How I Won the Yellow Jumper (4 page)

The rest of that day passed in a tailspin of activities, none of which were remotely focused or efficient. I scribbled fragments of script on notebooks; I tore them up. I recorded pieces to camera, only to have them scrutinised and rejected. I tried to gear up for what was to come; I failed.

And so it was that the following day, dressed in a poorly ironed shirt, I stood at the start of the Tour de France for the very first time. The streets were lined with people. The 2003 Prologue was about to get under way.

The first thing that I noticed was the noise. The speed came later. It sounded like the drumming of fingers, gaining in urgency. Disc wheels hammering up a cobbled road at forty miles per hour.

First off the starting ramp that day was, I think, some bloke from the Euskadi Euskaltel team (eight years on, and I still struggle to pronounce this team correctly, and normally find a way of avoiding it by referring to them as the ‘team from the Basque Country' or some such). He flashed by me, my first glimpse of a racing bicycle. I checked his unofficial time over the 6.5km course displayed on the digital clock overhanging the finish line. I had no idea what to make of the information. I had no point of reference, it meant nothing to me.

One after one, I watched them finish. It was an odd sight, but exhilarating at the same time. Seen from the front, the rider, clad in his time-trial skinsuit, his back arched and head dipped, flew like a bullet towards me. His energy was pent up behind him in an ordered fuss of legs and lungs serving only to push that millimetre-perfect front wheel over the line. In that instant, an unseen cord unclipped and the cyclist's spine crumpled down. His head snapped upright. His jaw suddenly
hung loose to gulp in the restorative air. Each time the cyclist would have a split second of utter peace before the madness of the Tour and of the crowd descended on him.

Overcome by a sudden fit of journalistic diligence, I would occasionally contemplate running after a rider. But when I looked down the length of the road, he would be long gone. Literally, gone.

What an unusual event.

The day wore on. I anticipated the hunched blue of Armstrong flying past. He was the star attraction and would start last of all, with the number 1 on his back, denoting his status as the reigning champion. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. In the meantime the endless procession of cyclists ground remorselessly on.

I stood alongside the tall, keen figure of Matt Rendell, the writer who has worked for ITV on all the Tours I have covered. The poor fellow had been seconded to guide me through the proceedings. I looked to his every gesture for confirmation that I understood the grammar of the day's events. He had plenty of gestures, including a quite uncontrolled throaty Hispanic holler. Every time a rider he knew personally flew past, he would let rip. I swear that at some point he screamed ‘Arriba!' in some bloke's sweaty ear as it fizzed past him.

I marvelled at his enthusiasm. The veins stood out in his neck. Nothing could deflect from his delight as some tiny Colombian climber pedalled over the finish line having posted the ninety-third best time of the afternoon. I could only dream of summoning up such passion.

But frankly, after a couple of hours, my first Tour de France had started to bore me.

Even now, I don't much like time trials. Only occasionally do they throw up much drama but more often than not they just confirm what we have all expected. I sometimes think that they are there solely for the purists, and that I am still too new
to the sport to understand the aesthetic. I lose track of the number of times I have been asked to film a guided tour of a time-trial bike. One day I might just blurt out, ‘Look, they're very light, and very aerodynamic, all right? That's it. That's all there is.'

The rhythm of that first, long day was suddenly enlivened as we edged towards our ‘on-air' time. We would be broadcasting live on ITV1, the big network! From a flat-pack set by the side of the finish line, Gary Imlach would thread together the denouement of the day's events before crossing live to the coverage of the best riders who would all set off in the final hour. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen would commentate. In that first year, Stephen Roche, the Irish winner of the Tour in 1987, was our occasional pundit.

My role would be limited to interviewing the winning rider. The hope, and indeed the expectation, was that this might be David Millar, a man I had never heard of and certainly never met. Apparently he was Scottish. Along with Armstrong, so I was told, he was one of the favourites.

I waited, and I watched. My earpiece crackled with Phil's commentary. His was a voice that would provide me with the soundtrack of my summers to come. Yet back then, I barely understood a word.

An Australian called Brad McGee posted the best time. In the all-white skinsuit of Francaise des Jeux, he looked like a kinky time-traveller from a David Bowie movie. He crossed the finish line, and I saw him being marshalled to a holding area behind the podium. There he would have to wait while the final dozen riders threw down their challenges.

Then came a slight raising of the tension. The commentary in my ear spluttered something about Dave Millar starting. In a kind of makeshift tent at the finish line, I glimpsed the TV screen through the hordes of journalists. I saw Millar's long ungainly form bowed to the frame of his time-trial bike,
rounding the first corner, the camera mounted on a crane pulling higher and wider as it went with him, until the elegance of the Paris skyline filled the frame.

The split times came through. Millar was in the lead by a fraction of a second. Then, at the second split, the gap had grown. Somehow, viscerally, I knew this was important. He was approaching our finish line hard and closing in on victory and the first yellow jersey of the 2003 Tour de France. I dashed across to the barriers to watch, both delighted and terrified for him.

It was at that moment that my earpiece exploded with noise. Liggett's excitable commentary was drowned out by the off-air expletives of Steve Doherty, Gary Imlach and just about everyone else on the production team.

On the final bend before the home straight, riding over cobbles, Millar's chain bounced off his front ring. In a split second, his challenge was over.

I only found out later, he pulled it back on with his fingers and sprinted hard for the line, but crossed it one-tenth of a second down on McGee.

At that precise moment, every spectator on the route knew more than I did. Everyone on our production team, every viewer at home, was better informed than me. I scampered around, trying to look purposeful by intermittently sticking my finger into my earpiece and frowning. But who was I kidding? Something profoundly unexpected had happened and I had no idea what it was. Yet I was about to be cast in the role of Man-On-The-Spot. I ran back to the side of my cameraman, and stood poised to interview . . . someone. Anyone. About anything. I was ready to impart News, oblivious of the fact that I Had No Idea What To Report. Adrenalin simply plonked me in front of the camera.

Minutes passed. They were filled with tense, incoherent airtime, which Gary Imlach and Stephen Roche on the set had
to bridge with talk of Millar's unchaining. There is only so much that can be said about a chain coming off, except for ‘the chain clearly came off', and there's a finite number of ways of expressing that, even allowing for Stephen Roche's bizarre Franco-Irish accent.

Millar had long since disappeared. Crossing the line at forty miles an hour, he had carried on at that speed, heading towards the Eiffel Tower where his Cofidis team car was parked up. Matt Rendell, long legs pounding away, had set off after him, shouting into the increasing distance, and with decreasing usefulness, ‘Dave!'

My ear crackled again. The voice of our director cut through. ‘Have you got anything for us, Ned?'

I didn't know what to say. I think I might have said, ‘Yes.' Just to appear useful.

‘We're going to come to you in twenty seconds. Stand by. Gary, hand to Ned.'

Then, before I could adjust my collar and compose my thoughts (which pre-supposes that I had any in the first place), Gary Imlach handed over to me ‘for the very latest on the David Millar situation'.

The blind eye of the camera fixed me. The red cue light went on.

In the polished glass of the lens a couple of feet in front of me, I caught a glimpse, like the image in the back of a spoon, of ITV's new cycling reporter, silent for a second, and then, in front of the reflected backdrop of ancien régime Paris, starting to talk.

What passed my lips must never be revisited. Some tapes are too painful ever to unearth from the archives. Even if the old adage holds true that one can learn from one's mistakes, there are some mistakes that can break one's confidence beyond repair.

I have been told though, by a friend who was watching in
embarrassed disbelief in a house in Chelmsford, that I uttered words like ‘some sort of thing with his bike'. I followed this up, apparently with the killer line, ‘kissing goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper'.

Yes, the yellow jumper. That's what I said.

Before sitting down to write this book, I had assumed that my first-ever cycling broadcast had taken place in 2003: that ill-fated live update on David Millar. Now, thanks to my sister Emily, I have found out that I am quite wrong. And, as older sisters tend to be, she is right.

In fact, my cycling pedigree predates that awful moment by some twenty years. In 1984, aged fourteen, I was at home one day in the Easter holidays revising for my exams. This involved a lot of worrying blackheads with tweezers, wobbling backwards on the rear two legs of my chair, rewinding cassettes by spinning a pencil (to save on the Walkman batteries, you understand) and occasionally reaching for a silver spray-can to daub some poetry on my bedroom wall.

Accompanying this teenage idling was the background noise of my late childhood, known as 96.9 Chiltern Radio. It was
the sound of Bedford, Dunstable and Luton. On that particular afternoon there was a phone-in: ‘The State of Bedford's Roads'. As if local radio in that early afternoon slot wasn't already dreary enough, they had summoned up a debating point with a stultifying lack of potential.

Quite why I decided it was time to phone in, I have no idea. Boredom is the only explanation I can offer. Boredom, with perhaps the added spice of fiddling with my brand-new Marantz stereo cassette-radio player in an attempt to record my broadcast debut. I unpeeled a brand-new TDK C-90 cassette, and slid it into position, then closed the door and pressed the record and pause buttons simultaneously. Now I was ready and I could phone in the station.

To my astonishment, I was put straight through to the studio, where they kept me on hold. Once the production team had established that I was simply a precocious little twerp who meant no harm and was unlikely to swear in the middle of the afternoon to the Chiltern Radio audience, I was told to stand by. I clutched the receiver, sweaty palmed with anticipation (a frailty that still affects my microphone hand).

The music faded down. ‘OK, that was Daryl Hall and John Oates,' said the DJ. Probably.

‘Now, what about the roads in Bedford?' he went on. ‘What about the state they're in? And just what is the council planning on doing about it? That's the topic for the phone-in this afternoon, and we've got a caller on the line. It's Ned, from Bedford. What have you got to say, Ned?'

The roof of my mouth went suddenly very dry. ‘Hi,' I struggled to get the word out. A displaced feeling started to overwhelm me, as if I was watching myself from a perch on the ceiling. From this elevated position, I looked down upon myself about to make my first broadcast. This is perhaps the only time that Chiltern Radio has ever been known to replicate the effects of LSD.

‘What do you think about it, Ned?'

A fatal, short, and very telling silence. Then I recovered, and began.

As soon as the telephone conversation was at an end, I hung up, and sat cross-legged in my bedroom, my white Solidarnosc T-shirt hanging loosely over a heart still beating hard from the stress of the encounter. After a minute or two, and feeling my pulse return to something approaching normality, I was able to rewind the cassette, and play it back.

It was horrifying. I wince to remember it.

The only other time I can recall a similar feeling was the moment I first discovered the size of my ears. On that occasion, I had been taken for a haircut at the Italian barbers in Foster Hill Road. The comforting hair flaps which, in keeping with the spirit of late seventies boyhood fashion, had kept my ears hidden for a decade were about to be hacked off by an indifferent middle-aged Sardinian barber, wielding a sharp pair of scissors in one hand and a John Player Special in the other. I was struck dumb by the sight of a mildly pornographic calendar and the proximity of a box of condoms. This was a man's world, and I was about to receive a man's cut.