How I Won the Yellow Jumper (41 page)

Another curiosity of the Tour's voracious appetite for toilet facilities is the ‘mushroom'. Although they bear a passing resemblance to an upturned mushroom, I like to think that they really get their name because they sprout up overnight. Tour debutants, on seeing them for the first time, consider them to be so wildly decadent that they could only come from France, frankly (if that isn't tautologous).

France is, of course, famous for pushing the envelope in terms of micturition technology, having been the last major European power to simply not bother with anything much except a hole in the ground, which scarred a few generations of visitors from the British Isles more than they would like to admit.

Then two factors collided to create a big bang in the field, although not literally: the advent of mouldable plastics and the growing internationalisation of the Tour de France.

When these two fuses were lit, and fanned by the winds of climate change that over the latter half of the twentieth century have raised summer temperatures in southern France to levels that require Tour workers to drink constantly from readily available sponsored water bottles, the invention of this particular type of
pissoir
was only a matter of time.

Women would rightly argue that they have been overlooked in this headlong charge towards an easier future. This is undeniably true, and while I can offer nothing compelling in defence of the Tour's toilet allocation policy, I should point out this one, irreducible fact. Everyone can watch you having a pee.

To return to the image of the upturned mushroom, three people can balance on the ‘head', facing centrally, and peeing against the ‘stem'. The great joy is that they can be plonked anywhere, and, simply drained off every now and again when their capacity has been reached. The physics, though, are a little precarious. At the beginning of the day, particularly if the mushroom has been placed on a patch of bumpy or uneven ground, there is not quite enough ballast to prevent the whole thing from developing an unsettling wobble. However, this improves with each subsequent visit.

I discovered early on that it is really only the English-speaking crews who find the ‘mushroom' a source of mirth and mortification. To the French it's probably a source of pride. To the Germans it's just a neat solution to a potentially thorny
problem. But to the British, Australians and Americans, it's a ribald source of fun, unrelentingly humorous and not a little titillating. It's the first question asked on arrival at the Zone Technique every day (‘Anyone seen a mushroom?' ‘Over there, just behind the Danes'), and it's the last thing visited at the end of the day too, before jumping in the car and resuming the endless travel.

The curious thing is the word ‘mushroom'. The more enlightened among us, like US cycling commentator Bob Roll, tend to pay our host country the respect of calling them ‘
Champignons verts
'. But don't for a minute think that this translates into Actual French. I have tried it, on more than one occasion, only to be met with a bemused frown from an Actual French Person and, on repeating my question, been fobbed off with a dismissive wave directed roughly towards the local supermarket.

Other than that, there is the demanding matter of etiquette. The mushrooms often appear in very popular thoroughfares between trucks, used by hundreds of co-workers every hour of the day. This poses a particular set of dilemmas. Is it, for example, acceptable to shout an unabashed ‘Hello!' at friends and colleagues, while continuing to go about your business as if this was nothing remotely unusual? Is there any form of legitimate conversation which can continue without hesitation under such circumstances? Sometimes, other veterans of many Tours, quite senior in their own right and respective areas of responsibility, will engage you in high-level editorial discussions about the day's agenda, disregarding the fact that all the while you are urinating down a length of green plastic. It's not easy talking to a Swabian TV executive about Gerolsteiner's form in such a context.

On the 2010 Tour, in the shade of a plane tree which had miraculously sprouted out from within the TV compound (or could it have been vice versa?), I was engaged by Phil Liggett in a longish debate about the morality of Alberto Contador's opportunistic attack on the slopes of the Porte de Bales.

‘What do you think, Neil? Should he have waited?'

The silver-haired commentator unzipped himself and started peeing, peering round the side of the mushroom to listen to my reaction.

‘I don't know, Phil. On the one hand . . .' I grew distracted. ‘Phil?'

‘Yes?'

‘Can we continue this conversation another time when you are not holding your penis?'

And yet mostly, and with people I feel less inclined to joke with, it would feel churlish to suggest reconvening at another point and starting the conversation from scratch when, perhaps, I wasn't emptying my bladder. I am, I suppose, too British to object really. After all, if you come on the Tour, then by default
you are buying into a ‘citizen of the world' set of values, in which nothing as trivial as a toilet should upset your equilibrium.

The weekend in 2007 when the Tour de France came to London provoked a seismic culture clash. The minute the Tour plonked its mushrooms down on the Mall, it introduced another layer of socio-political complexity to the issue, which touched on our competing notions of republicanism versus the monarchy.

Public peeing was one thing. But in sight of Buckingham Palace?

Actually it was quite liberating. It was an almost cathartic procedure for anyone of an anti-monarchist hue. Perhaps if the French aristocracy had simply installed
pissoirs
in front of Versailles, nothing would have kicked off; all revolutionary zeal would have been poured out in angry torrents, which would have dissipated before reaching the gates. All that republican fury neutralised in one simple gesture.

No French Revolution. No Bastille Day! No Richard Virenque! All because of a simple mushroom.

I was perched uncomfortably on the front of a rather over-engineered modernist chair in an Utrecht hotel room. It was, as hotels often tend to be, right next to a railway station. Through the double-glazed and unopenable window I was aware of the rumblings of Holland's garishly coloured rolling stock as it set about its task for the day, moving the Dutch back and forth across their watery land. The trains crunched over the points, grinding and slipping on steel still damp from the morning mist. It was a northern European sort of noise to set your teeth on edge. One that hinted ominously of greater forces being set in motion.

That was where I was when, one late September morning in 2010, and just when I was least expecting it, everything changed again.

These days I rarely bother switching on TV sets in hotel rooms. The landscape of channels grows bleaker by the year; a parody of itself morphing and evolving across cultural and linguistic borders till eventually nothing is left which is distinguishable from anything else.

But on this occasion, there was a race on somewhere in the world and I wanted to watch it. So I made an exception.

I had waded through endless German language business news channels before finding Sporza, the brash and cycling-obsessed Belgian sports network. It's knowledgeable
Flemish-speaking commentators had a flair for dipping into every major European language (‘Ooh la la. Fabian Cancellara. Wat een man. History in the making!'). It was the men's time trial at the 2010 World Championships. The pictures were coming live from Australia.

I watched the familiar hunched figure of David Millar, his head snapping up, and then sinking, rising and falling with extreme effort.

The mute cursor blinked at me on the computer screen. But I was glad of a distraction from the job of writing and was at once gripped by the action. At one point the graphics on the TV, based on live GPS readings from motorbikes on the course, suggested that Cancellara and Millar were locked together, tussling for pre-eminence. There was a chance that Millar might prevail, repositioning again the moral compass from 2003, when, with blood artificially enriched by EPO, he had won the thing once before.

Wearing a cobbled-together-looking GB skinsuit with his cobbled-together-looking Garmin aerohelmet atop his cobbled-together-looking body, he was simply tearing into the race. This was a late, unexpected flowering. Even though I knew in my heart he would ultimately not have the beating of the almost superhuman Cancellara, he was giving him a run for his money. I said a heathen little four-lettered prayer for him, and left him to it.

It was with about 15km to go that I returned my gaze to the job in hand and spotted a message on my laptop screen: Contador positive.

‘Alberto Contador today confirmed that a sample taken on 21 July 2010 had produced a positive test result for the presence of clenbuterol.'

It was one of those moments again. Millar. Landis. Hamilton. Vinokourov. Schumacher. Ricco. Riis. Basso. Beltran. Rasmussen. I was well enough versed in these stories to understand straight
away the sequence of events that would now doubtless unfold.

The shock. The denials. The protestations. Then the support of colleagues and rivals. The sniping from the sidelines of former riders. The accusations of cover-ups. The elimination. The suspension. The comeback.

The rewriting of the history books, and the tearing up of the future. The incomprehension, disgust and anger of the public. The whole emptiness of it all.

I thought of Contador. And immediately I was at a loss. It is not just the fact that I do not speak Spanish, and that he is too unsure of his English to risk answering me in anything other than his native tongue, but I have simply never been able to gain an access point into Contador. His character, both as a rider and a man, seems to repel interest. He holds at bay the curiosity which he attracts. Like two negatively charged magnets, the rider and his public skirt around one another, holding their distance.

I thought of the day in Luchon when I had asked him if he was proud of his tactics. It was the day he had attacked Andy Schleck when his young rival's chain had come adrift. I pictured his passive face, and big round brown eyes no more than a foot from mine, as he strained to hear my words above the cacophony of the finish-line announcer. He had an interpreter alongside him to translate into Spanish any question he didn't understand. This one he got immediately, and launched into his mealy mouthed half-truth of an explanation before the translation had even begun.

I let the Spanish wash over me, and watched him instead blandly justifying his actions. He looked unruffled. Later, when shown a full transcription of his words, I was struck by their lack of expression. Contador, the accountant. That's what his name means in Spanish.

Bertie, we nicknamed him, lending him a geniality he scarcely merits. In some ways he is a champion for our age:
professional, conservative, but there it ends. He had survived the storm called Operación Puerto, the drugs scandal that implicated a sizeable number of athletes in Spain. Although his name had been linked to the inquiry nothing stuck. But now, finally, he had a positive to explain away.

He should have been great. He should have been the greatest. And he should have been worshipped as such.

A Dutch train sounded its mournful and slightly underwhelming horn. The double-decker inter-city to Schiphol airport slid into view outside my window, the passengers on the top level passing by at head height to me. A man wearing a silver suit glanced across from his paper and caught my eye as I looked up from my computer. We exchanged a small smile, at the strangeness of the encounter.

As his train gathered speed and pulled away, I looked back at the TV.

Cancellara had pulled clear on the final split times. Millar was now just 5km out, but he was now riding flat out for second place. The rest of the contenders were nowhere. I watched for a while, as the laptop fizzed with theories and counter-theories about Contador. Like a thunderhead on a summer day, the hot air was getting funnelled
into a monster storm cloud. The cataclysms, the nightmare scenarios, the endgames for the sport were being touted all across the Internet: Contador – The Winner of the 2010 Tour de France?

On the final time trial of the Tour, Contador had been pushed surprisingly hard over the first half of the course by Andy Schleck. Indeed, for a period of ten minutes or so, the split times suggested that the entire Tour was in the balance. The virtual yellow jersey swung between them, a second either way. Then, as Schleck's effort fell away, Contador's steadied, and in the end the Spaniard rode out his win by just thirty-nine seconds, crossing the line in Paulliac straight into a seething melee of camera crews. I have a video on my phone of the moment he crosses the line. It has a Buster Keaton-like comedy about it. First a blur of Contador, hurtling from left to right. Then, half a second later, a phalanx of sprinting media operatives, clutching Dictaphones, and cameras, and microphone booms, like a horde of topless women chasing inexplicably after a British comedian.