies to exploit and which to leave, but this was my first Tour, and I had much to learn). Steve sat me down to talk through the first few days of the rest of my life.

Tall, blond and taciturn, Steve had, in one guise or another, produced and directed British TV coverage of the Tour since the mid-eighties. A man from the Borders with a love for Carlisle United, he balanced strongly held beliefs with rare shows of enthusiasm and a deep understanding of cycling. He also came with a reputation for not suffering fools. And here he was, amid the clatter and clutter of the vast French carnival gearing up for action, clutching a Bic rollerball in one hand and a throwaway coffee in the other, facing exactly that: a fool.

He had in front of him a list. His neat handwriting, headlines in CAPS, underlining in red, revealed a portfolio of short reports that I would have forty-eight hours to generate:

1. Lance Armstrong: from cancer survivor to champion.
   
2. The Famous Four: Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain. All five-time winners.
   
3. The Centenary Edition. A Hundred Years of the Tour.
   
4. The Tour Route, in facts and figures.
   
5. The Contenders: who can threaten Armstrong?
   

Steve shot me a glance across the table, which let me know that he didn't expect me to succeed. The glance was super
fluous. We both knew that I knew that I would not succeed.

I drew sharply on the Grand'Mère, which by now had grown cold. Instead of swallowing, I swilled it around my mouth, feeling at once how it was staining my teeth black.