How I Won the Yellow Jumper (37 page)

I drew the microphone towards me and fired. ‘Jakob,' I said. ‘You won!'

To this day I have no idea what he replied. For in that instant I realised the complete inadequacy of my effort, and I felt keenly the absurdity of our position. Leaning back at sixty degrees, with arms and wires and poles jabbing through me and across me and under me, I wore the simpleton journalist's expression of smiling absorption as Piil provided us with the sound bite we required. A sizeable chunk of the world's media had descended on this man and this spot on this Marseille street to gather this information. And yet, I swear, none of us could have cared less. We weren't even listening to what he was saying. I started to suppress a terrible desire to giggle.

Back in the truck, Gary and Steve had no need to hide their mirth. They were watching a locked-off aerial shot of the finish line provided by France Télévisions. They could see it all unfolding before them on their monitors. It was a bizarre sight: all these people, a hurricane of press and me and Jakob at the eye.

I can't remember how it all dispersed. I suspect that Piil was manhandled away from all of us by the Tour heavies
so that he could ready himself for presentation on the podium. Or perhaps the main field came in, and drew friendly fire. Yes, that would have been in it, I suspect. As the yellow jersey and the rest crossed the line, the perfect storm of pressmen would have dissolved as quickly as it formed, leaving Jakob talking into thin air, his moment of glory already, even now, starting to wear thin. A straw fire.

I saw him a few days later, and we spoke again, briefly. I was at Jan Ullrich's T-Mobile hotel, waiting for the surly German to come out and not give me an interview. It just so happened that CSC, Piil's team, were billeted in the same Campanile hotel. The door to one of the first-floor rooms opened onto a wooden balcony overlooking the central courtyard. A small, blond figure emerged in a CSC tracksuit, and began to make his way downstairs to the dining room.

I couldn't quite place him. Nor, I could tell, could the few dozen cycling fans who were stalking the T-Mobile team. Only when he approached where we were lurking with a meek smile of recognition playing over his lips, did I realise it was Piil. I said hello and congratulated him again. He thanked me and went in for dinner, passing lines of autograph hunters who paid no attention to him.

He had been the centre of the cycling world some three days prior. Now, no one knew him. He was thirty years old then. He rode on for a year or two more before packing it in. He had a good, but ordinary sort of career.

He seemed like an ordinary sort of man; a bloke on a bike, in fact, who, on 15 July 2003, did something extraordinary.

I wish I'd had a better question lined up for him.

When I first found out about the birth of Team Sky, I was out on a run with Chris Boardman. It was during the Tour of 2008. We had absented ourselves from the rest of the production team one morning, and set off in search of ten kilometres of release.

But it was one of those frustrating routes, and we never quite got going. We were forever running into cul-de-sacs, into roundabouts, or up dual carriageway slip roads. The conversation was much more fluent.

Chris was only working with us at the weekends that year, and had just flown back in to join us. During the week, he had been party to the ongoing negotiations between Dave Brailsford, the head of British Cycling, and a few potential sponsors, as the idea for the British pro team began to take concrete shape. I was fascinated, and wanted to find out more.

‘Go on, Chris. Where's the money coming from? What's the team going to be called?' I tried to persuade him to give me the inside track as we vaulted a central reservation and
dashed across the fast lane of a dual carriageway.

‘I couldn't possibly tell you. I'd have to shoot you. And I don't have a firearms licence.'

‘You could tell me and then just break my neck,' I panted. ‘Or you could just carry on running at this bloody pace. That'll probably get the job done.' Chris had run the London Marathon that year, and was still racing fit.

‘Well. One's a supermarket . . .'

‘Londis?' I quipped, simply because it was a short word and I didn't have enough puff to get ‘Morrisons' out.

‘. . . and the other one isn't,' Chris added, cryptically.

I waited. It's often the best way with Chris. He may tell you stuff. In fact he probably will. But sometimes you have to wait. We ran on, aware of the sound our trainers made slapping against the tarmac.

‘I'm not sure how much longer the Tour will be shown on ITV,' he continued mysteriously.

‘What do you mean?' I shouted at his back as he put in an unaccountable little injection of pace.

‘Someone else will want to show it. Because they will want to show their own team.' He slowed a fraction. I caught up. ‘Let me just say, a leading supplier of satellite dishes,' Chris revealed.

‘Sky?' I deduced, brilliantly.

Sky! It almost stopped me in my tracks. My first thought, I am ashamed to say, was selfish. It suddenly occurred to me that Chris might be right. I might be working on my penultimate Tour de France. The TV rights, as of 2010, were up for renewal, and it was by no means certain that ITV would retain them. The prospect of losing the gig was unsettling. I gazed at Boardman's briskly retreating form, and put in a middle-aged sprint to try and catch him up. He was loping along the hard shoulder towards a motorway bridge.

For the next twelve months, through to the following summer, I was disturbed by the introduction of Team Sky. TV
is a fiercely parochial business sometimes, and I was proud and protective of the little fiefdom that ITV4 had annexed for the Tour de France. Frankly I didn't want the big boys muscling in. After all, I knew a little about Sky.

From 1997 to 2001, I was training up as a reporter for Sky Sports, working with Jeff Stelling on the iconic ‘men-watching-football-on-a-telly' show
Soccer Saturday
. It was a good place to learn. I owe my career to the people there who encouraged me.

But it was also a brash, tough environment and, good though my grounding was, I was pleased in the end to move on. Sky, as a corporation, can be a lean, mean place. A former member of the BSkyB board, whom I have got to know very well down the years, has often told me that the reason for their success is that they are a retailer, first and foremost. Not a broadcaster. They sell satellite dishes. They are extremely good at it, too.

I considered it to be inevitable that they would acquire the TV rights to the Tour. It would not be uncomplicated, but I was sure that they would find a way of pushing aside both British Eurosport and ITV, the subscription and free-to-air rights holders respectively. The cost of buying the race would be piffling compared to the investment they were about to make in Dave Brailsford's team.

Yet some months later, and much to my amazement, ITV re-signed the Tour de France for another four years, from 2010 through to and including the 2013 Tour. While I was delighted, I was also puzzled, and curious to see how it would feel to be ‘calling home' a British team that bore the name of a rival broadcaster.

I decided from the outset to try and get as involved as I could with the new team. I met with a delegation from Sky in Monaco for the start of the 2009 Tour. I shook hands with the marketing men who were the financial engine room of the
whole project, and we agreed that I would start to make a film about the birth of the team.

It was not without its complications. My intention was to shoot a fly-on-the-wall documentary. But the problem was access. Too often, we found ourselves on the exterior wall, while all the interesting stuff was happening inside. All autumn, and into the winter, Sky were negotiating with Garmin to liberate Bradley Wiggins from his contract. All along, I knew that they were close to signing him, and yet I couldn't get any of the main players in the drama to talk frankly about the situation in front of rolling cameras, such was their fear of litigation and counter-litigation.

Instead, I was steered towards expending valuable filming days shooting the design elements of the team, from their Pinarello bikes and the endless quest for the right kit, to the all-important team bus. It was interesting, glossy stuff, but it didn't make for great drama. Finally, we politely agreed to go our separate ways and forget the project. I believe, in the end, that Dave Brailsford had gone cool on the idea, and it was quietly shelved.

Along the way, though, I got a good feel for how the team might work. We were privy to the first team meet-up in Manchester in November 2009. All the riders (minus Wiggins, who was still a matter of weeks away from signing) were there. It was a big ‘get-to-know-you' session, really. And it was a little overwhelming for some of the riders. The team was just showered with stuff.

Beautiful new Pinarellos, MacBooks and iPhones (the Apple image chimes in perfectly with Dave Brailsford's minimalist aesthetic), Adidas kits and leisurewear, and Marks & Spencer suits. I listened to Geraint Thomas in the foyer wondering aloud what he was supposed to do with two iPhones. The management team was equipped with crisp white shirts and dark tank tops.

Overnight more goodies would appear in the riders' bedrooms. On their first night they found a little bag of bespoke M&M's on their pillows, bright blue and printed perfectly with the Sky logo. They'd been imported from somewhere in Canada, at undisclosed expense. The next evening they found their pillowcases had been swapped for special custom-made designs featuring a thin blue embroidered line; the same one that adorned their kits and their bikes. They were now to rest their sleeping heads on Sky's branded embroidery. Corporate dreams. Another evening they found especially acquired toothpaste in their rooms. Blue stripes, naturally.

Downstairs, the team had taken over the hotel. Two rooms had been converted into photo studios where moody mugshots were being banked up for future use by the website. Another room was occupied by a TV crew. It was the same one that Sky Sports use to film their team line-up graphics on their football coverage. Shot against a green-screen background, which would later be cut out, the riders were each asked to take three or four portentous steps towards the camera and then come to a halt, arms folded and staring edgily into the lens.

Nigel, the team's ebullient nutritionist, was floating around the place, pulling riders to one side, one by one, and talking to them about the science of eating right. I watched him patiently explaining the word ‘mitochondria' to an attentive Kurt Asle Arvesen.

Brailsford and his management team occupied the most important area of all. A dozen of them in their identical tank tops sat all day for two days in a conference room, around a big table surrounded by notes. Each rider was called in to discuss their season's targets, and how the coaching staff might best help to achieve them. We were allowed in briefly to witness Edvald Boasson Hagen shyly suggest that he wanted to concentrate on winning Paris–Roubaix and then secure his place on the team for the Tour de France.

No cycling team had ever been prepared in this way. The riders who had joined from more conventional continental set-ups, such as the Frenchman Nicolas Portal, could scarcely believe what they were seeing. That sense of incredulity would scarcely have been lessened by the glitzy team launch, which drew hundreds of people to Millbank on a freezing cold January morning.

The kits were printed, the bus was buff, and Wiggins was signed; declarations of ambition were dropping into sound bites all over the airwaves.

So when the 2010 Tour came along the following summer, it was all a bit of an anticlimax.

I joined the race late. The World Cup in South Africa delayed my arrival until the first rest day. On 11 July, just as Andrés Iniesta was scoring the only goal of the World Cup final, I boarded a plane from Johannesburg to Heathrow, where I changed to Geneva. By two o'clock the following afternoon, I was swinging around in the back of a car being driven in typically unpredictable fashion by Liam. We ate dinner in a village near Avoriaz in the French Alps, and went back to the chalet where we were being put up. Instantly I felt at home, even though I was staying somewhere I'd never been before.

The following morning, we rose early and chatted to our English hostess over breakfast. Running the pleasant chalet where we had spent the night was just a sideline for her, it seemed. She and her husband actually ran a company which, to put it simply, made giant stickers.