How I Won the Yellow Jumper (36 page)

When I rediscovered the desire to hop on a bike and push off on my own, I was in my mid-thirties, and had started to grow a little soft around the edges. It was on returning from covering the 2003 Tour de France that I went to the nearest bike shop and got myself a second-hand road bike. To my amazement though, the act of pedalling and feeling the tarmac skitter along underneath you instantly flicked on a switch that had been dormant for decades. Straight away, I was off again. I was not so much lost in thought as not quite there, somewhere else. A connection had been made across fields of my life, which I never thought possible. I was riding in a paceline with my twelve-year-old self, taking turns to pull at the front.

I am, in this respect, making no claims to uniqueness. In fact, I would suggest that cycling's huge appeal to the
middle-aged man is based on precisely this desire, whether witting or unconscious, to connect with a time in which his life seemed a simpler, more harmless kind of existence. The MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man In Lycra) leaves it so late in life to hop back on his bike because he first of all has to build up enough things in his life that he needs to escape. And that can take time.

Sadly, now, I cannot fully engage with the chauffering game. Something has clearly withered within me, possibly my soul. But that hasn't stopped the recessive twelve-year-old gene inside me from inventing more age-appropriate nonsense to lend my cycling a meaning and a purpose and a pleasure, which still makes even the most banal ride a private thrill.

Can I maintain an average of 15 mph even on a commute through central London, with its many red lights? A glance at my computer tells me I've dipped to 14.7 mph. This is a disaster.

Can I beat the number 180 bus from Woolwich to Greenwich?
(Easy.) Shall I deliberately ride on the thick white lines even when it's drizzling? (Not a safe thing to do, but quite exhilarating.) Shall I stick to the inside of the traffic as they queue through Deptford, or shall I be Mr Outside, the fearless firebrand of the middle of the road?

There it is. I am just a Bloke on a Bike.

Which brings me back to professional bike racing. However much it is obscured by the scale of the event, there is something a little bit ridiculous about it all. We have constructed a pedestal on which we place the finest Twelve-Year-Old Boy that humanity can produce. Even Lance Armstrong at the age of thirty-eight, standing on this pedestal that we have called the podium, cannot be immune from the nagging feeling, very, very deeply hidden, that he too is just a small boy in black socks with his knees showing.

Can I beat Jan Ullrich from Bourg d'Oisans to Alpe d'Huez? (Easy.) Shall I pick up my bike and run across the fields on the descent into Gap? (Not a safe thing to do, but quite exhilarating.)

So it is then that cycling occupies two different spaces in our understanding. It is both the realm of the incredible, and the ordinary. And in this respect it is unique.

Football is a sport that offends many a cycling purist. Do not listen to such prejudice. At best, it is born of jealousy, and at worst, class snobbery. Football, even at a very ‘average' level, is a game of tremendous skill and courage. It works emotionally and aesthetically as a game because of the tension between the controllable and the chaotic which runs through it.

It is founded on a flawed premise, which lends it the beauty and the passion it can inspire, and that premise is simple: it's almost impossible to master a ball without using your hands. A foot coming into controlled contact with a ball is fundamentally a nonsense. Like using a carrot for a chisel, or a sock as a bucket, it's designed to madden. That's why those rare moments when a player connects cleanly with the ball thrill in the way they do. Wayne Rooney's overhead kick in the Manchester Derby will only happen once in his career.

I have never been anything other than awful at football. And not once have I either sat in the press box, or stood on the terrace, and even fleetingly thought to myself, ‘I could do that.'

But here's the difference. We can all ride a bike. And, to the untutored eye, the way that I ride a bike, and that you ride a bike, and Andy Schleck rides a bike, is much of a muchness. He might just be a bit quicker.

So when we watch these acts of greatness from the Tour, for all our
chapeau
-doffing deification of the riders, there is in all of us a little voice, muffled into muteness for the most part, which is wondering, ‘What if, instead of Contador, that was me? How would I have reacted when Schleck attacked? I would have gone with him, I reckon. Then, as I caught him, I would have accelerated again, just where the gradient gets steeper. Then I would have time-trialled to the finish, and gained fifty seconds on him. That's what I would have done.'

How many times, rooting for the underdog perhaps, or simply hoping for a more competitive spectacle, have we railed against a rider who has reached the limits of his power and can respond no more when a rider attacks? If it had been us, we'd have been up on our pedals and back at 'em. It's the equivalent of shouting ‘Slog out!' from the margins of a tedious cricket match.

Watching the Tour from afar is one thing. Working alongside the riders allows for this sense of ambiguity to breed and replicate: the slightly destabilising perception of unremarkable men doing remarkable things. Or even remarkable men doing unremarkable things. This is the confusion, which arises from the fact that we come face to face with these extraordinary men, in all their perplexing ordinariness.

And so it is, that I take you, rather bumpily, to Stage 10 of
the 2003 Tour. It was one of those breathless days in Marseille when the thermometer threatens forty, and the humidity means that any effort of more than token exertion brings about a beading of the forehead.

It was the middle eight of the Tour. The week between mountain ranges, when the race leaders hide in the pack. Normally, of course, this is a chance for the sprinters to reach for more stage wins, but occasionally a breakaway will form which gets away. On this particular day, they left it late. It wasn't until the race was blasting along the shimmering Marseille seafront that two riders broke clear. There was Fabio Sacchi, riding for Mario Cipollini's Saeco team. And there was a Dane called Jakob Piil.

He and I were about to be brought into very close proximity. But first of all he had to win the race.

Once that pair realised that they were clear of the bunch, and that one or other of them was going to win the stage, their cooperation turned to competition. They briefly sat up and shook hands. Sacchi said something to Piil, who later confessed, ‘I don't speak Italian. I have no idea what he said. I guess he wished me luck, but who knows.'

I often suspect that the Italian took the opportunity, like the dastardly Marco Materazzi to Zidane, to curse Piil, Piil's sister and Mrs Piil, his mother.

After the handshake, the serious cat-and-mouse game started. Both riders eyed each other closely, unwilling to be the first to go, trying to time their effort. In the end, it was Piil's track nous that won the day, as he picked his moment perfectly and out-sprinted Sacchi to the line.

And there he met me.

I was suffering the blurred vision and fatigued thinking of a man who's been squinting down the Avenue du Prado for half an hour, trying to pick out any sign of a bike race, as the sweat trickled into my eyes. And I was finding
it hard to concentrate on anything at all, especially the race.

This was still my first Tour. In fact, my entire cycling experience was less than a fortnight old. I was still giddy with Alpine drama, gulping in deep lungfuls of Tour history with each passing day: Alpe d'Huez, Armstrong, Ullrich. Only a matter of hours before, I had been doorstepping a distraught Manuel Saiz, the directeur sportif of Team Once, the morning after his prize asset Joseba Beloki had smashed himself to pieces on a patch of melting asphalt.

There was more drama in a day of this great race than I had known in some entire football seasons.

Now, though, I was confronted with this. A stalemate. A day of sleepy nothing. Armstrong and Ullrich invisible, and the race so uninterested in expending effort that it allowed these two nobodies to bore us all with their footling little victory. A marginal achievement, surely.

I didn't know then what I know now. There is great emotion attached to these days. They are moments of grace, really, when an individual's efforts, instead of vanishing into an uninterested peloton, are rewarded with the defining second in a decade-long career. I don't know Jakob Piil, but I suspect, somewhere in his house, maybe upstairs in his study, or in a games room in the cellar, he has hung a framed photograph. Piil, riding to the right of Sacchi, his arms bent to the task, the skin on his knuckles stretched taut. There is a look on his face of the most complete delight, given its potency by a wide-eyed surprise that has forced his mouth open as he screams into the cacophonous Marseille air.

Me? I'd never heard of him.

The two men were riding at seventy kilometres per hour towards us. We were positioned, along with the whole of the rest of the vast press pack, at a minimum safety distance of some 150 metres away. So it would have taken 7.71 seconds before he arrived at my feet.

He flew at me, as if guided by the some PR-conscious God, as if he had no choice. He might have aimed for my impeccably turned-out Danish counterpart. He might have ridden right past us all and vanished to leave us chasing along behind him. He might have done any number of things, but instead, at the zenith of his chosen profession, at the moment of his greatest triumph, where all things came together for him and he scored his name in the history of the sport, he came to rest inches from Ned Boulting, ITV Sport's bewildered and unprepared reporter, whose eyebrows were bleaching in the sun, and whose sunburnt ears were now beginning to pulse.

As Piil fumbled for the clasp of his helmet dangling under his chin and fell dizzily onto his crossbars, I had time to note the fevered rise and fall of his ribcage. Each breath in, seen from his back, forced the bumps of his vertebrae apart. They collapsed back together again. You could almost hear them clattering. I felt a pressure building behind me. Within seconds, within the space of half a dozen shudders from the gasping athlete, the bundle had begun. A hundred people perhaps, dozens of microphones, cameramen, sound recordists, journalists, the usual madness of men and women. All of us now
crowded into Jakob Piil's private world. I leant hard back on my heels pushing against the encroaching wall of hardware and flesh to avoid being spreadeagled across the diminutive Dane.

And then, equally suddenly, the realisation hit me that everyone was waiting for me to speak. Even Piil. I was the chosen one. The fates had thrown me to his feet, or rather he to mine, and now I would have to oblige them. The code of honour, such as it exists among the press corps, held firm: this was my interview, I must lead the way.

I looked at Piil, and cleared my throat. He had his helmet off now, and turned to face me with bloodshot, staring pie-eyes. They were wild with his triumph.